Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  But neither the Twins nor any members of their Firm had been involved in the so-called ‘fracas’ at a club in Catford which had ended in a shoot-out between the Richardsons and a local gang in which several of the Richardsons were wounded and one of the local men was killed. Nor was George Cornell involved.

  All that had happened was that on one occasion George Cornell was supposed to have shouted out to Ron that he was a ‘fat poof ‘. Ron told me this himself, but in fact this wasn’t the real reason why the murder happened and it was not until many years later when Ron was safely locked away in Broadmoor that he finally explained why, all those years before, he had felt he had to kill Cornell. During a visit his close friend Wilf Pine asked him why he did it and received the nearest that Ron ever came to giving anyone a proper answer.

  From what Ron told Wilf Pine, the killing really had its origins in an incident that had happened many years before when the Twins had been ‘minding’ an illicit card game in an upstairs room at the Green Dragon pub in Hackney. That evening Ron, for once, was on his own. He also admitted he was drunk, and when he arrived to find Cornell was there all the old antagonism between Watney Street and Vallance Road flared up between them. After the insults came a fight, which ended with Cornell giving Ron what he himself described as ‘the hiding of my life’.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Wilf,’ he said. ‘Cornell kicked the shit out of me that night.’ If Reg had been there too, or if Ron had not been drunk, this could not have happened. But since it did, and since it was one of the very few occasions when Ron received a beating rather than inflicting one, it stayed in his memory for ever.

  ‘Afterwards, of course, I wanted to go after him, like next morning, but Reg put a block on it. “Don’t go getting involved,” he said. We were getting a good pension from the place from Bill Ackerman who ran the Green Dragon at the time. So Reg told me, “Ron, don’t fuck it up by going for Cornell. It just ain’t worth it.”

  ‘So I didn’t do anything about it. But over the years, every time I saw Cornell he gave me a sneer and said something sarcastic. Yeah, once he did call me a fat poof, and a couple of other things I won’t repeat. But it was always a case of wrong place, wrong time for me to retaliate and it meant that Cornell was somehow always on my mind. I don’t know if I was afraid of him or what, but as the thought of that beatin’ kept on coming back to me I suppose I might have been. Fear can make you do funny things. Then, after I heard about the Richardsons’ fight at Catford, I wasn’t at my best. I know now that my pills weren’t working, And when I was told that Cornell was just around the corner at the Beggar, I could see him coming round to Vallance Road and making a name for himself by trying to kill all of us unless I stopped him. Luckily, I had a gun and Reg wasn’t there to stop me, so I took the chance and was away and did it and was back again, just like that.

  ‘And that was how Cornell got killed. And you know, Wilf, the funny thing is that it worked. After that I didn’t have to remember being beaten by him any more. Even now when I think about him, all I can see is his fucking head spurtin’ blood instead.’

  This account of Cornell’s killing matches what we know, and certainly by early 1966 Ron was becoming increasingly deranged. Later he would admit as much in his memoirs. ‘I didn’t know it then, but I think it was my mental illness, my paranoia. I just couldn’t stop myself hurting people, especially if I thought they were slighting me or plotting against me’ – which also applies to Ron’s obsession with Cornell as he described it to Wilf Pine.

  In practical gangland terms the killing of Cornell accomplished less than nothing, and was little more than a textbook killing by a homicidal schizophrenic. But by giving the Twins a new and authentic role as murderers it became important in their rapidly developing mythology.

  It was now that murder took its place in the Twins’ ongoing narrative and linked up with the myths that those they knew had been spinning round them for so long. From now on a veneer of homicidal glamour started to obscure the banality of the Twins’ everyday existence.

  All this was very different from the succession of highly profitable and efficiently organised crimes that Reg had hoped to build around the fact that they were untouchable. But from now on the two of them would be involved in a round of crazy killings that would do little for their criminal careers but would guarantee their places in the world of myth and legend as their real world descended into nightmare.

  Had the Twins wanted further proof of their status as ‘untouchables’ they only had to witness Scotland Yard’s attempts to catch Cornell’s killer. By now it was an open secret, whispered in the pubs of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, that Ronnie Kray had done it. Finally this reached Scotland Yard and led to a visit from its star detective Commander Tommy Butler who summoned the Twins to an identity parade before Mrs X at the Commercial Road police station.

  But Reg by then had been in touch with the East End’s own Mr Fixit, ‘Red-faced’ Tommy Pumley, who had had a word or two with Patsy Quill and Mrs X, explaining that if they knew what was good for them and so on. They were both East Enders so he didn’t have to spell out the consequences.

  It must have been a harrowing experience, particularly for Mrs X. After seeing one of her customers killed in front of her she now found herself face to face again with the man who did it. Confronted with those dead black eyes of Ron’s she found it hard to stop her tears but she never faltered. Drying her eyes, she told Commander Butler that she was sorry but this had been a dreadful time for her and she had never had a memory for faces. And no, she couldn’t recognise anyone among the six men before her as the one who murdered George Cornell.

  After which the great Commander Butler saw no further point in remaining in the East End any longer and was driven back to Scotland Yard, leaving the badlands of Bethnal Green and the Twins who ruled them to their own devices

  Soon after this Billy Hill decided that the Twins might be unwise to push their luck too far and that the time had come for them to take a little holiday. As usual he had plans for them – but not if they were going down for murder. So he suggested that they might enjoy a few days as his guests in Morocco.

  Billy Hill had been getting to know Morocco rather well. From his house in southern Spain it was easy to take the ferry over to Tangier where he had made a lot of friends. Some were criminals and some were not, but one thing that never failed to impress him in Tangier was the availability of heroin and marijuana. In Morocco they had always grown it and called it hashish, and almost everyone he knew either smoked it or enjoyed it in one way or another. He didn’t care for it himself but he had discovered that already there was quite a lot of hashish being smuggled from Morocco over to Europe via southern Spain, and thence to London where the craze for it was only just beginning, particularly among the younger set who already frequented Marrakesh.

  As for the Twins, it was during this holiday in Tangier that they became involved in one of the most surreal encounters of the Sixties. Whilst they were there three of the Rolling Stones – Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richard – had also been on holiday in Morocco with Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull and the Twins’ surprising fan, the fashionable art dealer Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser. This was the occasion when Anita had suddenly abandoned the Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones in favour of another member of the group, Keith Richard, and during the first days of their new romance the loving pair had driven off from Marrakesh to Tangier with ‘Groovy Bob’ as chaperone. Anita described what happened in her diary.

  She, Keith and Robert would go off on their own, wandering around the Kasbah and on the beach. One day they encountered two men walking along the beach in suits, looking like the Blues Brothers. It was of course the Kray Twins. Anita recounts how Tangier was a place where everyone went to get away, including gang members. In those days she’d heard all about the people the Twins had nailed so immediately imagined something horrific had occurred. Robert knew them both and approached them to ask why they were th
ere. ‘Oh, we’re on holiday,’ they replied. But Anita Pallenberg was closer to the truth than she imagined.

  16

  Exit the Axeman

  BY NOW THE Twins had reached a point where their lives were changing fast and, as Ron’s madness grew, Reg’s problem was to keep so many different shows upon so many roads. First and foremost came what Reg was good at, ‘doing the business’ and keeping the money rolling in from the rackets he’d been busily creating, like the long-firm frauds, the currency scams and the European sales of stolen securities, not to mention the ‘pensions’ from the clubs and businesses that they protected.

  As well as keeping all this business going, early in 1966 Reg became actively involved in acquiring a fresh interest in various West End gaming clubs to take the place of Esmeralda’s Barn. Had Reg been left to get on with this in cooperation with Leslie Payne things could still have been fine. And had he not merely listened to the advice of Billy Hill but been able to build on what he told him, who knows what Reggie might have done. There was just a chance that he might have even sorted out his life with Frances instead of stuffing her with yet more pills from Doc Blasker and leaving it too late to get her into hospital.

  All of this could just have happened if it hadn’t been for Ron. But then, if it hadn’t been for Ron and his erratic bouts of madness there’d have been little to recall about the Twins today: no legends, no iconic photographs, no British gangster movies, none of the myths surrounding these two celebrity criminals to liven up the image of the Swinging Sixties. Without Ron’s madness and the ensuing killings it would have been like Jack the Ripper without his murders. Which gives the strange, sick tale of Frank Mitchell, also known as ‘The Mad Axeman’, a special place in the twisted saga of the Twins.

  Much of the fascination of this whole disastrous affair comes from the way it started off as one of those highly publicised good deeds that the Krays made such a meal of. But, as Gore Vidal once said, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ particularly a good deed by the Krays, which in this case ended up killing the recipient.

  It was Ron’s combination of homicidal arrogance with his abject fear and bouts of wildest fantasy that had a way of leading him and those around him up so many dangerous paths. And what marked him out from most other paranoid schizophrenics and made his flights of fantasy so memorable was not only the determination with which he pursued them but the way he ended up imposing them on Reg and the rest of the Firm by force of will. In the process it was Ron’s unpredictable behaviour that became the source of much of his charisma, together with the positively Gothic shroud of mystery that dangerous madmen often weave around them. Certainly in the Mitchell case it was the strange psychotic mess of one of Ron’s wilder excursions into wilful unreality which lay behind the waking nightmare that he imposed not only on himself but on all around him in the closing days of 1966.

  If you compare what followed with the Twins’ artful exploitation of the Boothby scandal just two years earlier, not to mention the fixing of the McCowan trial soon after that, it’s clear that things were going very wrong indeed in Krayland as Reg began to lose control and crazy Ron took over.

  The Twins had known Frank Mitchell for almost a decade, ever since Ron met him in Wandsworth Prison back in 1959 and fell in love with him. Knowing Ron, it’s usually assumed that there was some sort of homosexual relationship but I’ve seen no evidence for this and it would seem unlikely. Mitchell was strongly heterosexual and Ron was attracted to teenage boys, not to grown men. But what did arouse Ron’s deep devotion was that Mitchell represented almost everything he dreamed of being – tall, good-looking, and so strong that he could lift up two men by their belts until they touched the ceiling. There was also much about him with which Ron could identify. Like Ron he had a way of turning violent when threatened. But in Mitchell’s case there had been no Reg around to look after him and from his earliest teens Mitchell had been in and out of Borstal. Thereafter he had been confined almost continually to one institution or another, ending up in Broadmoor. It was when he escaped and threatened an elderly couple with an axe, that the press gave him the title that had dogged him ever since – ‘The Mad Axeman’.

  Not that it was that far wrong. Mitchell had been certified insane while still in Broadmoor, but when his case came up for trial the judge ruled him fit to plead and promptly sentenced him to indefinite life imprisonment as a danger to society. By the time Ron met him at Wandsworth he had become thoroughly institutionalised and was a menace to everyone, himself included. His strength made it impossible to restrain him. He was impervious to pain and had been birched – and later flogged with the cat-o’-nine-tails – for violent attacks on prison staff.

  All of which impressed Ron greatly and he insisted on making Mitchell the star beneficiary of the Twins’ ‘Aways Society’ which had been looking after him with money and attention ever since. When Mitchell was accused of the attempted murder of a fellow prisoner in Wandsworth, the Twins arranged for Reggie’s own barrister, pretty Nemone Lethbridge, to represent him and their London tailor made him a suit so that he looked his best in court. Thanks to this – or, more probably, to the way the Twins put the frighteners on any prisoner who might have testified against him – Mitchell was acquitted. None of this brought him any closer to the one thing he had set his heart on – a definite release date – but from now on Mitchell worshipped both the Twins, especially Ronnie, as his salvation.

  Sometime after his trial an important change in Mitchell’s status did occur. He was moved to Dartmoor, and while he was in the prison that had always been regarded as the grimmest in the country he seems to have been as happy as he ever would be. Dartmoor Prison had been changing and a sympathetic governor took an interest in Mitchell’s case, promising him that if he behaved himself he would do what he could to get him the release date that he craved.

  So Frank Mitchell became a model prisoner. He was given the blue armband of a ‘trusty’ and ended up with other prisoners working on the moors. The prison staff humoured him, his fellow prisoners admired his physique, and the officer in charge turned a blind eye when they visited a pub on the moor when their work was over and Frank spent money from the Krays to buy them all a drink. Part Romany, Mitchell had a way with horses and used to ride the moorland ponies. He also had a way with women and did much the same with the young school-teacher from a nearby village who became infatuated with him. But he was still existing in a penal limbo, and when the Governor’s promises about a release date failed to materialise he began complaining in his letters to the Twins.

  Then, in the spring of 1966, something unexpected happened. Reg and Frances went on a weekend trip to Devon, which suggests that something of their old relationship survived and they still cared for one another. But inevitably the trip was also an excuse to visit Ron’s old friend Frank Mitchell. The meeting went well, with Reg giving Mitchell news about his hero Ron and the other members of the family, and Mitchell going on at Reg about his one obsession – his release date, and the time the governor was taking to obtain it.

  Reg did his best to reassure him, saying that he and Ron would not forget him and would do everything possible to further his release. Above all, Frank must keep his spirits up and stay out of trouble. In the meantime, he and Ron would make their friends visit him regularly.

  ‘But what about Ron? When will he come and see me?’ Mitchell asked.

  ‘Soon. But you know what Ron is. Always something different on his plate.’

  ‘But promise he will come.’

  Reg promised, and the visit ended with Mitchell giving Frances a velvet-lined jewel box that somebody had made for him in the prison workshop. Afterwards Reg was happy with the way that Frank and Frances seemed to understand each other.

  Afterwards, of course, Ron never kept the promise that Reg had made on his behalf but several members of the Firm did make the four-hour drive from London down to Dartmoor in the months that followed. These included ‘Scotch Jack’ Dixon, who had act
ed as Ron’s chauffeur when he shot Cornell, and ‘Big Albert’ Donoghue, a powerful and taciturn Irishman whom Ron had recently recruited to the Firm. And, as ever, Mad Teddy also went, getting on so well with Mitchell that they started up a regular correspondence. This continued all that summer, and in all Mitchell’s letters one theme and one alone emerged. The governor was not sticking to his promise over his release date, and he couldn’t stand the situation any longer.

  On hearing this, Ron became distressed and told Reg that something must be done. Reg advised doing nothing, saying that anything they did do could only make the situation worse. Like many prisoners before him Frank must be patient and do his time like anybody else. At first Ron seems to have agreed. Then, as often happened now, he changed his mind. Without telling Reg he sent Mad Teddy down to Dartmoor with a message. For the time being Frank should keep his mouth shut, but the Twins had a plan. When the time was right they’d tell him what it was. Whatever happened, Frank would soon be free.

  I once asked Reg how he and Ron reached this disastrous decision but he instantly clammed up, which was understandable. Still, various reasons for the springing of Frank Mitchell were subsequently suggested. Albert Donoghue, who was to play a key part in the escape, was convinced that Ron wanted Mitchell out to deal with a former ally of the Richardsons called Terry Swayling but this struck me as improbable. The Twins never had a problem getting people hurt – there was no need to get Mitchell out of jail to do it for them.

  When I wrote The Profession of Violence, I suggested that the freeing of Frank Mitchell started as an attempt to offset unfavourable underworld publicity following the Cornell murder, and I still think there was something in this. Around this time the Twins were becoming unusually aware of their public image and from watching all those Warner Brothers gangster movies they had picked up the notion that gangsters don’t desert their buddies when they land in trouble. I know that Ron felt this about Mitchell. But the truth is that their motives for this whole affair have long remained a mystery and it’s only recently that I’ve discovered what I now believe to be the answer.