Krayzy Days Read online

  I returned home to a shape up that started when the Krays went away and was still rumbling on. Everyone was jostling for position and there was an aggressive new language in the air. Strangely, it was different for the twins themselves. Now they were inside, a lot of the old grudges and feuds just melted away. The pair of them ended up friends with almost everyone once they went away – from Fraser to Shaw. Everybody you could think of – bar me. Not that they were enemies as such. I just didn’t go to see them and there was never any contact from their side. Yet people around us seemed to think that I owed them something and I felt there was less respect for me. Some of them were thinking, he’s not so smart without the Krays around. The Tibbs family, and particularly young Jimmy, were among those who were testing how far they could go.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Feuding with the Tibbs

  I knew that Robert Tibbs could handle himself when I went out drinking with him. I also knew that his family were increasingly prepared to strike hard – and first. But I was also more than willing to go on the attack. It was a combination which would end in a fight that evening and the start of a long-running battle.

  We were with a friend named Frankie McDonald. He was a ticket tout and was really good friends with all the footballers. He still knows a lot of them. We started at The Baker’s Arms in Stratford, then a pub popular with footballers. Some silly argument started between the other two.

  Frankie said, ‘Look, I’m not frightened of you, but if I have a row with you it’ll end up with your brothers.’ Robert just sneered at him and on they went.

  ‘Why don’t we move on somewhere?’ I said. We were all little bit pissed and I drove one car while Robert took his own. He was clearly still annoyed, as he kept stopping and starting and cutting into me.

  Despite the stupidity, we made it in one piece to a pub run by another friend of mine over in Canning Town. But no sooner had we got our drinks than the arguing started up all over again with Robert insisting that Frankie had the wrong attitude towards him.

  The sensible thing would have been not to have had anything more to do with either of them. And these days, now I don’t drink, I may have left them to it. But instead I told Robert to leave it out. Then I looked down and saw he was pulling out a knife. I knew from a conversation that I’d had with Robert’s dad that he had only recently assaulted someone seriously. I’m not going to say too much about what happened next, but there was a scuffle between the two of us. As the newspapers later reported, he got his throat cut. Robert survived, but that drunken argument over nothing caused mayhem for a lot of people. Everyone was up in arms.

  Robert’s dad was Jimmy Tibbs Sr. He had a metal yard in Ordnance Road, Canning Town. He also did some work with a fella called Ronnie Molloy, who got 15 years for a silver robbery and Ronnie Moore, who had been a partner to Georgie Walker. Heavy characters, by any standards. It was Tibbs Sr, Molloy and Moore who had stuck up the Krays’ name along with Ronnie Atrill and got Joe Sullivan into such trouble.

  Jimmy Sr was the father of three boys – Robert and Johnny and Jimmy Jr. The younger Jimmy was a boxer and the twins had once got it into their heads to manage him. His father was afraid of the twins, despite having quite a reputation himself. He wasn’t keen on the scheme and on that occasion I helped them through the potential minefield of negotiating with the twins who didn’t have a clue about management. They were shrewd about Jimmy Jr’s prospects, though – he was a talented boxer who went on to be an accomplished trainer for the likes of Frank Bruno and Barry McGuigan.

  Previously, Jimmy Jr had some sort of dealings with a family of real liberty-takers called the Nicholls – brothers Albert and Terry. Jimmy Sr came to me because he was again concerned the twins would get involved. Once more I told him to leave it to me and he offered me a few quid. He seemed very relieved indeed, but it seemed he had quickly forgotten his fear now the twins had gone away.

  The Tibbs got stuck into their feud with the Nicholls, escalating their fights until Albert Nicholls only just survived being blasted with a shotgun. They were beginning to think they were unstoppable, not least because they had very good connections with the local police. When the Nicholls case came to court, the Tibbs were given only a two-year suspended sentence for attempted murder and got away with a fine over the wounding and firearms offences.

  Jimmy Sr told me proudly how his son Robert and another fella we knew named Billy ‘The Bomb’ Williams had ‘stuck it on a man in The Bridge House the other night. Poor fucker! They smashed his head in.’ As a family of scrap metal dealers, all of the Tibbs were strapping men. Very strong.

  Jimmy Sr also said that he himself had been visited by the Dixon family – George Dixon was the loser that Ronnie had unsuccessfully tried to shoot on one occasion. Now there had been some fresh falling out between the Dixons and Jimmy Sr.

  ‘I said to them, “My boys ain’t cunts, you know.”’

  It seemed an extreme response and not like him at all. I thought, that’s a bit heavy.

  It was the same with Jimmy Jr. He had boxed for West Ham Boxing Club and being involved with the game, I shared a story with him.

  ‘I was reading in the paper that Chazzer Chapman won’t let you train in there during the afternoon,’ I said, ‘because you’re a pro and it’s an amateur club.’ I was surprised by the fury of his response.

  ‘Nah, he fucking will, though, when I break his jaw.’ I didn’t make any comment but the angry answer stayed with me, particularly as Chapman only had one leg.

  The Tibbs were like all metal dealers in being friendly with the police. One yard in Bromley-by-Bow was completely staffed by ex-coppers as most of the scrap was actually stolen. Buildings were going up and down all the time and the effect of bombing during the war was still being felt. There was so much being changed that it was relatively easy to make off with material as long as too many questions weren’t asked. But the Tibbs now seemed to be less cautious about causing trouble, perhaps it was because they were so strong with the Old Bill.

  In fact, Jimmy Sr said to me one day as we stood outside his yard, ‘I took a right liberty. I had a lorry load of whisky in here the other night. Mind you, I had the Old Bill in a squad car outside minding it.’

  Robert Tibbs was also being irritating, even before we had our fight. I’d had a row with a fella who was known for being quite tasty. Robert kept on warning me to watch my step.

  ‘He’s dangerous you know. He’ll come back.’

  He said it as if it was advice, but really it was like he was having a go at me. None of his fucking business, I thought, nothing to do with him. And then came the night out with Frankie that ended in our violent row.

  All three Tibbs brothers joined together against me and they brought their mates too, including Teddy Machin, who was still smarting from the ear-bashing I gave him in Spain and was very pleased to see me targeted. Teddy was having an affair with Chrissie McKenzie, the same woman who had got us into trouble over the trip. He was obsessed with Chrissie and he used to slag off her husband, my wife’s cousin Mick. Among his choicer insults were: ‘He eats so much he has to go to the toilet twice a day’; ‘He’s got shoulders like a Guinness bottle’; and ‘He never wears underpants’. His openness about the affair would later have fatal consequences for him.

  When I woke up the morning after the fight with Robert, I thought at first, what have I done? Right, I’ve got to face up to it. I arranged a meeting with Jimmy Sr’s brother, George ‘Bogey’ Tibbs. He was also friendly with the Old Bill and I thought I could test the waters with him. Make a peace offering. I met with him at his fruit stall in Leyton.

  ‘What they want to do,’ he said, ‘is to arrange for you to come round and have a fight with him in the yard.’

  I thought to myself – no, thanks! But I didn’t say it.

  ‘I’m a bit fed up walking about with a gun on me all day,’ I said instead. ‘That’s why I’ve come to see you.’

  ‘They’re all armed to the t
eeth,’ he said, ‘and they’re all fed up too. It don’t make no difference.’

  Within a day my house got turned over by the police. I thought again about the links they had with the Tibbs. It wasn’t a coincidence. The coppers had a warrant to search for preparations for war – gelignite and guns. Finding nothing, they left me alone, but still the fighting continued to spread.

  I decided to go to Spain. Once again we went as a family, more because I wanted to have my son Michael with me and I knew I would most likely be away for a little while. Driving to Dover, we boarded the HMS Patricia and sailed straight into a force-ten gale in the Bay of Biscay. That was an experience but not one I fancied repeating. I knew where I was going – the place I’d stayed with Billy Hill on the coast between Torremolinos and Marbella.

  Back in the UK there was another storm brewing. The Tibbs were going around threatening and beating people, largely because they couldn’t get their hands on me. They didn’t just stop at friends of mine. One victim was the mother of a girl I knew. The mother worked in a pub in Canning Town and they started scaring her. They were making themselves an absolute fucking nuisance everywhere. One of the bully boy Nicholls family was watching that night and they set about him too, just for being in the pub. The Tibbs had gone right over the top. It was like they were taking on the world and making enemies everywhere. As if they weren’t mad enough, Teddy Machin was working them up even more, telling them things that would steer them all over the place in search of a fight. Then he was himself shot, much to the excitement of the newspapers.

  Teddy Machin slept in a ground-floor bedroom in a flat in Forest Gate, somebody smashed the window and guided by the sound of his snoring blasted him out of bed with a 12-bore shotgun. Fortunately for him, the bedclothes and the darkness lessened the damage, but he still couldn’t sit down for a long time.

  Now a nephew of Machin joined in. He had just come out of a seven-year stretch in Parkhurst and was not only spoiling for a fight but was stupid too. Somebody took a pot-shot at him and he almost had a heart attack.

  The conflict took a new turn when the Tibbs were themselves targeted. There were shootings – fairly bad aims, it has to be said, which did little damage – but more seriously a bomb was put under the bonnet of Jimmy Tibbs’ van. The bomb went off when he turned the ignition key, but by pure luck the force of the blast was directed away from the front seat. Another bomb went off in the office of the Tibbs’ yard. Firm member Stanley Naylor was also shot at. The attacks served only to make the Tibbs family angrier and more frustrated. All they could see was that they were being battered all over the fucking place!

  To make matters worse, a bloke named Lenny Kersey, who I knew quite well, although we weren’t all that friendly, called the Tibbs ‘dirty pikey bastards’. It was an incident that was to be well documented in later reports and books. Word got back to the Tibbs and Jimmy, Johnny, Machin and Naylor turned up outside Kersey’s house where he was chatting with his wife and a neighbour who was holding her baby. They set about him.

  It was a furious assault, the Tibbs crew shouting, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’

  They covered Kersey with 36 inches of knife wounds. Afterwards his face was a mass of stitches and he had big lumps on his legs where the blood congealed. They also cut his back to bits. The scene was one of horror as the women around him screamed and the baby was dropped on the pavement. It was broad daylight in Stepney Green. Kersey survived, though, he was rushed to hospital where he was stitched back together.

  I stayed abroad throughout the fighting and, of course, it couldn’t be said that I was involved in any of this. Sometimes I stayed with Hillsy in Morocco at his flat in Boulevard Hassan II in Tangier. As he had promised, he continued to get me in with the Unione Corse and we planned to do the card game scam at the casino in Westcliff, Southend. Billy was going to be involved in anything we did in Madrid but he had no interest in returning to England if he could help it and was happy to leave it to me and his brother-in-law, Mickey Riley. I preferred to wait overseas until the Tibbs business settled down, but it didn’t. It didn’t settle down at all.

  When the Tibbs firm were nicked for chopping Lenny Kersey to pieces, he was given a few quid not to press charges. They were discharged from the Magistrates’ Court and they thought they had got off. But it wasn’t the same as being cleared after a jury trial. It just meant that charges weren’t being pressed. At the time you couldn’t be tried twice for the same offence – what was known as double jeopardy – but they hadn’t had the trial.

  Kersey went on to win some compensation from the Criminal Injuries Board and apparently the Tibbs tried to get the money from him. For the time being, the Tibbs enjoyed the confidence that came from having a very good friend inside the police.

  I knew exactly who it was they referred to when they told people, ‘Our Old Bill, when he catches Fawcett he’s going to plant ten sticks of jelly on him.’ Jelly being gelignite. The idea would be that I would get done for the bombings and shootings. ‘He’ll fucking show him! He’s going to get fitted up. When they get hold of him he won’t know what’s fucking hit him.’

  Mostly I was in Spain, enjoying life. I met a girl out there when I was staying with Billy called Wendy Jacobs. She really liked me – and that doesn’t happen often. Her father was one of Billy’s old gambling associates and she and her mother were involved in a laundry business he had out there.

  If I had any business that needed my attention I would just fly back to the UK for a short period and return to the sunshine as soon as possible. My son Michael was fascinated by bullfighting. He was about nine at that time and together we got to know some of the stars of the bullfighting world. Antonio Galán was a bullfighter and promoter I got to know very well and we even visited his home village with him. An English journalist named Sylvia North heard about my son’s youthful passion and she said she would like to take his photograph at a fight. She cooed over him, getting his name and how he was doing some training at a bullring run by the brother of the legendary Antonio Ordóñez. Sylvia sold the story to a Spanish magazine and I didn’t think much more of it until I was on a visit home and saw a big photo of my boy in The Evening Standard. The local paper picked up on the story and named me as a ‘restaurant owner’ – which is what I’d told Sylvia North. It was all over the place.

  That same night I was in The Lotus, an East End club, when I saw Jimmy Tibbs’ best friend, a fella named Frankie Simms. He was a tough silver-bullion robber who’d done 15–20 years.

  ‘Get on the phone to Jimmy,’ I said. ‘If he wants to see me, he can.’ Frankie was practically in tears at the thought of being dragged into our feud. He was very much a Tibbs man – he used to run a cafe for them and he was scared that I might set about him. The more I told him to call Tibbs the more he begged me to let him go. His cousin Jimmy Fleet was there and he asked me to leave Simms out of it. I wasn’t daft enough to lay into him anyway – it wasn’t my scene and I readily agreed.

  Bertie Summers used to go to the Tibbs’ cafe and he reported back to me the next day that there had been ‘pandemonium’.

  ‘Why?’ I said, knowing fairly well what he was about to say. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, your photo being in The Stratford Express!’ he said. ‘And you’re supposed to be in Spain. What were you doing up The Lotus? They went fucking mad! They were all running around like lunatics!’

  A mob of them surrounded Bertie. They were always desperate to know where I was and they weren’t going to hold back. But they underestimated Bertie, who pulled out a stiletto and one of their lot, ‘Jumbo’ Connolly, got it buried in his chest. They decided it was best not to follow that line of inquiry, realising Bertie was a dangerous little git and best left alone. Connolly survived but it was his own fault. Bertie didn’t have anything to do with the feud and, besides, he wasn’t a big fella. As his nickname suggested, ‘Jumbo’ looked very much like he could take care of himself.

  The Lotus was also visited by Lenny K
ersey. He was pissed and had a mate with him. They had it out with a fella who was on the very fringes of the Tibbs gang. This was Mickey Logan, who had once been referred to as a ‘poor consumptive cunt’ – though he wasn’t ill. He must have just come over like that. But whatever his natural condition, he certainly didn’t feel too good after Kersey impaled his hand to a table with his knife. Logan reported him to the police and Kersey was arrested. The response from the Tibbs camp was an offer to drop the charges in return for a hefty payment – something like a grand.

  This was just the greedy response the police had been looking for. When they got wind of it they told Kersey that while he had only inflicted a relatively minor wound on Logan’s hand, he had stitches everywhere from the Tibbs’ original attack. Kersey hardly needed reminding. The police said they would reopen the original case against the Tibbs and in return he would get off the Lotus charge.

  The police, led by a copper called Wickstead, seemed to be serious about this case. Wickstead was a man on a mission to wipe out crooked policemen. His squad ended up purging Soho of its once all-powerful porn mob and the Tibbs knew they were up against it. They tried to make me personally responsible for making sure that Kersey fell into line. The thing was, I knew I couldn’t stop him even if I wanted to. He wasn’t a bad fella, but he wasn’t a criminal and he had been messed up badly. He was a boisterous, mouthy hooligan businessman – and there were many like him in East London. Years later he made himself a millionaire through plastics and he now has a hotel in Spain. At that time the Tibbs thought they could get to him by saying if he didn’t do what they wanted they would swear my life away for slashing Robert.

  The police tried a similar trick. They told Kersey they wanted to speak to me, but they weren’t after an arrest. Through Kersey, Wickstead got a message to me: ‘We’re not the East Ham police.’ The distinction was clear. The local coppers might want to do me but Wickstead wasn’t interested. Wickstead later wrote in his own book how he decided that the Tibbs were a bigger danger to society than I was. He said that I wasn’t part of a gang in the same way. But he left out the real reason for going after the Tibbs – they had the Old Bill straight. The pressure on all of us was intense. Not only had this feud got very nasty indeed but everyone had an agenda and many of them would do anything to enforce it. Wickstead knew it and he offered me a private meeting. I thought to myself, I’ll have that. I had a right to talk to the Old Bill – I was being blackmailed by the Tibbs.