by James Morton
The other Osborne, Colin ‘Dukey’, the Krays’ armourer, was found dead on Hackney Marshes on 1 December 1980. Earlier that year he had put together a scheme importing drugs from Pakistan which all went wrong when, in October, one of the team members ‘Silly’ Lennie Watkins shot and killed a customs officer, Peter Bennett.
There are various versions of Osborne’s death, who was wanted both by customs officers and associates of Watkins. One is that he committed suicide, another that he died from a drug overdose or a heart attack, possibly during questioning by his former colleagues over the whereabouts of the drugs and their proceeds. Whichever is correct, it is probable he died at the flat of bank robber Ronnie Cook, the lover of the Black Widow Linda Calvey. It was thought his body had been put in a freezer while a decision was made about its disposal. Watkins later received life imprisonment for killing Bennett, and committed suicide in prison after an abortive escape attempt. Another allegedly on the importing team was Freddie Foreman, who was acquitted of Bennett’s murder.
In January 1977 the Twins’ friend, property dealer Geoffrey Allen, the ‘Michelangelo of Arson’, was found guilty of swindling insurance companies of more than £300,000 after fires at Briggate Mill in Norfolk and Shortgrove Hall near Saffron Walden. He received seven years at Norwich Crown Court and died in late 1992. At one time he had been suspected of involvement in the Great Train Robbery. He had also been dubbed ‘The Godfather’, a soubriquet which appeared on his gravestone in the village cemetery following his 25-year career in crime. Another property he owned, Gedding Hall, was later bought by Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman.
Connie Whitehead, perhaps the best businessman among them, opened a club and then a wholesale liquor business. In one of the wheels which continue to turn in the East End, he bought the Norseman Club in Canning Town, once owned by fearsome Firm member Alfie Gerard.
Ronnie Hart was said to have tried to commit suicide in Norwich and later to have gone to Australia. John Dickson became a successful businessman. After his release Ian Barrie disappeared from the criminal scene.
The Lambrianou brothers went different ways. Tony Lambrianou served out his sentence and, forgetting his grounds of appeal, took to lauding the Twins. Always a handsome man, he and Freddie Foreman appeared in advertisements for a London shirt makers and collaborated on the book Getting It Straight, in which they reminisced over their lives and crimes. He died in 2004. On his release his elder brother Chris became involved in charity work. He did not entirely disown his old friends and in December 2014 he was seen at the funeral of Mad Frank Fraser. Both brothers wrote books about their time with the Firm.
Ronnie Bender ‘never put himself about’, as one East End face described it. Bender had been a stevedore and ‘although he mixed with heavies he was really a straight man’. Nevertheless he was alleged to have ruled Chelmsford jail after he was transferred there in 1970, running card schools and having a doorbell over his cell. It was alleged he advised and helped prisoners and warders alike and maintained a stock of cigars and brandy. Bender’s rule ended when he was transferred after a fire broke out at Chelmsford. By the time of his release he was semi-institutionalised and effectively became a recluse, dying in 2004 aged 66.
Freddie Foreman continued in his role as one of the most feared of London criminals. After the Security Express robbery in 1983, then the largest of its kind, he went to Spain, living on the so-called Costa del Crime near Marbella. He was later sentenced to nine years for receiving part of the proceeds of the robbery.
On 10 January 1999 Foreman had rather disgraced himself in the eyes of some members of the criminal fraternity after his ill-judged television appearance around the time of Ronnie Kray’s parole hearing. Mad Frank Fraser roundly condemned him for this apparent betrayal and the two old men scuffled in a Hampstead coffee shop. Despite his confessions Foreman was never charged over the murders or his claim that he had intimidated witnesses in the Cornell murder. In 2018, a rather anodyne video Freddie featured him declining to explain exactly what happened to Mitchell’s body and a number of other things. His son Jamie has appeared in a number of films and, for a time, was Derek Branning in the television soap East Enders.
In January 1970 the fraudster Bobby McKew went down again, this time for five years and a fine of £10,000 for conspiracy to flood the continent with forged Swiss franc notes. On his release McKew went to Majorca, where he was involved in what was euphemistically called ‘transport work’. He later published a bestselling novel, Death List.
After his release, George Ince and Dolly Grey continued to live quietly in the East End. Dolly became increasingly fragile and, confined to a wheelchair, died in 2017. The short, balding Harry ‘Hate-em-all’ Johnston, who had attacked Ince in prison over his affair with Dolly, died following a heart attack.
Micky Fawcett followed the Rice-Davies path to respectability. After initial resistance from the British Boxing Board of Control, he was eventually granted a licence and became a successful trainer before writing his memoir Krayzee Days.
So far as the various Lords, knights and MPs were concerned, after his involvement with the Krays ended, Lord Effingham became an associate of a travel agency and regularly appeared in the House of Lords to claim his daily fee, usually without speaking. He died aged 91 on 22 February 1996. He had no children and the title passed to his nephew.141
In 1967 Lord Boothby married again, this time to a Sardinian, Wanda Sanna. He was 67 and she was 30 years younger. ‘Don’t you think I’m a lucky boy?’ he called to bystanders outside London’s Caxton Hall. He died in July 1986 aged 86. His efforts to have himself made a Companion of Honour had failed.
In 1969 Dickie Hart’s widow Eileen married Stanley Naylor, who later received 12 years for his part in the Tibbs-Nicholls families feud.142
On the plus side, however, the old Spot man Gerry Parker can still be seen most weekdays breakfasting in Claridges.
And the Krays’ ‘boys’? Peter Gillett never made it as a singer and was convicted with Joey Pyle in 1992 for a drug conspiracy, receiving five years. He was again convicted, this time in May 2002, when he was given a conditional discharge after swallowing a bag of heroin when the police searched his house. He was in a coma for seven days.
The next year Gillett did a great service to the art world and at the same time increased Reggie’s iconic status. Reggie’s art work was so highly regarded it had become worth faking. After Gillett’s intervention, three watercolours for sale by the Cambridgeshire auctioneers Cheffins were withdrawn. They included a beach scene and a nude, apparently signed by Kray, and with his prison number, and were set to fetch at least £500 each. A third piece, Girl Bathing, was said to be a homage to The Tub by Degas. Gillett, explaining his good deed, said of his former lover, ‘Reg was far too idle to paint much. There are a lot of forgeries out there. He was an egomaniac. If he had been that good he would have let everybody know.’143
He was back in the news in April 2014 when the drum-playing Joanne Dunmore, who lived next door to him in Littlehampton in Sussex, was given an interim ASBO over allegations of racially aggravated harassment. Gillett told the newspapers that compared with Dunmore, Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was ‘a saint’.144
Another of Reggie’s prison ‘sons and lovers’ Bradley Allardyce demonstrated that those who believe prison will cure criminality are likely to be sadly disabused. After Reggie’s death he went to Spain where he opened a gay bar in Altea, but in 2002, a few days after house hunters Anthony and Linda O’Malley were kidnapped and murdered, he closed everything up and returned to England.
The O’Malleys had been lured to a villa by Venezuelan brothers-in-law Jorge Real Sierra and Jose Velazquez Gonzales. Mrs O’Malley was bound and held hostage in the cellar while her husband was forced at gunpoint to empty their bank account with a series of card transactions for cash and goods. They were then killed. Sierra and Gonzales were sentenced to an aggregate o
f 116 years in prison. In 2006 Sierra wrote to a civil rights lawyer protesting his innocence and trying to lay the blame on Allardyce.145
In January that year the bisexual Allardyce told a BBC reporter, ‘I am openly admitting for the first time that we [he and Reggie] had a sexual relationship, as much as it was against my will and he knew it was against my will.’ But he added somewhat ambiguously, ‘There is not one day I would change with mine and Reggie’s relationship.’
By 2005 Allardyce was back in serious trouble. The money left him by Reggie brought no happiness. His wife Donna had gone and now a David Fairburn became involved with Amy, sister of Allardyce’s girlfriend Tracey Cooper. The relationship turned sour and Allardyce, along with Shane Porter and Wayne Turner, attacked Fairburn, stabbing him in the heart. They were all jailed for life with a recommendation they serve a minimum of 18 years.
Ronnie and Lord Bobby’s lover Leslie Holt died in September 1979 after a botched operation to remove disfiguring warts on his hands and feet. It had been carried out by Dr Gordon Kells, a former lover who used to inform him when wealthy patients would be away from their homes. In September 1979 Kells gave him a dose of Methohexitone 10 to 20 times higher than recommended. Pathologist Ian West told the inquest it was a totally inappropriate procedure to perform without an assistant present. Kells was acquitted of both murder and manslaughter at the Old Bailey when he explained that at the time of the operation he had been suffering from the effects of a car accident.146
Bobby Buckley, who went to prison for four years following an unsuccessful bank raid in Hackney in 1966, died from a drug overdose in the 1970s. His wife Monica, Ronnie’s confidant, remarried.
As for the Richardsons, the brothers became estranged after Eddie was sentenced to 35 years following a conviction in 1990 for involvement in a £70 million cocaine and cannabis heist. He was released after 12, bringing his total number of years served to 23. A talented artist, he also wrote his memoirs. Charlie Richardson died in September 2012. Frank Fraser, who gave evidence at the Kray trials, wrote a number of books and became something of a minor celebrity. He died in 2014.
The property dealer Peter Rachman died at the age of 42 following a heart attack on 29 November 1962. Two years earlier he had married his long-standing girlfriend Audrey O’Donnell, but he continued his relationship with Mandy Rice-Davies and a number of other women including the nightclub hostess Christine Keeler. Rachman was buried in the Jewish cemetery at Bushey. He left an estate valued at under £10,000 but the bulk of his property was said to have passed prior to his death to the money lender and Kray associate Tony Schneider.
What about the Kray hangouts? The Carpenters Arms in Cheshire Street has changed hands several times and is now a gastro pub. Previous owners made much of the Kray relationship and claimed the bar had been made out of coffin lids. The Blind Beggar, the location of the first sermon delivered by William Booth of the Salvation Army, became a stop on the tourist tours of criminal London. At one time it was owned by the former England football captain Bobby Moore.
Opened in 1874, the nearby Grave Maurice, where Nipper Read first saw Ronnie Kray in 1964, became a wine bar during the gentrification of the East End, but finally closed its doors in 2010 and was converted into a Paddy Power betting shop.
The Green Dragon in Aldgate passed through a number of hands. At one time it was owned by Kray associate, Bill Ackerman and run by Sammy Lederman. On 2 June 1969 an armed robbery took place in the club in which a gambler was shot. In the spring of 1975 there were a number of shootings at the club, culminating in what was seen as the contract killing in July of 32-year-old West Indian Lowell Lawes, shot when two masked gunmen opened fire while he was playing double rummy. Both the gunmen had northern accents. Georgie Plummer, the one-time boyfriend of Blonde Carol Skinner, had tried to intervene to prevent the shooting. No prosecution followed.
Esmeralda’s Barn became the site of the five-star Berkeley Hotel, described as ‘Contemporary Chic in Knightsbridge’.
The Stowe Club was taken over by some of the Nash brothers and Mickey Bloom. The one-time manager, cat burglar Charlie Clarke, was murdered in Kent on 10 March 1989 at the age of 71. Clarke had been known as a police informer for some years and on one occasion had set up Lenny ‘The Governor’ McLean to be given a bad beating and strangled with chicken wire. McLean escaped and Clarke was obliged to pay him substantial compensation. It appears that Clarke surprised a youth, Shane Keeler, during a burglary, and was stabbed in the neck.
In January 2009 an auction of Kray memorabilia in London fetched an amazing £100,000 plus. In a second auction, a police photograph of them in their teens realised £7,500 against an estimate of £100. In May 2014, letters from Reggie to his wife Frances and notes she made about their relationship made a total of just under £8,000 at Gorringes auction house in Sussex, which had held regular sales of Kray memorabilia.
Letter to The Times, 8 November 1994.
Gordon Carr, John Barker, Stuart Christie, The Angry Brigade: A History of Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group.
Lee Sturley, The Secret Train Robber; Conversations with author, July 2011; Daily Mail, 14 May 2009.
Freddie Foreman, Running with the Twins, p. 130; Herts and Essex Observer, 14 May 2013.
Warren Manger, ‘Reggie Kray’s wife was drug-taking wild child’, Mirror, 8 September 2014.
The Times, 24 October 1972.
Conversations with JM.
Evening Standard, 9 September 1970. Billy Amies served his short sentence and died outside London according to one East Ender of natural causes, whatever that may mean in the circumstances.
Albert Donoghue and Martin Short, The Krays’ Lieutenant; With a Gun in My Hand.
The Times, 23 July 1975.
Carrie de Silva, conversation with JM, 10 August 2018; Derek Raymond, The Hidden Files, pp. 311-313.
Nat. Arch. BT 226/4826; The Times, The Guardian,1 March 1996.
James Morton, Gangland Today.
Daily Mail, 11 May 2013.
See also ‘The New Face’ in Duncan Campbell, That was Business, This is Personal.
Danny Collins, Nightmare in the Sun. Mirror, 27 January 2005.
Professor J. P. Payne, ‘A Queer Affair’, The History of Anaesthesia Society Proceedings, Volume 34. Proceedings of the Summer Scientific Meeting, Grangewood Hotel, Grange-over-Sands, 2-3 July 2004.
Chapter 23
The Kray Legacy
What legacy, if any, did the Twins leave, and why do they remain in the public eye today?
Part of their appeal was that they were twins. From the time of Greek and Roman mythology, twins have always held a special interest in folklore, history and romantic literature – they often become separated, or one is good and one is evil. With the exception of June and Jennifer Gibbons, catatonic female twins who committed arson in 1982, in British criminal history the Krays were unique. Indeed examples of twins, let alone identical twins, who are such high profile criminals are not exactly common worldwide. As a result opportunities for sociological studies are limited and should therefore be grasped.
Then there has always been the fascination with the East End. There may have been more riots, freaks, bodies or slashings per capita in Elephant and Castle, Kings Cross or Paddington, but none of these areas has held the criminal cachet as the East End.
There was of course Jack the Ripper, about whom over 500 books have been written. Another possible identity was revealed in 2015.
Between the wars the East End was regarded by the middle classes as dangerous, and as evidence, police only patrolled the area in pairs. Just as their New York counterparts did in pre-war Harlem, ‘society’ in white tie and tails would end an evening slumming at Charlie Brown’s Railway Tavern in the East India Dock Road, where gentlemen would be taken behind a curtain to be shown exotica and erotica. Everyone could boast the next day of their bravery in surviving the encounter.
Earlier t
here had been the Ratcliffe Highway Murders, the Dock Strikes, the Elephant Man Joseph Merrick, born in Leicester but exhibited in the Mile End Road, the Sydney Street siege, and later the long-running myth of how the East Enders linked arms and repulsed Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts. Perhaps it is because the very word East carries with it the spice of the Orient.
In fiction, Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood opens in an East End opium den, and in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Man with the Twisted Lip, the title character disappears in a den in Limehouse; Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu used the East End as his base for his plans to corrupt the western world.
The rise of the Krays coincided with the rejuvenation of the area after heavy bomb damage in World War Two. The Theatre Royal, Stratford, re-opened. An interest in working-class culture developed nationwide. For the first time, members of the working class could be seen on the screen and in print as heroes or anti-heroes. Prior to the war and immediately after, working-class heroes were mostly of the comic variety – Stepin’ Fetchit in America; George Formby, Tommy Trinder, Norman Wisdom and Gracie Fields are good examples in the UK. They might still get the man or the girl at the end of the film, but they were never in competition with David Niven. Now, with Joe Lampton, John Braine’s anti-hero from Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and so-called kitchen-sink dramas such as The L-Shaped Room, working-class people, unmarried mothers, gays and black men were treated as real people and not simply as ciphers or figures of fun. The first British film with a black actor in a starring role was Basil Dearden’s 1950 Pool of London, in which Earl Cameron has a tentative relationship with Susan Shaw. The trend stuttered on from there.