Wannabe in My Gang? (6 page)

Geoff was jailed at Norwich Crown Court for 7 years in 1976 for masterminding a £300,000 insurance swindle after a historic building, Briggate Mill, was burned down. It was also believed in police circles that Geoff was the brains behind the Great Train Robbery. It was Geoff’s house in Suffolk where Ronnie and Reggie had gone to lay low after murdering Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie. I liked Geoff a lot. With him, you got what you saw. There was no gangster chit chat about how well respected he was or the usual shit the vast majority of Kray hangers-on came out with. Geoff warned me that many of the people present were not what they made themselves out to be and I should be cautious about getting involved with them. ‘Steer clear of the Frayne brothers,’ he warned, ‘and that Tony Lambrianou.’

I had never heard of the Frayne brothers but I had heard of Tony Lambrianou. Tony had lured Jack McVitie to a house in East London where the Kray twins had lain in wait. Once McVitie entered the house, Ron had glassed him and Reg had stabbed him to death. Lambrianou had not given evidence in his defence at the trial and was sentenced to life imprisonment. I was surprised Geoff was telling me to give him a wide berth. Perhaps Lambrianou was an East End psycho and Geoff was telling me to avoid him for my own safety, I reasoned.

Geoff and I spent most of the evening laughing at the guests who had arrived dressed as Kray clones. It reminded me of some of the sad individuals I had seen on Elvis Presley lookalike TV competitions. Nobody but themselves could see the slightest resemblance. They looked absolutely ridiculous, dressed in starched white shirts, black ties, Brylcreemed hair, Crombie coats and a fixed scowl to match, they believed they looked the part. Two Kray clones that were particularly prominent appeared to be very friendly with ‘promoter’ James Campbell. I thought they looked more like the comedian duo Hale and Pace than the Krays.

When I asked Geoff who they were, he told me they were Lindsay and Leighton Frayne, the brothers he had advised me to avoid. Later in the evening, Campbell brought the Fraynes over to introduce them to me. They seemed polite enough, but I couldn’t help but notice the sense of theatre about them. Every phrase, every bit of body language was well thought out, mimicking their heroes Ron and Reg. I also spoke to Lambrianou, who thanked me for a great evening. Why he should be thanking me did puzzle me a little, as he had paid £40 to get in – or so I thought. Lambrianou didn’t strike me as a violent man or appear in any way intimidating; he seemed OK, was extremely polite and went out of his way to be pleasant to anybody who spoke to him.

What I did find rather bizarre was the amount of people who asked Charlie Kray, Kate Kray and Lambrianou for their autographs. Another man I met there was a Scot named Alan Smith. Alan had written to me before the boxing show and had organised a sponsored run in Edinburgh to raise money for the Fallons. Alan was in his early 30s, fit and approximately 6 foot tall. He told me he worked as a doorman and often visited London doing security at some of the large outdoor pop concerts. We agreed that when he was next in London we would meet up for a drink.

The evening went really well. A couple of local fools tried to gatecrash, but when Charlie Kray, Lambrianou and a few other infamous faces appeared at the door to see what the fuss was all about, their mouths dropped open and they fled into the night. Flannagan, the self-styled first page-three girl, and ‘close friend’ of the Kray family, took the bids during the auction.

Out of the various items for sale, including the signed Rolling Stones albums and boxer Charlie Magri’s shorts, pride of place went to two official passes for visits to Broadmoor Hospital and Lewes Prison to see Ronnie and Reggie in person. Flannagan, treading the boards of the boxing ring, shouted out: ‘If you really fancy an interesting chat and want to do some good at the same time, then let’s hear from you.’ Both passes were quickly snapped up for £500 each. The event raised a reported £15,000. I was overjoyed that so much money had been made. It also eased the embarrassment I had endured following the non-event in Wolverhampton. With the proceeds from Reggie’s book, I thought I had generated about £100,000 for the Fallons. The fact that the police were still seeking Paul and me for the assault on Stuart Darley did not trouble me. All that mattered to me that night was the fact that I had finally achieved my aim and raised a considerable amount of money for James’s family.

At the end of the evening, I went to collect the money but I could not find Campbell or Brazier. The hotel and other expenses had been paid, but there was no sign of the promoters. It had been a long day and an even longer night, so I assumed they had gone home and would contact me the following day.

That weekend I contacted Dave Venables at Raquels nightclub and asked him if he had any door work for me. I was told that I could start work immediately. The wages, Dave said, were £40 per night, cash in hand. I stayed at the club for a short while, talking about things in general.

Dave Venables told me that things were not going too well for the local bouncers and I was entering the Basildon nightclub security scene at a time of change following a spate of retirements, deaths and public disorder. A bouncer named McCabe, who was once all-powerful, had recently died in a road accident and the infamous West Ham United football hooligans, known as the Inter City Firm, had taken on the hardcore of Basildon’s doormen at a rave held in the town.

Madness had reigned that night. The ICF had come prepared with coshes, hammers, ‘squirt’, tear gas and knives. The unwitting doormen had nothing to defend themselves with other than their muscle-bound bravado and reputations. They soon lost them both. The ICF rampaged through the hall, hacking, stabbing, slashing and stamping on the retreating bouncers whose crime it was to have had one of the ICF members ejected over a trivial remark. Being a good doorman isn’t about going to the gym and throwing your steroid-bloated frame about, it is about diplomacy and understanding the psyche of the psychos you encounter.

The Basildon bouncers were now learning this valuable lesson. Those who escaped tutorial in the main hall were captured in the car park and given the most brutal of lessons. They were beaten and their flesh torn open with Stanley knives. One blood-soaked bouncer was thrown into a lake. It was a miracle nobody died. Many of those who avoided hospital immediately ‘retired’ from the security industry, declaring almost comically, ‘Fings ain’t what they used to be.’ They were, of course, quite right: things had changed. Lager louts with bad attitudes had been replaced by smartly dressed, drug-fuelled, knife-wielding villains. Commuting to Essex from the East End of London, these villains wanted to flood the county with the ‘love drug’ Ecstasy. Disco versus rave; bouncer versus firm member; pints versus pills; they were all on a collision course and I was stepping into the epicentre without realising it.

I thanked Dave for helping me out and told him that I would start work the following weekend. After securing additional income and the event for James going so well, I thought things were certainly looking up for me. I still had the incident with the police in Wolverhampton to sort out, but it was hardly a hanging offence.

Over the next few days, calls from Ronnie and Reggie were fast and furious. They shouted at me and demanded that the funds be handed over to the Fallon family. I was in total agreement, but told them that I could not find the two men who actually had the money. Promise after promise followed, meeting after meeting took place, but the money never did materialise. Ronnie accepted what I had to say, but Reggie would not. He was constantly on the telephone. ‘You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that and you’ve got to hand that money over.’

I kept telling him that I hadn’t got the fucking money, that Campbell and Brazier had the money. It just got sillier and sillier.

I could offer no explanation other than the fact that I could not contact the two men or locate the money. Kate Kray joined in the barrage of phone calls, ringing me to tell me what Ronnie had told me five minutes earlier and what Reggie had told me ten minutes before that. Reggie Kray eventually informed me that Tony Lambrianou had been appointed to sort out the problem. He was to find out where the missing money had gone and arrange for it to be given to the Fallons. A meeting was arranged at a pub in Gants Hill, Essex. Campbell, myself, Lambrianou and one or two other people I had never met before attended. When asked about the proceeds from the boxing event, Campbell said most of it had gone on expenses. ‘Bollocks. Count the people on Tony’s table alone,’ I said, ‘12 at £40 a head, that’s £480 – plus whatever they bid for auction items.’

‘But Tony and people like that didn’t pay, Bernie,’ Campbell replied. ‘You can’t expect them to, they are on the Kray firm.’

It dawned on me: Charlie Kray’s table was on the Kray firm, as was Kate Kray’s table and no doubt Campbell’s and Brazier’s. They had used the money genuine people, including myself, had paid to supplement themselves. I went fucking mad and walked out.

When Reg telephoned me to find out how the meeting had gone, I told him exactly what had happened. ‘Those bastards have stolen money from a dead child and I want it. If I don’t get it, I am going to bash them.’

Reg said that money would be given to the Fallons. ‘A couple of grand,’ he said, ‘but we want you to forget this, Bernie, as Ron and I don’t want any bad publicity surrounding ourselves and a kid’s charity.’ Reg also wanted to forget he had pledged all the proceeds from
Slang
to James. No doubt he thought that now that James had died, his parents’ problems were over. It did make me wonder if the Fallons would still consider Reg ‘a saint’ now.

When Ronnie heard what had happened, he insisted that Lambrianou should pay for his table. ‘He isn’t one of us,’ he said, ‘make sure he pays, but as for the rest of it, we are never going to get the money now so do as Reg asks, accept the money he’s offered and let it end there.’

Why Ron had singled Lambrianou out, I didn’t know. I did know that I was never going to be able to recoup the Fallons’ money. A week later, I was told Campbell had given ‘some money’ to Kate Kray, which I was told had been passed on to the Fallon family. The subject was never again discussed with the Krays in my presence.

It came as no surprise when I read in the
Sunday People
some time later that one of the ‘promoters’ involved in the charity boxing event for James Fallon had been involved in another charity scam. In a weekly feature entitled ‘Rat of the Week’ the following story appeared:

STARS GET CONNED BY CHARITY CHEAT

Heartless taxi boss Dave Brazier took the dying for a ride when he pocketed the proceeds of a charity football match. He organised the game between a celebrity 11 and his own firm to raise funds for a local hospice, but his cheque for the celebrities’ expenses bounced and he never passed on a penny of the money raised.

He still owes hundreds of pounds to the people who helped publicise the event in aid of the Saint Frances Hospice at Romford, Essex. Hugh Elton, manager of the celebrity side which included boxer Terry Marsh and actors Glen Murphy and Ray Winstone said: ‘This leaves a really bad taste. I have been involved in charity matches for 30 years and this is only the second time it has happened. We agreed to play the match because it was a very worthy cause. We didn’t charge a fee, only expenses for the players who came from all over the country.

‘Normally these are paid after the game but Mr Brazier gave me a cheque for the £450 bill, which bounced, and despite numerous promises, including a new cheque in the post, he has not paid a thing. I understand he has failed to pass on anything to the hospice. It’s a rotten situation.’ One of those who attended the match last August added: ‘there were at least 200 people who each paid a couple of quid entrance money.

‘After the match, there was a disco and a raffle in the club house, which raised even more cash, and before the game, collection boxes for the hospice were taken around the town. Even the Kray twins sent an autographed copy of their book and they won’t be very pleased to learn that a charity has been ripped off.’

Hospice boss Harry Packham said: ‘We are most concerned for the good name of the hospice which relies on public donations to raise the annual £2 million needed to run our 22 beds. We did receive a disappointing £49 from a total of 30 collection boxes, but we received nothing from the match itself. I am also very sorry that the celebrity 11 have not been reimbursed for their expenses.’

At his home nearby, Dave Brazier claimed that he himself had lost thousands over the match, but when asked to give detailed accounts of the losses his sums didn’t add up and he couldn’t explain why the hospice did not receive a penny from the hundreds of pounds in cash taken at the event.

It sounded painfully familiar to me. The same promoter was at the helm and the same infamous villains had backed him by donating items to raise money. If they were not in on the scam, they wouldn’t have had anything else to do with Brazier after the Fallon fiasco. Ron and Reg were eager for the press and public to know that they were not happy about dying children being ripped off, but despite their position as ‘kings of the underworld’ and champions of a code of conduct men had allegedly died for breaking, I was more than certain that the Essex cabbie who had committed this despicable act had little or nothing to worry about.

3

GANGSTARS’ PARADISE

I had often wondered how my life would end, but I had never imagined anything quite so violent as this. I was staring death in the face and there was nothing I could do. The snarling man in front of me had a hammer and a previous conviction for a gruesome murder.