Krayzy Days
Page 14
Reggie, though, was deadly serious and there was every chance that this could go badly wrong. If we said, ‘No, you can’t do that, Reg,’ I knew that would be signing Dickie’s death warrant. All we could do was keep driving around and wait for him to calm down.
We were in the car for an hour or more. We kept cool, brought up other subjects of conversation and generally tried to divert Reggie’s thoughts. There would be no financial reward in Dickie dying, we suggested, no reputation to be gained for the Krays. We soothed, we were practical and we raised sensible considerations.
Gradually the danger faded as we turned from one street into another. It helped that Johnny Squibb was on my side and was a very old and trusted friend of Reggie.
Eventually I got the chance when we were pulled up to say to Dickie, ‘Go on, have it away.’
I advised him to get out of sight and he took me very literally and went to America. I didn’t blame him. Having survived the twins, I heard years later that he went on to do well in Las Vegas.
Chapter Ten
Billy Hill and the Unione Corse v the Krays
The twins were beginning to get on my nerves. Both of them were pissed all the time and there seemed to be more idiots around them every day. More of those inexperienced mugs who were attracted by the lifestyle. It wasn’t like Freddie Foreman’s lot – he had heavy-duty bank robbers around him who you wouldn’t want to tangle with. The presence of lightweights with the Krays wasn’t anything new, it just seemed there was more stupidity around than ever before. The twins were going nowhere.
After a while I began to get the message. Their hearts weren’t in it and they just didn’t seem to care. I’d still go out with Reggie though, though it did all feel a bit aimless. Esmeralda’s Barn had also run its course when they offered the club to me. The venue was managed by their Uncle Alf and they owed a fortune in income tax on the limited company which was responsible for it.
‘We’ll sell you the company on paper,’ they said. ‘You’ll owe the tax and there might be something you can do with the outfit.’
They were thinking I might swindle someone into investing in it. They didn’t much care – they just wanted to know if it was of any use.
The liabilities didn’t bother them.
‘I don’t pay tax – I’m a lunatic,’ Ronnie would say.
I was similarly unmoved.
‘Yeah,’ I said without hesitation. What difference did it make? I didn’t have bank accounts and there was no official trail leading to me. I needed only to duck and the tax would miss me. What could the Inland Revenue get off me? As far as the authorities were concerned, I didn’t exist. But that was about all the deal had going for it. I had never been a gambler and you really needed to know the games to make a success of a den like Esmeralda’s. You had to stick yourself up as a target for the other punters to aim at. It just wasn’t my scene.
I thought it would be nice to have a place in Belgravia, even if I only managed to hold on to it for a fortnight. With that attitude it was hardly surprising that I didn’t do much with the place. I took a couple of the waitresses out for dinner – that was about as far as it went. The biggest impact the place had on me was when I was eventually arrested along with the Krays and then the police didn’t half grill me about having been in charge of The Barn.
The club limped on for a time but it had been over as a destination before the Krays handed it on. And when a club’s over, it’s over. It might be open but if the crowd have moved on, you can’t bring it back to life. The twins wouldn’t have handed it to me if there was still any mileage in it.
Reggie had half a mind to help me make something of The Barn. One night not long after I became the owner, I went out with him and Coxie, who was a very good friend and a very tough guy. We were visiting various venues when Reggie was seized upon the idea of checking out a hot venue, The 21 Club – in the house once owned by Lord Chesterfield in Chesterfield Gardens. It was the epitome of a Mayfair casino down to the liveried doormen, who barred entry, even to the famous Reginald Kray. We weren’t members and there were no exceptions. Soon Reggie’s famous left hook came over and the offending member of staff went down. His colleagues came out and a bit of a free-for-all started in the immaculate entrance to The 21. But in the way of those things, and there were many of them then, it was soon over and we took our custom to elsewhere, to The Astor.
We got inside without any trouble this time and – at last – we saw a friendly face. A fella named Patsy Murphy.
‘How are you?’ said Reggie. ‘I’ve got Mick with me here, he’s taken over The Barn. I don’t know if there’s anything you could do with these guys?’
It was all rather vague and I wondered what was on Reggie’s mind. Probably no big scheme. Patsy was often to be seen in the casinos in the West End, he always had a few quid and he knew Billy Hill, whose influence in Mayfair was still very powerful. Billy had interests in gambling, from card games – which he loved – to betting shops all over that area of London. I guess Reggie knew it wasn’t going well for me. Having passed Esmeralda’s on, he was looking for any kind of inspiration as a way of helping me along. Perhaps he was also just a bit bored, having been turned away from The 21. It was always hard to tell.
Patsy looked doubtful.
‘Well, I can’t do anything,’ he said, ‘without first of all speaking to the old professor.’ He meant Billy Hill – but Reggie didn’t need to be told that. In fact, he really didn’t need to be told any of that. It seemed to be an unnecessarily aggressive way of pointing out that Hill was more important than Reggie Kray. Patsy suddenly didn’t look like quite such a friendly face.
‘Can’t ya?’ said Reggie, his jaw clenched. He grabbed Patsy and between the three of us we dragged him into The Astor’s office. We knew the manager and Reggie asked if he could use the telephone. It was polite enough but there was no mistaking the fact that Reggie was in charge now. He dug out Billy Hill’s number and dialled as if it was a scheduled business appointment rather than just gone half past two in the morning. And Billy answered the phone as if he exchanged pleasantries with a Kray twin at that hour on a regular basis.
‘Bill,’ said Reggie, ‘we’ve got a fella here who reckons he can’t hardly talk to us, he can’t do anything with us, without your permission.’
‘Come over now,’ said Billy. ‘Bring him with you.’ This was a suggestion that met with Reggie’s approval, as wise old Billy Hill undoubtedly guessed. We kidnapped Patsy, bundling him into the car to take him to Hill’s flat at 17 Moscow Road in Bayswater. It wasn’t far but it was almost three in the morning as our mini gang arrived on Billy’s doorstep. We were greeted by the man himself, relaxed in a Sulka designer dressing gown and cravat.
‘Come in, Reg! Come in, boys!’
He was welcoming. A fully-stocked bar ran the entire length of one big room in his flat and the rooms were hung with immaculate flock wallpaper. He glowered at Patsy.
‘Get in there, you!’ he snapped. ‘Get in the kitchen!’ He served us all drinks and when Reggie was quite comfortable he listened sympathetically to his account of the evening’s woes.
‘Yeah?’ said Billy at the appropriate moment. ‘Patsy shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Well, we’ll take him away with us,’ said Reggie flatly. ‘He’s going in the drink tonight.’
This was his favourite way of saying he was going to kill someone. I don’t know where he got it from. He probably just liked the sound of it.
‘Oh, Reg,’ said Billy quietly. ‘Can’t I just kick him up the arse and we’ll throw him out?’
‘Nah. It’s very insulting, what he’s done. I’m gonna do him. Throw him in the river.’
Billy tried a new tack.
‘Look, out of respect for old times, don’t. This is the last place he’s been seen. And I ain’t done anything. Please. Let me kick him out, can I?’
As if he was allowing a cheeky child an extra biscuit, Reggie said, ‘Oh, go on, then!’
When he came back, still resplendent in his dressing gown, he threw a little package into Reggie’s lap. A chunky, sealed envelope.
‘What’s this?’
‘There’s a monkey there, Reg.’ Five hundred quid. A lot of money at that time.
‘No, Bill!’ said Reg.
‘Please! Would you please take it? I wanna give it to you. And if you take it and ever I need you, I’ll feel that I can phone you up and speak to you. I just want to give you that as a token of goodwill, so we can be friends.’
Once again, as if he was doing a massive favour, Reggie nodded his agreement. I didn’t get a penny out of it – which was typical of Reggie. One or two more gin and tonics for the road and we left, some of us quids in. Billy Hill himself had even more to celebrate. He told me himself – a long time afterwards, when the Krays had gone away – that he was grateful for Reggie’s antics that night. The 21 Club had been straight on to Billy to say they’d had trouble with the Kray twins.
‘Leave it to me,’ he said.
He would handle it, he was the boss and they weren’t to worry about it. And indeed, that’s what he did. The 21 were indebted to him and now so was Reggie. The real result was all Billy’s.
Billy Hill enjoyed the kind of reputation and respect that the twins could only dream about. And they did. He might not have the public image that the Krays had but nor did he want fame. He had made his life work in a way they never managed. When he celebrated his birthday at The Latin Quarter in Wardour Street, everyone of importance turned out. The doorman was Bert Hyland, a nice, old Irish ex-boxer. He not only organised car parking but arranged for vehicles to be returned home as far east as Upton Park while their owners toasted Billy – everything seemed to be more polished around him.
It was only a few days after Reggie had been at the flat that cunning Bill called in his favour. Reggie was to help him with some sort of problem but he didn’t ask me because that would have meant sharing the cash. He asked me to stay by the phone at Vallance Road until he got back while he headed off with some likely looking characters from Aldgate. Whatever Billy wanted couldn’t have been too serious judging by the way they all came back, laughing and joking.
‘It was nothing,’ Reggie told me. ‘He was playing cards with some of his friends. They were just waiters from the local French restaurants. All he did was give us a few quid and say, “I was just trying you out. Sorry, Reg – I couldn’t help it.”’
They got a couple of grand for their trouble. But, as I discovered for myself much later, the scene had been far from an innocent wind-up. They had been completely taken in by Billy Hill. The ‘waiters’ were laughing at the Krays. And, more to the point, they weren’t waiters.
When I was later more friendly with Billy, he explained it all to me.
‘They were Unione Corse gangsters who ran all the gambling in the West End,’ he said.
This was the French Mafia who operated out of places like Marseille and along that Riviera strip. Very powerful and worse than the Americans for cold-blooded killing. They had been into loads of casinos in London and they had made money from marked cards. It was through them that Billy had made most of his fortune – through crooked gambling at some of the top places in London.
He even had people in leading casino The Clermont in Berkley Square, Mayfair, and when they got found out he went to John Aspinall the owner to offer him a choice. Either watch the story leak and people lose confidence in him, or let them carry on and cut them in. So when all these people like Lord Lucan were gambling, it was all crooked. And they never knew. It was incredible, really. The French were so much more discreet than any of their English or American counterparts. There was none of that talk of ‘taking over’ that you heard in London. That Corsican heritage was evident in their secretive, patient approach to empire building. They were able to take over more than the likes of the Krays ever did.
To demonstrate his influence to his partners in the Unione Corse Billy sent for the twins and they dutifully came tearing in. He only wanted to show how he could raise a right mob at a moment’s notice if he needed to. Reggie might have blustered to Billy but the truth was that both brothers were frightened of him. They knew that he was that much smarter than them even if they never knew how openly he used them to enlarge his own empire. Nobody ever found out how much Billy Hill manipulated them.
Patsy Murphy, the fella we met and Reggie went on to bully in The Astor, also wasn’t who he seemed. Not just some aimless character who got about, he was instead a rick, one of Hill’s own card players who worked with marked decks. There was some sort of contraption Billy got into casinos to mark the cards, he told me. Apparently the French used a wooden box which Billy said he improved on by making an aluminium version. I never got into the technical side because I wasn’t ever into gambling. But however he did it, these devices would introduce a subtle bend to the cards which you could recognise if you had an eye for it and you would be able to identify any card. The hardest part of Billy’s scam was finding someone on the inside to ring the cards for marked decks. It would be a cleaner or waiter who could do that. Skilful ricks like Patsy joined the clubs and read the cards just as clearly as if they were seeing each one from the front.
Without realising it, Reggie had struck gold with Murphy when he piled in like a short-sighted, angry rhinoceros. Murphy was an important member of Billy’s team who Billy moved quickly to defend, before with equal agility turning Reggie’s blundering to his advantage. If only Reggie had half Bill’s brains he might have worked out why the other man was so interested and gone on to use that for his own advantage. There was no chance of that. Reggie was just happy – as usual – to make a few quid.
And though I didn’t know what was going on at the time, I had a feeling that they were being made fools of. There was something wrong there, even if it was hard to pinpoint exactly what it was. It was part of a wider sense of an ending. The Krays’ little empire was on the decline. Their attention was diverted by the necessity of keeping an eye on other firms and families in London.
In the end, it would indirectly be their obsession with and failure to win against South London’s Richardsons and their associates that would bring them down, though the catastrophe began with a brush with the Mafia.
Visiting Americans had opened up a casino in The Connolly Club in Berkeley Square. It was next door to The Astor and it was very glitzy. George Raft was the main man with the new arrivals. Everyone latched on to him and it was all good natured. The Americans were here to play, not to shoot anybody. I remember people like Joe Pyle were breaking their necks to be seen next to them when they went to fights and the twins visited them at The Connolly. There they made a bit of a nuisance of themselves.
A Jewish family were having a loud argument among themselves – father and son were getting a bit noisy. Ronnie jumped up and was all for going over to sort them out. George Raft calmed him down.
‘Ron! They’re customers! It’ll be all right.’
Shortly afterwards George Raft pulled me aside and said, ‘Has Ronnie met the Blade yet?’
The Blade being Charles Tourine, the top Mafia enforcer here. It was obvious to me that Raft thought that Ronnie could become a problem. He eventually came up with a good scheme for containing the Krays. He approached Reggie with a business plan.
‘I can see things aren’t going too well for you, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
He meant financially. And he was right.
‘I wanna offer you some money. I wanna do a deal. I’ll give you £300 a week. You’re the top firm here, the Nashes and you. And I’m going to give you £3,000 now as a down payment.’
You could interpret it as protection money, of a sort, though Raft had gone to Reggie voluntarily. He just wante
d to avoid trouble.
And this was where the problems began. Ronnie immediately gave a third to Freddie Foreman and a third to the Nashes. The idea was to build some kind of coalition. He was very influenced by Winston Churchill’s belief in the power of great alliances – he was a fan of Churchill in general and would often listen to recordings of his speeches.
‘Great man, Churchill,’ he would say. ‘I will go to his funeral when he dies.’ Unfortunately, he was in Brixton Prison when he died.
Reggie backed his idea. The Nashes were a formidable force and Freddie Foreman had his robbers to call on. It was the link to Foreman that would later prove to be toxic, though the twins hoped it would provide a defence against the Richardsons in South London. The Krays were afraid of their connection with Frankie Fraser. This was an ancient feud.
The young Krays had been friendly with Jack Spot while the South London lot, along with Bobby Warren, Billy Bly, Albert Dimes, Battles Rossi and co, had sided with Billy Hill when he ordered an attack on Spot. They then threatened the twins, who were at that stage too inexperienced to take them on. They never really got over it and were shocked when Fraser joined with the Richardsons on his release from prison. Frankie Fraser had a hex on them from then on and so did Billy Hill. The memory of that lingered. When Fraser came to a local pub to see the Krays, nobody touched him. He was more of a menace than the Richardsons themselves.
I knew how much the alliance meant to them, but I was still very disappointed that they had given all that money away. Ronnie’s gesture might have been straight out of the statesman leadership handbook, but it meant that, once again, he had frittered away a useful source of income. By the time all three of the Krays had divided up the rest of the cash between them, there wasn’t that much left.
Nobody else around the twins seemed to understand how important money was. Most of them just sat next to the twins all day like the family was some kind of labour exchange. There were a few exceptions like an old fella who was a friend of the Krays’ father, known as The Plum because he had a blue face and a little fat neck. Ronnie rated him for going out and earning his own money, but mostly the Krays were surrounded by useless morons. Ronnie once addressed them all in a speech.