Krays- the Final Word

  First published by Mirror Books in 2019

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  © James Morton

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  ISBN 978-1-912624-69-0

  Typeset by Danny Lyle

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  Cover images: Mirrorpix

  ‘But there were other murders too, there were a hell of a lot of other murders. I investigated seven murders myself.’

  Nipper Read

  Interview with Craig Cabell, December 2001

  ‘Making heroes out of murderers strikes me as both crass and impossible.’

  John Pearson

  ‘Ronnie, Reggie and me’, Esquire, January 19

  Introduction

  So, how many was it the Krays killed? Or, how many did they have killed is probably a better way of putting it. They only did two themselves – or was it just two? There was Georgie Cornell, shot in the Blind Beggar of course. Two in the head as the juke box played ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore’. Dead right. Just like that villain who was reciting the Lord’s Prayer as he was about to be topped in a club down Walthamstow way, Valentine’s Day it was. When he gets to the bit, ‘Thy will be done’, the fellow with the gun says, ‘It will son, it will’. Cornell had been off his ground after visiting his friend Jimmy Andrews, trying to find out who shot him. Ronnie Kray’s was the name in the frame for Andrews as well. Well, that was one story.

  And then there was Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, stabbed to death in a basement in Stoke Newington. They were the only two murders the police could pin on them personally. Then there was Frank Mitchell. The Twins got chucked on that one, although years later their mate Freddie Foreman, ‘Brown Bread Fred’, they called him, went on the box to say how him and Alfie Gerard did it for them.

  So that’s three altogether or may be four, but there were others. ‘Mad’ Teddy Smith was meant to be one, but there was a rumour he’d jumped ship and legged it to Australia. Then there was a rent boy picked up in Piccadilly who’d snuffed it during a bit of over-enthusiastic sex. And what about Freddie Mills, the World Light Heavyweight Champion? Then he went on the stage and did telly and had a nightclub on the Charing Cross Road. Star of stage, screen and radio, as they say. But the official verdict was he’d topped himself. That’s the best of a contract killing – if it was that even. Make it look like suicide or an accident. Not that poor Freddie hadn’t good enough reason to do himself. The official verdict was suicide, but it could have been the perfect contract killing. He had reasons for suicide though – debts, boyfriend gone, not getting any more work on the telly.

  And what about Ernie Isaacs, shot in his own flat? That was another that was never solved. There were stories that it was Reggie in person. Did Reggie personally shoot Ernie Isaacs in his flat? And the solicitor David Jacobs? Another who topped himself, apparently? But there was a story Ronnie had him done for not helping him out in the McVitie case. Not impossible. Did brother Charlie on his deathbed tell Reggie to kill the drug dealer Peter Beaumont Gowling because he was a grass? Coming from a grass like Charlie that would have been a bit rich. Whatever Gowling had done and whether Charlie did ask Reggie to see to things for him, he was shot and killed in the north-east a month after he finished his 11-year sentence.1

  But as they say, ‘Where’s the evidence?’

  Daily Express, 25 February 2001.

  Chapter 1

  In the Beginning There

  Were the Krays

  ‘This boy has been beaten by beasts’, said Thames Court magistrate Herbert Malone KC. The date was 12 March 1950, the time around 11 p.m. and the place outside Barries’ Dance Hall in Narrow Way, just off Mare Street, Hackney. The boy in question was Roy Harvey, badly beaten with chains on his way home with Wally Birch, who went on to be a player in the West End escort agencies, and Dennis Siegenberg who, years later as Dennis Stafford, was convicted of the murder of Angus Sibbett in Newcastle.2 The beasts were allegedly the Kray Twins and their friend Patrick Aucott. Harvey had had the nerve and, for the East End, the bad manners to go to the police. But, when it came to it, he might have saved himself and his friends a good deal of trouble. He needn’t have bothered because amid fears of interference with witnesses, the committal proceedings dragged on. By the time the case came up at the Old Bailey, one girl had been threatened with a slashing and Harvey had received a warning letter. The case was dismissed when the witnesses failed to identify the Twins. It was the first of many abortive efforts over the next quarter of a century to pin the Krays down.3 Laurie O’Leary, a great friend of the Krays, claims in his book Ron Kray: a Man Among Men that the Twins were totally innocent in this case.

  As the years pass, the truth and legends about the Kray brothers blur and merge just as the men and pigs do at the end of Animal Farm. Writers have relied on each other’s inaccurate accounts. Dates have been transposed. Names have been changed. There have been so many contradictory memoirs that things have been reversed and the pen has become mightier than the gun. The tendency has been, as the character Maxwell Scott says in John Ford’s The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’.

  What then are the facts? To begin, it is certain the Twins were born on 24 October 1933, with Reginald a few minutes older than his brother Ronald. But even then some writers have the date wrong. Their brother Charles was seven years older, born on 9 July 1926. In between there was a daughter Violet, who died within a few hours of her premature birth in 1929, possibly because of a beating their father Charles Kray Snr had given his wife Violet during the last stages of her pregnancy.

  They came from Jewish and Gypsy stock and were born at 64 Stene Street, Hoxton, in London’s East End. They were monozygotic or identical twins, still a comparatively rare phenomenon and, given the high rate of infant mortality in the East End of the 1930s, their survival into adulthood was unusual. However, at the age of three they contracted diphtheria and were taken to separate hospitals. Reggie was home in a relatively short time but Ronnie fretted for his brother and had breathing difficulties for some months until their mother arrived at the General Hospital, Hoxton to take him back to Stene Street.

  Charles Kray Snr was a ‘pesterer’, a man who bought and sold wardrobes and gold and silver door to door. A deserter in World War Two, he spent the next 12 years on the run and so was absent from the family for long periods. Therefore their mother, a flower seller to whom they were devoted, was the greatest influence on them. Violet’s father, Johnny ‘Cannonball’ Lee, had been a fairly well-known boxer and entertainer, who could balance on bottles and lick white-hot pokers. Bef
ore the Second World War the family moved to the slightly more salubrious 178 Vallance Road in Bethnal Green – but still with no bath and an outside lavatory – a few hundred yards from Whitechapel tube station. Next door lived Violet’s sister Rose, and her other sister May was two doors away. Across the road, her brother John and his wife Maud lived above the café they ran. Opposite was a one-cow dairy.

  A different proposition from their father was their uncle Alfie, born in 1909, a high-class receiver who, although never a member of the Firm as such, would work with them during their heyday. ‘He warned me against the Twins,’ said the dwarf-like ‘Little’ Stan Davis, himself a noted receiver who also worked with their elder brother Charlie on the racecourse and Point-to-Point pitches. ‘Alfie was top class. A good man to work with. Reggie was more sensible [than Ronnie] but that didn’t make him any less of a menace.’

  During the war Violet and the three brothers were evacuated to Hadleigh in Essex. Billeted with the local doctor, the twins chased and killed his cockerel and defied his wife’s efforts to teach them to read and write. Violet Kray missed London, however, and they soon returned. Later they wrote they had enjoyed themselves hugely in the country.

  Back in London after the war, their school records were indifferent and they were continually involved in fights, which they usually won. As they grew up they took to wearing razor blades sewn into the lapels of their jackets, so that anyone taking hold of them would have their hands cut, much as the Peaky Blinders in Birmingham and the Sabinis had worn blades in their caps before the war. They also favoured knuckledusters and nails protruding from their shoes.

  Until they were young men the pair were identical in weight, height and looks, except Ronnie had a mole on his neck. Then, when their boxing careers ended, Ronnie put on weight, not a matter on which he liked to hear a comment.

  Ronnie Hart, their cousin on their father’s side, and later their nemesis, who probably knew them as well as any, thought the Twins were both similar and very different in their tastes. As he grew up Ronnie modelled himself on Al Capone, of whom he sometimes said he was a reincarnation, wearing an Albert watch and chain, a fawn camel hair or a dark blue cashmere coat, which he wore over his shoulders like the American Mafiosi. He liked opera and particularly Capone’s favourite, the tenor Beniamino Gigli. He kept a stock of around 50 shirts, giving them away when he had worn them once or twice. He would only wear black silk socks – his favourite colour. He drank gin and tonic but moved on to wine, which he thought was the thing to do. He soaked his feet in rose water and milk at night because he had been told European kings had done the same. The only car he could drive was an automatic, and that badly. He hoped that in a film he would be played by Rod Steiger. Once he told Hart, ‘I’m a genius, don’t you realise it? I’m like Hitler. He was also a genius and he was mad. It’s always been like that you know. Every genius is mad’. According to Hart he unsuccessfully attempted to organise a Kray Youth Movement.

  Reggie loved children, horse riding, slow dreamy music – his favourites were Timi Yuro (the little girl with the big voice) and Dean Martin – and writing poetry. He preferred casual wear, owning around 70 shirts, none of which he gave away. His favourite colour was blue. He had his teeth capped. He never forgot he could have been a force in the ring, often shadow boxing as he went along the street. He would drink a glass of hot water every morning and sometimes hot milk and honey at night.

  Both had rather effete high-pitched voices and author Bernard O’Mahoney thought that Reggie spoke rather like Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. Neither liked being touched. As a Scorpio, Reggie had a tie clip of a scorpion and Ronnie a charm, both made out of diamonds. Both had a Maltese barber visit them because they feared an attack while in the chair, something which happened to old-time American gangsters such as Albert Anastasia who, on 25 October 1957, was shot and killed while having his hair cut at the Park Sheraton hotel in New York. Both massaged their hair with olive oil and surgical spirit because that was what old-time boxers did. They had a private manicurist and masseuse and used York Town aftershave until Ronnie graduated to Brut. Both were vain and could hardly pass a mirror without straightening their hair, which they claimed was more luxuriant than that of any other member of the Firm. Both feared baldness. They liked having their fortunes told and Dot Brown, the wife of Tommy ‘The Bear’ Brown (or Welch), a member of the Firm, gave them suitable readings.

  As for literature, their detractors said they had read only one book, How Green was my Valley. Their lieutenant Albert Donoghue said that Ronnie thought urethritis had something to do with youths. This is probably a bit unkind; the Twins biographer John Pearson told a television programme that Ron’s favourite books were Boys Town (because it was all about boys) and Anthony Nutting’s life of General Gordon – ‘He’s my hero, gay like me, faced overwhelming odds and died like a man’.4

  Both collected old weapons, some of which were later hung on the wall of Ronnie’s flat at Cedra Court in Hackney. The flat itself had a giant four-poster bed. The lounge was done out in oriental style with Chinese and Persian carpets, an elephant’s foot, a three-foot ebony elephant which weighed around two hundredweight and stuffed birds in cages. The bathroom, with a black bath and pink tiles, had a peephole in the door. It was at Cedra Court that Ronnie threw his homosexual orgies, attended by milords Driberg and Boothby.

  Their older brother Charlie was unlike the Twins in habits, dress and affability, said Hart. A womanising man who was hail-fellow-well-met, he loved his wife Doris ‘Dolly’ Moore, whom the family regarded as neurotic and snooty, and adored his children Gary and Nancy. He wore no grease on his hair and little jewellery. His hobbies were his motor boat, caravan holidays and spear fishing in the South of France. After his release from his sentence for assisting in the disposal of McVitie’s body, he devoted much of his time to Gary, who had serious behavioural problems.

  The Twins had brief spells working as fishmongers, fruit pickers and labourers from 1949-50. After October 1950, neither of them was ever really gainfully employed again.

  Charlie was, again, a different proposition. Throughout his life he ran a series of unsuccessful businesses including a theatrical agency and a clothing factory. But most of that was in the future. After his National Service he had worked on the Point-to-Points with Stan Davis, putting up bookmakers’ ‘joints’. He also helped him with an early form of a package travel company, flying holidaymakers to Beauvais and then coaching them down to a camp in the South of France. That all ended when Davis, who could never resist making a dishonest penny when he could have earned a legitimate shilling, went to prison along with Uncle Alf Kray.

  East End hardman and lifelong friend of Charlie Kray, Mickey Bailey, remembered ‘Charlie told me a story about little Stan Davis. He was out in the south of France when he was held up by a car-jacker at gun point. He spoke perfect French, did Stan, and he told the man he’d just come out of the nick and hadn’t anything. The little bastard got away with it’.

  For a time it seemed as though, along with Charlie, the Twins might make a career in the Ring. Boxing, along with villainy, was then the traditional working-class way out of poverty. As kids they had fought each other over three rounds at Alf Stewart’s Boxing Booth when it visited Bethnal Green, for which they shared seven and sixpence. Later there were amateur trophies galore. In 1948 Reggie won the London Schoolboys championship and was later a British Schoolboy finalist. Ronnie won the Hackney Schoolboys’ championship and the London Junior title as well as a London ATC title. As teenagers Charlie bought them their first boxing boots at Grose’s in Ludgate Circus and took them to Bill Kline’s professional gymnasium, known as Kline’s or The Olympic in Fitzroy Square, where they sparred with top men of the time, including world champion Terry Allen and British light-heavyweight champion Ron Barton.5

  What their brother Charlie considered a defining moment in the Twins’ careers took place on a Saturday evening in October 1
950. Naturally his version is biased, but he claims that an officious police officer, enquiring into a fight at a youth club, told a group of youths to move away from Pellicci’s café in the Bethnal Green Road. According to Charlie, the officer poked Ronnie in the stomach and in turn Ronnie hit him. Back at the station Ronnie took a bad beating before being charged with assault. Reggie went to find out what had happened to his brother, hit the officer and so, a precursor to the Cornell-McVitie murders, ‘did his one’ too. Charlie maintains that he was told if the Krays raised trouble over Ronnie’s beating then, in turn, the police would cause trouble for the family, starting with their father, who was still avoiding the call-up. Charlie claims the police threatened they’d make life difficult for their draft-dodging father if Ronnie complained about his beating.6

  In the 1950s assaults on the police generally meant instant imprisonment, particularly since in this case the day before the hearing Ronnie had received one day’s detention at the Friends House Juvenile Court for attempted taking and driving away of a motor vehicle. But on 1 November at Old Street Magistrates’ Court, into the witness box stepped the chain-smoking Father Richard Hetherington of St James the Great in Bethnal Green. 1950 was a time when people still went to church rather than cleaning their motor cars on a Sunday morning; Anglican and Catholic churches were perhaps held in higher esteem than they are today, and a vicar or priest who came forward to extol the virtues of the defendant was highly sought after.

  Hetherington told Harold Sturge, the magistrate, how the Twins were generally good lads, ‘apart from their disgusting behaviour on this occasion’. The good Father won Sturge over and this time they received two years’ probation each. Over the next 29 years Hetherington and other priests would be regularly wheeled out on both sacred and secular occasions.

  The Boxing Board of Control took no notice of their convictions – if indeed they ever knew of them – and now trained by Henry Berry, the father of the very talented Teddy, they turned professional. One story by their driver Billy ‘Jack’ Frost is that Ronnie had hit a referee and left his amateur club. Reggie had the talent and won all his fights. Ronnie had the aggression. Charlie, who won 18 out of 21 fights, lost interest after his marriage. Finally all three brothers boxed on the same bill on 11 December 1951 at the Royal Albert Hall. Reggie beat Bobby Manito on points. Ronnie lost on points to Bill Sliney, whom Reggie had twice beaten. In the early 1950s the Southern Area of the Boxing Board of Control did not always look after its boxers as well as it might have done. Charlie, who had not boxed for a year, took £25 from the promoter and a bad beating from the then undefeated welterweight and very classy Lew Lazar, who later fought for the British Middleweight title. Outclassed and out of condition, he was knocked down twice for counts of nine but pulled himself off the canvas and, against the advice of Berry, continued until he was knocked out in the third round. That night was the highlight and indeed the end of the Twins’ non-criminal career. It was now time to do their National Service.