Wannabe in My Gang? (28 page)

On Bank Holiday Monday, 29 August, violence once more erupted at Epping Forest Country Club. About 3,000 people were thought to have been at the venue when, at 3 a.m., around 30 started fighting in the car park. The doormen ran out to try and break up the fight, but as they did so, a man took out a gun and shot two of them. One doorman was hit in the back, the other took a bullet in the stomach. Rumour and speculation were rife and everybody was saying that the shootings were connected to Darren’s murder. Some thought this was the comeback everyone had been expecting, but they were wrong. This was just another Essex boy who didn’t like doormen interfering in his business. Another Essex boy who would probably end up suffering an undignified death like his East End hero Reg Kray, who at the time was wasting away in a hotel.

At 7.45 a.m., less than five hours after the shootings at the Country Club, Ronnie Fuller left his home at Parkside, in Grays. Ronnie was on his way to work and was only yards from his gate when a man got off a motorcycle parked nearby and approached him. As he walked up to Ronnie he pulled out a 9mm pistol and shot Ronnie twice in the head and twice in the chest. The gunman turned and calmly walked away before riding off. Ronnie’s wife Larissa ran screaming from the bungalow where they lived with their three-year-old son. Larissa held her blood-soaked husband until an ambulance came to take him away. Shortly after 8 a.m., Ronnie was pronounced dead at Basildon General Hospital. He was 30 years of age. Despite a huge police investigation, his killer has never been apprehended.

I was upset when I heard that Darren and Ronnnie had been murdered. My friend Chris Lombard had been murdered a few years earlier, and my friend Larry Johnston was serving a life sentence for murder. Four young men cut down in their prime and for what? A stupid argument in a tacky disco or pub. A stupid argument that had resulted in someone losing face, stupid arguments that had resulted in the waste of four young men’s lives. Tell their mothers gangsters are fucking chic.

Reggie Kray, a man whom many young men aspire to be and who was in part responsible for the birth of gangster chic, had settled into his hotel and agreed to give a final interview for a television programme. There were things he wanted to say, he said, things he wanted to share before he finally died. Paramount for him was the fact that he believed the road he had taken had been a terrible and painful one. He felt that if by speaking directly he could deter others from taking the same road, then perhaps something good could eventually come from it all. During the interview, Reg was extremely honest and extremely open. He did not want anybody to endure what he had been through. Reg knew only too well what he had lost and why he had lost it.

The majority of his life had been taken away and he knew it had been a tragic waste. His reputation and a place in history were not a fair exchange for 32 years in prison. He knew that respect was not more important than love. He knew that existing in legend did not make up for existing in real life. His brother Ronnie would disagree, because, for Ron, being a gangster was everything. Ron, however, had an excuse: he was mentally ill, his judgement clouded by paranoia.

Reg had learned too late that being a gangster meant nothing. Sadly, Reggie’s words came too late for many of my dead friends, who saw the Krays as something of a criminal benchmark to match or surpass.

Throughout their lives, the Krays had been driven by publicity. As young boxers, the press had bestowed some essential meaning on their mundane lives. It was the press who had lifted them from the East End and onto the front pages of another world. Through boxing, street fights and teenage court appearances, it was the newspapers that evoked an unexpected and gratifying local respect.

That misguided respect gave them confidence and this confidence gradually inspired a very different kind of ambition. Success at any cost became imperative. Infamy and fame were two sides of the same coin. Like resentful partners, the Krays and the press fed off each other, each needing something only the other could provide.

Reg Kray died a free man on 1 October 2000, five weeks short of his sixty-seventh birthday. He died as he lived, in the midst of controversy. When it was announced who was to carry Reggie’s coffin, Freddie Foreman and Tony Lambrianou insisted that they were going to boycott his funeral. A few days later, Reggie Kray’s funeral took place. Unlike the earlier Kray funerals, Reggie’s was ridiculed by the press. One headline read: ‘He wanted a statesman’s funeral but all he got was a freak-show full of has-beens.’ The press seemed determined to bury the Kray myth along with the last family member.

Supposed ‘celebrity’ and underworld friends stayed away in droves after a row with Reggie’s widow Roberta over the pallbearers. A pitiful collection of has-beens, wannabes and never-will-bes, looking more like the Blues Brothers than Reservoir Dogs, came to mourn their hero. Crowds of 50,000 were predicted, but the turn-out was a fraction of that, although, true to form, there were a few old grannies banging on about how the East End was safer when the Kray twins were running it. In a sleazy, undignified end, Reggie’s coffin was carried out of the undertakers by six bearers, including boxer Adam Myhill, Kray solicitor Mark Goldstein, Bradley Allardyce and East 17 singer Tony Mortimer. The Kray firm must have misunderstood when they were told ‘this lad is big in East 17’. They obviously thought this meant Tony Mortimer controlled Dalston, not that he mimed to shitty ballads from the ’50s. The coffin was placed in a Victorian-style hearse, drawn by six black, plumed horses and driven by a Dickensian undertaker in a long black coat and top hat. The sides of the carriage bore the floral messages ‘free at last’ and ‘respect’.

Behind came 16 black Volvo limousines, carrying friends and relatives. As expected, the cortège slowed in Vallence Road by the Krays’ old house, then it drove to nearby St Matthew’s Church. The mourners spilled from cars like so many clichés from ancient gangster films. A regiment of bull-necked security men with shaven heads, tiny earpieces on wires snaking into the collars of their black shirts, enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame. Despite the overcast weather they wore dark glasses to try and look the part.

While male mourners sporting chunky gold jewellery and ill-fitting suits tried to look hard, for the women it was clearly no effort. Many boasted bottle-blonde hair, perma-tans and tight tops. Miniskirts and high heels completed the look. It was a kind of pantomime of people too old, fat or brassy to make it as extras in
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
.

The minders, probably fancying themselves as the new rulers of the East End streets, told the public where they could or could not stand. Bradley Allardyce, who had been Reggie’s best man at his wedding to Roberta, told the congregation: ‘I look for the words, but there are none.’

Reggie’s coffin was carried out of church to the predictable strains of ‘My Way’, and then he was off to Chingford Cemetery to be buried alongside his first wife, Frances, his brothers, his father and his mother Violet.

Before Reggie’s grave had been filled, his friends began to betray him. Bradley Allardyce decided to share some of his memories of Reg, in a BBC radio interview. He admitted to having a sexual relationship with Reg but added, ‘It was against my will and he knew it was against my will.’ Allardyce, who had written to me saying ‘Reg was like a father, I love him very much’, was claiming that Reggie Kray had raped him. I couldn’t help thinking of what he had said at the funeral. He was certainly not stuck for words now.

If the rape allegation wasn’t enough to rubbish the name of the man Allardyce had claimed ‘nobody would cross’, then Allardyce had prepared a second, equally heinous allegation. He went on to claim that one night, Reggie revealed the crime that haunted him the most: the apparent suicide of his first wife, Frances. Allardyce told Radio Four listeners that, ‘He put his head on my shoulder and told me Ron killed Frances. He told Reg what he had done two days after he had murdered her. He claimed Ronnie had forced Frances to take the pills that had killed her.’ The Kray gravy train had been derailed and the passengers who had lived off it for so long were clambering to salvage a bit of it to enhance their miserable lives.

Kray family ‘friend’, Maureen Flannagan, the page-three girl who took the bids at James Fallon’s fundraising evening, also cashed in by auctioning off her personal letters via a Kray website. I have no doubt they were of great sentimental value to her.

The Kray family are all better off in Chingford Cemetery; amongst the living, they really had nobody. At least in death, they have each other.

As the crowds drifted away from Reggie’s funeral, a teenager ran up to his friends and cried, ‘I’ve just shaken Frankie Fraser’s hand. I’m never going to wash this hand again.’ It was a sad day in Bethnal Green when they buried the last of the Krays. A very, very sad day indeed.

13

PINKY AND PERKY

I believed that when Reg Kray was laid to rest, the gangster-chic industry that he and his twin had made flourish would be buried with him. Unfortunately, Kray fans saw it as an opportunity to promote themselves as heirs to their hero’s vacant underworld throne by telling stories in ‘true crime’ books they thought would never be challenged. I was more than surprised when I heard that Leighton Frayne had published a book in 2003 called
The Frayne Brothers
with the subheading: ‘Welcome to the terrifying world of the notorious Frayne brothers’.

I laughed so much when I saw the book, I was almost tempted to read it. However, the brief description of the terrifying world of the Frayne brothers on the cover proved too much for me. It described how the Fraynes had ‘ruled their patch with a fair but firm hand’. It also claimed that the Fraynes were ‘the brains and brawn behind one of the most ruthless and organised firms in the UK’. ‘Violence and honour,’ the cover blurb went on to say, ‘are their watchwords’ and ‘they are more than ready to make sure that justice is maintained in the underworld’. Picking myself up off the bookshop floor, I wiped the tears from my eyes, caught my breath and stifled my laughter. Only three sentences I had read seemed to have a ring of truth about them and they had been saved until last: ‘Much has been written about them. Little of it is based on fact. Now they tell their story.’

Like Lambrianou, the Fraynes have undoubtedly told ‘their story’ to anybody gullible enough not to question it. They will hope people will believe them and they can fulfil their dream and become gangland legends. As in Lambrianou’s case, their story will have little to do with the truth.

The real Fraynes are a far cry from the gangland heavies they would like people to believe they are and I am quite certain that, like Lambrianou, the Fraynes will be bitterly disappointed that the truth is now being revealed. Not long after I had been banned from seeing Ronnie Kray at Broadmoor, brothers Lindsay and Leighton Frayne stepped into my vacant visiting shoes. The Fraynes were the Hale and Pace lookalikes from south Wales who had turned up at the boxing show in full Kray twin fancy dress. Meeting Ronnie sent their egos into overdrive and they began to really believe that they were the new Krays.

Everyone I spoke to was telling me about these two Kray wannabes who were trying to impress nobodies in the hope that they would be treated as somebodies. They began to make regular trips from their native Wales to London in order to try to form a gang based on the Kray model. They didn’t immerse themselves in the underworld or associate with active criminals; instead, the Frayne gang lived a ridiculous copy-cat Kray lifestyle, intimidating people in their own circle, talking about ‘big jobs’ they were going to pull off, laying flowers on the Kray parents’ graves, visiting their heroes’ old haunts and propping up the bar in The Blind Beggar where Ron Kray had shot George Cornell through the head. In the evening they would head for the safety of the suburbs, drinking in pubs around Epping Forest where few, if any, of the wealthy residents had come into contact with the real Krays. The East End after dark was, after all, a dangerous place to be for two Welsh boyos from the valleys. Everybody was laughing at their antics. They would walk into pubs surrounded by as many as 15 minders all dressed in suits. Mark Bullen, one of the boys who used to fetch and carry for the DJ at Raquels, even managed to get into their gang.

In a desperate effort to be recognised and acknowledged, the Fraynes sought out publicity. They thought they had finally hit the big time when the
People
contacted them for an interview, but the subsequent article only poked fun at them.

MEET THE KRAY TWINS’ TWINS

East End Mobsters Recruit Lookalike Boyos From The Valleys

Jailed gangland killers the Krays have recruited clone twins as their right-hand men on the outside. Twins Ronnie and Reggie have formed an amazing bond with 30-year-old lookalike brothers Lindsay and Leighton Frayne.

Hard man Leighton, like Broadmoor inmate Ronnie, is the quieter of the two and likes to be known as ‘the thinker’. Lindsay, like Reggie, looks younger, smoother and has the patter.

The Frayne twins dress like the Krays complete with slicked-back hair, Crombie coats, double-breasted designer suits and tie pins. They are inseparable and shared a prison cell after nearly killing a man over a family feud.

They were amateur boxers who learned to fight their way out of trouble as vicious street brawlers. Locals couldn’t believe their eyes when they spotted the twins outside The Blind Beggar in Bethnal Green, where Ronnie Kray had blown away George Cornell.

The bizarre similarities only end when the Frayne twins open their mouths, for they are Welsh boyos from the Welsh valleys, and both insist they aren’t involved in any villainy. ‘We’re no gangsters,’ stressed 14-stone Leighton, ‘we’re businessmen. The Krays trust us to handle their merchandising affairs, we make money for them the legit way.’