by John Pearson
Part of their secret was size, for with crime as with business, the profits increase with the scale of the operation. The twins were adroit users of bribery, blackmail and connections and could afford good lawyers and advisers and pay well for information. They manipulated the establishment, and used politicians, even to the extent of having questions asked on their behalf in Parliament. More important, they could always stay behind the scenes, organizing other men to do their bidding and ensuring that they themselves were never compromised. One of the lessons of the twins’ career is the ease with which they built themselves a position of immunity. Paradoxically, the fact they were so widely known as organizing gangsters proved an advantage. It added to their reputation, made people fear them more and even brought them a status as celebrities. Journalists and public figures could be used, certain policemen had their price, trials could be fixed and prisons infiltrated.
The potentiality of power like this was vast. Protection rackets formed the largest single source of income, but on top of them the twins easily controlled a network of associated crime, part of which they initiated and from all of which they took their toll. They were already well into large-scale fraud, crooked share deals, organized intimidation and blackmail, and were thinking of extending to drugs, deals with foreign criminal networks and prostitution. Their contacts with the American Mafia in London showed what could be done. Control was easy to enforce through delegated violence. Profits would have been enormous and they would have found no difficulty investing overseas and building up legitimate businesses abroad. With power like this the twins could easily have become invulnerable.
That they did not was due entirely to their personal deficiencies. What limited them was not the law but their incompetence and instability. As criminals their major defect was lack of seriousness. They proved incapable of exploiting the power they created and in the end became self-indulgent and erratic, soon bored and often surprisingly timid.
Society was lucky; the twins destroyed themselves. Another time we may not be so fortunate.
Postscript
The careers of most criminals, however ingenious, cruel or outrageous, take the form of climax followed by anticlimax – the climax being their crimes up to their arrest and trial, and the anticlimax everything that follows, as they are sentenced, imprisoned and almost invariably forgotten.
Take any year, then try remembering a criminal who hit the headlines in a major trial, and say what has become of him. It’s usually impossible, with just one exception – the Kray twins.
Today they are in their early sixties, ‘old men’ as Ronnie used to call any male over the age of forty, and have served twenty-five years of their ‘recommended’ thirty-year sentence. Ronnie remains in Broadmoor maximum security psychiatric hospital, where he was sent on being certified insane sixteen years ago. It is a tribute to the Broadmoor doctors that he doesn’t look it – Broadmoor’s regime appears to suit him. He is thinner than he used to be, but often wears the dark-blue suit and the solid gold wristlet watch that were once his trademarks and still make him the best-dressed man in Broadmoor. On heavy medication, he seems untroubled by the fact that he is unlikely to be released for many years to come – if ever.
Reg, on the other hand, with less than five years of his sentence still to run, is busily preparing for his life of freedom. He exercises vigorously, writes poetry, is a born-again Christian and is hoping for parole before his time is up.
But although they are now apart and living very different lives, one thing distinguishes the twins from the forgotten faces all around them: the fact that as convicted murderers they are now national celebrities.
When the Prime Minister requires a synonym for violent criminals he cites ‘the Kray twins’. When Ronnie stages a bogus heart attack it is mentioned by the BBC in their morning bulletins. And when either of them marries or divorces – as they do with dreadful regularity – the details of the lovely bride are recounted in the tabloid press with the seriousness reserved for the mistresses of erring politicians.
Even before the film The Krays was made about them, there was a flood of books and articles recounting yet again the saga of the doings – and mis-doings – of the Krays. Never ones to miss a trick, the twins actually employed a real-life ‘celebrity’, none other than Southern Television’s newscaster Fred Dineage, to ghost their ‘memoirs’. With so much flattering attention, it was as if their life in crime had simply been a preparation for their great media careers.
There is something relatively new about the idea of convicted murderers enjoying this sort of active reputation. In the days of the death penalty the fame of convicted murderers was, by necessity, posthumous. Men like Dr Crippen, Haig of acid bath fame, and ex-special constable Christie, the serial killer of Notting Hill, never lived to see themselves depicted in the movies – let alone make deals with editors and film producers for the rights to their personal stories. It is a sombre thought that twenty years earlier the twins would have shared their fate, and that neither would have been able to pursue, let alone enjoy, this late flowering of their extraordinary careers.
It is unlikely that when the death penalty was abolished anyone foresaw that the authorized story of the murder could one day become a source of profit to the murderer. Yet with the Krays the details of their crimes have become big business. With books and films and non-stop journalism now produced about them large amounts of money are involved. Fugitive Films invested £3 million in making The Krays, and the twins, however modestly and indirectly, naturally received their share. With a sequel to The Krays already in production, it is clear that the twins, despite their lack of liberty, have created a growth industry with a steadily increasing rate of profit.
In its way it is a remarkable achievement. From prison they have actually made murder pay – even if the money has to be held by outside nominees they hope that they can trust (a serious problem since the death in 1984 of the only person they could totally rely on, their mother Violet).
They have their fan club, and a pressure group campaigns for Reggie’s early release. They have their literary agent, their publishers, and for a period Reggie engaged a public relations man to boost his image and get him favourable media coverage. While ageing cockney actresses insist that they were ‘really lovely boys at heart’, a rich pop star is currently anxious to invest a large amount of money in the sequel to The Krays, which is billed to be even more violent and bloody – and more profitable – than its predecessor.
Unless paroled beforehand, Reg will be released in 1999, five years off his seventieth birthday. But his thirty years in prison won’t have been completely wasted. Having kept in trim he’ll be in excellent physical condition, and unlike most ex-criminals who find themselves forgotten when they come out of prison, the reporters and the TV cameras will be there to greet him. Providing someone hasn’t run away with it, a tidy nest-egg will also be awaiting him – as will his faithful agent bearing contracts with the British media.
‘When murderers become celebrities,’ wrote Salman Rushdie, ‘something has gone seriously wrong.’ But what? And why did it happen with the Krays?
***
Part of the answer is that the twins were determined that it should, long before they were arrested.
The pursuit of fame is actually extremely rare among criminals, and successful criminals, almost by definition, tend to be modest, self-effacing human beings. All a good burglar, conman, forger or swindler asks of life are the pleasures of obscurity and the modest joys of happy anonymity.
Not so the twins, however. Fame really was the spur that drove them on from puberty until practically the day they were arrested. Even as teenage tearaways in Bethnal Green, what distinguished them from the other adolescent criminals round about them was always their desperate desire to be noticed.
In the teenage slashings, woundings, beatings-up with which they livened up the street life of the old East End, what mattered more than blood and broken noses was the effect of
every scuffle on their all-important reputation.
By the time they had made themselves virtuoso gangland fighters, they were intensely jealous of their prestige, which they tended and projected like precocious pop stars. In her quiet way their mother Violet would have made a perfect pop star’s mother. Extremely presentable and nice, she was endlessly concerned about their health, the state of their underwear, the dreadful hours they kept and how her boys’ career was currently progressing.
One of the prized possessions at their house in Vallance Road was their cuttings book (no pun intended), the bible-like album neatly kept up to date by Violet of the boys’ press-notices – first as boxers, then as criminals. The two activities were in a sense co-terminous. Both brought respect and showed the world that, unlike all their humdrum neighbours, the Krays were ‘somebodys’. The point of life, as Ronnie never tired of saying, was ‘to be a somebody’, and not let any other bastard take ‘a liberty’.
As long as the twins were somebodys, Violet could go on being proud of them; which meant that, since they were both good sons, they could be proud and happy with themselves. And once they had started up their clubs, like The Double R and Esmeralda’s Barn in Knightsbridge, they could begin to mingle with the ‘straight’ celebrities whose lives they envied – hence their passionate pursuit of that curious medley of old boxers, show-business personalities and members of the House of Lords, which increasingly occupied their time and energies in the early sixties.
How Ronnie loved a lord! While Reg preferred being photographed with film stars like George Raft and Judy Garland, Ron’s proudest moments came when dining in the House of Lords with some silly nobleman, as he did on a number of occasions.
But as I trust this book makes clear, the celebrity status of the twins was only part of the story. They were also very clever and sophisticated criminals who became something which was relatively rare until their appearance on the scene – home-grown British organizing gangsters. As such they were remarkably successful. Having moved ‘up West’ from Bethnal Green in the early sixties, five years later they were ‘protecting’ much of the West End gambling in conjunction with the US Mafia. They planned. They made alliances with lesser criminals. And they steadily increased the fear – or, as they liked to call it, ‘the respect’ – in which they were held by other villains. They had something which was curiously rare among professional criminals – genuine imagination, great ambition and a natural instinct for corruption.
Stupid they emphatically were not, and anyone who thinks they were should study the way they exploited the aftermath of the Boothby scandal to extract maximum advantage for themselves. It was thanks to this that they achieved what every professional criminal dreams of, effective immunity from the attentions of the Yard, as well as of the mighty British press and the politicians at Westminster. It was as if collectively the British establishment, having been made fools of by the Krays over Robert Boothby, had decided they were far too hazardous to tangle with.
For the three years following the Boothby case, the Krays appeared to be succeeding in building up an international crime cartel based in London. Once they were trusted allies of the US Mafia, ‘protecting’ their investments in central London gambling, these connections brought them further business in the international marketing of stolen bonds. They became busily involved with fraudulent big business, blackmail and property frauds. They bribed senior policemen. They were contemplating contract killings, money-laundering and arms dealing.
Thanks to their virtual immunity from the press and the police, the twins could act largely unhindered. Reggie was particularly smart at knowing how to work behind the scenes in the grey area between licit and illicit business activities, and at using the Krays’ growing reputation for maximum effect.
Their model was essentially the US Mafia, with its universal power to corrupt, to deal and to enforce. They also copied them in the way they made their links with politicians and show-business personalities. The business was still growing six months before they were arrested.
Had they avoided this and been able to consolidate their organization, the Krays could certainly have controlled much of the narcotics business and the financial rackets which were just beginning in the early seventies. They could have become immensely rich. They might have made themselves impregnable.
Instead, as this book describes, Ronnie’s fantasy life took over and his private dreams of violence became self-fulfilling. Bored with business, which his twin did so much better, he still hankered after the old East End-style violence, which he had loved and grown up with – but which by now was purest self-indulgence.
Like his hero, Gordon of Khartoum, he longed for action, and once he decided he would shoot the utterly unimportant gangster, George Cornell, it was as if the film of Ronnie’s life had started. Cornell had insulted him. Cornell was scum. ‘I had to kill him. It was as simple as that,’ says Ronnie, and the murders started.
What was so scarey about them was their unreality, the victims being killed like extras in a gangster movie – which is essentially was what was happening. Action was needed, and the hero had ‘to do the business’. Gangster movies need at least a few dead gangsters and a lot of blood. As if with the plot of The Krays firmly in his mind, Ronnie set about providing them.
He went on acting out this mental movie to the day he was arrested. One of the last memories I have of him when he was free is at the house he’d bought for his ‘retirement’ at Bildeston in Suffolk. It was a comfortable, unassuming country house with white walls and a grey slate roof, and he was already planning how his friend Duke Osborne would join him there when released from prison.
That day he was happier than I’d ever seen him, painting the shelves in what was to be the ‘library’ and talking about the film and who would play the part of himself.
He was quite happy to be portrayed as homosexual. ‘It’s nothin’ to be ashamed of. But I don’t want to be made to seem a cissy – ’cos I ain’t one’ – which was true. He wasn’t.
Nor did he seem remotely troubled by the problem of the police who were closing in and waiting for the moment to arrest him.
Reg was more realistic. A few nights before he was arrested he asked me if I thought he could go to fight in Vietnam for the Americans.
‘You’re too old,’ I said. (He was thirty-four.)
He nodded.
‘It’s too late, anyhow,’ he answered. ‘And someone has to keep an eye on Ron.’
***
During these last few years in which the twins have made their comeback as criminal celebrities, they have also succeeded in creating certain myths about themselves, some of which require correcting.
The first of these is that during their years of power, they were not so much criminals and gangsters as a sort of East End Benevolent Society, pledged to protecting orphans, single mothers and old ladies.
This was in fact a fairly common theme one heard about the twins before they were arrested, and much of it was put around either by the Krays themselves or by their followers. There was one old gangster who used to hang around the twins; he enjoyed telling anyone who cared to listen that they weren’t dangerous at all, but kind and good and caring.
‘Benefactors,’ he used to say, ‘that’s what those two boys are. They’re not criminals at all. They’re public bloody benefactors. One day, mark my words, there’ll be a statue erected to them both in Bethnal Green.’
Possibly there will be. But the point about the twins’ ‘benevolence’ is that, like all good gangsters, they were generous with ‘their own’, and great free spenders. The booze flowed freely in their presence, and for the ‘aways’ (their friends in prison), they would ensure that their families were paid for and protected. But I never heard of them doing any favours for their victims’ families or for ordinary people.
The second claim one hears is that the Krays ‘kept London clear of crime’. To the extent that few other criminals dared to raise their heads above t
he parapet when the twins were around, this was true. But as their ‘power’ involved recurrent gang wars, with knifings, shootings and killings – not to mention bribing the police – it is hard to take them all that seriously as a force of law and order.
The most misleading myth of all is the one that the increasingly violent films about them will perpetuate as they portray the twins simply as sadistic killers in ever more violent situations.
It was bad enough watching pretty boys like Martin and Gary Kemp indulging in designer violence in The Krays. But there will undoubtedly be worse to come, with the film-makers now convinced that the box office appeal of the Kray twins is exclusively confined to blood and violence.
They may be right. The pornography of violence may yet make everybody’s fortunes – the twins’ included. But if it does, it will mean that the real lesson of the Krays has been forgotten.
When I wrote this book I tried to show that the most important thing about the twins was not violence for its own sake, but the use they made of it. They were clever criminals who did many more important things than simply murder people. Their true significance was as organizing criminals, and the real lessons that they left were not what they did to Cornell and McVitie, but the vulnerability they revealed in a society that permitted them to build an empire such as theirs. They were not just bloodstained monsters, any more than they were old-style cockney villains with hearts of gold.
They were something much more dangerous.
JP, 1995
Note on the Author
John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King’s College School and later at Cambridge, where he read history.
