Krayzy Days Page 16

  Roy also got mixed up with the Aldgate mob, another crew who were friendly with the twins, headed by Willy and Charlie Malone. They had quite a few people around them and Willy himself was a bookmaker with an SP office – SP for ‘starting price’, a racing term. He looked the part, though he was more fat than thick-set and he was smart and never short of money. They had a club in Brick Lane which I’d been to myself – more just a room with a bar than a proper venue. But it was somewhere to go at a time when the licensing laws made it impossible to go anywhere after 11.00 pm. Roy turned up – alone, drunk and boisterous, as usual. Willy asked him not to start trouble and that immediately got Roy going.

  ‘I’m just being friendly, I only want a drink. I don’t want no trouble. Look!’ He pulled out a huge knife. ‘If I was looking for trouble, I wouldn’t show you that, would I? I don’t even want it.’ He threw the knife to one side and Willy – who could handle himself – chinned him. The drunken Shaw was out with the one punch.

  Willy didn’t know Roy Shaw, but everyone was quick to tell him that it wasn’t any old drunk he’d dealt with. Although Roy was aware that Willy knew the twins, Roy wouldn’t care, they said. He’d be back. Feeling cornered, Willy took the first opportunity to head over to the twins, who did nothing.

  Late one night Willy was out in his area with one of his firm.

  ‘Me and you better take a walk,’ said Roy Shaw, who had appeared alongside him. Willy said nothing but, mesmerised, followed Shaw around the corner where he was beaten up. After that he stayed firmly at the side of the twins, a cap and plaster hiding his wounds. It was a shock to his system. Willy wasn’t as fierce as people thought he was. Anyone could be good at dishing it out – it was when it was coming back that the line was drawn.

  The twins got hold of me. Would I do Shawry for them? They wanted him dead and they didn’t know or care how well I knew him. I agreed with conviction, though I had no intention of doing it. It was a while before I ran into Roy again, by chance, at a popular tailor called Woods in Kingsland Road. Roy looked shocked. He’d heard that the twins were unhappy.

  ‘God, I’m glad it’s you,’ he said. ‘I thought it was the other two! I was just going to jump right through that window.’

  The Krays’ whims were becoming ever more bloodthirsty and less rational by the day. At a meeting in our new venue, a bungalow in Walthamstow, we discussed having Billy Stayton killed for his part in getting George Cornell shot. The twins and Freddie came along to hear that a friend of his had agreed to ready-eye him. This meant getting the trust of the victim so you could position them somewhere they could be targeted. All of this for someone who had just been a bit mouthy. I didn’t believe it was really going to happen and I didn’t want any part of it. They asked me anyway.

  ‘Will you shoot Stayton?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said flatly.

  I thought, Here we go again. It was just like the business with Roy Shaw in some ways, but I was no longer certain they would just forget it if I just did nothing. They seemed to be increasingly obsessed with killing anyone they had a problem with. Their lust for blood was unrestrained now they knew that Cornell’s killing had left them so publically exposed. In a sense, there was no option but to keep going.

  They knew Cornell was the end. Reggie certainly did. By that time Frances was in a bad way, his drinking was out of control and his nerves were playing him up. He couldn’t do it. He could not live that life any more. Nobody knew quite how bad it was but then came the night we were going out somewhere, walking from the house in Vallance Road and in the dark I saw him pop something in his mouth.

  ‘What’s that, Reg?’ I asked. He told me it was Librium – prescribed for anxiety – and he was taking loads of it.

  ‘I get this buzzing in my head,’ he explained, ‘and this stops it.’

  His personality disorder was becoming much worse. He never had the outright mental illness that his brother suffered from and he would never be admitted into a secure hospital like Ronnie, but he was losing it. Their health wasn’t helped by the imposters like Joe Pyle from Wimbledon, among many others from all over London. They were all over them. The madder they got, the more the newcomers liked it. It was like meeting the celebrities; the Krays’ press was telling them they were invincible.

  At the meeting I agreed to every detail for the killing of Billy Stayton. Freddie Foreman said he would put a car in a certain location. The boot was to hold a sawn-off shotgun. Billy was to be driven to a pub on Hackney Marshes and we would be assisted by Albert Donaghue, a fella who some have said was given an initiation by the twins. You can read elsewhere that they shot him in the leg to see if he’d go to the police and when he didn’t he was accepted. Whoever wrote that needs to be shot in their own leg. It’s complete rubbish. He was shot for sticking up for Lenny Hamilton and just another reason why I find it so hard to read some of those books.

  We left the meet and I got into Freddie’s Citroen. He showed me how the suspension could be moved up and down to compensate for weight.

  ‘Fred,’ I said once we pulled off, ‘don’t bother to put that gun in the boot. In fact, don’t bother with the car because I’m going. I’m finished. I don’t want to know. I’m off the firm.’

  ‘Hmm,’ was all he said.

  I said, ‘I don’t want to know. All them fucking people they’ve got round them, I don’t know them, I don’t know their backgrounds. They’ll be putting it on them all eventually. This is ridiculous! Leave me out of it. I won’t be turning up. Drop me off.’

  I got out in Cable Street and I went home and I forgot about them.

  The next time I had anything to do with the Krays would be when we all shared a cell together. Except for the one move that Reggie made. He looked for me at The Two Puddings, but not alone – he couldn’t do anything alone. A mug – an ordinary person – might not know who he was and try it on with him. It was a bit awkward so he always had to have a few people around him. One defeat and he’d be finished. Tommy Brown, big and impressive, a monster of a man, was typical of the accompanying muscle. But on this occasion Reggie took a gamble and came with his wife, Frances.

  Reggie asked about me in the pub in a very friendly way. I knew how friendly Reggie was. If I’d have been there he would have invited me back and I would have taken the place of Jack the Hat. Jack McVitie – he was famously the friend and associate of the Krays killed for stepping out of line and making a nuisance of himself. It would be one of the crimes which would be used to put the twins away for good and it might well have been that I could have been an addition to the charge sheet. Reggie might not even plan to kill me there and then, but his mood would have changed.

  At least Ronnie was more up front. I heard his view on my leaving from Bertie – my friend who’d been involved in some of the fighting with the Readings, who worked in The Regency, where everyone now tended to gather late at night. Bertie was a popular bloke and everyone liked him. He reported that Big Pat had said – and I knew it would have sounded even more preposterous in Pat’s broad Scottish accent – ‘Ronnie’s got the fucking needle with Mick, you know. He’s bought a machine gun and he’s gonna fucking shoot him.’

  It wasn’t actually that dangerous to walk away as I did. Not because the twins wouldn’t want to get me. Of course they would. I wasn’t alone in leaving – two or three others, including Ronnie’s loyal helper Johnny Davies, came with me or shortly afterwards. But the twins just didn’t know how to take us out. They were simply not able to find their way around town on their own. The fellas who surrounded them at the end didn’t know me. The Lambrianou brothers’ biggest crime was robbing a Wimpy Bar. One of them said that in a book. That was their level. They weren’t going to help.

  The twins were too out of it to do much by then, but at the best of times they just weren’t capable of searching properly and it was very unlikely they would see the value in coming after us as they knew we wouldn’t just roll over and they could get done themselves. It wasn’t out o
f benevolence, but rather incompetence. They’d lost it. And yet I wasn’t stupid. I knew that while they were at large there was always a danger, however small. I was told by one of my mates that the last thing governments do before they go to war is to withdraw diplomatic relations. I thought about talking, but decided against it. The only way out was to get out and stay out and either wait for their empire to unravel, or get them ourselves.

  I was still too cautious to get too cocky. At times I would think, hmm, yes, I’m skating on thin ice here. To rely on luck for them to fall apart before they stumbled upon us would have left us exposed.

  Instead we watched the Krays’ firm and waited for an opportunity to shoot first. My plan was not necessarily to kill the brothers. Even if you just winged one or other twin, that would be enough. They were always armed now and the police would have got them for a start. And their reputation for being untouchable would be ruined. The mighty Krays couldn’t walk around in public with an arm in a sling. That would be enough to break the spell. They were mad as March hares by now and they wouldn’t hesitate to do it to us. That’s why we started to hear stories like the one about the machine gun, though that was never seriously more than one of Ronnie’s fantasies. He’d have had his fingers off trying to assemble it.

  Reggie had no such problems when he went after Nobby Clark himself. Nobby later told me about it in Bow Street Court.

  ‘He came to me house and he put one in me scotch.’ Nobby meant leg and he had no idea why Reggie shot him. As far as he could work out, he’d said something out of order about Frances. Nobby never did find out that he was targeted for being the one whose outburst had led directly to Cornell’s murder.

  Reggie must have known the real culprit for Cornell’s killing was his twin brother. Yes, Nobby had been inexcusably stupid, but Ronnie pulled the trigger. Ronnie was to blame but how could his faithful Reggie ever admit that? He couldn’t say, ‘I wish this hadn’t happened.’ It just wasn’t in him to say that about anything Ronnie did. The frustration built and Nobby was a stand-in for the feelings he couldn’t allow himself to express. The closest he could get was when he met Jimmy Quill in another pub not long after the killing.

  ‘What could I do, Jim? What could I do?’ was all he said.

  I might not have been at the same sort of risk as Billy Stayton but the Krays were increasingly erratic and that was dangerous for everyone. Reggie even fought with his own brother, Charlie. They were outside The Carpenters pub and under covert surveillance by those of us who’d left them, with the exception of Johnny Davies who, while handy to have around as loyal muscle, was too much of a moron to be any help.

  We couldn’t leave it to chance that the Krays would never find us. Another night I was with a mate in a car outside The Carpenters, a pub owned by the twins near Brick Lane.

  Reggie happened to come out and my friend said, ‘I’ll shoot him now. I’ll get out of the car and shoot him now.’

  ‘No. In your own car?’ I said. ‘Leave off.’

  It wasn’t necessary for anyone else to take the risk. I’m not trying to make out that I could take them all on myself – quite the reverse, in fact. Freddie Foreman’s lot would have been a major risk if they could have been bothered to come after us. But his men were sick of it all by now, they realised that they weren’t getting anything out of the alliance. What they knew was robbing banks – big time. It might have been hard work but the easy money promised by Fred and the twins was turning out to be a mirage.

  If Freddie wasn’t a threat, I knew none of the idiots around the twins were going to come near those of us who left because they knew we were well armed. They all remembered the night in The Hammer Club when Johnny Davies shot Russy Bennett in the bollocks. If the Krays were going to get us there would be no use going after one or two – they’d have to make sure they took us all out.

  Chapter Twelve

  Assassinate Reggie

  The phone rang. It was the code that said the way was clear to get Reggie.

  ‘Your girl’s been down here’. This was Bertie at The Regency. He had been observing the twins at the club. ‘She’s leaving with a geezer,’ he continued, ‘about now. He lives at Albert Bigg Point in Stratford.’

  The plan was underway. We were going to make the first move against the Krays tonight.

  Bertie was a good person to have within the firm. He was quite tough for a little bloke but he wouldn’t start trouble. All he cared about was jazz. He was a music fanatic and very reliable. In our code, Reggie was ‘my girlfriend’ and that way he could say what was going on at The Regency while using the club’s phone.

  I got driven to the block by a fella I’m not going to name and we waited. I hadn’t ever killed anyone before – and in the end I never did, though there would be times when I was only lucky not to have finished someone off. But I was ready to do it. We felt cornered by having left the Krays.

  We had decided to make an exhibition of Reggie. We would shoot him, cut his throat and leave him outside the lift. Nobody would know who was behind it and the message would be far more effective that way. Reggie was expendable and it wouldn’t have been doing humanity a disservice, would it? Maybe it would solve all my financial problems, I was thinking. Perhaps I could pick up where they left off.

  He never turned up that evening but we weren’t bothered. I was pretty sure the twins hadn’t got any warning and we were determined to keep going until we got them, although, as it turned out, there wasn’t going to be time to set up another attempt. It was just as well.

  Killing one or both of the twins wouldn’t have solved anything. It wasn’t my smartest plan and it was one for which I would inevitably have been nicked for. Perhaps I even knew that at the time. But sometimes there is just nowhere else to go. The pressure under which I operated around the Krays had been intense. It always had been. At any point they might have discovered one of my freelance long firms or just taken against something I said. They might not have been that agile or as together as their legends have made out, but if I got in their way I would have been trampled before I even knew they were coming for me. Now it was so much worse. I no longer even recognised the world they lived in.

  I had once known everyone around the Krays but now they killed time with a largely new crowd. Many would later claim to be good and long-time friends. And at the same time, increasing numbers of celebrities were attracted to their name. The underworld was open for public inspection. At least the twins wouldn’t have to worry about being alone as they raced towards oblivion.

  Everyone knew what was going on. And I mean everyone.

  When I went all the way down to Dartmoor on another visit to a friend, he said, ‘You know Mitchell’s…?’ he crossed his hands over his chest like a corpse laid out. This was Frank Mitchell, an associate of the Krays, and even I didn’t know that he had been killed, the latest disaster for the twins. And here I was learning London secrets in the middle of Dartmoor Prison!

  Mitchell – the press called him the ‘mad axeman’ – had escaped with the twins’ help from a working party outside the prison. He had been a friend of the Krays and it was said they were mounting a campaign to get him the release date that the authorities just wouldn’t give him. Terrible – just not to know when your sentence would end. But like anything the Krays did that required even basic planning, their real motivation was publicity. It wasn’t out of loyalty.

  You could imagine Reggie getting very excited, thinking about taking Mitchell down The Astor. Great big Frank Mitchell, known throughout the prison system. Everybody was terrified of him. He had the run of Dartmoor. When they went out on a work party they left him in the pub and the screw let him know what time he was to be picked up. Anything for a peaceful life with Frank – he was like long-time prisoner Charlie Bronson is today, except Mitchell was twice the size and one of the strongest men in the world. He was nice enough, though. Friendly – but a half-wit. A bicycle thief, albeit one with massive muscles and incredible fitness.
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  The twins didn’t even need to break him out. All they had to do was to send Albert Barry in a car to the pub to pick him up – rather less impressive than organising the great escape from Dartmoor. But the follow-up was much less successful. A fella named Teddy Smith was engaged to write a letter – probably because he was the only half-literate one among the Krays, to the effect that Mitchell would give himself up in return for a date.

  The Home Office was run by Roy Jenkins MP at the time and as Home Secretary he later caused the underworld no end of trouble by telling the police to concentrate on criminals rather than solving individual crimes, as a result of which they started to do their research properly. Under Jenkins the Home Office stopped Mitchell as well, placing a note in the paper to the effect that they would agree to a date if he gave himself up – and said where he’d been since his escape.

  The twins were cornered and Mitchell himself was getting antsy.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ he said. ‘I give up one prison for another! I don’t like it here. This is driving me mad.’

  Reggie consulted Billy Hill and Hillsy himself later told me what they’d done. He had nothing but contempt for the Krays and wasn’t shy in the way he expressed it.

  ‘Those brainless cunts!’ he called them.

  He stayed well out of it after having offered a few thoughts on the original letter, which he noted with scorn they couldn’t put together on their own. I later found out it was Freddy Foreman who killed Frank Mitchell.

  The worrying aspect of the death for the Krays was the way I heard about it – on that visit to Dartmoor. They all knew what had happened even if the details weren’t yet out.

  ‘It’s all over here,’ my friend said. ‘Everybody fucking knows.’ And that wasn’t the only sign of the breakdown of secrecy.