by John Pearson
Cooper was genuinely upset. Then he started talking of their oldest dream of all: the worldwide murder network operating with the Mafia and the European syndicates. The time had come, he said, for the twins to visit Paris and the States to arrange things personally.
In theory this was totally impossible. The United States rigidly excludes known criminals and the twins had Scotland Yard investigating them for almost every serious known crime, including murder. Yet Cooper solemnly suggested to the twins that they should fly to Paris, contact the leading gangsters in France, then travel to New York, where he would arrange more meetings with the top Mafiosi in America. Reggie thought he must be joking. When it was clear he was not, he said it was a trap. Ronnie replied that this was a risk worth taking; he trusted Cooper and could hardly wait to start the great new role he promised him. On 2 April Cooper and Ronnie Kray travelled to Paris on a scheduled flight and nobody stopped them.
As Reggie would not come, Ronnie brought an old friend, Dickie Morgan. Cooper had booked rooms in the Frontenac Hotel and seemed firmly in command. He took them out to dinner, talked of the possibilities of a European criminal common market – ‘when you get trade between nations, crime follows’ – and next morning introduced them to an impressive Frenchman with grey hair and a Brooklyn accent. This, Cooper said, was the man sent to meet them by the brothers who controlled crime in the city. He was a knowledgeable man. He talked of how he had killed various people in the States and had spent some years in San Quentin Prison before returning to France. Discussion followed on the sort of deals the Krays and the French gangs could fix together. The first need was for close liaison; Cooper said he was prepared to act as go-between. The Frenchman made it clear that several Continental gangs regarded England as an unexploited market: they thought the narcotics trade could easily be doubled overnight; expert criminals from Europe could fly in, commit a major theft and then fly back again; French gunmen could be used in England, goods stolen on the Continent disposed of there. They talked along these lines most of that day and visited the US consulate so that Ronnie Kray and Morgan could apply for visas. These were immediately granted – Cooper explained that the Paris consulate had no way of checking on the records of British citizens. Next morning all three flew from Orly to New York.
This was the life for Ronnie; this was better than cowering in Bethnal Green and worrying about Nipper Read.
Ronnie had always known that he was someone special, but it was still exciting to have this confirmed. Immigration gave him VIP treatment; there were no questions, no examination by the customs. Cooper explained that the Mafia had arranged things and their man was waiting. He was an old friend of the twins, a tiny Jewish Sicilian called Joe Kaufman. Ronnie had met him several times in London for business over gambling clubs and stolen bonds and Cooper said he had powerful connections with the Mafia.
As if to prove that Ronnie was the honoured guest of the Mafia, Kaufman then took over, driving them to town from the airport, booking them a suite at the Warwick Hotel and acting as their host. Kaufman is hospitable by nature. He has a pretty wife and knows a lot of people – gamblers, boxers, theatrical celebrities. With Ronnie he did all he could to make him happy, introducing him that night to several boxers, including Rocky Marciano, taking him to clubs where he could find a boy or two, and paying for the endless rounds of drinks. Cooper, on the other hand, seemed ill at ease. He spent a lot of time on the telephone. Morgan noticed that his stutter was worse. He kept reminding Ronnie that he had friends to contact.
Next day, when Ronnie started making his appointments, something had gone wrong. Angelo Bruno had mysteriously left town; so had the other leading Mafiosi Ronnie had met and entertained in London. Cooper suggested telephoning other friends long distance in Florida, and Las Vegas; George Raft would be glad to know Ronnie was in town. Ronnie might even make a trip to see him in Hollywood. When Cooper rang there was no reply.
It was Kaufman and not Cooper then who saved the day by driving Ronnie to Harlem and Brooklyn to meet some old-time criminals he knew. This was no top-line gathering of the Syndicate, but retired gunmen, former racketeers, old bootleggers. They were all characters willing to have a drink and ramble on about the old days and Ronnie got on well with all of them. One gave him details of how gang killings were organized by rival gangs and spent an afternoon offering technical advice about assassination; in return Ronnie gave him his star-shaped diamond ring. Later he met the bodyguard of one of the ward bosses of Harlem. Again they talked of killing; Ronnie gave the man his £800 white gold and diamond bracelet watch. Cooper seemed increasingly elusive but Ronnie was happy. He rang home to Reggie and his mother and that night went out again with Kaufman, drank, nightclubbed, saw Greenwich Village and a lot of ‘interesting people’. At one club Kaufman asked him what he’d like. He answered, ‘A brown boy about eighteen.’ Cooper was the only one who didn’t laugh; he was concerned that Ronnie wasn’t seeing the men he’d come for.
The next few days were similar, with Ronnie in high spirits as they made the rounds of Brooklyn, Coney Island, Wall Street and Skid Row. He drank a lot, ate sparingly and met half the dead-beat criminals in New York City. New York appealed to him. He liked its size, its noise, its sense of possibility after the constraint of London. This was a holiday from Reggie and his worries, and from Scotland Yard. Kaufman was picking up the bills.
The only blot occurred when Morgan noticed they were being followed, always by the same two men looking suspiciously like plainclothes detectives. Ronnie was unconcerned, but on the night of 8 April they spotted them again waiting outside their nightclub in a dark-red Dodge. Morgan was certain they were tailing them all the way back to the Warwick, but Cooper said he couldn’t see them; Kaufman thought them probably from the FBI.
Next day Cooper once more brought up the idea of flying to Las Vegas. Ronnie announced that they were going home.
He came back to Bethnal Green in style, bounding with energy, laden with cigars, transistor radios, a big woolly dog for Violet, a stainless steel model of a knight in armour for Reggie. If his absence had proved anything, it was how much the Firm and his family relied on him for their existence. Ronnie was the centre of their lives. Rumours had started that he had cut and run for it; only three people in the Firm had known he was in New York. Tommy Cowley, one of the shrewdest members of the Firm, had decamped instantly for Majorca; most of the remainder started worrying about the future. Even Reggie had fleetingly thought of making his escape and asked Tom Mangold of the BBC, who was off to the Far East on an assignment, if there were any way of getting out to Vietnam as a volunteer.
The police had also been getting anxious over Ronnie’s absence. Amazingly, for all the supervision of Tintagel House, none of them had known Ronnie had given them the slip and turned up in New York. Nipper did not discover this until some time later. So at first there was considerable concern that the prime suspect of their mammoth inquiry had disappeared. Just for a moment it had seemed as if this might be a new trick of the twins’: everyone knew there could be no question of arresting one while the other was at liberty to scare their witnesses.
So Ronnie’s return pleased everyone and as he went into action he had the edge on Reggie. He was the hero proving everybody’s fears were groundless. Although he had not met the Mafia leaders, the trip had been a great adventure. His fantasy was coming true. He could do anything. While all the rest of them were cowering from Read and Scotland Yard he had been to America under the very noses of the police. This was the way a man should be – killing his enemies openly, taking money where he found it, drinking, enjoying sex, insulting the police just as his Aunt Rose did. A few days after his return he saw the film of Charlton Heston playing Gordon of Khartoum and came out of the cinema with tears still in his eyes.
‘Gordon was a real man. He did what he had to do and he was bent like me. When I go I hope I face it just like Gordon did.’
There was no excuse for cowering pathetically until the police
arrived to pick him up.
This meant an end of Reggie’s siege tactics: after America, Ronnie was thinking big, and in place of caution, silence, avoidance of all risk, he was eager for a full offensive by the Firm. Now was the time to streamline crime as he had heard they did it in the States. Big crime should be big business.
On the return from New York Cooper had flown on to the Continent for business of his own, but when he came back he agreed with Ronnie – reorganize the Firm on strict American lines, kick out the useless hangers-on, get working with a nucleus of tough professionals. There were whole areas of humdrum life waiting to be exploited on the American pattern – unions, taxis, building sites, the docks. What with their reputation and their knowledge the twins could treble their income in six months.
This could keep Reggie occupied; the idea of tying up the docks appealed to him. He made discreet inquiries among a number of top businessmen and politicians to see whether the docks’ management could use a properly organized force of strong-arm men in the next labour dispute. Drawing a blank, he tried the unions – also without success. Finally he persuaded some rich businessmen to start a moneylending business in the docks; the twins would back it with a loan repayment service of their own.
All this kept Reggie busy; Ronnie needed something more dramatic. Cooper kept telling him the time had come to show the world the Krays ruled London. He knew exactly how to work on Ronnie now. Maybe, he said, those Mafiosi in New York had picked up rumours that the Krays were slipping, that the police would soon be catching up with them. This might have been the reason why none of them had been over-anxious to meet him.
Ronnie was furious. In New York, it hadn’t mattered who had entertained him. He had enjoyed meeting the men he did. But he could see that Cooper could be right. The only language the Americans understood was power: a few efficient killings would restore their faith in the Krays better than any arguments.
As a beginning Cooper suggested Ronnie should do the Americans a favour. A well-known Las Vegas gambler and club-owner had been challenging the Mafia. The man lived part of each year in Kenya and was staying at the moment at the London Hilton. If the Krays quietly eliminated him it would be excellent publicity throughout the States and would also place the Mafia in Ronnie’s debt. Ronnie agreed and promptly made his plans. The man took an early morning constitutional in Hyde Park, so Ronnie arranged to have him shot by a marksman from a passing car. But this was a wary man and an unwilling victim, who seemed to know how to avoid presenting himself as a target: after several failures, Ronnie saw that if he wanted a dramatic killing to impress the underworld he must look elsewhere. Somebody suggested Caruana.
George Caruana was Maltese and a West End club-owner – a big, good-looking man. Recently there had been talk of trouble between him and another club-owner. Now came a rumour of an offer of £1,000 for anyone who killed him.
It seemed an economic proposition for the Firm. Ronnie had no strong feelings about Caruana, but a quick £1,000 was always useful and it was necessary to get his message over to the Mafia. As Cooper kept reminding him, the question of which London gang was to look after the big gambling junkets from the States was still not settled.
Ever since Ronnie had read his earliest books about Chicago gangsters he had dreamed of blowing someone up inside a car. In Sicily and the States it is a well-proved Mafia mode of death, but London gangsters had been slow to use it. George Caruana drove a bright-red Mini. This could give Ronnie his big chance to show that the Krays believed in progress.
There is no great problem in wiring a detonator and a parcel of explosive into the circuit of a car, but Ronnie had never been good with his hands, nor were there any real technicians on the Firm. Once more he had to turn to Cooper, and once more Cooper brought in the strange young man, Paul Elvey. Apart from all his other skills, Elvey was a qualified electrical engineer.
Eight months had passed since Nipper Read had taken charge of the inquiry against the twins, eight months in which his men had most methodically built up a dossier on their history and then ground to an almost total halt. There was a mass of detailed statements against them filed in Tintagel House, but until the twins were safely locked away none could be used. Also the great investigation, for all its thoroughness, seemed to have missed the biggest crimes: there was no evidence linking the twins with Cornell’s or McVitie’s murders; there was no hint of what happened to Jack Frost, Mad Teddy Smith or the Axe Man; no link had been established between the twins and the Clapham leader, Frederic Foreman, later to be charged with murdering Frank Mitchell and disposing of McVitie’s body.
Hopeful as ever, the police were waiting for the twins to make their big mistake. Nipper was adamant that nothing must be done to scare them now or put them on their guard; the police were kept away from them, and the twins saw no sign that the whole of Scotland Yard was waiting to arrest them. As a result it seemed that they were living in a sort of limbo-land: they had their freedom but there was a shadow enemy who had to be imagined listening on every telephone, watching from doorways, never leaving them alone.
Reggie was rational enough but Ronnie made this limbo world his own, an airless, haunted place devoid of ordinary feeling: killing was normal, cunning and violence the only ways of striking at the unseen threat of an unseen enemy. As the twins stood in the bar of a pub in Bethnal Green with Cooper and Elvey, planning another killing, all Ronnie’s fantasies seemed to have turned into reality. Reggie was opposed to the idea of killing Caruana but unable to stand up to his brother. Cooper could have been the stuttering echo of Ronnie’s madness; Elvey was nothing but a bespectacled technician.
Ronnie had photographs of Caruana, a quiet-looking man with a plump face; next day he would arrange for someone on the Firm to take Elvey to see him in the flesh. Then the talk turned to the question of explosives. Ronnie explained that there was gelignite available: Cooper was not impressed. Gelignite was tricky stuff to use; dynamite was safer. He had a source in Scotland; Elvey could easily fly up to fetch it.
And so the plans for blowing up George Caruana in his Mini went ahead.
The next day Elvey, waiting in his raincoat outside the Dominion Cinema in Tottenham Court Road, was picked up by a former boxer from the Firm and driven through Soho. The former boxer showed him where the Mini was always parked; a little farther on a man was standing in the doorway of a club – George Caruana. They slowed down to let Elvey see the face he was to destroy with dynamite.
Two days later Elvey took the morning flight from Heathrow up to Glasgow, collected four sticks of dynamite from an address in the centre of the city and caught a taxi back to the airport. As he was boarding the London plane the police arrested him. Later that evening Nipper Read interrogated him.
SIXTEEN
Arrest
The strange stalemate was over: the twins had made the blunder Nipper had been waiting for. Elvey confessed to everything, not just the plans for the Caruana murder but the suitcase murder and the crossbow killing. Nipper had known nothing about these murder plans and until he searched Elvey’s house was inclined to treat him as something of a crank; but he found the crossbow, the suitcase with the hypodermic and the cyanide. Elvey named Cooper as the brains behind it all, so Cooper was brought in for questioning.
It was a stormy interview, with Nipper threatening to charge him straight away with three attempted murders and Cooper replying coolly that he could prove that for the last two years he had been working with the Yard.
Cooper’s story was as follows; he admitted that his first contacts with the twins had been criminal, during the days when he was marketing stolen Canadian bonds for them through his European Exchange Bank; but soon after this, agents of the United States Treasury Department discovered proof of his activities as a gold-smuggler and offered him the choice of facing charges or working for them. He chose to work for them as spy and agent provocateur. He was controlled from Paris by an undercover agent attached to the United States embassy; this man con
trolled the Treasury Department’s work in Europe. His chief concern was combating the narcotics trade to the United States.
The Krays’ connections with the American Mafia appeared important in America, and the Treasury Department was disturbed. Cooper had already been minimally involved since the stolen shares originated from a Mafia subsidiary in New York. He agreed to keep in touch with the twins and keep the Paris embassy informed of fresh developments: meetings between the twins and Bruno and other leading Mafiosi visiting London were all reported back to Paris; so were the Krays’ involvements with the Mafia over their London gambling interests.
According to his story, Cooper’s American employers had allowed him considerable latitude in handling the Krays and he went to great lengths now to win their confidence. He said his Paris contact knew that he – a US agent now – supplied the twins with the two Browning machine-guns and paid for them from US government funds. He also claimed he had done his best to make sure that the other weapons he supplied were faulty: the .32 automatic which jammed when Reggie tried to shoot McVitie was one of his; so was the gun which failed to shoot George Dixon.
He said that at the start the US Treasury Department had informed the Yard of his presence with the Krays. Du Rose, he said, knew all about him. He also said that no one at the Yard had trusted him and Nipper had been told nothing of the plot. As a result he had found himself in the unenviable position of ‘the man on the tightrope’, balancing between two homicidal gangsters who would kill him if they found out what he was and a police force who would do nothing for him. And all the time, the Americans in Paris wanted action.
At first he tried ‘setting up’ the twins, involving them in some big crooked deal so that he could betray them to the police. Several times he seemed to have persuaded Ronnie, only to have Reggie stopping things from going any further. Then came the trip to Paris and New York, over which Cooper and the US Treasury Department took a lot of trouble. Cooper had flown several times to Washington to fix the details. The man in Paris arranged the visas and an actor friend of Cooper’s played the part of the killer from San Quentin to perfection. Cooper was hoping that once they reached New York he could offer the FBI a grand slam of compromising link-ups with the top syndicate bosses of America – ‘We were counting on Ronnie meeting Meyer Lansky, the Las Vegas people, Angelo Bruno and the Gallo Brothers. But Ronnie was so hot that none of them would risk seeing him.’
