We’d won the victory we needed. I had to get out and be sure not to look as if I was in any kind of hurry. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself once I was out of the club. I vaguely recognised someone else going down the stairs at the same time as me and tried to engage him in conversation.
‘What happened up there?’ I asked innocently. He had obviously seen what I’d been up to and could only stare at me in shock and horror. So much for the casual exit.
I legged it to Esmeralda’s Barn to find the twins, taking my time to ensure that I wasn’t followed. Only Ronnie was there. I told him what had happened and I knew he would understand. For the Krays, all kinds of shootings and similar rows were most welcome. As long as we won. They provided good war stories over a drink and they were just good PR.
‘I’ve got to find somewhere safe now,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re in luck,’ he said. ‘We’ve taken a flat off someone over a debt.’
It was the fag-end of a lease, not that Ronnie knew anything about how property worked. It just happened to work in our favour. The owner was a funny little fella called David Litvinoff. He was a journalist who worked on the William Hicky column in The Daily Express. I had seen him around, though I didn’t know him personally. His hair was very thin, he dressed quite well and if it might be stretching the point to say that he was Bobby Buckley’s previous boyfriend, as a much older man he did apparently play the role of sugar daddy. It wasn’t a secret – he was completely out of the closet at a time when it was still very much illegal and while he wasn’t effeminate, he didn’t give a fuck who knew he was gay.
As we talked over the details of the hideaway we were joined by Davies. The two of us had been split up in the race to get away from the scene of the fight. Somehow he met up with our mutual friend who got him safely to The Barn.
Davies had been impressed by my performance. He said, ‘Never get in a fight when you’re drunk. You’re useless. But up The Hammer Club you were sensational – when you were sober.’
He made a lot of sense; it just wasn’t something that I had considered before. Since then I’ve tried to stick to his words as much as I could.
Litvinoff’s flat was in South Kensington at number 7 Ashburn Place, just off Cromwell Road. It was the last place anyone would think to look for us.
‘I’ll see you there,’ Ronnie said.
It was the break we needed. He insisted we could stay as long as we needed, which ended up being something like six months.
There was a bit of a hue and cry on after the row with headlines in The Daily Mail but I missed it all while I was out of sight. When the story was later written up in the media I didn’t recognise any of it. It didn’t happen the way others have said. From what I later heard, the press once more made out that the Hammer fight was all about protection rackets. It made good copy and was more interesting than the truth – that most rows were over precisely nothing at all. Or at least, nothing important. The sad reality was that you were more likely to see a fight because someone simply wanted to throw their weight around. But that didn’t sell as many newspapers and books as claiming that gangs were taking over London and no small business was safe. If only anyone was that organised we’d have all made a lot more money.
The most valuable thing to come out of the two fights for me was reputation – I was now known as someone who was not to be underestimated. I was convinced that we had got away with it as far as the law was concerned as well, but I was wrong. Some ten years later I would be nicked and done two-handed with Johnny for attempted murder.
The turnout at The Hammer was important for another reason. It marked the end of one era of gangster and the rise of another. The likes of Jack Spot were history and they were beginning to decline and now their supporters among the Queen’s Road mob looked vulnerable too. The Krays were the next wave and I was coming up with them. The Hammer was the tipping point. It was a direct challenge to the old guard.
I was to see the effects for myself not long after I came out of hiding. I clearly remember the first morning leaving my house. I lived in Rochester Avenue, just off Queen’s Road, more or less within sight of the market. I had to pass the mob’s stalls on the way to the station. Just my presence was a challenge. Having won the battle at The Hammer Club I was full of confidence and, just as they had relied on Jack Spot and Billy Hill, I had the Krays’ name to give me strength. But I wasn’t stupid, whenever I did the walk I always carried a little shooter in my pocket.
The moment I was always half expecting came one Sunday afternoon when I stopped by The Queen’s for a drink. After the pub closed for the afternoon I had a chat with Stevie Tucker outside my house nearby. None other than Pippy Bennett happened to be passing with another fella, Harold Reagan. Me and Stevie were sat in a van on the side of the road and when Pippy got to the end of the street he and Reagan turned around and started back towards us. I was ready. I’d had enough time to slip back indoors and pick up a machete. I waited until they got near before jumping out of the van and steaming towards them with the weapon. They fled, screaming. And that was the moment I knew everything had changed.
If I’d done that to a member of the Bennett family in the middle of Queen’s Road before The Hammer Club I’d have been strung up from a lamp post. Anyone in the area would know what this latest encounter meant – word would soon get around and the mob would lose respect. Stevie Tucker, who I had been with that afternoon, went on to see Dicky, another member of the Bennett family. When Dicky heard what happened he immediately realised the importance and he was furious – but frustrated. There wasn’t anything he could do and soon it wasn’t just the writing that was on the wall.
‘He picked his dinner up,’ Stevie said, ‘and threw it across the room.’
Dicky’s food dripped down onto his carpet, marking the end of an era. The Upton Park mob fell apart after that. A few faces were quick to tell me they were on my side, though I had no intention of starting a war with anyone. Basically, they were all soon having a go at each other. But gangsters were like that – that’s why they were gangsters. As soon as things got difficult they were at each other.
Johnny Davies got very cocky when it became clear that the balance of power had shifted decisively in our favour. He walked into The Bongo Club in Canning Town with Jacky Bowers, whose brother Wally, even though he had an arm in plaster, had recently been attacked by Georgie Woods and his crew. John stabbed Georgie Woods in the throat for his part in the attack on both their brothers. He had a velvet collar on his overcoat and he would go to Queen’s Road Market and out-dazzle all the gangsters on the square. Freddy Foreman’s brother, George, had a club in Clapham. Davies was dancing there with his girlfriend one night when Joey Carter, an ex-boxer, touched him up the arse. Carter had a fighter’s flat nose and was quite a sight as Johnny turned to see who was making fun of him.
‘Did you like that?’ asked Joey. ‘I thought you’d like it.’
‘Bollocks,’ replied Johnny Davies. Joey punched him in the mouth and Johnny pulled out a knife and cut him to ribbons.
This was a major problem for Freddy Foreman. He was very friendly with Joey and apart from anything else, Johnny’s savage attack had happened in Foreman’s brother’s club. A full Kray meeting was held the next day.
It was very awkward. This was a real Judgement of Solomon moment. Nobody knew what to do for the best. The twins came up with one of their classic fudges – Johnny Davies was to be formally sacked from their firm. It meant nothing but all anyone wanted was a way out without losing face and all sides went along with it. Everyone except Johnny himself. He came to see me and was complaining bitterly about what had happened and wanted me to help him even the score, as he saw it. I paid very little attention to what he was saying. He was just being annoying and I told him to get on with it himself.
He left my house with a friend of ours, Davey Storey, who came back alone, minutes later, looking very shook up.
‘Johnny’s just shot hi
mself,’ he said. What? I thought. I hadn’t meant for him to think I was being harsh. I just hadn’t been in the mood for his aggressive nonsense. But before I could feel too guilty, Davey explained that Johnny had a gun in his pocket which he was just playing around with as they were out on the street and it had accidentally gone off. ‘He’s shot himself in the leg,’ said Davey.
‘Oh, bring him in!’ I said.
We eventually dispatched a hobbling Johnny to see Dr John, the local drunkard we all used for occasions like this.
‘Och,’ said the doctor when he saw him. ‘You’re a brave wee laddie.’
I was soon back to life as normal with the Krays. Back when Johnny and me had been in hiding in Litvinoff’s flat, David Litvinoff himself came to see us. He’d struck me as quite naive, a bit out of his depth compared to the characters we usually hung around with. For someone who had been around as long as he had he was unwise in calling Ronnie ‘bottlenose’ as often as he did. Once was too much, for a start. But the pair of them were competing for the affections of Bobby Buckley and love had obviously made Litvinoff stupid as well as blind. He was far too open in his opinion about Ronnie’s choice of young men.
‘I can’t work out what role Ronnie plays in this,’ he confided. He was very well spoken and chose his words carefully. ‘He certainly doesn’t father them,’ he said. The puzzle occupied him for a while, but by the next visit he’d worked it out.
‘He takes the woman’s role!’ he said triumphantly. ‘He likes to mother them!’
When Ronnie was later in the nick he would go on to try to adopt children. It was an instinct inside him. I’ve often thought about where all of that came from – it was irresistible, coming up with theories for the twins’ extreme characters. Knowing their famously devoted mother you might want to play amateur psychologist and put Ronnie’s extraordinary antics down to her influence. She was a funny old thing and she was exactly like Ron – cooing and clucking over her sons. But to be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t know. I was friends with them for years and I would still hesitate to claim to understand what made them tick, much less work out the roots of their sexuality. It’s only something I’ve thought about afterwards. At the time, motives weren’t so important to me. Litvinoff himself might also have done well to consider the danger he was putting himself in with his speculating. Ronnie eventually got someone to walk up to his love rival and slash him across the face in the street.
Whatever the reason for Ronnie’s behaviour, at last it made sense to me now that Litvinoff had shared his insight. I began to think that maybe something more had gone on with George Dixon. If Ronnie preferred the female role, perhaps he’d given Dixon a blow job. It would make sense – Dixon was such a giant, so masculine, that it couldn’t have been anything else. There was undeniably a pattern to how Ronnie behaved and now I knew what to look for. I’d seen it often enough.
Say he was in The Grave Maurice pub and in came some boy he was trying to seduce. He would beckon them over.
‘Come on, come on,’ he would say. ‘Come and sit down. What are you having?’ He was very charming when he wanted to be. But he would invariably turn to me and, adopting a simpering tone, say something like, ‘Look at his eyes, Mick! Ain’t he lovely?’
‘Oh, shut up, Ron,’ the boy would say.
‘Oh – but you are! Look at you! Aren’t you lovely!’ He scared off boxer Terry Spinks like that. Ronnie kept trying to pull him and when he wasn’t harassing him personally he kept a photo of him which he would coo over. He was like a fond grandmother even in front of his mates in public, scratching at the image with his finger and proudly pointing out Spinks’s cutest features to his largely horrified audience. He made me laugh, though he would go on and on until it got on our nerves.
Steff had the answer for him. ‘I just haven’t got the glands to appreciate it, Ron.’
He never knew when to stop and if he did indeed have a mothering instinct, it came together with a love of very sinister theatrics. At the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho, an insect lands on Anthony Perkins’ hand and as he glances down at it he says, ‘I wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ Ronnie appreciated the undertones of that line. It was his favourite in any film. He was always quoting it.
You could see his personality in the clubs the twins ran, particularly Esmeralda’s. It was undeniably louche, very sleazy, very dangerous. The punters who came to gamble did so partly to lurk in the shadows cast by the lighting arrangements, which were designed to look as intimidating as possible. Ronnie, even more than his brother, knew the value of special effects. The cloak of menace that hung over the tables at The Barn impressed a crowd which included the likes of painter Lucian Freud as well as Lords Kilbracken and Effingham.
The aristocracy were famously attracted to the Krays. Lord Boothby was one of their most prominent fans. It had been widely rumoured that he had an affair with Ronnie, but there was no substance to the story. Boothby had come into contact with the twins through a lad from Hoxton named Lesley Holt. He had come to meet a mate at the billiard hall many years earlier. This was long before the Krays had any kind of notoriety. It was Albert the Jar who pointed him out to me.
‘You see that kid over there?’ he whispered to me. ‘He’s been having an affair with Lord Boothby. He was telling us what he does. Boothby makes them pull their trousers down, bends them over and smacks their arses with a slipper!’
The lord was hardly someone to be mothered by Ronnie, but it was true that they were introduced – through Lesley. There wasn’t anything more than that to the Boothby legend and the papers had nothing more to go on than a photo of Boothby with Ronnie. This they had probably got from the twins themselves, who wouldn’t have been above having a bit of an earner out of themselves passing it over. Fame was always a motivating force for them. More than power, and much more than money.
Nobody else was allowed to enjoy publicity. It was okay for the twins to be interviewed and featured, but they would get very jealous when someone else even took the smallest step into the limelight, as local car dealer Connie Nunn found out. He was the centrepiece of some tabloid article about snatching back cars. I’m not even sure if he wrote it himself or was just featured, but the sight of his face staring out of a big article enraged the twins.
‘It’s grassing, innit,’ they said to each other. ‘He’s a fucking grass, ain’t he? He’s going to be dead.’ And yet Reggie would still be giving interviews and writing books as he lay on his deathbed.
Celebrity seemed to find the twins even when they weren’t looking for it. Once Reggie travelled with Johnny Squibb to Sweden to watch Floyd Pattison fight. Like me, the twins never lost their interest in boxing. There were a couple of very smart Americans who caught Reggie’s eye at the ringside. They really looked the part and made quite an impression on him, though he didn’t talk with them at that point. But he remembered them when he saw one of the same men some time later in a London club called The Astor. Ever the gent, Reggie approached him and confirmed it was indeed the same man.
‘Did you have a nice time?’ Reggie asked. His new friend had and the two were soon having a drink together.
The fella was an American lawyer with many high-profile clients. He was extremely well connected. Reggie had lucked out, though he had no idea at all of how good a contact book his companion had and was only being friendly when he said, ‘Look us up if you’re ever back in London. Or if you ever have any friends you want looked after, we’d be pleased to meet them.’
This was the famous Kray charm and Reggie meant it. This was nothing to do with crime or money – they didn’t only invite people to visit their clubs simply to belt them, though that wasn’t unusual either.
The lawyer took Reggie at his word and correctly guessed that his clients would be well cared for and would find the twins absolutely fascinating. He directed a stream of American celebrities towards the Krays, up to and including Judy Garland. I saw her myself at The Palladium with her daughter Liza Minnelli. Later, J
udy joined us with her then husband Mark Herron at one of the Krays’ locals in the East End. It was an unlikely location for the superstar, though she didn’t seem to be in a fit state to care much. She was on serious drugs, frail and thin. She looked terrible. There was nothing of her.
The pub was one of those pokey old buildings with the bar counters separated by a wood partition topped with a sliver of window. It was an old man’s boozer, where respectable elderly couples would come for a quiet drink. But that night everyone knew the special guest. Curious heads peered over the partition, yet nobody came in the bar itself. Not that it was locked, but somehow people wanted to be in her presence without actually stepping in. It was all very surreal, especially when the rest of the bar spontaneously broke into a hearty rendition of an old classic, the lyrics altered into the plural so as not to make anyone feel left out – ‘For They Are Jolly Good Fellows’.
And the stars kept coming. Frank Sinatra Jr arrived with a minder who would look standard issue these days but back then really stood out. Eddie Pucci, a hulking ex-American football player of inevitable Sicilian descent, who was later found dead, riddled with bullets on a golf course in America. Pucci lost no time in reminding Ronnie of his charge’s heritage. The twins were starstruck and were straight in there, bulbs flashing, endless matey photos. Visiting the Krays became the thing to do for a certain portion of the American elite. Barney Ross, an old-world champion boxer, was among those who visited Vallance Road and got a tour of the tiny streets packed into that area of the East End. I was charged with getting him there.
Krayzy Days Page 9
