Gangland UK

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  ‘Well, just look who’s here!’ cried Cornell, with mock surprise. Neither man answered him, but Kray’s companion, Ian Barrie, a former safe-blower from Scotland, drew a revolver and fired two shots into the ceiling. The barmaid screamed and fled. Cornell and his friend sat frozen, unspeaking. Then with a melodramatic gesture, Ronald Kray pulled a 9mm Mauser automatic from a shoulder holster and pointed it at Cornell’s head, pulling the trigger three times.

  With blood and brain tissue flying, Cornell bounced back against the pillar and then tumbled to the floor like an abandoned puppet. Barrie fired his gun into the ceiling once more and the remaining few customers dived for cover. A ricocheting bullet hit the juke-box and, as Ronnie and his partner walked out of the bar, it stuck in its track and kept repeating, ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine any more… any more… any more…’ As quickly as they had arrived, Kray and his henchman disappeared. The frightened barmaid ran back to help the wounded man, but he was beyond all hope. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

  Within hours, the whole of the East End of London had heard the whispered news that ‘Ronnie Kray had “done” a bloke in a pub’. It was a dangerous piece of information, and however swiftly it passed along the grapevines of Whitechapel, Poplar and Bethnal Green, it was not for the ears of outsiders.

  When Superintendent Tommy Butler, the outstanding and almost legendary Scotland Yard detective, arrived to begin his investigations, he was met by a wall of silence. Customers in the pub insisted that they had ‘not been paying any attention’.

  Butler, though, knew the identity of the killer well enough. He and his men had their own ‘ears’ along the grapevine. But the main problem was one that had prevailed in the East End for so long – no one with first-hand evidence would dare go into court and testify against the 32-year-old Ronnie Kray or his twin brother, Reggie.

  In what he was sure would be a fruitless move, but nevertheless one he had to try, Butler put Ronnie into an identification parade at Commercial Street Police Station. The unhappy and worried barmaid from The Blind Beggar went through the motions of walking along the line of men and studying their faces. Eventually, she apologised to Butler, saying that her memory for faces was not good, and she could not swear that she had seen any of the men in the pub at the time of the murder.

  The Firm had got away with it again, and it was the glorious draught Ronnie so desperately needed his brother to share. After all, they were inseparable twins. In his frequent rages, he screamed at Reggie, ‘I’ve done my one. When are you going to do yours? Are you too soft?’

  The loss of his pretty young wife and Ronnie’s ever-growing megalomania served only to thrust Reggie further under Ronnie’s dark spell. He drove early one morning to the flat of a former friend whom he suspected of making disdainful comments about his late wife and, in front of the man’s terrified wife and children, shot him through the leg.

  But no one had a luckier escape from Ronnie’s volcanic temper than George Dixon. Once a friend of the twins, he fell out of favour after making remarks about Ronnie’s homosexuality. One evening, shortly after the Cornell shooting, he paid a visit to the Regency Club in Stoke Newington. Spotting Ronnie sitting in a corner, he walked straight up to him and demanded to know why the twins had barred him from their clubs.

  Instead of replying, Ronnie took out a gun, put it against Dixon’s head and pulled the trigger. Miraculously, it failed to fire. Instead of trying again, Ronnie removed the dud bullet and gave it to Dixon as a souvenir.

  Frank Mitchell – ‘The Mad Axe Man’

  All reason now seemed to desert the twins, and one of their most brutal and bizarre escapades involved the Dartmoor prisoner, Frank Mitchell, dubbed ‘The Mad Axe Man’ for threatening an elderly couple with a woodsman’s axe.

  On 12 December 1965, the Krays assisted Frank Mitchell in escaping from Dartmoor Prison. Ronnie Kray had befriended Mitchell when they served time together in another prison. Mitchell felt the authorities should review his case for parole, so Ronnie felt he would be doing him a favour by getting him out of Dartmoor, highlighting his case in the media and forcing the authorities to act.

  Once Mitchell was out of Dartmoor, the Krays held him at a friend’s flat in Barking Road. To ease the boredom of his days under cover, the Krays provided him with a nightclub hostess, who later declared, ‘His virility was greater than any man I have even known!’

  But the twins were very soon tired of the burden of being saddled with the great bear of a man who, in physique and childlike character, was reminiscent of Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. Like Lennie, who needed in his confused way to cling to some other human being, Mitchell complicated the situation by falling in love with the girl who was being paid by the Krays to comfort him.

  As a final, desperate solution, the Krays told Mitchell he was being moved to a ‘safe’ farm in Kent and, for security’s sake, the girl would follow within a few hours. So, after dark on Christmas Eve 1966, Mitchell was bundled into the back of a van which sped off down the Barking Road, taking him to an unmarked grave.

  Subsequently at the Old Bailey, Albert Donoghue, Mitchell’s escort, alleged that, as soon as the van moved off, the two men, waiting inside, poured a fusillade of shots into Mitchell’s body. Later, Donaghue telephoned Reggie Kray with the brief message: ‘The geezer’s gone!’

  Freddie Foreman, a former member of the Firm, in his autobiography Respect, claimed that Mitchell had been shot and the body disposed of in the sea.

  Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie

  Despite the fact that Mitchell had been murdered on Reggie’s orders, he had not actually murdered anyone with his own hands, and this was an issue Ronnie wouldn’t let his brother forget. Repeatedly, he pointed out that there was no shortage of people ‘taking liberties’. At the top of his list was a squalid, small-time but extremely strong man and once a fearsome, brawling hoodlum named Jack McVitie who, because of his vanity about his baldness, was never seen without a hat and had thereby earned the nickname of ‘Jack the Hat’.

  Although undeniably a tough man, McVitie also possessed an unpredictable streak of sadism and masochism. On one occasion, a gang smashed up his hands with a crowbar after he was caught playing around with one of their women. Within a few weeks, he was back on the streets eager to fight with anyone. Like George Cornell, he did not restrict his violence to men. One of his most notorious exploits involved throwing a woman from a car travelling at 40mph. Although she broke her back, she was too frightened of the consequences to report McVitie.

  Now consumed by drink and drugs, occasionally the Krays offered McVitie a spell of employment. In the summer of 1967, he cheated them of some money. To prove his loyalty, he was told to shoot Leslie Payne, a former business associate of the twins. He was given a gun and an advance of £100, with another £400 to follow on completion of the job. McVitie never did kill Payne, but he kept the Kray’s money. When Reggie tried to smooth matters over by lending McVitie another £50, Ronnie taunted his brother that he was turning soft.

  Nagged by Ronnie, dispirited by a declining ‘business’ – Esmeralda’s Barn had long since collapsed in debt – Reggie gave in. And, to make matters worse, McVitie got drunk and, armed with a sawn-off shotgun, went to the Regency Club in Hackney claiming he was going to shoot the Krays. His threats soon reached the twins’ ears.

  On Saturday, 28 October 1967, the twins arranged a party for their mother and friends in a Bethnal Green pub. During the course of the evening, Reggie received word that McVitie was due to turn up at the Regency Club in Stoke Newington later that night. After drinking himself to the point of numbness, Reggie took leave of his guests and arrived at the Regency just before 11.00pm. McVitie was nowhere to be seen. Frustrated, Reggie left his .32 revolver with Tony Barry, one of the two brothers who managed the club, and left to join Ronnie at a party in nearby Cazenove Road.

  When Reggie arrived, Ronnie was disappointed – his brother had failed him once again. Resolvi
ng on action, Ronnie dispatched his cousin Ronnie Hart to the Regency to retrieve the gun, insisting it had to be delivered by Tony Barry himself. Then he sent out Anthony and Christopher Lambrianou, two half-Greek brothers, to track down Jack McVitie.

  Hart returned first. Barry handed over the gun and disappeared into the night. Shortly before midnight, the Lambrianous came back. With them was Jack the Hat. Completely drunk, he walked into the basement room shouting, ‘Where’s the birds and the booze?’ Reggie was waiting for him behind the door. He put his gun against McVitie’s head and pulled the trigger. The killing should have been as simple as Ronnie’s, but the gun failed to fire. Reggie grabbed McVitie, but he managed to struggle his way free and tried to throw himself through the window. He was hauled back in by his legs, losing his hat in the process. Trembling and pale, he backed away with sweat pouring from his hairless head.

  ‘Be a man, Jack,’ shouted Ronnie.

  ‘I’ll be a man,’ said McVitie, by now in tears, ‘but I don’t want to fucking die like one… why are you doing this to me?’

  His plea and Reggie’s oaths were drowned by the hysterical screaming of Ronnie. ‘Kill him, Reg! Do him! Don’t stop now!’

  With McVitie’s arms held behind his back by Ronnie, Reggie took a carving knife and plunged it into his face just below his eye. He then stabbed him repeatedly through the chest and stomach until he was dead. The house was cleaned up, and the corpse disposed of. At last, Ronnie could be proud of his brother, who stated later, ‘I’m not ashamed of having killed McVitie. I don’t believe I had any choice. It was either him or me.’

  With no witnesses other than members of the Firm, it was a while before the police got wind of McVitie’s disappearance. His wife reported him missing, but with no body, there seemed little reason to suspect foul play. Even when rumours of McVitie’s killing reached the police, there was little they could do. For the second time, the twins had killed in cold blood, but sheltered behind the barrier of the East End wall of silence. For the time being, that wall remained impregnable.

  What the police needed was a break. It came from the unlikely source of Leslie Payne, the man who had masterminded the acquisition of Esmeralda’s Barn and organised many of the ‘long firm’ frauds, and was triggered by the twins’ use of gratuitous violence.

  In a belated attempt to test McVitie’s loyalty before Reggie stabbed him, Ronnie had dispatched him to murder Payne. Although McVitie bungled the attempt, Payne came to the conclusion that it was either his life or theirs.

  He decided to talk to the police and, in December 1967, he spent three weeks in a Marylebone hotel giving a statement that eventually ran to some 200 pages. It contained everything he knew about the twins’ activities, from Esmeralda’s Barn to their Mafia connections. The task now was to verify Payne’s claims, and a deal was struck whereby the statements would never be used unless the twins had first been arrested.

  Despite the secrecy of the police operation, the twins’ network of sources soon let them know that the Old Bill was on their trail. They were not unduly disturbed – as Reggie later said, ‘We didn’t think we would go down. We underestimated the cunning of the police.’ The brothers contended themselves with buying two pythons and naming them ‘Nipper’ (after the officer chasing them, Inspector ‘Nipper’ Read) and Gerrard (after another a detective who had had dealings with the Krays in the past). Ironically, the snakes proved too hard to handle. One escaped and the other was returned to its seller.

  At this point, Alan Cooper, a financier, began to play a more important role in the Kray’s lives. Cooper had helped the twins dispose of some stolen Canadian bonds. Although Reggie favoured caution until the police hunt had died down, Ronnie was growing obsessed with establishing himself as the Godfather figure of the London underworld. This called for more contact with the Mafia and, in Cooper, he thought he had found the contact who could help him.

  Despite the fact that Ronnie had a criminal record, Cooper said he could arrange an American visa for him through Paris and, once in the United States, various meetings could be arranged with the Mafia. Ronnie leapt at the opportunity. Cooper was as good as his word and, in April 1968, the two of them flew into New York for a few days’ discussions with a Mafia representative called Frank Ileano.

  To Ronnie, it looked like another step up the ladder. After returning to Britain, he warmed to Cooper’s suggestion that the Mafia would appreciate the killing of George Caruana, a Maltese club-owner, as a display of the Kray’s strength. The two of them decided to put a bomb in his car. Cooper said he knew a man who could supply the explosive. He dispatched an assistant to fly to Glasgow to collect four sticks of dynamite from a contact in the centre of the city.

  As he boarded his return flight, the man was arrested. Under questioning, he named Cooper as his boss. Nipper Read hauled Cooper in, only to discover both to his surprise and irritation that Cooper had been operating as an agent of the United States Treasury Department and with the knowledge of Read’s superiors at Scotland Yard.

  According to Cooper, his task was to implicate the twins in an attempted murder. With the dynamite courier arrested, this now became impossible, so Read decided to use Cooper as bait to get the twins to incriminate themselves. He installed Cooper in a private hospital with a microphone beside his bed. He then got him to invite the twins round.

  A certain strangeness in Cooper’s manner on the telephone made Ronnie and Reggie suspicious and, instead of going themselves, they sent one of Reggie’s friends. He refused to commit himself in front of Cooper and, once again, the twins had escaped Nipper Read.

  It seemed that the police had walked into another cul-de-sac. The twins tightened their organisation and opted for a low-profile approach to running their empire. With the Richardsons in jail and the deaths of Cornell and McVitie fading into the past, it looked as if they would weather the storm.

  Nonetheless, the strain of endless vigilance had begun to tell. Although the money continued to flow in from the clubs and casinos, with no major deals on the go, life had lost some of its excitement. One evening in early May 1968, Ronnie decided that what the Firm needed was a good knees-up. He told everyone to collect their women and head for Mayfair’s Astor Club. Outside, there was the usual gaggle of photographers snapping pictures of everyone who entered. Maybe there were more than usual, and Reggie, visibly irritated, shouted at them to stop. No one noticed that they were never offered the rapidly developing prints as souvenirs later in the evening.

  Through the early hours of the morning, the twins carried on drinking, their troubles forgotten. Ronnie was enjoying the company of a young man he had brought along for the evening, and Reggie was enjoying the attentions of a young lady. At 5.00am, they left the Astor and returned to their flat in Braithwaite House, on City Road, Finsbury.

  They had barely time to fall asleep when the front door was crashed off its hinges with a sledgehammer. It was 6.00am on Thursday, 9 May 1968, when a specially recruited team of detectives, led by Nipper Read, raided the homes of 24 members of the Firm. Read personally arrested the twins.

  But, there is something decidedly odd about the generally agreed date of their arrest – 9 May – for The Evening News and Star ran the following headline on Wednesday, 8 May, a good few hours before the Krays were arrested: ‘YARD ARREST KRAY TWINS AND BROTHER… 18 men held for questioning after 100 police swoop on London homes.’

  The whereabouts of the remains of Frank Mitchell and Jack McVitie have never been established. Theories circulated, some based on court evidence and others on gossip which had worked its way along the grapevine in the East End. No one was found guilty of Mitchell’s murder and he remains officially on the run from Dartmoor Prison. But Albert Donaghue, a member of the Firm who turned Queen’s evidence, claimed in court that he knew how his body had been disposed of.

  He alleged that Freddie Foreman and others had taken it into the country where it had been cut up and burned. He also claimed that Foreman had described Mitch
ell’s brain as tiny and that, when they removed his heart, there were three bullets lodged inside. McVitie’s body was variously rumoured to have been buried in the concrete foundations of a City tower block, burned in the furnaces of Bankside power station, and turned into pig food. Another, more likely, theory was that the body was given to an undertaker for secret disposal.

  George Cornell is buried at the Camberwell New Cemetery. The grave is situated at the end of the main drive, on the left kerbside, facing the left-hand chapel.

  Once behind bars, the twins had time to reflect on what had happened. Reggie said, ‘Everyone in London was talking about us. It was getting to the point when either the police had to break us up or we would have broken them. But the party was over, it had been great while it lasted.’

  Even locked up in Brixton Prison, the twins were confident they could still escape justice. Every day, their mother brought them lunch, usually cold chicken and a bottle of wine, while friends would drop by with news from the outside world. With their cousin, Ronnie Hart, and Ronnie’s minder, Ian Barrie, still at large, most people who knew them thought they could continue to ensure that no one would talk. Even when these two failed to escape Nipper Read’s net, the Krays still believed the wall of silence would hold strong – how wrong they were.

  Slowly, the first seeds of doubt crept into their minds as the messages reaching them grew more pessimistic. Their fears were confirmed at the preliminary hearings held at Old Street Magistrates Court on 6 July 1968. To generate as much publicity as possible, the twins asked for all press restrictions to be lifted. ‘We want the world to see the diabolical liberties the law has been taking,’ Reggie said.

  Journalists were delighted – the trial would be the biggest they had witnessed for years. The twins were less happy when into the witness box stepped Billy Exley, a former bodyguard of Ronnie’s who had been on watch the day of Cornell’s killing.