Krayzy Days Read online

  In The Double R having a drink with Ossie, Dickie Moughton and Reggie talking with Tommy McGoven, British Lightweight Title Contender.

  Out celebrating down The Astor with (l to r) Terry Spinks, Sammy McCarthy and a guy named Dodger.

  (l to r) Teddy Smith, myself, Johnny Davis, Reggie, Freddie Mills, Ronnie, Dicky Morgan and Sammy Lederman in Freddie Mills’ Nite Spot.

  (l to r) Harry Abrahams, Bill Collis, Jacky Reynolds, Wolfy Gerber, Georgie Woods, Big Pat’s wife, Big Pat, Old Charlie, Buster Osbourne, Limehouse Willy, Alby Korsher, Billy Donovan, myself at Big Pat’s wedding

  Dolly, Ronnie, Nobby Clarke, Barbara Windsor and Lita Rosa suround Sonny Liston.

  (l to r) Bobby Ramsey, Henry Simonds, Ronnie, Sonny Liston and myself leaving The Cambridge Rooms.

  Ronnie objects to an outsider trying to shake hands with Sonny Liston.

  Liston signs a fan’s autograph watched by an admiring Dolly Kray.

  Ronnie with the love of his life Bobby Buckley.

  From back left: Buller Ward, Freddie Foreman, Charlie, Albert Donaghue, Billy Donovan, Reggie, Dicky Moughton, Terry Allen ex-world flyweight champion, Ronnie, Red Face Tommy, Old Steff, Big Pat Connolly, Ossie, Harry Coshaw. Front row: Freddie Cavanagh, Eddie Flowers, Old Charlie, myself, BBBC official.

  Billy Hill at home

  In Freddie Mills’ Nite Spot, myself, Reggie, Frances, Peter and Freddie Mills.

  Johnny Davies, Nobby Clark, Dolly Kray, myself with Lenny Peters, Bobby Ramsey, Big Pat, Terry O’Brien, Ronnie, Sonny Liston and Reggie.

  A tribute evening to the great Ted “Kid” Lewis who had 303 pro fights. From left: Reggie, Sulky, Ronnie, Ronnie Gill, George Last, Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, myself, Limehouse Willy, Terry Spinks, Charlie, Nobby Clarke, Billy Exley, Joe Abrahams, Dave Simonds, Andrew Ray (kneeling)

  In The Dolce Vita, Newcastle - (from left to right) myself, Billy Daniels, Reggie, Johnny Squib, Johnny Davies, a guy called Peter, Eric Mason and Ronnie.

  Johnny Squib, Charlie, Ronnie, Dukey Osbourne, Johnny Davies, Sammy Lederman, Bobby Ramsey, Eddie Pucci - Mafia man and Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard, Reggie, Shirley Bassey and Jimmy Clark of the Clark Brothers.

  Sammy Lederman, Charlie, Dolly, Noel Harrison, Reggie, Myself, Lita Rosa, Ronnie, Barbara Windsor and Ronald Fraser.

  Larry Gains - British Empire (Commonwealth) heavyweight champion, Ronnie and Johnny Davies with the twins’ racehorse Solway Cross.

  Chapter Eight

  Sticking the Krays Up

  The Kentucky Club was in Mile End Road and it was almost empty. Reggie walked over to the young man and hit him right on the chin. Then he booted him repeatedly. Nobody did anything. I feel a bit ashamed about that. There were just a few of us still there that night, Freddie Foreman too, among others. But nobody raised a finger. The object of Reggie’s rage was a mental health nurse from Scotland. Having been restrained in secure institutions, Ronnie was winding up his brother by painting the man as a screw in a prison.

  The lad was there with Stanley Crowther, an ex-barrister, gay, alcoholic wreck, who would give evidence against the twins in the end – and I didn’t blame him. He was like a seedy old lawyer character in a film noir, but not a bad old boy really. It was the long firm he fronted for the twins out of Great Eastern Street which had been scuppered when Ronnie took the money early. When he visited the club with the nurse, I couldn’t see at first that either of them had done anything wrong, but it became clear that somehow disrespect had been shown and that in itself wasn’t unusual. There was no predicting when they might take offence.

  At the end of the night, Reggie said to Stanley’s friend, ‘Don’t let Stanley shoot off, will you? I wanna have a word with him.’

  Reggie was in full cunning mode. He made it sound innocent enough and Stanley was duly persuaded to hang about when in fact, it was his friend who was in trouble.

  It was a vile incident and I’ve since come to feel even worse about it as I’ve had experience myself of dealing with people who have been in the mental health system. Those nurses can be really good and although I thought the victim that night wasn’t permanently injured – I certainly hope not – he undeniably took a right belting.

  It was the same with Sonny – that fella I’d first met back in the Aldgate warehouse days. Sonny was retired by then and his offence was to be patronising, putting his arm around Reggie and assuring him that if there was ‘ever anything you want me to do’ he would. Reggie broke his jaw. More than anything, it was touching that Reggie couldn’t stand. I seemed to get away with it – I’ve got a photo of myself with my arm draped over Reggie’s shoulder with a few other mates at a club up north. Most people found themselves sitting on the floor if they dared touch his personage. It was a bit like getting familiar with the Queen.

  Fans of the Krays either never got to hear of those outbursts or they chose to ignore them. The famous and the successful hung on their every word in a way that never sat easily with me. Director Joan Littlewood was always at The Kentucky with her thespian chums. She had been working down the road at the Theatre Royal Stratford and had come to be such a big admirer of the twins that she once confided to me she wanted to make a film about them. A fictionalised account with her own choice of actors.

  The slightly pock-marked face of Chuck Sewell was another regular sight at the club. He was an actor, but not as well known as Victor Spinetti, another permanent fixture. Not only was he always at the club, but he made it into the eventual Krays’ film that was, unfortunately, not made by Joan Littlewood. She would have done a better job. I hated the way that movie turned out and the twins didn’t like it either.

  But they loved having the celebrities around and were thrilled to be invited to the premiere of Sparrows Can’t Sing at the ABC, a cinema which stood opposite The Kentucky. I usually blanked all of those showbiz events. They were a real bore. Whenever the stars were around the conversation would always have to be about the twins. That was all any of them were interested in. Ronnie and Reggie were happy to play along. That night they were the only ones done up in dinner suits, standing out from everyone else with their bow ties. A friend of mine whispered to me, ‘I can’t wait to see if one of them stars thinks Ronnie’s a waiter and asks him to get a drink.’

  I hated all the hero worship you heard from the twins’ famous friends. ‘Wonderful fellows, aren’t they!’, ‘They give a fortune to charity!’ Totally untrue. They didn’t give a fucking penny to charity! The most charitable they’d get would be to send someone down a long firm and get the people running it to order a television. They’d then donate whatever they fraudulently obtained to some old folks’ home in a blaze of publicity. It was very cynical. I just didn’t like the way famous people lapped up the fakery. The stars themselves were okay, but I just didn’t feel comfortable in that world.

  Other villains were just as desperate to be seen with the Krays. It seems that anyone who ever met the twins has sold their story. One of the worst offenders is Lenny Hamilton, the little weasel. He is always sticking himself up as a jewel thief, although to me he’s always seemed more like the type to be a minicab driver. In the words of the old saying, ‘he lies faster than a horse can trot’. He was never anything, but it’s true he did get on the wrong side of the twins. Ronnie tortured him with a red hot steel used for sharpening knives. Lenny tried to make more out of it, saying that Ronnie went after him. Ronnie didn’t care about him – the truth was that Lenny made a nuisance of himself and put himself squarely in Ronnie’s sights.

  Lenny phoned late one night to tell Ronnie that he’d just beaten up the son of Buller Ward – one of those fellas who’d come with me on the Paris trip. Lenny pleaded for Ronnie not to get involved and asked if he could meet to talk to him about it. It was a very cheeky request. Ronnie wouldn’t normally have got involved and he didn’t know Lenny anyway. Now he was fuming.

  Ronnie arranged the meet at Esmeralda’s Barn, but kept Reggie out of it, knowing his slightly wiser brother wouldn’t ha
ve wanted to get them involved with anything so basically trivial. At The Barn, Hamilton was held down in a chair while Ronnie scorched his face and blinded him in one eye. Ever since then, the media has been happy to repeat Hamilton’s version of events – that Ronnie got involved on behalf of Buller Ward. It suits everyone to keep the legends alive.

  Lenny Hamilton was himself one of a little crew led by a fella named Harry Abrahams. They were outraged by Lenny’s punishment. Harry operated out of The Kentucky with Norman Winters, Bunny Harris, Billy Thomas – a nice guy from Hoxton – and Albert Donaghue, known to all of us as Albert Barry. Harry Abrahams went on to get five years for a robbery which got Albert three years. I got on well with most of them. Though when Harry said, ‘We’ve had enough of this. We’re going to do Ronnie,’ I thought, thanks for telling me! I need to know that, don’t I? But I also knew that once he’d told me, he wouldn’t really go through with it. The rest of them made a bit of a fuss about it, but it was mainly Harry who complained the loudest. He gave it plenty of verbal.

  Unfortunately, Ronnie got to hear something of what was going on and he asked Harry’s mob to meet him at Vallance Road. Harry later filled me in.

  ‘We’ve settled it,’ he said. ‘Ronnie was sitting there with his bull terrier, just on his own.’

  This was typical Ronnie. He would enjoy the fact that he was the lone desperado facing down the enemy. It bought out his theatrical side. But he hadn’t forgotten what they planned to do and called me in to ask me about it. At that time Ronnie lived at 66 Cedra Court, a nice block of flats in Stamford Hill. A tenor recital was playing when I arrived.

  ‘Listen to this music,’ he said. ‘It’s very good.’

  ‘Is that Gigli?’ I asked, ‘or Mario Lanza?’

  Without a hint of a smile he said, ‘Harry Secombe.’

  Ronnie said he had been to Steeple Bay. Just hearing that made me shudder. It was the most boring place on earth, a caravan site in Essex on the Blackwater estuary near Maldon. The Krays used to go there, big time, for weekends away. I couldn’t think of anything worse – you’d send me there as some kind of punishment. Ronnie said he hadn’t heard the full story but just knew that there was a plan to shoot him. Did I know anything?

  I said, ‘No. I don’t know anything about that, Ron.’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d ask you because you’d know.’ He wasn’t sounding threatening and he seemed convinced that I hadn’t heard anything.

  It was not wise to bother the Krays unless you really needed to. Boxing promoter Mickey Duff was another one who got in touch when perhaps he would have been better off just getting on with things. Reggie passed on the message that Duff had phoned and although I wasn’t there for the conversation, what he had apparently said made everyone extremely tense.

  I’d first seen Mickey Duff when he was the matchmaker at Mile End Arena when I was 13. He was now telling Reggie he’d got a licence to open what he called The Anglo-American Sporting Club in the Park Lane Hilton and – this was the killer – ‘Would you mind not coming?’ Not very tactful. ‘We don’t want any faces there because we’re on a trial and we may not get renewed.’

  Duff didn’t know the twins – and if he had he probably wouldn’t have asked for a favour like that. If he hadn’t mentioned it they probably wouldn’t have thought of going anyway. Now they had been specifically de-invited and everyone was very upset.

  The story that has since been well documented is that the Krays sent Duff four dead rats. It was a chilling message – though not quite what it seemed. They’d sent someone down the pet shop but he came back with four gerbils. Still, who could tell the difference once they had been killed and spent a couple of days in the post? It was a typical gesture by the twins. Nothing was what it seemed with them – even dead rats.

  The twins followed up with a bomb hoax. They nominated Dukey Osbourne to call up during the next of Duff’s boxing promotions at the Hilton. Duke proudly reported back down the pub that he’d done it and that he’d made himself sound suitably manic.

  ‘There’s a bomb under the ring, evacuate the building!’ he said, showing off the theatrical gasps he’d used during the call. ‘Evacuate! I can’t say more!’

  But there were no reports from anyone connected to the promotion, much less in the press. Discreet inquiries from our side followed. It turned out that Duff had been hosting some kind of ladies’ night – there wasn’t a fight and they hadn’t even set up a ring. Mickey Duff remained entirely unintimidated.

  If the Krays always came off worse in these kinds of situations it was because at heart they were afraid of straight people. That was behind all that hot-headed belligerence and it was the reason they never planned properly. They were scared. That’s why they didn’t set out to intimidate anyone in the straight world. They gave them a right miss. They spectacularly misjudged Mickey Duff who, if he was as ruthless and hard-nosed as you needed to be to succeed as a boxing promoter, wasn’t in their world. And they knew it.

  You were only at risk if they thought you were like them. It didn’t matter if you weren’t exactly a criminal, even if you were straight and you somehow ended up doing business with them then that made you fair game. I saw people getting themselves into trouble and I often stepped in to stop them making a fatal mistake. I must have saved three or four lives when I was around the twins. I mean that literally; I stopped people from being killed, usually over nothing.

  There was the time a fella called Tom Clegg turned up at Vallance Road claiming to be a messenger. He was a big bloke, with a scar on his face, though he wasn’t a criminal. I didn’t know him and I never ran into him again.

  ‘I’ve come to speak to you on behalf of Joe Sullivan, a friend of mine in Southsea, Portsmouth,’ he said. ‘He’s afraid. He’s been told he’s made a terrible mistake and he’s liable to be killed by you.’

  It was a complicated plot and it sounded like Joe Sullivan had got himself into a big mess. He owned a very large scrapyard called Southern Counties Metals and had dealings with a fella named Ronnie Atrill from Brighton. Atrill got him to put up money for some crooked scheme and then, to all intents and purposes, disappeared.

  An angry Sullivan commissioned four fellas to sort him out – Ronnie Moore, Ronnie Molloy, Jimmy Tibbs Sr, known by everyone as Big Jim, and Billy Smith. When they reported back to Joe Sullivan the news wasn’t good.

  ‘We’ve got a terrible problem,’ they told Joe. ‘We’ve tuned him up, we’ve slashed him, but he was meant to front a long firm for the Kray twins. Now they’re after us. We need some money to square the Krays otherwise it’s all going to come back to you, Joe, because in their eyes you’re the instigator.’

  This was news in Vallance Road and for good reason – Atrill had conspired with the four men sent after him. The Krays were never involved at all. The four men had come up with the story to frighten Sullivan while Atrill kept out of the way.

  We went off to talk about what to do. Ronnie was furious that they had bought his name into a fabricated story, essentially over nothing. I tried to calm things down, saying, ‘I’ll go down and see this Joe Sullivan.’

  I went to Southern Counties Metals with my men Tommy Brown and Teddy Machin, someone I would later have a major falling out with. We managed to sort things out with Sullivan. The nearest he came to a clump was when he said to Tommy Brown, ‘You’re a travelling man ain’t you, mush?’ Both of them were gypsy stock.

  ‘What?’ asked Tommy.

  ‘Fancy a bit of hotchi pie?’ he said mockingly.

  Hotchi was hedgehog and although Sullivan was only taking the piss, Tommy didn’t see the funny side and I had to pull him back. But there wasn’t really an atmosphere by that point. I’d assured Sullivan that although the Krays had been told about this local dispute, there wasn’t really anything to worry about.

  ‘This will go no further,’ I had promised Joe Sullivan, who I later became friends with. ‘I just want to know who helped you out.’ I was back in Vallance Road the sa
me day to confirm the four names with the twins.

  ‘Make them meet with me over Johnny Hutton’s,’ roared Ronnie.

  Hutton’s was a car site over in Walthamstow where Ronnie had once already shot somebody in the leg after they complained about the motor they bought off him. Unwisely, the purchaser told him, ‘This car is no good,’ provoking the display of Ronnie’s unorthodox approach to customer satisfaction. But even that violent outburst was nothing compared to how angry he seemed to be over Atrill’s men.

  When the twins lost it, they really lost it. I knew the signs. They would get worked up and stand, facing, angrily searching one another, patting each other down, wanting to be sure the other one wasn’t about to do anything without warning. Mainly this was Reggie checking out what his madder brother might be carrying. Interrogating one another – ‘All right, Ron, what you got there? What you got there?’

  Ronnie’s style was to keep a gun hidden because he just didn’t want to hear reason. He might even know deep down that taking someone out might not always be the best move but he wasn’t going to listen. If he wanted to do it and he felt it was right, that was enough. He wouldn’t even tell his brother and that was why they were now virtually squaring up, each pushing the other to greater fury. It was a terrifying sight. They were ready to head to Hutton’s place immediately.

  The worst possible thing you could do to the Krays was stick their name up. That was all they had. This was the corporate name being used on inferior goods and passed off as the real thing. As I knew, there were benefits to knowing the Krays. If you used their name and you were for real, you could be assured of getting the best of everything. And so it was true that they needed to protect their name – but they just didn’t have any sense of proportion. They were immediately ready to kill.