Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (10 page)

I
came out of prison to discover that my brother Chris had been having an affair with the girlfriend, Barbara, of a well-known villain called SP. Chris didn’t know SP, but when he finally did meet him it was in a violent confrontation which would put the Lambrianou brothers even more firmly on the map.

On his periodic visits to London Chris was active in the heavy game, which is how we referred to armed robbery, and was working on and off with a well-known firm at the Angel in north London. They were known as the Odds and Sods, but they were good at what they did.

One day, after he’d been on a successful bit of work with them, he went round to Barbara’s house. She knew he’d had it off with a nice few quid, and she said to him: ‘Where’s my fur coat, Chris?’

‘What do you think I am, a fucking idiot?’ was his reply. You don’t start flashing money around the minute a job is done. They had a row and Chris drove off.

He went back to pick her up that evening, but in the meantime she’d been in touch with her boyfriend. What she said I don’t know. She’d obviously wound him up against Chris, because when he
pulled up in his car SP was waiting. He put a blade up against my brother’s face, and he said: ‘If you come round here again, I’ll open you up.’

Chris said, ‘You’d better do it now, because if you don’t I’m coming back to shoot you.’

SP said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard it all before.’ He may well have done, but he didn’t know my brother. Chris was definitely coming back.

He went home, filled up a .38 revolver, a Smith & Wesson police special, and returned to the girlfriend’s house. As he pulled up, SP came walking down the front path.

My brother said, ‘If you feel that much about her, you can have her. She ain’t worth the aggro.’

With that, SP came at Chris with a knife and yelled, ‘I warned you about coming here.’

Chris pulled out the .38 and shot him three times, once in the stomach, once in the chest and once in the thigh. He then tried to run over him in the car, but the kerb was too high to reverse over, and Chris couldn’t hang around. People had heard the shots. He should have been dead, SP. He was nearly dead, but he did survive.

Three days after I was released from prison, I was in the Regency Club in Stoke Newington with Nicky and a friend called Paddy Dinnear. When I went downstairs for a drink I saw this bloke looking at me. I knew it was SP. I said to Nicky and Paddy, ‘Watch my back,’ and I went into the toilet. SP followed me in.

He said, ‘You’re Tony Lambrianou, aren’t you? Your brother did this to me.’ He lifted up his shirt and I saw these big holes. I said, ‘I know all about it. You came unstuck once. Don’t let it happen again, or this time we won’t fuck about with you.’

I went back to my parents’ house, and who was sitting there cleaning his guns but Chris. He used to sit indoors every night doing this. He’d oil them up and then bury them in the ground where the earth would keep them moist. It was a ritual called ‘Oil it, bury it’.

I said, ‘I saw a mate of yours tonight in the Regency.’

‘Who was that?’ Chris said.

‘SP,’ I replied.

Chris said, ‘I’ve got something for him. I owe him something.’ And he went out to find him and finish him off. But SP had left the Regency and Chris had no idea where he lived. SP escaped with his life that night.

The reaction to the whole episode in criminal circles was this: ‘They’re not mugs, those Lambrianous. They’ll go all the way.’ The twins, particularly, had an eye for people who could be useful to them, who could be good allies, and we fitted in. They started to take a lot more notice of us after that incident. It didn’t take long for the story to get around, and people from all walks of life started approaching Chris – ‘If we ever need a bit of help, can we rely on you?’

We were offered a lot of work. I was approached in the East End one day by a bloke called Mark. Somebody had taken a liberty with one of his brothers, and they weren’t really strong enough to get back at them.

I said, ‘Well, what do you want done?’

‘I want this man’s legs broken,’ he answered.

I asked, ‘How much are you prepared to pay?’

‘I’ll give you two grand,’ he promised.

He gave me all the details, which I passed on to my pal Paddy Dinnear, telling him what was necessary. The man we were supposed to do lived in Loughton in Essex, just on the outskirts of London. We went out there and knocked on the door. The father opened it. Paddy said, ‘Can I see your boy?’

Not only did Paddy do the son, he did the father and the sister as well. If I hadn’t pulled him out of there, he would have killed them. I didn’t want to see the woman hurt, so of course I stopped it. The
trouble with some women is that they won’t stay out of it. They jump into the middle of things, and they can be a nuisance.

My own experience of this was the day I stole a big brass till out of a shop in Roman Road. I had information that there would be around £2,500 in the bottom part of it where the paper money was. I went to the shop in a car with three other people I can’t name, and we parked outside. I walked in and tried to pull the till off the counter, but it was bolted on. The driver stayed where he was in the car and the other two came running in to help me.

We had to demolish the counter to get at the till, and while we were doing that the women in the shop were pelting us with cans of peas and beans. I spent quite some time recuperating from the injuries I received.

Unfortunately, as we came out of the shop a young girl who was passing jumped on my back and tried to wrestle me to the ground. I wouldn’t like to face her in the ring – I couldn’t come out of the house for days because of the injuries she caused me. My mate tried to grab her by the hair and she turned and jumped on him. She had to be thrown to the ground.

We never wanted to see women getting involved in this sort of business, but Paddy Dinnear didn’t even think about it. That day in Loughton, he was more than capable of killing the sister when she launched herself into the fray.

Paddy would use violence at the touch of a button. He was a man of very few words, but when it came to the action he was the man I always wanted there. I never stopped using him, and he never forgot us all the time we were away on the Kray convictions.

He was a boyhood friend of ours and later a bus driver who worked the 149 route from Liverpool Street to Edmonton. Often he flew into fits of temper. One day a cabbie tried to cut him up at Dalston Junction. He completely demolished the cab with his bus, he tried to kill the cabbie, and then he aimed the bus at a bus stop.
The bus inspector was terrified. Sadly, Paddy’s brother Tommy committed suicide a few years ago, and I haven’t seen Paddy since.

These were the sort of people I had around me in London at that time. My Nicky was always with me; he was very useful. We also had another five or six other reliable friends around us, plus the firm in general. I was going with the twins full whack and, at the same time, keeping busy with our interests out of London. We accidentally discovered a profitable way of combining the two, and on the basis of this we built up the most unusual public relations enterprise I’ve ever heard of.

It began when a car dealer in Birmingham approached Chris and said he would pay £2,000 for the opportunity to meet Reggie Kray. I contacted Tommy Cowley, a short, smart man with a red face and ginger hair, who was big on the business side of the Kray firm. He was an earner, always negotiating deals and involving himself in the protection; frauds and long firms rather than the villainous end of things. He wasn’t a violent man, and he wouldn’t have jumped into a fight. Certainly not.

Cowley rang back with a message from Reggie that we were to bring this car dealer down to London. In due course we introduced the man to Reggie. They shook hands and Reggie said, ‘How are you getting on? Have a drink.’ That was all there was to it. Yet the man was so impressed at having met Reggie Kray that he went away very happy and considered his two grand well spent. It was incredible.

We soon realised that there were criminals, club owners, all sorts of people in Birmingham and other towns who were willing to pay large sums of money to meet the twins. There was no reason why we shouldn’t take their cash when it was offered. So we started bringing all these people to London to see Reggie and Ronnie. The fee would vary, depending on the circumstances. The clients would deal initially with Chris. He would contact me in Birmingham or London, depending on where I was, and I would get in touch with
the twins. They would tell me where they were going to be on the night of the meeting: Only I knew. I would then meet the clients at another venue and take them on to where the twins were.

This was all good public relations for the twins, because it added to the strength of their reputation. The clients would go back to their home towns and circulate starstruck stories of their night out with the Krays. It was also good PR for Chris and me. These people would do our groundwork for us: they would make it known that we genuinely were with the twins, and it would carry by word of mouth, thus increasing our influence in whatever town they came from.

One day Chris phoned me in London and said, ‘I want you to meet a couple of boys from Birmingham and introduce them to the twins.’ They’d offered my brother £10,000.

I said, ‘Bring them down.’

The money was split equally between Chris and me and Reggie and Ronnie.

The two men, who were car dealers, came to my father’s house in Queensbridge Road. They parked a yellow E-Type Jag and an AC Cobra, which they’d bought while they were in London, outside the door. I asked if I could take a spin in the Cobra. They said, ‘Be careful, it’s a bit nippy.’

I didn’t know what I was driving. I took it down Queensbridge Road; along Hackney Road and Cambridge Heath Road, across the Bethnal Green Road junction and Roman Road, driving along towards the Blind Beggar. As I came to the lights outside the Beggar, I changed gear and shot forward, right underneath a lorry. All the lorry driver felt was something just touching the underside of his vehicle. He jumped out of his cab and there was me sitting beneath the lorry in an AC Cobra, a car which would cost at least half a million pounds today.

I reversed the Cobra back out, which ripped part of one wing off and tore the side. I exchanged numbers with the lorry driver and
contacted Leon. He had a big old Ford truck, which he reversed into the Cobra. He then ‘admitted’ the accident and his insurance company paid out £15,000 for the damage. My brothers and I cut it up between us and gave the car dealer a ‘drink’ – a small sum of money – out of it. We had the car repaired privately and returned it to this car dealer who was so rich he didn’t even blink an eyelid.

The night of the accident, we took the two dealers over to meet the twins. All the meeting consisted of was a handshake, ‘Good evening’ and ‘Are you enjoying yourselves?’ They went back to Birmingham happy as sandboys.

Another meeting we fixed up with the twins had a less happy outcome. This involved a man called the Tank, a forger who was operating in Birmingham at the time. He wanted to see what the scene was like in London, and was invited down by the Mills brothers in late 1967 – not long after the murder of Jack The Hat. This Tank was six feet four or so and weighed about twenty stone. He looked like a typical thug: he wore a Crombie overcoat with a velvet collar, like something out of
The Godfather
.

We were all in the Carpenters Arms that night; there was a big meet going on. When you drank with the twins, it didn’t matter whether you had money. Those who did would put a minimum of a tenner into the pot, but guests would never have to put their hands in their pockets. Regardless of how little you had, you drank. The scene in the pub that night was what people imagine when they think about the underworld, a word I don’t particularly like. It was a typical East End pub, not very big, with a long L-shaped bar going right the way round and plush red carpeting and seating. Everybody was suited and booted. The phone was placed on the bar, cars were pulling up and people were coming and going.

We’d all totally forgotten about this Tank, who was at a table beside the door. He’d been sitting there saying nothing, hardly moving, and the drinks were piling up in front of him.

All of a sudden, one of the Mills brothers, Ray, said to me, ‘I think the Tank has soiled his trousers.’

I said, ‘What are you talking about?’

He sniffed. ‘Can you smell it?’

The Tank had met Ronnie Kray, and Ronnie had shaken his hand. He’d heard so much about the twins that he imagined they were going to chuck him in the Thames, concreted up. He did actually soil his trousers. He never, ever got over what he saw. When he went back to Birmingham he became a straight man.

Some of the meetings we arranged for the twins did Chris and me more good personally than others. One followed an incident in a Birmingham nightspot called the Cedar Club, in Constitution Hill.

Chris, Nicky and I were there one night with a bloke called Patsy Manning, who was of Irish descent but living in Birmingham. We were drinking with a firm who were active locally. They controlled the gambling up there, and the prostitution, which was not our scene. They were also running protection rackets within their own community.

My Chris was talking to two particular members of this gang, whom I’ll refer to as X and Y. Suddenly, he called me over. He said: ‘Did you ask X for £50 a week protection money to drink in this club?’

I turned to them and said, ‘Ask you for £50 a week? You ain’t even got five bob in your pocket.’

What was going on here was a deliberate confrontation on their part, a challenge. They wanted to see how strong we were. It was something that had been coming to a head, but we were prepared for it.

Patsy Manning had this pump action shotgun. I said, ‘If anything happens here, don’t stop pulling that trigger.’ I had a .38 police special with me. I liked that one because it was accurate: a great stopper. It would stop anyone in their tracks. I think Chris had a .45 pistol, an American service one, and Nicky had a sword-stick.