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  We had what we thought was a good team at that time – all hand-picked villains, not rough diamonds, all with a little bit of class, or so we thought. The best of them all was Ian Barrie, my right-hand man. A Scot who’d come south looking for some action, a smart, tough, good-looking guy, with a scar down his face after an accident with some petrol in the army, he was a perfect minder who remained utterly loyal right to the end. Ron’s right-hand man was John Dickson, a close friend of Ian Barrie, who’d travelled down from Scotland with him. He had a mean streak and was a good driver, but we were never 100 per cent sure about Scotch Jack, as he was known, and he was to let us down badly in the end.

  So did most of the others who were only too happy to ride with us when the going was good: Ronnie Hart, our cousin, Big Albert Donaghue, Ron Bender and, of course, our own brother Charlie was still involved, though not always on a full-time basis. He sort of drifted in and out. Charlie was good to the end – but most of the others let us down badly.

  Things picked up as 1964 ended and 1965 began. We began moving our interests – strictly legitimate ones, I might add – into the provinces and bought shares in clubs in Birmingham and Leicester. We also took over another London club – the Cambridge Rooms on the Kingston bypass. The great Sonny Liston, then heavyweight champion of the world, came to the opening of that. We still loved boxing and boxers were still our favourite people.

  We even bought a racehorse for our dear mum. It was called Solway Cross and it cost a thousand quid, but it wasn’t very successful. Eventually we gave it away in a raffle.

  We’d also, with the help of an associate, devised a nice little line in fraud. It’s been called long firm fraud and, put simply, it worked like this: we would register a new company, rent a warehouse, and put in a front man as manager whose job it was to establish good relations with the bank and with suppliers. It would run as a proper business for a while and then, when the bank and the suppliers were feeling nice and trusting, we’d put in maximum orders to the supplier and flog the lot at cut-rate prices. We could clean up well over twenty grand in a single day – and the manager and his staff would be long gone before the supplier realized what had happened. Furniture, TV sets, radios, hi-fis – we’d handle anything. It was a nice little earner while it lasted.

  The police never pulled us on that one – but they did try to do us in 1965 for demanding money with menaces from a man called Hew McCowan. He ran a club called the Hideaway in Soho and he claimed we were demanding protection from him. The case went to the Old Bailey and we spent fifty-six days in custody. Eventually we got off and held the biggest party we’d ever had – a huge thrash that went on for two days. Then, like the bloke in the advert for razors, we went out and bought the club which had been the cause of the problem. We changed its name, of course – we called it El Morocco.

  It was in Gerrard Street and one of the first entertainers we signed up to do a regular spot was called David Essex. He was a complete unknown in those days – but you could see his great talent even then. Unlike so many of the show-business stars who were so keen to be in the company of Ron and me all those years ago, David Essex has never forgotten. Some years ago, when I was watching the TV in Parkhurst one night, David was starring in a show, and at the end of one of his songs he sent his greetings to Charlie, Ron and myself. I am proud that his career started in one of our clubs.

  Another star who didn’t forget us was Lenny Peters who, with his partner Dianne Lee, had a number one hit with ‘Welcome Home’. At the time of our trial for murder one of the papers spoke to Lenny Peters and he told them, ‘It was seventeen years of hard slog around the clubs. The Kray twins gave me work when I needed it and didn’t have it. They let me play at the Cambridge Rooms night club, at Kingston, in Surrey. I speak as I find. Whatever they may have got up to, they were always good to me.’ Thanks Lenny. So you see, there are people who’ve got something nice to say about us. No one can be all bad.

  1965 also produced the wedding of the year in the East End. I married a beautiful and lovely girl called Frances Shea, whom I’d been courting for some time. She was the sister of a friend. It was an amazing wedding, packed with celebrities, and one of the happiest days of my life. We went on honeymoon to Athens. At the time it seemed that nothing could spoil my future happiness. But when you start to feel like that life has a habit of kicking you in the teeth.

  The underworld grapevine began to warn us about two coppers – Nipper Read and Fred Gerrard. Leonard Read was a chief inspector working out of West End Central Police Station, along with Gerrard, who was a chief superintendent. The word was that Read and Gerrard were making more than the usual number of inquiries about us and were trying to talk to people we’d been involved with in various dealings. It was said that they were compiling a dossier on us and that Scotland Yard had been told by top people in the government that we were becoming too big and too influential. The word was that Read and Gerrard had been told: ‘Get the Krays.’

  It was a threat we didn’t take seriously enough. In fact, we even bought two snakes, evil-looking bastards they were, and we called them Nipper and Gerrard. We had a lot of laughs in the firm over that, although the bloody things kept on escaping and causing a right old stir. In the end we lost one of them altogether and I think we gave the other one back to the petshop.

  We never managed to control the little buggers, and I suppose the same was true of Nipper Read and Fred Gerrard. We underestimated them – or, at least, we underestimated the low levels to which they would eventually sink in a desperate attempt to put me and Ronnie away. Really, in the end, they were as devious as most criminals.

  But we always had a lot of respect for them, particularly Nipper Read. He was a good boxer and won the Metropolitan Police boxing championships three times. In our book, anyone who’s a decent boxer is usually halfway towards being a decent bloke. We still hold no grudge against Read, Gerrard and the others. It was business, as they say, it wasn’t personal. Not on our side anyway.

  All in all, apart from the McCowan affair, 1965 was a pretty good year. Business was flourishing, and we had built up a good team. Building up a firm – in the underworld sense – takes a lot of time and patience. There’s an awful lot of trust involved. We’d got a good mix – or so we thought.

  There were our right-hand men, Ian Barrie and John Dickson. From Glasgow was Big Pat Connolly – as his name implies, a very big, tough man. So was Big Albert Donaghue. I’d once shot him in the foot for an act of dishonesty – after that we were as close as brothers, or so I thought. There were others near the top of the firm who let us down badly – Ronnie Bender, Cornelius (Connie) Whitehead, and our cousin Ronnie Hart.

  Hart was another strong, good-looking bastard, who loved the glamour of being with us. He came knocking on the door at Vallance Road one day and said, ‘Hello, I’m your cousin. I want to join your gang.’ We’d never met him before but our checks showed that he seemed to be reliable – another mistake – and so we took him on. He was our cousin but he had the habit of calling us both ‘uncle’.

  Later a pair of Greek brothers, the Lambrianous, were close to us. Then there was Mad Teddy Smith, a very funny although quite lethal guy from London, and plenty of other fringe members, like Billy Exley, an ex-lightweight boxer whom Ronnie used as a bodyguard occasionally. Exley was a fairly insignificant character in our story in those days but later was the first one to rat on us. But, of course, we had no knowledge of that at the time.

  Nor did we have any idea that 1966 was going to be such a dramatic and traumatic year for us. It was the year when we freed Frank Mitchell, the so-called Mad Axeman, from Dartmoor. What we did, though I say it myself, was brilliantly clever. We were tried for the murder of Mitchell, though the police never found a body which is probably why we were acquitted and the case remains open.

  1966 was not a good year for Ron’s health, which had been very much up and down for some time. He would have good periods when he was his real self – a nice, gentle
man fully in control of every situation, who would only get nasty when he was provoked. At other times, though, he would go into deep depressions and disappear for days and weeks on end. He was convinced the police or other villains were closing in on him.

  These times put a great strain on me because it left me to run the firm by myself, and I was having plenty of problems of my own in my personal life. Frances was also suffering periods of great depression. Our marriage was going through a bad patch and I was worried about her.

  1966 was also the year when our feud with the Richardson gang came to a head. They attacked a club at Catford because they thought some of our gang were inside it. Unfortunately for them, there were a lot of tough customers inside having a drink, but only one member of our firm, a really nice guy called Richard Hart. Hart, who was only thirty, was shot dead. It was senseless. Most of the Richardson gang, including Frankie Fraser, got shot or stabbed. Most of them got put away. The only one to wriggle out of the net was – yes, you’ve guessed it – that evil bastard George Cornell. So the next night Ronnie killed him. He shot him in the Blind Beggar pub. Ron tells the full story of what happened in chapter 4.

  You could say that 1966 was the beginning and the end for the Krays. It was the beginning of the period where we were one of the most feared gangs in Europe. But in a sense it was the end as well, because the government and Scotland Yard could no longer ignore us. Everyone in London was talking about us. It was getting to the point when either the police had to break us or we would have broken them.

  It was a pity really. Everything would probably have been OK; we could probably have lived fairly peacefully alongside the law, but for George Cornell and those Richardsons.

  RON: 1966–67

  The Richardson affair, which I talk about in chapter 4, cost us our deal with the Mafia – a deal we had been prepared to cut the Richardson gang in on. It was my idea to try to establish links with the Mafia. We knew that some London clubs were funded by them. We wanted to get them to fund more clubs, in partnership with us, and in return we would offer them complete protection from the law and other gangsters. This, we thought, would just be the start. Once the Mafia could see we were to be trusted, they would want to increase their business links with us. With their backing and money and our knowledge and control of the London scene, I didn’t see how we could fail.

  The problem, initially, was making the right contacts and I thought it would make a good impression if I went to them with our proposals. I didn’t know anyone over there, I wasn’t sure who I wanted or needed to talk to, so I suppose, looking back, it was either a brave or a bloody stupid thing to do. Talk about walking into the lion’s den.

  The first problem was getting a visa to get into America – after all, I did have something of a criminal record. Eventually I became involved with an American called Alan Cooper, one of those sort of international Mr Fix-its. You pay him the money and he gets you what you want – in my case, permission to get into America and stay there for a few days. Cooper had a lot of connections and finally he said it was all fixed.

  We went first to Paris, where Cooper took me to the American Embassy. He acted as though he owned the place and started giving some woman official a real cock-and-bull story about who I was, how I’d been badly treated by the police in Britain, and how I desperately needed to get into America for a few days to see a sick and dying relation. It worked. She said to me, ‘I can see you have got convictions but, under the circumstances, we can grant you permission to visit America briefly.’

  We flew to New York and when we landed at Kennedy airport the FBI were there to meet us. They searched us and our luggage very thoroughly and asked me what I wanted in America. I told them the same cock-and-bull story and they told me to report to the embassy the same day. This I did and, despite my convictions and despite the lies we had told, I was allowed into America for seven days.

  Cooper took me to meet Joe Kaufman, an Italian-American Jew, who was the Mr Fix-it on the American side. Kaufman had been in London several times and knew who I was. He listened to what I wanted and suggested that we go to Brooklyn to meet Frank Ileano, one of the top men in the New York Mafia. Phone calls were made and a meet was arranged at a house in President Steet, in Brooklyn, owned by three gangster brothers, the Gallos – Joe Gallo, known as Crazy Joe, Larry Gallo and Al Gallo, who for some reason was called Kid Blast.

  The atmosphere was electric. I suddenly knew I was in the big league and I’d better make out a good case for being here, otherwise these bastards were liable to chop my balls off. They were deliberately trying to unnerve me, trying to see how much bottle I’d got. Things weren’t improved when, as I struggled to make polite conversation, a tiny thickset dwarf came and stood behind my chair. He was carrying a bottle which he held near my head. This evil-looking midget, who I learned later was known as the Dwarf, was Armando Ileano, the brother of the gangster I was waiting to meet. When I saw Armando the Dwarf hovering behind me with a bottle in his hand, I couldn’t help thinking of the old saying, ‘Mark well the man whom God has marked.’ Funny the things that go through your mind when the pressure is on you.

  Frank Ileano eventually arrived. They called him Punchy because he’d been a very good middleweight boxer. He was a most impressive man. Kaufman introduced me and told him that I had got my button, American Mafia slang for murder or murders. He told him he could check me out with Angelo Bruno, a Philadelphia gangster who had knowledge of the London scene. Frank Ileano said, ‘Don’t worry, I will do.’

  He went into another room to phone and after what seemed like an age he came back and said, ‘I’ve checked you out. Bruno says you are OK.’ Suddenly the tension in the room began to lift. Out came the coffee and discussions began almost immediately, discussions that covered the club scene in London, the possibilities of bringing big-time American gamblers from Las Vegas to London for week-long orgies of gambling.

  Ileano and I got on fine. That night he took me to his club in New York, the Mousetrap. He told me I was very hot and that the FBI were watching me all the time and, presumably, reporting my every move back to Scotland Yard.

  Frank Ileano and I continued our discussions over the next few days and I have little doubt we were well on the way to forming a link between the Mafia and the Krays. All in all, it was a highly successful trip and, loaded down with gifts, I returned to London well pleased.

  It wasn’t long before the Americans showed they were serious about our discussions because one of their top front men – I shall call him John Smith, because he is still in business – arrived in London to talk further business. We met him at the Pigalle with the Richardsons, who by now were getting really troublesome and threatening to disrupt the plans Reg and I were making. So we thought it was better to include them in discussions, rather than have them blow up the Pigalle while we were sitting in it. I tell you, these were troubled times.

  Unfortunately Smith and the Richardsons didn’t see eye to eye on one point and one of the Richardsons started swearing at him.

  I was annoyed at this and said, ‘There’s no need for the swearing at him. He’s in the country on his own.’ I could see Smith was pleased at this and we managed to sort out the business to suit all of us.

  The next night I took Smith up a tie and handkerchief set.

  Some months later I was back in New York, drinking in a bar with the boxer Rocky Graziano, when a man who was obviously a hood approached me. ‘I have got a message for you from someone upstairs,’ he said.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked.

  He said, ‘John Smith. He sends you his best wishes. He can’t come down to see you because the place is crawling with FBI.’

  I thought to myself it was just as well I’d been nice to him while he was in London. After all, now I was very much on his territory.

  The American Dream never quite came off for Reggie and me, although we did do some business with the Mafia, but nowhere near as much as we might if things had worked out differently.<
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  Our American links produced other side effects – some good, some bad. The good? Well, one gangster I was chatting to in America told me that the great boxing champion Joe Louis had fallen on hard times. He asked if I could fix him up with a little trip to England. So I rang two brothers I knew called Levy, who ran a club in Newcastle called La Dolce Vita. They were marvellous. They sent Joe Louis first-class air tickets, had a car waiting for him at Gatwick airport, and then paid him more than a thousand pounds for four days of personal appearances, in which all he had to do was say a few words and sign a few photographs.

  Marvellous blokes, the Levys. When Reg and I were in Brixton awaiting a demanding money with menaces charge, they sent someone down with a gift of £5,000 to help us.

  The bad side of the American business were our two main contact men – Alan Cooper and Joe Kaufman. When Cooper first offered to fix up my trip to the States I thought of the old saying, ‘Beware of Greek gods bearing gifts.’ But I badly wanted to go to America so I ignored my warning thoughts. But my premonitions were proved right because a few months later he was a prosecution witness against us at our trial.

  The police also arrested Joe Kaufman and told him they were going to charge him because of his links with us. Kaufman, like Cooper, offered to do a deal with the police: he would tell them everything he knew about the Krays if they would drop the charges against him. Yet another case of rats deserting a sinking ship. We let Cooper get away but at least Reggie had the satisfaction of breaking Kaufman’s jaw when we were on remand together at Brixton.

  I haven’t seen Frank Ileano for many years now. The last time I saw him I gave him a diamond ring worth £1,000.

  REG: 1967–68