Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins

by John Pearson

  Du Rose was clearly flattered by the idea and when the Admiral introduced him to Cooper they got on well together. Later, when I got to know him, Cooper always spoke warmly of du Rose, as ‘the straightest copper I have ever met’.

  Du Rose’s attitude to Cooper was more realistic. ‘Sooner or later he’ll end up in a ditch with a bullet in the back of his neck,’ he told the Admiral. But in the meantime he was perfectly prepared to make the most of Cooper’s undoubted talents and cooperate with him in any way he could. He and John Hanly trusted one another and if, through Cooper, he could gain entry to the closed world of the Krays and destroy their power for good, what had he to lose? As an old detective John du Rose had schooled himself not to let a lot excite him. But when he was offered Cooper on a plate, together with the full support of the US Secret Service, something must have told him that this just might be the chance of a policeman’s lifetime.

  Of course it was risky, and not just for Cooper. But at this point in the game none of them realised quite how mad and dangerous the Twins could be; nor could they foresee where the Admiral’s plans would lead them. During this meeting both Hanly and du Rose were particularly insistent on the need for secrecy, and emphasised that Cooper was answerable solely to Hanly in Paris and du Rose in London. The two of them would do everything they could to help him, and while he was in London he would be working closely with du Rose and keeping him informed of all he did. In return, du Rose promised Cooper his full support, including concocting bogus Scotland Yard reports in order to impress the Twins and, wherever possible, mislead them.

  After the meeting Cooper knew that he could count on their support, but he also knew the rules. However much they were prepared to help him, if anything went wrong John du Rose and Admiral Hanly would both drop him like a very hot potato.

  Despite this, Cooper couldn’t quite believe his luck. Just a day or two before he had been facing twenty years in prison, and today he was being bankrolled by the US Secret Service. He had always been a chancer and wasn’t one to quit in the middle of a winning run. Besides, for all his charm, the Admiral wasn’t offering him a viable alternative. So Cooper decided he would make the most of the situation and next day flew to London.

  In London in the 1960s life for rich Americans was good. The Admiral had arranged for Cooper to have a London office in the European Exchange Bank at 101 Dean Street, which had originally been set up as a front by the US Secret Service. At the same time Cooper was informed that a luxurious apartment near Kensington Palace had been placed at his disposal, together with an authentic English butler, a well-stocked cellar and a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud.

  A few days later he was joined by his wife Beverley, their young daughter Leslie, and Sam, their Yorkshire terrier. Before long the family was displaying all the effortless assurance that one might expect from very rich Americans in Europe.

  This was intelligence-gathering de luxe, on a scale that Britain’s MI6 could never have afforded. Only someone as important in the US Secret Service as Admiral John H. Hanly could have ever mounted such an operation. But with the US Treasury there to meet the bills, no one seemed to worry. Certainly nobody ever questioned the Coopers’ way of living. So while Admiral Hanly was pursuing his obsession back in Paris, the Coopers made the most of their life of luxury in the line of duty. Before long it would be serving to disguise the fairly hideous risks they soon discovered they were taking.

  To start with, Admiral Hanly’s plan worked perfectly and when Cooper made contact with the Twins they were obviously impressed by all the signs of Cooper’s new prosperity. Ron was particularly taken with him now and during the summer of 1967, when Ron was making such determined efforts to persuade Reg and other members of the Firm to murder someone, he was often meeting Cooper every day. When Cooper overcame his stutter, he could be a strangely mesmerising talker and Ron started to depend on him for information and advice. Certainly Cooper seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of organised crime in Europe and America – and what he didn’t know, he could always make up from his fertile imagination.

  At the same time Cooper made fresh contact with du Rose and kept him carefully informed about whatever he was up to. In return, du Rose arranged to let him have bogus documents from Scotland Yard so that he could feed the Twins with misleading information. Most of Ron’s wilder flights of fancy during that long hot summer came from Cooper. He took a lot of trouble over the Tshombe escape, the whole idea of which came entirely from Cooper. As did another way-out plan which impressed Ron for a while – a fully worked-out scheme for kidnapping the Pope.

  In the end Reg became cynical and poured cold water on most of these ideas while Ron was going off his head with fantasies of bloody murder. Most of the crazier ideas that Ron came up with in the months before McVitie’s murder were being fed to him by Cooper.

  At the same time Cooper was discovering much more about the Twins. He realised that Reg was comparatively sane and didn’t trust him, and that Ron had become a death-obsessed psychotic who was concerned with one thing only – killing people.

  All the talk about freeing Tshombe and kidnapping the Pope was fine but it was soon becoming clear that there needed to be more to their collaboration than this. Since Reg didn’t trust him, he played along with Ron’s homicidal fantasies about his murder syndicate. He even suggested calling it Murder International. But Ron wanted further proof of Cooper’s seriousness, which was when Cooper made a serious mistake that could have been disastrous. When he inadvertently let slip that he had been an arms dealer, Ron instantly started asking him for weapons.

  Some months later, when I was learning more about McVitie’s murder, something puzzled me – the way that Reg’s gun had jammed when he tried to shoot McVitie, after a similar gun belonging to Ron had jammed a few months earlier when he had tried to shoot George Dixon. Modern automatics are specially designed not to jam. And yet here, not one but two .32 automatics belonging to the Twins had jammed within a few weeks of each other.

  When I mentioned this to Cooper some months later he finally admitted that both the guns had come from him. He said that at the time Ron was constantly demanding weapons for Murder International and after discussing this with John du Rose, the police commander had reluctantly agreed to Cooper supplying the Twins with a pair of .32 automatics to prove that he meant business – provided that both the guns were immobilised beforehand.

  Presumably that summer the Twins had too much on their minds to have noticed the coincidence when both the guns had jammed. But by now, with Ron increasingly obsessed with his dreams of killing people, Cooper must have understood the full extent of the nightmare he was in. If the Twins had suspected that he was a spy, he’d have had it; and if the Admiral suspected that he’d lost his nerve, he’d also have had it. As he told me later, ‘It was then I realised that I was like the man on the high wire in the circus doing my act without a net – and facing death whichever way I fell.’

  Meanwhile, to add a further complication to a nightmare situation, barely a month before the Twins killed Jack the Hat Scotland Yard had finally started their own investigation of the Krays under the former chief inspector ‘Nipper’ Read. He owed his appointment to Sir Joseph Simpson’s deputy, Assistant Commissioner Peter Brodie, who had set up the Kray unit on his own authority. And, rather than risk trouble from the Commissioner, or betrayal from his colleagues, Nipper Read had arranged to have it safely tucked away in total isolation from the rest of Scotland Yard in Tintagel House, a faceless block of offices on the far side of the river. To show how seriously Brodie took the need for secrecy members of the team were actually provided with false cover stories. (Interestingly, the line they chose, just to make sure that no one else in Scotland Yard would question it, was that Nipper and his men were busily investigating a number one docket – a corruption charge against other members of the police. This would not arouse anyone’s suspicions with so much corruption going on around them.)

  The way that Read was summone
d back to take charge of the first investigation of the Twins in more than three and a half years was in itself an illustration of what was happening.

  Since Nipper always felt that the McCowan case was the one disaster of his career he was not best pleased to find himself having to face the Twins again; and since he’d had no contact with them now for over three years, his first action was to put in a request for all the files on their activities in the meantime. Back came the reply that there were no files.

  No files, no information in the whole of Scotland Yard on the two most dangerous criminals in London? Surely some mistake.

  But stranger things were still to come.

  Since Commander John du Rose was the Head of the Murder Squad, he had overall responsibility for what went on in Tintagel House, and Nipper regularly reported back to him. At this point, relations between the pair of them were perfectly amicable, with du Rose very much the senior officer in charge, smoking his cheroots, discussing progress and offering the younger man his experienced advice.

  But while he was apparently assisting Nipper Read, du Rose never felt obliged to tell him of his own quite separate freelance efforts to entrap the Twins. Still less did he explain his relations with a former arms dealer turned gold smuggler who was in close touch with them, and that with the backing of a senior agent in the US Secret Service, he had recently authorised him to supply a pair of .32 automatic pistols to the Twins.

  19

  Murder For Two

  ONE OF THE strangest consequences of the McVitie murder had been the subsequent behaviour of the Twins. Far from them showing any signs of revulsion or remorse, the killing left them in the best of spirits and had clearly brought the two of them even closer together. Whatever the rights or wrongs of Jack McVitie’s slaughter, it had been so badly bungled that it would be hard to imagine even the most hardened killers wishing to be reminded of it later and one might well have thought the Twins would have wanted to forget about it too. But not at all.

  The necessary sacrifice had been made. The joint credentials of both the twins as murderers had been established and, in Mafia language, Reg had ‘made his bones’ at last – or rather, Jack McVitie’s bones, which were now wrapped in chicken wire and firmly weighted down in one of the deepest stretches of the English Channel.

  After the killing the Twins’ first thought was to get Ron Hart to drive them to the house in Walthamstow belonging to their father’s lifelong friend and fellow deserter Harry Hopwood. Later Hart described how he ran a hot bath for them and helped them to perform a sort of ritual cleansing, scrubbing beneath their fingernails and washing their hair, and getting rid of everything connected with the killing, down to their shoes and every scrap of clothing, all of which Hopwood later burned. He also threw Reg’s useless .32 automatic into the Grand Union Canal near the Queensbridge Road (where police divers found it, still jammed, a year later). Someone arranged for fresh clothes to be brought over from Aunt May’s house in Vallance Road, and members of the Firm who saw the Twins next morning remember them as bright as sunshine, laughing and joking and in the best of spirits.

  One might have thought they’d just accomplished some heroic deed. Hearing about this later, I was reminded of Ron hiding in the flat in the Lea Bridge Road after murdering Cornell, and playing those wartime records of his hero Winston Churchill. Something similar was happening to Reg. For the rest of his life he would always speak with pride about killing Jack the Hat. He had ‘done society a service’ by getting rid of him. (Ron was content with simply stating that he was ‘scum’.) But there was more than this to the killing, and to the Twins’ subsequent behaviour. It took a while to work out what it was.

  One thing at least was obvious. Whatever else had been accomplished, Jack’s death had served to reunite the Twins. At long last, Reg ‘had done his one’. Honour, if that was the word for it, had been satisfied between them, and their endless arguments and rows over Reg’s need to murder someone were behind them.

  The following afternoon Hart drove them up to Cambridge where they were booked in under another name at the University Arms Hotel. Cambridge was an odd destination for the Twins. They’d never been there before and it was hard to imagine them in that stuffy old university hotel, less than twenty-four hours after butchering McVitie – which was presumably the point of their going there at all. For if by any chance the police had been pursuing them the University Arms Hotel in Cambridge would have been the last place on Earth they would have thought of looking.

  Not that the Twins had any need to worry. Sick he may have been but Sir Joseph Simpson was still Her Majesty’s Commissioner for Police and as determined as ever to avoid any further confrontation with the Twins. As for John du Rose, as Head of the Murder Squad he was in a quite alarming situation. He couldn’t have known it yet but the .32 automatic that he had recently sanctioned Cooper to pass on to Reg as part of Admiral Hanly’s plan to catch the Twins had actually been involved in Jack McVitie’s murder. Had Four-Day Johnny not insisted on having it immobilised Reg would undoubtedly have used it to shoot McVitie through the head, and in due course John du Rose might well have found himself in court as an accessory to murder. Instead, as things turned out, by making sure that the weapon didn’t work, du Rose had saved McVitie from a speedy death by bullet only to condemn him to a slow and bloody death from Reg Kray’s carving knife instead.

  But at this stage Four-Day Johnny didn’t know about McVitie’s murder. Nor did Cooper, and nor did Admiral Hanly. The police knew even less, for the morning after Jack was murdered his anxious wife had gone to her local police station to report him missing but no one had seemed particularly concerned. Jack often went missing and since Nipper Read was still trying to work out how George Cornell had met his death the fate of Jack the Hat would have to wait. However, for the Twins it looked as if McVitie’s murder was about to open up a new, exciting chapter in their lives.

  One of the more attractive members of the Kray menagerie was the ‘property developer’ Geoff Allen, whom we last encountered looking after Ron in the caravan on his Suffolk farm following Ron’s escape from the Long Grove mental hospital. Geoff was a man of parts – card sharp, gambler, con man and womaniser – but in the underworld he was known as the most successful arsonist in Britain. He had been burning down properties for years and growing rich and happy on the proceeds, while the insurance companies seemed incapable of catching him.

  He still had a soft spot for the Twins, which he put down to what he called ‘a streak of devilment in my nature’. Others ascribed it to his lack of inches. Geoff Allen was extremely short, although this didn’t seem to interfere with his success with women, and he might have felt a little bigger with the Twins around. Certainly with them he behaved like a sort of underworld godfather, acting as their private banker, helping them to solve their problems, and giving them advice as and when they needed it. This was a moment when they needed it.

  After McVitie’s murder, which they described to him in detail, it had been Geoff’s idea to hide them away for a night or two in Cambridge, just in case of trouble. He made the hotel reservations for them, and afterwards he paid the bill. When Monday came and there was still no sign of trouble, it was Geoff who collected them in his blue Rolls-Royce, and drove them to an even more unlikely destination – the Lamb Hotel in the picturesque village of Lavenham.

  Anyone not knowing who they were would certainly have wondered what these three suspicious characters were up to in that sleepy Suffolk village in mid-October. But just for once all three of them were doing something absolutely legal. They were house-hunting.

  Remembering Violet’s desire for a place in the country, Reg had as usual turned to Geoff for help. But now it wasn’t only Violet who had dreams of moving to the country. So, in theory, had the Twins, since everything in Vallance Road was soon to be demolished. Once again Geoff had come up trumps and picked a winner. For £12,000 he’d found them a house overlooking the village green in the tiny village of Bildestone
– and that afternoon all three of them drove off in Geoff’s Rolls-Royce to see it.

  ‘The Brooks’ turned out to be an elegant cream-painted Edwardian villa, with a paddock and a private drive and a garden which reminded one of tea on the lawn and games of croquet – except that Ron had rather different things in mind. Still on a high after murdering McVitie, he was very much in favour of buying the house at once. Reg was as usual slightly doubtful and no one mentioned Violet or old Charlie. But what was secretly exciting Ron was the thought of transforming The Brooks into the sort of fortified stronghold he’d recently been dreaming of, complete with guard dogs, searchlights and the machine guns that he was nagging Cooper to get him. Here he could be safe at last and, as usual now, Reg went along with the idea. But having found their dream house the Twins were up against a problem that hadn’t worried them for years: money – or, to be precise, their lack of it.

  They weren’t exactly broke but their flush days as criminal tycoons were over. During the last year they’d been spending too much time on murder and far too little making money.

  After all the easy profits Reg had been milking from the frauds and rackets and gaming clubs in years gone by there was now something ridiculous in the mere idea of the Kray Twins being forced to ask Geoff Allen for a mortgage. But, ridiculous or not, Geoff obliged as usual. Since I can’t imagine many building societies welcoming the Twins as customers I would guess he paid for it himself. In return the Twins were promising swift repayment from a new and exciting source of income that they seriously believed was in the offing.

  Since they thought, correctly, that at present there was no real threat from the police, they were anxious to return to London. But before they did they still had one thing to attend to – a meeting at Geoff Allen’s stately home of Gedding Hall near Stowmarket. The Twins had personally arranged this in advance for 5 November, which was in two days’ time. Geoff was lending them Gedding Hall for the occasion, and the Twins were very anxious to impress their all-important guest by pretending that the stately pile was theirs.