‘I wanna speak to all you lot,’ he said, specifically excluding me and a couple of other fellas who had a living. It was the rest of them who had got to him.
‘I’m fucking fed up of you, you make me sick.’ It was a bizarre, mad rant. ‘I ain’t asking you to be French gangsters! I ain’t asking you to go out and cut people’s throats! But why don’t you go out and tap people like The Plum does, and he’s 65? You’re just sitting around skint all day.’
Maybe most of the mob around the Krays were on the dole and didn’t need the money. Maybe they just didn’t care.
As Ronnie’s speech of frustration demonstrated, the twins knew they couldn’t rely on their men for anything important, particularly the feud with their rivals. And this was more serious than the frequent, spontaneous fights which often came out of nowhere, though Freddie Foreman has claimed that the row with the Richardsons was no different. He was wrong. The twins were always plotting against them. Always. There was a big row in a Catford club called Mr Smith’s between the Richardsons and Fraser and the Hennessey crew which was the main example. It has always been said since that this was an impulsive free-for-all, but that wasn’t the case.
The Hennesseys asked Foreman, ‘What happens if it’s off? Are we all right to have a row?’
The message back from the twins was unambiguous – ‘Definitely. We’ll back you to the hilt.’
They did just that, arming the Hennesseys as well. The resulting battle has been extensively documented. The Richardsons had taken over security at the club, more as a kind of status thing than for the money. But what has always been denied was the involvement of the Krays – yet they were up for it. Within a couple of nights of asking permission, the Hennesseys staged an attack that seemed chaotic but was fully sanctioned by the twins.
Among the casualties was Frankie Fraser, shot in the leg, and Dickie Hart, who got killed. He went along with the Hennesseys and was thought of as a full member of the firm, though the twins never met him. The upshot of the row was that Fraser and Eddie Richardson got ten years each. I don’t think any of the Hennessey mob got any bird. As a side note George Raft and his Mafia pals wanted no part of the row and caught the next plane back to the States. When they eventually tried to return to Britain the Home Secretary barred entry to them, probably saving the West End from falling under Mafia control in the process.
The twins were triumphant but they were too loud about it. I began to feel uneasy after meeting Reggie on my way to visit a couple of people at Dartmoor. I had been to the prison before and my routine was to try for a morning visit and that meant I would either be driven overnight or stay in a hotel. This time I dropped in at The Regency Club on my way to meet my driving partner. Reggie was outside the club. He grabbed hold of me, which was right out of character for such a buttoned-up fella, and pulled me on a wild waltz in the street.
‘Ain’t it great?’ he said. ‘What about that? It’s wonderful!’
He was almost hysterical with joy at the result in Mr Smith’s. I didn’t like it. As I extricated myself from his embrace and walked off, I thought to myself, you shouldn’t be doing this. You’ll be next. This doesn’t sound too good to me at all. It was all off, this gloating. There wasn’t any need to be vindictive about it.
I was out of touch until my return to London the next day when I grabbed a couple of hours sleep. I bought the newspaper early that morning and near the back was the headline: MAN SHOT DEAD IN THE BLIND BEGGAR PUB. This was a total shock – the landlord was Patsy Quill who, along with his brother Jimmy, were friends of mine.
The shooting had to be bad news. I phoned Charlie, who told me to meet him that morning at Mile End Station. My question was only one word.
‘Reggie?’
‘No,’ said Charlie. ‘Ronnie.’
‘What happened?’
‘Mick,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s a shame you wasn’t around. Some nightclub hostesses from the West End spoke to Freddie Foreman.’
Freddie had The Prince of Wales in Lant Street near Borough Market. The girls told him that a Richardsons’ firm member called Billy Stayton had got drunk and said he was going to throw a petrol bomb pub in Fred’s pub. And while he could always have a fight, anyone with any sense knew that Billy wasn’t ever going to carry out his pissed threats. But Freddie was close to the Krays, lived above the pub with his family, and so something had to be done.
‘We’d have sent you over there, Mick,’ continued Charlie, ‘but who we sent over in the end was fucking Nobby Clark’
He was an ex-flyweight boxer, though he’d have been better off as a circus ringmaster. Extrovert, outgoing and theatrical, he was also a total nuisance. Loud voice, bald head. You couldn’t fail to notice him and he was the last person you’d want to send on a delicate mission like this.
‘It’s all off!’ he shouted on his return. ‘It’s off again. They’re going to bomb Fred’s pub!’ And on he went. This set Ronnie off and with great relish he worked himself up into a state of battle readiness, every inch The Colonel about to lead his troops over the top. He grabbed two of his nearest men and ordered them to drive him to The Blind Beggar. And there can’t be many people who don’t know where the story is going.
‘Who’s in The Beggars?’ said Charlie. ‘George Cornell. Ronnie shot him, killed him stone dead. Oh God. We’ve won the war and now we’re back in it. What are we gonna do?’
George Cornell, the Richardsons’ man, shot in front of so many witnesses you’d think that Ronnie wanted to go down.
Poor Patsy Quill was driven fucking mad over the Cornell shooting. He and Georgie had known each other all their lives. Patsy was upstairs in The Blind Beggar when he heard two shots and came down to find Georgie slumped over.
The Old Bill took Cornell’s body away and then said to Patsy, ‘Scrape them up.’ They pointed at Cornell’s brains, blown all over the floor.
Shooting Cornell was the end for the Krays. It was as bad as it could be. They’d won a great victory over the Richardsons in Catford without having to fire a shot themselves. Charlie and I played it cool as we spoke but I could tell from looking at him that he knew it would be nearly impossible to pull things back. We were all stuck for our next move.
Eventually, Reggie suggested putting it about that it was nothing to do with the ongoing feud, but it was personal. Cornell had called Ronnie a poof. If we spread that story around, he hoped, maybe the Richardsons wouldn’t try and retaliate. So that’s what me and Charlie told Billy Hill.
Coincidentally, Billy Hill’s favourite all-purpose insult was to say whoever was on the receiving end of his displeasure was ‘a fucking poof’. He didn’t react when we gave him the story. He just adjusted his cufflinks before looking back at us.
‘What Ronnie does is his own business,’ he said, dismissively. ‘It doesn’t concern anybody else.’ I thought it was a magnificent response from Hillsy, and quite funny.
The legend of Ronnie’s personal vendetta against Cornell was born. Billy had understood perfectly what we were doing and he didn’t want anything to do with any of it. Years later, when we were good friends, he would say that’s how he survived so long.
‘I was the only one who could think,’ he said, and I also found that any ability to reason put you ahead in the world of the twins.
There wasn’t really any particular reason behind Cornell’s death. It wasn’t him calling Ronnie any names. It wasn’t the feud. A lot of bollocks has been written about it since. Some have even claimed that George had once given Ronnie a right hiding. But I knew Cornell and he was friendly and amiable enough. Certainly not a particularly powerful geezer. He wouldn’t have taken Ronnie on.
It was purely Billy Stayton and Nobby Clark’s carry-on that led to the shooting and I can’t emphasise how much damage they did. Before Nobby’s performance the Krays had even been known to defend Cornell.
There was one time when Ginger Marks, who we all knew and who was also killed himself in a shooting, was in The Kentucky
Club.
‘Mick, I’ve just had a right touch,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you something. I’ll give you a nice few quid if you do George Cornell for us.’
Marksy, also known as Tommy Marks, was known for being a bit impetuous. I had no intention of doing the job for him but didn’t tell him outright. Meanwhile, I reported the encounter to Ronnie.
‘What?’ said Ronnie. ‘Cornell’s a friend of mine! He put me up when I was on the run!’
And so he went on, raging against Marksy’s disrespect. He followed it up by frightening the life out of him. Cornell hadn’t done anything to deserve his shooting. It could have been anyone in The Beggar that night. Poor old George.
Even Freddy Foreman thought the killing was unnecessary.
‘You’d have thought he’d walk down the road from the pub a bit. Just wait for him to come out, if he was so determined to do it.’
The shooting was so self-destructive that you had to wonder if Ronnie wanted to bring things down. Perhaps that’s looking too deeply into it. But while they would never have consciously wanted their lifestyle to come to an end, they knew they weren’t going to go any further. Ronnie was certainly aware of it. Reggie, meanwhile, was just a shell of his former self.
Chapter Eleven
Leaving the Krays
Ronnie Kray was a shambling mess, drunken, pilled-up, telling any random stranger who would listen.
‘I shot George Cornell, you know.’ This was getting a bit boring. ‘Did you like him?’ he would mutter. ‘Did you agree with it?’
The twins had been on the slide for a while but now everybody knew. From the moment of the killing in my friend’s pub – and that was a fucking liberty without any point whatsoever – the insanity had gone public. I wanted out. But how could I get out? You couldn’t just say a cheery ‘Good day!’ to the Krays.
Reggie was also beginning to cut a sad figure, skulking around, sticking to the streets in which he felt safest. The clubs were all going and the circle of Kray influence was shrinking to the two or three other pubs nearest their house. There they felt secure. When we were somewhere like The Grave Maurice there were loads of people. Partly that was because it was opposite London Hospital and, as my then friend Teddy Machin once observed, ‘This place is full of surgeons.’
He looked at the medical staff up one end of the pub and the Krays at the other.
‘Surgeons up there and surgeons down here.’
Yet as desperate as life was getting, Reggie could still hold a grudge.
‘Mick! See that fella over there?’ he said one night in The Maurice. ‘I’m gonna chin him later. I’m going to stick it on him. Buller’s just told me he’s a grass.’
I kept my voice natural. ‘No, he’s not, Reg. I know him quite well. That’s Bill Taylor.’ AKA Bill the Blower, from Manchester. ‘He’s a nice guy. Good as gold.’
Bill was a very smart, good looking, veteran safe blower. But Reggie wouldn’t be convinced now he’d heard it from Buller Ward – Buller the bully. A liar as well. He was the muscle who came to Paris with me.
‘Old man Burns has told him,’ said Reggie.
Burns was a waste paper merchant whose son was Tony Burns, a former amateur boxer who had taken over his father’s boxing club, The Repton, in Bethnal Green.
‘Look, Reg, leave it to me,’ I said. ‘I’ll sort this out and if it’s proven that Bill’s a grass, I’ll do him. That’s how confident I am.’ I went over to Bill and came straight to the point. It was the only way to deal with it. ‘Do you know old man Burns?’
‘Yeah, I know him quite well.’
‘He’s called you a grass.’ Bill was clearly shocked. I filled him in with what Buller said. We decided to go and see Burns at his home ourselves just off Bethnal Green Road. He looked delighted to see us and Bill in particular.
Inside Bill asked him, ‘Have you heard any stories about me being a wrong ’un? Anything like that?’
‘Nah,’ said Burns. ‘Leave off, Bill. Everyone’s got the utmost respect for you.’
‘Buller’s told the twins that I’m a grass!’
‘Fucking liberty! My God, you’re nothing of the kind.’ It sounded sincere and that’s what I told Reggie. I knew Buller was lying and that it was completely motiveless. Buller was just wicked. You get them. A nasty bastard.
The incident was put to one side for a while, but Buller was always on borrowed time. The one thing you really didn’t want to be getting Reggie to do was to chin someone on your behalf – even now the twins were on the way out. Anything else might be forgotten but this would have niggled away at Reggie, no matter the state he was in.
Not long before they were nicked, by which time they were generally barely able to stand up most of the time, Reggie happened upon Buller and slashed him across the face. Even when Buller told others what happened, he couldn’t help but embellish the story.
‘He was walking past me and then turned and hit me on the chin. I said, “Is that the best you can do?”’ said Buller.
There was no way that anybody would ask Reggie Kray a question like that. Buller never knew why he was attacked, but he had it coming.
Less welcome was the way that Reggie was starting to muscle in on my business. A friend called Kenny Johnson owned The Two Puddings in Stratford and he had asked me to do security.
‘Can I give you a few quid every week? I’m not worried about local people coming in and causing trouble,’ he said, ‘the doorman can deal with all that. But if I have any bigger shots causing me problems, you could handle it for me or tell me what to do.’
That was how it worked. People were always nervous of the big names – if they’d heard of someone that was half the fight, at least until the name himself got done and then it started again. I was part of that system and not intimidated. For me it just meant regular money, if no fortunes.
Reggie became one of those problems. He had become obsessed with a load of one-armed bandits he had got into. Fruit machines.
But he just didn’t know where to put them all. The upshot was he wanted to put a machine in my mate’s pub. You might think that was a small request, but that was his foot in the door. He’d soon want what I was getting. I didn’t give him an answer and trusted that he would forget about it. I knew how to handle him.
I had to do more to earn my money when Roy Shaw made himself a nuisance in the dancehall above the pub. He threw first his weight around and then Kenny down the stairs, just another day at the office for Roy Shaw but it frightened the life out of Kenny. He didn’t know that I already knew Roy when he asked me for help. I got a message back to Roy through one of his associates.
‘Tell your mate Roy Shaw that if he don’t go in there and apologise, the next time I see him I’m going to shoot him.’
For a while nothing happened. I got back to the friend and asked him what the response had been. He claimed not to have seen Roy since we’d spoken, which I knew wasn’t true but I didn’t respond. I just waited until the night I saw Roy myself in The Two Puddings. He was at the bar with two friends, Denis Callaghan and Dicky O’Sullivan. I was with Johnny Davies. Roy was unmistakeable, as ever a proper old-style tearaway. When he was drunk and ready for trouble he stood against the bar, his hands spread awkwardly wide to hold himself up, snorting and jerking his head as he looked around the pub. Looking for a fight. He probably had a handful of purple hearts inside him as well. But he seemed to snap into focus when he saw me.
‘Mick! How are you?’ Roy said. ‘Getting a few drinks in here. I’ve already apologised. What d’ya want to drink?’ He was easy to deal with and the brooding trouble on the horizon faded away. Soon it was just the two of us after Johnny had to make an appointment at The Regency and Roy’s friends went on to some other venue. Roy had an idea.
‘Fancy going up the West End?’ He’d just had a bankroll robbery at one of the national newspapers. ‘I’ve got a load of notes that I’m just getting rid of. I’ll take you out and it won’t cost you nothing. We’ll k
nock this money out.’
The cash was numbered and the police knew what had been taken. Somebody had to do some spending. Lovely! Right up my street!
The Bagatelle Club was in Cork Street in Mayfair and the owner took me aside when I was on my way to the toilet.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ he said. ‘Didn’t you used to get down here before with Jacky Buggy and that lot?’
Jack was a Scottish fella who finished up in chains at the bottom of the sea. I did remember him and a couple of other names the owner mentioned from the same era. It was clear that he was just establishing common ground between us and he hurriedly got to the point.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘see your mate? Is he all right?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Good as gold.’
‘Only he came down here the other night,’ he whispered, ‘and he was chewing the glasses.’
This was Roy’s party trick – crunching pint glasses in his mouth and spitting out the debris without a cut to his mouth.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘He’s all right when he’s with me. Just don’t stripe him up.’
I was suggesting that the owner didn’t charge us too much. Me and Roy certainly hadn’t held back – there was a good dinner, hostesses at the table and a vast amount of drink. But when the owner himself brought over the bill with a nervous smile it was for little more than a fiver. We were left with no choice but to spend more money elsewhere.
It was around 3.00 am when we headed off to an upstairs Soho speakeasy, though not one used by gangsters. It was more bohemian junky types and they weren’t ready for Roy Shaw in full flow.
He charged behind the counter, pushing the barman out of the way and shouted, ‘I’m gonna have a lay down! I’m tired!’ There was a shelf under the bar and as Shaw tucked himself in he made a parting reference to me. ‘And fucking look after him. ’Cos he’s worse than me – he’ll cut your throat!’
Krayzy Days Page 15
