Krays- the Final Word Page 8

  It was not every gambling club which would wish to stage a boxing match, but one took place one morning at 2 a.m. at Esmeralda’s between Buckley and Tommy Waldron, known as Chomondley, for a purse of £50 with Lord Boothby and others baying at the ringside. At the end of two rounds Waldron was losing but in the third he caught Buckley on the nose and blood spurted out. Ronnie immediately stopped the fight, throwing the £50 on the floor. When Buckley wanting to continue, saying he was all right, Ronnie protectively replied, ‘You ain’t, son. You were much prettier than you are now, so you can fuck off home’.75 After all, Ronnie had said that if Buckley were a girl he would marry him.

  Finally the guardsmen and their Sloane girlfriends drifted away to smarter premises. The rump of the club was handed over to the astute Micky Fawcett to run for a few weeks before the shutters went up. The company collapsed, and it was finally wound up with debts amounting to £4,400.

  But by now Leslie Payne had already found them another jam pot back on their home territory and they strong-armed their way into the Kentucky at 106 Mile End Road. They kept the name and hired Ben Lipner, who had once run the Beehive Club in Streatham for Billy Howard and who had already decorated the Regency, to tart it up. When it was finished it was a plush crimson-velveted and mirrored nightclub which would bring them their greatest social success. It was at the time of the East End renaissance, with work beginning in earnest to repair bomb damage from the War, and indeed when the working classes were starting to be portrayed on the stage and screen as something other than figures of fun.

  One story is that in 1963, Joan Littlewood, the producer of the hugely successful Oh, What a Lovely War! and who was then making the film Sparrers Can’t Sing starring Barbara Windsor, encountered trouble with a group of dockers who, it appears, wanted protection money to allow the production to proceed. Barbara Windsor, who in her early life had a penchant for good-looking, charming villains, including Charlie Kray, now appealed to him for help. Charlie informed his brothers, who saw it not only as an opportunity to appear as white knights acting for oppressed women but also as an encroachment on Kray territory. They spoke with the dockers and the production continued unmolested. Barbara Windsor, in her autobiography, claims there was never any approach by the dockers. Littlewood visited the Kentucky and it featured in the fight scene which ends the film.

  When the film was premiered at the ABC in the Bow Road, the after-show party was held in the club. The premiere had been due to be attended by Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowden, and some versions of the opening have them both at the cinema, but with Princess Margaret not attending the after-show party. In fact neither did and she did not attend the premiere either, having unfortunately had a sudden bout of flu.

  Nevertheless, as far as the Krays were concerned it was an unprecedented triumph, with the stars of the film Barbara Windsor and James Booth both at the party. The brothers had bought and sold £500 of tickets for the premiere and the local businessmen duly stumped up, as they did for Reggie’s charity wrestling, buying expensive advertisements for the programme. It is unclear how much of this cash actually ended up with the charities for which it was intended.

  Perhaps the first months of 1963 were the zenith of the Krays’ social ambitions. The local newpapers now reported them as being respectable businessmen and there were regular favourable reports on their charitable work.

  On 23 January that year Reggie Kray began promoting wrestling at the York Hall Baths. His first bill in aid of charity was supposed to be topped by the ex-champion Bert Assirati, matched with a giant Russian, The Great Karloff, in reality the New Zealander Ernie Kingston, who had taken the name after appearing in the Hammer horror film The Evil of Frankenstein. When it came to it Assirati would have nothing to do with the show, and the crowd had to make do with lesser fare in the form of Ed Martinson ‘The Docklands Strong Boy’.

  Assirati or not, the evening was a sufficient success for further promotions featuring the Kray workhorse, the ageing Bobby Ramsey, and attended by the Mayor of Hackney and Lord Effingham along with a collection of old boxers such as Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis. On the bill of 12 February Ramsey was in a boxer vs. wrestler contest with Roy ‘Chopper’ Levaque. The now well out of condition Ramsey was not expected to work for too long and, to the delight of the crowd, knocked out Levaque in the second round. The poor man was later required to go through the same routine in a number of bouts.

  The matches were made by wrestler Tony Scarlo, who initially had no trouble with the promotions. That is, until one night at the York Hall when the dwarf Royston French tried to threaten the wrestlers into accepting £2.50 instead of their agreed fees. He threatened Syed Shah with a knife, who took it away from him and explained the rules of life. But that was the end of the promotions.

  For a time the Kentucky prospered and was packed out night after night, until the police objected to its licence and the licensing justices agreed. On 7 April 1963 the club, registered on 11 September 1961, closed its doors after just 18 months.

  Sally Green, Rachman, pp. 166-168.

  Ronald Hart, Unpublished MS.

  Leslie Payne, The Brotherhood, p. 66.

  Min Scala, Diary of a Teddy Boy, p.60.

  Kieron Pim, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, p 94.; Min Scala, Diary of a Teddy Boy, p. 69.

  Nat. Arch. KV 2/2387; National Archives of Australia.

  Conversation with JM, 19 March 2015.

  Nat. Arch. MEPO 2/10075.

  Evening Standard, 22 February 2010.

  Geordie Greig, Breakfast With Lucian: A Portrait Of The Artist.

  Charlie Kray, Me and my Brothers, p. 82; Tony Lambrianou, Inside the Firm, p. 110.

  the gentle author, ‘Lenny Hamilton, Jewel Thief’, Spitalfields Life, 1 September 2010.

  John Pearson merely has Hamilton branded on both cheeks. Ron Kray, My Story, p. 50; Leslie Payne, The Brotherhood; Joe Lee and Rita Smith, Inside the Kray Family; Micky Fawcett, Krayzee Days; Lennie Hamilton, Branded by Ronnie Kray.

  Min Scala, Diary of a Teddy Boy, pp. 62-64.

  Chapter 6

  1964

  1964 was a defining year in the Kray saga, one which may be seen as the zenith of their careers but also as the beginning of their inexorable slide. Given that for much of the time hanging was still the mandatory sentence for murder, they could perhaps be described as careless with their use of guns and knives. Not only was Reggie involved in the shooting of Albert Donoghue, he was also linked to the shooting of Jimmy Fields in the lavatory of the Senate Rooms, a club in Highbury. Ronnie was involved in a shooting in the Central Club, Holborn, and again when he opened fire while Bert Rossi, who had protected him in prison when he was having a breakdown, was quarrelling with other Italians; he tried to shoot George Dixon, one of the formidable brothers, as well as Russy Bennett from the Upton Park family. Bennett’s wounds initially appeared fatal, but fortunately for Ronnie he pulled through. The gun was given to two men to hand to a third for safekeeping, who was not best pleased. ‘If the police had come round I’d have grassed him,’ said the third man, uncharacteristically.76

  For once, however, the Twins seem to have been blameless when on 10 January 1964 the 35-year-old ex-boxer Teddy Berry was shot a hundred yards from his home in Bethnal Green. Known in the ring as ‘The King of Dynamite’, he’d never had much luck in life. Married with three children, he had won all his 26 fights, 18 by knockout, before he became blind in one eye and was forced to retire. At the time of the shooting he was working as a bookmaker’s clerk. Berry had been drinking with his brother Henry ‘Checker’ Berry and was on the Hadrian Estate when he was shot from a passing car. He collapsed and the masked gunman then stood over him and shot him in the left leg at point blank range. The remains of Berry’s leg were amputated later that night.

  The conventional version of the Berry shooting is that it was a dispute over a car sold by a garage which was under Kray protection, but more likely it was also in part th
e result of a fight in the Regency the previous year in which an East End hardman had been badly cut.

  Ronnie was arrested and taken to Bancroft Road Hospital where Teddy Berry identified him as the man who had shot him. But when the police were about to charge him with grievous bodily harm, he swore he was not Ronnie but Reggie, and produced his driving licence to prove it. His alibi for the time of the shooting was so strong that the embarrassed police at Arbour Square station had to release him. Then, using the services of the East End fixer ‘Red Face’ Tommy Lumley, the matter was resolved.77

  It was a question of ‘The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh’. On 12 February 1964 the brothers organised a show with ex-boxers playing for laughs, formally promoted by the Spitalfields Porters Association, at Bethnal Green’s York Hall to raise funds for Teddy Berry. He used the resulting £500 to buy an interest in The Horns public house.78

  And then on 12 July that year, it all blew up when the Sunday Mirror headlined the story which would signal the beginning of the end of the Kray Twins’ empire: ‘Peer and a Gangster: Yard Inquiry’. The article reported that a Detective Superintendent was leading an investigation into an association between a peer who was a household name and an underworld thug. He was looking into parties attended by the gangster, his relations with the peer and the peer’s visits to Brighton – as well as allegations of blackmail. The unnamed peer was man-about-town Lord Boothby, who was also something of a television pundit, and the unnamed gangster was Ronnie Kray.

  The next day the Mirror ran an editorial:

  ‘This gang is so rich, powerful and ruthless that the police are unable to crack down on it. Victims are too terrified to go to the police. Witnesses are too scared to tell their story in court. The police, who know what is happening but cannot pin any evidence on the villains, are powerless.’

  That morning Bernard Black, a freelance photographer, went to the Mirror to supply photographs of Robert Boothby and Kray. By the afternoon he had changed his mind and asked for them back, claiming he did not own the copyright. On the Tuesday he applied in the High Court for an injunction preventing the Mirror from using the photographs. On 16 July the Daily Mirror led with the story ‘The picture we dare not print’, and described it as one of ‘a well-known member of the House of Lords seated on a sofa with a gangster who leads the biggest protection racket London has ever known’.

  The MacMillan Government was still reeling from the Profumo affair, in which the War Secretary John Profumo admitted sleeping with Christine Keeler, also the mistress of a Soviet naval attaché. This second scandal might just do for the Government. It was now a question of the top brass conducting an inquiry. What they wanted to know was what Boothby had to say about the matter.

  On 18 July Boothby wrote to the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, saying that by appointment Ronnie Kray and his lawyer had visited him about six months earlier asking if he was interesting in chairing or directing an extensive housing programme.

  Kray returned, again by appointment, a week later, this time bringing a friend. Boothby gave them a drink and ‘Before he left he asked if his friend could take a photograph of us, as he was a great fan of mine on radio and television’. This was quite usual for Boothby and he claimed ‘This is the sum total of my relationship with Mr Kray’.

  Boothby denied he was gay and added, ‘If I were a homosexual, which I am not, I should not choose either gangsters or clergymen.’ He claimed had never met Kray – ‘He seemed an agreeable chap’ – outside the flat, and then for no more than twenty minutes on each occasion.

  The Home Office file noted that Assistant Commissioner Ranulph Bacon (unsurprisingly known as Rasher) in charge of the CID had seen the twelve photographs, none of them compromising except one with an ill-dressed ‘beatnik’ youth also sitting on the sofa. The police had yet to identify him.

  On 20 July Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson made a public statement that he had asked senior officers for ‘some enlightenment’ on reports that inquiries were being made into allegations of a relationship between a homosexual peer and East End gangsters. The next day another senior CID officer, Fred Gerrard, took a statement from Boothby essentially reiterating his letter to the Home Secretary. He denied he had been at any Kray parties or to any of their clubs and he explained this strange friendship:

  ‘I met Leslie Holt [the beatnik on the sofa] at a boxing match. I took to him right away. He used to drop in a couple of times a year for a chat. We were just good friends and I enjoyed his company.’79

  In fact the ‘beatnik’ was the talented cat-burglar and homosexual Leslie Holt, one of six sons of a Shoreditch dustman, a rent-boy marred only by disfiguring warts on his hands and feet, whose favours Boothby, Ronnie Kray and a number of others shared. Some said that Boothby used to masturbate while smacking Holt’s bare backside with a slipper. Micky Fawcett one said to me:

  ‘The Twins both wanted their picture with Boothby. It was better than money for Ronnie. That’s what he lived for. He liked Lords. He was a proper old Queen.’80

  ‘Lord Bobby’, as the German magazine Stern called him, had had an interesting and upwardly mobile career. Fleshily handsome in the fashion of the time, with a gravelly voice, the long-serving Conservative member for East Aberdeenshire was created a peer in 1958. He was bisexual, with a taste for coprophilia, and was rumoured to have fathered a daughter with Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s wife Dorothy, something discounted by Macmillan’s biographer D.R. Thorpe.81

  But, by the end of July Stern was less circumspect: ‘Lord Bobby in Trouble’, it said, ‘sitting on a settee with a well-known criminal of degenerate tendencies’, naming Boothby and Ronnie Kray.82

  There was keen anticipation that the photograph in question was of Boothby in a compromising position – with the fuss that was made it had been thought that at least the pair were naked – but when it was eventually published in the Daily Express at the beginning of August it merely showed Boothby and Ronnie Kray fully clothed, sitting on a sofa.

  Now the government was also making further inquiries and information came from Tory MPs Brigadier Terence Clarke and Barnaby Drayson, of whom one civil servant wrote, ‘[They are] both gossips. Yet, I do recollect that they were for me the original source about Boothby and greyhound racing tracks etc.’

  Another to provide tidbits of information was the louche member for East Thanet, man-about-town and barrister Billy Rees-Davies, the one-armed MP for East Thanet, who had been mixed up in the Profumo scandal when he tried to buy off Christine Keeler.83 He thought the photographs were ‘prejudicial’, in other words pornographic. He believed it was all a calculated Labour Party plot to further destabilise the government, but he also reported that the Krays had tried to muscle in on the White Elephant club, a fashionable dinner and dancing place on the river. They had, however, been sent packing by Raymond Nash, the Lebanese partner of Peter Rachman.

  There was also a rather sinister note dated 21 July on the Law Office file:

  ‘Apparently a Chief Constable knows about this but is taking no official action. It is understood however that he is prepared to sell his knowledge to Conservative MPs.’84

  The newspapers were being unduly reticent about who was with the Peer until on 24 July 1964 the Krays were named by Private Eye. With tongue in cheek, the editor suggested that this might be the last issue under the present management.

  The matter was taken very seriously by the Government and three meetings were held in the Home Secretary’s office in the House of Commons. The last was held on 28 July at 4.15 p.m. with, in attendance, the Home Secretary, the Chief Whip, the Minister without Portfolio, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General. Now things seemed to be under control. A story about Boothby and his fellow peer Tom Driberg importuning at a dog track had faded away. Boothby suggested it was all an attempt by the Labour MPs Marcus Lipton and Arthur Lewis to manufacture a pre-election scandal. The Mirror had been negotiating
to publish the Krays’ memoirs, as they had earlier for those of the Nash brothers. As for the meetings with Boothby, the information was that the ‘Kray brothers have amassed a great deal of wealth by crime in the past and are now seeming to become respectable’.

  Driberg was a predatory homosexual in the days before the Street Offences Act of 1957, when indecency between men carried a two-year prison sentence and buggery 14 years. He plucked a handsome boy out of the carpentry division of the BBC and made him his secretary, pursuing him sexually over a long period. He never managed to have sex with him – his ultimate goal – but on one occasion after he had taken the boy out for the evening he sent him a note the next day reading, ‘Thank you for almost everything’.85

  When Melford Stevenson, the judge in the Kray trial, stood against Driberg for the Parliamentary seat of Clacton, he opened one meeting by saying he wished to have a cleanly fought campaign and so would not in future refer to Driberg’s homosexuality. Driberg had met the Krays when Joan Littlewood introduced them at the Kentucky Club. He would maintain that he had only a very slight acquaintance, but in reality he was a regular attendee at Ronnie’s parties at Cedra Court when East End youths were passed around like parcels.

  The next bullet was a letter on 4 August to The Times from Boothby re-asserting that he was not homosexual. At least that bit was true: he was bisexual. Boothby had, he said, met the man alleged to be ‘King of the Underworld’ only three times, and always at his home, which he used as an office. He had no knowledge that the man had convictions. No one had tried to blackmail him. ‘Despite advice I have found the best way to treat the press is perfect frankness and telling the truth. This is what I have always done.’