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

by Lambrianou, Tony

  The Assistant Governor came to see me. He said that that day, no matter what happened, I had to report to my probation officer, Mr Goode. He also passed me my life licence, and asked me to sign. I was told I had to read it carefully. A lot of people seem to think a life sentence finishes when the prisoner is released. Far from it. A life sentence is never over. You are only released on licence, and if you get arrested again for so much as a fight in a pub you can be recalled to prison to finish serving life.

  The licence carried my name at the top, and it stated the conditions I was going to live under for the rest of my life: I was to be under the supervision of a nominated probation officer, report to him as often as he told me to, receive visits from him at home, live and work only in places approved by him, and get his permission before I could travel anywhere outside Great Britain. At the bottom was a sentence which summed up the absolute power this document would have over me: ‘Unless revoked this licence remains in force indefinitely’. In other words, if I broke any of the conditions I would have my licence withdrawn and I’d be straight back in the nick. And it would only take one person with a grudge to pick up a phone….

  It was twenty past nine in the morning, and I was standing at Maidstone prison gates. I was about to walk out for the last time when PO Sneed called me back. He said, ‘You forgot your rail ticket. Remember this is a one-way. No return.’ My brothers had offered to pick me up, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any crowd outside the gate. I just wanted to walk away from it on my own. It was important that I did this.

  I wandered down County Road to the station. It was a nice, summery day, pretty mild, and I sat down with a bag and a case at Maidstone East, waiting for the train to come in. In my mind, I was thinking about the past. Would there be any comebacks from what had happened? Did people still remember? What would be their reaction to me around where I lived? What was Chris doing? He was being released on the same day from Wormwood Scrubs hostel, and going to live in Banbury, in Oxfordshire. He wanted nothing more to do with London. I was going back to the East End because I considered it my home. It was where I had been brought up; it was what I knew and it was where my wife and kids were living.

  My marriage itself had, however, died a long time back. It was just a convenient thing at the time to keep it going, however superficially, because of the terms of the licence and the condition that I had to have an approved address. I didn’t know what to expect from Pat when I moved back in. I just wanted to push the problem to the back of my mind.

  I arrived at Victoria Station and, for the first time in fifteen years, I was a free man in my own eyes. That’s when it hit me. In Victoria. I was back in the city. I thought, ‘Things haven’t changed that much,’ although it was certainly a hell of a lot faster.

  It was about 11.30, and I was starving. In prison, you got your dinner about that time. I didn’t want to booze, like I thought I might. I just walked around Victoria, and went over and had a coffee beside the theatre. All I could smell was food, and I realised I could have it. For the first time in years, I could have things. I could buy a paper without having to wait for someone to bring it in, hours late. I could actually smell women around, the femininity, without seeing them. I still couldn’t help staring. Everything was a novelty, even after six months of semi-freedom at the hostel.

  I took a tube to Mile End, and when I got there my son David was waiting with about eight of his mates outside the station. One of them had a book about the Krays and he was looking at it, trying to recognise me. David spotted me, and one of his friends, Raymond, took my case. Scott, his brother, took my bag. We all walked along towards where we lived, and every time I turned round, David and his pals were looking at me. I said, ‘Are you going to have a drink with me?’ They were only sixteen or seventeen years old, and there I was wanting to take them into a pub. By now I was on a high, and I didn’t want to go back to the house.

  We went into the Coburn Arms off Mile End Road. I pulled out a £20 note for a round of drinks, and the barmaid gave me about £8 back. I said, ‘Have you made a mistake?’

  The boys were looking at me – ‘What’s he on about?’ When I went away, 1s 9d got you a bottle of lager, 2s 9d got you a packet of Benson and Hedges, and 4s 6d bought a gallon of petrol. The currency had gone decimal since then and the money we handled in prison was black market, worth about half of its face value, so I didn’t understand the worth of money in the real world at all.

  There I was sitting in the pub with all David’s lot. Not one of them asked me a thing! We left there and went to the house, and Pat was there. So was Karen. We sat indoors. Pat said, ‘Do you want something to eat? It’s nice to see you home.’ It was no great big thing to her. There were no banners out or anything.

  I had a cup of tea and then I slipped out to see John Goode, the probation officer, in his office in Mile End Road. I’d met him before in the hostel. He said the police had been informed I’d been released, and he told me: ‘For the foreseeable future, you’ll be reporting to me once a week. You know the rules. You’ve got to live like I tell you. If you’re going to get a job, I have to be told immediately. You’ve got to tell me more or less everything. Any problems, get in touch immediately.’ There was something about him that I wasn’t sure about, something which told me that he and I weren’t going to see eye to eye….

  I wandered back to the house at about five, and watched the six o’clock news. And I thought to myself, ‘What am I going to do now?’ For years, all I’d been thinking about at this time of the evening was getting ready for bed, collecting the papers and the boiling water for the flasks, maybe getting a sandwich. Six months in a hostel was hardly what it took to break the habits of what seemed like a lifetime. It certainly didn’t prepare me for what I was facing now. Here I was, a free man without limits on my first day of proper freedom, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was bored. Lost. I didn’t have any of the boys around me.

  I thought, ‘I’ll go and have a drink,’ but I didn’t want to walk out of the house. It was my security. Unbeknown to me, I was making other prisons for myself. I had become institutionalised and as the weeks went by, the symptoms became apparent. I wouldn’t come out of the kitchen, because it was the smallest room. It became a cell to me. I wanted to be alone for periods of time. I would get very tired around nine at night, and I was always awake by 7.30 the next day. Your day is very short in prison, and I wanted my days to be the same out here.

  I had brought so many of my prison habits home with me. I’d keep a flask around me, which I didn’t need. If I bought more than two ounces of tobacco, which was the regulation limit in the nick, I’d hide the extra in a cupboard: I carried on smoking roll-ups: it didn’t occur to me to buy cigarettes for eighteen months. I’d go mad at the sound of a loud radio. I’d make my bed in the prison way the instant I got up, with the sheets and blankets boxed up and the pillow sitting on top. I used to watch policemen. To me, they were screws. Many a copper said to me, ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ I still tend to avoid uniforms.

  Quite a few of these old prison habits have remained with me to this day. I still mash my food up, and I’ve got to have a good supply of tinned soup. I’m as fanatical as ever about cleanliness. Every last spoon has to be washed up after dinner, my bathroom is always spotless, and I cannot stand dirty ashtrays: I have to keep getting up to empty them.

  My first few weeks of freedom were much the same as the first day: empty. Leon would come down, Jimmy would come down, they’d stay a few hours and then they were gone. I was with a wife who had become a total stranger to me and a son and daughter who didn’t know me. I couldn’t act naturally around women I met in the course of everyday life. I was frightened of them. I’d get very, very embarrassed and find nothing to say. But the strangest feeling of all was that I had nothing to hate any more.

  I was confused, too. I’d come out to a different world. Going dutch? I didn’t know what the bleeding hell they were on about. I
didn’t know what women’s lib was. I’d been brought up to believe that the old man was King of the Castle. I couldn’t understand why people weren’t giving their seats to ladies on the bus. Men were swearing in front of women, and women were drinking as hard as the men. Women were making approaches. I couldn’t believe the sort of crime that was going on, the raping and mugging and the extent of it. In my own way I was still twenty-six, the age I went away at, and I was still in the sixties. Prison suspends time. And I was finding it very difficult to adjust to life out of prison.

  I started drinking. I went out to pubs with Jumbo, who was married to Pat’s Aunt Gladys, and another bloke called Ronnie Lloyd. They were hard, decent, working people, rough and ready and totally honest. They loved their drink, loved their fag, loved their bet. They lived their lives to the full the way they wanted. When I came out of prison I was A1, in top condition. Within six months I had ballooned up to sixteen stone. They were professional drinkers, and I just couldn’t keep up with them. But it was by being in their company that I started to feel accepted again. And I stumbled across a very interesting truth indeed: people were falling over themselves to give me money. For nothing. It all began when I started having a Sunday lunchtime drink with Jumbo and Ronnie in the East End. That’s when I realised how legendary the twins and the firm had become. People really wanted to know me. Some of them thought that by giving me money they could buy my friendship, which would give them ‘prestige’ in the eyes of their mates. Some of them thought that by slipping me a few quid I might be able to do them a favour one day. But others genuinely did believe I had felt the rough end of British justice, and wanted to see me get on in life. They all had one thing in common: they wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  One Sunday dinnertime, in a pub called the Bancroft Arms in Mile End Road, I was handed a brown envelope containing £500. It was from a building contractor called Joe The Beard. I was told that an envelope would be left behind the bar for me every Sunday. People just don’t give you £500 for nothing every week. I didn’t even know the bloke, but when I did get to know him he told me: ‘I wanted to give you this money as a sign of my respect. I couldn’t have done what you did – fifteen years for keeping your mouth shut.’

  I met bookmakers, club owners, business people, all asking, ‘Do you need a few quid?’ As it happens, I had a little bit left from before I went away, although not a lot, and I didn’t ask any of these people for a penny. If I refused their money, they’d give it to someone else to give to me. I was given a car by five different people. I was offered two pubs and a business, none of which I accepted. At that time I couldn’t have run a scooter, never mind a business. I would go into restaurants and clubs and I wouldn’t be given a bill. I suppose the owners thought that the very fact that I was there might stop problems. I would have been a fool not to take advantage of it. If people wanted to shower me with things, who was I to refuse them? Especially when I was, and still am, what they call ‘unemployable’.

  By law, I had to go and ‘sign on’ after I was released from the hostel. I was given a letter and told to take it with me to the office. This I duly did, and I was told to sit down and wait. Ten minutes later, I was called into an upstairs room to talk to three men. Their attitude towards the idea of me finding a job was this: ‘Go away, we’ll send you a giro, don’t worry about it.’

  One of them said, ‘In my experience of dealing with the unemployed, I’m at a loss with you, Mr Lambrianou. One, what have we got to offer you in your line of business? And two, who in their right mind would employ you?’

  I must admit, I had to agree with him.

  Things were getting very hard to handle in my home life. On paper, everything was lovely. But something was missing between me and Pat. My daughter had grown up into a woman of twenty-one with a very strong personality. David was fifteen, and he saw me as a challenge. If I sat down next to Pat, he’d get up and walk out of the room. I tried in my own way to be friendly, and I put up with weeks of being stared at by David and his friends. Every time I came into the room, it was like walking into six pairs of eyes. I expected David to do my running around. I’d say, ‘Shoot round and get me a paper.’ He started giving me these looks, half taking me on. If I wanted an ounce of tobacco, I wanted it there and then. I could lose my temper very quickly. What I’d done was transfer my prison into the home. Looking back on it, I can see that. At the time, I didn’t.

  My answer to it all was to bribe him. I’d give him a tenner to go round and get me tobacco. If he wanted to go out with his mates, I’d give him a fifty. It meant nothing to me: I still hadn’t come to terms with the value of money, especially when total strangers kept coming along and giving it to me. But David resented it. I made an enemy of him by doing that. If I said anything to him, he’d go and tell Pat and it would cause a row. That caused more resentment. If I turned his music down, he didn’t like it. ‘Why do I have to do what he tells me?’ Also, my daughter comes into the frame here a lot. She was holding a grudge against me over an argument which happened during one of my weekends on leave from the hostel.

  It began on a Saturday when I refused to take Pat to Karen’s shoe shop in Bethnal Green. The shop, Robert Shoes, was owned by Karen’s common-law husband, a Turk called Ken. He was a nice fella, a bit older than Karen, and he gave her security and everything she wanted. But my dad was a Greek, and Turks and Greeks do not get on. In the back of my mind, my family background loomed up very close here. I wouldn’t have interfered in Karen’s life, but I didn’t particularly like the situation and I was watching it very closely.

  Throughout my prison life I always had something to take my grievances out on, and I suppose I looked for it here. Pat wanted to go to the shop, and I said no. The next Friday, when I arrived home for the weekend, Karen was waiting there with Pat. Karen said, ‘Don’t you think you can get away with what you did last Saturday. Any trouble out of you, and out you go.’

  No one spoke to me like that, especially not in my own home where the father was the head of the household. I went mad. I grabbed hold of her and I said, ‘If you ever speak to me like that again, I’ll wallop you from one end of the room to the other.’

  She started to scratch me, so rightly or wrongly I gave her a smack. She shouldn’t have spoken to me like she did.

  Karen was never the same towards me after that. So now, here I was in a house where I felt like a stranger. David was half-challenging me, and Karen was giving me a bit of a bad time, trying to run my life like a prison Governor. She was causing me a lot of grief.

  I didn’t know how to handle it. I had no idea. So I started laying down the law. I said, ‘Now look, this is my home. I pay the bills, you do as you’re told.’ Little did I realise what was going on. They were ganging up on me, the three of them.

  Then Pat did something very stupid. She went to see John Goode, the probation officer, and she told him I’d been getting a bit aggressive. She said known criminals were coming to the house. No, they weren’t. She said there were mystery phone calls in the middle of the night. That was a total fabrication.

  I was certainly up during the night. After breaking away from my prison sleeping habits, I’d become hyperactive. I wanted to do a thousand things an hour, and I couldn’t sleep.

  I went to see John Goode and he was like a different person. He said, ‘You’ve got to get out of your house. Pat and Karen and David have been over here, and things aren’t working out with you. If you don’t find another place in fourteen days, you’ll have to go back to the hostel.’

  I could not believe it. I went straight round to Pat’s aunt’s, where I knew she would be, and I went absolutely potty. They must have called about sixty police round there, but they didn’t want to get involved, even though they knew who I was and they knew I was on a licence. They looked upon it as a domestic dispute.

  The terms of my licence were such that, if I wanted to watch BBC and Pat wanted to watch Coronation Street, all she had to do was pick up the phone and
say I was playing up in the hope that she would get me recalled. Which is exactly what she’d done. I’d just come back from sixteen years, and I’d wound up with a family and a parole officer who had it in for me.

  My freedom was on the line here, so I made Pat’s life a misery. I made things as difficult as possible because I didn’t want to give the flat up. I wanted her to leave it. It was my place anyway. I got to her guv’nor at work. He was told to sack her - I suppose you could say a bit of intimidation was involved. I made sure nobody would talk to her. She went to Charlie Kray in desperation, but he couldn’t get involved. It was nothing to do with him.

  So she left. She went to stay at her aunt’s with David. I thought that because it was my home and in my name, nobody had any legal right to kick me out of it. But Pat got in touch with John Goode again and said she needed the flat back. He told me I was leaving, and there was nothing more I could do.

  I was sent to an after-release hostel in Camberwell. I wasn’t subject to any rules, but I was under observation and I had to sign in and out. They were keeping me under what they thought was a little bit of control.

  I had to go back to the flat, occasionally, to get clothes – which David would pass out to me. By now, he had become a sort of middle man, the one member of the family I could communicate with without too much hostility. Next thing, I had every conceivable type of injunction slapped on me. I wasn’t to go near the house, and I wasn’t allowed to approach my children.

  Injunctions were all very well, but there were things in the flat that I needed. One day in April 1984 I went round to get some stuff and had an argument with Pat. Again, it ended up with the law being called in. I arrived back at the hostel to be surrounded by police. There were so many of them milling around that they obviously thought I’d committed a crime. I was taken to Carter Street police station and held in a cell. Pat had gone back to John Goode and told him there’d been an incident. He’d gone right ahead, phoned the Home Office and got me recalled.