Bringing Down the Krays (11 page)

‘Who is it, Dave?’

I already knew the answer. We all did. Almost every night Reggie or Ron would phone up to ask us to come out drinking. If we said no, they’d just send someone round to get us anyway. It was 9 March 1966, a Wednesday, the day after David’s birthday, so we all still had a bit of a hangover and didn’t want to go out. We just wanted to watch telly. Have a few drinks.

‘So, is it the usual?’ I asked him. ‘Of course it is,’ David said. It had been Reggie on the phone saying that we should come over for a drink at the Widow’s. No special reason. Just get over.

We all looked at each other. Better do as he says. David’s car was outside the flat – a grey, two-door Ford Popular. Not flash.
The three of us got in and headed for Bethnal Green. David did the driving, with Alfie and me in the back.

We got to the Widow’s. Reggie was outside in the street with the rest of the Firm, all of them milling around under the railway bridge beneath the street lamps. There was something funny going on, we could sense it. We all got out. There’s Reggie walking towards us, saying to David quite matter-of-factly: ‘Where’s your motor?’

David nodded towards it.

Then Nobby Clark – an old safe-cracker and founder member of the Firm – said to Reg: ‘What motor are you going in?’

Reggie replied, ‘I’ll go with these.’ He indicated us.

We got back in the car. Reggie jumped in the front. He said to David, ‘Come on, kid, we’ve got to get off the manor.’ Reggie was excited, but spoke as if he was just arranging any other piece of business. David stepped on the accelerator hard and we screeched away.

At first no one spoke, but eventually Alfie asked Reg, ‘So, what’s the matter?’

Reggie said, calm as anything: ‘Ronnie has just shot Cornell.’

‘Who the fuck’s Cornell?’ It was David who asked. He didn’t know and I certainly didn’t.

Alfie had a bit more of a clue. George Cornell was some face who’d done rough stuff for the Richardsons, the scrap-dealing brothers who ran crime in south-east London with a sadistic ruthlessness that outdid even the Krays. His real name was George Myers. The word was he’d once beaten the shit out of Ronnie in a fist fight, the only one who ever had. The
Christmas before there’d nearly been a shoot-out at the Astor Club when Cornell was supposed to have referred to Ronnie as a ‘fat pouf’. For him to come drinking in Whitechapel had been taking the piss.

Reggie was sitting in the front passenger seat complaining about why Ronnie had to do Cornell. Reggie was always moaning about what Ronnie had or hadn’t done. The way he went on, it was like it was some domestic tiff.

So where are we all supposed to go? I was thinking. Nobody’s saying.

David’s driving very carefully, looking out for the Old Bill. Reggie says, ‘Where are we going to go to now?’ We all remain silent. Then Reggie tells David, ‘Go up Lea Bridge Road way.’

The Krays had no hide-outs, whatever anyone might have suggested later. It was all far less planned than that. We were heading out of the East End, up Cambridge Heath Road, back past Cedra Court and David’s flat in Moresby Road, past the dark Hackney Marshes and on into the suburbs. Nothing much else was moving; the streets were as quiet as a graveyard.

David thought he knew where we were going. He’d driven the twins this way before. It was a place called the Chequers in Walthamstow High Street, a favourite of the twins, run by an ex-policeman called Charlie Hobbs. There was a poker club called the Stow, round the back.

Reggie was still mumbling away, complaining that Ronnie ‘should have organised this better’. The twins never organised anything. Everything happened because there was no fear of the consequences. Both of them acted on their impulses.

We got to Walthamstow and went into the pub. The governor glanced up at us and quickly opened a flap in the bar counter, and we all marched into another bar room that wasn’t normally used. Ronnie was already there too and he came towards us when he saw us enter. It was very chaotic in there. The calmest one was Ronnie. At least it seemed to be.

He asked us as we came in: ‘Do you want a drink?’ I suppose at that moment, we could have used one.

While we had driven Reggie, Ronnie had been driven to the Chequers by Scotch Jack Dickson, so I found out a little later. We all gathered in the back room. You could feel the tension and excitement fizzing in the air. Everyone was talking at once and no one was making much sense. The radio was kept on in the background so we could listen to the news bulletins.

Ronnie went into a lavatory and changed his clothes and started to wash his hands in a sink. When I first saw him that evening he had been wearing a dark suit, shirt and tie. Now he looked more like a clown with a pullover too small for him and trousers too short. He had put on some of Alfie’s clothes and looked absurd. If Ronnie had been a woman, he’d have been a size sixteen, while Alfie would have been a ten. So now he looked like Max Wall in his trousers.

We all gathered in an upstairs room when we heard on the radio there were road-blocks all over the East End and that someone was being rushed to hospital after a shooting in the Blind Beggar Pub on Whitechapel Road, just down the street from where we’d picked them up at the Widow’s. There was laughing and whooping when they all heard that. The Firm were revelling in it, with Ronnie as the ringmaster.

Ronnie said: ‘I hope the bastard’s dead.’

At midnight the radio news came on again, telling us again that a man had been shot. This time it said he had died in the ambulance. Everyone started talking excitedly and I heard Ronnie say: ‘Always shoot to kill. Dead men can’t speak.’

So what the fuck had actually happened? Eventually it came out in a lot of fractured conversations around me. I could put together most of it – and the details were going to be common knowledge soon enough.

The events started when Ronnie gets a message that George Cornell was in the Beggar. He thinks that’s a bit of a liberty. He gets Scotch Jack (John) Dickson to drive him there in his Cortina from the Widow’s, along with Scotch Ian Barrie.

Ronnie enters the bar of the Beggar brandishing a 9mm automatic pistol. Cornell is sitting on a bar stool sipping a light ale. Scotch Ian fires two shots into the air and everyone dives for cover. And Ronnie calmly puts a single bullet into George Cornell’s forehead. He didn’t die straight away.

The talk in the Walthamstow pub turned to where we were going to go now. People started moving to a flat up the road above a parade of shops owned by a regular at the Chequers, a brewery driver called Roland Tarlton, who had set up an improvised bar in his front room with space for thirty or more revellers to carry on drinking. However, soon after a group of us arrived, his wife came in from her night shift and started screaming for us all to get out. You couldn’t argue with her and there was a baby in the next room.

So then Reggie turned to David and said, ‘Right, Dave, we’re going to stay round your house tonight. We can’t go near the East End. You’re a straight boy. The Old Bill don’t know your place.’

Alarmed, David said quickly, ‘You can’t. We’ve only got two rooms. My kids are there. And Christine has got another baby on the way.’

But David couldn’t stop them. The Krays insisted on bringing everyone back to his family flat in Moresby Road. We didn’t know it then but we’d all be trapped there for weeks.

I got there with Alfie, David and Reggie at about one in the morning. All of a sudden there’s a knock at the window. I look up and there’s Ronnie. I didn’t know what David had told Christine about what was happening. But I knew she would not be pleased. He must have given her some old chat. Then Ronnie demanded: ‘Can’t she get up and make us some food? I’m starving!’ So David had to ask Christine to make some cheese sandwiches.

Alfie was sent out to get more booze even though by now it was the middle of the night. He’d done that a lot over the last few years, coming back from Madge’s way after hours with crates of the stuff – gin, whisky, beers, tonic, cigarettes. Madge had told him one time: ‘Where’s the money? What does Ronnie think I am, a fucking charity?’

Christine started trying to get some sheets and blankets together, but it was ridiculous. There were so many of us there was no room to move. There were about ten, twelve people sleeping on the floor.

That first night Ronnie and Reggie started arguing so badly that Alfie and David had to dive in between them. Eventually
Reggie said, ‘Fuck you, I’m going,’ and went out with Nobby Clark. It wasn’t very long before he came back.

Meanwhile Ronnie announced: ‘I want to have a bath.’ David told him Christine was in bed and he’d have to walk through the bedroom to get to the bathroom. It was not what you might call ideal. David also explained to Ron that they had an old-fashioned heater that would take a while to warm up. Ronnie put half a crown in the slot and waited. To us it was all completely mad, but I realised then that for Ronnie this was just an ordinary night.

People were coming and going after that. Ronnie came back in after his bath and after Reggie had returned with Nobby he and Ron started arguing again. It was like we were dreaming.

The next morning David was woken by Ronnie putting his head round the door and asking, ‘Can Christine make me some tea?’ It was about 8 a.m. but he’d been up with the sparrows. He then informed David: ‘We’re going to have to stay here for a bit.’

David looked scared and told him, ‘The Old Bill will come round. They’re bound to. I’ve got my wife and children here. I don’t want it, Ron, I don’t want it.’

Ronnie said, ‘Listen, Dave. Dead men can’t speak, can they?’ We all heard that.

So we all got up and had some tea. We needed more supplies – cups, plates, food, everything. Christine and David were allowed out to the shops in Upper Clapton Road but not without one of the children staying behind as a hostage. ‘They won’t come in while the kids are here,’ Ronnie said. He meant the police. He said that twenty times at least.

He was clever like that. Christine was terrified. Then our eleven-year-old younger brother Paul came round the next morning from our mum’s house nearby to see Christine and the kids without knowing what he was walking into. He wasn’t going to be allowed to leave.

Ronnie had taken a pencil and piece of paper from one of David’s kids’ little notebooks. He’d made some sort of list and was constantly scribbling on it. I managed to see it and realised it was full of the names of people he wanted to get shot of.

There was a rival firm in Clerkenwell. Someone from that was going to go. Leslie Payne, the money-man, was also on the list. They had fallen out big-time by now. There were people from south London. Ronnie would leave the list around for a day, then the next morning he would tear it up and start again. He couldn’t put any of our names on it as we were all in the house with him.

Ronnie seemed quite relaxed on the surface. He seemed to trust us all. But if one of us wasn’t around for a day or two, he would want to know the reason why. We all knew exactly where we stood.

Insane as he was, Ronnie was completely in charge.

CHAPTER 10

THE TURNING POINT

THE DAYS PASSED
. I was now very aware of Ronnie’s ‘dreaded list’. I realised that the list contained the names of people that he wanted to kill; that he was going to kill. As soon as I saw it, I knew something had to be done. The Krays were out of control. They had the East End buttoned up too tight and someone had to undo it. And, slowly, I realised that someone had to be me… It took just one moment for the scales to fall from my eyes. All the Colonel’s ‘glamour’, if he ever had any, was as nothing now. I had spent the last six months fawning on them both, being so flattered that the twins seemed to think well of me. Now I’d heard Ronnie boasting about how good it felt to kill. And now he and Reggie were hiding behind children. I felt physically sick.

But what could I do right there and then? We were all effectively hostages, with David’s wife Christine and their two young kids. Also there was our eleven-year-old brother Paul. Now all of us were in the power of this paranoid schizo and an armed mob who would do whatever they were told to do.

Ronnie knew it. We were all like his human shields. He knew the police were never going to come in shooting because of all the kids being in the place.

But there was something else that happened in that flat, too – something that would make me act in a way that would change my life for ever.

It was the third or maybe the fourth day. Ronnie announced that he wanted Paul to sit on his lap. I told Christine under my breath that if Ronnie made a move to the bedroom for what he’d call a ‘lie-down’ with Paul I would shoot him dead there and then. I could only imagine what he had in mind for my little brother. The room was dark so I went to the kitchen and got my own gun, a 9mm, from where I’d left it on the top of the fridge. Christine saw me and, hearing the click of a bullet going into the chamber, she grabbed my arm and started pleading, ‘No, no, Bobby! Please not here, not in front of the kids!’

But I’d made up my mind. I loaded a full clip. If Ronnie made a move on Paul, that would be his last. I was intending to unload the gun on him. Christine grabbed my arm, still begging me, ‘Please, please don’t do it!’

I said something like, ‘OK, Chris, it’s OK.’ But it wasn’t OK, not in the slightest. I hid my gun under my coat and, taking a deep breath, I pushed by her and stood in the doorway of the living room. Ronnie started to walk towards me until we were face to face with each other. He had his arm on Paul’s shoulder. He told me he was just going to lie down for a few minutes. I didn’t move out of the way. He could see I was not going to put up with it so he said: ‘Bobby, you silly boy, I just need to lie down.’

But he did not push by me, as I thought he would. He just stood there and talked on, with his eyes half-closed. And then, after what seemed to be the longest time, he turned and went back to the couch and sat down, putting Paul on his lap again. He closed his eyes, and seemingly went to sleep. I went and sat next to him and now I had my gun out under my coat, pointed at his heart, with one bullet in the chamber and the safety off and my finger firmly on the trigger.