Bringing Down the Krays

by Bobby Teale

  ‘You’re Bobby, are you? I’ve heard such a lot about you, all good things. This is a nice little business you’ve got here for yourself, haven’t you? We must come over here again soon.’

  Now I’m going through the ‘great to see you, Ronnie’ routine and all the rest of the horseplay with my brothers. My first impression was of someone confident and commanding – but definitely on the make. He was looking around him, taking in everything – me, the boat business, my brothers – as if he were working out what he could get out of what we had. The way he strutted around it was as if it all already belonged to him. I had heard he had a very violent streak, that his mood could change in a second and that he was feared by everyone, but I had not at that time heard he was gay.

  At first I didn’t look at him as some kind of crime king, although I’d heard enough stories about him from my brothers. I thought he was just another villain out to make a pound note. I can’t say I was overly impressed. I learned quickly how to get a read on Ronnie, a skill that later helped to me to stay alive.

  As soon as Ronnie saw the speedboat, he wanted to go out in it. It was a jet turbine we’d bought brand-new from the Earl’s Court Boat Show. It was the fastest speedboat on the island at that time. Ronnie loved it.

  When he came back from the speedboat trip he stepped out – and immediately sunk down in the mud till it covered his shoes. He looked confused and unsure of himself while trying to keep his balance as he made his way back to shore. It was hard not to let him see us all laughing. As Ronnie always needed a drink we went to a pub called the Folly Inn. But it was fifteen minutes to opening time. Ronnie started banging on the door. We could see the staff inside the pub so Ronnie walked off, marching several feet away and swearing for two or three minutes. Then, unable to control himself, he stomped back to the pub and started banging on the door again.

  The staff inside looked furious and shouted back, ‘Not till 5.30!’ Five minutes to opening time they gave in and Ronnie rushed inside and ordered a gin and tonic and instantly downed it before ordering another. This was before any of us had managed to get a drink for ourselves.

  I remember thinking what an oddball he was. I had no idea then of how Ronnie was to take over my life, the same way he had with my brothers. Years on we would all wonder to ourselves how we ever let him do this to us. But that’s how it happened with Ronnie; it’s what he did to everyone.

  A couple of weeks later I came up to London to stay with Mum for a few days. There was a summons to go to Madge’s, the Lion in Tapp Street. The place was packed. I managed to push my way to the bar and got a gin and tonic and then Ronnie, who was standing at the end of the bar with a young boy, spotted me and waved me over. There were some other faces with him who I did not know. I shook hands with Ronnie and he introduced me to his boy and to Scotch Jack Dickson, a huge man.

  Then Ronnie waved to someone in the crowd and that’s when I thought I was seeing double. Next thing I knew I was shaking hands with a slimmer version of Ronnie.

  ‘This is my brother, Reggie,’ Ronnie said. ‘This is Alfie’s brother, Bobby. One of Nelly and Alfie Teale’s kids, who have the 66 Club on Upper Street.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see,’ said Reggie. ‘Let me get you a drink… What are you having?’

  ‘Gin and tonic,’ I said. And that’s how it all started. Reggie wanted to ask me about the Isle of Wight so we chatted for a bit, mostly small talk. I remember him asking me, ‘Can you drive, Bobby? Perhaps you could drive me around sometime?’

  ‘I’ve got to go, I have a meet to go on,’ I said. In fact the truth was I was too skint to pay for another drink.

  ‘OK,’ Reggie said. ‘I hope to see you later.’ It was hardly big-shot gangster talk. But then it never was.

  A few weeks later, Reggie came down to see me on the island. He got especially excited when I told him that me and Johnny Quinn were in the habit of taking a team of footballers into Parkhurst Prison to play the inmates’ team.

  From then on Reggie would find any excuse to come to the island. For example, not long after Pat and I got married, they were visiting Colin ‘Dukey’ Osbourne, who was doing time in Parkhurst for firearms offensives. I took them up to the prison and waited outside the gates for a couple of hours. I’d invited Ronnie and Reggie to come to our home for dinner afterwards. And they’d accepted. I couldn’t believe it. It was so flattering.

  It was a Sunday. Our house was a three-bedroom, two-storey semi on Oaktree Drive in East Cowes that Pat and I had bought new for two thousand quid when we got married. Ronnie sat in the living room with one of the Firm, and Reggie and another one of the Firm sat at the dining-room table. I don’t remember their names. The conversation wasn’t exactly sparkling. All through that dinner I was on edge because I thought Pat would speak her mind about this lot turning up and behaving – well, as I was finding, they usually did behave quite well in company. The talk, such as it was, was of villains and general villainy. The twins were polite enough with no swearing.

  The Krays were always polite in front of women, so Alfie had told me. It was the way their mum had brought them up. The Firm mostly grunted: ‘Yes Ron, right Ron.’ It was hard to keep the conversation flowing.

  In fact Pat said very little. Ronnie was just looking around and taking in things. We got through it somehow and it seemed to be a success, and I felt I was getting to know them better. It all looked good as far as I was concerned. Everything my brothers had been telling me for so long seemed true – the Krays were big-time villains. They had it all: glamour, clothes, money…

  Pat was not that impressed. But I was overwhelmed. What had I been doing on the dozy old Isle of Wight all these years? OK, so David and Alfie were a bit too ready to jump when told to but so was everyone else, I could see that. I wasn’t frightened of the twins, though, not me. I was going to go for it big, make up for lost time.

  My brothers knew the score; they’d been at this game for five years already. They’d become wary. Me, I was starstruck.

  Out of the two of them, Reggie especially seemed to need a friend – someone to draw him out of always being in Ronnie’s shadow. Being with me helped him to do that. Ronnie could see Reggie and I were hitting it off, and he’d get pretty angry about it. But I understood it, sensing instinctively that Reggie admired me, not in a sexual way, but as one young man sometimes looks up to another. In another life a part of him would have liked to be me, I think – to have a wife and child and a nice little boat business on the Isle of Wight.

  But Ronnie had other plans for him, and for me too. I soon learned the kind of thing they had in mind for me. Reggie asked me how far out I could go out with my boats, as they might need me to help them get someone out of Parkhurst Prison and off the island. It all seemed like a movie, a big adventure. I was loving every minute of it.

  Not too long after this, Ronnie sent two men over to the island with a couple of large, heavy black holdalls. They told me: ‘Ronnie told us to come over with these. He wants to get rid of all this rubbish – just papers and documents and so on. He wants you to sling it in the sea. It’s all weighted down ready for you.’ So I took the bags out to the deepest point of the Solent, where the current is at its most dangerous, and I threw the holdalls into the water. The men left without a word of explanation. Was it a body? I wasn’t going to ask.

  And by now I would do anything for them, the more villainous-seeming the better. This was better than putting out deckchairs. More and more frequently I was coming to London to run little errands for the twins – Reggie especially. Then came a really big moment. Reggie asked me to carry a gun for him. I was to have it on me, concealed, while he went into some club or other, ‘in case I need it’.

  A gun! I was made. This was proper villainy. It was a six-shot revolver, I don’t remember which make. I held it for ages, felt its weight, pushed in the shells, flicked the safety catch. I was on the Firm.

  I had to tell Alfie about it. ‘I carried a gun for Reggie today, y’know,’ I said c
asually. I was trying to be so cool but I had to show my elder brother that I was as much, if not more, a member of the Firm than he was.

  He was not that impressed. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘that’s what they do, the twins. They get you at it then you can’t get out.’ He told me the police had already marked him and David as associates of the Krays, and that as a result their usefulness to the twins – in, say, doing the driving or carrying a gun to a meet – was not quite what it used to be. I didn’t believe any of that. Reggie had asked me because he liked me and trusted me.

  But my marriage wasn’t going to stand it. Pat had Reggie competing for my attention. She hated it, getting more and more jealous as time went on. To be honest, we had been arguing for a while. Reggie’s arrival in my life only worsened what was already a relationship heading for the rocks.

  The few days that I went home to East Cowes, the rows got really poisonous. Tracy was just a baby. How could I do this? What the hell was I playing at hanging round with these creeps?

  It was Pat and her family who started the divorce. Her family couldn’t wait to see the back of me. Reggie put up the money for my solicitor’s bill – two thousand pounds. ‘Leave her behind,’ he’d tell me. ‘Women, what do they know?’ Reggie was only too pleased to stump up the money to buy me out of a marriage that was no longer working. His own marriage had failed, so why not mine?

  That part of my life was over: a wife, children, a home of our own. I was back running with a pack. I was on the prowl again. I came back to wicked old London, to be part of the big Kray party.

  Alfie had already warned me about getting in too deep. But the one thing you couldn’t do was say ‘no’ to the twins. If they asked you to do something, you did it. Alfie said it was starting to get dangerous. I thought it was overwhelmingly exciting. And so in that early spring of 1966 I became the coolest gangster in London. Or so I thought.

  I had to learn the proper talk, learn to get a read on Ronnie’s moods – when to flatter, when to duck out of view. Reggie was emerging as my friend but it was Ronnie giving the orders. I was sent down to the West End at one time with Ronnie Hart (the twins’ cousin) to ‘kill’ someone. We were both tooled up. But I can’t even remember who we were meant to murder. Ronnie Hart had no more intention of killing this person than flying to the moon, and neither did I.

  I’d never killed anyone and never would. But you had to go along with it, pretend you were going to. When we came back that time we just said we couldn’t find him and Ronnie had already forgotten about it. If you’d asked him the next day why he wanted us to kill whoever it was, he wouldn’t even remember.

  I bounced around, staying with Alfie in Holborn or with David and Christine in their ground-floor flat in Upper Clapton near Stoke Newington, not too far from Mum and Dad. It was at number 51 Moresby Road, an anonymous suburban street of Edwardian terraced houses. I felt safe there. Nothing bad could happen at David’s place. Not with his kids there. That’s what I believed, anyway.

  CHAPTER 9

  DEAD MEN CAN’T SPEAK

  IT WAS A normal spring evening the night it happened. I was round at David’s gaff. His wife Christine was preparing supper in the little kitchen and Alfie was with us in the front room watching TV. I think it was that US show The Fugitive, about an innocent man who escapes from prison. It was a big deal at the time.

  Early in the evening the phone rang in the hall. David went out to answer it.

  ‘Who is it, Dave?’

  I already knew the answer. We all did. Almost every night Reggie or Ron would phone up to ask us to come out drinking. If we said no, they’d just send someone round to get us anyway. It was 9 March 1966, a Wednesday, the day after David’s birthday, so we all still had a bit of a hangover and didn’t want to go out. We just wanted to watch telly. Have a few drinks.

  ‘So, is it the usual?’ I asked him. ‘Of course it is,’ David said. It had been Reggie on the phone saying that we should come over for a drink at the Widow’s. No special reason. Just get over.

  We all looked at each other. Better do as he says. David’s car was outside the flat – a grey, two-door Ford Popular. Not flash. The three of us got in and headed for Bethnal Green. David did the driving, with Alfie and me in the back.

  We got to the Widow’s. Reggie was outside in the street with the rest of the Firm, all of them milling around under the railway bridge beneath the street lamps. There was something funny going on, we could sense it. We all got out. There’s Reggie walking towards us, saying to David quite matter-of-factly: ‘Where’s your motor?’

  David nodded towards it.

  Then Nobby Clark – an old safe-cracker and founder member of the Firm – said to Reg: ‘What motor are you going in?’

  Reggie replied, ‘I’ll go with these.’ He indicated us.

  We got back in the car. Reggie jumped in the front. He said to David, ‘Come on, kid, we’ve got to get off the manor.’ Reggie was excited, but spoke as if he was just arranging any other piece of business. David stepped on the accelerator hard and we screeched away.

  At first no one spoke, but eventually Alfie asked Reg, ‘So, what’s the matter?’

  Reggie said, calm as anything: ‘Ronnie has just shot Cornell.’

  ‘Who the fuck’s Cornell?’ It was David who asked. He didn’t know and I certainly didn’t.

  Alfie had a bit more of a clue. George Cornell was some face who’d done rough stuff for the Richardsons, the scrap-dealing brothers who ran crime in south-east London with a sadistic ruthlessness that outdid even the Krays. His real name was George Myers. The word was he’d once beaten the shit out of Ronnie in a fist fight, the only one who ever had. The Christmas before there’d nearly been a shoot-out at the Astor Club when Cornell was supposed to have referred to Ronnie as a ‘fat pouf’. For him to come drinking in Whitechapel had been taking the piss.

  Reggie was sitting in the front passenger seat complaining about why Ronnie had to do Cornell. Reggie was always moaning about what Ronnie had or hadn’t done. The way he went on, it was like it was some domestic tiff.

  So where are we all supposed to go? I was thinking. Nobody’s saying.

  David’s driving very carefully, looking out for the Old Bill. Reggie says, ‘Where are we going to go to now?’ We all remain silent. Then Reggie tells David, ‘Go up Lea Bridge Road way.’

  The Krays had no hide-outs, whatever anyone might have suggested later. It was all far less planned than that. We were heading out of the East End, up Cambridge Heath Road, back past Cedra Court and David’s flat in Moresby Road, past the dark Hackney Marshes and on into the suburbs. Nothing much else was moving; the streets were as quiet as a graveyard.

  David thought he knew where we were going. He’d driven the twins this way before. It was a place called the Chequers in Walthamstow High Street, a favourite of the twins, run by an ex-policeman called Charlie Hobbs. There was a poker club called the Stow, round the back.

  Reggie was still mumbling away, complaining that Ronnie ‘should have organised this better’. The twins never organised anything. Everything happened because there was no fear of the consequences. Both of them acted on their impulses.

  We got to Walthamstow and went into the pub. The governor glanced up at us and quickly opened a flap in the bar counter, and we all marched into another bar room that wasn’t normally used. Ronnie was already there too and he came towards us when he saw us enter. It was very chaotic in there. The calmest one was Ronnie. At least it seemed to be.

  He asked us as we came in: ‘Do you want a drink?’ I suppose at that moment, we could have used one.

  While we had driven Reggie, Ronnie had been driven to the Chequers by Scotch Jack Dickson, so I found out a little later. We all gathered in the back room. You could feel the tension and excitement fizzing in the air. Everyone was talking at once and no one was making much sense. The radio was kept on in the background so we could listen to the news bulletins.

  Ronnie went into a lavatory and cha
nged his clothes and started to wash his hands in a sink. When I first saw him that evening he had been wearing a dark suit, shirt and tie. Now he looked more like a clown with a pullover too small for him and trousers too short. He had put on some of Alfie’s clothes and looked absurd. If Ronnie had been a woman, he’d have been a size sixteen, while Alfie would have been a ten. So now he looked like Max Wall in his trousers.

  We all gathered in an upstairs room when we heard on the radio there were road-blocks all over the East End and that someone was being rushed to hospital after a shooting in the Blind Beggar Pub on Whitechapel Road, just down the street from where we’d picked them up at the Widow’s. There was laughing and whooping when they all heard that. The Firm were revelling in it, with Ronnie as the ringmaster.

  Ronnie said: ‘I hope the bastard’s dead.’

  At midnight the radio news came on again, telling us again that a man had been shot. This time it said he had died in the ambulance. Everyone started talking excitedly and I heard Ronnie say: ‘Always shoot to kill. Dead men can’t speak.’

  So what the fuck had actually happened? Eventually it came out in a lot of fractured conversations around me. I could put together most of it – and the details were going to be common knowledge soon enough.

  The events started when Ronnie gets a message that George Cornell was in the Beggar. He thinks that’s a bit of a liberty. He gets Scotch Jack (John) Dickson to drive him there in his Cortina from the Widow’s, along with Scotch Ian Barrie.

  Ronnie enters the bar of the Beggar brandishing a 9mm automatic pistol. Cornell is sitting on a bar stool sipping a light ale. Scotch Ian fires two shots into the air and everyone dives for cover. And Ronnie calmly puts a single bullet into George Cornell’s forehead. He didn’t die straight away.