Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (12 page)

‘Between four and seven,’ I replied.

He was prepared to accept that, and he started ordering large amounts of goods. He wanted Chris and me to run the car wash firm, the legitimate end of his business, which was making a good profit. We agreed to keep it ticking along, mainly for our own
amusement. Every night we’d cut up the takings, and we’d make about £200–300 a week out of it. He would also give us a little whack out of what he was defrauding from the garage.

But we knew that something wasn’t right about him. Overnight he changed the way he dressed from suits and boots to a black Crombie overcoat with the collar turned up, and he started telling people that he was a friend, a dear friend, of the Krays. In the end, Chris and I had to have a talk with him; I whipped him with a pistol and whacked him round the head a couple of times. To our surprise he loved it, and then started putting it round Birmingham that he had been pistol-whipped by Ronnie Kray. Just for the glory of it.

He wanted to be a nine-to-five gangster. At the end of the day he went home to live a normal life with the wife and kids, but at work he revelled in his imagined image. He even started to cultivate prison mannerisms. Long-term prisoners form certain habits: they walk around with their hands behind their backs, shoulders straight and eyes down, and they whisper out of the corner of their mouths. He began doing this around the garage forecourt. Chris said to me, ‘He thinks he’s on exercise.’

We were living like kings, though. We got Hart to book us into the Albany Hotel through the company, and we were still involved with the car wash when we got nicked with the twins. Then we forgot about him straightaway.

But he started to visit Chris in Wandsworth and me in Brixton while we were on remand. I was called up for a visit one day, and when I walked into the visiting room Hart was standing there in a trilby with tears streaming down his face, his collar rolled up and his hand on his chest. He shouted across the room, ‘I should have been in the dock with you boys. It was all my doing.’ This was the type of person that you could attract if you weren’t careful. Eventually he went into debt to the tune of about £180,000, at least some of which was down to our extravagant hotel bills.

After our trial, a spate of stories began to appear in the papers about what we had got up to in the Midlands. Who was the author? Tony Hart. According to him he wasn’t scared of us – although he kept a shotgun under his bed – but his wife lived in utter fear. We apparently asked him to bury people for us, and he was all the time in contact with the Birmingham Regional Crime Squad, tipping them off about what was going on. It was a pack of lies from start to finish.

He wound up getting a few years for the garage long firm, and unfortunately he served some of his time in Leicester prison while I was there. I was in the maximum security block and he was on a level above it. He kept throwing pieces of paper with messages over the exercise cage – ‘Anything I can do for you…’ I was forever picking up little notes with Tony Hart’s name on them.

Another bizarre character from the Birmingham era was Richard Forbes, a multi-millionaire whom we came across one night in the Cedar Club. Chris and I were having a drink with one or two of the boys when all of a sudden bottles of champagne started coming up. We were then told that everything we wanted was on the house, down to this Richard Forbes. Chris had met him somewhere along the line. I never had.

I didn’t really pay him a lot of attention that night because we were in female company, just out enjoying ourselves. But the next morning I woke up where we were staying in Harts Hotel – nothing to do with Tony Hart, I might add! – and outside in the grounds was a brand-new white Ferrari. Chris said, ‘It belongs to that Richard. He seems all right.’

Richard duly came down to breakfast drinking a bottle of vodka. He went, ‘Look, my father owns a steel works and he gave me half a million pounds, five horses, a flat in Birmingham and a cottage in the country to stay out of his life.’ He was also drawing on a pension
fund set up by his father. He never carried cash, only cards, and he was a raving alcoholic. A couple of days later he came round again, this time in a powder-blue Aston Martin DB6, a James Bond car. He changed cars like they were going out of fashion.

In a way, Richard Forbes was courting us. He loved the atmosphere around Chris and me. He obviously didn’t need us in a financial way, but we needed him. Here was a man who thought it would do him favours to be connected to criminals, and he was prepared to spend large amounts of money. If someone comes up and wants to give you money for nothing, why refuse? There are some people in this world who want to give money away, and I never saw anything wrong in taking it off them.

One day he turned up at the Albany in a new Jensen, phoned me in my suite and asked me if I would like to go riding. I agreed. I was wearing jeans, a shirt, a jacket and ordinary shoes. He was dressed up like Prince Charles with a topper, a red hunting jacket, breeches and boots, and had a whip in his hand. What I found more fascinating, though, was the bottles of vodka sticking out of his pockets. We came out of the stable and were cantering along this road when he insisted on stopping at an off-licence for yet another bottle of vodka. Needless to say, it wasn’t long before he and his horse started disagreeing with each other…..

Sober or drunk, Richard Forbes would always insist to me and Chris: ‘If you want anything, just ask me for it.’ I always found, after entering into professional as opposed to amateur crime, that there was no such thing as a demand for money (except if it was owed), and I personally never uttered a direct threat in any of the situations I profited from. It was mainly a matter of persuasion. But Forbes, like many others, didn’t need any persuasion. He was one of those people who wanted to be on the right side of us at all costs, for the ‘glamour’ as much as anything else. He paid everything. He paid hotels, he wanted to buy us cars. We had him around us purely and
simply to pick up the tabs. He invited Ronnie Kray to his cottage in the country and he wanted to take him abroad on a cruise. He would have given Ronnie anything, but Ronnie didn’t go. He didn’t want to know. Ronnie was busy, anyway – as I knew from my other life in London.

A
t the time I came out of Bristol prison, just before Christmas 1966, the twins were into having new faces on the firm. I was a young guy, smartly dressed, useful, reliable, and they wanted me to be around them. Within days, I became a party to one of their most closely guarded secrets.

I was asked to drive a member of the firm, Scotch Jack Dickson, to a flat in Barking. When I pulled up outside I saw another member, Albert Donaghue, open the door. I noticed he was pushing someone back, someone who was trying to stick his head out, and I recognised him straightaway: Frank The Mad Axeman Mitchell. I was shocked, and didn’t want to know too much about it. Frank had been in prison for many years for violent crime. On one occasion, he had escaped and had terrorised an elderly couple with an axe while robbing them. He was subsequently recaptured, but now he was on the run again. It was common knowledge in our circles that the twins had organised Frank’s escape from Dartmoor, but his whereabouts were being kept very quiet.

I knew Frank well. He was a simple man in many ways, a big man, very well built and immensely strong. You couldn’t fight him
– he would just crush you up. Everybody knew about him: he was a legend.

I remember Frank arriving at Wandsworth prison while I was there, almost two years before his escape. He’d been brought from Dartmoor in a coach which was carrying two men called Mitchell, a little weedy one and big Frank. The prisoners had to leave the coach, which was surrounded by about ten screws, as their names were called.

‘Mitchell.’ The little weedy one stepped off the coach, and the screws started heckling him – ‘So you’re the Mitchell’ – and pushing him about. All of a sudden a big hand came out. ‘No … I’m the Mitchell.’ That was a standing joke around the prison for months.

The screws came to realise that you couldn’t give Frank a direct order and expect him to carry it out. It was physically impossible to punish him, so they treated him very gently. But he didn’t always respond to this softly-softly treatment in the way they wanted. When the Governor came into the S1 shop – the high-security workshop – on his daily rounds, Frank used to like to pick him up and carry him around, to the delight of every con in Wandsworth. He made the Governor promise to behave himself.

Frank never knew what a normal life was like. He had spent most of his time behind bars from an early age, and rumour had it that he was never to be released. The twins had a great affection for him – they looked after him in a lot of ways and they got him out of prison simply to help him. The idea was to use the escape to bargain for a release date for Frank, while he remained hidden away. When it was given, he would return to Dartmoor.

But the authorities were not forthcoming with a date. And Frank wasn’t a man you could control. He didn’t see things in a rational way, and from what I understand he had his own ideas about what he wanted to do. The situation was getting dangerous, for Frank and
everyone around him. Apparently this led to trouble between Frank and certain members of the firm. I was busy with other things, and nobody was talking too much about what was going on. Finally I heard that Frank had been shot dead, just before Christmas.

The twins had nothing to do with his murder, as was shown in court when they were acquitted of it. I did hear that Frank had been killed by Billy Exley, an ex-boxer who was on the fringes of the firm. He vanished from the scene after Frank’s disappearance. That was the rumour at the time, and rumours carry a lot of weight. In criminal circles, rumours are usually correct. Exley’s name came up quite a few times. The whole tragedy of Frank Mitchell is that he ended up dead over something that had started with the best intentions in the world.

It was often said that the twins could have two hundred armed men on the street within an hour if they wanted, and at that time they could, without any doubt. But the twins were an army on their own. There will never be another two like them. They took the lot on. They got London by the scruff of the neck and they didn’t ask permission. They just went there and took it, because they knew they could.

The firm they gathered around them was composed of people who could be relied upon in the three areas they were concerned with: villainy, business and image. Image-making was a very important part of the operation. It became an essential part of the legend which was building up round the twins, and that legend gave them more and more power as it grew. The more fear they could inspire, the more successful they would be. If the Krays did something, it had become twenty times bigger by the time the story reached the bottom of the road. The twins were well aware of the advantages of this, and they knew that if there was going to be one big picture, then it had to be larger than life in every way.

They were good at putting out an impression of danger. Both of them had minders, even though they were the last two men in London who needed them. Some people on the firm, like Tommy The Bear Brown, were brought along for show on social occasions. Tommy was a gentle giant, a very likeable person and a good friend of the twins since they were boys. Standing at about six feet three, his eighteen stone of muscle dwarfed everyone: He was a handsome, white-haired man with a kindly face, except when the twins wanted him not to look kindly. But Tommy was never really used in any of the activities.

The twins could lay it on lovely when they wanted. They could have every major face in the East End in a pub on the same night, and all of this was particularly useful when Chris and I brought our clients down from other cities. They would see a very impressive show.

The whole of the Kray empire revolved around fear. That was the key to the lot of it. And it was a very real and deep-rooted fear, as I soon discovered. The more I became involved with the firm, the more my own friends became frightened of me. I didn’t encourage this. I did try to have a bit of a separate life and go out on a Friday night with my mates to the Queen’s Arms in Hackney Road. But I could see the difference in their behaviour; I could sense that their reactions to me were changing. They became wary of me. Sometimes I’d invite them to come over and have a drink with the twins and they’d shy off. Their attitude was: ‘We don’t want to fuck about with them. They’re dangerous. They go beyond.’

Some characters’ fear of the firm was so overwhelming that they were driven to acts of sheer lunacy and ended up bringing upon themselves the very trouble they had dreaded in the first place. One example of this happened after we made a meet with a man called Walter who had some plates for printing forged money. Chris and I went to see him in a pub in Notting Hill Gate with Peter Metcalfe.
Eric Mason and Davy Clare, who had established an uneasy peace with the twins, were there too.

Eric had been freelancing around the country, and he knew this Walter’s firm. Because he also knew us, he became the go-between in our dealings. That night, he’d pulled Davy in for back-up. We wanted these plates, and so did various firms; they were worth a fortune, and they had been causing big fall-outs amongst a lot of people.

Walter wasn’t there when we arrived, so we ordered a drink while we were waiting. We saw three Irishmen in the bar, navvies about six feet tall and built like the proverbials. They were with a woman who was wearing a pair of tight leopardskin trousers. Eric Mason, who always had an eye for the ladies, saw her at the jukebox. He walked over, put a coin in and said: ‘Would you like to pick some records out?’

One of the Irishmen got up and said to Eric, ‘You’re talking to my woman.’

Eric replied, ‘I’m very sorry about that, but I don’t really see what it’s got to do with you.’

Standing on the bar was a big red glass vase, and all of a sudden I saw Eric go to pick it up. The Irishman tried to throw a right-hander at him and Eric cut him to pieces – he did him in the face with the vase. All he had left in his hand was the stem of it.

The barman let the Dobermann out and came running round with the ice pick. The bar was U-shaped, and in the middle was a big, fancy glass display unit. Chris grabbed this barman, threw him straight over the bar into the unit, picked up the dog and sent him flying over as well. Then we completely demolished the pub. All the windows went.

Meanwhile Walter walked into the pub, saw what was going on, thought it was something to do with the plates because of all the aggro they had caused so far, and did a runner. That’s fear of the firm.

We caught up with him at a flat in Brick Lane in the East End. Davy Clare knew where he was staying and took us there, and as we got out of the car we heard two loud bangs. I saw this Walter firing a pistol at us. One bullet went in the side of the car, and another missed Davy’s head by an inch. We got hold of this geezer and we beat the shit out of him. He was stabbed up the behind and he had a tendon cut. He had to have about 150 stitches.

He didn’t even have the plates, although he was supposed to have brought them to the pub. In later weeks we discovered that the plates had been broken and were therefore useless, so no one ever got their hands on them or the money. You can be a millionaire one minute and a pauper the next….

In happier circumstances, the general fear of the twins could be turned to the advantage of individuals who needed help. One day a man called Peter who owned a café in Bethnal Green approached me and said: ‘Can you get me a gun?’

I said, ‘What do you want that for?’

‘I’m hoping to have the basement done into a restaurant,’ he replied, ‘but we’ve already had tearaways going down there and smashing the place up.’

I told him, ‘I can’t just do that, but I’ll go and talk to somebody.’

I went to see the twins: Ronnie said, ‘I’ll go down there on Saturday and have a meal.’ He was famous for his bit of plaice, Peter.

I told him, ‘I’m going to bring someone here on Saturday. Just look after him.’

Sammy Lederman and I accompanied Ronnie to the café, and we sat at a table for a couple of hours. Peter never had a problem there again, for which he was eternally grateful. It solved itself, just through Ronnie Kray coming in for his dinner.

That story illustrates yet again that it wasn’t the use of violence, but the fear of violence that kept everything afloat for the twins. People
knew what the consequences would be if they didn’t play ball. The truth is that the twins never used violence unless they had to, because the fear was usually enough. They certainly never used it as much as people would like to believe. If anything they would avoid it to an extent, but if you crossed them you were crossing the wrong people.

Who in their right mind would want to take them on? I never saw anybody throw a punch at either of them. No one ever threatened them, because if you did you paid the price. It was well known that if they had to be ruthless, they were there to the limit. They were deadly. And I’m talking about violence like you’ve never seen.

Their whole reputation was built on their violence, so it stands to reason they were more than prepared to use it to safeguard their standing as the top men. Play the fool with them, and you would expect to get it. When they gave out a kicking, it
was
a kicking – inevitably a hospital job. When weapons came out, it was for something more serious. They’d cut people, or they’d shoot them in the leg. If a challenge was sent out, it was met with a challenge. If anybody played up with a person or property they were protecting, threatened or attacked any of their friends or the firm, adversely interfered with their business affairs or tried to cheat them, woe betide the one who was causing the problem.

The twins were always prepared. A lot of people around the East End were carrying artillery of some sort or another, and the twins had to live with all sorts of rumoured threats to their lives. It was said at one time that other gangsters were planning to shoot them from the railway bridge over Vallance Road.

But all of this was kept within the criminal community, amongst ourselves. It’s been said so many times it’s a cliché these days, but we never involved innocent people. I have no reason to lie now. I’m out, and it’s all in the past. I can only think of one instance when
someone who was not in criminal circles suffered injury. He came to a party in a flat in Manor House with friends, who, we assumed, had told him about the company and what sort of behaviour was expected.

Reggie, Tommy Cowley and I had been in the Regency Club to pick up some drink. We arrived at the party to see Ronnie steaming out of the flat, followed by a young fella and a model, who were friends of his. He was going: ‘Fucking liberty!’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Reggie asked.

There was a geezer in there holding a towel to his face and three girls screaming their heads off.

It transpired that Ronnie had hung his coat up on a hanger in the hallway. Then these people arrived at the party. The bloke took Ronnie’s coat off the hanger, flung it on the floor and put his own coat up. When Ronnie went out to get his Players from his coat, he saw it on the floor. He came back into the room with the coat which had replaced his on the hanger. ‘Who does this belong to?’

The guy said, ‘It’s mine.’

Ronnie opened up his face.

If Ronnie let someone throw his coat on the floor, he was leaving himself open for others to treat him disrespectfully. Everyone who came unstuck asked for what they got, and not one victim ever complained or came back whingeing that they didn’t deserve it. If the twins took action against someone who later on turned out to be in the right, they would be the first ones to make it up. I’ve never heard anyone accuse them of taking liberties. I’m not trying to justify the things that happened; I’m not saying that what the twins did was right; but it was right for them in their position at that time. It was villains among villains, people who lived by our code, people who knew the rules and were fully aware of what would happen if they chose to break them.

What the Krays actually did in London at that time was keep the
peace. They kept all of the villainy under control. No one stepped out of line. They hated grasses, sex offenders, people who committed crimes to do with women and children – ‘They’d better leave town.’ They couldn’t stand petty housebreakers. The twins would never have stood for muggings and the sort of street crime that’s going haywire today. In those days the East End was a better and safer place for the general public to live in, and I feel a bit proud of that. The twins did a job that the police couldn’t do, and there are a lot of coppers who would admit it. The twins should’ve been given a bleeding medal.