Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (5 page)

I left school early, at fourteen, and took a job at the Sleepy Valley Bedding Company in Hackney Road, Bethnal Green. I got it through a youth employment agency, where I didn’t have much choice. I used to knock holes with a machine into the edges of the beds and I was paid 2s an hour. I gave my mother £2 10s a week. One day I came out of work and saw Frankie Shea at the junction of Hackney Road and Weymouth Terrace, which is where his family came from. His sister Frances came along. She would have been about twelve or thirteen, very quiet and very beautiful with big eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen the girl who would grow up to marry Reggie Kray. The bedding company was one of the longest jobs I would ever hold, and I worked there for nine months. And from that period onwards I started getting into villainy. Properly.

A
bout this time Leon, Jimmy and I began to hang around the local dancehalls, places like Barry’s in Mare Street and the Royal in Tottenham, as well as various arcades and cafés. A lot of similarly minded local boys were around: the Venables brothers from Hoxton; Terry Smith, who was a gunsmith; Johnny Dallison, later to be one of the Wembley bank robbers grassed up by Bertie Smalls; Roy Ewes, who went on to do the Baker Street vaults in the seventies; and the Nash brothers, Jimmy, Johnny, Georgie, Billy and Ray, who would each wind up convicted of a murder.

We teamed up with Terry and Jimmy Venables and started causing the occasional fight in Barry’s. We’d go down there to take on the local tearaways because it was something to prove. I think we were on an ego trip: other gangs from different areas would be challenged, and we would always do what we wanted. We didn’t fight clean: Chains, knives, anything that came our way we used, which is a trademark of the East End.

Eventually we discovered that there was money to be made from the fighting. Barry himself was a very nice bloke, a gay; he had a couple of bouncers there keeping a bit of order, but they couldn’t
cope with us lot. He asked us to stop the fighting, and in the end he propositioned us: he gave us £10 a week to keep the peace, but it didn’t go very far among five of us.

After a couple of weeks of this, more trouble started. We put it to Barry: ‘If you gave the boys £5 each, this wouldn’t happen.’

Then we started to spread to the Royal. The manager said, ‘We’re going to bar you.’

‘You’ll get more trouble than it’s worth,’ I said.

One of the bouncers, Jim, went and had a chat with the manager, who then said: ‘As long as there’s no trouble caused, you can come in here for nothing.’ It reached the point where he was giving us £50 a week.

This was our first little taste of protection, which was to expand greatly at a later stage. I was also going into a bit of thieving. By the time I was seventeen, my Dad saw the path I was taking. He never managed to speak English well, but he was no one’s fool. If he saw me in what he thought was bad company, he’d say, ‘What do you bring a person like that round the house for?’ Leon was courting a girl called June Veal, his future wife, and my Dad would say, ‘Look, Leon’s found a girl and quietened down, what about you?’ I did meet a girl, although I wasn’t about to quieten down for anybody.

I first saw Pat Strack in 1959 with three of her mates in Barry’s dancehall. She was a local girl from Bollo Road, Bow – very pretty, one of the best-looking girls in the East End. She was then sixteen, about five feet two, with blue eyes and naturally fair hair coloured auburn. What attracted me to her was her short, urchin haircut; she looked like a little doll. Pat wore the rock’n’roll era clothes, the billowing skirts and all that. She was an apprentice hairdresser at the time, working in Kilburn in north London, but she left after a couple of years.

I walked her home that night, down Mare Street and along into
Bollo Road. I took her to the door and said, ‘I’d like to see you again.’ She said yes, and we arranged a date for the next night.

I was seventeen, out to impress but I was skint – I had only a pound on me. I took her to the pictures, and from that day onwards she only ever had one night away from me while I was in freedom. That was the night she did her Aunt Gladys’ hair.

Her mother, Maisie, came from a well-known family in Bethnal Green and her father, Charlie, who was nicknamed Flip, was a cab driver and an ex-docker. He knew everyone, including the Kray twins. I think he objected to me pretty strongly in the beginning, but in later years we were to become close. Pat had a younger sister, Anne, and a brother, John, who was the youngest of the family.

I remember the first time I brought Pat home. Everybody took to her, my Mum and Dad, and my Leon who was there with June. They virtually moved Pat in with us. She loved her parents, but she was with us all the time now. My parents idolised her: she was the daughter they never had, and that’s the way they treated her. Our courting days were nothing spectacular, but all the same she quickly became one of us – a Lambrianou in all but name.

And then I got nicked. I was making quite a lot of money at the time by breaking into shops and wealthy houses, and in August 1959 I went off to the Midlands with a Shoreditch bloke called Phil Keeling and a couple of other local lads. Keeling had a nice car and he always had a few quid around him, and that was how I judged his success. He was a lot older than me, which was an advantage because if anything came to court my representative could always play on ‘the influence of the older man’ to wiggle me out of it.

We travelled with him doing jobs in Coventry, Sutton Coldfield, Nuneaton, Hinckley and Leicester, staying in bed and breakfasts or sleeping in the car. In the end, the police caught up with us in Coventry, where we had stayed the night with a friend of ours. I woke up to hear the door coming in. The police surrounded the
house and took us to Nuneaton, where we were held for two days. Phil had apparently left a thumbprint at the scene of one of the crimes, and I’d left prints of a thumb and index finger.

I spent five months on remand in Leicester and Winson Green prisons. It was my first experience of prison. Winson Green was a dingy, filthy place in the worst part of Birmingham. There were three of us in a cell, locked up twenty-three hours a day. I felt a long way from home and my visits were a bit restricted. Pat, my mother and my father came to see me when they could, every Saturday and sometimes during the week. I would look at people doing fourteen years and think to myself: ‘If that was me, I’d hang myself.’ Little did I know what the future had in store for me.

I appeared at Warwick Quarter Sessions after doing a deal with the authorities. I was told that if I pleaded guilty, and saved them the cost of a trial, I would be put on probation. There were so many charges against me that they decided to make do with a nominal two. Pat and my father were waiting for me when I walked out in January 1960 with a two-year probation order.

In April I turned eighteen; by now we had reached the stage where people knew better than to rub us up the wrong way. As we got older, the tally man got bashed up, and there were incidents when the neighbours came to us for help. One day, my old man said to us: ‘Joe Sylvester in Orme House wants to see you.’ Joe was a well-liked man in Haggerston, and he asked us to sort out some people who had caused problems for his daughter. It was the first time we had ever been called on like this, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

Jimmy and I and the Venables brothers drove over to the address Joe gave us in Lewisham, knocked on the door and duly bashed up these blokes. Joe was so impressed he gave us £75 and told us that some of his friends might be able to use us. Another neighbour came
home one day and found out his wife was having an affair with someone. He offered us £100 to beat the geezer up – which, again, we did. From smacking us round the earhole to paying us to bash someone up was obviously one big step. We were starting to be treated really differently: ‘All right, Tony? How are the boys?’ People knew we were getting useful. It didn’t take long for these things to get around.

My mates and I were ready for anybody and anything. We had built up an arsenal, with weaponry like you’ve never seen. We had shotguns galore, three rifles and half a dozen hand guns, a Thompson sub-machine-gun, a couple of grenades and numerous knives and swords. A lot of these we were able to get through our connections with Terry Smith, the gunsmith, who would steal them out of the factory bit by bit, the barrel one day, the stock the next. We also knew a trading place for guns, old wartime relics, called Port Road. A lot of dealers kept souvenir weaponry, which could easily be converted back to what it was.

The machine-gun had been taken off a plane used during the First World War and renovated privately by Terry Smith. We decided to test it out in the Venables’ back garden in Hoxton. Terry Venables let the chickens out: one burst and they were all dead. It was always kept nice and clean and oiled, the machinegun, but it was never used against people. Nor were the grenades. We exploded one in a field in Epping Forest and it blew a tree right out of the ground. The other one we threw in the sea, just to see what would happen. About thirty fish flew up, dead.

The nucleus of our gang was Terry and Jimmy Venables, David Sadler, Terry Smith, my Jimmy and myself. By now we had started to go to town on the dancehalls, the arcades and the cafés, and we were always tooled up when we were around them, in case we came up against another gang. The swords were stored in the boot of the car, and we carried a gun and daggers and knives. People didn’t
mess about with us, but at the same time they never took a lot of notice of the weapons. On a few occasions we fired shots into the air in certain places, but the reaction would be: ‘No one hurt, let’s keep this quiet.’

We were taking weekly payments from the dancehalls and we started making money from a string of amusement arcades run by a man called George Fairey and his partner Paddy. They had four businesses in Hackney and Dalston Junction. We’d go in and, all of a sudden, bang! A machine would get done or one of his customers would get knocked out. I’d say, ‘You’d better keep this lot happy.’ And eventually he started paying up. We used to get a lot of money out of him.

Round the corner from his arcade in Dalston Junction was a club called Chez Don, which was doing well. I walked in there one night with a friend called Timmy Reynolds and it went off – an East End expression for trouble starting. We said to the manager, ‘If you don’t let us in here again, there’s going to be more.’ In the end, they were paying us £50 a week to stay away from the place.

Fifty yards away was Lou’s Café, which was owned by a Jewish couple. We used to get a few quid off Mr Lou: he didn’t want his business turned over. One Saturday afternoon I was in there with Terry Smith, Jimmy and Terry Venables and Davy Sadler. Five Irishmen who were doing roadworks outside came in for a meal. Somebody handed me a packet of three. I took out one of the condoms and chucked it into the chip pan. It expanded more than a bit, but because it was that pale, fatty colour Mrs Lou didn’t notice it. She served it up on one of the Irishmen’s plates.

He said, ‘What’s this?’, and all of a sudden he grabbed her by the throat and tried to throttle her, at which point her husband dived underneath the counter to hide. The place was in uproar. We just broke up.

When we went back after that, Mrs Lou wouldn’t serve us
although old Lou himself would. He used to call her the dragon – ‘Don’t come in when the dragon’s here.’ I think he was scared to refuse us – he was very wary of us. He had another café in Shoreditch. One day about a year later I walked into this café and there she was, Mrs Lou. She yelled, ‘Get out, you animal! Get out!’, and chased me down the road.

I was doing well for an eighteen-year-old. I was earning about £130–140 a week from all these rackets and the thieving. The other boys viewed it all as a bit of a joke. I didn’t. I saw the opportunities, the openings and the advantages. My mother, naturally, wanted us all to settle down, but I was drifting in and out of odd jobs, doing a lot of driving with the aim of nicking a load when the right one came along. I was always one to keep my eyes open for an easy chance. Looking back, it was pretty reckless.

I remember working for a firm called Blue Star Sheets Ltd. It was run by a little Jewish man, Manny. It was all very Jewish in the East End in those days, although the Maltese were coming in and opening lower-calibre cafés and bars. I took the van out, loaded with sheets, and drove round the corner, where a couple of my mates were waiting. We unloaded the van and its contents. I went back to Manny and said, ‘I think someone’s stolen the load out of the van.’ I got the sack, obviously, and a couple of days later we shared out the load.

My brother Nicky had become heavily involved by this time, and Nicky was good. You could always rely on him to get a few quid. He would think nothing of jumping a lorry, pushing the driver out and driving off. Jimmy, however, had drifted back out to the fringes of it all – and, thank God, he was to go on and do greater things in life; Leon, too, was more or less straight. They still joined us on the occasional job, but it was getting rarer and rarer. So it was Chris, Nicky and I who were coming through as not the best boys in the area.

It was also during this period that I started having a bet. Bookmakers were illegal at the time, but street-corner bookies would operate out of a house. There were always two runners, whose job it was to watch for the police. When the shout went up, the bookie would lock his door. The street-corner bookie was very much part of the atmosphere of the old East End. I remember one Grand National day when I was eleven or twelve. All the old girls were putting on bets of 6d and a shilling, but this bookie, Harry, did a runner with the takings. Some of the Hoxton mob got him in Southend, brought him back and gave him to the old girls. They whacked the life out of him.

From having bets myself, I started working for one of these bookies in Haggerston. He paid me good money to run for him, and I soon found out that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the police were aware of what was going on and were being paid back-handers. I used to see the local copper go in there and come out smiling.

Throughout this period, people kept saying, ‘You should be with the twins.’ The Krays’ name was very big then; everybody knew of and respected them. They were very, very powerful men, at the top of the tree. They were known to be ruthless: they didn’t threaten – they did it. They weren’t men who messed about. No one in the local criminal circles ever referred to them by name. It was always ‘they’ or ‘the other people’ or sometimes ‘the firm’; an expression which at the time specifically referred to the twins’ gang but has since passed into everyday language to describe any band of villains.

The minute Reggie and Ronnie walked into a nightclub, you knew instantly. You didn’t even have to see them. The atmosphere would change. People would stop talking; some would leave. Their presence alone gave out certain messages: be careful what you’re saying; don’t barge in; never touch them; always be polite. They
were treated with the utmost respect. I never saw anybody pat them on the back or use bad language around them. If someone was out of turn they wouldn’t stand for it, and everybody knew that. As fighting men they were unchallengeable, and it was no shame to say that if either of them hit you on the chin, you went down on the floor. And they were always on the look-out for up-
and-coming
material. Of course, we were nowhere near their league in those days and all that was still something in the future. I’d only just met them.