Bringing Down the Krays (25 page)

But Christine was so obviously distressed that I could see she was telling me the truth. She said she had felt ill and depressed ever since – but she hadn’t known how to tell me.

She said she didn’t want to go to the police because she was too ashamed. When she said that I knew exactly how she felt. I’d been through the same experience, of being raped by Ronnie, myself. Could I tell her that?

I could not. I already felt too humiliated. I felt she’d never think of me as a man ever again. In the end I never told her, although now I wish I had.

Things stayed very difficult between us. In the weeks and months following my release from prison and the lead-up to the trial, Christine was drinking more than she’d ever done before. I warned her several times but she didn’t seem able to stop. She was also visiting the doctor frequently, getting pills to wake her up in the morning and pills to help her sleep at night.

She was pregnant when the Firm all came to camp out at our flat. She gave birth to our youngest daughter while I was in prison. And then to be raped by Charlie. What happened was tough on everyone, but it was tougher on Christine than any of us.

Charlie Kray was not as violent as his brothers – but he was the jackal of the family. I wanted to go and front him up straight away but there was nothing I could do. Not then anyway. My brothers and I were about to go and face the whole lot of them at the Old Bailey.

CHAPTER 21

SECRETS AND LIES

AS FOR ME
, my own release date was getting near too. I’ve done my number at Bow Street and everyone knows I’m a grass. Am I safer in prison or outside? And I’ve got to go through the whole thing again at the full trial that’s coming down the track like a train. If I can stay alive that long.

My life was in Nipper Read’s hands. But could I still trust him? I guessed he was never telling me the full truth and was keeping things back from me. In one of our talks at Tintagel House, Nipper told me about the changeover at the Yard. When he’d gone to look for my files he found that ‘they had disappeared’. That’s what he said in his memoirs – and further that he was not aware of there being an informer in the Firm until the Old Bailey trial, which was in January 1969.

In fact he knew there was an informer from what I said at the committal six months before. Either that or he didn’t believe me. That was a matter of official record. I had said it out loud from the witness box in Bow Street when I was being cross-examined by Scotch Ian’s brief.

There were other puzzles too. Our mother’s court appearance on a wrongful charge of housebreaking had been mysteriously postponed. And whatever Read might say, I knew that evidence from March 1966 did exist – surveillance photographs of Moresby Road, of the comings and goings at the flat. I saw them. David and Bobby saw them. Walls covered in them at Tintagel House. That was Butler’s operation, when I was meeting Pogue. And I had actually got a photograph of Ian Barrie for Butler at the time. I was asked for it. I gave it to Pogue. I saw it blown up as a mug-shot at Tintagel.

Whenever I asked where Butler was, I was told he was sick, or he had retired. In fact I found out later he had managed to get his retirement postponed, aged fifty-five, and in 1968 he was in pursuit of the last Great Train Robbers still on the run. I was asked to make another statement. I did so willingly.

I think they wanted as little as possible to emerge about how Butler had cocked up the Cornell investigation. Especially how they’d left the Krays free to kill again. Not just once but lots of times. Tommy Butler was supposed to be the most renowned head of the Flying Squad in its history. I think they wanted nothing said about Butler and the Krays at all – and the Yard has kept the same line ever since.

I was allowed out for a weekend on pre-release home leave. Around that time I had a little chat with Henry Mooney, Read’s deputy. I’ve got a note of what he said from the file. It’s pretty terse but it shows the way my case was playing in Read’s mind as he was putting together his part of the big Old Bailey prosecution:

Robert Teale came to see me on 24 September [1968] on home leave from prison. It will be recalled he gave evidence at the Bow Street committal during cross examination that he was obliged to reveal he was in contact with police shortly after the death of Cornell. A further statement has been taken from him that he used the name ‘Phillips’. DS Pogue confirms the story. A copy of a photo of Barrie was taken and this can be produced.

So Read’s man knew it was me who’d got the photograph of Scotch Ian. They even had a ‘copy’ of it. So why, I ask again, did Read insist there was ‘nothing on file’?

A few days later it was the end of my sentence at Maidstone. I was all ready with my suit and my few belongings on my way to the prison gate when I was stopped by two men. The fear of ‘the gate re-arrest’, as any con will tell you, is terrible, but apparently these men just wanted to take me back to Tintagel for further questioning. My nerves were on edge in fear of yet another false arrest. I just couldn’t trust them any more after all that had happened. We had to change cars three times in case anyone was following us before arriving at Tintagel.

I’d already told them at length about the chaotic goings-on after George Cornell had been shot. That was down to Ronnie. Now they wanted to know more about the time between the end of the Moresby Road siege and our removal from the streets. They wanted to know about me and Reggie.

I didn’t know it but they’d charged Reggie the week before, with killing Jack the Hat, even though no body had been found.
Now it was all about Reggie – my time with him, what he was thinking, what he was capable of. So on 29 September I gave a statement to Henry Mooney in which I explained how Ronnie had been urging Reggie to kill someone after the Cornell murder. He would say: ‘Why don’t you do one, you don’t do fuck all, get something going.’ I also told him about the twins’ ‘dreaded list’, and about the time in Blonde Vicky’s flat off the Hackney Road when Reggie, Albert Donoghue and Big Pat Connolly were there, when Jack McVitie and Connie Whitehead had turned up with Bobby Cannon – and how Reggie was all set to kill him.

I also told Mooney all about the shooting at the Starlight Club and how Reggie had shot Jimmy Field at the Regency. It was all about Reggie – my best friend Reggie Kray who would have done for me in Epping Forest if he could have shot straight.

It was all good stuff but what I had to offer was not going to put the Krays away. I could also tell that what Read was dreading was another Yard cock-up. I repeated in this new statement what I’d said in open court at Bow Street about being the informer. And I added this bit, which I hadn’t said in court: ‘I kept in touch with the police after the Cornell murder. The officer I dealt with was Pogue. I used the name of Phillips. I was arrested on 9th August 1966.’

Read and Mooney believed me, I’m sure, but at this stage they really did seem not to know too much. And so I was baffled. How come they didn’t seem to know anything about Butler’s operation given that I knew they’d seen all those
surveillance photographs? Anyway they went off to track down Detective Sergeant Pogue and get some more out of him. I’ve got what he told them from the archive, dated 8 October 1968.

He told them that in spring 1966 he had been engaged under Detective Superintendent Axon of H Division (Whitechapel) in the inquiry into the killing of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar. He had ‘met and interviewed a large number of people,’ so he said, and ‘one of them was Robert Teale who had introduced himself as “Bobby Phillips”.’

According to Pogue’s statement I had ‘offered to supply information concerning Reginald and Ronald Kray with whom [I] was at that time living at a house in the Clapton E5 area [David and Christine’s flat],’ he said. Then he said this:

[Phillips] stated that he had heard Ronald and Reginald Kray talk about the shooting of George Cornell and Ronald Kray had boasted about the way he had shot him in the public house… another man known as ‘Scotch Ian’ was in the Blind Beggar that night when the shooting took place. He then promised that, although he was not able to give evidence of the actual shooting, he would glean as much information as he could regarding the identity of ‘Scotch Ian’ and the movements of the Kray twins.

At the time that must have been gold dust. Remember, this was when nobody was saying anything to the police – especially
about the identity of the second gunman in the Blind Beggar. And here it had all been on a plate for Scotland Yard in spring 1966! Pogue went on:

It was arranged that I would meet him [me, a.k.a. ‘Phillips’] daily at a particular place in the Clapton area. If he failed to turn up, the meeting stood for the same time the following day and so on. It was quite obvious from Phillips’s behaviour that he was terrified of the Kray twins and he admitted this, stating he had difficulty in getting away from them without being missed.

During the following weeks I met Phillips who passed on information that the Kray twins and Ian had stayed immediately after the shooting of Cornell at his brother David’s flat before moving to the house in the Clapton area. He also stated that they paid visits to a woman publican’s premises with whom they were friendly, she having a pub in the Bethnal Green area. The pub was known as the ‘Widow’s Pub’ [Madge’s].

Further information given by Phillips was that the Kray twins had visited a man named Geoffrey Allen who lived in the Saffron Walden area in Essex and had stayed with him for some days and during this time had visited the Saffron Walden Hotel and a number of hotels in the Cambridge area. This information was verified by myself after a visit to Saffron Walden and Cambridge.

During this time Phillips was endeavouring to establish the identity of ‘Scotch Ian’ and after some weeks he managed to get to me a photograph of ‘Scotch Ian’ but still no identity was made. However, later this man was identified as John Barrie.

Although Phillips was unwilling at that time to give evidence [to be used in court] he stated he would [do so] if police were able to secure the arrest of the Kray twins and ‘Scotch Ian’.

Some weeks after meeting Phillips regularly, he failed to show up at the meeting place and I never saw him again or heard from him.

This statement confirmed that everything I’d said was true. I had met Butler’s man
while
the Firm had been holed up in Clapton E5. The great detective had presumably set up a surveillance operation as a result. Then I’d risked everything to get a picture that would identify Scotch Ian.

Pogue had even tailed us to East Anglia on our ‘holiday’ with the arsonist Geoffrey Allen – when, terrified for my life, I’d made my bid to get a message back to the Yard saying they had a grass on their side who was feeding the name ‘Phillips’ back to the Firm.

And Pogue was absolutely right when he said that, although I was unwilling at that time to give evidence for use in court, I would do so if I knew the twins and Scotch Ian had been arrested. He could have added: ‘and stayed arrested’.

This was the same thing that Read had been gambling on all that summer when he’d made his move to arrest the twins first – and then used me to persuade the faint-hearts to come
forward once they’d been nicked to give statements that could bring them to trial. And they
had
come forward, once I’d been detonated like a bomb in the committal proceedings.

Read had been adding to his collection. After Albert Donoghue, Nipper had got Scotch Jack Dickson to come over. He made a statement on 24 September in Brixton saying how he had driven Ronnie and Scotch Ian to the Blind Beggar on the night Cornell was shot. On the return journey to the Widow’s pub in Tapp Street, Ronnie had said: ‘I hope the bastard is dead.’ That’s what I told Pogue Ronnie had said in the Chequers pub in Walthamstow at one of our meets two and a half years before.

Ronnie Hart came over to Read’s side on 2 September – and pretty soon he was telling what he knew about the butchering of Jack the Hat in Blonde Carole’s flat, which was a lot. And that’s what they charged Reggie with on 19 September, after which they’d come back to me looking for more stuff on Reggie. And I’d given it to them, lots of it.

Although of course I knew the Krays could still walk. Just like they’d done before when they walked out of the nick when Butler had screwed up the identity parade in August 1966. After that Butler had just given up and I’d been hung out to dry. Maybe Read was made of tougher stuff.

He was going to have to be. What would a clever brief make of what I’d said? They might say that the police had planted me deliberately. That I was put into the Firm to urge Reggie to kill. Whatever I said, it was going to be acutely embarrassing for the Yard – especially for the reputation of the great Tommy Butler.

Well, history knows quite a lot about the rest. By the end of October, the committal proceedings had been concluded for murder in the cases of George Cornell and, missing bodies or not, Jack McVitie and Frank Mitchell. The trial date was set to begin on 8 January 1969 at the Old Bailey.

But there was another trial to get out of the way first – the trial of our mother, Ellen Teale.

On 28 November 1968 Mum appeared at the Old Bailey. It was over very quickly. She’d had been told to plead guilty by Nipper Read because she ‘let the thieves in’ and had no proof that she was not involved in it. As far as we, her sons, were concerned, she was made to plead guilty but we had been reassured she would not go to prison, as long as we told all we knew about the Krays in the full-scale trial that was now just a few weeks away.