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  Luckily we weren’t in the Regency that night, otherwise McVitie would have shot us to pieces. But people who were there said he definitely meant what he said, and he was going to get me in particular.

  Now when a guy like McVitie is making threats about you and walking around with a shotgun, if you ignore it, you’re asking for trouble. Not only that, all the other villains are looking at each other and saying ‘What’s happening to the Krays? They’re letting this McVitie make ’em look like a right pair of soft prats.’ It’s a matter of honour, what the Eyeties call ‘face’. If you show you’re weak, the others start to close in on you like sharks.

  We had to make an example of McVitie. Even then I didn’t intend to kill him – just to give him a bloody good hiding. So early the next night I went down to the Regency to look for him. I took a gun with me, a. 32 automatic, but I didn’t intend to use it – not unless McVitie started anything nasty. I’d never shot anyone before, except with a slug gun when I was a kid.

  I also took some muscle with me, just in case things started getting rough. There was Ronnie Hart, our cousin, and the Lambrianou brothers. They were trying to get on the firm at the time and were looking for ways to show Ron and me that they were up to it. We were a bit particular about who we took on. The only reason Hart was on the firm was because he was family, and what a mistake that turned out to be. He turned Queen’s evidence and it’s because of him as much as anybody else that I am where I am today.

  McVitie wasn’t in the club, luckily for him, so I went for a Chinese meal with Hart and the Lambrianous. Who should be sitting in the restaurant but Jack McVitie – pissed as usual, broke, and bloody offensive. He called me some names and then said, ‘I’ll kill you, Kray, if it’s the last fucking thing I do.’ Then he staggered out without paying.

  I paid his bill – I didn’t want any more fuss. There were a lot of people around, ordinary civilians. But as I paid that bill I remember thinking: that’s your last supper, McVitie. I had no doubts that the guy was a maniac and he was trying to kill me. Now I was going to kill him. I’d had just about enough.

  We were going to a party that night at a flat in Stoke Newington owned by a girl called Carol. I got there about eleven with Hart and the Lambrianous. Ron was there with a couple of young guys and Ronnie Bender, who’d done a few jobs for us.

  Ron was in a bad mood. He sent Carol and her mates away to another flat, and we sent the Lambrianous to find McVitie and invite him to the party. I never thought he would come, I didn’t think he would fall for it. He was friends with the Lambrianous, but he also knew they were as good as on our firm. But he was pissed and the thought of getting his hands on more booze and on some birds must have persuaded him. Anyway, he turned up about midnight with the Lambrianous and a couple of other guys in an old Ford Zodiac. He came straight into the flat and said, ‘Where’s the birds and the booze?’

  I took out the gun and tried to shoot him in the head. I pulled the trigger twice. I wanted to get it over and done, but the gun jammed. The same thing had happened before with Ron and George Dixon. Ron took it as an omen and let Dixon go. McVitie thought I’d do the same with him. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You let Dixon off.’

  ‘Yes, Jack,’ said Ron, ‘but we ain’t letting you off. You’ve taken too many liberties.’

  It was starting to get confusing. The gun hadn’t gone off and I’d had a few drinks myself. I started to struggle with McVitie and Ron was screaming at him, calling him a slag. McVitie knew he was in dead trouble, but he was a strong bugger and got away. He couldn’t get through the door because one of the Lambrianous was in the way. So he ran across the room and tried to dive straight through a window. There was glass and broken wood everywhere. McVitie got his head and shoulders through, but the rest of him was stuck. He couldn’t move, so we pulled him back by his legs.

  By now he was crying. He wasn’t the tough guy any more. Ron said to him, ‘Be a man, Jack.’

  McVitie said, ‘I’ll be a man but I won’t fucking die like one.’

  One of the others was holding McVitie’s arms behind his back. I was handed a knife. It was a long one, a carving knife. I looked at McVitie and hated him for all the trouble he’d caused. I didn’t think about it. I just pushed the knife into his face, near his eye. I just kept on stabbing him.

  McVitie fell on the floor. Bender put his head to his chest and said he was dead. I felt relieved and a bit sick. I was glad it was over. There was blood everywhere, a lot of it on me. I felt I had to get out of the room.

  We left the Lambrianous to clean up the place. Most of the others had already done a bunk. Ron and I went to a friend’s in Hackney. We had a good scrub down and changed all our clothes. We left them there for our friend to burn. We got rid of the gun and the knife in the canal by Queensbridge Road.

  They did me for the murder of Jack McVitie almost a year after the event, and they never found the body. They did my brother Charlie and Freddie Foreman for disposing of it – but that’s ridiculous. People said McVitie had been buried in the foundations of a motorway or an office block. People said he’d been made into pig food or buried in Epping Forest or put in a furnace at a power station. People even said he’d been put in a coffin and cremated along with someone else. Only Ron and I know what really happened to the body, and we will probably take the secret to our graves. We will never incriminate the other people who were involved. We will never grass on them in the way that people have grassed on us to save their own skins. We would only reveal what happened to the body if we were both released and if everyone else involved was dead and could not be touched.

  Despite everything it has cost me, I have never felt a moment’s remorse. People from the Home Office used to come and see me at Parkhurst. They always said, ‘Don’t you feel sorry you killed Jack McVitie?’ If I had said, ‘Yes I am very sorry, I never meant to do it,’ it would probably have looked good on my reports. It might have even helped to get me out of gaol, or moved to a softer place than Parkhurst, or made my life in prison a bit easier. But I couldn’t say it.

  I have felt sadness for his family. Someone must have missed him, maybe even loved him. Well, for them I’m sorry.

  I felt bad afterwards, though. I had a lot of nightmares. Not because I’d killed McVitie – one of the nastiest villains I have ever met – but because sticking a knife into anyone is not a pleasant thing to do. It would have been much easier and cleaner to have shot him. But killing isn’t something you do lightly. You try to imagine what it’s like to be in a dimly lit room, face to face with another man, and then stick a knife in him. Unless you’re a psychopath – and I’m not – it’s not an enjoyable feeling. It’s a bloody awful feeling. And the panic afterwards, when you realize what you’ve done. What shall we do with the body? What am I going to do with the knife? What shall I do with my clothes? Will anyone grass on me? Maybe the coppers are on their way even now. And you try sleeping afterwards with so many thoughts going through your mind.

  But soldiers have to kill the enemy, otherwise the enemy will kill them. No one calls soldiers murderers. And in a way we were soldiers, only our battleground was the streets of London.

  I wouldn’t kill now. I’m much older, much wiser, much more patient, and I’ve had a lot of time to think. But at the time it seemed the necessary thing to do.

  Angelo Bruno was right, though: we shouldn’t have done our own dirty work. I should have paid someone else to do it for me. Perhaps if McVitie had just been badly hurt it would have been different. But you can’t turn the clock back. What’s done is done and you have to pay the price. I think I’ve paid, all right – it’s cost me nearly half my life.

  Books and newspapers have said that I killed McVitie because I was under the influence of my brother, because I was frightened of him, because I was trying to prove that I was as tough as he was, because he had killed George Cornell. It’s not true. I was not under Ron’s influence. I am sick to death of people saying Ron was the bad one, the evil one, and I
was the nice one, the weak one, who was led astray by him. I was every bit as bad – if bad is the word to use – as my brother. He didn’t frighten me. Even in his black moods, when depressions hit him hard and the madness started to set in. I was never frightened of Ron. Why should I have been? Apart from Charlie and our mother, I was the one person in the world he would never have hurt, the one person he trusted in business matters. I never felt I had got to ‘prove’ myself to Ron by killing another man. He never tried to goad me into it.

  McVitie was not the snivelling weakling that some books and articles have made him out to be. He was a tough customer, a man with the strongest arms I’ve ever seen, a man who was given to terrible violence. If I hadn’t taken him out he would have got me – possibly killed me. Certainly he would have waited his chance and had me done over. So I killed him. And I’m not sorry, even though it’s cost me so much. But I wouldn’t kill again. The price was too high – even for the last supper of a man like Jack McVitie.

  7

  RON: THE TRIAL AND THE TRAITORS

  ‘I am not going to waste words on you. In my view society has earned a rest from your activities. I sentence you to life imprisonment, which I recommend should not be less than thirty years.’

  The words of Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, at the Old Bailey, on 8 March 1969. Just thirty-six words to condemn two men to a fate far worse than death. Has Mr Melford Stevenson, with his silver-spoon, public-school upbringing, ever realized his cruelty? What he did to us was just as bad, worse, than anything we ever did to another human being.

  Can you imagine it? Put yourselves in our place for a few moments. We were thirty-four years of age, in the prime of our lives. We would not be free men again until we were sixty-four. The chances of either of us being fit or sane by that time were slight. The system, the authorities, were being allowed legally and systematically to destroy our bodies and our minds. And this in a so-called civilized society.

  Many would say we deserved it. Fair enough, they are entitled to their opinion. But what about those who worked alongside us, whose crimes were every bit as bad as ours? Was it really fair, was it really justice, that they got away so lightly – and in some cases without any penalty at all – in exchange for our liberty?

  With very few exceptions the men we had supported and paid a fortune all deserted us and gave evidence against us. And in their vendetta against us the authorities forgave these men most of their crimes in exchange for evidence which, in many cases, was a pack of lies.

  When Nipper Read and his army of policemen smashed their way into my flat at Cedra Court at six o’ clock in the morning on 9 May 1968, Reg and I gave up without a struggle. We’d only just gone to bed, very tired and fairly pissed after a night of pubbing and clubbing. The coppers handcuffed us both, though there was no need. They knocked my flat about a bit as they searched for weapons and drugs. They found neither, only an old crowbar I kept in the flat for my own protection.

  We were taken by car, first to Scotland Yard – where we were officially arrested and cautioned – and then on to Brixton gaol, where we were to be held until the preliminary hearing at Old Street magistrates’ court in July, when we and the police would discover if there was going to be a case for us to answer at a higher court.

  When we got to Brixton we were taken to a special wing which had just been completed. It had electronic doors and all sorts of other security gadgets. We were the first people to use it. We were put in adjoining cells, but the screws had obviously been told to keep us apart. But even there we soon managed to find a couple of screws we could bribe, and soon information began coming in and out of Brixton.

  One of the first messages we got was from Mad Frankie Fraser, who was downstairs in the prison itself. He’d been banged-up after the raid by the Richardson Gang on Mr Smith’s Club in Catford. Frankie said he would give evidence for us in the Cornell case if we thought it would help. It was a nice gesture.

  That was the start of our friendship with Frankie, who up to then we’d always regarded as our enemy. We later shared time at Broadmoor, and when he was eventually freed he used to come back to visit me. I was sorry when he got gaoled again on a robbery charge not too long ago. I’m afraid that another gaol sentence could well turn Frankie’s mind altogether. I hope not, because he’s a good bloke.

  Other messages we were getting were not good. We began hearing stories that the law had arrested virtually every key member of the firm – Connie Whitehead, John Dickson, Chris and Anthony Lambrianou, Ron Bender and others. The word, also, was that several of them were cooperating with Nipper Read and his men in a bid to soften their own sentences. If this was true it was serious news. We couldn’t believe it – we had looked after them all so well when they had worked for us.

  Then the police pulled in our brother Charlie and Freddie Foreman. Foreman wasn’t even on our firm, he operated his own businesses south of the river. Still free, at that time, we were told, were our cousin Ronnie Hart and Ian Barrie, my own right-hand man. We were confident we could trust both of them if they were caught.

  Not long after, Hart was arrested hiding away in a caravan with a girl. And poor Ian Barrie, who was shattered by the collapse of the firm and the disappearance of virtually everybody he knew, was eventually cornered by the cops, pissed out of his head, in a pub in the East End. Ronnie Hart, sadly, collapsed under police pressure and talked. It was a wicked thing to do to your own cousins, and he knew it. Later he tried to commit suicide but – typically – he failed. After that he scarpered off to Australia, where he lives now.

  As for Ian Barrie, he refused to say a word to the police. Ian was the best signing we ever made. He was spotted by one of our uncles, who thought he would make ideal material for the firm.

  Barrie stayed loyal. So did Freddie Foreman and, of course, our brother Charlie. Virtually everyone else turned on us.

  Life in Brixton gaol in those early days, in May and June 1968, wasn’t bad. The screws treated us with respect and we were allowed quite a few privileges. Our mum used to bring our lunch in every day, usually cold chicken and salad and a bottle of wine. Several of our friends from the worlds of boxing and show business were allowed in to visit us as well. It was a funny feeling, rather like being in limbo. We knew we had a few problems, but we had such faith in ourselves and the fear we could put into people, we still believed we were going to get out of the mess. We still didn’t believe, despite the rumours, that our mates, members of the firm, would go into the box and testify against us. That was the feeling in the East End too. Most people still believed the Krays would outfox the law once again. That’s why people were still paying protection money to those of our collectors still outside – no one really believed we would go down for a long spell, and therefore no one wanted to face our wrath for non-payment of protection money once we got out again.

  Nipper Read, Fred Gerrard and other cops came to see us and tried to question us, to put the frighteners on us – but we just told them all to fuck off.

  Our preliminary trial, at Old Street magistrates’ court, began on 6 July 1968, in front of the Metropolitan Chief Magistrate, Frank Milton. We were taken to the court in a convoy of police vehicles, with motorcycle outriders. When we arrived we were amazed to find dozens of police and massive security. It was just like a Mafia trial in Italy. We hadn’t seen any members of the firm who were supposed to be testifying against us. They and other witnesses were apparently in secret hideouts and the police were guarding them like hawks. No one could get near them. We knew that because we had tried to get messages to them, to ask them what the hell was going on, what the hell they thought they were doing. And also, to be honest, to warn them of the consequences of doing the dirty on us.

  Normally the press are not allowed to report preliminary hearings, but we asked the magistrate to lift the ban. Reggie told him, ‘We want the world to see the diabolical liberties the law has been taking.’ The press, of course, were delighted because this was the biggest case the
y had covered for years.

  We weren’t sure what the police had got up their sleeves for this preliminary hearing, but we knew we might have a bit of bother when they produced Billy Exley to give evidence against us. Exley was really a nobody so far as we were concerned, certainly not a top man in the firm. He was an ex-boxer whom we’d used as muscle on a few occasions. Unfortunately, one occasion was to help guard Frank Mitchell, the Mad Axeman, after his escape from Dartmoor. Obviously, if Exley was going to reveal to the police that we had hidden Mitchell away, and if he was going to claim that we’d had Mitchell killed, then this was not a good start for us and was instrumental in our pleading guilty to harbouring him. The prosecution used Exley brilliantly. They told the magistrate that Exley had a bad heart, that it was possible he could die at any time and that he wanted ‘to clear his conscience’.

  Exley played his part well. His voice was soft, halting and uncertain. He didn’t look too clever. He sat in a chair in the witness box and spoke into a microphone. The dying man purging his soul. The irony was that Billy’s heart held out for another twenty years – he didn’t die until late in 1987. We’d looked after Billy Exley well on the occasions he worked for us. In return he told the court what he knew about us, including plenty about the ‘long firm’ fraud, one of the several phoney companies we’d formed in order to sell stock which didn’t belong to us.

  Exley had been the first target for Nipper Read and Fred Gerrard. He wasn’t a big fish, but he was enough to set their ball rolling. And because of his poor health, he was an easy man for them to get at and break down. I could imagine them saying, ‘Come on, Billy, we’ve got enough to put you inside. Your heart won’t stand it, you know. You’ll die in the nick. So what about it, eh? Just a few words on the Krays and you’re a free man. We won’t be troubling you again, Billy boy.’ And, of course, Billy Exley fell for it. He knew what he’d done. He couldn’t look us in the eye as he sat in the witness box.