Krays- the Final Word Read online

  Like Jack Spot, the Krays did not appreciate being approached and then, if a job was cancelled, not being paid. Now in his 90s, Gerry Parker recalled over breakfast one day at Claridge’s:

  ‘I was always friendly with Reggie. In about 1964 I was living in Hampstead and I got a call from Eric Miller’s mate, Alfie Isaacs; would I go and see him in his office in Regent Street? When I got there he told me there was a problem with Colin Jordan of the British National Party and he wanted him done. Could I see to it?

  I went over to Vallance Road in the afternoon and the door was opened by one of the Berry brothers. It was, “Come into the parlour, have a cup of tea.” Reggie was there with Big Patsy [Connolly], a huge man. I asked if he wanted a bit of business and he asked who. I said Colin Jordan, and he asked which manor he was on. I said he was the BNP. Did I want him hurt? Yes. Did I want him cut? Yes. He said he couldn’t tell me how much it would be because Ronnie was at Brighton races. I was to ring the Double R that night. Reggie came to the phone and said it would be a monkey.

  Next day Isaacs rang and said not to do anything because Jordan had been arrested. I rang Reggie and asked if he could hold things and he just said, “Fuck yourself. We know where you are. We want our fucking money.”

  I thought I was getting too old for this. I had two young kids and so I went to a good friend Steve who had a greengrocery. In the past he’d had a half-hour straightener with Tommy Smithson outside Kearly & Tonge in Bethnal Green, and he lived near the Twins. He said he’d see what he could do. He rang me later and said he’d done something he hadn’t done before. He’d gone round and half pleaded with them. They’d thought about it and said for £300 I’m off the hook.

  A few weeks later I was buying fruit from Steve, and who walks round the corner but Ronnie and Reggie and Scotch Ian Barrie, who could be a spiteful bastard. I thought, “this looks serious,” but it was, “How are you Ger? We’re opening a club in Knightsbridge, come and have a drink.” It was all pals again. But that was when I went out and bought a shotgun.’45

  The Twins were also quite capable of extorting money from their associates. On one occasion the late Mickey Bailey and the Jewish hardman Harry Abrahams went to the Regency on behalf of Bill Ackerman, yet another who for a time managed the Green Dragon. Abrahams was no slouch. He was thought to have been capable of taking over Jack Spot’s interests in the East End after that man’s decline, but it appears he never wished to. Later convicted of a robbery with Albert Donoghue, he received five years and from time to time he managed some of the Kray clubs. At the time the Twins believed Ackerman owed them money from the proceeds of a long firm fraud. Bailey recalled:

  ‘Ronnie and Reggie were going to do Bill Ackerman who’d pulled a stroke and muscled into a long firm. Bill wasn’t fully accounting for things and whether Harry’s Jewish blood was siding with Bill’s Jewish blood I don’t know, but he went to see the Twins on his behalf and I went with him.

  Ronnie just said, “You can fuck off back, Harry and tell that fucking Jew bastard he’s got to pay.”

  Once we got outside Harry wiped his forehead and said, “At least that’s all he’s got to do.”

  Next day I got a call from Ron, who wanted to know why I’d been along. I said Harry was a friend of mine. He wanted to know if I was backing Harry against him and I said there was nothing like that. “Did Ackerman give you a few quid?” he wanted to know. I said he gave us a monkey, and Ronnie laughed and said he should have given us double. Ackerman had to go to the Regency the next day and Ronnie took another £500 from him and gave it to us.’46

  After the Twins met the hail-fellow-well-met fraudster Leslie Payne, their greatest money spinner and ultimately the man who would contribute greatly to their demise, from the beginning of the 1960s the bulk of their money should have come from long firm frauds.

  From the start, while the Twins were enchanted by Payne, other members of the Firm were less so. The first time I met him Micky Fawcett, himself an experienced LF man, recalled:

  ‘At the time the Twins were looking around. Not doing anything much except chinning a few old timers; people were coming to them and they were building a reputation, but then they met Payne who had loads of contacts in a different world. We were told to be in one of the pubs and to be on our best behaviour because we were going to meet someone who was going to be very useful and could do wonderful things. ‘Who could this be?’ I asked Georgie Osborne. And when Payne came in it looked like he was doing an imitation of the actor George Sanders. “Do you know boys,” he said, “I can live on £30 a week.” Well so he should have been able to. It was two if not three times the weekly wages of a working man. Some of us thought he was a police informer, but so far as the Twins were concerned everything he said had to be done.’47

  In his book The Brotherhood, Payne, nine years older than the Twins, claimed rather romantically to be the son of a solicitor who after going deaf became a vet and then a horse keeper for United Dairies. According to Payne, he himself had been a vacuum cleaner and radio salesman before going into partnership with Alexander Rapp on a small East End car site. It was there he met the short, plump Freddie Gore, whom Payne describes as an eternal optimist, who had been doing the books for Rapp. In time they bought Rapp out and continued in partnership together working a hire purchase ramp.

  This account was not quite accurate. In an earlier statement to the police Payne had been rather more forthcoming. He certainly had worked for Alexander Rapp, who changed the name of his company from Rapp Radio to 625 Centre. Rapp wanted to close his business after several unexplained burglaries and Payne had bought him out. Rapp stayed for a time but very soon there were visits to the premises at 181 Dalston Lane by Alf Willey, Billy Exley, Bobbie Buckley and more significantly by Charlie, Ronnie and Reggie. Bobby Ramsey was used as a debt collector. It was then that Rapp ceased to have any connection with what had once been a decent little business.

  Payne maintains the first LF he ran for the Krays was in 1960 when a supermarket owner friend of his who was running an LF was beginning to lose his nerve after he had been taking too much money too soon. Payne took it over and ran it for the Krays for the last two months before it finally went bust. It was such a success that another end-of-time LF was set up in Brixton, and this was followed by a series of long firms all over London and throughout the country.

  Little Stan Davis did not like Payne:

  ‘Leslie was a very arrogant man, he would always talk down to you; clever but audacious. He was a self-promoter; people would believe what he said.’48

  In 1961 Payne came up with the idea of an overseas investment in the form of a development of 3,000 homes and shops for the township of Enugu, the capital of Eastern Nigeria, which had just gained independence from Britain. Just as the idea of the Great Train Robbery was hawked around the country’s top robbers for some time before it actually took place, so this scheme had been hawked around the fringes of finance. In theory, the project was legitimate and possibly viable but at the time, doing business in Nigeria was fraught with danger, both physically and politically. Payne claimed that the land was worth £750,000; there was mortgage financing available and, better still, two building contractors had been signed up to do £50,000 of work each before any payment had to be made. They had also paid an introductory fee of £5,000 and Payne thought that, with other contractors coming in, introductory fees would come to £60,000. Ronnie, Reggie and Charlie went out to Nigeria and lorded it over the natives, with Ronnie thinking it would be a great idea to bring a black servant home.

  Unfortunately, according to Payne, Charlie later thought the boys at home were short of cash, and he appropriated the £5,000 introductory fees. When Payne, Gore, Charlie Kray and their fellow fraudster the Canadian Gordon Anderson returned to Nigeria, one of the contractors wanted either another contract to build five hundred homes or his money back. He received neither and went to the police. Payne and Gore wer
e arrested and imprisoned. Charlie telephoned to England for help, and now began a frantic whip-round to raise the money. Each member of the Firm was told how much he must raise from his contacts – £100 from X, £500 from Y and so on. Reggie Kray says that both Dolly Kray and Payne’s wife declined to contribute, but eventually the £5,000 was put together and telegraphed to a waiting Charlie, who drove with a lawyer to pay the money to a judge.

  How much of the money the contractor actually received is not known, but Gore and a very chastised Leslie Payne, said by Charlie to be on the point of a nervous breakdown, were released. As the tale was told and retold the Krays were said to have been on the point of raising a team à la Wild Geese to fly to Nigeria to break their men out of prison.

  Charlie maintained the fault was all Payne’s, and once back in England, they gave him the elbow but he wasn’t actually sacked for another five years. Payne himself claimed Charlie caused the trouble by remitting the £5,000 back to the Twins in England. This may well be true. Would Charlie really have allowed Payne to siphon off £5,000 in front of his very eyes?

  At the other end of the Kray flowerbed of fraudsters were much more exotic plants, such as the always immaculately dressed Bobby McKew. Born in 1924 and a member of the breed known by the newspapers as ‘West End Playboys’, he had earlier on served two years in the Lebanon for a jewel robbery. Then in 1956, along with the playboy and amateur jockey Dandy Kim Caborn-Waterfield, he was convicted in his absence in France for the 1953 burglary of the safe of film magnate Jack Warner, which had netted £25,000. He had been extradited from Tangiers in July 1959 and was sentenced to five years, which he served in Les Baumettes prison in Marseilles and then in Fresnes.

  At one time McKew was married to the South African Ana Gerber, then the world waterskiing champion, whose brother Robin worked at Raynors, the Leicester club run by Charlie Kray with his partner Trevor Rayner. McKew now lived in a mews house in Swiss Cottage and, during the day, could be found in the company of Leslie Payne and Freddy Gore, and in an evening at the then fashionable villains’ and actors’ pub, The Star Tavern in Belgrave Mews off Knightsbridge.

  Another flower, albeit somewhat faded, was the one-time barrister, and now alcoholic, Stanley Crowther. Called to the Bar in 1949, he began his career brightly, joining the fashionable Derek Curtis Bennett’s chambers. However he quarreled with another member of the Chambers, and soon left. But his legal career was already on the wane, and he took to accosting solicitors on Fleet Street hoping for work.

  His luck turned, not nessarily for the better, when he impressed two customers, telling them they had the law wrong one evening in the Lord Nelson pub in the Kings Road. As a result he was recommended to various East End clients and was finally asked to help the Twins when they were due to be placed on an ID parade over the stabbing of the ‘African’ in Tottenham Court Road.

  Quite against the code of conduct for barristers, Crowther met Charles Kray Snr and the Twins near the ENT Hospital in the Gray’s Inn Road. He then bamboozled the officer in charge of the parade into arranging separate parades for the Twins instead of one large one. At each, wrongly thinking they had to pick out two men, a witness picked out one Kray but also another man, which as a result meant they could not be charged.

  After being disbarred and jailed for passport offences in 1959, Crowther worked a number of menial jobs until he was offered a job by Johnny Gamman of A & R Direct Supply Co in Stoke Newington, whose co-director was Alfie Anish. Gamman and Anish later opened the Regency club, allowing the Krays to use the basement as a betting office and spieler before they were legalised. When A & R plunged into financial difficulties the club was sold to John Barry for £1,000 with the proviso that he paid the debts, including £6,000 to the brewers Watneys and the last quarter’s rent.

  One A & R creditor was David Forland of Oslo Electronics Ltd who then offered Crowther a job. The Krays were regular visitors at Forland’s premises in Hoxton Street and one afternoon they brought along Leslie Payne with them. It was no time at all before Crowther was sent to work at an LF at Blenheim Gardens, Brixton Hill under Payne’s supervision and later he ran his own long firm, S Crowther & Co in Artillery Passage in the City.

  Reggie claimed he met the East Anglia-based arsonist Geoff Allen through Moishe Goldstein, the one-time proprietor of the Green Dragon. Blueball told Reggie he had met a ‘mug punter’ who lived near Stanstead and was planning to take a few quid off him in a bent card game. He asked if they wanted to come along for the ride, which translated as would they be his minders. If they did, he would give them a few quid. They went with Sammy Lederman. Blueball won £1,100 and Allen told them he would meet them the next morning to pay. When he failed to appear they headed over to his cottage but found him there armed with a shotgun. Later Reggie, recognising talent when he saw it, went back alone and asked if they could do business. Another version suggests it was the great Billy Hill who advised Reggie to do business with Allen.

  Maybe Leslie Payne did cost the Firm money in Nigeria, but his biggest coup on the Krays’ behalf was introducing them to what was potentially their greatest legitimate money spinner, the night club and casino Esmeralda’s Barn, then run by the man-about-town Stefan de Fay.

  Conversation with JM, 17 April 2015; Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/11386.

  Leslie Payne, The Brotherhood, pp. 16-18.

  Evening News, 27 September 1963.

  Eric Mason, Inside Story, pp.170-171.

  Albert Donoghue, The Krays’ Lieutenant, p. 49; Conversation with JM, 7 September 2012.

  It was a time of sieges. In March that year James Baigrie killed himself in a van in Earl’s Court during another siege. He had escaped in October 1983 from Edinburgh’s high security prison during a life sentence for shooting a barman in the back. He had been on the run for 16 months.

  The Times, 4 April 1959.

  Conversation with JM, 16 August 2007.

  John Dickson, Murder without Conviction, pp. 1-6.

  George Tremlett, Little Legs: Muscle Man of Soho; Frank Fraser, Mad Frank’s London, pp. 58-9. For more about Smith generally see Mrs X, The Barmaid’s Tale.

  Conversation with JM, 27 May 2015.

  Conversation with JM, 7 September 2012.

  Conversation with JM, 22 May 2017. Sir Eric Miller, once head of the public company Peachey Property Corporation, committed suicide on the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur 1977 while under investigation for fraud. Doubts have been raised about the circumstances of his death, with some suggesting he may have been murdered.

  A leading member of an early neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, on 25 January 1967 Colin Jordan was sentenced to 18 months in prison at Devon Assizes for a breach of the Race Relations Act 1965 by circulating material likely to cause racial hatred. He died in 2009.

  Conversation with JM, 17 April 2002.

  Conversation with JM, 10 April 2015.

  Conversation with JM, 24 October 2013.

  Chapter 4

  9-5

  Although, as Albert Donoghue wrote in The Krays’ Lieutenant, the working day for members of the Firm began with a meeting at Vallance Road at 9 a.m., it was by no means a steady nine-to-five job. There was, of course, the usual Friday round of collecting protection money, but there were a host of other duties: LFs to be organised and supervised; new businesses to be brought into the fold; boys to be found for Ronnie; enemies to be shot, or at least shot at or beaten up. There was also often work to be done of an evening.

  From time to time members and indeed other East End figures were required to attend meetings away from Vallance Road. Mickey Bailey thought:

  ‘A summons from the Twins wasn’t to be ignored. Invariably one of the Firm would come round. When they come they’d say, “Ronnie, or the Twins, want to see you tomorrow morning. Get over between ten and twelve.” The meeting was always at their house, the Regency or Pellicci’s, which was a café in Bethnal Green Road. There was two Pelliccis, Nevio a
nd Terry and invariably it would be in Terry’s. If it was at their mother’s or Pellicci’s you knew you didn’t have a problem, but if it was at the Regency it could be. This was where they held their court.49

  The best you could expect if you went to the Regency was a bollocking or maybe that you’d have to go and hurt someone. That would clear off the offence, whatever it was.’

  Another punishment was for the offender to have to go to a club owner and tell him the Twins were now his partners or even that he was out of the club completely. In one case when they were feeling moralistic, the offender had to go and tell the owner of a porn shop that he was to close it down. Back in the 1990s Mickey Bailey told me:

  ‘The next worst was a beating or a cutting. If you was called over it wasn’t likely to come to a cutting. It never took them long of a night to find out where you was. Someone would give them a bell and you’d have visitors in the pub or when you come out.’

  The penalty for warning someone brought in for punishment was that instead you would be the one to suffer. When the receiver Tony Maffia refused to give the Krays £400 to help retrieve Payne and Gore from Africa, he was due to ‘be hurt’. When his friend Buller Ward intervened and warned Maffia to leave the Regency, he himself was set upon by the Twins, and Reggie cut him so extensively in the face that he required over 100 stitches.50