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  There was no need for all the panic – it was six hours before Frank Mitchell was missed! It was as easy as that. This didn’t surprise us, any more than getting a phone call from Frank. At our trial the landlord of a pub six miles from the prison said that Frank had been in the pub on several occasions and bought bottles of vodka, whiskey and brandy, and flagons of cider. On his last visit, said the landlord, he’d changed notes of five pounds and ten pounds. Even the judge said, ‘It sounds like cloud cuckoo land.’

  It was also revealed that Frank used to go shopping by taxi to Okehampton, where he would buy budgerigars for other prisoners. It was on one of these trips that he made his phone call to us. Most amazing of all, perhaps, Frank even had a couple of girlfriends on the moor, and when he wasn’t boozing, he would slip away from the prison working party and give them one in the heather. The attitude of the prison officers was, apparently, ‘Just keep Frank happy – he’s no bother that way.’

  If the public realized the extent of the corruption in the prison and police service over the years, they would be amazed. Just before we sprang Frank, a warder working at Dartmoor had been sentenced to three months in prison for taking bottles of Scotch and tobacco into the gaol for the cons. The way the authorities picked on him was a joke. At that time half the warders in the British prison service were at it one way or another. And Reg and I used to send booze and tobacco into a good many of Britain’s prisons simply to make life a bit more pleasant for our mates inside. After all, what are friends for?

  I suppose Frank could have escaped by himself, but he was the sort of person who always needed organizing.

  We took Frank to a flat in Barking owned by a friend of ours called Lennie Dunn. We did all we could for him. We provided him with companions, the likes of Teddy Smith, John Dickson and Billy Exley. We provided him with a woman, a big attractive blonde, to attend to his physical needs. This was important because Frank was as randy as a stoat. I’ve never known a guy like it. He would give a bird one and then give her another one with hardly a pause for breath. Women went wild for him. They’d queue up just to be given one by him. He looked like a gypsy, had a body like Charles Atlas and screwed like a rabbit. It was what you might call a winning combination.

  We got Teddy Smith, who was the best writer among us, to write a letter for Frank to the Home Secretary. It said: ‘All I am asking is a date of release. From a young age I have not been free. I am not a murderer nor a danger to the general public.’

  We posted copies of the letter to the Daily Mirror and The Times. It was published, and everyone waited for a reaction. If there had been one, if the Home Secretary had been wise enough, humane enough, to say, ‘OK, this man’s case will, at least, be looked at,’ then Frank would have been on his way straight back to Dartmoor. As it was, there was nothing, no response at all. Which meant there was no way that Frank was going to go back to Dartmoor and a future without any hope at all. He appealed to us to help him still further, and we agreed.

  Now this was a difficult time for me personally because I was hiding from the law, but not for the usual reasons. Quite the opposite, in fact. The police wanted me to appear as a witness for them against a bent copper who’d been offering us protection and immunity for members of the firm in exchange for money. There was no way I would ever appear as a witness for the police, not even against a rogue cop. It’s against all my principles. So I went into hiding at a friend’s house in Mayfair, which meant leaving poor old Reg in charge of the whole operation.

  Charlie, our brother, wanted to drop the whole thing – to take Frank Mitchell back to Dartmoor and make him give himself up, but there was no way Reg would do that. Neither he nor I regret that decision, even though the whole affair developed into a nightmare. In the end Frank was driven to the farm in Suffolk which we had used ourselves in the past and which we knew was safe. He stayed there for a few days, then was taken by boat to the Continent. After that your guess is as good as mine.

  To the best of my knowledge, the Axeman is still alive and well and living in — I won’t reveal where. Perhaps South America, perhaps Australia, maybe even Spain. Certainly not in Britain. I doubt Frank Mitchell will ever be found. It’s amazing what a new passport, a change of identity and a bit of plastic surgery can do.

  As is now well known, eleven days after we had freed him we were charged with murdering Frank Mitchell. We were tried at the Old Bailey. The prosecution said that Charlie, Big Pat Connolly and I freed Frank Mitchell from prison and that Reg and Freddie Foreman – a London club owner – murdered him. We pleaded not guilty. They also said that Reg had harboured Mitchell. Technically he did, and he pleaded guilty to this charge.

  Albert Donaghue told unforgivable lies in court. He said, ‘It took eleven or twelve bullets to kill Frank Mitchell. I saw Freddie Foreman pump him full of bullets in a van in Barking.’ Freddie Foreman may or may not have been in a van in Barking – a van that may or may not have been on its way to a farm in Suffolk. But Freddie Foreman certainly did not pump Frank Mitchell full of bullets, and that was the conclusion of the court of law too.

  It was said in court that Foreman received £1,000 for killing Mitchell, that Foreman and a man called Alfred Gerrard shot him, and that Ronald Oliffe was the driver of the van in which he was shot. Donaghue also claimed he heard Gerrard say, ‘The bastard’s still alive. Give him another one, Fred.’

  The jury considered the case for seven hours and twenty minutes and found us not guilty.

  The prosecution had tried, and failed, to prove that we had murdered Frank Mitchell. And despite what countless newspaper and magazine articles and television programmes have said, despite the outlandish claims made by John ‘Scotch Jack’ Dickson in his book Murder without Conviction, despite all the lies and suspicion, I say again: we did not kill Frank Mitchell.

  It seems no matter how many times we claim our innocence, some people will always believe we killed him. We’ve owned up to the crimes we have committed, but I’m buggered if either of us is going to get done for murders we haven’t committed. It’s been said we kept Frank Mitchell in the van for six days and then chopped up his body, that his brain was remarkably small, that his body was sent to a farm and put in a pot, that he was buried in a motorway flyover, that he was turned into pig food – all the usual things.

  Dickson, in Murder without Conviction, tells the most extraordinary tales. He quotes me as saying to him, ‘He’s fucking dead. We had to get rid of him. He would have got us all into trouble.’ I deny saying that, and it’s interesting to note that Dickson has no witnesses – not one person to substantiate his claim. Dickson also claims to have heard three shots as he sat in the flat when Frank Mitchell got into the van. It’s true Dickson was in the flat – he’d been helping to look after Frank. But how strange that he heard three shots, while Donaghue said he heard eleven or twelve shots. Someone somewhere must have been a bit confused. Either that or one of them couldn’t count.

  Dickson also accuses me of apparently trying to murder him. He says he stayed with me at my flat at Cedra Court after the Mitchell business. He says, ‘I eventually dozed off. I was awakened by the smell of gas. The gas fire in my room had been left with the gas switch open. I got up and turned it off. I didn’t sleep after that. My mind was working overtime. Did Ronnie come in and turn it on or did I accidentally turn it on? I never found the answer to that one.’

  I can tell him the answer to that. Like much of his book, the story comes from his own lurid imagination. I never gassed anyone in my life and if I had wanted to kill Dickson I would have found a safer place than my own flat.

  However, to be fair, Dickson does admit in his book that when he quizzed Albert Donaghue – the man who claimed in court he saw Freddie Foreman kill Frank Mitchell – he got nowhere. Dickson admits, ‘No matter how persuasive I was, he didn’t intend to tell me who he thought shot Mitchell.’ He couldn’t tell you, Dickson, because, as you well know, Mitchell wasn’t shot.

  The accusations abo
ut Frank Mitchell really hurt Reg and me. We were all very fond of Frank, particularly my brother Charlie, and horrified to be accused of his murder. Charlie even wept in court.

  And while I’m about it I’d like to express my feelings about Freddie Foreman – a guy who took his punishment like a man.1 He was luckier than we were – they eventually let him out. And I’m pleased to say he seems to be living happily and successfully in Spain. I’m told he’s even vice-president of the Marbella Boxing Club. The police still want him apparently, but Freddie is too clever for them. Good on you, Fred.

  And as for Frank Mitchell, the man they called the Mad Axeman. He wasn’t mad, he wasn’t an axeman, and he isn’t dead either. Like many others, he has good reason to thank the Krays. One day he will reappear and then the world will know the truth.

  6

  REG: THE LAST SUPPER – THE KILLING OF JACK MCVITIE

  Yes, I killed Jack McVitie. I denied it at my trial and I’ve wished ever since that I hadn’t. You see, I’m not ashamed of having killed him. I don’t believe I had any choice. It was either him or me. In my book, I had to kill McVitie.

  He was killed for several reasons. He cheated us – not once, but several times. He was becoming a danger – to himself, to the whole system we had built up, and a danger to me personally. He had said publicly on more than one occasion that he wanted to kill me, and I had good reason to believe that it was no idle threat. He’d become crazy, his mind demented by a combination of booze and drugs. So in October 1967 I killed him.

  I did not regret it at the time and I don’t regret it now, even though the extermination of a man no better than a sewer rat has cost me my freedom for the best part of my life. I have paid the greatest price of all. Hanging would have been preferable to the hell I’ve been through for the past twenty years. Every day, even now, is a living nightmare. The price I’ve paid has been totally out of proportion – but still I say I don’t regret it.

  To understand what I’m saying you have to understand what it was like to be a villain in the East End in the fifties and sixties. It was a jungle, it was survival of the fittest. There were some very tasty guys living up there in those days, guys who were useful with their fists and who weren’t averse to using a razor or even a gun. These boys meant business, there was no pissing about. So when you got to the top of the pile, like Ron and I did, people were always trying to knock you off (and I mean ‘knock off’ in every sense). When that happens, when someone tries to put the frighteners on you, you’ve got three choices. You either run away, or you stay where you are and let them take what they want, or you get them before they get you. It’s the same in show business, or in big business, or in life generally. The only difference is, in the underworld blokes don’t die of heart attacks – they get beaten up or cut up and sometimes killed. It happens – it always has and it always will.

  It was the same with Jack McVitie. He fancied his chances, he was making very serious threats. In the end it was a case of him or me.

  McVitie was a slag (a contemptible person). Ron and I had used him a few times over the years as a heavy. When certain people were getting a bit out of hand we’d send McVitie along to sort them out. We used him as a frightener. When other villains copped a look at him and one or two of our other boys, they’d usually hand over the money they owed or stop doing whatever they were doing which had upset us.

  McVitie was tough all right. He once got into a bit of bother with the husband of one of his bits of stuff. This particular geezer took exception, and he and half a dozen of his mates were waiting for McVitie outside a pub one night. They took a crowbar to his hands. Really smashed them up so he wouldn’t feel like using them to mess about with women again. His hands were really mangled but it didn’t stop him. Within a few weeks he was up to his old tricks.

  Women were McVitie’s weakness. He had a way with them. I couldn’t understand it. He was bald, that’s why he always wore a hat, he was no looker and he wasn’t a snappy dresser. But he could still pull them – and some of them lived to regret it. He chucked one of his birds out of a car when it was going at forty miles an hour. She broke her back and was in agony, but McVitie thought it was a laugh. The woman was too frightened to complain to the law about what had happened.

  On another occasion he razored a guy in a club, cut the guy’s face to ribbons, then wiped the blade of the knife on a woman’s evening dress. There was blood everywhere and she screamed the place down. McVitie thought it was so funny, he nearly razored her for good measure.

  This was the guy I killed. I’m no saint, but Jack McVitie was worse. I only ever hurt other villains and then it was business, never personal. McVitie would hurt anyone and wouldn’t give a toss. I killed a dangerous man and got thirty years for it. I accept that no one has the right to go around killing people, but thirty years for killing scum like McVitie? And when my own life was in danger? It’s ridiculous.

  As I say, women were his weakness. But so too were the booze and the drugs. The booze made him mean and the drugs made him constantly short of money.

  Foolishly, after he’d been on the booze all day, I took him with me to collect some money owed to us by a club owner in Stoke Newington. This guy’s club had been having a rough time from local thugs, so he asked us for protection. He was getting the protection, but we weren’t getting the money. He hadn’t paid for several months and owed us roughly £1,000. The club owner got in a real sweat, said times had been hard, and could he pay a couple of hundred pounds up front and the rest would follow later. I accepted his explanations, admittedly not very happily, when suddenly McVitie whipped a gun out of his pocket and shot the guy in the foot. He was crazy – the guy was screaming in agony, and if the law had come we’d have both been put away in no time. As it was, I smacked McVitie around a bit until he cooled down and then arranged for a doctor on our payroll to attend to the club owner. He finished up in hospital, of course, and there were questions asked, but, luckily for us, he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and we, in return, overlooked the money he owed us. But I made a mental note never to take McVitie along with me on a collection again. The man was becoming dangerous. It was only a matter of time before he would kill.

  Then there was the job we sent him on in Kent. We offered him £200 to pick up some merchandise from a warehouse in Kent and deliver it to an address in Stoke Newington. He was given fifty quid for expenses in advance. We didn’t trust him, so we sent John Dickson, Ron’s right-hand man at the time, to trail him.

  On the return journey Dickson soon realized that McVitie wasn’t heading in quite the direction he should have been. He was obviously calling in somewhere else first with our lorry-load of merchandise. Dickson continued trailing him, but McVitie saw Dickson, realized what he was up to and lost him in the London traffic. Eventually McVitie turned up in Stoke Newington with the lorry, which, of course, was minus some of the stuff it had been carrying.

  It was a clear case of double-cross. McVitie denied it, of course. We couldn’t prove anything and we weren’t into the ‘torture and tell’ business like the Richardson gang across the river, so we decided we’d let him off – for the time being.

  But McVitie was such a prat. Instead of being thankful, he went straight out, got drunk and started telling all and sundry, ‘I’ve just turned the Krays over and they’ve done bugger all about it. I tell you, they’re getting soft. They’ll have to watch it.’ But he was living on borrowed time. So, too, was the owner of the warehouse in Kent. We were convinced he was involved with McVitie, and after a few threats he owned up.

  We still had the problem of what to do about Jack McVitie. He was drinking more and more and taking a lot of really lethal pills – black bombers they were called. Like a fool, I felt sorry for him. He’d done a fair bit of work for us in the past, and Ron and I always showed loyalty to anyone who had worked for the firm.

  But then McVitie did a crazy thing. He cheated Ron out of some money he owed on some purple hearts. It was only a h
undred quid, but it upset Ron. He felt that if you let one villain cheat you and get away with it, then others would start fancying their chances and start taking liberties. McVitie had cheated us – not once, but twice – and he was boasting about it in the pubs.

  As if all this wasn’t enough, McVitie got smashed out of his brains on booze in a club in Balham owned by Freddie Foreman. Unfortunately he also caused a very bad scene and started to break the place up. Luckily for him Freddie Foreman was not about, because Freddie is not a guy to mess with. But he was a very good friend of ours and this was really embarrassing – a member of our firm smashing up his club.

  Ronnie and I weren’t having any more of it. We apologized to Freddie, squared up with him for the damage and sent a message to McVitie to meet us at the Regency in Stoke Newington. Ron really slagged him off over the damage to Foreman’s club, and over the missing merchandise and the club owner who’d been shot. Ron was bloody furious and said he wanted the money McVitie owed on the purple hearts, there and then, or else. When Ron was in that sort of mood he’d scare the pants off anyone, and McVitie was scared all right. He told us he owed a lot of money, his nerves were bad, he couldn’t get off the pills, his kid was sick and he just didn’t know what to do. ‘Give me one more chance, Ron,’ he kept saying. ‘Please give me one more chance.’

  Like a bloody idiot I started feeling sorry for him. It was the stuff about the sick kid that got to me. I could never resist a line like that. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but McVitie had one or two kids scattered about, so – like a bloody fool – I lent McVitie fifty quid. I should have known he’d blow the lot on booze and pills.

  When I later told Ron that I’d slipped McVitie fifty quid he went berserk. He sent a message to McVitie saying he wanted all the money back or else. McVitie must have thought I’d dropped him in it with Ron on purpose, which was a load of bollocks. The silly bastard got drunk again and a couple of nights later he comes into the Regency waving a sawn-off shotgun and screaming he’s going to kill ‘those fucking Krays’.