Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (9 page)

And as for Bill Heaney we took everything he had; we took him something terrible. He wound up sweeping the streets: We were active and we had to be that way.

Unfortunately, before long people began taking a really big interest in us. Obviously, the twins’ name was still getting mentioned a lot around the town. One of the Nash brothers, our old friend Johnny, came up, and he was inviting all the boys from London to Blackpool. We’d been there for five or six months, trading on our reputations, so it had to come to general attention sooner or later. Trevor Aspinall of
The People
started making enquiries about criminal activities in the area, and one Sunday morning Chris came screaming into the bedroom. There, in the paper, was an article about lawlessness in Blackpool, and about London gangsters taking complete control of the town..

Our policy was to keep one step ahead and, bearing that in mind, we decided it was time to leave Blackpool. Our plan was to move to other cities, to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Stoke-
on-Trent
, Leicester, Cardiff, Bristol and Plymouth, and do the same thing all over again in each one. In other words, take them over.

We’d already got into quite a few places, including Liverpool, Manchester and Preston, which were next door to Blackpool. Normally we’d know people in every town we went to, through prison or reputation. Chris would go in and do the groundwork, making the contacts and gathering information, and I’d follow on, sometimes with my Nicky. Obviously violence did come into it along the way. If it was necessary we would take out the local villain, make
him the target and belittle him. That pulled everything into line. You don’t start at the bottom when you can start at the top. It didn’t often come to that, though. We were known for our association with the criminals of London; who was going to threaten us?

It was Chris and I who came up with the original idea of getting out of London, making money across the country. We were very mobile. Nowhere was too far to go for a pound note. And up to the point where we started taking off in Blackpool, it was an independent operation. However, we soon began to realise the potential advantages of having the twins’ backing. We wanted their name. At that time, a lot of people were going round England sticking their name up without permission, with the result that they were being associated with crimes they knew nothing about. This was a sore point with them. They saw it as a liberty, and became very touchy about who used their name and in what way. But they gave Chris and me their official blessing. Reggie said, ‘Put us up, but put us in.’ By this, of course, he meant that we could use the Kray name for a price.

So with these words ringing in our ears, we exploited it to the full. That name was worth money on its own. It opened doors for us wherever we went, and did us vast favours. From then on, the twins got a cut of most of the stuff we were doing. Not all of it – they had enough coming in as it was – but we never did anything behind their backs. We always went to them with news of what was going on. Sometimes they’d say, ‘We’re not really interested, but go ahead, do it.’ At other times, they’d want to know the ins and outs of it and want some cash, or ask us to carry out some justice if they had the hump with someone. It was called Kray justice, and it was more feared than the lawful variety.

Things began to move very quickly for us. But my own involvement came to an abrupt halt when I was sent back to prison in the New Year of 1965.

It all began in a Wimpy bar in my old stamping-ground of Dalston Junction. I was on one of my visits back to London from Blackpool and I was sitting at a table by the window, keeping observation on a bank for future reference. Another man was with me who shall remain nameless because he wasn’t caught. We had our eye on this Wimpy bar, too, because the takings in there must have been coming up to £1,000 a day, and we decided to do it there and then.

So we went downstairs into the office. I got the manager by the scruff of the neck, put a knife up to his throat and asked him to open the safe, which he did. I then pulled a gun on him, and when he gave us the money we disappeared. But the paper seller on the corner recognised me. I was well known in the area through my dealings with the amusement arcades, Lou’s Café and Chez Don, and this man decided to point the finger. Even more to my surprise, he couldn’t be straightened out.

I went to see him and I asked: ‘Are you going to give evidence against me?’

He went, ‘No.’

I said, ‘Good-day.’

The next thing I knew, I was being warned about approaching witnesses by the police, who came to pick me up at my parents’ house. Despite the fact that I was married and living with my wife and daughter at Blythe Street, when I wasn’t away earning money in Blackpool, I always considered Betford House to be my home; and, like all of my brothers, I spent a lot of time there. Detective Sergeant Robeson, who later claimed he nicked the Great Train Robber Bruce Reynolds, and Detective Sergeant Terence Day took me to Dalston Lane police station, where I was charged.

The trial went on for five days at the Old Bailey. I expected to be acquitted, because the case against me was very weak. The witnesses – the Wimpy bar manager, his assistant and the paper seller – were contradicting each other all the way through, and the police
officers’ notebooks didn’t match. One claimed that he had made his notes at the same time as the other, but his colleague said something completely different. But unfortunately I wasn’t very well represented in court: my QC wasn’t putting the case over as I would have wanted.

I was in front of Judge Maud, who was known as the Lagging Judge – he was always giving out three-year sentences, as if that was all he knew. I suppose I should have counted myself lucky: on 29 January 1965 I was sentenced to thirty months’ imprisonment for assault with intent to rob and for being armed with an offensive weapon with intent to rob. I was acquitted of having an armament in my possession.

While my case was going on I was sharing an Old Bailey cell with Frankie Shea, Reggie Kray’s brother-in-law. He was being tried for robbery with John McVicar and Roy Nash in one of the other courtrooms in the building. On the day of my sentence, I spent some time in the cell with Frank while the jury was out considering his case. I remember giving him my dinner because I thought he was going to go down. He was acquitted. And I wasn’t.

I was taken back to Wandsworth prison in a van with McVicar and Nash, who had been sentenced to eight and five years respectively.. I thought back to the last time I had seen McVicar, when I was walking along Essex Road in the Angel with Chris. We saw Frankie Shea there too. Frank waved us on, and we knew immediately that something was up and we should get out of the way. It turned out they were in a robbery – the same crime which brought them to the Old Bailey where, unfortunately for all of us, I saw them again.

John McVicar, at that time, was in his prime. He was about twenty-three or twenty-four and was probably one of the top men of his profession. Strictly a robber, he had built up a solid reputation and was very well liked among the criminal fraternity.

But he’s lost a lot of respect lately over his writings and articles. He sees himself as a professor of criminology, talking about prison reforms and pointing the finger at other people about their past. Considering the things he was involved in and the sentence he served, I believe he should keep his views to himself. He will be remembered more than anything for being one of the hard men of London and one of Britain’s most wanted villains, after his escape from Durham prison and the film
McVicar
which documented it. If I was a member of the public, I would view John McVicar not as a campaigner but as an ex-criminal.

There were quite a few cons in Wandsworth at that time who were, or would later be, ‘celebrity’ criminals. One was Ronnie Biggs, a likeable fella who always had a smile on his face. Everyone used to point at him – ‘That’s Ronnie Biggs’ – and I think he liked that little bit of glamour within the prison. But I don’t think he expected for one minute to become what he is today. I was pleased – everybody was pleased – when he escaped. I’d only like to see him able to return to freedom in England.

But the odd character apart, Wandsworth prison was the most doomy, gloomy place I could imagine being in. I was devastated enough that I’d been convicted, but this made the misery worse. Wandsworth was a law unto itself. There’s no other nick in the country like it.

I immediately lodged an appeal, and while an appeal is running you’re still technically innocent. But the authorities failed to take note that I was an appellant. In the meantime, I was transferred to Chelmsford prison, and further charges were brought against me. It was said that I was in breach of the probation order imposed after the Ilminster Co-op case because I had broken the law again. But I could not have been said at that point to have broken the law again, because I was to all intents and purposes an innocent man until the Court of Appeal decided I wasn’t. But this didn’t occur to me at the
time. I was sent back to Bristol on the breach of probation order charges and sentenced at Wells Quarter Sessions to two concurrent sentences of six months, added to the end of my two and a half years. This made three years altogether.

I stayed in Bristol to carry on with my sentence and did my best not to think about the extra time I’d been given. Then one day I came across another barrack-room lawyer. I was in the prison tailor shop when a con said: ‘They can’t do that. They can’t sentence you for breaking a probation order through criminal activity when you haven’t finished going through the channels of appeal.’ They’d jumped the gun. So I decided to petition the Home Office about it, petitions being the one form of protest always available to the prisoner.

If you don’t get an answer within forty-two days, you can try to expedite it on Governor’s applications. My petition was in for seven months, and I kept going down to the Governor’s office, trying to get it hurried up. I was told it was with the Home Office’s legal department. Eventually I was called up and told I’d been given six months off my sentence over this mistake. The original appeal, over the thirty months, was chucked out because the authorities felt I had no grounds for it.

It was while I was in Bristol that my mother died. It happened on a Friday the thirteenth, in August 1965. I woke up that morning and – I don’t know why – I put on a jacket and tie, and had a shave. I was walking round on exercise with my mate Johnny Peebles, a Portsmouth boy, and I said to him, ‘I can feel there’s something wrong at home.’ Just before midday, I was working in the prison tailor’s shop when I was called out by a screw, taken into the main wing and shown into the Governor’s office. He said, ‘I have some very bad news for you, Lambrianou. Your mother has passed away.’

There had never been any bad news in my family before, and I
just didn’t believe it. Without realising what I was doing, I dived across the table. I just wanted to grab hold of the Governor and batter him.

We’d all lived around my mother, the five of us, and all of a sudden she was gone. End of. It was a terrible blow. She had died in Newcastle, in the house she was born in, the first time in thirty years that she’d been back to it. For three years she’d lived on half a lung and never known it. She was a heavy smoker, one after the other, and her lungs had burnt out. And she worried a lot. She’d had a bleeding hard life.

The night before she went to Newcastle Chris had a blazing row with her, and I always used to blame him in a little way for what happened. Throughout our long years away for the McVitie murder, I would always bring it up when we were arguing: ‘I blame you for the old lady.’ It was the one thing that would shut him up. I suppose, in my way, I was looking for some excuse for my mother’s death.

Today we never, ever talk about my mother. We all feel a lot, but she’s never mentioned. She was a very basic, pure woman. What life had she had with the five of us? And when we were eventually in a position to do something for her, she wasn’t there. Chris and I were to make a lot of money from our criminal dealings, which would have made her life much easier; she would have gone short of nothing. But time didn’t give us the privilege of being able to do it for her, and that’s one of the biggest regrets of my life. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about her.

My mother was going to be buried in Newcastle the following Monday. I was told at lunchtime that day that, because of my connections with the London underworld, I would not be permitted to attend. The authorities believed my brothers would make sure I didn’t return to prison. They denied me the dignity of being with my brothers at my mother’s funeral.

I was released in December 1966, having served almost two years. I would have been out before that if I hadn’t lost some remission for bad behaviour. I lost fourteen days for illegal bookmaking in the prison, and I had to serve two weeks without privileges and without associated labour – that is, labour involving the other men. For three days of this time I was on a number one diet, which was literally bread and water – a punishment that no longer exists. A bloke called Billy Thomas was also down the block – the punishment or isolation cells – for cutting another geezer in one of the workshops. He was on a normal diet; and he used to leave boiled eggs and other bits of food for me wrapped in paper behind the toilet.

While I was away, Chris was out and about all over the country, getting up to all sorts of villainy. He would check into London from time to time, but he still preferred to be out of it. That’s how he acquired the nickname of London Chris. By the time I came out of prison he had set up a base in Birmingham, but I decided to stay in London and go to Chris, if and when he needed me.

It turned out that I was to spend a lot of time up in Birmingham with him throughout 1967, while together we scaled dramatic heights of criminal activity. But I was also around the East End for long enough to become heavily involved with the Kray firm.