Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (25 page)

My answer to it all was to bribe him. I’d give him a tenner to go round and get me tobacco. If he wanted to go out with his mates, I’d give him a fifty. It meant nothing to me: I still hadn’t come to terms with the value of money, especially when total strangers kept coming along and giving it to me. But David resented it. I made an
enemy of him by doing that. If I said anything to him, he’d go and tell Pat and it would cause a row. That caused more resentment. If I turned his music down, he didn’t like it. ‘Why do I have to do what he tells me?’ Also, my daughter comes into the frame here a lot. She was holding a grudge against me over an argument which happened during one of my weekends on leave from the hostel.

It began on a Saturday when I refused to take Pat to Karen’s shoe shop in Bethnal Green. The shop, Robert Shoes, was owned by Karen’s common-law husband, a Turk called Ken. He was a nice fella, a bit older than Karen, and he gave her security and everything she wanted. But my dad was a Greek, and Turks and Greeks do not get on. In the back of my mind, my family background loomed up very close here. I wouldn’t have interfered in Karen’s life, but I didn’t particularly like the situation and I was watching it very closely.

Throughout my prison life I always had something to take my grievances out on, and I suppose I looked for it here. Pat wanted to go to the shop, and I said no. The next Friday, when I arrived home for the weekend, Karen was waiting there with Pat. Karen said, ‘Don’t you think you can get away with what you did last Saturday. Any trouble out of you, and out you go.’

No one spoke to me like that, especially not in my own home where the father was the head of the household. I went mad. I grabbed hold of her and I said, ‘If you ever speak to me like that again, I’ll wallop you from one end of the room to the other.’

She started to scratch me, so rightly or wrongly I gave her a smack. She shouldn’t have spoken to me like she did.

Karen was never the same towards me after that. So now, here I was in a house where I felt like a stranger. David was
half-challenging
me, and Karen was giving me a bit of a bad time, trying to run my life like a prison Governor. She was causing me a lot of grief.

I didn’t know how to handle it. I had no idea. So I started laying down the law. I said, ‘Now look, this is my home. I pay the bills, you do as you’re told.’ Little did I realise what was going on. They were ganging up on me, the three of them.

Then Pat did something very stupid. She went to see John Goode, the probation officer, and she told him I’d been getting a bit aggressive. She said known criminals were coming to the house. No, they weren’t. She said there were mystery phone calls in the middle of the night. That was a total fabrication.

I was certainly up during the night. After breaking away from my prison sleeping habits, I’d become hyperactive. I wanted to do a thousand things an hour, and I couldn’t sleep.

I went to see John Goode and he was like a different person. He said, ‘You’ve got to get out of your house. Pat and Karen and David have been over here, and things aren’t working out with you. If you don’t find another place in fourteen days, you’ll have to go back to the hostel.’

I could not believe it. I went straight round to Pat’s aunt’s, where I knew she would be, and I went absolutely potty. They must have called about sixty police round there, but they didn’t want to get involved, even though they knew who I was and they knew I was on a licence. They looked upon it as a domestic dispute.

The terms of my licence were such that, if I wanted to watch BBC and Pat wanted to watch
Coronation Street,
all she had to do was pick up the phone and say I was playing up in the hope that she would get me recalled. Which is exactly what she’d done. I’d just come back from sixteen years, and I’d wound up with a family and a parole officer who had it in for me.

My freedom was on the line here, so I made Pat’s life a misery. I made things as difficult as possible because I didn’t want to give the flat up. I wanted
her
to leave it. It was my place anyway. I got to her guv’nor at work. He was told to sack her - I suppose you could say a bit of intimidation was involved. I made sure nobody would talk
to her. She went to Charlie Kray in desperation, but he couldn’t get involved. It was nothing to do with him.

So she left. She went to stay at her aunt’s with David. I thought that because it was my home and in my name, nobody had any legal right to kick me out of it. But Pat got in touch with John Goode again and said she needed the flat back. He told me I was leaving, and there was nothing more I could do.

I was sent to an after-release hostel in Camberwell. I wasn’t subject to any rules, but I was under observation and I had to sign in and out. They were keeping me under what they thought was a little bit of control.

I had to go back to the flat, occasionally, to get clothes – which David would pass out to me. By now, he had become a sort of middle man, the one member of the family I could communicate with without too much hostility. Next thing, I had every conceivable type of injunction slapped on me. I wasn’t to go near the house, and I wasn’t allowed to approach my children.

Injunctions were all very well, but there were things in the flat that I needed. One day in April 1984 I went round to get some stuff and had an argument with Pat. Again, it ended up with the law being called in. I arrived back at the hostel to be surrounded by police. There were so many of them milling around that they obviously thought I’d committed a crime. I was taken to Carter Street police station and held in a cell. Pat had gone back to John Goode and told him there’d been an incident. He’d gone right ahead, phoned the Home Office and got me recalled.

Ten minutes after I was put in the cell, the door opened and an inspector was standing there with a couple of CID men. He said; ‘Do you know why you’re here?’

I said, ‘Tell me what it’s all about.’

He replied, ‘I really don’t know, but I think you should have a word with your wife.

Pat was under the impression that I’d be held for a few days until I’d calmed down, and I would then be released. But it doesn’t work like that.

Twenty minutes later, the inspector came back and said, ‘You’re going to have to go back to prison. We’ve been given an order that you’re to be returned to Wormwood Scrubs immediately.’

Within an hour I was back in D-wing in the Scrubs doing a life sentence. I couldn’t believe what had happened. Nobody knew where I was. My brothers were looking for me. No one was told anything.

The next day I was called in front of the Assistant Governor of
D-wing.
He said, ‘There was a complaint from your wife that you were getting aggressive.’

‘What’s the position now?’ I asked.

He said, ‘Within twenty-eight days of a lifer being recalled, there has to be an inquiry. The probation officer has to come and see me and submit a report.’

My Leon came to see me and got in touch with David Atkinson at the Home Office lifers’ division. Chris was going up the wall to hear that I’d been recalled for absolutely nothing. The chaplain at the Scrubs wasn’t having it. He said, ‘I’m not satisfied with this.’ And the number one Governor, McLeod – Honey had left – came to see me. I told him what had happened and he believed me. The Local Review Committee man arrived on the scene. He said, ‘I’m recommending you be released as soon as possible.’

One day shortly afterwards, I was told by an Assistant Governor that John Goode and another probation officer would be coming to see me. Obviously, I was angry. It was Goode who had got me put away. When he turned up at the Scrubs to see me, I wanted to go wild, but I took one look at him and I just felt sick.

He said, ‘Look, I don’t know what to say, but in my view….’

I exploded: ‘Your view nearly wrecked my life.’

There was nothing he could say.

By the time the whole muddle had been sorted out I’d been in there for four months, one of the shortest terms ever served by a lifer on recall. I returned to the hostel in Camberwell and was assigned to a new probation officer called Keith Norton. There was nothing my wife could ever say to me again. But I wouldn’t be satisfied until I’d got my revenge, and I was prepared to go back to prison for it.

It was New Year’s Eve 1984. I’d been drinking in company in an East End pub called Batleys. At five to twelve I ordered a taxi and slipped out the door. I asked the driver to take me to the Bancroft Arms, where I knew Pat and her family would be drinking.

I arrived at exactly one minute to midnight. The pub was packed. Just as they were getting ready to chase in the New Year, who came bursting in the door but me. Everybody jumped back, and I just dived in the midst of them. The guv’nor nearly had a heart attack. All I wanted to do was upset the lot of it. And I did. People were flying in the air, tables were going over, there was drink everywhere. The police were called, and I was carted off to the station and banged up in a cell. I thought, ‘That’s it, I’m getting a recall’, but it didn’t matter to me because I was satisfied by what I’d done.

About an hour later, the door opened and a sergeant came in. He said, ‘You know if we put you in court, you’re in breach of your licence … so I want you to sign this piece of paper saying you won’t drink, in the area of the pub inside the next twenty-eight days.’ He said if I signed it, he would release me straightaway.

I could not believe my luck. I walked out of there feeling as if somebody had given me a million pounds.

I went back to the hostel, and I was expecting for quite some time to hear a bit about it from Pat’s relatives. I never did. The only thing I did hear was the news of my divorce coming through. I haven’t seen Pat since, and I haven’t spoken to her or Karen. They
haven’t tried to contact me; they know better. They were totally disowned by my family.

David occasionally comes to see me in my regular pub, the Florist in Bethnal Green. I didn’t go to him in the first place; he came to me. And I still don’t know if I truly forgive him for his part in it all, and for the heartbreak he caused me. He may only have been fifteen, but he did go to my parole officer and put his two penn’orth in. On the other hand, he sometimes asks me, ‘Where were you when I needed you?’, and he’s right. But, whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, I always do my best to make him welcome when we meet.

On 14 April 1985 I moved from the hostel to the flat at Borough in south-east London, where I still live. I had managed to get to the top of the council list through a contact at the town hall, and the flat they offered me was ideal. It was in a terrible state, though, and I had to do it all up myself. I had no money left by now, and I couldn’t earn a living. But I had to start picking up the pieces of my life.

Before I could do that, however, there was one more hurdle to jump: an illness which nearly killed me. I was unwell anyway, after all the months of stress and worry, and I’d gone down to ten and a half stone.

I walked into my flat late one night and I felt ill. I wanted to be with someone, so I went round to see my friend June, who lived nearby. I had begun to make friends in the neighbourhood, and June and her husband Charlie were among the few I trusted. At the time of my illness, Charlie was away.

I was sitting having a cup of tea with June when I started getting a lot of pain in my back, as if someone was shoving a poker up my spine. I left June’s and stopped for a Chinese takeaway on my walk home. I was sitting in the kitchen eating it when all of a sudden I felt sick. I went into the toilet and threw it up. I kept on
vomiting, bringing up a brown liquid, without realising that I was bleeding inside. I had two ulcers I never knew about – one duodenal and one peptic.

I went back to June’s and she said, ‘Get yourself to hospital now.’ I walked round to Guys Hospital, to the casualty department. I remember seeing a fox on the roadside. They put me in a cubicle, took my temperature and gave me a blood test. Al! of a sudden, there were five doctors around me.

They said, ‘We’re going to have to keep you in for tests. We think you’re very ill.’

I insisted, ‘I can’t do that. I can’t leave home without informing my probation officer.’

One doctor replied, ‘You’re not leaving this hospital.’

I said, ‘I assure you I am.’

He made me sign a form and gave me a bottle of medicine, but within an hour I was back. They immediately put me on a drip in the surgical ward. They did some tests, put a camera down me and found the ulcers. They didn’t know whether to operate or keep them under observation.

I got up to go to the toilet, taking the drip off, and as I walked down the ward everything went light. All I remember is trying to get off the floor while blood was coming from out of my ears, my nose, everywhere. The ulcers had burst. I was dying and I never knew it. I ended up lying in a bed with three machines keeping me alive. A doctor sat with me all night.

Eventually I recovered, and was sternly warned by the doctor: ‘From now on no curries, no spicy foods, no fried food and not too much alcohol.’ I had to change my entire diet, but that was only a small part of a greater thing: I was about to start changing my whole life.

O
ne day in 1988 I happened to be walking along a road in Milton Keynes with a friend of mine when we heard a terrible yelping sound. I looked over a fence and I saw this guy bashing an undernourished white boxer dog.

I shouted, ‘How would you like me to do that to you?’

He said, ‘If you feel that strongly, you can have him.’ Without thinking about what I was doing, I took the dog. I called him Prince.

I got him home, and I didn’t know what to do. He was a sick animal. I took him to the vet with the intention of getting him better and finding him a good home. I fed him up and spent over £600 in vet’s fees putting him right.

When it came to getting rid of him I just couldn’t do it, but at the same time I still didn’t really want him. I gave him a hard time – I hit him for messing up the house and he never once complained.

At the time, I was fed up with everything. The ulcers and the stress I’d suffered after my release from prison were still taking their toll on me. I was gaunt, I wasn’t eating properly and I had no energy or enthusiasm. The only interesting thing to have happened in my life over the previous couple of years had been the television
documentary I presented on ITV in August 1987. I’d made the film with a friend of mine, the director Adrian Penninck, to talk about the problems of living with a life licence, and to guide the viewers round our old East End haunts.

But that excitement had subsided, and my life was back in the doldrums. I’d had a few brief romances, none of them even worth mentioning. There was nobody special in my life, and the only people I bothered seeing were the few friends who would put up with me in my depressed condition – people like Lenny Thomas, Joe Griffiths, and Charlie and June Olson, whom I’d met when I moved to Borough.

One afternoon, I looked at the dog and I said, ‘What am I going to do?’ He looked back at me, and suddenly I decided to treat him with kindness. This was a very important lesson for me. From that day onwards, he was a changed animal. And he changed me too. I enjoyed being with him, and together we developed an instinctive understanding of each other. I never had to give him an order: he knew. He never gave me any further reason even to raise my voice at him.

He gave me something to come home to. Before Prince came along, all I had had to look forward to was an empty house, and I didn’t spend a lot of my time there if I didn’t feel like it. But once I had the dog, I knew I had to be home at regular times to feed and exercise him. He may have been only a dog, but that was a big responsibility for me, which was something I had not known in my life for a long time. It was a challenge, and the fact that I met it gave me a real sense of achievement.

I’m grateful that Prince came into my life at a time when I was ill and had no one, really, to go to. I was never a man to share my problems with other people. But Prince I treated fairly and squarely as a companion. I’d had no response from him until I started to treat him like a human being. And I grew to love that animal just as he
grew to love me. It took a dog to teach me about human beings, about treating other people with kindness.

That was the first major change in my life. The second was Wendy.

I was always wary where girls were concerned, because a lot of their interest in me was to do with my past. But Wendy Mason was different. I’d seen her in the Florist in Bethnal Green off and on with her two mates, and she didn’t know anything about my background. I used to drink in there with some of the boys who worked in Smithfield Meat Market, and we were on about Wendy for a long time. I remember a bloke called Dave, who was a mate of the twins’ cousin Kevin, saying to me: ‘She ain’t half nice, over there.’ But I’d seen her, so I made it plain that I liked her, and kept the other lads at bay.

She was very pretty, I liked her long, dark hair, I liked her smile, I liked everything about her. Every time I turned round I saw her smiling at me. But we were making eyes at each other for months before we started talking properly.

One night in February 1989, round about Valentine’s Day, I asked her if she would come out with me on Saturday night. She said she’d been invited to a party, and wasn’t sure if she was going to go or not.

I said, ‘If you don’t go to the party, I’ll be here.’ And I was, but she didn’t come in.

On the Sunday I went back to the Florist again, because I had a feeling she’d be there, and I was right. I must have gone in and out of the toilet about eighty-nine times just to get her attention, and when she finally came by me I grabbed her hand and I said, ‘Are you going to have a drink with me?’ We stayed together, talking, for about two hours. And I kept trying to get her to leave the pub.

I think she thought it was purely an excuse when I said I had to go home because my dog wasn’t well, and asked her to come with me! She wasn’t having it. But I took her phone number. When I rang
and asked her out again, she couldn’t go because she had made other plans, but I made a meet with her for another day later in the week.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her – even though, at twenty-five, she was much younger than me. She was quite unlike all the other girls I’d come across since I left prison. She was interested in me for me, not for who I used to be, which she still didn’t know about. She was honest, hard-working and came from a good family. Her mother was Italian and her father was English. Wendy was the youngest of the family, still living at home. She was working in promotions for a beauty company in Fleet Street, and still is.

I picked her up in my Renault from her Mum’s house on the night of the date and took her to a pub in Gants Hill. Then I took her to meet my mate Bryn and his wife Lorenza, who also has Italian blood. They got on well, Wendy and Lorenza. I took her home to her Mum’s, and from that point onwards we’ve seen each other every night bar one.

The next evening we went to a little pub in Borough, and I was telling her more about Prince. She came up to see the flat, and she noticed a photo of me and Ronnie Kray on the mantelpiece.

She said, ‘Is that you?’

I answered, ‘Oh, yeah, it was a long time ago.’

She didn’t push the matter, but I wondered what she must be thinking. You don’t always walk into someone’s house and see a picture of that person with one of the Kray twins. I was worried that if anybody told her about my background it could frighten her off. I didn’t want it to come from anybody but me, and I was leading her up to it gradually. But she found out in her own way after about two months.

She went to have her legs waxed one night by a girl called Lynn, who was also the barmaid in the Florist.

Lynn asked her, ‘How are you getting on with Tony? My Mum knows him from before he went away.’

‘What do you mean, “went away”?’ said Wendy.

Lynn replied, ‘Didn’t you know he was involved with the Krays and went inside for a long while?’

Wendy told me later she was dumbfounded. We saw each other that night, and she asked me about it. I explained that I’d been afraid to tell her in case she decided not to see me again. I knew she wasn’t criminally minded at all. She’s never taken a penny off anyone.

So, yes, it was a bit of a shock to her; but she accepted me for what I was, and in the end it created a stronger bond. She moved in with me two or three months after our first date. She’d been staying over a lot of the time at weekends, and it just seemed silly for us to be living apart. Her mother, being Italian and traditional in her ways, didn’t believe you should just set up home with someone. She said to me, ‘I don’t agree with it, but you make sure you look after her.’

Against all the odds, the family did accept me, even given my unusual circumstances. She’s a diamond, Wendy’s Mum, and she does insist on feeding me. I’ve put on a lot of weight since I met her! And Wendy and I are building for the future.

Before we met, I had nothing except my dog. I had no family as such. My brothers had all left London and gone their own ways. I was feeling down, just living a day-to-day life, going nowhere. It’s not impossible that I might have drifted back into crime.

But Wendy brought a lot of stability into my life; she gave me a permanence again. With her around, keeping my feet on the ground, I’d never be tempted to go back to my old way of life. She doesn’t like crime of any kind, and she keeps me on an even keel. Far from slipping back into bad habits, I’ve gone on to do things with Wendy I never dreamed I might do. With the permission of my probation officer we’ve been to America, Cyprus, Spain and elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

The difference in our ages can cause the odd difficulty, but I do understand Wendy. For her part, she’s told me that my sixties’
attitudes towards things like manners and chivalry are among the things she respects and likes best about me. I treat her like a lady, and I like to spoil her, but I can be a bit protective at times. I don’t like people leering or looking the wrong way at her. I’ll jump on that. For her own protection, I don’t like her to wear a mini-skirt if she goes out on her own. It’s asking for trouble in this day and age, much as it would be nice to be able to walk along the street without having to worry about other people.

Yet, for all of my feeling for the sixties and their values, I have very few dealings these days with any of the characters I knew back in that era. I went out to Spain for a couple of weeks in 1988 with a friend called Andy, and while we were touring the country we stopped at the Costa del Sol, or the Costa del Crime, as the newspapers like to call it. It was like stepping into the East End of London with the number of old faces we bumped into there – people like Ronnie Knight, Freddie Foreman and the train robber Gordon Goody. The last thing I expected to drive into was that situation, but having said that, it was good to see some of them again.

A lot of the men, obviously, are wanted in England – which doesn’t make them guilty. They would love to come back for a plate of pie and mash, but they don’t believe they would get justice if they did. Recent events, primarily the arrest of Fred Foreman, would tend to lend weight to that opinion. Most of them live peaceful, legitimate lives in Spain, from what I saw. Back in London, I still have the odd chat with Buster Edwards, the Great Train Robber, at his flower stall at Waterloo Station. He’s become part of the character of London. Also, I went to Frankie Fraser’s do when he came out of prison in the mid-eighties, and the fact that the party was attended by members of all the old gangs in London says a lot about the respect that people had for him.

Some of our ex-fellow cons, however, came out of long prison sentences only to return to crime. Eddie Richardson, for instance,
was sent down in 1990 on a charge involving millions of pounds’ worth of cocaine. The Richardsons today I would describe as friends, even though we started our careers on less than friendly terms. In prison they always made me welcome in their company, although we didn’t make a particular point of keeping in touch when we came out of the nick.

One person I do still see socially, however, is Charlie Kray. Charlie wants to lead a normal life, like me, but because of his name he’ll probably never be able to do that. As for the other members of the firm … they’re scattered all over the place. Ian Barrie is living a quiet life in Scotland. From what I’ve heard, he’s repping for a company and prefers not to be in touch with anyone from the past. Ronnie Bender, who I’ve seen on occasions, is also keeping a low profile, living with his wife Buddy in the Isle of Dogs in east London. Connie Whitehead I still see occasionally in pubs and restaurants in the East End. I have to admit to a sneaking liking for him, despite the suspicions over his loyalty in the trial, but I never have anything to do with him when we meet. He keeps himself to himself and says nothing, although his wife, Pat, is a very nice lady whom I’m always happy to talk to. Tommy Cowley has, sadly, died of cancer. I always got the impression he felt guilty because he didn’t go down with us. The last time I saw him was in Durham prison when he came to visit Ron.

And so to the Kray twins, whose parole I would wholeheartedly support, having visited both of them since my release. At the time of writing, they have each served twenty-two years in prison. That’s not justice, that’s a pound of flesh. Revenge. There comes a time when the authorities have got to justify keeping you in prison. When they can’t do that, they have to let you go. They cannot justify keeping Reggie Kray, at least, any longer. So you’ve got to put it down to politics. We all went away together and we should have come out together, too. We’ve all paid the price, if we deserved that
price. Keeping Reggie Kray in prison for the McVitie murder is achieving nothing. What’s the point? Once your sentence stretches beyond a certain time, is there really any difference between eighteen years and twenty-five? What good is it doing anyone? This is where I think the system is going wrong.

Reggie is in Lewes prison in Sussex, striving to keep his mind and his body in peak condition. It’s a credit to him, after all this time, that he’s still up to it. How much more can they ask a man to take? I say give him a chance, don’t kick him when he’s down. In my opinion, he should be given his parole while it’s still possible for him to come out and fit into society. As Chris and I discovered, there’s no such thing as rehabilitation, nothing which can prepare you for the realities of a society which has overtaken you by a couple of decades. Purely on humane grounds, Reggie ought to be released now.

I’d like to say the same for Ronnie. I’m not here to argue the case against his doctors at Broadmoor Hospital, but Ron deserves to be given a little bit of hope. He still thinks about life outside, and his pride in his appearance is as strong as ever. He has never complained. Ron has his dignity, and I believe that dignity should be respected by the authorities. I find it tragic to think that they would be quite happy to hold him in there for the rest of his days. It’s time to consider the view that he ought to be given his chance.

The twins are still very well respected in every level of society, not just in criminal circles, and a real cross-section of the public now genuinely feels that enough is enough. People ask if they still control things outside, or if they would take up where they left off on their release. I believe the answer to both questions is no. If they came out now, every eye would be on them. They could never reach that position of power again; they wouldn’t need to. The twins can make their money in other ways, particularly Reggie with his books. I also know that Reggie has a business brain which is second to none. He could do a lot of good in certain ways. He could go out, like they do
in America, talking to people in institutions, putting a view across. He was always a very persuasive man, and we shouldn’t lose that talent.