Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror

by Lambrianou, Tony

  We got into the store at midnight and ran round the different departments, picking up fur coats and carpets to cover the safe with so as to muffle the bang. But gelignite has got to be kept cool and dry, and the heat was making ours start to run. It was too dangerous to use – we would have blown half of Somerset away. So we had to find another way.

  I went for a walk around the Co-op and found a 14lb sledgehammer. But the safe had a steel door, solidly built into concrete. The counter was built round it. I was smashing this hammer into the concrete and making no impression whatsoever. Then we went right to the back of the store, by the railway, where we found an oxy-acetylene bottle and a flame gun. So we set about cutting the safe. We were half an inch away from getting the door open when we ran out of gas….

  We read in the next issue of the local paper that the safe had contained nine grand, which was a lot of money in those days. Before we’d left the store, however, Keeling had picked up a little jewel box with two diamond rings in it. When we arrived back in London, he gave one to me and one to a girlfriend he was having an affair with. She put it on, not realising it was worth £6,000. She was in a café one day when the guv’nor, a Jewish guy called Day, said to her, ‘That’s a lovely ring.’

  She said, ‘Phil gave it to me.’

  Obviously he knew a bit about jewellery, so what did he do? He picked up the phone.

  Just after this I walked round to Great Eastern Street, near the City, where Keeling lived. His wife was in tears, saying, ‘The police have taken Phil away.’

  I went home, got my ring and immediately had it valued: it was worth £2,600. I got rid of it through certain channels, and two days later I was nicked. Keeling’s wife had obviously mentioned my name.

  They picked me up at my father’s house in Queensbridge Road and took me to Cannon Row police station. I was brought to the Flying Squad offices and from there I was taken by train from Paddington to Taunton, cuffed up to an officer throughout the journey.

  I was held at Taunton police station for two days pending an appearance at Ilminster Magistrates Court. Keeling was charged with the explosives side of it, and I was charged with shopbreaking and breaking and entry. Keeling was pleading guilty, which left me nowhere. His girlfriend pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property. I was kept in custody for another week without bail. Then I was granted bail, and finally I was given three years’ probation.

  But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. Two officers involved in arresting me turned up at the house not long afterwards in a grey Rover. The heavy one was an out-and-out bruiser who was as bent as a nine bob note, as was publicly proven later.

  They said to me, ‘We want you to go and pick up some insurance money.’

  What happens when property is stolen is that the insurance companies pay a reward when there’s a conviction. It’s supposed to be paid to the person who gave information to the police, leading to the conviction. In this case I committed the crime, the two officers solved it and now they were putting me up as a beneficiary so I would sign for the money. Then I was expected to hand it over to them.

  I didn’t know what was going on at the time. I just went with them to the insurance claims building off Albert Embankment and received an envelope with money in it, which the policemen took off me. They couldn’t claim for it because they weren’t allowed to. They were supposed to give it to the person who put them on to the recovery of the property, but it ended up in their pockets. That’s how naive I was in those days. I didn’t realise what was happening until it was over.

  Just before they left me, they said: ‘Thank you very much for your help. You got your result in court….’

  And so I walked away from the whole episode a wiser man, at least as far as the law was concerned.

  Life carried on as normal with the rackets and the clip joints. I was running around in my own Zephyr, I was always dressed smartly and I was never short of a few bob, but my parents never asked any questions and I never felt that I had to explain where I got my money from.

  My mother and father were straight people. My brothers and I, on the other hand, had our fingers in the pie. If my mother had known we were giving her money gained from crime, she wouldn’t have wanted it. Yet she wasn’t a fool. She saw the type of people we were mixing with, she saw that money was coming into the house and she knew that we were up to no good in some way. But she just never said anything about it because I feel, deep down, she didn’t want to know.

  I think my Dad knew a little bit of what was going on but, like any father, would tend to ignore it until we brought the problem home. He’d voice his opinions, especially if he didn’t like someone in our scene, and we’d argue with him, but at the end of the day we respected and listened to him.

  But by and large he wasn’t a man to interfere. His sons were six feet tall, looking for trouble all the time, fearing no one. Because of his lack of English he didn’t understand a lot of it. But he understood it when we got into trouble, and if trouble came, he was there regardless of what. We were his sons and that was it. He was very, very proud of us. Same with my mother. She believed that her boys were being singled out by the police, that there was a vendetta going on about getting Chris put away, and she lost a lot of respect for authority.

  My mother and father were people who would help anybody. Sometimes it would involve criminals. If Chris had been in a fight with a couple of his pals, my mother was the first to dress their wounds. I have never known my parents refuse anybody a cup of tea and a meal. They were as good an influence as they could possibly be under the circumstances, and we brought them a lot of heartbreak. Yes, we did that. And there was more of it to come.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CASHING IN ON CHAOS

  I was nineteen when my brother Jimmy went to work at a refrigeration depot which had opened about a hundred yards from where we lived in Queensbridge Road. It was owned by a man called Carlo Gatti, who was known as the Ice King of the East End. He had originally made his money selling ice to fish stalls and shops. The depot was purpose-built and it contained four massive stores, each set at a different temperature. If you had turkey for Christmas from his deep freeze, you could bet your life it was seven years old. Meat traders from all over London used to store their goods at the depot, and various frozen-food firms had contracts to put their fish and pies and other foods in there.

  Jimmy and a couple of his mates were taken on as porters, and he said to me one day, ‘Why don’t you go over there and get a job?’ So I did. And before long we had about nine of our pals working with us. We used to have to come to work with donkey jackets, thick trousers and socks, steel-capped boots, hats and gloves because it was so cold in there. But we were on to a good thing. We were stealing meat, topsides, silversides, steaks … half the stock was disappearing, and we were earning bundles.

  Jimmy and I had the power in the workforce. If there were any problems in the firm, Jim the manager and Pete the assistant manager would come to us and we’d sort it out. Inevitably we’d cause trouble every now and again; so they had further reason to ask for help, and we would end up getting more out of them. One day one of the lorry drivers from Smithfield Meat Market pulled in and asked, ‘Are you organised in here?’.

  I said, ‘What do you mean, organised?’

  ‘Union,’ he said.

  Once you’re in with the Meat Market, you’ve got a job for life. So of course we were very interested.

  He said, ‘If I talk to one of our boys, perhaps we can enlighten you on how to get a union here: Any problems, we can back you.’

  Jim and Pete got to hear that the union was becoming very interested in this cold store, and they didn’t like it. As things stood, the management could pay lower wages and sack the staff, and they could continue hiring out storage space to frozen-food companies, which would be in contravention of the union rules: the Meat Market handled meat, and meat alone.

  We appointed a bloke called Ted to be our union official, the puppet who
did what we told him, and a few days later the same driver came to see us. He said, ‘You know the Meat Market have been trying to get this place in the union since it opened, but we won’t go in there while it’s handling frozen food and all that. Go away and think about it….’

  The prize was a Meat Market ticket. Ten of us were strong for the union, and six, led by a half-gypsy called Spike, were against it. We called a meeting, at which I said: ‘We’re on strike, call the management in and tell them we want to join the union.’ We had already told this lorry driver we intended to come out, and the Meat Market had trucks parked up and down Queensbridge Road. We set up a picket line straightaway – me, Jimmy and the boys, and Leon too. A union representative gave Carlo Gatti the message: ‘The boys are definitely not going back. Not a lorry is going to pass the picket.’

  Gatti wasn’t giving in. He thought that he could beat the unions, but he was a doomed man. The six employees who were against the strike were just standing around doing nothing. Four of them were told what would happen to them if they went in there again, and immediately left their jobs. Spike and his brother were not so easily intimidated, but after we bashed them up they left too.

  We had support from everywhere. No lorries attempted to cross the picket lines, except for a few frozen-food firm vehicles. We approached them, threatened the drivers and punctured the tyres. Other than that, we didn’t take a lot of notice of them. They had no power anyway. The strike lasted for five months, during which time the Meat Market was having a whip-round for us, plus we were nicking food from the cold store.

  It all ended up with us getting our tickets into the Meat Market, so Jimmy, Leon, Timmy Reynolds, Ted and I and a couple of others left the depot and started work at Smithfield. We left Carlo Gatti to pick up the pieces of a completely ruined firm. He lost all his contracts, and the strike sent him virtually bankrupt.

  It was during our time at the Meat Market that we became involved in the Oswald Mosley riots in London. We were approached by a friend of ours who was a minder at a dancehall in Dalston and also a Meat Market man. He was very friendly with Mosley; a Nazi who was notorious for his anti-Semitic rants and the violent confrontations they provoked with members of the Jewish community. This bloke said to us one day, ‘You know the area really well. Mosley wants to do a bit of talking in Dalston. You could have a few mates up there to create a fracas while he’s talking.’

  Mosley was a guaranteed crowd-puller, and he’d have heavies scattered throughout the gatherings to get everyone going. His aim was to attract publicity.

  Next thing, we were in Dalston Junction with the Meat Market boys in a crowd of about a thousand; there were riots going on, mass fights with all sorts of weapons, and Mosley was on the news. We weren’t in it for anything other than the money. On that occasion, and on several others afterwards, we were getting £50 a time to be out there Jew-baiting. There’s a lot of money in racial issues. Mosley was never short of a bob or two, and he always found money to throw around.

  I have never, ever liked what they did, the Nazis. Anybody who could approve of the terrible things they were responsible for has got to be sick in the mind. It just didn’t occur to us at the time that by being at the rallies we were supporting them. To us it was just a few quid. We treated these people purely on a financial basis – we were in it for what we could get out of it.

  Jimmy and I and our friend Davy Sadler were also picking up a bit of cash for going on Nazi manoeuvres which were organised by Mosley’s right-hand man, Colin Jordan. These often took place in Dorset, sometimes on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Occasionally, he’d have his fifty or sixty men marching around Dartmoor.

  We got into this by accident; through Davy Sadler. He was a giant, about six feet seven, though his father Jimmy was a midget of four feet ten. We used to go round to his flat in Hoxton to play cards; we’d all be sitting there gambling while his father, this midget, would be running round getting teas and drinks.

  A fanatical SS lover, Davy used to collect uniforms. You very rarely came across a genuine Gestapo or German uniform; if you did, it was a collector’s item. His bedroom was covered in SS flags, and he had dummies dressed in all these Gestapo uniforms. He had machine-guns and pistols in there too. One day, he dressed himself up and went marching up and down the heavily Jewish area of Stamford Hill wearing the uniform, the boots, the lot.

  Davy organised a holiday for me, Terry Smith and the Venables brothers down in Devon. When we got there, we were each given a .303 rifle, old army issue. He said, ‘We’re going for training.’

  I said, ‘I thought we’d come down here for a holiday.’

  We stayed for a week, during which time we shot a cow in a field. Stories about the manoeuvres began to appear in the papers, so we disappeared and came back to London. Despite the fact that he lived, and really believed in himself, as a Nazi, I always saw Davy Sadler as a useful person to have around – ‘We can always do with one of those.’

  After this period, my Jimmy dropped out of things completely – just retreated into the background. He’d come out occasionally, socialising, or to offer brotherly support, but we never involved him in anything again. He went into legitimate business. Had he not, he would have wound up the same as us. By this time he’d met his wife-to-be, a Hoxton girl called Carol, who married him in 1963.

  However, before that wedding there was another one: mine. I hadn’t yet turned twenty when Pat informed me that she was expecting a baby, so we decided to get married. It delighted my parents, but I didn’t like the idea of becoming a father one bit. It was a responsibility, and at that time I had no sense of responsibility.

  We were married in the register office at Shoreditch Town Hall on 23 August 1962. Leon was the best man; Chris was still away on his Corrective Training. I wore a blue serge suit, white shirt, blue tie and black shoes. I remember buying Pat a nice dress and matching coat in beige.

  I thought the whole thing was a big joke – I remember bursting out laughing when I took the marriage vows. Pat took it all rather seriously, but my view at that time was, ‘If it keeps her happy, don’t worry about it.’ We got in the car and drove home after the ceremony, and my mother was crying, but that afternoon I went out as usual. Pat and I went out to the dogs in the evening, and then for a meal, with Leon and June: I won £800 at the racetrack, so that was a nice little start for us.

  It was only later that the whole significance of the day occurred to me. I thought, ‘God almighty, I’m a married man and I’m only twenty!’ But being married didn’t mean that everything had to stop. My brothers and I always tended to do what we wanted anyway, and I carried on going out and about with my mates.

  I saw some pressure at home with Pat, though. We needed somewhere on our own, especially with the baby coming. Leon was living in a house in Blythe Street, and he introduced me to the landlord. Pat and I moved into number 22, the top flat next door, and Jimmy and Carol eventually took the flat above Leon. Nicky stayed at home in Queensbridge Road until he was nineteen, when he moved in with his girlfriend, Cathy Reilly, a Bethnal Green girl.

  My daughter Karen Lee came along on 13 October 1962; she was born in Bethnal Green Hospital at five past midnight on a Tuesday morning. I’d been on the phone all Monday night trying to find out what was happening. When I found out that Pat had had a 71/21b baby girl, I rushed over with my mother to see her.

  I felt absolutely great. It’s yours, and nothing can ever take that away from you.

  When we brought the baby home, my mother wouldn’t let her out of her arms. Now she had a daughter, the first girl born to the family. And as the weeks went past, she took the baby over; my Mum almost brought her up. Everybody was thrilled about it. Leon and Nicky were always making a fuss of her, and she was spoilt rotten. She was a beautiful baby, my pride and joy, and this was a very happy period for me.

  The happiness, unfortunately, came to a standstill for a while when Karen was a year old.

  On 6 October 1963 I was sent away
for my first term of imprisonment. I’d been arrested one night after going out drinking with Timmy Reynolds and two other blokes called Frankie Hawkey and Jimmy Cribbin. We were all walking along Bethnal Green Road, and as we turned into the top of Vallance Road we went down an alley to pass water. Two constables came along and accused us of attempting to steal a motor car. We were taken to Bethnal Green police station and charged with that offence. I was put up as the ringleader and kept in custody, while the other three were bailed out.

  At that time there was a CID officer at the station who was determined to make life as miserable as possible for my brothers and me. His name was Sergeant Gray. If he could nick one or other of us it was great, so he was in his glory when they got me. Next thing, my Jimmy, Leon and a few of our pals turned up at the police station and Jimmy threatened to bash him up.

  The arrest was on a Saturday night. On the Monday morning, Thames magistrates committed us for trial to the London Sessions, and heard our applications for bail. Timmy, Frankie and Jimmy Cribbin had no problems, but the police objected strongly to releasing me and said they believed I’d been interfering with witnesses. However, the magistrate, Donald London, said: ‘I don’t see how you can grant bail to three men and keep one in custody.’ So we were all granted bail, and subsequently stood trial. Jimmy Cribbin and I were sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment, Frankie was sent to a Corrective Training centre and Timmy received a Borstal sentence.

  I found myself first of all in Wormwood Scrubs, but within a few weeks was moved to Eastchurch prison on the Isle of Sheppey. There was a lot of trouble in Eastchurch. A laundry burned down in mysterious circumstances, so they moved about thirty of us out to different prisons. I had nothing to do with the laundry, but I wanted to get out of Eastchurch anyway – it was like a military camp. I went to Canterbury and from there was transferred to Stafford. Several months into my sentence, another con in Stafford asked me: ‘What are you nicked for?’