Krayzy Days Read online

  Wickstead and me got together on the neutral territory of the Embankment.

  ‘We know you had a fight with Robert Tibbs,’ he said. ‘They want you badly at East Ham for cutting him.’

  I said ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘You can be out of it if you’re willing to admit that this all started over you having a fight with Robert Tibbs.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘everybody knows it did.’

  ‘Okay, then. On your way.’ That was the end of our discussion. The police did go on to leave me alone – at least for a while.

  Early one morning came the swoop on the Tibbs. The gang grassed each other up with enthusiasm and before long some 20 of them had been scooped up. Just a few mornings later they came for me. When I looked out of the window I saw the Old Bill with Frankie McDonald in the back of the car.

  ‘You two,’ the driver said to us in the back. ‘Don’t talk’. This simple request was a physical impossibility for Frankie. He has always been incapable of keeping his mouth shut for any length of time. He gabbled on despite the presence of the very tough Old Bill who had been assigned to us. They were serious about what they did – Wickstead’s own memoir would be called Gangbuster – and they failed to see the funny side.

  ‘Fucking shut up!’ they both shouted. ‘Stop talking!’

  We set off, but in a different direction to Scotland Yard. We were heading to Tintagel House, a more secure facility in that it was staffed entirely by hand-picked coppers who could be trusted. We were searched and surprised that despite what Wickstead had said, they did seem to be after us. Tout Frankie demanded they return his collection of tickets.

  ‘I ain’t done anything!’

  The police were unimpressed. They told him he could have them back the following Tuesday – three days after the game. Now he was really annoyed and he got a bit lippy, shouting and carrying on. I watched as he threatened to take them on until one of the Old Bill punched him in the head knocking him over a desk.

  ‘You stay there,’ they said to me and Frankie was marched off.

  I later found out they grilled him about the night of the fight with Robert. Once they had every detail, they told him he had to give evidence. He refused.

  ‘I’m frightened.’

  ‘Who are you scared of?’

  ‘The Tibbs.’

  ‘You frightened of Fawcett?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve got no reason to be scared of him.’

  That seemed to be all they needed. Frankie soon reappeared and they let both of us go. Wickstead was as good as his word. I got a witness summons to the Old Bailey where I was asked to confirm that I’d had a fight with Robert Tibbs. Did I do it? They meant had I cut Robert’s throat.

  ‘No.’

  That was as far as my involvement was supposed to go, though they did try and push it in examination. At times it was as if I were in the dock rather than the witness box.

  The defence jumped in to ask, ‘Did you try to arrange for Jimmy Tibbs to be managed by the Krays?’

  Again, I said, ‘No.’ That was as far as my involvement in the case went.

  The type of write-up we were getting that upset the hypocritical Banksy.

  Billy Hill at work

  Keeping a low profile in the 70s

  Terrible Teddy Machin

  With title contender Micky Driscoll

  With Barry McGuigan, a great role model to any aspiring young athlete.

  With Trevor Curry, British heavyweight champion and Errol Christie, a great fighter and a really nice guy.

  At the weigh-in and ready for action.

  Banjo, Patsy Quill, Jimmy Quill and myself at a weigh-in at the Ruskin

  Gloving up Banjo

  With Patsy Quill and Shane Banjo

  My great friend Gilbert Acuna (centre) training in America with Roberto Duran and Sly Stallone.

  With my good friend Wag Bennett

  Myself with Barny Eastwood and Paddy Byrne, Barry McGuigan’s manager and trainer.

  Don King, myself, my business adviser and Larry Holmes, recently crowned world heavyweight champion.

  Funso Banjo

  Bone Crusher and myself at the Bruno weigh-in.

  George Prendas, Marvis Frazier, myself, Larry Frazier and Smoking Joe Frazier Jnr.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The End of the War

  I was flat on the pavement in Brussels surrounded by gendarmes with guns pressing on the back of my neck. Makes a change from English coppers, I thought. One of my friends, who had most of the dodgy travellers’ cheques in his pockets, managed to escape. The rest of the gear was in the car boot and that meant at least the two of us left weren’t holding. All I could see was a whirl of green capes and caps as we were rushed off to a police station. In Belgium they followed the Napoleonic system – you were guilty until you were found innocent.

  My brush with the European justice system meant I was not in the UK to see the Tibbs get sentenced. I had gone abroad to do a bit of work, which was all going badly wrong, and I was going to find myself staying away much longer than planned.

  I had left London during the trial with some £50,000 of travellers’ cheques which were stolen or forged, something like that. There were three of us taking the cheques to Brussels in the boot of my car. Patrick was one, nice enough, and the other fella was an old colonel type. He planned to get money for the cheques in the currency bureaus over there, but he was a proper piss artist. We had no sooner arrived at a car park in the capital to park my Fiat 124 sports car when he started getting impatient. He claimed he wanted to start work but as a real alcoholic, that was just another way of saying he was keen to start boozing. My attempts to decipher the no parking signs were not fast enough for him.

  ‘Come on, there’s a space there,’ he said. ‘What are you hanging about for? We’ll come back for it later.’ I had parked in a strictly no parking area.

  We moved from one Bureau de Change to another, collecting cash at each until, without warning, we found ourselves arrested and in the local police station. Before we could get to the examining magistrate, a policeman came to record the case. He put a sheet of paper in the typewriter.

  ‘Come on,’ he said in French. ‘What’s your story?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ I said. They swiftly installed me in a real piss-hole of a cell. It was horrible. The bedding was filthy and it was clear they knew what they were doing. The police had slung me in the worst place they had to soften me up a bit.

  After a grim night we got to see the examining magistrate in the morning. Now I had an interpreter.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s all about,’ I said. ‘I only just met these people.’

  The magistrate had good if heavily accented English.

  ‘I will be looking at this case very, very carefully,’ he said. In the meantime we were sent on remand to Brussels’ Forest Prison. The regime was very different to anything I’d experienced in the UK. At 5.00 am they would come storming down the landings, pounding on the doors of those who were due in court with their batons and yelling, ‘Palais! Palais!’ That meant you were due back in court again at the Palais de Justice. I repeated my story.

  ‘We’ve found almost £50,000 of travellers’ cheques in the boot of your car,’ said the magistrate. I wasn’t asked for a plea, but was simply bundled back off to prison to await sentence. When it came it included a period ‘avec sursis’ – suspended, depending on good behaviour. I can’t claim Belgian jail was an enjoyable experience but looking back on it, the time was at least at first, quite interesting. I read The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. The plot to kill de Gaulle in France suddenly seemed to be all rather relevant and I could daydream the story with me as Edward Fox’s cinematic portrayal of the Jackal.

  I was there over Christmas when another inmate spoke to me on the exercise yard and I was caught answering. My punishment was to spend Christmas Day in a cage, staring at the walls and thinking what a fucking idiot I was to fi
nish up here.

  Eventually I was transferred – by a connecting tunnel – from the Forest to St Gilles Prison. Some of the other prisoners I got to know in Forest were looking forward to meeting up but I ended up in solitary. This was the étrangers section for foreign prisoners and it was even more restrictive than the other jail. There wasn’t even a proper exercise yard. Behind the gates I’d been waiting to open expecting a bit of fresh air there was just another cage – larger than the punishment cell, but still little more than an extension of the regular cell, surrounded on all sides by netting. I could do nothing but walk up and down, bored to death. Nothing was provided to break up the tedium. No newspapers, no books and correspondence was limited.

  Someone wrote a letter from home to say how things had gone in the Old Bailey which – when it at long last arrived – revealed the stiff sentences the Tibbs received. As for me, I wasn’t going anywhere. They said that my passport was irregular in some way but I knew it wasn’t. The authorities had been talking to the police in the UK and I wondered to myself what they were up to. There was talk that I would be transferred to a prison in a Belgian chateau. It wasn’t until someone came over and got a travel document for me from the consul that I was finally released.

  Pausing only for a couple of drinks with the fella who got my documents, we took a flight to Southend Airport. My friend phoned someone who met us in the car park where we were shortly afterwards also greeted by special branch with their own brand of welcome home message – a warrant for my arrest. ‘Causing explosions with intent’. They were talking about the bombs in the Tibbs’ van and office.

  ‘Look, I’ve been to the Old Bailey over this already,’ I said.

  But it was no good, they said they had to contact the officer who had issued the warrant. The name was Tom Lamont and I recognised it as belonging to the policeman looking for me over the Tibbs business. I had to admit he was determined. Obsessed, more like. With a name like that he sounded like some kind of fucking Canadian Mounty, determined to get me at any cost. But there was not one shred of evidence linking me to the fighting. How would he prove the bombings weren’t the work of any of the many people the Tibbs had attacked? Perhaps more importantly, I had already appeared in the trial against the Tibbs as a witness. Commander Wickstead had made the decision to go after them and squared that with the director of public prosecutions. Wickstead’s side knew that they would have to let charges against the Tibbs’ enemies go as the price of putting the gang away. The last thing they wanted was a policeman who was friendly with the Tibbs messing up that result. I outfoxed Lamont the Mounty and they had to let me go.

  The mood should have been one of celebration but when I returned to my home in the East End and my regular existence, I was at a low ebb. The adrenaline of the fighting had gone. I no longer had to travel between Spain and the UK. While living abroad my wife had begun to develop the illness that led to her needing lengthy treatment on a dialysis machine. I had been staying with her because of our son but I knew I couldn’t leave her while she was so seriously ill. I was trapped in the relationship and I didn’t have the security of knowing what I was going to do for work.

  Having saved nothing I had gone through almost all my resources and I was virtually skint. What money I did have I was spending on booze and nightclubs. Those who hadn’t deserted me in the middle of all the trouble were now fast losing respect for me. Nothing was ever said to my face but people just started to stay away. The consensus was I was a troublemaker who shouldn’t have got involved with the Tibbs in the first place. Worst of all, my reputation had sunk in the eyes of Billy Hill. I heard it through Jimmy, the friend I had introduced to Billy and who had got close to him.

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ Billy said. ‘I don’t want anything to do with that East End business anymore.’ Billy thought I was showing myself up as a terrible hooligan and a generally risky character.

  This was an impression that Michael Machin’s uncle Teddy did his best to exaggerate. Teddy hadn’t forgotten the row the two of us had in Spain and while it was true that I had a real rant at him, he seemed intent on doing his best to get me back by having me killed or, which was even worse, have me put away for life. He had once been the one to introduce me to Billy Hill but, ever the mixer, he was now was in a prime position to make things very difficult. Billy let me know what was happening.

  ‘Ted’s been up here,’ said Billy. ‘He’s been telling me terrible things about you.’ He gave me a very thoughtful look.

  ‘He’s telling everyone, Bill,’ I said quietly. ‘He’s talking to everybody.’

  Billy was animated. ‘But terrible things! Terrible things.’ I didn’t ask what Teddy was saying because I knew. This went back to some idle banter I’d had with Teddy when we were still on speaking terms. Along with another friend we had been speculating about what would happen if Billy got kidnapped. Who would he go to for the ransom? That sort of thing. It was stupid stuff which Teddy reported back as if it were a real plan. Someone else told me that Billy was now too scared to show his face in the East End, particularly as things had got so heated with the Tibbs. It did seem like anything could happen and kidnapping was something he might well have done himself in his earlier days. Maybe it seemed a more realistic prospect for someone like him. I knew I had been tactless to talk like that but then Teddy shouldn’t have been stirring.

  Teddy had also got in the habit of telling people that I was going to kill them. It was a bit much and, if only he stopped to think about it, he’d have realised it was a dangerous game for someone who had his kind of sexual secrets. He knew my nature and must have been very stupid not to guess what you probably already have – that word of the affair he was having with Chrissie got back to Mick McKenzie. There’s an old Sicilian saying – ‘A word in the right ear can make or kill a man.’ It wasn’t long after the affair came out that Teddy Machin was blasted to death with a shotgun. It was Mick’s own relative, Alan, who did the shooting and he got just three years for it.

  This did nothing to improve the opinion most people had about me. They thought I was a nuisance and, to be quite honest, I was. I was starting to resemble any one of those idiots who surrounded the Krays in their last days – I was exactly the kind of person I would once have kept right away from. And, what was worse, I knew it. The insight into what was wrong should have acted as an incentive to change, but it just made me feel more depressed. For someone like me, who at the best of times is not gregarious or convivial, I was even more of a loner.

  One of the clubs I went to at the time was The Room at the Top, in Ilford. It was after one very typical evening there that I woke up with my bed surrounded by police. That wasn’t so typical.

  ‘Come on, get dressed, you’re nicked, mate.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘You’ll find out. Get downstairs.’

  They searched the house thoroughly. They even picked up a lighter shaped like an antique pistol to examine it closely.

  Superintendent Frank Cater, who had been on the Kray case, said, ‘May I use your telephone?’ They were obliged to ask and I said he could. ‘We’ve got that man,’ he said to whoever picked up. They found nothing in the house and, none the wiser, I was taken to City Road Police Station where I spent the night without anyone talking to me.

  When I was taken upstairs by a policeman he gave me an apple.

  ‘I bet you’re a bit hungry and thirsty down here, aren’t you? You’ve been here quite a while.’ It was a softening up trick. ‘Those Tibbs are bully boys, aren’t they? Fucking bully boys!’ He was nice enough, but the attempt to find a weak spot in me was obvious.

  The man waiting to interview me was a Commander Davis.

  Sprawled in a chair, he said, ‘Fuck me! There ain’t nothing of you. The stories I keeping getting told I thought you were going to be a fucking great gorilla of a man. How come you’re going around setting about all these people and all the things you’ve been up to?’

  This was the cue
for my usual response. ‘What’ve I done?’

  ‘Cutting people and all that.’

  ‘Who’ve I cut?’

  ‘Robert Tibbs.’

  I didn’t respond. I suddenly realised that I was already saying too much. I thought, I’ve been lured in here! I’m talking. That was the end of the interview from my point of view. But this was a serious attempt to get at me and I knew the Tibbs had something to do with it. Confirmation came when they came to take me out to charge me and I was surprised to see Johnny Davies and alongside him three other fellas called Jimmy Fleet, David Storey and Johnny Ennifer. As far as I knew, there was nothing that connected us here, particularly not Ennifer, who I think was married to Nancy, the daughter of Bogey Tibbs. Nancy and I got on all right. The Tibbs gang had become obsessed with getting me. They had recruited anyone they could find to help get me arrested. That’s why Ennifer was interesting. I didn’t know him at all. What’s he doing here? I wondered to myself. This was an attempt to link us as a gang. I thought the war was over, but someone had forgotten to tell the other side.