London's Gangs at War

by Dick Kirby

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘Did you say anything about it when you gave your evidence in chief at the retrial?’

  ‘I’m not familiar with the words “in chief”.’

  ‘Did you say anything about it while you were being examined by Mr Griffith-Jones?’

  ‘No’.

  ‘When did you intend to volunteer it?’

  ‘When I was asked. Then I would have volunteered it.’

  ‘Supposing no one had asked you, what would you have done?’

  ‘I would have seen my solicitor or I would have had to see the prosecuting counsel.’

  ‘Why didn’t it occur to you to do that before the second trial if you knew your story was true?’

  ‘I’m not familiar with court procedure. I’m lost in these surroundings.’

  ‘It didn’t occur to you, knowing that Simons was not there [on the first floor] to tell anyone?’

  ‘I thought it would be best kept to myself until it could be told to the prosecution.’

  Sammons also stated that Joan Bending was so drunk she had to be assisted down the stairs. But again, he had also not mentioned this previously, and when this was put to Bending, she replied, ‘Sammons is a liar.’

  When Simons was questioned about Bending’s capacity for alcohol, he told Durand, ‘She could put back as much as you would care to buy her’, which elicited the caustic reply, ‘I hope I will never be in your circle.’

  And when Durand suggested that Simons had remained on the second floor of the bar whilst the shooting was going on, Simons replied, ‘No, I’m telling you the truth. I’m not being paid, like some people.’

  It was unclear if he was referring to Durand, Sammons or any of the other witnesses.

  Summing up, the judge, referring to witnesses in the case, told the jury:

  Ambrose, you may think, does not help you very much. You may think he wasn’t trying to help you. David Sammons had said that Joan Bending was drunk and Johnny Simons was in the second floor bar at the time of the disturbance on the first floor. He said that for the first time last Monday. You may think there is no room for mistake and if he is lying, you may think the evidence of Simons of what happened in the first floor bar when the blows were struck is uncontradicted. None of the accused has gone into the witness box to tell you anything different. You will examine Simons’ evidence on its own merits. Did it bear the ring of truth under probing and skilful cross-examination? Has he been shown after he has given evidence now four times to have varied his account of what he saw? Is there any possible reason why he should be guilty of so wicked a fabrication, because if Sammons is right, it must be a complete and wicked fabrication against men against whom he had no previous grudge?

  After retiring for an hour and a quarter, the jury found Nash guilty of causing grievous bodily harm to Cooney and he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. In passing sentence, the judge told him:

  You have been found guilty on abundant evidence of a brutal assault upon a man who is now dead in a drinking club frequented by crooks. And as a result of the fight you started, there was such a panic that two men were shot. An example must be made of you and people like you.

  As Nash was led off to the cells, James Cooney, the murdered man’s father, cried out, ‘He killed my son; and I will kill him, that is a certainty’, leaving Nash’s barrister, Victor Durand, to murmur with almost unbelievable unctuousness, ‘That very outburst illustrates the strength of feeling that is to be seen in the currents that swirl about us’, piously adding that he hoped that the Pen Club would ‘not operate again’.

  Read and Pyle were acquitted of the same charge but were both convicted of being accessories after the fact; passing sentence on Read, the judge told him:

  You have been a professional boxer. You went to this drinking club, the resort of crooks and when Nash made a brutal attack on another man, you, as the jury have found, tried to prevent justice from taking its course. You and your like have got to learn that you cannot do that. I take into account you have been in prison for three months and have had hanging over your head a capital charge.

  Telling Pyle ‘You are in exactly the same position’ and having heard that they were ‘easily led’, the judge sentenced each of them to eighteen months’ imprisonment.

  The trial, which had cost £20,000, was over, and with the dock now empty of miscreants, the judge told the jury:

  I have no doubt you have been shocked to learn the sort of thing that is going on in this city. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is that some of these witnesses, and I have no doubt that you thought so with me, were scared, scared to tell the truth. It is a perfectly shocking thing.

  It was these remarks that the firebrand Labour MP for Northampton, Reggie Paget (later Baron Paget of Northampton QC), alluded to on 26 May during a House of Commons debate when he asked the Home Secretary, R.A. Butler (later Baron Butler of Saffron Walden KG, CH, PC, DL), whether ‘in view of Mr Justice Diplock’s observations from the Bench, he will institute a public enquiry into allegations as to intimidation of witnesses and jurors in the Pen Club trials?’

  The answer was short and succinct: ‘I do not think a public enquiry would be appropriate.’

  That was a pity. It is difficult to imagine a more serious miscarriage of justice in a murder trial, and the perpetrators later had the gall to publicly boast about what they had done and how they did it.

  By their own accounts, Freddie Forman and Reggie Kray were responsible for much of the skulduggery which went on before and after the Magistrates’ Court appearances and the subsequent trials; and it begs the question, why did they do it? Was it because they thought that the three men were innocent? Certainly not. Was it because they were close associates? Again, unlikely. And yet the machinery was put in place to frighten some witnesses, injure others, nobble juries, provide lying witnesses and carry out wholesale intimidation, as well as providing a range of top class Queen’s Counsels for the prisoners’ defence.

  The answer is this: they were not demonstrating that they were above the law; they were setting out the fact to their fellow East Enders that they were the law. So when the Kray empire was smashed up, eight years and a few more murders later, it came not a moment too soon.

  Referring to the Pen Club affair, Foreman said, ‘It’s a pity that politicians and heads of state can’t settle their differences as effectively as we did.’

  This is an interesting comment, because it fits in quite well with the claims frequently made by him, the Krays and other gangland glitterati, who would assert, ‘Well, wimmin could walk the streets in safety in them days.’

  Mind you, that wouldn’t have included Fay Sadler, who had been frightened off to Ireland and who later departed from London, saying, ‘Cooney’s death was the end for me.’

  Nor, I expect, Joan Bending, who also left the capital. ‘I’m turning my back on the life I’ve known’, was her parting remark.

  Then there was the forty-five-year-old woman juror whose address was provided by her charmless husband to the three men accused of murder. And – oh yes – Simons’ girlfriend, once attractive Barbara Ibbotson, who retired to Yorkshire with her ruined face, which required one less stitch than her boyfriend had.

  So apart from those isolated instances, London’s East End in the 1960s was a veritable haven of safety for women.

  *

  All three men were refused leave to appeal, with Mr Justice Hilbery commenting on 21 January 1961 that there was ‘an abundance of evidence’ to secure their convictions.

  Chief Inspector Leslie Jones visited Fay Sadler’s club at Moor Street, Soho; of her, there was no trace. The local magistrate, Mr Barker, granted an application to strike off Mrs Sadler’s club but he was glumly informed that a new club was in existence at the same address, having been registered at the same court.

  The Pen Club was closed and boarded up. But the Shamrock Club, which immediately backed on to the Pen Club, was opened just after the murder. It was rai
ded and on the same day it was closed it opened again, this time as the Ricardo Club. The police only became aware of this after they were told by a social worker.

  Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravendale CBE took a passionate interest in these matters; the sixty-four year old peeress steamed into ‘one of the hottest strip-tease clubs in London’ situated just 150 yards from the Pen Club looking for ‘a lost girl from Newcastle’. The proprietor – described as ‘oily and cautious with excuses’ and said to have been connected with the Pen Club – had opened the present premises one week after the closure of the Pen Club. But despite the Baroness’s apparent disgust at the revolting behaviour which went on at this and other strip-tease clubs, she could be accused of double standards. She had a penchant for sleeping with married men, including the celebrated pianist Arthur Rubinstein on his wedding day, as well as her brother-in-law, the notorious Fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley.

  Billy Hill apparently offered to organize (but not necessarily fund) a spectacular gangland-style funeral for Cooney along the lines of those provided for Tommy ‘Scarface’ Smithson or William ‘Billy-Boy’ Blythe; the offer was flatly rejected by his dignified parents. Jimmy Nash was twice attacked in prison, apparently losing half an ear in one of these encounters. Johnny Simons was provided with a new life in Spain but returned disenchanted after three months. He visited Cooney’s parents in Leeds but at that city’s bus station he was attacked by three men who slashed him once in his arm and twice on his face, leaving a two-and-a-half-inch cut by his ear; twenty-seven stitches were required to sew him back together.

  *

  This little episode considerably strengthened Billy Ambrose’s position in the underworld. Not only had he maintained the skilful series of rebuttals in court demanded by the East End lowlifes, he had actually assisted the defence of those charged with attempting to murder him. He was ‘staunch’, wasn’t he? One of the chaps. In fact, the tributes went further than that: he was a ‘diamond geezer’, and there could be no greater accolade than that on the slippery streets of Stepney.

  Foreman hinted that Ambrose and Callaghan were employed by him carrying out ‘pavement jobs’ – armed robberies. The two of them later bought up betting shops in Stepney. And when the Great Train Robbery was pulled off in 1963, Ambrose’s name was one of eighteen on Tommy Butler’s list of possibles, but he was eliminated from the enquiry.

  In the mid-1970s he came to the attention of the Yard’s Serious Crime Squad after he moved into a rather prestigious house in Sandown Road, Esher, Surrey, just across the road from Sandown racetrack. Since these properties fetch anything from £2m to £3.5m at the time of writing, and because he was now driving a Rolls-Royce Corniche, he really could not expect to blush unseen. Whatever business he was involved in was definitely dodgy, and he was duly arrested and charged with being the leading light in a firm of international swindlers. Known as ‘The Hungarian Circle’, they used London as their base and carried out frauds world-wide; it was claimed at the Old Bailey that ‘they had the ability to bankrupt a small European country’. Ambrose filled the public gallery with his thugs, who scowled at the jury – old habits die hard – and he was acquitted. His leading accomplice went down for fifteen years. Billy Ambrose died in April 2009, aged seventy-nine; his wife Betty, who stayed with him during the bad times as well as the good, followed him to the grave four years later.

  Joey Pyle became as well known to the law-abiding public as had Billy Ambrose; that is to say, hardly at all. But he became one of the underworld’s most prolific members and had his fingers in any number of dodgy pies, being involved with protection, loan-sharking and drugs. Time and again he was arrested; in 1972 he was acquitted of possessing a gun, and seven years later he was cleared of conspiring to pervert the course of justice in the murder trial where John Bindon was accused, and acquitted, of murdering fellow gangster Johnny Darke.

  Pyle had links with the US mafia and in 1987 he was charged in connection with a £5m cannabis smuggling plot; he was released after a witness for the prosecution refused to give evidence. In 1992 he was convicted of drug trafficking after a retrial (during the first trial jurors had received death threats to induce them to return a not guilty verdict) and sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. He appealed, received a fresh trial and in 1995 was again convicted, although his sentence was reduced to one of nine years’ imprisonment. He died in February 2007 of motor neurone disease.

  The year after the Pen Club case, Victor Durand QC was suspended from practising for three years by the Masters of the Middle Temple after admitting concealing evidence during a trial. Naturally, he appealed. Naturally, the suspension was reduced to twelve months.

  William John Kenneth Diplock QC, who as Mr Justice Diplock presided over the murder trial, was later elevated to the peerage. Thirteen years later, he was responsible for founding what became known as ‘Diplock’ courts during the IRA offensive in Northern Ireland: trials were heard in front of a single judge, without juries being intimidated by the garbage in the dock and their supporters, or bamboozled by smart-arse lawyers; I witnessed several and thought they worked very well. However, I’m prejudiced; I like to see guilty people convicted.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Krays

  It seems to me that about once a week another book is published about the Kray brothers; each one contains startling new revelations about them and previous facts which everyone thought to be gospel are debunked.

  In outlining the history of the brothers Kray – briefly, I hope, because most Kray aficionados will be fully aware of what follows – any new disclosures will be few and far between. To grip your attention, I should love to impart to you that Ronnie Kray was the father of twenty-three illegitimate children or that Reggie was secretly married to Princess Margaret, but alas, neither would be true. Nevertheless, it is necessary to outline the accomplishments of the brothers to show how their preoccupation with gang warfare brought about their demise.

  The twins – Reggie and Ronnie – were born within ten minutes of each other on 24 October 1933 in Bethnal Green. They were the latest additions to the family of Charles David and Violet Annie Kray, who already had a son, also named Charles, who was seven years older than his siblings; a daughter, Violet, born in 1929, died in infancy. By the time the Second World War arrived, the family had moved to 178 Vallance Rd; and even at this early age, it was clear that the twins would fight any of their contemporaries, as well as each other, at the drop of a hat. They came from a fighting family; whilst their father was not a violent man, his father was known as ‘Mad Jimmy’ Kray, a well-known street-fighter, whilst the twins’ maternal grandfather was boxer Jimmy ‘Cannonball’ Lee.

  Any parental control was minimal; their father deserted from the army and was away from home for long periods, while their mother doted on them (and vice versa) and refused to acknowledge any of their wrongdoing. So when Reg was arrested, aged twelve, for firing an airgun out of a train window, Violet was furious – but only with the police. Father Hetherington from the local church spoke up for Reg (as he would do on several more occasions) and he was placed on probation; however, a condition of the order was that he should attend the local boxing club in order to instil a little order into his life. In fact, both boys already trained at a lads’ boxing club south of the river, so to have this made the a subject of an order suited Reg down to the ground; and where he went, Ron followed. Boxing became a religion to them; a gym was fitted out on the first floor of Vallance Road and they trained incessantly. They fought as amateurs and also in fairground boxing booths; their fighting skills were honed in beating up anyone who crossed them and even people who didn’t. They were now gathering an arsenal of weapons, including a revolver which they hid under the floorboards in their bedroom; their home was nicknamed ‘Fort Vallance’.

  In 1950 came their first serious confrontation with the law. Sixteen-year-old Roy Harvey and two friends were attacked in the street; Harvey had been punched hard on the nose, in both eyes and
kicked all over his body, then mercilessly thrashed with a bicycle chain and left for dead. The twins were committed in custody from North London Magistrates’ Court to stand their trial at the Old Bailey, but between committal and trial witnesses who had been appropriately ‘spoken to’ (a typist was told she would have her face slashed) suddenly lost their memories and the trial collapsed.

  One of their contemporaries referred to them as ‘A thoroughly evil pair of little bastards’. It was an epithet that was not undeserved.

  The twins were seventeen when they became professional boxers, Reg, at five feet seven a lightweight and Ron, two inches taller, a welterweight. But a week after Ron’s second bout he was arrested for punching Police Constable Donald Baynton on the jaw; hearing the news, Reg roamed the streets until he found the self-same constable and attacked him, too.

  Aided and abetted by Father Hetherington, the local magistrate (probably believing with considerable justification that the brothers had had the living shit knocked out of them whilst in police custody) placed them on probation.

  It is perhaps surprising that they were allowed to keep their licences during their five-month professional career, but they did and Reg won all seven of his bouts. At their final appearance, on 11 December 1951, all three brothers appeared on the same bill at Earls Court Empress Hall. Charlie, in the last of his eighteen bouts, was knocked out by Lew Lazar. Ron won four of his bouts and was disqualified in one – Bill Sliney (whom Reg had beaten twice) won on points.

  If Billy Ambrose had imparted any words of wisdom to the twins in respect of National Service when they all trained at Govier’s Gym, they failed to take them on board. Five years previously, when King and Country called him, Ambrose had decided that his fighting would be confined to the ring, rather than against His Majesty’s enemies; he put on such a convincing display to the medical board that he was classified as ‘a mental defective’.

  Had the twins followed his lead – and to be fair, they could have been far more persuasive to the board than Ambrose regarding their mental capabilities – they would have saved themselves a great deal of hardship and could have continued their activities around Bethnal Green, happily slashing, shooting or maiming anyone they pleased.