Our Story Page 5

  The protection racket has always been rife, even before the days of organized crime. When we were kids the likes of Dodger Mullins and Wassle Newman used to operate simple protection rackets, only they tended to take food and drink in return for making sure a shopkeeper wasn’t bothered by other toughs.

  It’s an odious form of crime really, although in some of the tougher areas, where a number of gangs operate, it’s sometimes the only way of getting a bit of law and order. Otherwise businesses can finish up paying protection money to several different individuals at the same time.

  But, as you can imagine, we were horrified when those Maltese boys tried to put the squeeze on us. We were just about the worst people they could have picked on.

  We were fearless in those days. Fighting was our game. When we got bored we would team up with our mates from the billiard hall and go to a dance hall or pub, just looking for a bit of bother. We never got beaten. We were big drinkers but we never seemed to get drunk. Those were wild and wonderful days. At that stage we weren’t really villains, more like Jack the lads, certainly no worse than Teddy Boys.

  It was around that time that the Kray gang was formed. It wasn’t something deliberate, it just happened. Blokes seemed to congregate naturally around Ron and me. Local villains – thieves and the like – would come to us with goods they had stolen and ask us to hide stuff. We would charge them a percentage for this. Once or twice we hid weapons for people, and I think it was that that started Ron’s interest in guns.

  Then the protection racket reared its ugly head again. A gang from over Poplar way tried it on us, but we soon smashed them up and two of them were quite badly hurt. Suddenly we saw the possibilities that the protection business might hold for us. After all, with our friends we were the most feared people in our part of the East End. So we devised our own protection business and it was soon working well. It may sound silly, but I believe we were offering a real service. Things had got completely out of hand in the East End and we brought some law and order where previously two or three gangs a week had been calling for protection money.

  With us there were two kinds of payment, you were either on the Nipping list or on the Pension list. The Nipping list was those places where we could pop in if we needed a quick crate of gin or Scotch or a case or two of champagne: pubs, off-licences, small shops and the like. The publicans and shopkeepers were actually well pleased. We were providing them with total protection in what was a very rough area for next to nothing. The Pension list was for more up-market places: restaurants, gambling joints and so on. They paid more, but not a vast amount of money; they were on a fixed rate which depended on the sort of turnover we thought they were doing. We didn’t charge the earth, but none the less we now had a tidy sum coming into the old coffers every week.

  Mind you, we had to provide a service. Other gangs would occasionally try to muscle in and would call round at a business we were protecting. We’d have a couple of our boys waiting for them next time they called. They generally got the message. If they didn’t they’d get a broken nose instead. OK, so it wasn’t straight. But what is straight anyway? All these so-called businessmen using lawyers and accountants to fiddle their books to cheat the taxman and the VAT man? I reckon they are as guilty as we were. Occasionally we would have to resort to violence, but only when it was necessary, and only against members of other gangs.

  We still lived the simple life at Vallance Road. Our mum still looked after us and we didn’t even have a car. The only real luxury was having our hair cut at home by a local barber. We got that idea from an American gangster film.

  By 1955 the Kray name was getting more well known around London, though London in those days was really run by two guys – Billy Hill and Jack Comer, who was known as Jack Spot. They were the undisputed kings of the underworld. They were into everything: night clubs, spielers (drinking clubs), gambling clubs and prostitution. Then they fell out and Jack Spot came to see us. He wanted Ron and me to act as his bodyguards because he feared an attack by Hill and felt he couldn’t trust some of his own men. It wasn’t really our kind of work and we didn’t much like Spot, but it was a good in for us at a higher level than we’d been in previously. So we travelled around with Spot for a while and made sure he never got into any bother. Then he paid us off and, unluckily for him, got carved up a few weeks later outside his flat in Bayswater. That was enough for him and he decided to quit. So did Billy Hill, who went off to live in Spain.

  They didn’t leave behind any real successors, just a number of gangs which were operating in different parts of London. The time was ripe for someone to move in and take over. Ron and I really fancied our chances. By now our firm (gang) was growing and we had quite a few blokes on the payroll, even though we were still based in the East End. We’d got our protection business, we’d got several little spielers and gambling clubs. We were the big men in the East End. But the question was: could we make it into the West End where the really big money was? We decided there was only one way to find out.

  RON: 1955–59

  1955 was a memorable year. Reg and I were beginning our move towards the West End – and I shot my first man. He was a docker, an ex-boxer, who was trying to put the frighteners on the owner of a garage we were protecting. The garage owner was scared out of his wits, but he had the good sense to tell him he was short of readies and asked him to come back the following night. Then, said the garage owner, he’d have the necessary cash. In the meantime, of course, he was straight on the phone to us.

  I was bloody livid. After all, here was this guy paying us good money to keep unsavoury individuals away, and here was the ex-boxer, who knew the garage was on our patch, trying to muscle in. He had to be taught a lesson. So when he came back the next night I was there waiting for him with a Luger pistol.

  I was feeling really excited that night. When the fool started giving me a bit of mouth and started to get a bit threatening I shot him in the leg. I was thinking to myself: that’s the last time that stupid bastard will ever try it on with the Krays.

  Reggie wasn’t too pleased when he heard what had happened and there was a bit of heat from the police for a while. We visited the guy we shot in hospital and told him to keep his mouth shut, or else we’d really do a job on him when he came out. And, to show there were no hard feelings, we gave his wife a bit of money – a few grand in fact – just to tide her over and make sure she didn’t start getting lippy to the law.

  The police came round to Vallance Road and said they wanted me to attend an identification parade. We were a bit concerned that Shorty might be stupid and pick me out, so Reg went in my place. The idea was that if Shorty did pick Reg out, then Reg would say, ‘You’ve got the wrong one, I’m Reggie Kray!’ That way I would have been forewarned and could have gone on the run. As it happened, Shorty was sensible and didn’t pick anyone out.

  Reg and I had a few words once the incident was over, but the fact of the matter was that it didn’t do my reputation any harm at all. On the contrary, it did it the world of good. There were plenty of hard men in London in those days, but not many who were prepared to use a shooter. The whole thing helped to make the Krays, and me in particular, something to be avoided at all costs.

  No sooner was this little bit of bother sorted out, than Reggie and I got what we’d always wanted – a foothold in the West End. A guy called Billy Jones had taken over a West End drinking club called Stragglers just off Cambridge Circus. But it was being ruined by constant fights between various characters who thought they could demand a spot of protection and make a name for themselves. These fights were expensive: they caused damage, they drove away decent customers who wanted to drink in peace and, most serious of all, they upset the law, who were threatening to close the place down unless things got much quieter. So Billy Jones’s partner, an old boxing mate of ours called Bobby Ramsey, called us in as informal partners. The deal was that we’d get a share of the takings in exchange for making sure the trouble stopped. Within no
time, of course, Reggie and I had banged a few heads together, told one or two characters that they were no longer welcome, and there was no more trouble. Peace reigned, and the money started pouring in.

  It was too good to last, though, and sure enough it didn’t. Bobby Ramsey was attacked and beaten up by a gang of Irish dockers who called themselves the Watney Streeters. They were upset because a couple of them had been thrown out of Stragglers and they decided to take it out on Bobby.

  We had to get our own back, of course; otherwise we’d have lost all the control we’d worked so hard to gain. We made a few inquiries and discovered that this gang were to be found early most nights in a pub called the Britannic. About a dozen of us were waiting for them one night. There was a tremendous battle and one of them, a geezer called Jackie Martin, got very badly hurt. Unfortunately he did an unforgivable thing – he broke the East End code of silence and named me as the man who’d hurt him. He also named Bobby Ramsey and Billy Jones.

  It meant that Martin was finished in London, of course. He had to beat a very hasty retreat. But it also meant that Ramsey, Jones and I were charged at the Old Bailey with grievous bodily harm. I got three years, Ramsey got five years because of his previous record, and Jones got three years. So by November 1956 I was in Wandsworth. I was twenty-three, I was one of London’s most feared gangsters, I had a record, and I had shot a man. For a poor East End boy I had already made a bit of a name for myself.

  Wandsworth was no problem for me. I very soon became the biggest tobacco baron in the place. I was making money inside and our businesses outside were going from strength to strength. But then, two years later, with the end of my sentence in sight, my life started to go wrong. I began to go mad again.

  It happened when they sent me to Camp Hill, a soft prison on the Isle of Wight, for the last few months of my sentence. It was such a doddle there, just like a holiday camp, yet I hated it. It seemed so far away from home and my friends and family and Reg. It was great for them up in the Smoke, but I wasn’t a part of it. I got depressed and withdrawn. I didn’t want to know anything or anybody.

  Then I heard that my Auntie Rose had died of leukaemia. I went berserk.

  That’s when my paranoia started. I began feeling that people were plotting against me. If I saw two people chatting I was convinced they were planning how they were going to get me. So I just had to stop them, hurt them, make them see what they were doing was wrong. Without my drugs I still get the same feelings today. I was taken to the psychiatric wing of Winchester prison and declared insane.

  I was sent to Long Grove mental hospital near Epsom. I was in an awful state. I thought the bloke in the opposite bed was a dog. I couldn’t recognize anyone. I kept putting my hand through the glass in the windows. It was hell. But they put me on strong drugs and gradually I started to feel a bit better, though I knew I wasn’t right.

  The family were really worried about my condition. They were worried that the authorities were going to use this as an excuse to keep me locked away for the rest of my life. That’s when Reg decided to swop places with me. He and Charlie reckoned that if I got out and managed to stay out without getting into trouble, it would show the authorities that I wasn’t insane any more and they would have to release me from custody. And that, in fact, is more or less what happened.

  The swop was so easy it was monstrous. Reg and Charlie came to see me, and as they stood by my bed Reg said in a loud voice, ‘I must go to the toilet.’ And off he went. A couple of minutes later I said to Charlie – again in a loud voice so anyone nearby could hear – ‘I think I must go and have a pee as well.’ Reg was waiting for me in the cubicle in the toilet. He took off his clothes and I took off my pyjamas and we did a swop. Then we walked back to my bed, only this time it was Reg who climbed in and, half an hour later, it was me who left the mental hospital with Charlie.

  Reg gave us time to get clean away and then he calmly walked up to the officer on duty and said, ‘I’m going home now.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ said the officer.

  ‘Oh yes I can. My name is Reggie Kray and if you don’t believe it here’s my driving licence.’

  They had no choice but to let him go, even though the police came and grilled him. He just said he had felt tired and decided to lie down, and when he woke up I was gone. It sounds silly, I know, but it’s amazing how easy it is to deceive the authorities, particularly if you’ve got the nerve – and a twin brother.

  But though I can joke about it now, that was a bad time for me. I stayed free for a few months, spending most of my time living in a caravan on a farm in Suffolk, owned by a friend. Occasionally Charlie and Reg would take me up to London, but not often. Then I went back voluntarily to Long Grove. I got a rollicking, of course, but soon after that they said I was fit enough to finish my sentence, so I returned to Wandsworth, and they let me out in early 1959. For a while I was treated at the St Clement’s mental hospital in the Mile End Road, but in the end I stopped going there. I still wasn’t right: I kept getting these urges to kill people because I was convinced they were plotting to kill me.

  Shortly after I got out of Wandsworth, I became very friendly with an Italian fellow by the name of Battles. He asked me to have a drink with him one night in a club called the Central in Clerkenwell, a popular meeting place for many of the Italians in London at that time. While we were there Battles had an argument with another fellow by the name of Billy Alco. It ail got a bit heated, nothing more, and then Alco went across to sit with some of his mates. I saw them talking, their heads together, and looking over at Battles and me. That did it. I was convinced Alco and his mates were plotting against me.

  I had a revolver on me at the time and I took it out and had a shot at Alco. Luckily I missed, but the shot caused fucking chaos in the club. I was ready to shoot them all, but Battles held my arm and said to me very quietly, ‘It’s not necessary, Ron, let’s go.’ Something in the way he said it brought me to my senses and we left. Just as well, really, otherwise I might have massacred half the Italians in London. But I tell this story because it shows that I really did have problems, even at that time.

  The funny thing is, Billy Alco – the guy I tried to kill – later turned out to be one of the best friends I ever had. He comes to see me in Broadmoor and is a real gentleman. So often the people we’ve tried to hurt have turned out to be our best friends later on.

  REG: 1959–64

  After Ron was put away for the attack on Jackie Martin it didn’t take the law long to close down Stragglers. But it didn’t really matter because Charlie and I were now working together more closely and we were successful in our other business ventures.

  I never forgot about Ron, though. While he was inside I bought an empty shop in the Bow Road and turned it into a club. I called it the Double R – a sort of tribute to Ron. Above the club we built a very snazzy gym and I got Henry Cooper to open it.

  The Double R did well. Queenie Watts, the cockney singer, came there a lot. So too did Barbara Windsor, Sybil Burton and many other famous names. I got on particularly well with Barbara Windsor and those days were the start of a friendship that’s lasted right until now. She’s a bloody wonderful person who’s managed to ride out some very difficult times. My brother Charlie played a big part in making the Double R a success. We haven’t always seen eye to eye, Charlie and I, and even these days we occasionally fall out, but he certainly played his part in one of the most successful Kray ventures ever. He was married at the time to a girl called Dolly who always thought she was above the lot of us, and they had a couple of kids.

  I loved my life in the late fifties. I made a lot of money but I was a good club owner. I was always there, I ran my club properly, as well as keeping an eye on our other little interests. These included a drinking club at Stratford in the East End, a financial interest in several second-hand car businesses, plus, would you believe, an illegal gambling club right next door to Bow police station. It took ages for them to sus us, but most copper
s are as dim as Toc H lamps. That’s been my experience, and I’ve had more experience than most. But even though I was so busy I never forgot about Ron and often went to visit him at Wandsworth.

  On one of those visits I met Frank Mitchell, later to be known as the Mad Axeman and soon to play such an important part in our lives. Ron and Frank got on very well and Ron told him we would look after him when they both got outside.

  I also got involved with a small-time hood called Ronnie Marwood, and that involvement probably cost us a small fortune. The police were turning a relatively blind eye to our drinking and gambling clubs for the simple reason that they were well run and there was never any trouble. The police aren’t altogether stupid; they know that there will always be drinking and gambling clubs, but it’s much better if they are well run. That way they don’t give the law too many problems. So the coppers were leaving me fairly well alone until one night this face called Ronnie Marwood comes to see me. He was in a right state. He told me he’d stabbed a copper and wanted me to hide him.

  I owed Marwood nothing and I knew he was going to cause me nothing but trouble. But, despite what they say, there is some kind of honour among thieves, a sort of code of conduct. Right or wrong, I took Marwood in and hid him in a safe place until he was ready to make a run for it.

  The police came to see me, and in so many words they said, ‘Tell us where Marwood is and we’ll give you a free rein on your clubs, turn a blind eye.’ But I wouldn’t. I told the police, ‘I’m sorry, you’re on one side, I’m on the other. I can’t tell you where Marwood is.’

  After that it didn’t take the law long to shut down the Double R – they can always find a problem with your licence – and after that every club and business we owned was persecuted by the police. And all because we tried to help someone out.