Krayzy Days Read online

  I sent someone to the hospital to find out what had happened.

  He said, ‘They said, “Where do you wanna be dumped? Around Vallance Road?”’

  This was a mortal insult, another way of sarcastically asking if someone you’ve just injured wants to go to see his friends. I saw it as a quite a challenge and I was surprised when the twins didn’t want to do anything about it. This was one occasion when they didn’t want to have an opinion about what had happened.

  When the twins did fight, I never saw anybody ever throw a punch back. Not one person in all the years I knew them. The reason was simple and it was one of the many things I learned from them. They always took people by surprise. Nobody ever had a chance. Reggie, with his greater reserves of patience and guile, could even wait a day or two. Ronnie was something else entirely. He would be much more likely just to charge in there. And he always had a fantasy about having the fight to end all fights. He imagined himself placing a photograph next to his heart in his chest pocket, a picture of a boy he met on a trip to Tangier, whose name he had long forgotten. Ronnie would take a gun up high on a roof, in this daydream. In reality he was no marksman, but he thought of himself having a shoot-out with whoever he felt was the biggest threat at the time.

  In more rational moments, both Reggie and, to a lesser extent, Ronnie realised that they would need help to be able to move up to the next level, whatever that turned out to be. They recruited new people to refresh the cause and, although these characters were never officially announced, I could always tell their importance by the way that the twins got more excited and nervous. The buzz going around the local pub was a giveaway. One night, when everyone had their best clean collar and tie on, I knew there was going to be an interesting arrival.

  Me and Georgie Osbourne, in particular, were very intrigued by the mystery the twins were creating about our guest. It was a financial adviser named Leslie Payne. He was tall, well spoken and very smart. We started calling him George Saunders after the famous actor of the time. He was very much the smoothie businessman, but a conman too – not the street sort, but something more sophisticated.

  ‘Do you know, I could live on £30 a week?’ he said that first night. Back then £30 was about twice what most people earned and a typically snotty comment from him. We didn’t end up taking him very seriously, but the twins did. Very much so. He was going to be a front man for them; he was going to take them places. Leslie was going to help them take the next step up the ladder. They employed him to stretch themselves.

  Payne told them about a new town being built in the north of Nigeria. With the right amount of money behind him he could be a part of a scheme which included Ernest, son of Labour’s Lord Manny Shinwell. Ernest himself was at Vallance Road one day at the same time as Freddy Bird, an old Mile End face who knew the twins from way back – old school failure, like so many of them around the twins. His task was to give Shinwell a lift to his next engagement in Surrey. I was curious about how the former public schoolboy and Freddy would get on and later asked him.

  ‘He said he’s got a chicken farm down there,’ said Freddy, ‘and I said to him, “Oh, do you? I breed chickens also.” So he said, “Which breed?” I said, “Red ones.” He was very impressed. He said, “I do like to have a sensible conversation.”’

  Fired up by the Nigerian plan, Ronnie, Charlie and Leslie Payne went out to see Enugu, the new town, for themselves. They were, as always, very secretive about finances but drew money from somewhere before they left. They also raised the necessary investment, which I did know about because I knew the people they talked to. It was the experience of travelling itself which was fantastic for Ronnie, someone who spent so much time close to home. And yet his interests remained much the same, even away on the trip.

  ‘Is there anything you’d like to see?’ his hosts asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Would you show me around the local prison?’

  He was given a tour of the facilities as a visiting dignitary. Ronnie returned from the trip with Charlie, the financial adviser and his souvenir big knife. But something went wrong out there on a subsequent trip. The money didn’t get to where it should have been – I never knew the details – but the upshot was that his brother Charlie and Payne later ended up as inmates of the Nigerian nick.

  Back home, Reggie was left to run around like a headless version of one of Freddy Bird’s ‘red’ chickens, frantically raising more money to get his brother out. I accompanied him on one of the fundraisers. We paid a visit to some car dealer’s house one night.

  ‘Reg, Reg,’ said the fella, ‘I’m having a row with the wife. Can I speak to you another time?’

  ‘You’re bothering me with your domestic squabbles while my brother’s in the nick in Nigeria!’

  He grabbed the dealer by the throat and slammed him up against the door, starting to strangle him. Amid the choking and shouting, a small Scotty dog ran out of the house and attached itself to Reggie’s leg, yapping bravely. It was closely followed by the man’s wife, who added her piercing scream to the general confusion. Somehow we extracted Reggie and somehow he managed to assemble enough money in the end to get Charlie home.

  The scheme itself didn’t come to anything, but it was a relief just to have Ronnie out of the country for a while. It was the same whenever the Krays were abroad. They went to Jersey and thinking back now I can remember only the intense sense of being able to relax and breathe easily for a while. It was as if I was having a holiday at the same time. Ronnie also went to Ibiza, having become enthused after hearing good reports from a friend. He was in The Double R that same night.

  ‘So you didn’t go?’

  ‘I been,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not what I thought it was,’ he said. ‘It’s different.’

  The speed of his trip was soon explained. Having got off the plane and as far as the airport building, Ronnie decided there and then that Ibiza was not for him. He didn’t even leave the airport and got the next plane back.

  Chapter Four

  Shooting George Dixon

  I didn’t know either of the two men Ronnie was attacking in The Double R. One minute he had been talking to me and the next he was steaming into them. Until that point it had been a very quiet night in the club. At that time they were running a gym above it and Ronnie and I had been standing downstairs. I had my back to the door but he had an uninterrupted view of the whole place. We weren’t talking about anything particularly important when Ronnie suddenly broke off.

  He said, ‘Excuse me a minute, Mick.’

  Ronnie walked around me and all the way along the largely deserted bar. That was when he laid into one of the strangers, seemingly without any provocation. He was punching him like mad. As he went down, the fella was calling Ronnie ‘Craig’ for some reason and telling him he ‘didn’t think you was like that. I thought you’d have a straightener, but you need all this lot.’

  By that time the few of us who were in the club were running over. Ronnie immediately stopped and spoke calmly to the man.

  ‘I’ll have a straightener with you,’ he said. ‘Come on then, we’ll go upstairs.’

  The other man scrambled to his feet. He was a big bloke, maybe 6ft 2 or even 6ft 3, fierce eyes. This was George, one of a well-known family called the Dixons, though I’d never met him before. The two of them were halfway up to the gym before Dixon turned around to see that the rest of us were guarding the stairs to ensure that they were left alone. He realised what he was doing to himself – he was going to lock himself in a room with a complete raving madman of incredible strength and viciousness. With a yell he stopped in his tracks and refused to go further. Ronnie kicked him in the bollocks and he came tumbling all the way down the stairs and he was thrown into the street. That was my introduction to George Dixon and I didn’t have that much more to do with him. From what I could tell, he was a bit of a loser really, certainly whenever I s
aw him he was getting into scrapes.

  This kind of encounter was not uncommon in The Double R and for the most part the place kept both twins busy. I didn’t see Ronnie do much else, though just once he went on a robbery – and I went with him. I think I must be the only man in the country to say I’ve been out robbing with Ronnie. Not that he would have done it on his own. He wouldn’t be able to find anything to rob to start with. Not a clue, particularly as he didn’t drive. But on that one occasion we were in The Regency, a North London club used a lot by all of us, and he got me to get him a motor with a driver.

  Albert the Jar’s brother, Freddy, was chosen with his big Austin three-way loader van, though we weren’t going to travel far for our heist. In the basement under The Regency was a hire purchase place, a tallyman’s run by two guys named Gannon and Hamish. According to an old friend of Ronnie’s, Dicky Morgan, they had one room filled with stacks of beautiful carpets. At least, that was what this friend said. I hated these tip-offs from Ronnie’s old friends. They were the worst people on earth – they had his ear but you couldn’t be sure they had the first clue about what they were doing. And you wouldn’t be able to get through to Ronnie once he’d got an idea in his head. I had no idea how Dicky Morgan knew they were there, maybe he’d just seen them or something, but he told Ronnie the carpets were worth a fortune.

  While Freddy Lovett went to get his motor, the rest of us stayed behind when the club closed up. We broke in downstairs and waited until about seven or eight o’clock in the morning to avoid suspicion before lugging the carpets outside. Ronnie had a contact in Chingford who agreed to have a look at the goods. He only needed one look.

  ‘What have you done?’ he asked. ‘They’re not Indian. They’re not Chinese. They’re Belgian. A load of rubbish, the whole lot of them. They wouldn’t come to 100 quid.’

  But though Ronnie called Dicky every name under the sun as we drove away without making a sale, we had actually had a narrow escape. The Chingford fence had just come from doing a long prison sentence and he was soon in all the newspapers. He had what the reporters called ‘an Aladdin’s cave’ of stolen property hidden in a vast secret basement under the house we visited. Despite prison he couldn’t stop buying off other criminals – it was an addiction. If we’d been picked up in connection with that load of dodgy old carpets we’d have got about five years each.

  It was never going to be through robbery that the twins made their name. They should really have stuck to the clubs. In later years, when The Double R closed, they started on a new venture down the road called The Kentucky. The design of this place was down to their brother Charlie. He was totally different to the twins. He was much more straightforward, a very nice fella. And though that was just my opinion, I never heard anybody say anything about him to the contrary. On the surface he was typical of that kind of East End guy – smart, always had a nice car and he had been a professional boxer. But he wasn’t damaged in the sport and I’m sure he would have a better life if he hadn’t have been cursed with Ronnie and Reggie for brothers. It was terrible to see him dragged down with them. I have to admit that I saw Charlie at the fights many years later when I got into the business side of boxing and I ducked him. By then I’d been out of contact with the Krays and everyone connected with them for a long time. And Charlie just seemed too sad and I was frightened of embarrassing myself. I just didn’t want to see him. I heard from him just once since the Krays went away. He got Ray Moore, his wife’s brother who was later shot dead in an unrelated incident, to give me a message – tell Micky I wish I’d gone with him. And I bet he did too. Like his dad, Charlie senior, he didn’t deserve to be caught up in the fallout.

  It was a couple of years after George Dixon had been kicked in the bollocks at The Double R that I saw him again. I was in a car with Reggie and a couple of others after the club closed one night when we passed him and a fella called Dalison that Reggie had the needle with. They were also in a car. Pulling up in Mile End Road, Reggie stalked back to them.

  ‘Oi, you, come here,’ he said. I didn’t know the fella Reggie was after or what the problem was. Dixon got out of the car and, rather disloyally, pushed his mate towards Reggie. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour but something about that annoyed me. While Reggie set about punching into Dalison, I striped Dixon.

  By then the twins had moved out of Vallance Road and lived in flats above one another in Stamford Hill. I was over at Ronnie’s the next day. He wasn’t particularly pleased to see me.

  ‘You beat my boyfriend up, didn’t you?’ he said. I didn’t say anything. ‘Never mind, Mick’, he continued, ‘I think that little scar suits him.’

  It was odd to hear of Dixon as anyone’s ‘boyfriend’. Not George Dixon – big, tough guy, leader of the Dixon family. It was a mystery what really went on there. Dixon wasn’t known for being gay and – not that it necessarily always means that much – he was married. At a later date Ronnie went on to claim that Dixon had also taken a liberty with him because he knew Ronnie fancied him. This was hardly unusual – Ronnie often had crushes. He was always upset because he never got to meet ’60s icon Terence Stamp, for one.

  The liberty that George Dixon was accused of taking concerned the Nashes. He’d had a disagreement with them and now he was scared. He’d asked Ronnie to straighten it out for him.

  ‘Yeah, all right,’ said Ronnie. ‘Just keep out of the way and it’ll be all right. I’ll sort it out for you. Keep out of the way. Don’t be about, don’t put me in the middle and I’ll sort it.’

  He couldn’t have been clearer. But then Dixon saw Charlie Kray.

  ‘You know I had a bit of an argument with the Nashes?’ he said. ‘Has Ronnie done anything about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Charlie, fatefully as it turned out. ‘Come down to The Regency on Monday morning and I’ll ask him.’

  The Krays held a regular Monday morning meeting in a room under the club – though there was never much of interest discussed. It was more just to keep a presence. I picked up a pack of cards and started playing pontoon with Nobby Clarke. Aside from all three Kray brothers, present were also Johnny Davies – Ronnie’s sometime minder and driver – and notorious associate Freddie Foreman.

  Just at that point, Dixon turned up, without saying anything. That was bad enough, though Charlie wasn’t to know that Ronnie had specifically told Dixon to keep a low profile. For his part, George hadn’t thought to ask Charlie if he’d warned Ronnie that he was coming. He hadn’t. The bad part was that George had a mate with him. Nothing was said, though, and Ronnie gave no sign of ill humour as he got up and casually strolled out of the room.

  When he returned, Ronnie was running and he had a gun. He put it to Dixon’s head and pulled the trigger. Everyone sprang to life, diving towards Ronnie as fast as they could as the gun went click, click, click. Fortunately for Dixon, Johnny Davies – an exdocker and old friend of mine who had been introduced by me to the twins – took his duties as Ronnie’s right-hand man seriously. He had diligently oiled not only the gun but the bullets too. He was always oiling things – ‘I am very efficient,’ he used to say. The trigger mechanism slipped repeatedly and that was all that saved Dixon’s life. Freddie and Reggie wrestled Ronnie, still waving the gun around and incoherent with fury, to the floor.

  Charlie shouted, ‘Get out!’ repeatedly at Dixon, whose mate was standing, stunned and motionless in the unfolding insanity. George himself wasn’t in much better condition. He was running like some cartoon character. His feet were going but, dragging his panicked mate behind him, it seemed like he wasn’t moving at all. It took them ages to get up the stairs and out. Or maybe it was just time seeming to go slowly while Ronnie raved under the combined weight of his brother and Freddie.

  It was a moment to remember and in the years since then plenty of people have claimed to have been there at the time. Others have said it happened somewhere else or didn’t happen at all. But the truth was strange enough and I was one of the few who
can say I was definitely there to witness it.

  Poor old George – still the loser. He even claimed that he made up with Ronnie and that Ronnie gave him the bullet which almost killed him. He said he had it made into a necklace – I didn’t see it, but I could believe that.

  Another of Ronnie’s crushes was actor Billy Murray, who went to find fame as Don Beech in The Bill. Unlike Terence Stamp – who the young Murray resembled – Ronnie did get to meet Billy, though he didn’t have much more luck with him. Murray was also born in the East End to an Irish father and although he had a couple of fights as a boxer, he was always determined to be an actor. He had the sort of tanned, leading-man looks that appealed to Ronnie.

  ‘Do me a favour, Mick,’ he said. ‘Will you go and knock on his door and get him out? I don’t like to go round there. I don’t want his dad to see me.’

  I ended up knocking at the door like a kid calling after school.

  ‘Is Billy in, Mr Murray?’ But he came out and I told him that Ronnie was sitting out front in a taxi. We went back to Mile End and Ronnie made an excuse to get us over to Dickie Morgan’s. His mum allowed Ronnie to bring his boys over and I knew enough to leave them to it. But I was curious to find out how it had gone and asked Ronnie the next day.

  ‘Fucking useless,’ said Ronnie. ‘He didn’t want to know.’

  Billy Murray might have been determined to be an actor – but not at any price.

  George Dixon got into more trouble with his brother Alan when they teamed up with the Berry brothers and started throwing their weight around. I liked Teddy and Checker Berry, former talented boxers, and I was shocked when I heard what happened to Teddy. Details were sketchy to begin with. I was told Teddy had been outside the hospital on Hackney Road when he was shot from behind and one of his legs disintegrated in the blast. He never saw who did it.