Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (3 page)

Chris and I went back to our Dad’s house. He got out of bed and knew something was wrong. We were sitting there, the old man, Chris and I, with a cup of tea and we said: ‘Something very, very bad’s happened tonight.’ The old man didn’t want to know. He didn’t ask us. I went home to my wife, who also realised that something was wrong but again didn’t ask questions. That was an accepted thing. She knew I was involved with the Krays.

I could hardly sleep. I might have had a couple of hours, and
when I woke up I didn’t want to believe what had happened. There was nothing in the papers, so it seemed the body hadn’t been found.

There were, at the time, five or six firms operating in south London, and I can say that while Freddie Foreman had absolutely nothing to do with the collection and disposal of the body, certain help was given, and it was done properly. It was picked up at about eleven o’clock on the morning we left it there and held until the early hours of Monday in a shed about three miles away from the church. The people involved said they were pleased it was Jack The Hat because he had caused trouble for them in the past.

When they picked him up, there was a fine white powder covering his body. No one seems to know what that could have been. Obviously, all the blood had drained out of him. The stink, apparently, was terrible. His car was crushed into a three feet by three feet cube in a masher. After that it was referred to as the Oxo. Then it was slung on to a scrap heap.

Jack himself is about three miles away from where the car went into scrap, and fifty miles away from where we left him. His body will never, ever be found. He and his hat were put into a grave which had been pre-dug, and covered with a layer of soil. A funeral took place the next day, and the grave was filled. So he did get a decent burial.

Chris and I next saw the twins on the Monday after the murder. They were in the Carpenters Arms with the Mills brothers, just sitting talking. Jack The Hat was mentioned only once. That was when Chris said, ‘Tell me something, Reg. Was he a grass, was he a wrong ’un? Let’s justify it.’

Reg said, ‘No, he wasn’t. He was just a nuisance.’

I hadn’t in a million years expected to see anything like what happened. I thought Jack would be hurt, which he thoroughly deserved, and that would be the end of it. But set out to kill him? It
just wouldn’t have made sense. Where was the plan? There was no plan. Would we have been daft enough to bring the Mills brothers along to witness a murder? They, and the two young boys, would not have been in the room if anything like that had been predetermined. None of the details of that night point to any kind of conspiracy.

In my own way, I liked Jack The Hat. He wasn’t a bad fella. He was a generous man and he had a very good sense of humour. He was flamboyant, loved to be the centre of attention and enjoyed having women around him. He was a total rebel, and he was fearless.

But overall, I never regretted what I did. I’m not for one minute saying murder was the answer to anything, but Jack was the one who made threats in the first place. The twins had not been threatening him in any way. And if he was prepared to take them on, he was also aware of the consequences if he came unstuck.

Let’s not whitewash it. Jack McVitie was a man of violence. A lot of what has been written has painted a picture of him as mild, meek and helpless, a hard-done-by, innocent man. The girl he lived with got up at the Old Bailey, gave evidence against us, spat at the dock and talked about ‘my poor Jack’. He had no respect for her, just as he had no respect for anybody else.

Reggie didn’t do society such a bad turn. Jack The Hat was a known heavy man. He was six feet two and as hard as nails. He’d done a lot of imprisonment in his time. He’d been through the school and he’d hurt a few people along the way.

His stock-in-trade was crime, and he made money out of it. He was an active robber, he cared little for anyone and he was capable of anything. He was known to carry and use a gun. He would use a knife, and had no scruples about whether it was on a man or a woman. He would cause trouble and he would challenge people. He was on drink and pills and he was unpredictable. Where there was
a good time, he wanted to be. If there was a row, he’d be in the thick of it. He’d be the first one over the counter. Even having a social drink, he could suddenly turn vicious for no reason.

He didn’t have a care in the world. He didn’t give a monkey for anything, but he should have done. That was his downfall. He became his own worst enemy. The twins only ever tried to help him: they put lots of work his way. But he started making errors, and he brought the trouble on himself.

He’d get into drunken moods and produce a gun, threatening to shoot the twins, which he was more than capable of doing. He’d mug the twins off – bad-mouth them – in front of other people. He’d pick up phones in pubs and pretend to be threatening them. He’d insult women who were with members of the firm. He’d go into clubs which the firm was protecting and cause violent scenes. I’ve seen him have a gunfight in the Regency: he issued threats there, he brandished a shotgun and he slammed an axe into the door, all on separate occasions. He burst into other clubs with guns. He shot out a bar in a pub because they wouldn’t serve him. Usually the next morning he’d be sorry, but at night he’d had the bottle again and he’d be back. I mean that. Back.

All of these things were building up against him. Jack had been warned by myself and other members of the firm about his behaviour, but had paid no attention. How far could the twins let it go? He was persistently challenging their power, constantly trying to undermine their authority, and they could not allow it to happen. Men of their standing could not be seen to have someone like McVitie carrying on like that, particularly in the East End. Had I been in Reggie’s shoes, I would certainly have done the same thing. And the tragedy of it all is that so many suffered for something which the victim himself decided to cause.

L
ooking back at my childhood in the East End, I don’t believe it’s any wonder that a lot of us turned to crime. We went to rough and ready schools where all that mattered was who the best fighter was. We were always getting caned and whacked. When I was in my early teens, a youth employment officer came to my school. His report on the whole class was, ‘No hope whatsoever.’ None of us really had a future. And when I say we were living in times of poverty, I mean poverty. The money just wasn’t there.

I was born in the middle of the Second World War, on 15 April 1942 in Bethnal Green Hospital. My Mum, Lilian, was a Geordie, born in 1912, who came from Irish stock in County Kildare. My father, Christopher, was born in Cyprus in 1899 and sold as a slave to an Arab at the age of twelve. He was taken to Egypt, but ran away a year and a half later and jumped on a ship with his sister Marie. He hit these shores when he was fourteen, one of the first Greek Cypriots to arrive in this country.

Dad made his base in London and took a job in a munitions factory in Newcastle-upon-Tyne when the First World War broke out in 1914. He later enlisted in the RAF, but remained working at
the factory. When the war was over, he returned to London and began work training as a chef, eventually building a solid career in catering. He was also a very good gambler and in 1927 he won about £12,000, which he eventually invested in two restaurants, both in Charlotte Street in central London; he bought the first one in 1938. His sister also went into business in Charlotte Street, with two dress shops and a café.

A few years before the Second World War started, my father was drafted back into the RAF. He travelled up north again to serve in the same munitions factory, which is where he met my mother, a very religious woman, a strict Catholic with a fiery temper. My eldest brother Chris was born on Christmas Day, 1938. Leon came into the world during an air raid, inside Chalk Farm tube station, in September 1940. At the time I was born, two years later, the family base was in Mornington Crescent in north-west London.

With my father in the RAF and the restaurant in business, we enjoyed a relatively good standard of living during the war years, although we were frequently shifted about. We were evacuated up to Newcastle, returned to London, and then sent off to Leicester before coming back down south for good. My father was stationed in Newcastle throughout, but we saw him often: he had quite a bit of leave, and when there was heavy bombing, they would close the factory.

In 1944 we moved to Howland Street, off Tottenham Court Road in the centre of London, near where the Telecom Tower stands today. My brother Jimmy was born on 14 April that year. The baby of the family, the fifth son, Nicky, arrived on Boxing Day, 1946. Ironically, in view of what happened later, we were all named after saints.

My earliest memories go back to the age of three. I remember visiting my grandfather, Arthur, on my mother’s side. He had a small farm in Consett, outside Newcastle, with a cow and a couple of
pigs. He had a fireplace in the house, a great big thing with an inglenook. My grandfather had his chair on one side and my grandmother had hers on the other. I sat on a stool in the actual fireplace, next to my grandfather, and I was crying because he tried to pick me up. I could never, ever stand anyone touching me apart from my mother and father. I would always scream. And that’s my only memory of my grandfather.

Certain things have always stuck in my mind to do with the war itself. Again, around the age of three, I went with my brothers to Tottenham Court Road to get the accumulator, which was used to keep the radio running, charged up. And I’ll never forget seeing a crater in the road with a bus teetering on the edge of it, and a couple of bodies lying in the street.

My mother used to grab us and whack us on to the floor when there were doodlebug attacks, and when there were air-raid warnings she would take us to the tube stations at Mornington Crescent, Camden Town or Tottenham Court Road. The house next door to us in Howland Street was bombed.

She always used to tell us about the day she was hanging out the clothes in a field in Consett while my father was in the RAF. I was in the pram and Chris and Leon were playing around at her feet. Out of the mist, she suddenly saw a German bomber coming down really low, so she threw us to the ground and waited for a burst of machine-gun fire. It never came.

All of these things, in their own way, alerted me at a very early age to violence of a certain kind, which probably hardened me up to a lot of what happened afterwards.

In 1945, my father acquired his second restaurant. But even though the war was at an end, rationing and the black market carried on. I remember my mother giving me a coupon and a sixpence for two ounces of sweets at the little shop near our house.

There were no televisions in those days, and families were more like families. The mothers used to be out chatting to each other while the kids played around the streets, and this was how I first came to hear about the Bentley murder. It involved two young kids, Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig. Craig shot a policeman, but because he was sixteen and not old enough for capital punishment they hanged Bentley, who was eighteen but innocent instead. It was a major topic of conversation at the time. I remember my Mum talking about it to a neighbour and saying, ‘What that boy’s mother must be going through, poor woman….’

She was a very maternal person, my mother, very protective, very proud of her sons, and she was desperate with worry when I was taken to Middlesex Hospital with yellow jaundice as a toddler. They didn’t expect me to live. Another major family crisis came only a couple of years later, in 1947, by which time I had started school at St Marylebone Convent.

Chris, Leon and I were in one of my father’s restaurants one day when my father caught a rat. If you run a catering business and you find a rat, what do you do? You kill it. He put it on the pavement and scalded it to death with boiling water. An RSPCA inspector happened to be passing by at the time. My father wouldn’t apologise for what had happened, and it all ended up with him being taken to court for cruelty to a rat. He was kept in Brixton Prison for a short while, an experience he never forgot, and he had to hire a lawyer because he couldn’t speak very good English.

It went as far as the High Court. The whole case hinged on whether or not you could be cruel to an animal which was classified as vermin. In the end, they ruled that you could. My father was heavily fined and that, combined with the lawyer’s costs, left him penniless. He had to sell the restaurants to pay the bills, and from then on things got very bad for the family financially.

My father went on to do some relief work as a chef in hotels and
restaurants, and he started selling ice cream off a trolley. My Mum was working as a part-time home help. I can never stress enough how hard it was for them, with five sons to bring up.

In the summer, when he was selling the ice cream, he used to keep his trolley in the ground-floor passageway of the derelict house next door, the one which had been hit by a doodlebug. Chris, Leon and I used to get into the house in the morning before school. We’d nick some of our Dad’s ice cream and my two brothers and I would walk down Howland Street to Marylebone Road, to the convent. One morning, we went to the floor upstairs to see what was there, and we found a pile of tinned fruit. We’d never seen anything like it before. Obviously, it was in storage for the black market.

But beside these tins of fruit was a dead baby, all wrapped up in a shawl. It couldn’t have been more than two or three days old. It looked like a doll to me. We told our Mum and the police were called. They questioned us about where we found the baby, and that was the last we ever heard of it. Whether anybody ever got nicked over the baby – or the fruit – we’ll never know. It was my first experience of police questioning.

I was about five then, and Chris, Leon and I were all altar boys. I used to carry the mace, wearing my white surplice. The only thing I ever won in my life, apart from the odd bet, was a Bible. Whatever happened, our Mum always made sure we were Catholics. Every week, no matter what, she would see that we had a shirt and tie on to go to Sunday school. She was very strict about that, and so was my Dad. While we lived in Howland Street we had to go to St Peter’s church, Marylebone. The other mothers and fathers didn’t like us because we were the ‘ruffians’, and they used to tell their kids, ‘Don’t mix with them.’

At that time we were just young tearaways who got into a bit of trouble now and again like any other kids, and I look back on my time in Howland Street as some of the happiest days of my life. We
used to love going to the stables in the mews and back streets of the area. Bertram Mills, the circus impresario, used to hire out a stable there, and Chris, Leon and I used to exercise his ponies round the yard. One of the highlights of our year was the Easter horse parade in the Inner Circle at Regent’s Park.

But in 1948 our lives were suddenly disrupted when we came home from the convent one day and found that the locks on the door had been changed. Our parents had been evicted because they couldn’t afford the rent and we wound up in one of the old workhouses in south London. It was at the Elephant and Castle, and we spent four months in this place; everything smelt of disinfectant and the food was filth. We then moved to a rest centre, which was the next step towards being rehoused, in Sloane Square for another nine months. The facilities were slightly better but, like the workhouse, it had rules which did not allow the father to live there with his family. We kids were taken away from the convent and the nuns and given places in a school beside Victoria Station for a while. We used to make a few bob by carrying cases for passengers at the station. We went out there and we became the Artful Dodger.

In 1949, we were rehoused in the East End. We got a
five-roomed
flat in a block called Belford House in the Haggerston area of Queensbridge Road, London E8. It was bounded by Bethnal Green, Hackney, Hoxton and, in the north, Clapton and Stoke Newington. My parents were to stay there until they died. I was enrolled in Laburnum Street Primary School where I remained until the age of eleven. All of my brothers went there except Chris, who was by now a bit too old. He attended Scawfell Secondary Modern. At Laburnum Street we became very friendly with a schoolmate called Frankie Shea, the brother of Reggie Kray’s future wife, Frances.

We quickly made a name for ourselves there – Chris was already known to be trouble. Junior school was where you started earning
a reputation. Maybe we didn’t know exactly what we were doing at the time, but this is where the reputation of the Lambrianou brothers, in some small way, began to take shape. Once again, but with more reason now, the kids around us were told: ‘Keep away from those boys.’

We got kicked out of everything, including the Cubs and the Sunday school. After we moved to Haggerston, our mother had seen to it that we went to All Saints’ Church and its Sunday school. We used to steal the collecting trays from both. Chris did it three times, and I stole the church tray once. When anything went missing, it was us who did it. The stage in the church hall used to be hired out for fêtes and functions. We were told on one occasion that we couldn’t come unless we were dressed properly, which we considered to be an insult, so we set fire to the stage to get back at the church authorities.

When Chris was eleven, going on twelve, he fell foul of the law for the first time. He went out with Leon, broke into a local factory and stole some property. I remember my mother breaking down and crying, begging the officers not to take her sons away. They kept saying, ‘No, they’ve gotta go.’ They spent two or three weeks at Stamford House boys’ remand centre in Shepherds Bush. When it came to court, Leon got off and he never went back to an institution of any kind. Chris was convicted and sent to approved school for two years at St Vincent’s in Kent. He behaved himself throughout that time and came home on visits every Sunday.

By this time in my life we were really bleeding poor. Everything my mother earned was spent on us. I saw her crying because she was worried about where the next meal was coming from, but somehow she found it; somehow we always had our bellies full up. She never, ever went out, and she never drank. My father I only ever saw in a pub on Christmas Day, with the family. He’d have a drop of
wine now and again, or if a bottle of whisky came along he’d have a little drink, but it was rare.

I remember the winter when I was nine, and my parents couldn’t afford a Christmas dinner. My mother cried and my father went out and brought back kebabs. On Christmas Day, the only presents we ever got were an apple, an orange and some nuts in a sock. I never had a Christmas toy. In fact, I never had any toys at all. Our playthings in the East End were bricks, and our playground was the bombsite.

One day I was sent home for having a hole in my shoe. It had been pouring with rain and I walked across the assembly hall leaving muddy footprints, which showed up the hole. A teacher stopped me, and I had to stay off school for three days. In the end, my father found 3s 6d to buy me a pair of pumps.

It got very bad, but we weren’t the only ones by a long shot. There were three sisters in that school who used to wear the same clothes every day. Each one would wear what one of the other two had been wearing the day before.

My Mum used to buy shirts and trousers for us at second-hand shops, and sometimes on credit. Everybody lived on ‘the tally’ in those days because they couldn’t afford cash. You would pay the tally man a deposit and then a certain number of shillings a week, when he came round to the door, for clothes or other goods. We had two tally men, a big Jew and a little Jew. My mother could never afford to pay both of them, because that would come to 4s a week. The first one to turn up got paid, and the second one didn’t. In the end, they were racing each other to get to us first.