Wannabe in My Gang? (15 page)

Tate was laid up in Basildon Hospital after the shooting at his home. He had lost a lot of flesh from his upper arm, but he seemed in good spirits. Tucker was making sure of that. Despite being in a hospital bed under medication, Tate was supplied with a steady stream of drugs. A side effect of his heavy drug habit was that Tate suffered from extreme paranoia. He had convinced himself that Nipper was coming back to finish him off, so he asked Tucker to give him a firearm to keep in his bed. He was immediately supplied with a revolver. Within a couple of days a nurse discovered the gun while making up Tate’s bed. The shocked nurse immediately contacted the police and Tate was arrested. Because he was still out on licence from his six-year robbery sentence, Tate was automatically returned to prison for being in possession of a firearm, a breach of his parole-licence conditions.

Nipper remained off the scene. I did ring him to say I would stand by him but he has since told me that he didn’t trust me because of my association with Tucker. Little did he know that I was growing tired of Tucker’s irrational behaviour myself. Fearing a reprisal attack, Nipper bought a Smith & Wesson for £600 and a bullet-proof vest for £400.

When Nipper was finally arrested for the shootings, the case against him was never pursued because the judge ruled that the gun that he had on him at the time of his arrest was not the gun that was used to shoot Tate. Nipper did, however, serve seven-and-a-half months in prison for illegally possessing a firearm.

I could see the writing was on the wall for the firm and myself. The drug-taking and the violence were completely out of control. As soon as somebody put a foot wrong his loyalty was questioned and once that happened his popularity quickly diminished until he was deemed an enemy. Once deemed an enemy, that person became the subject of some sort of violent attack.

On a morbid high because he had literally got away with murder, Tucker started to rant about killing one of the firm’s doormen, whom he thought was a grass. J.J. was a good, decent man who lived in Chelmsford and had known Tucker for years. However, Tucker’s drug-induced paranoia had turned him against J.J. Unsure he could take on J.J. alone, Tucker turned Carlton Leach and a number of other friends and associates against J.J. by saying he knew for sure he had been giving information to the police. One drug-crazed night, Tucker, Tate, Rolfe and a fourth man went to Epping Forest Country Club with the intention of carrying out Tucker’s murderous plan. They filled two syringes with a cocktail of drugs they called ‘champagne’. A third was plunged into Rolfe’s vein so blood could be extracted. This was then topped up with pure heroin and shaken so it resembled the contents of the other two syringes. The plan was to get J.J. in the car, let him see Tucker and Tate injecting the ‘champagne’ and then offer him the syringe containing the heroin. If he refused, they intended to ‘jab’ him with it and if that failed the fourth man, who was sitting in the back of the car, had agreed he would shoot J.J. through the head.

When they arrived at Epping they found out Carlton Leach, who knew nothing of the murder plot, had arrived there earlier with his firm and J.J. had decided it would be best to leave. Back in Basildon that night, Tate was so drugged out of his mind and hyped-up at the thought of killing somebody, that he had tried to shoot Craig Rolfe. The following day Tucker and Tate were laughing about Rolfe, who had been so terrified he had climbed out of a window to escape. They told him it wasn’t personal, Tate was just hallucinating. Everybody knew it wasn’t right, whatever Tate’s excuse. Deep down, we all knew the way things were going somebody else was sure to get murdered soon.

The next time I met Dave Courtney was in a place I had never expected to see him. He was in Maidstone Prison visiting Reggie Kray. Going to see Reggie was totally unlike visiting his brother in Broadmoor. Reggie, in an effort to see as many people as possible, used to ask fellow inmates who didn’t receive many visits if they could send their visiting orders to his friends. The end result would be that you could end up sitting at a table with a person you had never even met. On average, Reg would send out about four or five of other people’s visiting orders, so there would be five or six tables full of his visitors on any particular day. Reg would move from table to table, thanking his ‘fans’ for coming, spending a few moments with each of them and then moving on. On this particular visit, I spotted Courtney at a table and assumed he was there visiting an inmate he knew, so I was surprised when he came over, said hello and told me he was there visiting Reg Kray.

I asked Courtney about the night I had thrown his friend from Coventry out of my car. He laughed and said that it was a genuine party and I was just being paranoid. Because he was denying anything untoward had been planned, there was little point in debating the matter further.

Courtney did not know the Kray brothers – like so many of their fans he had written to them in the hope that his heroes would write back. Reg had fulfilled Courtney’s wish and invited him to visit. To be honest, my heart sank when Courtney said who he was there to visit. I took comfort in the fact that visits only lasted about an hour and so I wouldn’t have to put up with too much bullshit from my would-be ‘killer’.

Thankfully Courtney was sitting at a different table to me and so the visit passed off without me having to converse with him too much. Over the next few weeks, Courtney appeared at Maidstone more and more often. He was very keen to visit Ronnie Kray but Broadmoor had tightened up on who was allowed to visit patients, so Courtney’s wish was never granted.

7

AN INDECENT PROPOSAL

On the morning of 17 March 1995, a reporter rang me on my mobile phone and told me that Ronnie Kray had died of a massive heart attack. Ronnie had passed away at 9.07 a.m. at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough. He was 61 years of age. I tried ringing Maidstone to offer my condolences to Reg, but the prison had been inundated with calls and none were being accepted.

That evening I got a call from Reggie. Naturally he was upset about his twin brother, but his grief, he said, was a private matter.

Over the next few days Reg rang me regularly. He told me that Dave Courtney ‘and his men’ were guarding Ron’s body at a funeral parlour in Bethnal Green. He asked me if I would go to the parlour to do a shift as Reg wanted to ensure ghouls or publicity seekers didn’t pull a stunt. I said I would get in touch with Courtney and sort it out. I had no intention of doing so. I thought this type of gangster theatre was a step too far. What harm could anybody possibly do to a dead man? Hard men who employ minders have always puzzled me, but a dead man needing protection was beyond comprehension.

On the morning of Ron’s funeral I arrived at the funeral directors at around 9 a.m. and made my way inside. Crowds had already begun lining the street and some teenagers had scaled lamp-posts and buildings where they hung precariously, waiting for a glimpse of Reg, Charlie, Ron’s coffin and other ex-members of the Kray firm, who were to be united on their turf for the last time. Bouncers in dark glasses stood all around, gloved hands clasped in front of them. There was no air of sombreness or sense of mourning, but more of a carnival atmosphere.

I was surprised to see Kate Howard outside the undertakers; she was talking to a journalist. Kate had been divorced by Ronnie after she had published her tacky book about her brief spell as ‘Mrs Kray’. In the book she had described having an extramarital affair in lurid detail.

Ronnie, for whom pride and self-respect meant everything, was understandably upset that not only was somebody having sex with his wife, but she was letting everybody know about it. To add insult to injury, Kate revealed that whilst married to Ronnie she had been charged and convicted of using a stolen credit card in an attempt to try to obtain goods from shops at the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex and she had spent time at her friend’s sleazy phone-sex call-centre listening in on perverts.

Ronnie was also upset that Kate had graphically described her own appalling manic behaviour in the book. Sounding more like an East End fishwife than a Kentish housewife, Kate described kicking her lover in the face, stabbing him with car keys and attempting to run him over because he had thrown her sunglasses out of the car. Apparently, her lover had not suffered enough for his misdemeanour – Kate said she turned around and drove at him again. ‘Then I went really mad,’ she wrote.

There was a wooden stake lying by the side of the road. I picked it up and began to beat him . . . I’m not a violent person, but something in me snapped. By now, the police had arrived and they pulled me off him. Good job too – I think I could have killed him.

Mrs Kray could have kept her sordid secrets to herself, but the whole point of mixing with the Krays, for most of their fans, was to tell people how hard you are or how close to them you were. Given the opportunity of seeing a combination of the two in print was obviously too much of a temptation for Kate. Ronnie divorced her, but Kate chose to hang on to his greatest asset: the Kray name.

I went into the funeral parlour and saw Reg standing in an office with a female prison officer. He was reading a meaningless framed certificate on the wall. Reg looked vulnerable, a broken man, his twin brother’s death having devastated him. I asked his prison escort if we could have a few seconds alone. The officer said that she couldn’t leave Reg, but she would not intrude. With that, she walked to the window and looked out, leaving us looking at her back. I was in no doubt that she thought we wanted to share a few private words, which we did, but first I whipped out a metal flask of brandy and offered it to Reg. He smiled, gulped down what he could and gave it back to me.

‘Thanks, Bernie,’ he said, ‘you’re a good friend. I will need that to get me through today. It’s going to be hard saying goodbye to Ron, but I’ve got to keep my composure because so many people are going to be there.’

I told Reg he would be OK. He embraced me and invited me to go in to see Ronnie. I entered the Chapel of Rest and approached Ron’s coffin. He looked extremely peaceful which, to me, seemed odd for such a violent man. Ron looked older and thinner than when we had last met. His hair, brushed back in the familiar style, had turned white. In his coffin, people had placed mementos – a packet of cigarettes, photos and the odd red rose. I brushed Ronnie’s face with my hand, said goodbye and walked out. I couldn’t feel sorry for Ronnie, a man who had inflicted fear, pain and even death on others. He chose the path he took and revelled in it. I did wonder if behind the face of ‘The Colonel’ was a man who would have lived his life differently if he had known what was in front of him. Despite what Reg had told the media on a regular basis about having no regrets, I knew he did have them and that, given the choice, he certainly wouldn’t have taken the same path.

When I walked out into the reception area, there seemed to be more bit-part bouncers around than genuine friends and family. The kings of the London underworld, who seemed to have everything, at the end didn’t have anything or anyone. I looked around at my fellow mourners. When they weren’t flexing their muscles and trying to look mean for the cameras they were laughing and joking amongst themselves. It was obscene.

The prison officer told Reg we would all have to leave soon. I looked across at Reg then nodded towards the Gents. Reg asked the officer if he could use the toilet and she said, ‘OK’.

Once Reg had disappeared inside, I went in and once more produced the flask of brandy. He held it, raised it, said, ‘To Ron’, and took three or four mouthfuls. Walking outside the funeral parlour, I was amazed at just how many people had now gathered. Bethnal Green Road was a sea of people; the bouncers stood in a row outside the funeral parlour, now buried in a mass of flowers. As soon as Reg stepped outside, Courtney, who was dressed in a long coat more suitable as a prop on a sci-fi film than for use at a funeral, began to usher him through the well-wishers as if he were incapable of walking the ten or so steps from the undertakers to his car. When Reg reached the car Courtney continued to move through the crowd, organising men who didn’t need organising. He was trying to look busy and important, trying to be a somebody. The fact that we were at a man’s funeral was totally overlooked. A mass of bouncers pushed people back as if their very presence posed a threat to Reg. Some were shouting at people who looked back at them in total bewilderment.

On a visit a few days earlier, Reg had asked me if I would remain with him and Charlie throughout Ron’s funeral, as he was concerned ‘some nutter’ was going to cause a scene and he didn’t want the service disrupted. For that reason, I agreed I would.

Now that the macabre circus was on the move and I had witnessed the legions of fools trying to promote themselves, I decided there and then I wanted no further part of it. I was sure the prison officers, police officers, countless journalists, underworld cronies and hordes of Courtney’s merry men would be sufficient to ‘protect’ hard man Reg Kray.

I saw Annie Allen (Geoff’s wife), Alan Smith and John Masterson getting into a limousine and so I joined them. Tony Lambrianou and his wife Wendy didn’t have a car and so they also joined us. The journey from Bethnal Green was something that I don’t think Londoners have ever witnessed, or will ever witness again. I saw
EastEnders
actress Patsy Palmer, who played Bianca, at various points along the route. As soon as Ron’s coffin and the limousines carrying the invited guests had passed, Patsy would jump into her jeep and reappear somewhere further along the route. People ran up to our car, wanting to shake Tony Lambrianou’s hand; a few asked for his autograph. There was only one brief incident. Two women, their faces contorted with hate, screamed, ‘Fucking murderers,’ but their voices were soon drowned out by the clapping and cheering of others. It was a bizarre cavalcade, like one of those Victorian travelling freak shows where the locals would come out to gaze in wonder at weird and dysfunctional people.