Our Story Page 6

  Not only were we having problems with the law over the next three years, we were also very worried about Ron. His mental state really went downhill after they moved him to Camp Hill on the Isle of Wight. Suddenly Reggie and Ronnie Kray, the golden boys, seemed to have lost a bit of their glitter. But gradually Ron got back to being more like his old self and we were making a very steady income looking after the business interests which Billy Hill still controlled in London. These were mainly gambling clubs and Billy was pleased with the work we did for him. As a result he gave us some good advice. ‘Go a bit up-market,’ he said. ‘Get yourself a really decent club, then the coppers have got no reason to give you a hard time.’

  And that’s exactly what we did. In the summer of 1962 we opened a club called the Kentucky in the Mile End Road in Stepney. It was really smart. We spent a fortune on it. Two thousand pounds alone on carpets, lighting and wall-to-ceiling mirrors. Two grand may not sound much today but in the early sixties it was a lot of bread, particularly for a couple of working-class lads from the East End.

  Early in 1963, a few months after we’d opened the Kentucky, Barbara Windsor asked me if we would let the club be used for some scenes in the film Sparrows Can’t Sing, which starred Barbara, James Booth and Queenie Watts, and was directed by Joan Littlewood. I agreed and we were paid a decent sum of money by the film company. At the end of the year the film’s premiere was held at a cinema in Stepney and there were some big names present, including Lord Snowdon and Roger Moore. My family and friends all attended – in fact, we bought the majority of the tickets. Afterwards, most of the cast and dozens of other celebrities came back for a party at the Kentucky.

  It was on that night, with Ron and me done up like dogs’ dinners in our bow ties and dinner jackets, and surrounded by the rich and the famous, that I realized that we were well on the way to making it to the very top. I felt so powerful that night. I felt nothing was going to stop us. The good times were back for the Kray twins, and, by Christ, we did have some good times and some good laughs at the Kentucky.

  By today’s standards the Kentucky was probably a bit loud and garish. It was all deep red carpets, mirrors and sprayed-gold ‘antique’ chairs and furniture. But the Kentucky was right for the time and, more especially, right for the toffs who wanted to come over from the West End and see a bit of the seamy side of life without having to get themselves dirty or put themselves in any danger. They loved it. It was exciting, it was exhilarating. They could kid themselves it was dangerous because there were plenty of evil-looking gangsters around. But they were actually as safe as houses. We ran a very tight ship indeed. There were never any problems at our club.

  But if these rich punters wanted to pay well over the top for their food and drink and then lose a good few bob on the gaming tables, that was all right by us. They wanted fantasy – and we provided it. We also provided some novel entertainment which the toffs could go home and tell their hoity-toity friends about.

  One of the stage acts we used was called Tex the Dwarf. He was a midget who wore an enormous Texan hat. He would climb on the back of a donkey and strum away on a guitar and sing cowboy songs. At the end of the act Ron would walk to the stage and lead the donkey over to the bar by its reins.

  One night Ron had just led the donkey over to the corner of the bar and he’d got the donkey’s reins in his left hand and a large glass of gin and tonic in his right. At that moment in walked a bookmaker who owed Ron a large amount of money. When Ron spotted the bookmaker he went bloody berserk and started telling the bookie he better pay up or else.

  I just stood watching – it was bloody hilarious: there was Ron, gesticulating and laying down the law in general, with a donkey in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. The bookie didn’t seem to see the funny side of it, though, and sped out of the club fairly promptly.

  Ron could be a very funny man, often without trying, and yet this is a side of him that is never portrayed. A few years later he was on the run from the police for about a year. There was a warrant out for him. During this time he used many aliases and disguises and was living in a secret flat in west London. One day he wanted to visit a friend in Bow in the East End. As this was obviously an area where the law would be looking for him, Ron decided to cover his face in bandages covered in tomato sauce, to make it look like he’d had an accident. For some reason he thought that this was an ideal disguise and that no one would possibly recognize him. Just as he knocked on the door of the house in Bow, a bloke who was passing by said, ‘Hello, Ron, how are you keeping?’ Ron was as sick as a parrot!

  Like I say, he could be a very funny man. He still is, often without realizing it. I went to see him in Broadmoor shortly after the publication of a book I helped write called Slang. It was all about East End rhyming slang and I told Ron I had sent a copy to Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Ron, ‘what did he think of it?’

  The good times came to an end when the police closed the Kentucky down a year later in 1964. They objected to us having a licence and took their objections to Stepney Borough Council. We were very upset because we felt this was blatant persecution and they told a lot of lies about us, how we were running the club badly, illegal drinking and gaming, etc. Is it any wonder we turned more and more to our protection business to make money?

  Peter Rachman, the London landlord who received a lot of publicity at the time of the Keeler-Profumo affair for his extortionate rents and bully-boy tactics, was paying us for protection. He had to – it was either that or his rent collectors were set upon. They were big, but our boys were bigger. He didn’t want to pay up. He avoided us at first and then sent a cheque that bounced. Silly. After that it was his rent collectors who started bouncing, and the unpleasant Mr Rachman started to see the error of his ways.

  We never minded putting the squeeze on characters like Rachman, who made his money out of the misery of others and out of prostitution. An odious sort of person, though you had to admire him in some ways. His background was even poorer than ours. He was a Pole who slipped into Britain in 1946, at the age of twenty-seven, with just sixty quid in his pocket. When he died of a heart attack in 1962 he was worth millions. Who says crime doesn’t pay?

  But Ron and I never really liked the protection business. It wasn’t glamorous enough for us. We longed to get back into club life in a big way. So, despite all the problems we’d had, we opened up our first legitimate night club in the West End. And it bloody nearly broke us.

  RON: 1964–65

  Esmerelda’s Barn it was called, in Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, a real posh West End club – and it was ours. We were good club owners, we worked long hours as hosts to the many celebrities and the rich young bloods who came to the club. But it was essentially a gambling club, and maybe we didn’t know enough about managing a gambling club at this sort of level. After about a year we pulled out. Fortunes were won at Esmerelda’s Barn, and a fortune was lost – ours.

  We made a lot of mistakes. We thought it was enough to have a real-life lord – Lord Effingham, in fact – on the board of directors and a staff who had experience. We were wrong. Lord Effingham was a nice enough bloke. He was a close personal friend and we shared some similar interests. But we were done for a fortune by the staff and also by many of our customers, the rich and the famous, people whose word we trusted, who ran up fantastic gambling debts and then couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay them. Sure, we chased them. But with that kind of customer – the sons of lords and earls, and film stars and so on – you can’t go around banging their heads together or they go screaming to daddy or to the press. There’s a bloody sight more honour among thieves than there is among the so-called aristocracy. For the first time in our lives Reggie and I were done for a lot of bread, and there was bugger all we could do about it.

  What did for us more than anything was the book work. We had an accountant who cooked the books, didn’t pay any tax, and then scarpered. If he’s reading this, he�
�ll know who he is. Tell you what, Mr X, why not pop along to Broadmoor for a little chat? There’s still a few things for you and me to discuss.

  The dear old Inland Revenue moved in like barracuda. Funnily enough, most of America’s top gangsters – and that includes Al Capone – have been nailed, not by the police, but by the Inland Revenue. They effectively put us out of business at Esmerelda’s Barn and almost into the nick. It was a case of ‘pay up or go inside’, and for once we had no choice. We had to cough up. So, by the end of 1964, we were out of the West End in a big way, with our fingers just a bit burned.

  We also lost a packet in 1963–64 in a building project in Enugu in Nigeria, which was later to become Biafra. It was Ernest Shinwell, the son of the Labour peer Manny Shinwell, who got Reggie and me interested in this one. By this stage of our careers we were worth a few hundred thousand pounds and we didn’t know what to do with it. We were still a couple of East End boys with simple tastes. Sure, by now we had a flash motor and good clothes and we used to take expensive holidays to places like Tangiers with people like Billy Hill and his girlfriend Gypsy, but basically we had more than we could spend and were looking for ways to invest it, a sort of pension for when we got too old for villainy. We wanted something with a bit more security than clubs. So along came Ernest Shinwell with this project he’d become involved in in eastern Nigeria. He’d been approached, he said, by the government there, who wanted him to form a company to develop and build housing estates and factories and schools. Shinwell said there was a fortune to be made for those who invested in the scheme. We stuck in £25,000 straightaway and a lot more money from the Kray coffers followed that little lot straight down the Nigerian drain. It was another case of us getting involved in something we knew nothing about. We just got out of our depth. It happens.

  The only good thing about it was that I had a couple of trips to Enugu, which was the capital of that part of Nigeria. On both occasions I was welcomed by Dr Okpara, who was the prime minister at that time. He drove me around, with his chauffeur, in a battered old Rolls and really wined and dined me. I didn’t realize at the time, but it was probably Reggie and me who were actually paying for all this VIP treatment.

  Just before the end of my second visit to Enugu Dr Okpara asked me if there was anything I hadn’t seen or done that I would like to do. I said yes, I would like a guided tour of Enugu prison. I was only in that place for five minutes and that was enough. It was a stinking hell hole and made Dartmoor look like a holiday camp. I felt really sorry for the poor bastards locked up in there.

  Ventures like the Enugu project weren’t just a case of a couple of East End villains trying to be flash – there was a method in our madness. I’d read and heard how people like Capone built up a lot of their power because they had friends in high places, namely politicians. Not only that, but they also knew things about certain politicians, things which the politician concerned wouldn’t want to get out or fall into the hands of the press – secret love affairs, homosexual liaisons, illegal money deals, and so on. Now Reg and I would never resort to blackmail, but it was always useful to know things about important and influential people, and to mix with them. We knew a lot about a lot of people, things they were terrified we would reveal when we were finally gaoled for life. They needn’t have worried, though. That was never the style of the Kray twins.

  The other unfortunate aspect of the Enugu business is that it led to what became known as the Boothby affair. Ernest Shinwell had suggested that Lord Boothby, a famous political figure, who had once been the Tory MP for Aberdeenshire, might be prepared to invest a good sum in the Enugu project. He (Shinwell) had already spoken with Boothby, who had expressed some interest, but he wanted to discuss the whole project with someone else who was investing money to compare notes. So I made an appointment to see Lord Boothby – a meeting which later made headline news when Boothby sued the Sunday Mirror for £40,000. I was a reluctant witness at the trial – reluctant only because such publicity would draw unwelcome attention to us from the police and the public.

  The Sunday Mirror got to hear about my approach to Lord Boothby and then, amazingly, wrote a story about a ‘top-level Scotland Yard investigation into the alleged homosexual relationship between a prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld’. They claimed the investigation had been ordered by the Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson. The article also spoke of Mayfair parties ‘attended by the peer and the thug’, of visits to Brighton with other ‘prominent public men’, of a ‘relationship’ between the peer, an East End gangster and some clergymen, and there were also allegations of blackmail. You can imagine the stir that little lot caused.

  It was the start of a campaign by the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Express and other newspapers to try to get the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, to crack down on us and other London gangs. But none of the papers actually named me – they knew they couldn’t prove a word of what they were claiming.

  Then Private Eye joined in and wrote:

  Either the charges are true, in which case the newspapers should have the guts to publish names, whatever the risk of libel. Or they are untrue or grossly exaggerated – in which case they should stop scaring the people with this horror movie of London under terror.

  The Krays have been with us for a long time, so have the protection rackets. The question is – why has the subject suddenly become a matter for such grave anxiety?

  I have kept all the clippings for all these years and even now I am astonished at the headlines I made.

  Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, was forced to join in and issue a statement. He said: ‘The Protection Racket situation in London is less serious than it has been on several occasions in the past.’ Well said, sir. Then Lord Boothby himself very bravely wrote a letter to The Times about what he called ‘a tissue of atrocious lies’. Eventually IPC, the owners of the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror, apologized and paid him £40,000. Cecil King, the IPC chairman, issued a statement saying: ‘I am satisfied that any imputation of improper nature against Lord Boothby is completely unjustified.’

  So now the whole world knew about Ronnie Kray, top London gangster. Some of them now believed that I was a homosexual and that I had had a homosexual relationship with Lord Boothby. Let me now – for the first time – make the truth absolutely clear. Yes, I was a homosexual at that time, and for many years afterwards I found greater pleasure in the company of men than in the company of women. No, I did not have any kind of sexual relationship with Lord Boothby. It was strictly a business relationship which later became a friendship – a friendship based on the fact that we had both been so badly smeared by the national press.

  Boothby was a good man, an honest man. Some time later, when I was charged by the police with demanding money with menaces from a West End club owner, Lord Boothby asked a question in the House of Lords about why the police had held me in custody for five weeks without trial.

  As for myself, I was relieved that people now knew about my homosexuality. I didn’t have to hide my leanings any more. I didn’t feel any shame then – I don’t feel any now. It was the way I was born. There is nothing necessarily weak about a homosexual man – and I believe he does no wrong provided he does not force his attentions on anyone who doesn’t want them. I hate people who pick on homosexuals. I hate words like ‘queer’ and ‘poof’. Some time later another gangster called me ‘a fat poof’ – and he died for it.

  But that was in the future. Right now we had more than enough problems to deal with.

  The publicity the Krays received at that time undoubtedly helped us towards our downfall. Suddenly we were major celebrities, and suddenly, also, we were right at the top of the Metropolitan Police hit list. Every copper in London who wanted to make a name for himself was on the lookout for the slightest mistake by Reggie or Ronnie Kray.

  REG: 1964–66

  The Boothby affair, Enugu and Esmerelda’s Barn weren’t our only problems in 1964. I als
o got involved with a guy called Daniel Shay in a spot of protection that went wrong. I went with him to a shop whose owner was withholding some money which he owed. Normally in such cases, if Ron or I appeared, there was usually no problem and the ‘misunderstanding’ was cleared up. However, on this occasion the law was hiding in the next room and they pounced. I appealed, but got sent to Wandsworth for six months. This was the period that I fell in love for the first and only time in my life, but I will tell that story later (chapter 8).

  The police continued to harass us, looking for any excuse to get rid of the threat of the Krays. Ronnie was accused of housebreaking, a ridiculous charge, and the case was dismissed. We were both accused of loitering with intent – again, a good lawyer, a poor case by the police, and case dismissed.

  Meanwhile, our protection business was booming. New casinos were springing up all over the place, ripe for the picking. We devised a system of payment based on profit – and some of the profits were bigger than you would imagine. Again, we provided a service. Nothing and no one else was allowed to bother the casinos. Of course, if any casino manager started to play silly buggers or if a rival gang or individuals tried to move in on ‘our’ casinos, then pressure would be applied. Usually the threat of trouble was enough – there was very little violence – but if anyone did try it on they would get hurt. But it didn’t happen often and they only did it once.

  Other gangs occasionally resented the success we were having and there were attempts to put us out of business. There was a home-made bomb which we returned to the guy who sent it, only rather more successfully than he’d sent it to us. He lost one of his hands. There was an attempt to poison us. That guy had his jaw broken. And some gangsters flew in from Europe thinking they were going to do a bit of business in London. We met them at London airport, exchanged greetings, and they went home on the next flight. No bones broken.