Epilogue

Even before their deaths the Krays had become folk heroes of a kind, exploited but glamorised by the media – especially the tabloids. Their myth, started many years ago by well-wishers and news people alike, was that they only hurt their own kind – but in recent years this has been disproved time and time again. Now, with the passing of the last Kray, no one seems to care about this mistake.

The celebrities are all still there, some coming out of the woodwork for the first time about their experiences. The twins have become ‘Ronnie’ and ‘Reggie’, and not the old familiar Ron and Reg. This has had the effect of making them friendly and affectionate characters, the loveable rogues so favoured by the movie makers – not the deadly villains they actually were in real life. Ronnie Biggs came in for this treatment – so too did Frankie Fraser. The legends have now become more interesting than the people themselves.

The Krays have continued the legacy of other myths like Robin Hood and Dick Turpin and the public appetite appears to be insatiable as news still emerges of the Krays – sometimes even from the grave. In recent months a letter appeared in The People– a letter proclaiming that Reg Kray was bisexual. It wasn’t the fact that it was being said out loud that was interesting, but rather the fact that it was written by none other than Reg Kray himself. It was a final confession to having homosexual leanings.

The letter came about due to blackmail attempts by fellow inmates, who had seen the hard man of British crime in action and knew all about his extra-curricular activities. He was terrified of being branded a ‘queer’ or a ‘poof’, something that had happened to his brother Ron. But Ron didn’t care about the name-calling, unlike Reg. Reg had carefully crafted an image of himself over the years: he was hard but fair; he was a man’s man and no ‘poof’; he was a philosopher and a writer and no killer of innocent men, women and children. Nothing must change that perception – not while he was alive.

As it happened, he managed to buy them off. No one talked. But Reg had handed a letter over to a journalist who kept it on the promise that it would be published if ever anyone brought up the subject of Reg and his ‘lovers’. No one ever did when he was alive, but on his death the journalist, Ian Edmondson, had the scoop of a lifetime. Ian had been reporting on the Krays for many years – he knew them better than most and being a twin himself certainly helped. It was this ‘twin thing’ that had started my interest in the Krays, all those years ago, so I fully understood his fascination. And I, like Ian, had been threatened by the Krays – so I knew that no one can say that he didn’t earn and deserve his exclusive.

It appeared that Reg had pestered fellow inmates for favours of a sexual nature. He had bought them expensive gifts to win them around, and he had even had himself checked for AIDS as a precautionary measure. He told the world that he was really bisexual, mainly due to all those years of incarceration. He hated blackmailers, he said, and he talked about not living a lie. But that is exactly what he had done for all those years – remember, it took a long, long time for him to admit that he actually killed McVitie.

The legend of the Krays has much to do with sexuality. It has excited men and women alike, but for different reasons. Whatever those reasons are, the movie folk are into them in a big way. ‘Don’t question it,’ they say – ‘exploit it!’ And so we have a profusion of home-made British films, all about loveable and not so loveable rogues, people with a sense of humour backed up with knuckle-dusters and machineguns.

Comparisons with Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde are commonplace. Ron Kray has been likened to the American Mafia boss, John Gotti – called the ‘Dapper Don’. Naturally enough, this is mainly due to the attitude of the Mafia capo who went out of his way to seek publicity. It was this search for fame that finally brought him down – just as it did with the Krays. Over the years other Mafia bosses became friends and allies of the Krays. Tony ‘Ducks’ Corallo, represpenting the Lucchese family of New York, visited London and hired the Krays for his business dealings in the UK. So too did Joe Pagano, respected hit-man for the Gambinos. I have been informed that Pagano even managed to visit Reg in jail, using a false identity – just to wish his old pal well. This Mafis involvement brought the Krays into the higher echelons of organised crime – and it brought them publicity.

Our fascination with American culture has now turned into idolism. We are inundated with American this and American that. Our lives are run through the world of media, twisted and turned by the makers of the programmes – the ‘good’ becoming better and the ‘bad’ becoming even worse. Everything today is of outsize proportions.

It was America who first invented the ‘hero-crook’. It was a retrospective move trying to make sense of a shallow and corrupt past. The avenging cowboy with the gun became a symbol of their age, even though they never really existed. So will the Krays survive as folk heroes – or will we some day learn the lessons and remember the facts as they really were?

We can’t blame the Krays for our society, but we should try to understand their effect on our lives and put their achievements into some kind of perspective. They achieved the fame they were after. They even received a gift from Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin in the mail. It was shirt, with a note attached saying simply ‘To Reg, best wishes Buzz Aldrin’. ‘Notoriety’ rather than ‘fame’, however, is possibly a better word to use when talking about the Krays.

The Kray brothers were different. No one previously had terrorised the nation as they had done. No one had killed as many as they apparently killed; no one had flaunted their achievements as they did. As far as gangsters go they were the biggest – and the best.

But individually they were not alike at all. Ron did what he did because he wanted to do it, on the spur of the moment, on a whim. Reg planned every single day of his life by the clock, a routine that would enable him to survive the rigours of prison life – and fight all the way. And Charlie continually followed the smell of success, trying to grab a bob or two on the way.

The whole truth of the Krays will never be known. There are too many secrets hidden away. But things are changing and gradually voices of old pals and old adversaries are being heard, faintly, in the distance, calling out the names of the dead.

I have spoken with many contemporaries of the Krays and their evidence is imposing. There was the guy who ran the pig farm feeding arms and legs to the animals; there was the helper at the funeral parlour who packed bodies two by two into coffins carried by the heavy brigade, and there was the man with the incinerator who shovelled in corpses.

The village of Nazeing hides bodies buried in the garden centres, and Steeple Bay holds the secret to the end of both Jack Frost and ‘Mad Teddy’ Smith. Reg went on record, on his death bed, to admit to the killing of one more, although he was reluctant to go further. Nipper Read suggests that it was ‘Mad Teddy’ Smith, but others told of how ‘Mad Teddy’ escaped to South Africa. Reg never told how many his twin brother had slain.

Yet more people were reportedly killed by the Krays, including the tobacco baron Ernie ‘Mr Fix it’ Isaacs and Billy Stayton of the Richardson Gang. Many others had contracts on their heads, including Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, for having attacked Ron in Broadmoor, and Pete Gillett, Reg Kray’s adopted son, who knew too much about their organisation and their killings. Reg had even put out a contract on the policemen involved in Charlie’s recent drug case. Reg never stopped his violent ways, although he tried to tell everyone he had time and time again. Some believed him. Others didn’t.

The following story about Peter Sutcliffe is proof that he hadn’t stopped. Sutcliffe had been visited by Diane Simpson, who was trying to gain the confidence of The Yorkshire Ripper to help the police. Someone from the press was at Broadmoor to see Ron and noticed this blonde woman talking with Sutcliffe. Naturally, the reporter found out who out was and wrote an article about her visits for his newspaper. Sutcliffe thought it had been Ron who had told the journalist the story – and decided he had to be punished. Sutcliffe’s attack on Ron Kray was unprovoked and unwarranted and it left Ron a weak man. Reg didn’t like it – he didn’t like it at all. So he put a contract out on Sutcliffe and got a pal to do the job. Sutcliffe was stabbed in the eye and required immediate hospitalisation.

Pete Gillett managed to sort out his troubles with Reg by promising not to tell the truth about him and his twin brother while they were still alive. He kept his promise.

The Krays couldn’t stop at killing just one man. One murder wasn’t enough. Ron discussed ‘Murder Incorporated’ with the Mafia in New York – he had a desire to kill and felt that it gave him strength and power. Even asking others to do his dirty work was a show of strength and Ron never flinched from taking that most final of decisions – to kill or not to kill.

Villainy was indeed deep rooted when it came to the Krays. Reg Kray especially was most devious in his attempts to pry money from the punters. His last book (A way of Life) has been well publicised by the publishers Macmillan. ‘This is Reggie’s story,’ they told us. ‘It is a story of courage and remorse, revelation and friendship,’ they said.

But it didn’t take courage to stab poor McVitie to death and to order the execution of countless men, all done in the name of honour and respect. And how can you talk of remorse, when it took some 20 years for Reg Kray to admit to the McVitie killing – and he has said that he would have done it all again. ‘It was him or me,’ he said in his books. There was no remorse, no sense of pity for McVitie’s family, no mention of doing anything wrong. Revelation is something else that I find contentious, since there are no real revelations here – certainly not about the old days of the Firm. This is what people really want to know about, not the antics of a gay prisoner and his young lovers behind bars. When he died, Reg Kray had very few friends around him. Perhaps these are the people who really know where the bodies are buried?

What Reg kept a strict secret was the fact that he hadn’t even written the book himself. This was carried out initially by his adopted son, Pete Gillett, while Reg was in Lewes Prison in the early ’90s. Pete visited him regularly and Reg told his stories. Then Pete would go home and write it all up. Reg asked Pete to keep the original as his pension, telling him that it was only to be released on his death. But Reg couldn’t wait – and anyway by this time he was a married man, his allegiance had changed. He had the stories copied and did the deal with Macmillan.

Even Reg Kray’s agent, Robert Smith, was not informed about the copyright to the book. Reg told him that it was he, and only he, who had written it – and everyone accepted it as a fact. No one doubted the word of Reg Kray – crook, killer, con man and king of the underworld. He had, in fact, done this kind of thing before – doing a deal with one publisher and then trying to do the same deal with another. Reg didn’t mind where the money came from, as long as he had enough of it. The Krays were something else, they were the top gangsters of this country and the name is known in almost every house in the country. Even after death they are still in the news.

The twins, Ron and Reg Kray, were sentenced to a minimum of 30 years each because Scotland Yard knew the body count – they just couldn’t prove it. This was the final countdown – the one they never managed to complete.

Charlie was there when the order went out to kill Frank Mitchell, and he got rid of many a body for his brothers. The ‘undertaker’ didn’t like his work, but he was good at it. The saddest occasion was when he had to dispose of a young kid. He wasn’t a member of a gang, he wasn’t anyone in particular and did Ron no harm at all – he was just a penniless lad from the streets. He had been taken in by Ron Kray and used for his pleasure – then summarily executed. Ron pulled a gun and shot him dead – just for the pleasure of it. They were all guilty, no doubt of that.

However, Charlie was a victim too, of the aggression and pure lust for killing that his brothers exuded throughout their lives. He was forever picking up the pieces and, of course, trying to gain something in the process. Charlie would have preferred it another way, but he never got the chance.

Where his brothers were concerned, Charlie was always in the right place and at the right time – one step behind, cleaning up as he followed in their footsteps. He suffered the slings and the arrows, and he never quite got used to it!