‘Bring him all the way through Spitalfields Market,’ said Ronnie, ‘in the dark.’
It was that theatrical side coming out again. He knew that the deserted rows of stalls at night would be a delightfully spooky way to greet the visitor. Ross got a flavour of the East End that many were fascinated by and most people never got to see.
Another American boxing legend who visited was Sonny Liston. He didn’t come via Reggie’s lawyer friend, however, but was hired by the twins to be at one of their functions at The Cambridge Rooms, a venue out by Kingston to the south of London. Liston didn’t really know what he’d got himself into. He had a manager who agreed to let him be the guest of honour for a fee, the money being more important than who would be at the club. I’m sure Liston regretted letting his management make this particular booking for him. The night itself was not much documented. For some reason the press had taken against giving the Krays publicity and even though many of their celebrity fans turned out, there was hardly a mention in the newspapers.
Women clustered around Liston, who proved to be quite a hit. They included Dolly, Charlie Kray’s wife. Ronnie already hated her, just as he did Frances. He convinced Charlie that flirting with Sonny Liston was somehow showing up the Kray family name. I’ve got a photo of the twins with me and I’m looking out of the shot – over to the phone booth outside the room where Dolly had crashed over, fighting with Charlie. It was a typical evening out for the Krays, but not for poor old Sonny Liston. He knew enough about gangsters from brushes with the Mafia in America and realised exactly what he’d got himself into. He was terrified.
Reggie drove us home afterwards, with Sonny and a couple of his friends in the back. The boxer was used to facing racial harassment from the police back home and he could see that Reggie was drunk. He was even more nervous.
‘Has Reggie been to the States?’ he asked.
‘He hopes to go soon, Sonny, but he hasn’t been yet,’ I said.
‘So why he is driving on the fucking right-hand side?’ snapped Liston. ‘I’m gonna do what the guy did when he fell off the truck, Hit the Road Jack.’
He spent the whole journey looking around for police cars, convinced we would be pulled over.
Chapter Six
In Danger in The Kentucky
It felt as if the ground shifted under my feet. I was in The Kentucky Club with Ronnie and had mentioned the name of a friend we both knew but for some reason he took my innocent remark to be a trick. Even then I didn’t quite realise how much danger I was in.
‘That’s not the name you told me last time, is it Mick?’ Ronnie said.
This could be trouble. One minute we were passing time, just talking about a charge I’d been fitted up with. It didn’t even concern Ronnie. Now he doubted my every word, even the name of the person I was nicked with.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Lenny Stringer.’
‘No, that ain’t the name,’ he said. ‘You told me a different name. What’s it all about?’
‘What? I didn’t!’ I said. ‘That ain’t about anything.’
‘You’re doing this for a reason, aren’t you?’ he said, but without raising his voice. ‘You think I’m a grass, don’t you? Everybody’s going around saying that Reggie and me are grasses.’ I felt the trellis work by the wall behind me in The Kentucky Club’s bar. Any second now he was going to punch me straight through it.
The evening had taken a sudden turn from the pleasant social encounter it had started as. When we met there weren’t even many customers in the club, it was really just me and Ronnie. He bought me a gin and tonic and I was just gossiping more than anything else.
‘Got three months today, Ron,’ I said. And then the words that for some reason got him so angry: ‘Do you remember I told you about when we got nicked over the offensive weapons with old Lenny Stringer?’
I made it worse after he said that everyone thought he was a grass. Even then I hadn’t realised how deep the waters were with him that day. I wasn’t paying attention to the way he was talking, just to the facts of what he said.
I dismissed his concern: ‘Don’t worry, they say that about all club owners, you don’t want to take no notice of all that, do you?’
Now Ronnie was off, raving incoherently. That was when I really thought he was going to smash me. But his rant was interrupted by the arrival of someone else we knew and, once he was distracted, I was able to seize the opportunity to go around the trellis and out the door.
I couldn’t be sure that he’d forgotten about it when I went over to Vallance Road the next night. A bigger group of us were going to go to The Kentucky again but Ronnie asked me to hold back.
‘Hang on a minute, Mick, I’ll have a walk down there with you,’ he said.
That wasn’t out of character for him, although it might sound sinister given what had only just happened. Ronnie wanted me on my own. Of course, I was wary, but then I always was when Ronnie was around. I wasn’t cocky, but the rule had to be the same as around a wild animal. I could never get myself comfortable around him, but I also couldn’t show any concern. In that respect this was like any other evening. We walked down Vallance Road together in the night air, just the two of us, towards Whitechapel.
‘Mick,’ said Ronnie softly, ‘I’m sorry about the other night. You must think I’m a right prat.’ I’d never heard him say those words before – two sentences relating to himself with ‘sorry’ and ‘prat’ in them.
‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s all right, Ron.’
‘Nah, I’ll tell you what’s happened. I’ve been experimenting with my medication. I’ve left it off for a few days. I’m taking it again now. But when I wasn’t…I can’t describe it to you. Everything was like a fog. It’s really strange.’
In my own dealings with people who’ve had mental health problems in later years, I’ve come across that description more than once. The idea that you’re in fog is common. Many find it hard to get the feeling across.
‘Look,’ he said, holding out a hand filled with tablets, ‘there’s the pills I take. Do you want one? You can take one.’
It was like a kid sharing candy. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Give us one!’ I had no wish to taste what was called Stelazine, an anti-psychotic, but it was just to show a bit of goodwill. I gulped down his freebie and that was the end of the matter. One dose of the drug had no effect on me but at that time not much did. I was soon washing it down with a nice gin and tonic at The Kentucky and we went on with our evening as the best of friends. Ronnie was stable and the incident was never mentioned again.
The prison sentence we had been discussing the previous night had been hanging over my head for a while. I had been arrested some time before while giving a lift to my friend, old Lenny Stringer. I was in a car with a friend when I saw the conman who had done six years down The Moor – one of the few unfortunate enough to get caught at the corner – and I had to stop for a few words when I saw him down Queen’s Road. He was like an uncle to me. As I drove him home, we were boxed in by two big Humber cars. Forced to pull up, we were told to get out by men in suits who turned out to be Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad. We were scurfed – grabbed – and bundled into one of the waiting police cars.
I didn’t like the look of what was on the floor in the back of the car. A crowbar wrapped in brown paper. Lenny the old boy was in a different car as the three of us were taken to West Ham Police Station. Not a word was spoken as we were taken down to the cells, even when I got my fingerprints taken. But I knew what had led to us being picked up. If you were pulled in and you didn’t know what it was you were supposed to have done, it was usually because some other criminal had put the finger on you. I just didn’t know the details and so I asked a real mug’s question. ‘What’s it all about?’ That was such a clichéd question to ask. So many mugs come out with it when they’ve been chinned that it’s something of a saying. But I came out with it and a Welsh-sounding officer had an answer for me.
‘The manor will be a bit fucking
quieter without you, boyo.’
Somebody wanted me and my friend off the streets. This had to have gone back to The Hammer Club fight. The row might have made my name but it also made me enemies. I was a nuisance now, too big for my boots. Somebody wanted to take me down a few notches and to this day I don’t know who it was who set me up. All I was able to find out later was that the source of the trouble lay with the relations of those who had been hurt in The Hammer.
We were all slung back in our cells until the police were ready to let us have it.
‘You are charged with possession of the following offensive weapons: an iron bar, stockings, two bits of celluloid and a cosh.’
The bar was the crowbar and the celluloid was used for opening Yale locks. The cosh was a length of rubber hose. We were in the hands of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad. Frank Williams was the Welshman and the squad’s second-in-command. He was also a very good friend of Freddie Foreman, which would later be the cause of a fight between him and Frankie Fraser when he accused Foreman of being a grass.
With the offensive weapons laid out in front of us, the three of us heard the charges. Then we were taken back our cells and I began to feel a bit sick. I was convinced this wouldn’t be the end of it. We would end up on a charge of conspiracy to robbery and I thought, I’m going to get five years here. Each in our separate the cells we talked amongst ourselves in a mixture of Gypsy and Yiddish and slang that would have been virtually incomprehensible to anyone listening in.
The gist of it was that the other fella that Stringer and me were with, said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I can get this watered down and we can straighten it. We’ll give them a few quid.’
For the first time I felt a bit of hope. He seemed confident.
‘Today?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we’ll get bail soon.’ That could be handy.
My friend offered £200 to the Flying Squad to keep the charge at possession of offensive weapons. The police would also not verbal us, meaning that they wouldn’t say that we’d admitted we were going out to burgle somewhere or carry out some major robbery. Bail was duly granted and at the Magistrates’ Court two of us pleaded guilty – another part of the agreement – while Lenny Stringer was acquitted because we’d only been giving him a lift.
I felt I had just about successfully negotiated an occupational hazard. If you had friends and a bit of luck you could usually make your way around these sorts of things. You just had to keep your eyes open. That same night at The Kentucky I forgot to follow my own advice and that was when Ronnie cornered me. Having survived the encounter with him and accepted his unexpected apology, I went back to court to drop my appeal.
My friend and I appeared at West Ham’s quarter sessions and were sent to Pentonville Prison to serve the time. The jail term wasn’t, really, a big deal. I never found out who was behind the fit up and I wouldn’t have gone after them even if I had. I’d have settled for hating them from a distance. Should whoever was behind the fit up come within range, well, it might be different. But I certainly wouldn’t have gone after them. The police were the guv’nors at that time and I couldn’t ignore the fact that someone had serious influence with them. If they were prepared to fit me up for robbery, what would they do if I escalated the feud? I would just be arrested for something else.
The twins suffered from the same problem a lot. There was one crooked woman who swore blind that she caught Reggie breaking into her home. She was probably completely mad, but there was a load of aggravation for Reggie in getting out of that. It was all too easy to get into the criminal justice system if someone made a complaint. But getting out was very difficult. You had to see it through the whole process.
It’s hard to overstate how much power the police had back then. It’s so different now, when you can often see young people – women as well as men – talking back to officers on the street. They know that now the police can’t just do anything they want. Back then there were no limits. You could go away for a long time just for being in the way. If you were crooked, that was enough. You didn’t need to have done the crime. Sometimes the police were just downright incompetent, but there was nothing you could do about it. We just got on with our lives and treated them like a force of nature. You could see the storm coming, but there wasn’t a lot you could do if it hit you.
Two men I personally knew were sent away for a long stretch when they were completely innocent. I first read about it in an Evening Standard report of an armoured car robbery in Longfleet, Kent. Some £87,000 had been stolen; an impressive amount and one of my friends knew the mob who were behind it. We all got to hear about it in time. There wasn’t much to it. I knew Roy Shaw was involved. He was on the dole at the time but was soon cruising around in a white Mercedes sports car – so at least he got something out of it.
The robbery was just a fact on the manor and everyone knew who was really behind it. But the police didn’t seem to have a clue. They whirled around, pulling in all sorts of people and questioning them down at Plaistow station. Yet of the five suspects eventually charged, only two were involved. Roy and one other. Another fella got acquitted, but the two men I got to know – who I will call Bill C and Bill S – were innocent.
I became friendly with Bill C years later and he told me that his problem had been that he knew the robbers. The firm warned him to steer clear of them as they were being watched. But he was young and didn’t think he had anything to worry about. He didn’t know how careful you had to be when the police were looking to get someone.
Bill S was more of a mystery to most people. He was from the Elephant & Castle – or over the water, as we called any place south of the Thames – and I only knew him through the friends I’d made there with my friend Ronnie Curtis. Most people on the manor who didn’t travel around as much as I did had no idea who he was. Bill S was an upright-looking fella of above average height, about 5ft 10–5ft 11 and he could have passed for a policeman himself. As he sat in their cell, the others stayed at the other end. They wouldn’t talk to him.
In court the jury heard how the armoured truck used a road which passed a piece of green where the robbers staged a bit of a kick about with a football. It meant they avoided standing on the street corner looking like gangsters. A policeman passing on a bike happened to see the game and gave a description of a 5ft 8 man with a big mop of hair. As the judge summed up the case he told the jury that Bill C wouldn’t have looked his full height if he’d been dashing around the football green. And perhaps his straight hair would have been flying around. It was hardly conclusive. Bill S had been buying long-firm gear – goods obtained through fraud – in his area.
When the police raided Bill S’s house they found a significant sum of money in the shoebox in his wardrobe and some more in his wife’s handbag. Bank clerks used to sign off on a sticker on the bundles of notes and a signature found on a note at Bill S’s place was said to match the missing money. That was all the evidence there was. It didn’t matter. A couple of soppy pieces of circumstantial evidence were enough to do for those two.
The lesson from that was the only way to deal with the police was to keep out of their way entirely. If they wanted you badly enough, they’d get you. Each of the four in the Longfleet case got 15 years.
Bill C recalled, ‘I sat in the cell under the court after I got the 15 and my legs wouldn’t stop shaking.’ I had to feel some sympathy – these were incredibly long terms. It was a foretaste of what the Great Train Robbers could expect later in the 1960s. They were given 30-year stretches.
I would later get to know Bill C when a friend of mine asked me to visit him in Dartmoor Prison. As my friend was on the run, I took his place and Bill told me more about his story. I was determined to do what I could to help him get out. Through a solicitor I got to meet columnist Jeremy Hornsby on The Daily Express. He took up the campaign. Between us we would eventually got Bill C parole but not until he’d done eight years.
It wasn’t uncommon to try and help people o
ut when they got sent down. If nothing else, there was often a collection for the aways, which was mainly done to further the twins’ PR. When I did my time after being fitted up, the Krays organised one for me – though I never saw any of the money. They gave it to Tommy Hume, a small, thin man who lived down Custom House in a prefab. He was always conning people and he used to run about like a rat. There was always someone after him. A sickly man, he came down with tuberculosis but he didn’t care a fuck for anybody and when Ronnie asked me if I had got the money from him, I knew immediately that he would have spent it himself. Hume ended up in a chest hospital and nobody had the heart to sort him out. It was even suggested that we go and see him when it sounded as if he might not survive. But then another one of the Krays’ associates vetoed the idea.
‘Think about it,’ he warned. ‘He may get better.’ Oh, yeah, everyone thought. And he never got another mention. And he didn’t get better either.
I haven’t talked much about my family life and I want to keep that personal side of things out of this book as much as possible. I will say that it was around this time, 1961, that my son Michael was born. His mother, my wife, was one of the Queen’s Road mob from Upton Park and I got to know her through being friendly with them. Having grown up in the area, she knew everyone, including those who would go on to be the bosses. But our relationship was a huge mistake. We didn’t get on from day one and we had a very quiet marriage in a register office, staying together for the child, at least at first. We were together for ten years.
I didn’t want Michael growing up with what was then still the stigma of having unmarried parents. But my wife and I lived our lives completely independently from the day we got married. She barely knew the Krays and of the twins themselves, only Ronnie came to visit our place and that was only once.
For most of our marriage we lived in the area in which she’d grown up. There was a brief period we spent abroad – I had to go to Spain in a hurry. It was out there that she first became ill and had to go onto dialysis. I decided to stay with her and we remained together throughout the long treatment. But by the time she died following a kidney transplant, we had finally agreed to separate. That is all I really want to say about that side of my life – I did meet someone else in 1979 and we’re still together now, though we were never married.
Krayzy Days Page 10
