Krayzy Days Read online

  Charlie continued. ‘What they’ve told me about you today down The 99 (a pub in Bishopsgate). Oh. You make me feel sick, it’s disgusting.’ Charlie had discovered his son was gay. He might not be able to say the word ‘homosexual’ but that was what he meant and Ronnie knew it.

  ‘Shut up!’ growled Ronnie.

  ‘Shut up? You’re fucking gone, you are!’

  At this, Ronnie jumped up, startling the dog, and took a couple of paces across the room to face his father, knife and fork in his hands. I sat at the table, not looking at Dukey, dying a death and just listening as Ronnie repeatedly shouted ‘Shut up!’ into his father’s face. The terrier joined the family bust-up, trotting across the room and biting the old boy on the leg. Ronnie had his knife in one big fist, raised above his father. He held himself back, though the knife grazed one cheek. It was enough.

  ‘You cut me, son!’ shouted his father. ‘Oh, what have you come to?’ Looking over Ronnie’s shoulder he called into the kitchen, ‘Violet! He’s cut me! Oh, my God!’

  I took the opportunity to make a discreet exit – I don’t know what happened to Dukey on that day – and Charlie’s drunken shouts faded as I moved quietly and fast down the passageway and out the front door. That was that afternoon’s cabaret concluded as far as I was concerned.

  The next day I called round the house for Reggie. He came out limping slightly and grimacing.

  ‘What’s the matter, Reg? I said.

  ‘The Colonel’s kicked me up the bollocks,’ he answered. I didn’t ask why.

  But visiting them was mainly a social thing. You had to do it but you didn’t get much business done, even when they weren’t at each other’s throats. It was understood that when you went over to see them there, or to some degree at The Double R, you were on call, if only to keep them company. Sometimes I would go over when I had a scheme of my own or made a few quid and we’d go for a drink together. But at the same time I never worked for them, as such. Nobody did, really. The job was always to work out how to make money out of the situations in which the twins put me. They never gave anybody anything. At least, not in financial terms. I did get a couple of presents. One was a monkey, in a cage, the other – continuing the animal theme – was a Great Dane. It was rare enough that Reggie willingly gave anything anyway.

  On those occasions when business was discussed, it often included a trip to the local bathhouse – back then public baths were still very popular. The entrance fee included a towel and you locked yourself in one of the little baths and they’d see to it that you sweated nicely. ‘More hot in number seven!’ and similar cries could be heard all the time. ‘More cold in number three!’ Staff charged up and down the corridor making sure that everyone was happy. It was very relaxing and a favourite destination for the Krays and an entourage, which regularly occupied the whole of the local baths. The experience was enhanced by various fads. For one, Tommy Brown advocated splashing surgical spirit all over the body, for some reason now lost in time. You never asked for the reasoning behind these brilliant suggestions. There probably wasn’t any. It was some kind of toughening process and it was certainly that as the baths resounded to the agonised yells of those of us who had spilt spirit on our bollocks.

  If you had a proposition to put to the twins, or a shop or other business you wanted them to back, you knew you were doing well if they invited you to join them in that day’s excursion. It was informal and light-hearted, yet it was an important ritual for those in their circle. People who didn’t know them that well were startled when Reggie announced, ‘We’re going over the baths.’ His audience would look as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

  ‘You want to come over and have a bath?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, yeah. Baths? Good idea.’

  As one man, everyone in the house – anything from six to ten, or even more – would up and troop across over the street to the nearest bath. We marched across in crocodile formation like something out of Reservoir Dogs and it must have been quite a sight. Naturally, as part of the Krays, we went to the head of the queue each time.

  Harry was the man who ran the baths and he later opened the gym above The Double R. On his suggestion the twins installed a couple of sunbeds and it was them who first gave them a go. But they didn’t wear the protective goggles and both ended up blinder than usual for a few days with a nasty case of conjunctivitis. They got some funny stares, both looking as if they’d been crying their eyes out.

  When outsiders came to Vallance Road, local businessmen chasing opportunities with the Krays, they were mainly very naive. You’d have to be to go there in the first place. It wasn’t as if the Krays controlled the area so tightly that you couldn’t start a legitimate company without them. But there were those who seemed to want them on board and that was probably far more dangerous. Some hopefuls were after finance or a bit of advice but the twins were essentially clueless when it came to anything except clubs. Clubs were different – that was their world and Reggie and Charlie in particular worked well in it, though even there they had their limitations.

  Photographer David Bailey tried to take over a club with Reggie in Stratford Place near Oxford Street. I thought it was a brilliant suggestion but Reggie was strangely unenthusiastic and I just couldn’t move him. When there was no audience I could usually talk sense to him and when he came up with all sorts of unlikely excuses I guessed the real reason. He didn’t have his whack to put in – he had no money. The famous David Bailey might want to be seen with the famous Reggie Kray but he wanted his money even more. That was very typical. The celebrities I met through the Krays were shrewder at business than those of us who had less money and needed to be more careful.

  As I didn’t earn a wage myself I had the use of the Krays franchise to my own advantage. Their name could be useful enough on its own sometimes, as a friend of mine Harry Abrahams discovered when we were walking through Soho and he decided he wanted to go in what he thought was a strip club. As I immediately realised, it was a rip-off – a clip joint. There was a bird on the door who played on his enthusiasm and, despite being convinced that disaster lay before us, I eventually agreed. The girl tried to get Harry to buy soft drinks, promising him that she would meet him around the corner. It was the classic con, but he was mesmerised.

  The club was run by a Scotsman who came up when he heard me arguing with the girl. I was getting really annoyed and the owner could tell that something was going to go off if he wasn’t careful. On home turf, he thought, he started to get aggressive and I said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m with the Krays.’ He looked terrified. Of course, I could have been lying for all he knew but maybe there was just something about the way I carried myself. You would have to be sure of yourself to pretend you knew the twins if you didn’t – just in case the person you were talking to knew them for real. The owner started apologising; we were offered drinks and everything changed. That was how it was – everyday reality at the height of the Krays’ fame.

  The twins had a reputation for making a lot of their money from protection rackets, but although this was a favourite scare story for newspapers, it was completely untrue. It just didn’t work like that for them, not in Soho and certainly not in our neighbourhood. You can’t go around demanding half someone’s takings with menaces. In the end straight businesses go to the police. You couldn’t keep that up. The exception was if there was a fellow criminal of theirs who’d had a good result, they knew he had money and couldn’t go to the Old Bill – that would be the protection racket, if you could call it that. That was about as business-like as they got.

  Their real mission, if you could call it that, was to cull the old-school gangsters. They made themselves known by fighting their way up the ranks and that was at least as important as having regular income. Reggie was the more diligent. He was always at work from the moment he woke up to last thing at night – and his work often consisted of chinning people. He would go out specifically to invite older villains back to the club and then
he’d do them. He made sure that Ronnie knew all about how many more people he’d clumped than his brother.

  ‘What were you doing last night?’ he asked. ‘Cos I was working until one o’clock this morning. I chinned so-and-so.’

  And so it would go on. It was a way of marking out territory. There was a spate of this from Reggie. He was doing it ever such a lot. He got the taste for it – I’d say he was addicted, perfecting his left hook.

  Ronnie was far less devious in many ways. You wouldn’t get a sly right-hander off him. Or a left hook. That said, he might kill you – but you wouldn’t be tormented. Mostly, Ronnie was more likely to ignore you. He was often just confused – and this was his mental illness coming out. There was the time a couple were ordering at the other end of the counter in Esmeralda’s Barn one night and Ronnie muttered, ‘Look at him. It’s one of that Canning Town mob.’ I didn’t comment – I’d never seen the fella before. Ronnie started to do a contemptuous nasal imitation of the Canning Town accent – our part of London was so tribal that there were real differences between them and Ronnie’s neighbourhood, which wasn’t really that far away in Bethnal Green. The object of Ronnie’s scorn soon realised he was being watched and came over. I later found out he was actually from Fulham – not that it would have done any good to try and convince Ronnie of that – and he was perfectly polite.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink, Ron?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ronnie flatly. ‘But I am with some people.’

  ‘That’s all right. I’m buying.’

  Ronnie bought everyone in the club a drink.

  The man was panicked. ‘Ron, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise. I haven’t got the money.’

  A fella called Dougie King was the doorman at the club.

  ‘Mr King,’ called Ronnie. ‘Would you come over here please and escort this gentleman from the premises?’

  He carried on with his evening as if nothing had happened – Reggie would never have had the humour to do that. It was this dryness which offset the unpredictability in Ronnie’s character. If you were wise you took him at face value and he could seem all the funnier for the sense of relief you felt that everything was okay – for the moment. The best moments for me came when he went off at some bizarre tangent while I was around to hear it but not the focus. Like when we were riding in his car with a club owner called Steff. He was up front with Steff and me and Coxie were in the back.

  ‘Could you find me a Chinese houseboy?’ asked Ronnie, in full Colonel mode. He was deadly serious. If it was anybody else you would ask, ‘Why?’, but not with Ronnie. Coxie and I held in our laughter until we were dropped off at Mile End Station, grateful to have an excuse to get away. We ran down the stairs and collapsed onto the platform in hysterics, thinking of how somewhere above us Steff was no doubt trying to hold a sensible conversation and fend off Ronnie. He did have a flair about him – he was stylish, really.

  Reggie lacked the humour but he made up for it with his business schemes. He always had something going on with the local car dealers. Most of them in Mile End were at what was called the zump. This involved tracking down cars that had something wrong with them. The dealer buys cheap cars that, apart from the fault, would have been quite nice according to the official price guides. Then one of the Krays would find a likely customer to front up, just an ordinary person, offer them a car virtually for free. All they had to do was agree to sign for it. The dealers got the finance at the list price, the customers signed for it – and got a few quid for their trouble – and the finance company would then find that the customer didn’t pay off what he owed. Occasionally a car dealer would be arrested but mostly it was a nice racket.

  Reggie always had a good car out of it and he never paid a penny for any of them. The first one I remember him having was a bottle green Mercedes 220SE Coupé. I’m not much of a car person but it looked amazing. Then there was the big American car, his Ford Fairlane. You’d see him gliding up and down Mile End Road like something out of a film. It was fun, actually. In the end, that was what we were doing this for – a good time.

  Ronnie did have a go at driving himself, once. He got one of the dealers to get him a Jaguar Mark IX, a dignified motor not unlike a Rolls Royce. Beautiful. Having not passed a test, he left the insuring of the car to one of the brothers. One day in The Spieler he fancied a drive, got in the car and went straight into a lamp post.

  When a policeman soon arrived on the scene, Ronnie said, ‘Here, don’t worry about that,’ and gave him a fiver. It was a typical Ronnie gesture. But the uniformed police and CID were totally different. You couldn’t bribe a PC at that time – the CID nicknamed them ‘wooden tops’ – and in any case, not all police were corrupt by any means. The gangs I knew often had insiders working for them on the force but you couldn’t guarantee that and even the most bent of officers would not simply take money from complete strangers. Ronnie must have realised that they always had to know who they were dealing with – always. He would have had to have a name to mention at least – and even then they’d probably only talk to the face they knew. I’ve never personally given a policeman a penny. Ronnie was just trying it on.

  He was duly charged with both driving without a licence and bribing a policeman. At the station they asked him for his profession and on the spur of the moment he said he bred dogs. The local newspaper ran with: LOCAL DOG BREEDER CHARGED WITH BRIBERY.

  Reggie had more success with the car dealers than in debt collecting. He tried collecting for a while and returned from one mission saying that it was the worst game in the world. He learned his lesson after getting involved with a fella called Danny Shay, who was a sort of long firm operator – a fraudster – working in his own circle in Hampstead. A Jewish businessman named Maurice Podro was being slow in settling his invoices. To my way of thinking, this was just his working method. Some people just don’t pay until the last minute – it’s sharp and mean but that’s how commerce works in general, in my experience.

  The tone of the disagreement was set when Danny took a swipe at his opponent’s chest with an umbrella while Reggie brought Ossie along. But Maurice Podro went to the police and Reggie and Ossie got 18 months each. Having served a third he was out for another six months before losing his appeal and having to go back to serve the rest. It was back in jail that he met Frank Mitchell, a big giant of a man, who would later cause the twins a lot of problems when they came up with the idea of breaking him out of prison. The sentence put Reggie off debt collecting and it underlined the reason that the twins avoided getting into protection – the risk of someone going to the police was just too great.

  With Reggie out of the way, Ronnie came up with a number of ideas while he was solely in charge. One idea was to use carrier pigeons to collect protection money – but that was as detailed as the proposition went. Another was to open a brothel on the Thames. A floating brothel on a barge. The reasoning behind this was no less obscure. When Ronnie came up with schemes like this, it was usually best not to get deeply involved. My response was generally just to agree with him, even when he asked me if I would be in charge of the wine cellar. It was one of the scattiest proposals I’d ever heard, not least because I was drinking like a fish at the time and was the last person you’d want in charge of the alcohol. Inevitably, Ronnie had forgotten the whole thing by the next morning. We were all relieved when Reggie got out.

  Life around the twins was as chaotic as it sounds. There were no strict regulations you could follow. It was really all about how they felt on a particular day and whether someone’s behaviour threatened their largely selfish interests. A fella named Ronnie Marwood became a cause célèbre after he stabbed a policeman with a diver’s knife and killed him. He came from North London and the dancehall where the attack happened was around his way in Highbury. We all had to have an opinion about what he’d done and what people were saying about it. The twins were obsessed. But you had to be careful that you expressed the right opinion. It went without saying that you backed
Marwood over the police and it would be a very unwise customer at The Double R who would say anything else. This was another example of the tense, peculiar atmosphere in the place. Everything was significant and you could never drop your guard. It was the embodiment of that old saying, a still tongue keeps a wise head. Always good to remember around the twins but not so easy for some people to do once they had a few of an evening.

  Ronnie was a friend of the Nashes, another mob we knew. Jimmy Nash was practically one of us. You could see him most days in The Spieler. The Nashes had a row in The Pen Club, an illegal drinking den in Spitalfields. A fella there belted one of them and the Nashes went up there to sort him out. They ended up going up against the owners of the club, bank robbers who themselves had only just come home from long-term sentences in Dartmoor. Jimmy Nash shot one of them in the head and killed him and shot another – Billy Ambrose – in the stomach. That was enough to get Jimmy arrested and it looked like enough to get him hanged. But then someone gave evidence to the contrary and the case collapsed, probably not least because one of those who had been there that night with the Nashes had a father who was a policeman. That all got a bit murky and we probably don’t want to delve into that too much. But for a while Jimmy Nash was another one about who you just had to have an opinion – the right one.

  The twins’ reactions were frequently unpredictable. I remember a fella called Eric Mason had a little club in the West End and I got on well with him. He didn’t look like a tough guy, but he had done loads of time, including being on the quarry party down in Dartmoor. He was famous for having an erratic temper but I never saw that side of him myself. Then there was Frankie Fraser from South London, by contrast, a legend and a real rabble rouser. Even in prison he’d be trying to organise riots and he never did anything alone. He and Eric had an argument one night in The Astor Club and when they went outside for a fight, Fraser had a whole mob with him. Eric was attacked with an axe and when he instinctively put his hand up to protect himself, the axe went right through it and into his head.