Krays- the Final Word Page 6

  Ronnie, who by now liked to be known as ‘The Colonel’, had either a high sense of security or the dramatic or both. When there was something to be discussed he would lead members over to the local Public Baths where, he believed, they would be safe from police spies. There was a simple code among members. A successful job would be reported as ‘That dog won’ and a failed mission as ‘That dog lost’. A visit to a business under protection and due to pay money was prefaced by a telephone call, ‘Has that betting money come through?’ Actual names were never mentioned over the phone. The Clyde was ‘The Old Woman’, the Crown near Vallance Road was ‘The little pub’, the Two Puddings was called ‘The Fire Engines’ because it was next to a fire station. The Lion in Tapp Street was ‘The Widow’s’ or ‘Madge’s Place’, run by the red-haired, stylishly dressed Margaret ‘Madge’ Jacobs, who allowed the Krays to use an upstairs room as a sort of clubhouse.

  The childish code was something which must have taken a listening officer at least fifteen seconds to work out. A gun was ‘a book’; a knife was simply ‘a thing’. Members such as Dukey Osborne were also required to stash or carry weapons for them. Weapons were kept behind the bar of pubs they used or hidden in the cisterns of the men’s lavatories.

  The shooting of the enormous, handsome and usually engaging George Dixon was a rather more public affair. With minor variations, the story is that Dixon, barred from the Regency after allegedly causing trouble, returned one night thinking Charlie had granted him permission. Furious, the Colonel headed for the men’s lavatory, where he kept a gun. The gun jammed when Ronnie fired it and Dixon ran out of the club. In an improved version Reggie, seeing what was happening, grabbed the gun, knocking it to the floor before it went off. Ronnie later patched up his quarrel with Dixon and gave him the bullet as a souvenir.51

  According to Ronnie Hart, the Firm had an arsenal which included Gurkha knives, bayonets, a Limpet mine, a rifle with a telescopic sight and two Sten guns. Reggie had an automatic shotgun and Ronnie a .410 shotgun which was kept for him by Charlie Clarke, the Cat Man, in Walthamstow. His swordstick was carried by Sammy Lederman, who claimed he had gout. Another gun was kept in the bottom of a piano in Lederman’s house. Hart claimed they also had a bomb which could be stuck under a car and detonated at a three-mile range. The pair were security conscious, and Reggie Kray’s flat at Manor House had a steel plate in the door. Of an evening one of the Firm would be told to leave the pub or club before the Twins to check whether their enemies, the Richardson brothers or others, were about. It seems they were right to do so. One night a certain Albert Nicholls was mistaken for Ronnie and had his leg broken in a hit-and-run outside The Widows.

  Their brother Charlie was often used as a middle man. When the heavyweight Fred ‘Nosher’ Powell retired from the ring he was approached in his dressing room by Jack Isow and asked to act as doorman and take over the cloakroom concession at his restaurant in Brewer Street, Soho. He managed to upset the Twins there by barring them for not wearing ties. He was visited the next day by Charlie who appeared to accept his explanation. Generally afraid of no one, Powell nevertheless admitted that for the next few weeks, after the restaurant shut for the night, he had walked down the middle of the street and avoided multi-storey car parks.52

  Friday was generally collection day, something Donoghue referred to as the ‘Milk Round’. He claimed it was conducted in a gentlemanly fashion.

  The protected ranged from the high to the low. At the upper end was The Colony in Berkeley Square, said to be paying £100 to £300 a week (the figure varies and is anyway disputed) and the Casanova off New Bond Street which paid £50. Donoghue relates:

  ‘Ronnie introduced me to Joe Dagle, Pauline Wallace’s partner at the New Casanova. He told Joe I was now the collector. After that I called on Joe every Friday to pick up the £50… Dagle was a white-haired man in his sixties. He had a little flat at the top of the club. I’d go up there, have a coffee with him; he’d be having his toast and marmalade, reading the Sporting Life. We’d discuss the weather. “Now there’s the envelope,” just like that. When we’d finished talking I’d say, “Right, see you later! Back next week.”’53

  Franny Daniels of the Mount Street Bridge and Social Club in Mayfair, where the last thing played was bridge, paid £10 less.54 At the lower end of the scale, scrap metal dealers in Hackney and Poplar paid £10 a week each. There was a mini cab business in the East End from which Albert Donoghue had to pay £10 in addition to the Krays’ cut of 40%; Benny’s, a spieler in the Commercial Road, anted up £15 a week; the owner of Dodger’s in Brick Lane paid over £15, where the collectors were allowed to keep the money as wages. Of course, the Green and Little Dragon Clubs in Aldgate also paid. The Soho porn king Bernie Silver handed over £60 a week for three Soho clubs which the Krays split with Freddie Foreman and Johnny Nash. In return Nash handed over part of his take from the Olympic in Camden Town, the Astor and the Bagatelle.

  Members of the Firm worked mostly in pairs guarding each other’s backs. ‘Scotch Jack’ Dickson and Ian Barrie had known each other in Scotland for years. Donoghue and Ronnie Hart teamed up as, naturally, did the Lambrianou brothers. The pairs didn’t always get on. Donoghue did not rate Ronnie Bender, whom he considered a bully. Ronnie Kray disliked Connie Whitehead. On one occasion Whitehead put a bottle in Dickson’s face and was put on ‘trial’ by the Twins at the home of their friend Charlie Clarke. After suggestions that the Old Testament law of an eye for an eye should apply and that Dickson should be allowed to bottle Whitehead, he was merely suspended from the Firm and ‘sent to Coventry’, which meant that his pension was withheld for a time.

  The Twins were basically acting as thieves’ ponces, but they were good at it. Mickey Bailey recalled:

  ‘I know of one guy from South London – he’d had a lorry load of cigarettes and the Twins thought Charlie was entitled to handle the receiving. They had to give Charlie his whack out of the fags. It come to around £2,000, which was money. The fellow had told a man who was some sort of a relation of Charlie’s by marriage, and it got back to them.’55

  There was a standard tariff. Ronnie Hart recalled:

  ‘They had their ears to the ground all the time. They knew all the good villains in all parts of London and their intelligence services provided them with information about any good jobs villains had pulled off, like major breakings and the hijacking of lorries. When a job had taken place members of the Firm like myself were sent to call on the villain concerned. We had to invite them out for a drink with the Twins. During the meeting the Krays chatted to them about the job they had done. They assessed the overall value and then ordered the crooks to pay up a fairly substantial percentage of their take. Even members of the Firm were not immune. Anyone working for them who did an outside job had to pay up.’56

  If the Krays knew the thief would get only a third of the value from a receiver then they would take a third of that third.

  On one of the rare occasions when they did steal goods themselves, it was a fiasco. Carpets and rugs which the Twins thought were Persian were loaded up and taken to the receiver Stan Davis, then living in Chingford. He took one look and pronounced them as Belgian and worthless. In February 1961 Davis was sentenced to seven years after the police discovered ‘a warehouse of stolen property’ at his home. It was then the Twins warned poor Charlie, who had been in a loose association with Davis, that, carrying as it did the risk of a prison sentence, receiving was not a suitable line of work for him and he should join with them. Davis did not, however, give up his association with the Kray family, and in August 1967 he was arrested with Alfie Kray and charged with possessing forged American travellers’ cheques.

  Nor could Firm and fringe members necessarily expect help from the Twins when things went wrong. Their friend Eric Mason tangled with Frank Fraser and Eddie Richardson in a quarrel outside the Astor Club in Berkeley Square. After being hit in the head with an axe, Mason was dumped o
utside the London Hospital. Mason himself claims that after the Astor fight, Fraser and Eddie Richardson bundled him into a car and took him to Atlantic Machines in Tottenham Court Road, where his hand was pinned to his head with an axe. He was left on waste ground and ended up needing 370 stitches. When he was recovering he went to the Twins asking them to take retributive action on his behalf. They were having none of it and instead they gave him £40.57

  Once a week the Twins would have a collection for the ‘Aways’ – locals who were then in prison. Once released, they felt in their debt and would stand at the bar with them in reflected glory: ‘I was having a drink with the Krays last night’. It was a way of providing a network of informers who would report back to them of deals or police activity.

  The Aways had been founded in a curious way. The Krays were always looking for a spot of good publicity. They had sent money to Oxfam and had a splash in the East London Advertiser where they had a contact. One item on the table was the opening of a home for alcoholics in Cheshire Street with Lennie ‘Books’ Dunn as the warden. The project never got anywhere but Ronnie had made friends with a tramp, James, to whom he gave £1 a night for his lodging. ‘We must look after these people and they will look after us if we are ever in trouble’, he told Ronnie Hart. One night when the Twins were due to meet Adrienne Corri and Lita Rosa in the Grave Maurice in the Mile End Road, Reggie objected to James’s presence but Ronnie insisted James was his friend and ‘he’ll go wherever I go’. A row followed during which Reggie said, ‘You talk about friends but what about our friends in the nick? Who gives them money?’ Ronnie replied that they did, but only when they were released. Reggie replied, ‘That’s fine. You’re in the nick for seven years and then you come out and get £50. That’s no bloody good’. It was then agreed that instead of handing money to tramps like James it would be more useful to make sure the men in prison were looked after and their families were catered for. A meeting was set for Vallance Road the next day to arrange the details and all the pubs the Firm used were given a pot marked ‘For the Aways’. There was also a contributions book kept by Ronnie. At first the scheme was voluntary, but when the Krays saw how much money was coming in they made it compulsory and took half for themselves every Friday. Any money left would be handed to the men’s wives to help pay their electricity and gas bills. The rest went on cigarettes, books, magazines and liquor which were made into parcels, known as Joeys, and then sent inside.

  Many years later, former Flying Squad officer John Rigbey told me how just before Christmas 1967 he had taken two young Aides to CID (i.e. police on probation to become detectives) to The Horns:

  ‘There were the three brothers along with Sammy Lederman and several Chinese men who I suppose were paying their weekly dues, as well as various people I knew and half knew. I was near the stage when Ronnie came past and looked at me with those expressionless eyes. I had my back to the company when one of the Aides said, “Guv, look behind you.” The bar was empty. They had all gone into the other bar. Checker Berry was there that night looking sheepish and I said to him, “Tell Ronnie if he wants to play games he’s got the wrong person. I don’t mind a joke but I’m not going to be insulted. Does he want his mother’s drum spun (house searched) at four o’clock on Christmas morning?”

  The following Sunday morning an anonymous bunch of roses was delivered to my home as, I suppose, a sort of apology or maybe they saw it as a sort of warning – “We know where you live.” I’ve always wondered how they found out my home address.’58

  One of the ways to tie a person to a criminal organisation is to have him or her commit a serious criminal act, which can be held over their heads in case of any potential defection. So, from time to time, members or aspiring members were sent to shoot men who had offended them. When they took in their cousin Ronnie Hart while he was on the run from Eastleigh open prison, he was required to shoot a club owner, who had upset them by claiming that he could send them packing but also that Ronnie’s ‘little boys’ preferred him. Scotch Jack was told to give Hart a .45 gun and a coat to conceal it. Armed with a photo of the club owner and £10 expenses to get to the Horseshoe Club in the West End where he might be found, Hart was told to go with Bobby Teale, find the man and shoot him.

  Ronnie gave instructions, ‘Don’t aim at his head because you might miss. Aim at his chest and pull the trigger three or four times. Nobody will touch you because everyone in the club will be too surprised and frightened.’ On the way to the club Hart and Teale thought better of it and instead went to the El Morocco, where they met the Twins’ friends Tommy Flanagan and Billy Gentry. They spent the £10 on drinks in the club and went back to report their failure to Ronnie, who was throwing a party in the Balls Pond Road. He did not seem at all upset and told Hart to keep the gun, adding that if they spoke to anyone about the expedition there would be serious trouble.59

  Then there were businesses to be found and brought under the Firm’s umbrella. One of these was Lanni Caterers, which had the Cambridge Rooms, an old-fashioned roadhouse on the Kingston bypass. One story of the acquisition is that Charlie Kray moved in to offer protection after a fight. Certainly Lanni sold 51% of his shares and very soon the Krays moved in, with Leslie Payne being given a share to run it as a Long Firm. Pat Connolly was the doorman, Lederman was a barman and up to twenty members of the Firm were there at night drinking and eating without paying. The former world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston attended the opening night there and the Krays auctioned the useless racehorse Solway Cross, for which they had paid 500 guineas. Stanley Crowther was obliged to find the purchase price. It was finally auctioned when it was bought by the gay alcoholic actor Ronald Fraser.60 It was at the Cambridge Rooms that Ronnie Kray changed his shirt after cutting Johnny Cardew in Le Monde. The Cambridge Rooms were duly run down and Lanni was the first person on Nipper Read’s visiting list when he began his final investigation into the Krays.

  When work was done it was party time, often impromptu ones, with women on tap. One woman now long married with children who attended as a young girl told me:

  ‘A neighbour of mine was Winnie Harwood – she was tall and blonde – from Evering Road; she was 12 or 14 years older than me and was always on the pub and club scene. Pat Connolly, who was on the Firm, rented a room from her and that’s how I met the Twins. Connie Whitehead, who was also on the Firm, had been a friend from very early days as well.

  You would get an invite from Winnie probably about midday for that evening. You would just be told to produce yourself. Most of the time it was Winnie who’d tell me. It wasn’t very flattering but you went.

  They loved having women around them though and I was with Winnie at the opening night of the Colony Club. George Raft was the sort of greeter, and I’ll never forget he had a lot of make-up on and it looked like he was in a corset. It was really quite funny.

  I started to go to the Regency which was just a five-minute walk away. I remember I was at Al Burnett’s Stork Club one night and the Richardsons came in. We was told it might go off in a few minutes and we’d be better to go. I remember another night at a party somewhere in Bow, I was dancing with this really gorgeous fellow when I saw Pat signalling at me, but I took no notice. Then he come over and whispered the man was Ronnie’s boy. That was a night I made a very swift exit. Everyone knew Ronnie was gay and Reggie was bi. If you saw a boy with a gold bracelet standing near Ronnie you knew he was his.

  You weren’t required to sleep with members of the Firm. There was plenty of girls hanging around who were happy to do that.’61

  All in all, it was a busy life being a member of the Firm.

  Conversation with JM. In 2002 Mickey Bailey recalled the Pelliccis: ‘Terry’s dead now. He was very friendly with the Twins but Nevio’s still alive. There was better service in both of them than in the Savoy, and the cooking was better. Everything was clean, freshly cooked and you couldn’t fault it. There’s a mention of them in Egon Ronay. At d
inner time there’d be roast beef and potatoes or steak and kidney pudding. It was a proper Italian-run caff that served English food.’

  Henry Ward, Buller, pp. 175-6.

  Reg Kray, Villains we have Known, p. 41; John Pearson places the shooting in the Green Dragon Club; Profession of Violence, p. 208.

  Conversation with JM.

  Albert Donoghue, The Kray’s Lieutenant, p. 51.

  ‘Scotch’ Jack Buggy, who had served a nine-year sentence for wounding, was shot and killed in the club in May 1964 when he went inquiring about the disappearance of Great Train Robber Roy James’s share of the money. It was run by a serious player ‘Franny’ Daniels, an old Jack Spot man, who was later acquitted of Buggy’s murder. Donoghue, The Kray’s Lieutenant, p.51. For an account of the career and death of Buggy, see Leonard Read, Nipper.

  Conversation with JM,

  Ronald Hart, Unpublished MS.

  Eric Mason, The Inside Story, pp. 184-5.

  Conversation with JM, 17 March 2015.

  Ronald Hart, Unpublished MS.

  Foaled in 1958, before it was sold to the Krays, Solway Cross came second twice as a two-year-old and in 1962 was third in two Selling Hurdles, the winner of one of which fetched only 380 guineas. It last ran that year at Windsor, where it finished down the field at 20-1.

  Conversation with JM, 27 April 2015.

  Chapter 5