by James Morton
Reggie Kray left an estate of rather under £210,000. On 6 September while in the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital he had written a will leaving his wedding ring, gold cross and gold boxing gloves with chain to Roberta. His Omega watch went to his friend Bill Curbishley; Allardyce had his ‘Legend’ brooch; Donna had his gold pendant engraved with Ron’s picture. As for the residue, Roberta was to receive 80%, another prison friend 8% and Bradley and Donna 12% between them. There was a caveat that if the Allardyces published any personal letters before or after his death or contacted the media to sell his story without the trustees’ permission, then their gifts were forfeit.
There was an additional clause. ‘I direct that all persons attending my funeral do so on a happy note and express only happiness at the time of my demise.’ This may have been slightly ambiguous and certainly did not turn out to be the case.
But first there was the ultimate betrayal by Bradley Allardyce. Unable to keep his hands off spare cash and unaware of the provisions of the will, he had taken a picture of Reg with an oxygen mask in the hospital and passed it on to the newspapers. At first he denied it, then denied he had received money, and finally admitted his deceit.
On 11 October 2000 Reggie Kray, the last surviving brother, was buried in what would be called Kray Corner at Chingford cemetery. In contrast with his brothers’ funerals it was a relatively quiet affair, albeit with a modest 18 limousines following the six black horses which drew the hearse covered in wreaths bearing words such as ‘Respect’, ‘Free at Last’ and ‘Reg Beloved’. One in the form of a red cushion showed two clasped hands and the motto ‘Reunited Again’. The hearse slowed in tribute in Vallance Road and then drove to St Matthew’s Church. Only about 3,000 of the estimated 100,000 turned out to watch. Two Kray funerals in one year was one too many for the East End faithful.
Many old-timers stayed away. They included Tony Lambrianou and Freddie Foreman, who instead kept an appointment at Scotland Yard to discuss his apparent admissions over the Mitchell killing. Foreman claimed Reggie had asked him to be a pallbearer but Roberta had decided otherwise. In fact, of the real old timers, only Frank Fraser, for whom there was generous applause from the crowd, could be spotted in the church.
Taking the service were the Reverends Allan Green and Ronald Vaughan together with Dr Ken Stallard, the Free Church minister from Oxford. During the ceremony Donna Allardyce read a little poem:
‘It broke our hearts to lose you but you did not go alone.
A part of us went with you the day God called you home.’
There was a tribute from his solicitor Mark Goldstein, who described Reggie as ‘A man of honour’ and ‘a 20th century icon’. Dr Stallard, who told the congregation he was not going to talk about Reggie’s crimes, instead described Kray’s repentance. ‘There were tears in my eyes when I said to him, ‘Reg do you repent of those things you have done?’ It was almost as though I should not have asked such a stupid question, as he said ‘of course, of course’. Stallard then went on, saying in Mockney how Kray had told him, ‘I wanna be a Christian. But I don’t want anybody to fink I done it just to influence people and get parole.’ Stallard added in his tribute, ‘This rare bird has flown his cage’.113 The congregation again sang ‘Morning has Broken’, ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and ‘Abide with Me’.
The body was taken to Chingford, where locals visiting graves were turned away by security men wearing red armbands embroidered with RKF (either ‘Reggie Kray’s funeral’ or ‘Reggie Kray forever’) as the great man was finally laid to rest.
It had been hoped that a Spitfire would fly past, but the weather was bad and the pilot never took off. Old-time villain Albert Chapman threw a rose on the coffin on behalf of Tony Lambrianou and Foreman.
After Charlie’s funeral there had been a big wake held at the Horn of Plenty in Stepney, and the landlord Paul Jonas brought in the food for another wake.114 It was cancelled by Roberta but others still went there.
Naturally there were long obituaries and assessments in the newspapers, with a notable exception being The Times. When asked why, the obituaries editor remarked obliquely, ‘We don’t do obituaries for gangsters unless they go on to run countries.’115
Given that Charlie’s son Gary was already dead, with Reg’s death so ended the legitimate male Kray line. For all practical purposes, however, ‘Those were the Krays.’
Possibly not, however.
Nat. Arch. HO 336/736. In this chapter all probation, special and medical reports appear in HO 336. In particular his parole reports appear in HO 336/734, 736, 738.
Daily Mirror, 29 December 1983.
Reg Kray, Born Fighter, p. 158.
Earl Davidson, Joey Pyle, p. 246.
Nat. Arch. HO 336/713.
Nat. Arch. HO 336/733.
Sunday Express, 11 August 1986; The Sun, 1 September 1986; Sunday Mirror, 9 July 1989.
Paul Callan, ‘Why I murdered this man’, Daily Mirror, 29 May 1986.
Sunday Times, 21 December 1986.
Nat. Arch. HO 336/714.
Nat. Arch. HO 336/731, Report of 26 June 1987.
Reggie Kray and Peter Gerrard, Reggie Kray’s East End Stories, p. xviii.
Nat, Arch. HO 336/746, Report 7 September 1993,.
The People, 14 August 1994.
Conversation with JM, 20 September 1996.
Jeff Edwards, ‘I’m not Reggie GAY’. Daily Mirror, 22 November 1996.
Sunday People, 8 October 2000.
Maureen Flanagan, One of the Family, p. 291.
Chris Tate, ‘My Jailhouse gropes with Kinky Kray’, News of the World, 19 December 1993.
Roberta Kray, ‘Best of Times, Worst of Times’, Sunday Times Magazine, 9 April 2006.
Roberta Kray, A Man Apart, p.193.
Nat. Arch. HO 336/746.
‘Guess who’s out to make a killing this Christmas?’ News of the World, 22 November 1988.
Roberta Kray, A Man Apart, pp. 274-5.
Letters to PB, dated 4 October 1999.
Freddie Foreman and Tony Lambrianou, Getting it Straight, pp. 360-361.
Aidan McGurran, Lucy Rock and Gill Swain, ‘Reggie Kray 1933-2000. He wanted a statesman’s funeral but all he got was a freak show full of has-beens’, Daily Mirror, 12 October 2000; Simon Hughes, John Troup and Antonella Lazzeri, ‘The Reggie they spoke of in church, all love and Christianity, was not the Reg I knew’, 12 October 2000.
Freddie Foreman and Tony Lambrianou, Getting it Straight, pp. 364-366.
Daily Express, 12 October 2000.
Chapter 20
The End of the Line
Was the death of Reggie really the end of the male Kray line?
In his unpublished memoir, his cousin Ronnie Hart claimed that Reggie Kray fathered three illegitimate children and forced another girlfriend to have an abortion.
If it is accepted, however, that Nancy Kray/Grey is Charlie’s daughter, then there is still the female side of the family. Nancy married Norman Jones from a well-known North London family. She had three sons, one of whom, Jamie, became a successful apprentice jockey, riding 15 winners mainly on the all-weather tracks, until he was involved in a very bad fall in a five-horse pile up at Kempton Park on 30 July 2008. He broke three vertebrae and never returned to the track.
The next year another son, 24-year-old Joseph Jones, and his stepfather Norman were convicted of the murder of traveller John Finney, whom they were alleged to have tortured and killed, believing he had stolen their drugs.
Around 7 p.m. on 29 February 2008 Finney, a scrap metal dealer, was kidnapped from his Mitsubishi Pajero at Park Farm in Northaw, near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, and driven at gunpoint to an industrial unit in Hitchin. Two weeks later his naked remains were found behind a garage block in Wilbury Way which had been rented by the Joneses. His buttocks had been slashed and his head and hands cut off. They were never found. His Mitsubishi was found at Park Farm with a window smashed and with Fi
nney’s mobile on the front seat. The van in which he was abducted was found burned out but John Finney’s keys were still inside.
In March Joseph Jones went to Malaga with his girlfriend and Norman followed him three days later. They were arrested on 1 May and returned to England, where they stood trial at St Albans Crown Court in February 2009.
The prosecution claimed the Joneses had cleaned the unit twice but left traces of Finney’s blood on the wall. Part of the evidence against Norman Jones was that his Range Rover had been seen on CCTV on the night of the killing, but he maintained that the vehicle had not been moved that night from a gated community in North London. Other damning evidence was said to be a threatening telephone call and another call from Norman Jones’ pay-as-you-go near the murder scene. There was also a suggestion the pair had made a dry-run the day before Finney’s abduction.
In a cut-throat defence Joseph Jones, who claimed all he had done was act as an obedient son and had been manipulated by his father, claimed he was playing poker on the night of the murder. Norman Jones said he had never met Finney. Shortly after the murder a man committed suicide, and the Joneses claim that he was the real killer.
Both men received life sentences, Joseph with a minimum of 30 years and Norman a minimum of 33. Sentencing them, Mr Justice MacDuff, who said he nearly wept when reading the victim impact statements, told the Joneses:
‘You are both evil men with nothing to commend you. You committed a meticulously planned murder. You decided summarily to execute a man who you thought rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly, had crossed you. You have both lied in a breathtaking way to this court to save your skins. It is difficult to comprehend how evil you are. You lack any semblance of humanity.’
Their appeals were dismissed but Norman Jones, in particular, maintained his innocence, and a website arguing his case was set up on his behalf in January 2012.
The next year Joseph Jones was alleged to have taken part in a racially motivated attack when a black prisoner was hit with billiard balls wrapped in a sock. The Daily Star reported enthusiastically that only a few weeks earlier Jones had begged the then Home Secretary not to allow him to die in prison.116
When Nancy Grey was last heard of, she was running market stalls in the Home Counties.
Rebecca Lowe., ‘“Evil” father and son will spend life behind bars for John Finney murder’, Times-Series.co.uk, 18 May 2009; Daily Star, 12 May 2013.
Chapter 21
Who Did They Really Kill?
In his deathbed interview, Reggie Kray hinted at one more murder. In turn his biographer Colin Fry said he thought there were about 30, including Ernie ‘Mr Fixit’ Isaacs, shot inside his flat in Shoreditch on 24 May 1966; their sometime driver Jack Frost; an old Richardson man, Billy Stayton; and their friend and letter writer Mad Teddy Smith. Bodies were jammed in oil drums and dropped in a hole. In Essex there was, Fry said, a garden centre which ‘has difficulty in planting deep-rooted trees’.117
John Pearson, and indeed a number of people after him, has it that the Krays killed Frost, a victim of the ‘mini-cab call in the night’, then said to be in vogue: ‘Cab, sir.’ ‘I haven’t ordered a cab.’ The target was hustled in and that was the last anyone saw of him. Pearson wrote:
‘The comradeship within the Firm was not improved when two of its members disappeared after trouble with Ronnie. One was his driver, a talkative young man called Frost… To this day, Frost [remains] on Scotland Yard’s missing persons list.’118
Later Pearson wrote:
‘The great [Scotland Yard] investigation, for all its thoroughness, seemed to have missed the biggest crimes… there was no hint of what happened to Jack Frost.’
Frost had disappeared after the murder of his friend McVitie because it was thought the Twins feared he might inform on them. But like the death of Mark Twain, Frost’s demise had been greatly exaggerated. In fact he had merely travelled north, and he resurfaced many years later in the East End.119
The second potential victim was Firm member Mad Teddy Smith, who disappeared after the Frank Mitchell escape. He was certainly still around on 11 October 1966 when he refused to give evidence for the prosecution in the D.S. Leonard Townshend bribery case. He was almost certainly alive at Christmas that year, writing drafts for Mitchell’s letters to the press. There have been continuing stories that Smith had been killed in a quarrel with Ronnie over a rent boy at Steeple Bay in Essex. In Notorious, John Pearson says Kray friend Wilf Pyne told him that Ronnie had told him that sometime in April 1967 he had broken Smith’s neck in a headlock, over ‘trouble with a boy’.120
However in his 1974 book Buller, Henry Ward claimed that, well after the Kray trial, he had met Teddy Smith in a cinema queue in Leicester Square and Smith told him he had managed to break away from the life.121 But there were other stories that he had left England. Albert Donoghue said he had heard Smith had gone to Australia and died there of natural causes. This story was confirmed by Micky Fawcett, who wrote in Krayzee Days that Smith had died in 2014 or 2015 in Australia. Other stories have him dying there a decade earlier aged 74.
However, the former Flying Squad officer John Rigbey maintained he had been told by one of a family of North London brothers and by Kray associate Leslie Berman that whatever anyone said, Smith had indeed been killed in Steeple Bay.
In 2002 Reg Kray’s prison boyfriend Peter Gillett appeared on the Channel 5 documentary The Krays: Their Empire Behind Bars to say:
‘16 years ago Reg burdened me with the secret of this other murder he did. It was a young gay boy. He was disgusted with himself for realising that he enjoyed that sort of thing, and he shot the kid.’
Another unlikely suggestion has been that Ronnie Kray, while in custody, organised the murder of the flamboyant solicitor David Jacobs, whose showbusiness clientele included Liberace. One of the first male solicitors to wear makeup in court, on 15 December 1968 Jacobs was found hanged in his garage at home in Hove, Sussex. The story goes that he had refused to help in the Krays’ defence against the Cornell and McVitie murder charges, and this was retribution. There was no evidence to support this but, as has been said on many occasions, this should not be allowed to get in the way of a good story.122
More interesting is the murder of 42-year-old professional criminal Ernie Isaacs, a self-styled Prisoners’ Welfare Officer who covered his illegal activities by street trading. A gunman was lying in wait for Isaacs when he arrived at his basement flat at Penn Street, Shoreditch on the night of Tuesday, 24 May 1966. The killer fired five times, hitting Isaacs with four of the shots. The fifth hit the skirting board. He was probably killed with one of his own guns, a Webley or Enfield service rifle, which the killer knew would be in the flat. A .38 revolver of the type which fired the bullets was missing, and a .9mm Luger was found wrapped in a piece of cloth in the piano. His body was found by his live-in girlfriend when she woke at around 5 a.m. She told the police she had heard nothing unusual during the night.
There was no question of robbery. Isaacs had £215 in cash and £200 in bonds on him. There was, however, a wide variety of potential suspects. Isaacs was a violent man whom his former wife described as ‘a vicious man who would hold a grudge forever’. The word in the underworld was that the killer had been Reggie Kray but once again there was no real evidence against him.
The police looked closely into Isaacs’ relationship with the Krays and the Richardsons. He had been a friend of George Cornell and after that man’s death he had made no secret of the fact he believed the Krays had done it. The police decided that they had no hard evidence against the principal suspects and that in any event Isaacs was so disliked, any of a number of people could have killed him. Years later an Anthony Patrick Austin confessed, saying the Krays had paid him £500 and he had thrown the Luger pistol he had used into a nearby canal. A short investigation showed he had been in prison at the time of the killing. He was now in Rampton secure hospital.1
23 The file remains open.
People can agree on only one thing concerning the death of Freddie Mills, one-time light heavyweight champion of the world and a hugely popular television celebrity. And that is that on the night of 25 July 1965, he was found shot in the eye in his car parked in Goslett Yard at the back of his club, Freddie Mills’ Nitespot, on the Charing Cross Road, which he ran in partnership with Andy Ho. Many other questions arise: was it suicide or murder and, whichever was the case, why? Why would Freddie, one of the most popular figures of his day in sport, want to kill himself? Why would anyone want to kill him? Nevertheless, it is a death to which the Krays’ name has become linked over the years.
There have been many suggestions, some more improbable than others, why Mills was killed with a faulty rifle which he had borrowed from a fairground stall holder the previous week: he was in all sorts of personal trouble and had been liquidating his properties in South London – by the time of his death he was almost bankrupt; he was killed to prevent him informing on a homosexual ring; he could no longer go on paying protection money to the Krays or the Richardsons or the Chinese; the Chinese wanted his club to distribute drugs; his club was haemorrhaging money; his partner was stealing from him; he was being blackmailed over a homosexual relationship; he had been arrested for importuning and could not face the scandal; he was the murderer Jack the Stripper. These point to suicide, but yet another suggestion is that he was killed by Mafia hitmen on the orders of Meyer Lansky because he was trying to blackmail boxing promoter and Mafia associate Benny Huntsman for the £2,500 needed to keep the Nitespot open, by threatening to expose the Mafia takeover of gambling in London.124