Bringing Down the Krays (7 page)

The Krays would get whatever information they wanted from the police – who was doing well, who might be in need of a little visit, who was going to get nicked and who might be talking to the coppers about the twins’ business. It was a way of spreading fear: ‘You talk to the police about us and we’ll be hearing about it pretty quick.’ So much of their operation depended on information – and informers – which is why they were so paranoid about anyone informing on them. Having coppers on the payroll was the best insurance policy. Sometimes David would go on special meets way outside London to make the pay-offs. One day he would find himself heading for the airport with a suitcase of cash.

David told me in detail afterwards what had happened. It was spring 1963. David was asleep at about eight or nine o’clock with a girl called Lucy on the couch at the 66 Club when there was a bang on the door. Big Pat Connolly and Charlie Kray walked in and told David he had to take some money to Ronnie in Jersey. He thought they were joking but he soon realised they were deadly serious.

They told him to go to Vallance Road. He went there and waited for about five hours before Charlie eventually came in and said: ‘I’ve got a packet here with some money in it. And an air ticket. Keep this on you, whatever you do. Get a case and put some clean shirts in it for Ronnie’ – Ronnie liked shirts – ‘and get a cab to Heathrow. When you get to Jersey, someone will be there.’

David couldn’t help feeling quite excited. He didn’t know exactly how much money there was in the packet but he knew it must be a lot to warrant a personal courier to take it to Ron. He caught the plane to Jersey and waited for an hour but no one turned up to meet him. He knew Ronnie wouldn’t want to be kept waiting so he started to panic. The last thing he wanted was for him to think he had absconded with the money.

Luckily he remembered Charlie saying to someone at Vallance Road that the hotel was near a castle. David jumped in a cab, keeping close hold of the packet, and asked if there was a hotel nearby that was also near a castle.

The cab driver said there was and took him there. Running up the steps into the reception David asked, ‘Have you got a Mr Kray staying here?’ The girl said, ‘Try the bar.’

David walked in and saw Ronnie and Dickie Morgan sitting on a sofa with another man and a girl. He didn’t recognise either of them. Ronnie glanced over at David and said in an offhand way to the others: ‘Get David a drink, will you?’ David felt pretty furious – he’d come all this way and Ronnie was treating him as if he’d just come from down the road. But of course he didn’t say anything.

Ronnie then asked David, ‘Have you got that packet for me?’ My brother handed it over mutely. Ron left the bar for a moment and the girl turned to David and breathed a sigh of relief, saying ‘Thank God for you, Dave!’ She gave the impression it had been an anxious wait for the money. Ronnie returned, took out a wad of notes and gave them each some cash. Afterwards when they all started drinking and talking, the
man said – cool as you like – that he worked at Scotland Yard. This was some sort of high-class pay-off and David had been the courier for the money.

So then David, Ronnie, Dickie Morgan, the policeman and the girl – a grafter who’d clearly been brought over to entertain the policeman – all proceeded to have a lot to drink in the bar, then they moved back to Ron’s room and carried on drinking there. By the end of the night, the police officer was very drunk, the girl was happy and Ronnie seemed to be OK. The girl kept saying, ‘Good for you, Dave,’ to my brother, because he had brought the money.

Dickie and David, however, were just tired. Returning along the corridor from the bar with more drinks, Dickie, who’d had enough of the evening, slipped away to his room. David asked Ron where he was supposed to sleep. Ron kept saying: ‘We’ll sort it out later.’ David didn’t feel particularly comfortable with the situation but what could he do?

So they all kept talking and drinking in Ron’s room for a while longer. Suddenly the copper passed out on the chair, fast asleep. Ronnie gave the copper a nudge with his foot so he slipped to the floor and Ronnie could take his seat. David again asked Ronnie where he should stay the night and this time he pointed to the girl who was lying on the bed and said: ‘Just get in there and give her one.’ David didn’t know what to do. The girl was willing and he wanted to, but he naturally didn’t like the idea of Ron being in the room while they did it.

But the girl kept asking him, so eventually David got into bed and had sex with her. It was only when it was all over and
he looked round that he saw that Ronnie had been watching the whole thing from the chair, masturbating. David felt quite sick with disgust at what he’d got involved in.

At that stage it seemed Ronnie was bisexual, or perhaps he didn’t even know what he was. Later on he had affairs with all sorts. But at this stage it wasn’t widely known that he was gay. Certainly David didn’t know at first. To him the image of a gangster and a ‘pouf’ just didn’t go together, so it just hadn’t really occurred to him. Later, Ronnie was to take David into his confidence and tell him a bit more about his sexuality. He said he had liked women when he was younger, but that one particular experience had put him off for life. He said he’d taken a young woman back to Vallance Road with him one night. After having sex he’d fallen asleep, only to wake the next morning to find himself, the woman and the bed all covered in her menstrual blood.

Jumping up in horror, he ran out of the room like a madman, going over to the bath-house six times that day to wash himself. He said he could not forget the disgust of that moment and how dirty it made him feel. He claimed this completely changed him, and that after that day he absolutely hated women. He said he could not even speak to his own mother for days.

When this incident occurred Reggie was having one of his spells in prison. Ronnie told David that while Reggie was away, he had been mucking around with Teddy Smith one day. Teddy climbed on top of him and Ronnie said something changed in him and he felt different. From that point he knew he was gay. That was what he told David, anyway.

Reggie was also difficult to read sexually. There was one night when David pulled a bird (a grafter again) and suggested the three of them went back to Vallance Road. The girl was up for having both of them and David thought Reggie wanted it too. So the girl and my brother went into Reggie’s bedroom at the back of the house and got into bed. But after David had had sex with the girl, Reggie said he’d changed his mind, and let it go. Neither of my brothers ever saw Reggie sexually with a girl, ever, before he met Frances Shea – the teenager from Hackney he went on to marry.

Anyway, after the first night in Jersey the little group stayed at the hotel drinking for three days – though my brother insisted on getting his own hotel room on the second night. On the plane coming back there was another man and a woman, a supposed honeymoon couple, but they were clearly police. Everywhere Ronnie went, they were there watching. Ronnie insisted they all sit separately on the plane.

Three months later, David was sent out to Jersey again but this time there were two male officers from the Yard there. The Krays wouldn’t trust anyone. Once Ronnie met someone in a rowing boat in Victoria Park in Hackney to make sure he wasn’t wired up. All that paranoia about informers was because they depended on spies and informers themselves in other firms and in the police.

By now there were other things going on in my brother’s life than doing errands for the Krays. That summer, 1963, David had come to see me again on the Isle of Wight to help out with the boat business – and to tell me more about the endless Kray
parties in London. Along the way he fell in love. He saw a young girl walking along the boardwalk in Shanklin and that was it. She was called Christine. Meanwhile Alfie had also met his future wife, Wendy. Our mother predicted it wouldn’t last for either of them, so David said to Alfie: ‘We’ll prove them all wrong and have a double wedding,’ and they did. They both married on 26 September 1963, in Russell Square Registry Office. One after the other: David to Christine and Alfie to Wendy.

After the ceremony my brothers put their new wives in a taxi to go shopping in Oxford Street and they went round the pub. That night we all went to Talk of the Town in Leicester Square for a big party. And for once it was without Ron and Reg who were now ever-present in my brothers’ lives
.

CHAPTER 6

THE CEDRA COURT SCENE

THE KRAYS’ CRAZY
world was the only one that mattered. I desperately wanted to be in on it myself but I was not there yet. It was like nothing could go wrong for the Krays at this time. The Barn in Knightsbridge shut down when too many cheques bounced but the twins had the other spielers and the long firms bringing in the cash. Their ambitions were bigger than ever. Ronnie was out of his own mum’s way now, living in the same block as flats as our mum and dad, Cedra Court in Upper Clapton. It could get pretty wild there at times. The parties would attract all sorts, celebrities and villains, with people coming and going into the small hours.

Ronnie loved blue films. David told me about a party one night at Ron’s flat. Everyone was watching them and getting very drunk. The film kept breaking and everyone started booing. It was funny really.

There were a lot of girls around too. Reggie used to say to Alfie: ‘Go and get some women.’ Alfie was a real ladies’ man; he was the one bringing the birds back. But Ronnie would be
saying: ‘No, go and get some boys.’ So half the time poor Alfie didn’t know where he was.

One of the girls was very pretty, but looked very much like a boy, slim-hipped and short-haired. Ronnie took to her immediately, whispering in her ear, and leading her to the bedroom. Suddenly Alfie and David heard the girl crying out, not in ecstasy, but in distress. David walked over to the door and called out to her, asking her if everything was all right. Ron was furious, telling him to ‘Fuck off out of it.’ But David guessed what was happening – that he was forcing her to have anal sex.

Ten minutes later the girl came out of the room, screaming that she wanted to go home, that Ronnie was ‘mental’ and she didn’t want anything to do with him ever again.

Ronnie did what he liked. There were so many incidents that should have alerted my brothers. Not only was he going more and more insane, but he was also getting increasingly sexually voracious, if that were possible. They were always being sent out to find him boys.

Ron was after David too, right from the beginning. He was always touching him but David wasn’t frightened of him then and would just tell him to leave him alone. He kept him at bay by getting him rent boys instead.

It all nearly came out in public. The Cedra Court scene with all those celebrities and politicians trooping through Ronnie’s flat was far too wild to keep hidden. On 12 July 1964 the famous newspaper headline appeared in the
Sunday Mirror
: ‘Peer and a Gangster: Yard Inquiry’. The story went that a
senior Scotland Yard detective was investigating connections between an ‘underworld thug and a well-known member of the House of Lords’. A week later there was another front-page headline when the
Mirror
ran a story entitled ‘The Picture We Dare Not Print’. It was a stunt really – a story about a photograph of the peer and the gangster sitting on a bed with a ‘beatnik youth’. Well, it’s true, they dared not print it.

The photo was of Ronnie and Lord Boothby. Lord Boothby was the Conservative peer who appeared frequently on the telly and in the newspapers. That’s what the foreign magazines said at the time, even though you couldn’t say that here in Britain. The boy on the bed was Leslie Holt from Cedra Court, rent-boy and cat-burglar. But it didn’t come out until years later that the Prime Minster and Home Secretary had been involved in the cover-up, and that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had terminated the investigation. The government were really frightened, worried that Ronnie was trying to get his picture taken with Sir Winston Churchill. So Boothby got a heavy solicitor and the
Mirror
ended up paying him £40,000, an enormous sum of money in those days. It didn’t even go to court. But it was all true, what the paper had said. Boothby told people that he’d used the libel money to buy a house in France. In fact he gave much of it to Ronnie.

There was also a Labour MP on the scene at the time, named Tom Driberg. He was another homosexual. He loved the set-up at Ronnie’s and was always round Cedra Court. It was Mad Teddy who introduced the Krays to Driberg because Teddy was sleeping with him. Teddy was like a scout for the Krays, searching
for people who might be useful. The Krays then met Boothby through Driberg.

The two of them were very different personalities. As Alfie described them, Boothby was big and blustering, whereas Driberg was small and sickly-looking, like you wouldn’t want to get too close to him. Both got a real kick out of being friends with the Colonel. And of course having these powerful connections on both sides of the political spectrum was tremendously advantageous for the Krays. They were controlling the police and now they could control the Establishment too.

David told me about one night when he and Alfie went to a party down in Brighton. It was a big house, full of MPs, including Boothby and Driberg, as well as Ronnie and Reggie. Everyone was terribly drunk. Mad Teddy Smith was there too, with Driberg, who had a gold cigarette holder and was walking around like the Queen with his drink balanced in one hand.

My brothers discovered that Driberg used to tell Mad Teddy about the houses of rich friends he could burgle. He and Boothby would send Teddy or Leslie Holt out on housebreaking missions to turn over anyone who had crossed them.

It was around this time that the Krays got involved in a mad scheme to fund the building of a new town in Enugu, Nigeria. Ronnie had been introduced to the project through his new political connections and Leslie Payne encouraged him to take it on. David was driving Ronnie round for meets and he heard about it all first-hand. Payne had set up an investment vehicle for this building development in the newly independent African nation. Ronnie got flown out to Nigeria, where he was treated
like royalty and given VIP treatment. He thought the deal would be his ticket to greatness. It all went wrong. The project collapsed, Payne was arrested in Nigeria and had to be sprung out of prison with a big pay-off. Boothby would later claim he’d only got involved with Ronnie because he’d been approached to be an investor in the Nigerian project. It was lies, rubbish. He got involved because they were sharing boyfriends.