I was born on 5 March 1932. This first picture was taken when I was two. I had rickets and they put me in the nursery to build up the strength in my legs. I was definitely undernourished because we were really poor, down in Sheepcote Lane, Battersea. Just the old gas mantles, no electricity, no real fire, only a stove to cook on, no heating. We’d got a radio with an accumulator, a battery filled with the acid you had to go out and buy. There was a toilet outside, naturally, and an old mangle for the washing – which I used to swing on with my mother. ‘You’re a strong little boy, Freddie!’ she used to say, geeing me up.
We had a garden out the back. I was the youngest of five brothers – that’s my brother Wally on his bike on the next page. We had a pigeon loft at the back and they used to go down to Battersea Bridge and nick the pigeons out of the bridge, which was a dangerous thing to do. My brothers Herbie and Wally used to go swimming down there, jumping in the Thames. Our father warned them not to do it, but as he came by there one day he recognised their shoes, so he nicked them and brought them home with him. Of course, they came home barefooted and got into trouble!
They were real hard times, real poverty. Then we got moved because just across the road was a railway with stables in front of it and the other end was a Gypsy camp with caravans. It was one of those areas with vendors coming down – you had the muffin man, salt sellers and knife sharpeners. Then there was Prince Monolulu: ‘I’ve got a horse!’ The first black man we ever saw, he was an infamous tout. As kids we would follow him down the street; he’d have robes and a turban on. All the women used to run out and he’d give them a bit of paper with a bet on it. They all liked to gamble if they could afford sixpence, but he’d give the name of every horse in the race, so one of them would go, ‘I’ve won, I’ve won!’ One of the horses had to come in, that was his graft.
It was all tallymen then, having it on the never-never: sixpences and pennies to clothe the kids. In 1939 they moved us to Croxteth House on the Wandsworth Road. There was a row of houses and behind that was a big factory. We were the first people to move into this brand-new block of council flats at Union Road, Clapham, and we were delighted because we had an indoor toilet with an actual bathroom instead of the old tin bath that used to come out every Friday night – and I was the last one in, with all the scummy old water, being the youngest. But now we had a nice kitchen, electric plugs and a little fireplace. There were three bedrooms, too, whereas when we lived in Sheepcote there were four of us to the bed, top and bottom, and my eldest brother Herbie over in a little bed in the corner.
No sooner were we there than war was declared. The below picture was taken at the beginning of the Second World War. That’s my father, Albert, and my mother, Louise, with me (centre) and my brother Bert (right) in Brighton.
My brothers had good jobs at the time, working in Whitehall Court as liftboys, wearing little uniforms. The people who lived there would treat us to a hamper at Christmas, and to get a £5 note was amazing! We were just getting on our feet as the boys were bringing some money back into the home.
My father had been at the Somme. He served in the King’s Royal Rifles during the First World War. A trainee blacksmith who was shoeing horses, he was conscripted at sixteen or seventeen. He got wounded in France: his arm was shattered and all the muscles were gone. As he wasn’t strong enough to hold a horse and put a shoe on it, he lost his trade. He just walked around London, never had a bike, and learned ‘the Knowledge’. So that’s what he went into: the old taxi with the hooter on the side, in the open air, with a bit of tarpaulin in the back. That was a luxury, but the cab driver wasn’t supposed to be comfortable! Out in all weathers, open to the elements. He used to bring the cab round to the flats and the kids loved the hooter. They would run and jump on the running board.
So, the Second World War started and then the air raids began. I remember the first air raid on Wandsworth Road – everyone was looking at the trails in the sky on a sunny Saturday afternoon. There was a dogfight going on up there, and it was quite an experience to see it. Then of course people realised what was going on: it had been a ‘phoney war’ as they later called it, up until the first raids came.
With my nearest brother, Bert (who was too young to be conscripted), I was evacuated to Woking. We were sitting in a hall; Bert was picked by a family and toddled off, and I was the last one left. I don’t know what was wrong with me!
I finished up with a family, but it was dirty and rotten, and I had to sleep in a bed with other kids. The old man came in from the pub and never acknowledged any of the family, just went up to bed. One of the kids I slept with had TB – he used to cough up blood. It was horrible. I remember the woman standing me up in the sink to wash me, and I didn’t like that. I was really unhappy there. After I’d had it good with my brothers all round me, Herbie, Wally and George had gone off to war. I was the youngest, and then there was Bert (above centre, on page 9 – after he’d joined the Navy), George (left), Wally (right) and Herbie (centre, bottom). Bert passed away during the interviews for this book, on 25 November 2014.
After that I was billeted to Brighton, with a nice, kind woman. That’s my parents visiting Bert and me there, with my dad’s sister, Auntie Emma (sitting), who’d lost a leg due to illness. I thought it was great in Brighton.
Then we went home and the Blitz really got started. All of a sudden I was in the thick of it. The factory on the other side of the road turned into a munitions manufacturer. We were sitting on a big target! They aimed for that every night – they hit it twice. Every street in the area was devastated. They used to train troops there because it was like a battlefield: all the conscripts with cap guns hanging on the end of their rifles, smoke bombs as hand grenades, even live ammunition. We were made to keep away, but we watched all the soldiers in the streets. It was like a game to us; it wasn’t the real thing.
Across the road from us they put a barrage balloon and an ack-ack gun, and there were WAAFs (members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). You could sit at your window watching it, and on this one particular night my father said, ‘I’m not going down that shelter.’ They’d built one at the back of the house, you went down underground and there was an escape hatch at the end of it. You’d get forty, fifty people down there in iron bunk beds. It was all right for kids to play and run around there, which I used to do, but as a family we wouldn’t go down because there was just a corner with a bucket in it and a little sheet. It stank of carbolic.
All night long there were noises: couples making love and everything else. It was enlightening, I suppose; educational. But my old man wouldn’t stand for it. We used to stay in the corner of the flat. In that one section my mother got all the pillows, covers and eiderdown, and put them all on top of us. That went on for ages.
But the Blitz got really heavy; it was coming down bang-bang; they were trying to iron that factory out. We were in bed one night at the weekend and it’d just started. My brother Bert said, ‘Come on, we’ll have to get out.’ I was still in bed, but all of a sudden there was an explosion! I was lifted out of bed and onto the floor. All the windows came in. Bert was saying, ‘Come on, Fred, get your things on!’ I was standing up on the bed and he was trying to dress me; I was only little. It was the first time we went down the shelter but we stayed from then on; it shook us up a lot. It went dark then. There was a pub across the road where my father used to play darts; he came home one night and it got a direct hit. They were all fucking killed, all of them local neighbours; he’d come home just in time.
I finished up being evacuated to Northampton, but Bert was old enough to join the Navy. Then there was a lull in the bombing and they thought, ‘That’s all right, he can come home now.’ But there wasn’t a family now: all the boys were in the forces; there was only my mother and father and me.
Bert was out in the Channel when they were attacking the torpedo boats that were sinking the Atlantic convoys; his ship got a torpedo in the bow. His captain said to batten down the hatches but there were still people down below. Dead ruthless, but they had to sacrifice them to save the ship. They got back to Portsmouth in reverse – they couldn’t go forward with a hole in the bow.
Bert sailed around Australia and the Pacific. He saw a bit of action, though not as much as George, Herbie (whose wartime military record you can see to the right, which we’re very proud of) and Wally. He was on the D-Day invasion, but George was on a ship sunk out in the Atlantic and the other two were in Paris. George’s ship, the Fitzroy, went down in four minutes. We heard it broadcast on the radio by Lord Haw-Haw (the wartime traitor William Joyce): ‘The German Imperial Navy today sank the minesweeper HMS Fitzroy. All hands were lost.’ It was propaganda but there was an element of truth in some of it.
George was a stoker and he’d just come out of the stokehole in his boiler suit. He was making a cup of tea at the end of his watch. When the torpedo hit it capsized the ship. The ladder to the escape hatch was across the ceiling, so he had to clamber hand over fist to get out. ‘Abandon ship! Abandon ship!’ He didn’t need telling twice, he just dived straight over the side. George was hanging on to a Carley float (a life raft supplied to warships) instead of a lifeboat. Another minesweeper picked them up, but he was out there in the Atlantic for quite a few hours. There were only a few survivors.
But we’d heard that all hands were lost, so we thought he was dead. I was looking over the balcony a few days later. My mother and father had shed plenty of tears, but all of a sudden someone walked over in a boiler suit, plimsolls and a raincoat. He waved his sailor’s hat. I could hear my mother in the kitchen, washing the pots and pans.
‘Muvver, quick, come out ’ere! It’s our George!’
‘George … our George?’ She was drying her hands on her wraparound pinny as he came across the flats. We ran down the end of the balcony and there were tears. The old man went down the Portland Arms in the Wandsworth Road that night and they all had a piss-up. One minute we thought he was dead, the next he was alive. That’s why I’ve always stayed close with George.
My brother Herbie was at Arnhem. That’s him (second from right) at a memorial for the fallen in 1965. Ten thousand men went there; two thousand returned. Eight thousand were taken prisoner, wounded or killed. It was one of the biggest blunders of the war, Montgomery’s idea – a bridge too far, as they called the film about it. They only landed with what they could carry – machine guns and light Sten guns – and a big battalion of Tiger tanks had moved in there. They had no chance.
It all went quiet for a period, so we stayed where we were right throughout the war, until the very end, when the V-1 flying bombs – the doodlebugs – started. Oh, fuck me, those were nasty! During the day they gave you a warning, you had to get to the shelters. On one particular day my father was on fire warden duty. You could always hear that drone, even if you were in the shelter, and then it’d stop.
Oh, please, don’t stop! Drop on some other poor bastard, not on us!
Then it’d start up again and go a bit further.
Oh, thank God for that!
It was when it shut off that you were waiting for the bang, the explosion.
Down below, we felt the ground lift up. There was dust and all the lights went out. Everyone started crying and screaming. Some time went by and this one particular couple went up. They said our block of flats had been hit on the corner; our flat was right in the middle. My father came down, covered in brick dust, with congealed blood covering his forehead. My mother was all tearful.
‘We lost everything, Lou,’ he told her. ‘It’s all wiped out.’
All she had was this big old leather handbag full of her belongings.
Eventually we went up to look at the flat. Where we used to huddle together was just concrete. There were a few deaths – people who were in the building. We got sent to another address in Battersea.
I was evacuated again. My brother Herbie’s girlfriend’s parents had a shoe shop in Northampton; she had a nice old boy with a wooden leg that was just a piece of wood, not like what they’ve got today. Her mother used to say, ‘Get that leg out the way!’ and kick it when it stuck out – she wasn’t very nice.
She got me working in there, cleaning the windows at the back of the house. I was looking over the back of the garden fence and I heard this woman telling her posh little boy he mustn’t talk to me any more – ‘You’re speaking like he speaks!’ – because I was a cockney boy. That was my friend gone.
Anyway, I was sitting on the windowsill; I rolled down the sunblind and fell into the main road! Right in front of a fucking bus! It stopped in front of me and I broke my arm. They put me in plaster and I remember how I liked being off school, getting a bit of sympathy and attention. I went to the cinema and the usherette said, ‘What have you done to your arm, sonny?’ I played on that, didn’t I? The cinema was empty, it was freezing cold in the afternoon, but it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I really enjoyed watching that film.
I went back home and by then we were living down in Wickersley Road, off the Wandsworth Road. We had no furniture left because we’d lost everything, so they gave us this utility furniture made out of Lyon’s tea chests.
My brothers were all overseas; they were in nine different campaigns from North Africa to Sicily and the European campaign, including D-Day. They all saw a lot of action and Herbie finished up in Japan at the end of the war, taking the colonial prisoners of war from the Japanese. So, even when the war was over in Germany, he was still out in the Pacific. They took a few of the fucking Japanese guards out when they saw what they’d done and the state of the prisoners. It wasn’t properly disclosed but they saw the emaciation, and that they’d been chopping heads off with samurai swords. They found the store open and every parcel from the Red Cross was there; they hadn’t given them to the prisoners at all. The prisoners were picking grains of rice out of the fucking dirt and the Japanese were giving it large in their smart uniforms! So, they chased them all round the camp and done ’em. But that story’s not been told.
This was after the war, about 1948. I think there might be a drop of foreign blood in me. My mother was very dark, with long black hair, but my brother George is blond and blue-eyed so I don’t know what my mother was up to, years ago! These two are young guys I used to knock around with (Billy Adams – left – and Joe Turner at the Roehampton open-air swimming pool); one of them is dead now and I don’t know about the other one.
Recently, I went back to my roots at the Battersea Boxing Club, at the Latchmere pub, where I had quite a few amateur fights. We used to fight the Army, the Navy, the Police Force, Nine Elms baths and Tooting Bec baths – they used the baths as boxing arenas for the amateur shows. I belonged to Jack Solomon’s Nursery. His gymnasium was above a snooker hall in Windmill Street, Soho; there was a salt-beef bar underneath it. My old man and my brothers used to come to watch me box. At Jack Solomon’s on a Sunday morning you used to see all the top fighters coming over from America to fight Bruce Woodcock and Freddie Mills. We were really into all that. We’d listen to all the fights on the crystal set back in Sheepcote Lane, like when Tommy Farr fought Joe Louis – we thought he’d won it because it sounded like he had by the commentary, but he didn’t get the decision. Boxing was the main sporting interest then rather than football, but Chelsea were just over the bridge and my brothers used to support them.
In those days, every Saturday night there would be a fight outside the pub; blood on the cobbles. They’d all form a circle, and my old man used to fight this guy called Johnny Whicker. He had loads of fights with him and it was, ‘Who’s going to fucking win this one?’ It was a real rivalry between the two of them. Whicker was half-related to the family; he was someone’s husband. But, even when we used to have a party at Sheepcote Lane, they’d be all round the piano, singing and drinking – then they’d be screaming and hollering. It’d be the old man and Johnny Whicker having a straightener outside the door. I can remember watching them roll around the ground, punching each other.
But boxing was just learning how to defend yourself and boxers were the heroes of the day. Herbie got involved in boxing and ‘Boy’ Bessell, an area champion, used to come from Bristol to visit us, so that was another incentive for teaching you how to shape up. Jack Sullivan was famous then, and he was the reason why I joined Battersea Boxing Club. When I went over to Solomon’s gym with all the professionals, my father and his friends would come and sit on these trestles to watch them sparring, training and working out.
I used to go to Bud Flanagan’s Crazy Gang Show at the Victoria Palace because he would sponsor the young boxers. Flanagan had a little place just round the corner and it was the first fucking time I’d been to a restaurant! He treated us all to a bowl of tomato soup, all the junior boys. The film actor Stewart Granger used to come up there as a sponsor – he bought me these shorts with the ‘FF’ on (see next page). I trained indoors; my brothers had weights lying around and I used them too.
I can remember fighting on the undercard at Manor Place Baths. I never had a dressing gown or anything like that. Henry Cooper, George Cooper, Dave Charnley, Charlie Tucker and Freddie Reardon were on the bill – all local fighters from south London. It was Henry Cooper’s first pro fight. Tommy Davey was the manager and he’d overmatched me with Del Breen from Croydon because this guy had had twenty fucking fights and won the last four on knockout! It was my first pro fight, so Davey tried to talk me out of it. I said, ‘I’ve told everyone I’m fighting now, I’ve gotta be on the bill!’
Because I had a lot of friends and supporters I used to have a lot of fights over the coffee stalls. I’d bring blokes over to have a row with me – up at the Elephant & Castle, Tooting, World’s End, I used to go there just to have a fight.
‘Who’s the best fighter you’ve got round ’ere?’
I pushed up the front but I was fighting full-grown men, not teenagers. I was scaffolding, saddling roofs and I’d worked in Smithfield meat market, carrying sides of beef about in cold stores, so I was a pretty strong kid. It was hard fucking graft – I did it just to earn a few quid extra.
But this night I was the first one on. I rushed there and got in the ring, just in my shorts and a towel. As the bell went I charged out to have a row, tripped over his foot and hit the ropes. I remember the crowd laughing. Though I didn’t go down, it made me feel a bit silly, gave me the hump; I suppose it was a bit comical. But then I got serious. We had six rounds of three minutes, which was a lot for a first fight. But I had a right fucking war! In the third round, I came out with some really good shots and put him down. I thought, ‘I’ve won this’ but at the end of the round the fucking bell saved him – they had to pick him up and put him in his corner.
After the fight, the ‘nobbings’ started coming in the ring – half a crown, silver. I was paid twelve quid for the fight but got about twenty-odd quid nobbings. So did Del Breen, and that was money then. I got good write-ups in The Ring and Boxing News, and this was with top-rated fighters and future champions on the bill.
The guy in my corner later said, ‘I could have made a champion out of Fred.’ Henry Cooper’s manager, Jim Wicks, declared, ‘He’ll never get an easy fight now, because he can’t be matched with novices like himself.’ I’d had twenty or thirty fights as an amateur, and I had a following of girls, all screaming their heads off. I liked the little bit of notoriety, of course, and it didn’t stop me pulling a few girls, either – they were a perk of the job. But Wicks turned out to be right.
Then I got into thieving and that was easy money. Why get your brain scrambled for twelve or twenty quid when you can get a hundred quid out of thieving? I was nicking washing machines, spin dryers and Hoovers; when televisions started coming on the market, we were picking open the shops on half-day closing and going in there.
With the boxing I might have made it, I might not. You just don’t know, do you?
The picture overleaf (left) is me with my old girlfriend, Patsy Keith. She was a bookmaker’s daughter, a lovely girl. We had a little fling. Then I met my Maureen – that’s her on the motorcycle, the woman I married, with our Gregory at a year old. She got pregnant, so it was a bit of a fucking shotgun wedding!
Milton Road was in Herne Hill – all the streets up there are named after the poets. We got a little ground-floor flat there. The girls in those days, they entrapped you, they set their sights on you: he’s a little bit of a money-getter, he keeps coming up in taxis and picking me up … She was working in a factory, pressing women’s clothes, so she stopped work from that day onwards! The next thing I know I’m getting married, we’re getting the bottom drawer ready.
I was nineteen. Before that I’d already been in the nick: at sixteen I was nicked for affray after a gang fight – I was dragged into this retaliation by some kids who’d got beaten up. There was a boys’ club over on the North Dulwich–Peckham border; it was a rough area. Two mates of mine who used to go to the dancehalls had been battered by a mob out of the club. We had a bit of a skirmish and, the next thing you know, I’m fucking nicked! Nobody got hurt really badly, it was just the fact that these kids from Clapham had come over and had a fight in the street. It finished up in the club itself. We had a sand-weighted sock as a cosh!
There were six of us from Clapham who ended up at the Old Bailey. It was ridiculous, really; it went on for over a week. One of the prosecution would hold up this smelly old sock away from his nose and say, ‘… and one sand-weighted sock.’ We used to have our heads down, but we’d repeat it, giggling every time he said it: ‘… and one sand-weighted sock!’ We all got fined a fiver. Sir Gerald Dodson was the judge and he gave us a right lecture: ‘When you walk out of here, look up at the sky. If you go on like this, you’re going to wind up doing prison time.’ As if we didn’t know what a cell was: we’d been in the fucking Old Bailey cells for a week!
But I was sent to Stamford House, the remand centre at Shepherd’s Bush. It was known throughout the criminal fraternity – for years to come all the London villains I met in prisons up and down the country started off in Stamford House. It was a breeding ground for crime, this gaff; it hardened you.
This is me with Tommy Wisbey (overleaf, top picture), later one of the Great Train Robbers, whom I’ve known since I was fifteen or sixteen, and a little team. The chauffeur/driver took us down to the hop country in Kent to have a drink and a night out. There’s another picture of us below. Later on, I’d be godfather to his daughter, Marilyn. Tommy would lose his other daughter, Lorraine, while he was away: she was killed in a car crash. She was only sixteen.
I had Tommy on the firm with me when we’d go rob the shops in Clapham on closing day: Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, that’s how it used to be in those days. ‘The Bosh’ was the guy who would make all the keys for you in alphabetical order and you used to keep trying them out till one threw the lock over. They were usually double-throw locks. Then we could walk in, walk round, come back and lock it up, then go to the end of the street to see if it was belled to the nick. Because there weren’t bells like there are today; people didn’t think it was necessary. I’d say 90 per cent of them had no alarms.
We used to pull up in a van. I’d have a brown coat on and we would be ‘the workers’, carrying out the washing machines and radiograms over the pavement. We’d load up the van and we had them already sold. We’d fill out the orders: ‘My daughter’s getting married, can you get her a Hoover cleaner?’ That was how we performed.
Tommy’s still alive, though his wife, Rene, has just died. Rene was my Maureen’s friend: ‘I’ve found a nice fella for you!’ Girls look after their mates, they plot and plan and scheme – and ensnare you. To not get married in the fifties when you got a girl pregnant, you were the dirtiest dog ever!
At this time I went and bought this big old car (below) at the sale. You can see the ladder on the roof rack. This guy on the right, a Paddy, was the labourer; the guy on the far left was an electrician and a plumber, and my pal Horry Dance and myself were both thieves. We used to nick all the paint and all the materials, so we were alright for a bit of painting and decorating. We had a few contacts, and anything they wanted I’d go out and nick.
We ran the painting-and-decorating firm for a couple of years; this is outside the house in Elsynge Road that Horry bought (he finished up buying about three houses). He carried on but I left it and sold the motor to my brother-in-law.
The family had bucket-and-sponge days at all the racetracks and dog tracks. Maureen’s uncle took bets under the name Jack Ray; he was the first one to have a telephone, which he’d work with his feet, and put up runners from other racetracks on the board. It was all bollocks, because he was making his own prices up. He was a shrewd bastard, Jack! But he got five years for assault and got the birch – so he was a face. Gordon Goody, Tommy Wisbey and Buster Edwards got it in Wormwood Scrubs too – they’d stand you up against a cross and bind the birch twigs up into a whip. Prisons were brutal at that time.
It had been a short period of trying to go straight but afterwards I took Tommy with me. Buster Edwards had just come out of the RAF and tried a window-cleaning business; that went pear-shaped, so he went to work for a florist called A.D. Warner in Lower Marsh, The Cut. He used to sell our goods for us to the stallholders. When he saw the sort of money we were making, he said, ‘Can’t I come to work for you?’ So I turned him into a fucking criminal because he was previously a straight-goer.
Tommy Wisbey’s father used to stand on the corner of Cooks Road, Kennington, taking illegal bets. The coppers would run him down the nick for street bookmaking. He’d have to produce bodies for them: pay people to get nicked at Lambeth Court. I even did it myself once: all you did was take a few slips in your pocket, the copper took you in the nick and charged you. That was the crooked little coup. They had their lookouts. They came round as milkmen and coalmen; it was a game to a lot of them. Tommy’s old man had a bottle-washing yard and whoever was taking the bets used to go through the yard to escape.
So, Tommy, Buster and I were the main three during that period. We took a big van down to Southampton because we wanted to do this particular electrical supplier. We did it early morning so we could get back to London; we emptied the shop out – there was no one there – and put it all on the van. We loaded up and pulled off and then Tommy comes up the other side and tells us to pull over. We had a crooked Ford Zephyr to escort the van.
‘What’s the matter?’
We had a Decca radiogram that you screwed legs onto the bottom of; it was a great little seller. ‘That Decca,’ he said, ‘I’ve fuckin’ handled that!’ He meant his dabs would be on it, because we couldn’t walk across the pavement with gloves on. If two coppers walked by, chatting, I’d say, ‘Don’t worry, just keep normal.’ But it meant your dabs were on the gear you’d nicked.
‘I fuckin’ left it inside the door. I forgot to pick it up as I come out!’
Buster and me drove back, by which time twenty minutes to half an hour had gone by. When we pulled up, there was a window cleaner at the front and right outside the shop was a fucking newspaper stand!
‘Front it up, front it up!’
It had a Yale on it, as well as a dirty mortise lock, so we put a screwdriver in and knocked that off. Buster brings the radiogram out and puts it in the boot of the Zephyr, down the next street. But they’ve seen Buster and me. We catch up down a lay-by.
‘We’ve got it.’
‘Oh, thank God for that!’
I drive back to London and I’ve got three lock-up garages I’m renting down Herne Hill.
I had loads of bent gear in there – it was like a wholesale place, loads of LP records too. I had one of those little silver-grey Ford 500cwt vans; it was nice for me, and nice for taking the kids out. Tommy comes to me and says, ‘I’ve got a couple of customers.’ So we load up and off he goes in my van. But, instead of delivering the stuff, he goes to his father’s pitch. And while he’s there the Old Bill pounce, nicking them for street bookmaking.
‘Whose van’s this? What’s in it?’
Who’s it registered to? Me! They’ve got my van down the nick and I’ve got to go and get it. But, before I know it, in the morning they’re bang-bang-bang on my door. I know they’ve got two witnesses and I am fucking nicked.
I’m not fully dressed, but down the next street there’s a bombsite where I used to leave my car. I go out the back way. They’re going, ‘Open up, it’s the police!’ and banging on the door. I’ve only got my trousers, shoes and shirt on – I never had time to put a jacket on. Maureen’s opened the door to them. They’ve come tearing in. I’m over the back garden to the next street, got to the turning with the car, but they’re right on me. I was nicked in the car as they’d surrounded the next street.
I got some bird for that: two years, but in stages. I was in Brixton, but from there I went to the Isle of Sheppey – and then back to Brixton for six weeks on a motoring offence, driving without a licence. Later, I was wanted again for another robbery and I had to leave south London, but this time I got away. It was 1958 and I went to the East End because Charlie Kray used to come over to me. He was working over there with a big buyer, who bought lorry loads of stuff. Charlie was introduced to me and used to buy from my lock-ups.
When I went over there on my toes, I met Charlie and his wife Dolly. They said, ‘We’ve got somewhere you can hole up. Ronnie’s got a flat in Adelina Grove,’ which is opposite The Blind Beggar. Sidney Street, where Churchill laid siege to ‘Peter the Painter’ (ringleader of a group of East European anarchists and armed thieves cornered in the East End in 1911), was at the side of it. Those flats are really expensive now; they want a fucking fortune for them. But it was like two rooms – a kitchen, and you went outside to a verandah, where the toilet was.
It wasn’t in good nick but I had it all done up in what were modern styles then. There was a gay fella, John, who used to work on the firm for the twins. He was good at fashion and designing and he helped me do it up when I took Maureen over there. It had been a shithole, really. But Jamie (overleaf, with Buster Edwards) went to the local school round the corner. I was under the name of Freddie Puttnam, Maureen’s brother’s name, so I took his identity and I lived over there for quite a while. That’s Ronnie Kray’s legs on the right-hand side, when he was on his toes from Epsom mental hospital. It was the first time I’d met him.
I had a nice place over in Herne Hill but I had to let it out to Ronnie King, who was an ABA champion. My Jamie was born in Million Road, Herne Hill; the doctor and the midwives delivered him in the next room. I’ve actually got a photo somewhere of Jamie just after he’s been born.
Charlie had said, ‘Come round the house and meet my mother and the twins.’ But I wasn’t too keen because I knew their reputation: they were always beating people up at that snooker hall they had, and getting into rows and trouble. I was out to make money but they were a lot different, though they were opening up spiels then and getting into long firms.
Eventually I went into one of their spiels. Maureen was sitting in the car outside and she said, ‘I saw the police vans come round and they all steamed out. I knew you were nicked.’ With all the other guys I was done in Harper Square for illegal gambling.
I was in the cells and they said, ‘We’re gonna take your dabs and see if you’re wanted.’ So I’m thinking, ‘Fucking hell, I hope I can pay the fine now and get out of the nick.’ So, I’m in the dock and we’re getting silly £2 fines, but there were a lot of us. I can see these CID coppers over the side of the court. As I went to walk out, they said, ‘’Ello, Fred, we’ve been lookin’ for you. What you doin’ over ’ere?’
So, they walked me to the car park. There were three of us; then all of a sudden there were four. I look round and there’s my George walking at the side of me.
‘What you gonna do, Fred?’
He’s got a stick down his trousers and he thinks I’m going to have it away again. But the copper said to me, ‘Albert’s been round and had a word.’ This was Albert Connell, the bookmaker, who was a straightener with the coppers. He wasn’t a grass – he was a good man who got people out of lots of trouble. Maureen’s been round to see him and he’s gone into Carter Street, where they issued the warrants.
So, I know I’ve got a bit of help and I’ve said, ‘What you doin’, George? Fuck off! Go on, everything’s all right!’
The coppers have gone, ‘’Oo the fuckin’ ’ell’s ’e walkin’ along with us?’
He left us and they drove me down to Carter Street. The geezer behind the desk said, ‘Do you want me to handle it? You’re gonna get a bit of time.’
My hands are tied; you do what you have to do. He phoned up Southampton: ‘We’ve got this guy you’ve been lookin’ for, Freddie Foreman, what d’ya wanna do? It’s two years old now – are them witnesses still available? D’ya want me to deal with it or do you want me to send him down to you? I’ve got him on receiving, not the actual robbery.
‘All right, leave it to me.’
‘How’s that?’ he said to me.
‘Yeah, cushty, fine.’
So I went to Wandsworth nick for six months, which was nothing. After that I got to know the twins and Charlie very well. That’s how it all started.
When I came out, I moved on and got another firm round me: Alfie Gerard, Ronnie Everett and Mickey Regan. Older, more professional people to work with.
I’d just come out of Wandsworth in the left-hand picture. I put Gregory in a good school when I got my pub, years later: Oakfield College in Dulwich. From there, he and Jamie went to the boarding school up on Blackheath, Christ’s College. Gregory said, ‘I’ll go there if Jamie follows me when he’s old enough.’ He’d got caught up on London Bridge with some other kids, nicking stuff off the backs of lorries, and there were no decent schools at the Elephant & Castle. I had the house at Dulwich Village – ten grand for a house there in the sixties. So I gave them the best education at the time. They’ve had no convictions and never had any trouble – they’ve never needed to, they’ve had a good life.
We’ve got the three kids in the second photo. Jamie (left) came along about six years after Gregory, and Danielle (right) another three years later.
There’s Buster Edwards in Cornwall with his wife June (seated), with my boys and Maureen. June was pregnant with a little girl, her first baby, but the baby died. I took the photo.
That’s my second firm there, with our wives at a boxing dinner at the Dorchester in the very early 1960s. The only ones missing are Alf Gerard and Mickey Regan; Alf wasn’t photographed very often. There’s Ronnie Everett (tall guy on the right); ‘Dingdong Del’ Rudell (second from right), once a bookmaker in the gambling business; Lenny White (in glasses), who used to work with me when I was doing the shops; and Johnny Mason (second from left), who came on the firm with Mickey and me.
This is Alfie Gerard and his son Nicky. People were petrified of Alf – he could be terrifying, but he had a heart of gold. He was such a lovely guy, but he wouldn’t suffer fools gladly. Things were black and white with him, there was no grey; you either accepted people or you didn’t, that was his style. But he was solid, loyal as they come.
Alf died in Brighton in 1981; he had food poisoning. Jerry Callaghan, another member of the Foreman firm, was with him and should have taken him to hospital – his stomach was swelling up and he was ill. He died in the fucking lift going to the surgery; he should have been taken earlier, but they were on their toes as usual. That’s why he didn’t want to surface. Mind you, Alf was a terrible eater – he’d eat six pies and mash at once.
Alf had a fish restaurant in Bermondsey called The Blue Plaice. He came out of the back one day when I went down with Maureen before they opened. I said I fancied some eels and he called out to his chef, ‘Scatty Eddie’ Watkins, who would later shoot a customs officer in 1979. He gave him a job because Eddie used to cook for him in the nick. Alf comes out with his white outfit on. He’s got a big knife in one hand and a huge conger eel with its head hanging off, covered in blood down the front where he’s been having a carve-up.
Maureen nearly threw up: ‘Let’s go and have some Italian!’
‘What’s the fuckin’ matter with ’er?’ he said.
‘See ya later, Alf!’
His little boy was Gregory’s age, so they were friendly and grew up together. It was tragic what happened to young Nicky – but of course Nicky turned into a fucking villain, like his dad.
In 1970 he killed Tony Zomparelli in a Soho arcade. Ronnie Knight (married at the time to the actress Barbara Windsor) was accused of giving him the money to do it, because Zomparelli had stabbed his brother David to death in a West End club, but he was later acquitted.
Then Nicky had trouble with Tommy Hole Senior and Junior, some nonsense over his wife. He went out to get some booze for his kid’s birthday party in 1982, then they plotted up and shot him. He got out of the car but they were hitting him over the head with the shotguns. They made a right messy job of it.
Years later, they were both paid back. Young Tommy Hole hanged himself in Parkhurst in 1991, then in 1999 the old man was shot at the Beckton Arms in Canning Town.
That’s Big Georgie Cahill on the left – he had a scrap-metal yard. One of the firm, he was good at the old fizzer (burning open safes) because he could use a torch and cut up metal.
This is Scotch Pat Connolly (left), and Henry Cooper, in 1961; Red-Faced Tommy (second from left) – ‘The Jar’, they used to call him – would sell zircon rings with snide diamonds to publicans’ wives and got a lot of money out of it; that’s Henry Cooper, obviously; Bert ‘Battles’ Rossi (right), the Italian was convicted of the slashing of Jack Spot (Jewish East End gangland leader in the pre-Krays era) in 1956, alongside Teddy Dennis, Bill Blythe, Bobby Warren and Mad Frankie Fraser. Dennis and Blythe did the cutting.
That was when the Krays opened the gym at the Double R club. I took Buster, Ronnie King and Tommy McGovern with me. I worked with Tommy when I was on the meat market; I used to pick him up at three in the morning. That’s Sulky Gower on the right, manager of the Astor Club; next to him, Jim Wicks, the manager of Henry Cooper, me, Reggie Kray, Red-Face, Charlie and Ron Kray. We used to go down the Astor after all the boxing matches, from all the different parts of London; the twins were the East End and I was south London – they used to call it ‘Indian country’, coming over to the fucking south! They came firm-handed when they came to my pub, The Prince of Wales. The Astor was neutral territory, where we could all go.
In front at the ringside (Page 40) are Tim Riley, editor of Boxing News, and Charlie Kray Senior (second left and centre). Next to me at the back is Buller Ward (top left), whom Reggie Kray ended up slashing because he was minding Tony Maffia. Buller wouldn’t let them in on the action so they did him in the Regency Club – Reggie was a fucking liberty-taker, but a good man.
When I look back over it, I realise I never really liked him as a person. I didn’t trust him. Ronnie was definitely the nuttiest, because he had mental breakdowns, but he was on tranquillisers that would knock a horse over. He used to give them sometimes to people on his firm and they were out for two days. He’d giggle about it – hee-hee-hee! I liked Ronnie, but I always felt Reggie sat on the fence and would go whatever way suited him.
I once had a little fallout upstairs in their house with the Nash brothers (Islington-born-and-bred family firm, whose reputation predated that of the Krays, with whom they shared a cautious respect). It could have got nasty because I was on my own and he had his brothers there – Roy, Billy John, George and Jimmy, who was the more dangerous of them. ‘It’s gonna go off ’ere, they are gonna have a go at me,’ I thought. It was only Ronnie Kray and Jimmy Nash who talked sense and calmed the situation down. Reggie never took my side. I thought, ‘You ain’t said a word, you would’ve let it happen. If Ronnie hadn’t have been there they’d have set about me.’ And that would have been a big mistake.
But Ronnie was all right, and so was Jimmy – it turned out that I saved Jimmy Nash and Joey Pyle from getting topped for the Pen Club shooting, in 1960 (in Duval Street, off Spitalfields Market; the club’s name alluded to its funding by a robbery at the Parker Pen factory). It was Jimmy who actually shot the barman, Selwyn Cooney. At the time, the club was being run by Jerry Callaghan and Billy Ambrose, who were on my firm – they were at the ‘Battle of Bow’ with me the next year; we were close. In fact, I later saved both of them from being arrested.
I had a meet with the twins and Bill at the Krays’ house in Vallance Road, Bethnal Green. Jimmy Nash was charged with the murder of Cooney, as was Joey Pyle from south London. We sat down and said, ‘Let’s work this out. Who’s the main witness for the Prosecution?’ Bill had been shot in the stomach as well that day, but he’d said nothing. But Fay Sadler – ‘the Kiss of Death’, who’d had three boyfriends who all died – was having it with Cooney. One of the witnesses was pregnant – we got her over to Ireland, got her to change her story. All the other witnesses rewrote their statements so they couldn’t identify anyone who actually fired a shot.
Jimmy Nash was making little cotton nooses with Joey Pyle when they were in HM Prison, Brixton. He was a little nutty, but, if they’d been found guilty they’d have been topped, no question about it. But the judge said, ‘Well, it looks like Mr Cooney stepped in the way of a passing bullet.’ They all walked out.
Fucking amazing!
Then there’s Albert Donoghue (top, fourth from left), who’d be chief prosecution witness in the Frank Mitchell case; he rolled over. And that’s ‘The Duke’, Dukie Osbourne, next to him on the right, who was later wanted over the shooting of a customs guy in 1979.
When his partner Scatty Eddie Watkins’s lorry full of cannabis was surrounded by customs, they phoned me to either find them a safe house or alternatively to help them to cut the puff that they had hidden out of the floors and walls of the container they had. I therefore got myself involved in a very bad situation – one which went terribly wrong for everyone involved. Especially the poor customs officer who was shot dead by Scatty Eddie.
Dukie committed suicide in a flat on Hackney Marshes shortly after; they laid him out on a football pitch. I’d had a passport made for him to come to America with me. He had a moustache; suited and booted, looked like a military guy – because he went a bit hippie after this photo, mixing with all the drugs crowd. Christine Keeler and all the titled people were puffing away, everyone was at it, but I’ve never smoked in my life. Dukie had done a twelve-stretch in prison before he killed himself; couldn’t face going back.
Most of these people above were on the Kray firm. The two barmen at the Double R club were Cliffy Anderson and John Doyland, the gay fella who did up my flat for me. I nicked the pair of them off the twins when I had The Prince of Wales at Lant Street in the Borough – the street where Charles Dickens lived when his father was in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. I had the lock off Dickens’s door in a frame on the pub wall, but that went missing somehow. John and Cliff were well pleased to come and work with me. The twins didn’t like it, but I wasn’t worried about them. They were the two best barmen they had, really fucking good at their job.
This is Jerry Callaghan (right), who was at the Pen Club shooting; he was one of my firm. I was a professional thief, but Ronnie and Reggie never nicked a car – they didn’t even know how to drive a fucking car! They were using strong-arm to get into clubs and pubs; they were into protection money. Then they got into the long firm – when they’d build up the credit, run out the back door and sell it all. But they were also doing some business with Eddie Pucci (below second from left – with the twins and Charlie Kray), who came over as Frank Sinatra Junior’s Mafia minder when he appeared at the Rainbow Rooms in 1963. Pucci was later shot dead on a golf course in Chicago by the Mafia.
Charlie and me used to go high-society gambling with Billy Hill (the nearest thing in London to a godfather figure in the late forties and fifties). He had these chemin-de-fer clubs for lords and ladies in Knightsbridge and Kensington. They were all illegal, but they used to set them up – you never knew the address where it was going to be held till the last minute. They’d have a buffet table laid out with smoked salmon and all that gear. Charlie and me were there as minders every couple of weeks and we’d go home with a couple of hundred quid – terrific! Red-Faced Tommy used to come in with a deck of cards. Billy Hill and Gypsy, his wife, used to read the cards from his crooked set. They cleaned up with the lords and ladies.
I was there when the twins bought a gambling club in Knightsbridge, Esmeralda’s Barn, for two grand. Stefan De Faye was running the booze behind the bar and he used to give me all the drink he got hold of when he was working at this big hotel. All the high rollers used to go there and he would put it on their bill – all these bottles of wine and cigars, they were his little earner when their bill went in. He used to come over with cases of Scotch and Camus brandy; he was educating me in all the different German wines, the Niersteiners and Mosels and that. Stefan was a lovely man; he used to do the Café Continental TV programme: ‘Welcome to the Café Continental!’ It was all juggling and tightrope acts, and cabaret. Word was that the little French singer on there was fucking a very well-known person in the highest government circles!
My mate Mickey Regan (overleaf left, with his wife Chrissie) died in Brighton a few years ago, bless him. He was from a very respected family; the Regans were rivals to the Nashes – they were even born in the same fucking square in Islington. Their fathers knew each other, but Mick had a bit of a falling-out with the Nashes. I went over and gave him some support. Mick was a good businessman; he had an SP (bookmaker’s) office at the Angel over the ChiChi Club. Mick’s brother Larry worked for him and his cousin Danny Regan, who was a face.
That’s Ronnie Knight with Barbara Windsor in the middle; he was partners with Mick in the A&R Club and I got on well with him. Barbara was lovely; I knew her through the twins and I was at the 1963 premiere of her film, Sparrows Can’t Sing. Charlie Kray was going with her for a while.
We had a great club down Lambeth Walk in the early sixties, the Walk-In. I put the money up; Buster Edwards was running the bar; my George was manager; I was behind-the-scenes minder – making sure none of the fucking mugs took liberties, or took over the club as they used to in those days. I put Ronnie King on the door, the ex-fighter I always had on a job – I had him up in my casino as well, on security. He was very well spoken and well behaved.
My sister-in-law Nellie was the barmaid. We had Jock the piano player, Bertie Blake singing, Roaring Twenties dressup nights. It was successful; we had people coming from all over London. We kept it on time, because Kennington nick was right on top of us.
It was in old warehouse-type premises. You entered via a shopfront before it went long and narrow. We had two floors upstairs, where there was a little SP going on, a bookmaking game. Joe Carter, an ex-lightweight out of Mitcham, was running that. It was like a family-run business, in a way.
Then I get a visit from the local police to tell me there’ve been some complaints about people leaving of a night, making a noise, slamming car doors – you know how people can be when they’re drunk. The copper was Frank Williams.
‘Have a drink, Frank.’
We had a chat. He was a commando during the war, captured prisoners and brought them back across the channel. There’s a photo of him carrying the British flag at Montecassino. I got on well with him. There was a kind of understanding – he never asked questions about anyone or anything. But it was coming to an end. He told me, ‘They want to object to the licence when it comes up.’ The club had a short lifespan.
We knew we were going to lose the Walk-In club and we wanted to get insurance money out of it. We couldn’t burn the fucking place down – it was all concrete and solid. But my relation was an insurance assessor, so I got him down: ‘How can I make a bit of money out of it when we shut up shop?’
‘There’s not much you can do about it, is there, Fred?’
No, there was nothing we could claim for. But one night Buster had an accident. He’d been drinking; he smashed the car and cut his head. He came on foot, covered in blood.
We’d had enough of it, so we smashed the bloody club up – smashed the whole bar, the mirrors, the jukebox. Buster was shaking his head and spraying blood up the walls, over the furniture. We made out there was a disturbance and a fight, and claimed damages and loss of earnings till the club got fixed. We got out with a few quid, but that was the end of the club.
That’s how I got to know Frank Williams. He went from there to the Flying Squad – ‘the Sweeney’. Frank was in touch with Albert Connell, the bookmaker, and all those people, so he could put feelers out if I was in trouble. Then it finished up that Jimmy Hussey and Gordon Goody got involved with Buster, and it led to the Great Train Robbery.
Before that, we had a go at a Lloyds Bank van in Bow, in December 1961. It was one that got away. Two guys reversed a flat-back lorry into the bank van – one of those little V8 vans with a reinforced back axle. They didn’t expect that at all. Then we came up the side of the van with another lorry that had a tarpaulin sheet where we’d cut out the side of it. We put a hook and chain through the doors and windows and drove off. The doors fell open in midair and exposed the money from the tellers in those big, red-leather cricket bags. They were all lined up, full of cash, from the power companies. It would have been a good bit of work. But there was a City copper, Ted Buckle, and his dog Flash, who jumped out onto the street.
One of our firm was shot through the head. Two guards shot through the windows, but we had no guns; they had the shooters. An MP later got up in Parliament and asked how many of these vans were driving round London with armed guards.
‘Is this New York or Chicago?’
(It turned out that the two guards from Coutts, the Queen’s bank, went for target practice every week.)
When the chain went, Mickey Regan put his arm in and they shot him too. The bullet went through his arm but he still hooked up the van. When we pulled it forward the two doors fell right off. Alf Gerard and I tried to climb in the back but, once they started shooting, one of our firm was crawling on his hands and knees with a bullet wound that went into his head at the base of the skull and out the other side.
‘Are we all ’ere?’
‘No, where’s Bill and Jerry?’
We looked down the side of the bank van to our long-backed lorry. Twenty-five yards further down there’s Billy Ambrose and Jerry Callaghan fighting with the copper. Jerry’s swinging on his arm and Bill’s got the dog hanging on his arsehole. The three of them were fighting in the road.
I grabbed a stick and jumped out the van. The guards in the back said, ‘They’re coming back! They’re coming back!’ and started shooting again.
It’s funny how you do things in the heat of the moment. I ran down the side of the van. They’re further down the road now, the three of them struggling and spinning around, the dog still hanging on his arse. I’ve whacked the dog and he’s legged it. I said to the copper, ‘Let ’em go!’ He’s got one under his arm – he was a big, strong bastard, you’ve got to give him credit. He’s got hold of another stick and Jerry’s swinging on it.
‘You bastard! You bastard!’ the copper’s saying to me.
‘Let ’em fuckin’ go!’
Whack! I gave him another and another. He let them go. Now they were all getting excited in the van again because they thought we were coming back again.
The bullet had entered my friend’s ear, ricocheted around the base of his skull and come out the other side. He was nearly brown bread (rhyming slang: brown bread = dead; hence the soubriquet ‘Brown Bread Fred’, i.e. mess with Fred and you’re dead). He had searing red-hot lead tearing through his head and they thought he might get meningitis, so the old doctor pumped him up with antibiotics and drained the wound through the night, then got him to King’s College Hospital on Denmark Hill. They had a theatre for brain operations. Maureen, my wife, was up with him all night – he had a bit of a bad turn, not so much from the injury as because he could have got plenty of bird just for being on the scene. But he’s about today. He survived to enjoy his life ever since.
There was a big scream about the Battle of Bow: 150 grand on board. It was a big one for that time. We’d have got the prize if not for the guns used by the bank tellers.
Just before the Train Robbery, in May 1963, I robbed forty bars of gold. I buried them in the country. I was going to leave that for a year before I surfaced, because I had the pub and all the coppers were going down the cellar: ‘Got any gold bars down ’ere, Fred?’
People were coming to me: ‘Oh, Fred, I can buy that gold! Can you come and give me a bit of credibility?’
‘Yeah, sure, I’ll come with you.’ I know it’s bollocks because I’m the one who’s got it put down. I’m not walking round, going, ‘Who wants to buy this?’
There was only one bar that went out on the market, and that was because Tommy my mate had no money. He was brought on the firm because Alf and Ronnie were in the nick; Mick and Big George had gone into business together and were giving it a rest, so I had to make up the firm.
Tommy sold his one bar to a man named Tony Maffia. He was murdered by a man named Jewell, from up north. Maffia was a buyer of tom. He got him out in the car on a moody one of selling some jewellery – ‘Bring some money with ya’ – and shot him in the head to nick the money off him. He was charged with the murder. When they went to investigate Tony Maffia, they found a safety deposit box and, lo and behold, there’s a bar of gold. I never even knew who Tommy had sold it to. He said he wasn’t going to market it, so there was no danger of it coming on top, but that was the only one they got back.
This gold was so hot we had to put it down. Every fucking grass in London was trying to find out who’d got it and who was trying to sell it, and some of the frummers in Hatton Garden were working with the Old Bill. You couldn’t trust some of the bastards.
I wanted to get it out of the country and get the right price for it, because each bar had its own quality with the South African rand stamp on it. You couldn’t damage it, you had to keep it how it was, because otherwise they’d have it assayed to see if it was pure gold or not – whereas this marking told you it was.
So, I couldn’t risk what we had put down and go and get nicked on something else – there was a lot of fucking money there. It was the biggest gold robbery since Captain Blood sailed the Spanish Main – that’s what they put in the papers! After a while I got it out to Switzerland. Someone bought me out in Swiss francs and I put them in a Swiss bank account. That’s how it was sold, one bar at a time. I was in Geneva for months.
(Later I’m in Brixton, nicked, and I’m in a cell next to this fucking geezer called Jewell. He was the one who shot Tony Maffia and got life for it.)
FRANK KURYLO: I was in Cockney Joe Freeman’s office one afternoon in Mayfair, and Freddie came in because he knew him. Freddie had about four offices; this was after the Train Robbery. He didn’t notice me.
Joe said, ‘That fella who was just here, do you know who he is?’
I didn’t know his second name, so I said, ‘Yeah, it’s Freddie from Dulwich.’
‘Do you know what his people are doing?’
Well, I’m not going round with him …’
Cockney Joe treated him like he was his own son. Charlie Kray was Freddie’s pal – he didn’t meet the twins until after about six or seven months of knowing Charlie. That’s how I used to see Freddie about.
I knew he was at it, or rather, we thought he was at it, we thought we knew what he was doing. I know now, but back then nobody knew.
FREDDIE: Later in 1963, Roger Cordrey, who did the signal on the Train Robbery, was arrested with the poor old darts player Bill Boal, who he used to have a drink with. The two of them had seen an advert in the newspaper for garages to let. They went down and put Cordrey’s Ford Prefect in there. But in the car he had a couple of holdalls. He pulled out the cash and paid in advance. They were all spending the money, which was reported to the police. It turned out that the woman who owned the garages was the widow of a police officer.
That’s how Cordrey and Boal got arrested. When they got him in the police station Roger was wriggling about. They said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He said, ‘I’ve got to tell you … you’ll have to get a doctor. I’ve got a key up my arse.’
He had an ignition key up there, so they got the doctor in. They take it back to open the motor and find a holdall with thirty grand in it. Then they find more money in the other car.
‘Where did you get it from?’
‘Oh, I can’t tell you that …’
They go to his house and find more cash, so he’s in deeper shit. Boal had some money in his house too. So, they’ve got them banged up and the Flying Squad are coming down. They pulled them out the cell, giving them the usual treatment, a hard time right through the night.
‘Now, tell us who you got the money off of.’
‘A fella called Fred.’
‘Where did he give it to ya?’
‘At the Brighton races.’
‘What’s his other name?’
‘I can’t tell you that, I’ll get topped.’
Nice statement. But from then on everything went pearshaped. He was the first one to get nicked. Then Brian Field’s father (the crooked solicitor, who conspired on the Great Train Robbery) threw all the money out into the woods, when it hit the newspapers, but he left a little with his name on it at a hotel he stayed in at one time with his wife.
After the Train Robbery, I did the phone-box business – left fifty grand with ten grand on top for Albert Connell, on a separate little parcel wrapped up. But then Superintendent Tommy Butler got in the car with the person who was meant to be getting the money from the phone box and Detective Constable Frank Williams, so they couldn’t go to pick it up.
‘We’ve got to go to arrest Jimmy White,’ he said.
‘We’ve got to pick some money up.’
‘No, that’s all bollocks, that won’t be there!’
But Williams and his little firm knew it was good information – there was going to be some money from the Train Robbery.
Tommy Wisbey could have walked at that point but the silly bastard wouldn’t stand for it. Tommy had left a thumbprint at Leatherslade Farm, the Train Robbers’ HQ.
‘I’ve got two alibi witnesses.’
One was Jimmy Kensit, Patsy’s dad – he was a pickpocket – and the other was a publican in East Street market, near Walworth Road. The Old Bill went to see them and they rolled over straightaway, said they were approached to give a false alibi.
If Wisbey could have pulled out thirty grand he might have walked from a thirty-year sentence. I’ll never forgive him for that. I was close to him and his family.
‘I’m trying to get you out of trouble ’ere,’ I said.
I was trying to talk to him in a lift, knowing there were probably cameras on me.
‘I’ll take me chances!’ he told me.
‘Take your chances? You’re going to get a load of bird. What’s the matter with you?’
I tried to impress his situation upon him but he wouldn’t have it, so he got his thirty years. I was just trying to help him out.
There was nowhere else to drink in those times when the pubs closed halfway through the day. If you went over to Ludgate Circus you could drink for another half-hour. People used to drive over the bridge just for that when they had the flavour.
So, there’s a gap here, we’ve got to do something about this. There were derelict buildings that were going to be pulled down and empty shops waiting for their leases to run out before they demolished them. We got a couple of those places, knocked the wall down in between and made more room, put a bar in the corner and made a ‘Shush club’ – after the Schweppes advert when they used to go, ‘Shh …’
Everyone used to come over when the pubs closed at lunchtime, had a drink and went back to the pubs in the evening if they wanted to be out all day; it filled the day. But they often didn’t leave our Shush club because they enjoyed themselves so much – we used to have singers, music, dancing. It was like a speakeasy. We named it after the Humphrey Bogart film Casablanca. As we closed one down or it got raided, we’d open up somewhere else, where the demolition people were pulling houses down. Hence the club got called Casablanca 1, 2, 3 …
‘You’ve gotta get out now,’ they’d say, ‘we gotta pull the fucking house down! We’re holding it up as best we can …’
They’d come in and pull the floorboards up; people would just tread over the nails and the gaps. They were jumping over fucking trenches to get into the house! Women were pulling up their skirts between their legs to jump over. We’d say, ‘We’ve still got a lot of stock to sell, you’ll have to give us another week.’
We had one in a transport yard with charabancs, in Peckham. The coachmaster would say, ‘Now, look, if we get raided then the coach has broken down. We’d got all the booze on board so the twenty-five, thirty people are havin’ a drink in ’ere instead of goin’ down to Southend. It’s their day out, but it’s been ruined.’
On the day we did get raided, he was standing there, pissed.
‘Give ’em the fuckin’ spiel for fuck’s sake!’
But he was too drunk to say anything.
They nicked all the booze – the cossers used to take it all back to the station and have a piss-up. But it wasn’t that serious a deal, you were just drinking out of hours.
The Shush clubs ran for a long time – all the way up until when they legalised drinking through the day. They were great little places and there was not one bit of trouble in any of them – but, then again, they knew they were mine and George’s. What I didn’t know was that George had been having an affair with Pat, one of six girls who used to come in on Friday nights. I never knew anything about it, but my sister-in-law Nellie sussed it out and told Maureen. George was going away a bit early when I was closing up; he’d do the till and disappear.
Then all of a sudden, in December 1964, I get a message from one of his daughters that George is in St Thomas’s Hospital and he’s been shot.
I go up to the hospital and there’s coppers everywhere. When I said I was there to see my brother, they said they might have to take his leg off from the hip because it had hit the femoral artery, just past the groin. They had to stop the bleeding and you could have put a bottle in the wound, it was that big. It had been done close up. He was in a bad way, his eyes were sunk in his head; there were big, dark rings and he looked fucking terrible.
They left us alone and I whispered to him, ‘Give me a name, George.’
When George was having a meal with his wife and kids, he’d heard a knock at the door and gone to answer it. There was this guy standing there, asking for a fictitious person. George said, ‘I don’t know anyone of that name.’
‘Oh, okay, mate.’
He shut the door but he thought, ‘I recognise him, I know him from somewhere.’
I pieced it together. There was a bloke running car sites at the time who fitted the bill. ‘Yeah, that’s him. That’s Ginger Tom – Tommy Marks,’ I thought.
Of course the twins knew him: ‘Yeah, Ginger Marks goes round with that fuckin’ Jimmy Evans, he runs with him.’
Charlie said, ‘They’re goin’ on a bit of work Saturday night and they want me to handle the tom from it. They’re doin’ the jeweller’s round in Bethnal Green Road.’
Right away, I’ve put it together: I’ve got names, and it was Evans’s bird that George was getting hold of. He was a face – he used to burn warehouses down for the Jewish mob and things like that. Apart from that, I’d never met him or seen him before. But now Charlie’s talking to them about their bent gear: ‘Don’t take it to no one else, bring it to me and I’ll give you a good deal.’ They said they’d bring it round straight after they’d done Attenborough’s, the jeweller’s.
I was told that on that Saturday, as luck would have it, a car door opened, Marks and Evans came out two-handed and started walking towards Bethnal Green Road. The people who were on their case and keeping watch on their movements followed them at a distance, tailed them down the back, near a church. The rest of the firm was already in the jeweller’s, two-handed inside. They had already been in there, apparently, and had come out. It was fate, really.
When they got to where the Repton Club was, just past The Carpenter’s Arms (the Kray twins’ local), one of the street lights was out. That’s where Marks was done. Evans ran round the street and hung underneath a lorry, got his legs up and held on.
Evans went home to his wife, Pat, and said, ‘You nearly got me fuckin’ killed tonight!’ He was putting his fingers through the bullet holes in his coat because he’d held Marks up as a shield.
‘Who was it?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t know who the fuck it was! It was too dark there, I couldn’t see!’
That was as far as it went at the time.
Years later, when we were interviewed by the police, George had carried on his relationship with Pat for twelve years or so. All she had to do was tell the truth: Evans had come home, put his finger through the bullet holes in his coat and said he didn’t know who had done it. It was too dark and it happened too quickly, he couldn’t identify anybody. Evans didn’t know – he would have said so if he did.
But would she do it? She wouldn’t make a statement because she was frightened of this fucking Evans (below, pointing to a bullet hole near Attenborough’s jeweller’s). He used to batter her and beat her up, and lock her in. He was a sick, wicked bastard. He’d already cut someone’s thumb off because the guy put his hand down when he went for his bollocks. That was someone else he’d accused of having it off with her.
She didn’t help one fucking bit. I never spoke to her or had anything much to do with her after that.
It’s funny because, when Evans was in the nick in the seventies, he had three witnesses who were after a bit of parole. One made a statement to the effect that Alf Gerard, who was on a different wing, was trying to get someone to poison Evans’s food.
Evans was in for stabbing this Scottish kid, who was down in London with his girlfriend. He chased him round his car over a row with his new French wife and stabbed him to death. He was charged with murder but they reduced it to manslaughter after he said, ‘I’ll tell you who was in the car that night’ on the Ginger Marks case. So he rolled over and they gave him seven years.
He was up in court to give evidence on two trials that I faced. The judges were the ones who’d just weighed off the Guildford Four for thirty years apiece. The jury just couldn’t agree in Court Two, so we went to Court One in front of John Donaldson, who was made Master of the Rolls afterwards.
Two coppers gave evidence but put the wrong date at the top of it – they said 6 January instead of the 8th (which it was), but they’d never interviewed anyone then. They’d written down the answers on the questionnaires – ‘Foreman said follow them down this road, don’t get too close.’ I’m supposedly giving instructions from the back of the car, but they didn’t realise they’d dated it on a clean sheet of paper.
We had a great QC, Louis Hawser: ‘You conducted the interview, you dated it, you timed it, question and answer … Okay, show us your notebook. Please sit down and don’t leave the court.’
He called the other copper in so the first one couldn’t mark his card. They’d already given this evidence at the magistrates’ court prior to its going to the Old Bailey, so it was previously quoted.
‘Just look up into the corner, where you put the date. Can you read it out?’
As soon as he read the date, he realised: they’d made the statements out days before they ever arrested Ronnie Everett, Alf Gerard or Jerry Callaghan. Mine was, ‘No comment – no comment – no comment,’ but on their statement there was all this ‘verbal’. Then they put the wrong fucking date on it! Of course it had to be thrown out.
We’re all eating at the Jack of Clubs restaurant here. On the right of this picture (overleaf) is my barmaid from The Prince of Wales, Maggie Furminger. Her husband Terry was my customer, worked in the print.
When Biggsy (Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs) escaped from Wandsworth in 1965 I looked after him, had him holed up. His wife Charmian was down on the coast. When he was most wanted, I took him down to see her before they split up because they wanted to get out of the country. Maggie got the passport for Charmian and she went out as Maggie Furminger; Biggsy went out as Terry Furminger at a later date.
I got Biggsy out via a boat at London Bridge. Charmian wasn’t so recognisable as she wasn’t wanted – there weren’t any posters up. But Biggsy had to have his face done. I put him on an old tramper going over to Antwerp. I gave Maggie five hundred quid to get the pictures done and get a passport. Then I got Ronnie King to get Biggsy another passport when he went from Australia.
I went on holiday to Jamaica with the wife and kids. While I was up in the plane, Ronnie Everett, Alfie Gerard and Jerry Callaghan went round to the lock-up I used to have in Herne Hill – we had vans, Post Office uniforms, cutting gear and shotguns. They went there to tune up a Ford Zephyr and the Old Bill walked in on them. Two coppers wanted to look at the cars, and they had a fucking fight. It finished up in the office using chairs and God knows what.
They got away; some women were pulling out of a turning and they pulled them out of the car, nicked it and drove off. A gas gun was fired; it wasn’t a real gun, but they were wanted for attempted shooting of the police. The coppers tried to nick me for it, too, but I’d been on my way to Jamaica. My poor old sister-in-law, Nell, was held in the kitchen with an Alsatian dog in her face.
The firm were holed up and I had to get them out to Australia the same way as Biggsy, who’d already been out there for years. They bought houses, had businesses: a trucking business, hardware shops. So they got established.
But then the satellite pictures came over of Biggsy and Eric Flower, a pal of ours who used to come to work with us. Suddenly, they’re all on the television and they get nicked out there. Biggsy was the only one who escaped; he got to Brazil. Otherwise he’d have got his thirty years because Paul Seabourn, who helped him escape over the wall into the furniture vehicle, was taken into the nick three times. He knew where he was; he put him in the flat. I said, ‘We’ve got to move him, I don’t like it.’ They got Seabourn a fourth time, so I went up there and moved Biggsy and Eric to another safe house. It was my own fucking flat I put them in, on the Kennington Estate!
Next thing I know, they’ve kicked the door in of the flat underneath. It’s a bit close to home. I knew Seabourn in Leicester when he was doing a ten-stretch there, so he hadn’t been out that long.
The lady on the right (overleaf) is Mary Gorbell. Her husband Bill worked for Tommy Wisbey and myself in the Borough. Mary used to work in the champagne bar at the races, where she was known as ‘Marilyn’. Bill Gorbell was a good settler; he settled the bets. Tommy Wisbey was running the front counter. I had other betting shops at Nunhead Lane, Brixton Hill and Croydon Lane. Nosher Powell was minder of this restaurant, the Jack of Clubs, and he did a lot of film work as an extra.
Round the corner from my pub was the Marshalsea, which was a dosshouse. A row of houses had been converted into a prison, back in the seventeenth century, and now all the old dossers had their beds there. It still had the old windows and it’s still standing today – you can go and see it. But it had quite a lot of floors in it, so I thought I’d open a gym in there. I had a twenty-three-year lease on it – I took it over and converted the whole building.
Down in the basement, in the mid-sixties, I had recording studios and rehearsal rooms. I had the Small Faces down there, Cat Stevens, the Spencer Davis Group. My nephew, Eddie Hardin, who went to school with my Gregory, was a natural musician. He wasn’t a streetwise kid, but when it came to music he could play anything.
When Steve Winwood left in 1967, Spencer Davis wanted someone to take his place; I took Eddie up on audition and he got the job! He could sing and play keyboards exactly like Winwood; you couldn’t tell the difference. I got him to audition for the job down at the old cinema in Barnes, where they did the rehearsals and recording, with Shirley Bassey’s arranger. I paid £1,500 for the session, which was a lot of money then. But, when Spencer took him on, the kid made a shitload of money and I never got a penny back!
When the Spencer Davis Group split up in 1968, Eddie and Pete York, the drummer, formed their own band. They were having number-one hits in Germany; he bought a house in Sunningdale with great big columns and top-of-the-range motors. He did all right for himself.
I could have been an impresario. I could spot talent when I saw it, and I could have nurtured it. Crime was only a business. To me, the worst crime was for a man to bring his family up in poverty, but how you get your money is another matter.
My Maureen used to say, ‘When you gonna stop this? Why don’t you stop now? We’ve got enough.’ But I would say to her, ‘It’s only business.’ I should have listened to her. We had six betting shops and the 211 Club in Balham, which was fucking massive – it’s the Polish Embassy today. It was Lady Hamilton’s house, which Nelson bought for her. It had a ballroom at the side of it, where I put a boxing show on – that’s how big it was. But the police from Tooting stopped it because the twins came over: ‘What’s the twins doin’ on our patch?’
This is Mark Rowe, a good light middleweight, with Maureen and me at my Chaps gym. Next to him is Phil Lundrigan from the Boxing Board of Control; he was ringside all the time. And of course that’s Dave Charnley (right), ‘the Dartford Destroyer’, who should have been a world champion when he fought Joe Brown for the title.
This is Tim Riley on the right. He was the editor of Boxing News; next to him is Ron Oliver, who was a boxing writer; Bill Chevalier (in the ring) was Rowe’s trainer; Gordon W. Prange (ringside, second from left) was the author of a book called Tora! Tora! Tora!, which they made into a film about Pearl Harbor and made him a shitload of money.
The first time Frank Mitchell (overleaf) got a conviction he’d stolen a bike. But his father never took him round the house and said, ‘Give him the bike back’ – he took him to the police station and got him nicked. That was the first time he had a brush with the law, so his father didn’t do him any favours. I suppose that traumatised him a little bit.
He wasn’t a well boy. They certified him and he went to Rampton, the secure hospital in Nottinghamshire. I don’t know what they sent him there for, but it must have been serious. He was notorious in prison for attacking screws and prisoners: cutting them, breaking ribs with bear hugs. Frank was immensely strong, but with a twelve-year-old’s brain, chucking his toys out the pram.
He was very vicious and stabbed a friend of mine, Bruce Reynolds, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery, in the bathhouse. Bruce kept a lid on that, never wanted to talk about it. Mitchell was charged, but he went to magistrates’ court and was found not guilty. I suppose there were no other witnesses, but Bruce was badly attacked.
Ronnie Kray paled Mitchell up when he was doing four years in Wandsworth. Mitchell terrorised the whole nick. The screws were frightened of him; it took a lot to control him. He’d go in the gym and, if someone could lift a certain weight, he’d up it ten times – he had to be the number one at everything.
He’d escaped with a fella from Rampton nuthouse; they were called ‘the mad axemen’ for terrorising people, breaking into their houses with axes. But they were captured and got the birch for punishment. They couldn’t handle Mitchell there so he went to Broadmoor. Fuck me if he doesn’t escape again!
He gets himself an axe for the second time and terrorises an old couple – nicks their money, their jewellery, their Ford Fiesta (though I wouldn’t have thought he could drive it). He’s recaptured and the next time he escapes is from Dartmoor. They let him go down to the village there and he was treating everyone in the pub. He’d apparently been fucking a schoolmistress in a barn there and going to buy budgerigars. They never searched him. He had a charmed life there; the governor was very easy on him. No screws were allowed in his cell, though he had a knife he was going around with.
But in late 1966 the twins told him they’d take him back to London, where they’d campaign for his freedom. Now, he’s regarded as the most dangerous criminal to escape. They’ve got the Army out on the moor with loaded rifles, looking for him – they’re going to shoot him on sight. The press are covering him: ‘Lock up your women and children, your dogs and cats. Lock up your home. Don’t step outside the house.’ They’ve got these cartoons of him under bridges like a fucking big ape or monster.
And of course he’s still got the knife on him – he showed it to Albert Donoghue, who threw it away with his clothing on the way back from the Moor. They take him into this house with Billy Exley and Scotch Jack Dickson as minders. They were sleeping all over the place since there was only one bedroom: on the floor, on the settee. He was kicking off all the time – he was going over to see the twins’ mother, or his own mother. They sent out for some fish and chips; they never got him a saveloy, so he fucking kicks off again. He’s got to win every game of cards. He’s doing press-ups and chinning the bar; he’s picking them up by their belts above his head.
And now he wants to go out and get himself a bird. So they get him a hostess and he’s fucking the life out of her. She’s only supposed to be there one night but becomes a prisoner – for twelve days altogether. When she tried to escape out the window, he caught her and pulled her back in.
He’s cleaning his teeth every five fucking minutes, all this weird behaviour. He’s picking up this iron-framed piano on his own to show how strong he is. Reggie Kray once went to see him and he got him arm wrestling – and of course he won every time. He’s a strong bastard. But now Exley is saying, ‘I’m not looking after this cunt – he’s got a fucking tool!’ He’s got a shooter on him.
Exley’s woken one morning by being tickled under the chin, and he’s looking down the barrel of his own fucking gun. Mitchell has gone down his pockets and found the shooter – none of which the twins or anybody else mentioned to me. He’s carrying one of the kitchen knives as well and has sworn to take six coppers with him rather than go back to prison, because he’ll never get out after this.
‘I want to live out in the country with Ronnie,’ he says, because Ronnie has bullshitted him: ‘No one will know you there.’ Like Of Mice and Men: ‘Tell me about the rabbits, George.’ He’s in this dreamworld and thinks he’s going to get away with it. No way is he going to give himself up – there are six bullets in the gun. So, he’s become a complete liability. They’ve come to me to ask what I can do to help them. Like a fucking idiot, I stood for it.
When I’ve come to take him down to the country, to see what can be done with him, as he comes out of the door with Albert there’s a fucking copper walking towards him. Mitchell panicked. As Albert said in his book The Enforcer, he had to calm him down: ‘He won’t recognise you – he’ll recognise me.’ The copper just kept on walking, took no notice. He was lucky that he never said, ‘Excuse me, sir …’
He’d have been a goner.
Mitchell gets in the back of the van and pulls out the fucking shooter! I’ve got my back to him, talking to Donoghue in the front. He’s saying, ‘We want to go through the tunnel – we go straight down ’ere and turn right …’
Then all I hear is, ‘Look what I’ve got!’
Alf Gerard’s gone mad. He’s sitting on the other side and, Mitchell being the nutty bastard that he is, there’s got to be a shootout now.
Right, then, I’ll stop there and sling him out.
But he went straight to the back of the fucking van. It wasn’t intended for anything to happen there: it was too close to the house we’d just walked out of. It was ridiculous: there were neighbours either side and if they stood on the pavement they could see him get into the back.
When I got to Leicester Prison, the governor came to see me in the cell, with the chief warden and the top brass: ‘Foreman, if it’s true what you did regarding the Mitchell case, you need a medal the size of a dustbin lid.’
That’s the fucking governor of the nick!
But they were cunning bastards, the twins. They never told me about him having a gun. They wouldn’t go to see him themselves. Ronnie was in hiding because he’d spoken to a copper in the pub and taped it all – who’d wanted twenty-five quid a week for letting him drink in the pub, or some shit. He should never have done that, the silly fella, but he was hiding because he’d never give evidence against anyone, even a copper. Which is right.
So, that was the situation and they left me to deal with it – but it was after the work they did with the Marks thing, over George. They’d also put one of our people from the Battle of Bow into Dr Blasker’s surgery and cleared him up with an alibi – he might have got a fifteen, you don’t know how much bird he’d have got otherwise. So, that was a big favour I owed them for helping my friend out of trouble. I was truly indebted, and they’d looked after me when I’d had it on my toes from south London; they put me in the Colony Club as well. So there were quite a few reasons why I should help them out.
That’s Maureen, Ronnie and me with George Raft when I had The Prince of Wales, but that was later on in the 1960s. Like James Cagney, New York-born movie actor Raft was originally a song-and-dance man before becoming associated with gangster roles – most notably in support to Paul Muni in the original classic film version of Scarface (1932). When they brought all the gaming machines over, I was the first customer of the American Gabe Foreman (same name as mine) for the one-armed bandits. They were illegal then, but we put them in all the little cafés and drinkers. Frankie Fraser and Eddie Richardson got into it as well, but we were the first. They were our rivals; they had a place in Wardour Street.
When I opened a casino in the early 1960s, the 211 Club in Balham, George Raft came over for the opening. The Nashes, the twins and I had been drawing money out of George’s Colony Club. That was how it worked, like in New York – you had to have the three firms, who all got their bit out of anything.
George was respected as an actor; he’d made loads of films. But that night I asked him: ‘Who was the main man who gave you help, George?’ He said it was a Yorkshireman, Owney Madden. He was the one who went to America and opened the Cotton Club. (They made a film about it, with Bob Hoskins playing him, and his mate Frenchie was Fred Gwynne from The Munsters.) Madden got Carnera the boxer over from Italy; he got Mae West and put her in shows. The big musicals were on Broadway but the Cotton Club was in Harlem, with all the top bands there – black musicians who had to come in the back door, as that was the way it was run then. ‘I rode shotgun with him when he used to take the booze down to different places [in the twenties],’ said George. He was walking across the pavement when a rival gang opened up on them and shot two guys; he was right there in the thick of it.
The twins wound up with some American people who were wrong ’uns – they were slipped into them. When they opened the Colony Club, Meyer Lansky (the Mafia’s Jewish financier) was behind it. George Raft was just the frontman, the meeter and greeter. It was run by Lansky’s firm: Dino and Eddie Cellini, the two brothers who are mentioned by Hyman Roth (Mario Puzo’s fictionalised version of Lansky) as Dino and Eddie Pennino in The Godfather: Part II (1974) – ‘I’ll have them running the casino’ – when it’s his birthday and he’s cutting the cake. They were real people; they used to run Lansky’s casinos. I would go over and meet Dino. We used to walk round the street and he’d give me the envelope, for the twins and me, and the Nashes. We were copping a bit of money. We’d get it one time, the Nashes would draw it another – so we knew what they were fucking getting!
The twins were the worst trouble because they kept going down the Colony Club, taking fucking ugly people with scars down their faces and ruining the gaff. So, to keep their licence going, they put an ex-Old Bill on the door. He was photographing everyone coming in and out, getting them to sign the register. I met Dino outside: ‘We’ve got to stop them coming down, Fred, bringing all these fucking villains down here! We’re here to keep ’em out!’
Sinatra had been down there and they wanted to meet him and all the Hollywood actors. They wanted to be up the front, they couldn’t keep away. I was trying to keep a low profile and go legitimate with the betting shops, the casino and the clubs, kids in boarding schools; I was trying to be a straight-goer.
The Krays did help some people, but they were strong-arming most. They didn’t do a lot of good as far as I knew. I don’t know of anyone who really benefited from knowing them. They were always bleeding people, really – in the clubs and bars they took over.
The other sidelines I had with my old firm were big, heavy bits of work but nobody knew it was us who was doing it; we kept very shtum about it all. We never started splashing our money around. The twins were the only ones who got my photograph taken with different people. We were getting invited out to all these dinners – bowtie, dressed up. Of course the women loved it, but we didn’t want to go. They were getting us involved in these sorts of things, which was our downfall, really: being associated with them all. We should have kept ourselves to ourselves, low-profile.
Ronnie Kray went over to New York in April 1968, the month before the twins got nicked, but it was the Yanks who took him there – the undercover-copper grasses. They were showing him where the St Valentine’s Day Massacre took place – which made them look like cunts, as it was in Chicago!
We raised a load of money up the river for the British Olympic Boxing Team to go to Mexico in ’68, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been represented in a lot of divisions – which was a liberty, really. Mickey Regan and I were going out there. That’s John H. Stracey on the left, the Olympic champion, and Johnny Cheshire to my left, who was around me quite a lot down the pub and the 211 Club. Nicky Carter, on the end, wound up with his own company in the City. I had tickets to go to the Olympics but couldn’t do it – I’d got fucking nicked with the twins! But Mickey went and while he was out there he got Montezuma’s revenge. He wound up in the hospital with food poisoning and nearly died.
After the Colony Club, the twins fucked up everything that they touched: the casino in Knightsbridge; getting mixed up with politicians – they’ve put an additional thirty-year notice on some of the evidence surrounding that because it’s too fucking hot. With the Lord Boothby business – and more on that later.
Ronnie didn’t hide the fact that he was what he was. He came over to my pub: ‘Ooh, I like these little bank robbers you got over ’ere!’
‘Now, don’t you fuckin’ start all that!’ I said.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying; I thought it was a joke. But the twins used to argue like two fucking women: ‘You bitch!’, ‘You slag!’ You don’t call a man a ‘slag’ – or at least you didn’t in those days.
All the firm used to call them ‘Gert and Daisy’, or ‘the Brothers Grim’. But they were vicious and evil, wicked bastards. They were in their own fucking world that they couldn’t see out of, and they thought they were something special. There was nothing special about them, but they met Sinatra’s son, Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, Billy Daniels – all these American people. They were becoming famous and believing their own hype.
The Twins had these parties where everyone was constantly going off to the bedrooms. It was all too much for me. I couldn’t get out of there quick enough!
They were all off in the bedrooms, having their nonsense. Dingdong Del and I seemed like the only straightgoers there. I said to him, ‘This is not for me!’
Frankie Warren, the promoter’s father, was there that night, too. He said to me in the toilet, ‘What the fuckin’ ’ell’s goin’ on ’ere?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it, would you?’ I said.
Priests and politicians, it’s a different world out there. They’re just dealing with it now: I knew a girl who worked in the Home Secretary’s office and she said one of them was a paedophile. This was back when I had the pub. I said, ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t wanna know.’ But it won’t die; it keeps raising its ugly head.
The reason the Krays killed Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie in 1967 was that they wanted him to go and kill Leslie Payne. (Payne was the Krays’ financial adviser, who introduced them to long-firm fraud. He became their enemy after removing himself from the Kray firm.) But he never did it, because the place where Payne lived was security-controlled. So, he’s taken money for it and he’s done the money on booze and drugs: ‘You’re off the fucking firm now. Fuck off, Jack!’
Sometime later they meet him; they’ve made a decision to take him back. But, before they told him he could come back, he’s got a little team round him and he’s running around saying, ‘I’m gonna do the twins!’ He even mentioned it to me at one stage.
‘Don’t talk like that, Jack,’ I told him.
‘I’m not fuckin’ frightened of them. I’ll fuckin’ shoot ’em!’ Then he’s at my club in Balham. I get called out and he’s having it out with the croupier – but, before I get there, he throws his knife under a table, where a couple are sitting. It was a Scottish boxer and his wife, having a drink and something to eat from our free buffet.
I said, ‘Come on, Jack, get out! I wanna speak to you.’
‘What, and get a bullet in the ’ead, like Ginger Marks?’
‘Never mind about that. I’m goin’ downstairs to have a light ale. I’ll give you ten minutes and, when I come back, I wanna see you gone. Get out of ’ere and don’t come back again!’
He’d pulled his knife on the croupier because he’d done his money, he thought he’d been robbed. The people with him were a little crew from over Notting Hill. They were all round the table, gambling: ‘Come on, Jack, you better go.’
‘I ain’t fuckin’ goin’ …’
‘You’d better go ’cos it’s serious, you’ll get ’urt. We don’t want no trouble ’ere …’
They talked him out of it, the bastard!
So this gets around and everyone is saying he misbehaved at the 211 Club. Ronnie Kray gets to hear of it and he’s going off. So this is going on behind the scenes and then Jack goes to the Regency Jazz Club (a popular venue in Stoke Newington, where he lived), but I didn’t find this out until twenty fucking years later!
Bertie Summers and another guy were on the door; Bertie later met me in my Gregory’s pub, The Punchbowl, and wrote on a piece of paper exactly what happened that night. Jack came to the door; he was drunk and they wouldn’t let him in. Under his coat he had a sawn-off; there was a bit of a scuffle on the door.
‘Any of them Krays in there? I’m gonna fuckin’ shoot ’em! Any of the firm in there?’ he said.
He was going to shoot someone. They struggled with him. The gun went off and blew a fucking hole in the door!
Well, Reggie Kray was in there – he was sitting at the end of the bar, rotten drunk. This was after his wife Frances had died and he was drinking himself into a stupor. If Jack had gone in there he’d have shot Reggie, that’s for sure. But they forced him out and got the gun off him. They put the gun in the cloakroom.
Reggie came down and said, ‘What was all that about?’
‘Some drunk tryin’ to gatecrash.’
They hushed it all up, didn’t say it was Jack at all.
FRANK: Reggie (above, with Freddie, Charlie, Henry Cooper and Sulky Gower) wasn’t ‘the man’; he seemed to be more and more in thrall to Ronnie. He was taking a lot of purple hearts. That’s why he got involved with McVitie, who was always taking them, and that’s why McVitie was saying silly things. Not only that but he was drinking more. He was going out drinking with Tommy Cowley at the nightclub where Nosher Powell used to be the doorman. I heard him shouting there one night. I don’t know what was happening, but some people were ducking him by then.
FREDDIE: Reggie went away, satisfied, but word got around. So, they got him on the phone and said, ‘Come back, Jack, we got some work for you to do.’
But he turned round in front of the two of them and said, ‘You’ve only got me back on the firm because I come out to shoot you the other night!’
Reggie and Ronnie looked at each other as if to say, are you fucking sure? Now they know what happened on the door: Reggie would have been a goner.
So, of course now they’re plotting to do him. They got Tony and Chrissie Lambrianou to bring him to a party, but what cunts they were! They had a roomful of people, young girls and young boys! I think they intended to batter him and really hurt him, but not to kill him. Still, they did say, ‘Bring the gun.’ But all the guns they had were from the Yanks, and they were fucking useless. That geezer was giving them all duds! (The mysterious American Alan Bruce Cooper was the Krays’ armourer by this point.)
Knowing Ronnie, I reckon he might have gone through with it, but now they were going to batter McVitie. They had a screaming match with him first of all. Then Ronnie smashed a glass in his face.
Jack’s taken his coat off to have a fight with them; he’s got a silk-lined waistcoat on. One witness statement said Reggie was pushing a knife in and it was bending in the silk lining, so it wasn’t going in. Then the other witnesses were saying he went out the room and they told him to fuck off, but he came back in to have a fight with them.
Jack was that type of fella, all pilled up. He could have walked out of the room that night, but instead he came back in to have a row. Because he could have a fight, Jack, he could walk on his hands around the room – he was strong, with powerful shoulders. In that Krays film (1990), he was a frail little weakling, but he was fitter and stronger than they were. He had no fat on him and he was on amphetamines all the time.
But there was no premeditation among the people who brought him, the Lambrianous and Ronnie Bender. Bender was silly because he got the knife from the kitchen for Reggie – that’s why he got twenty years, whereas Tony and Chrissie got fifteen. Bender joined in the fight with Jack as well; even two little croupiers were having it in the fight until it got really serious. That’s when they realised it had got out of hand. They reproduced their statements in Martin Fido’s book, The Krays: Unfinished Business, which confirmed that the twins didn’t really want to kill him that night.
They tore Ronnie Hart (the Krays’ cousin) to pieces in the witness box because it wasn’t him who came over to me: it was that little bastard who ran with them, Tommy Cowley. He was the one who came with Charlie.
Lant Street was right off the Borough and there on the corner was my pub. Hart said they parked on the corner and he saw Charlie go round to me; I opened the window up and looked out; I opened the door and let him in – for him to tell me they’d dropped Jack McVitie’s body down in Bermondsey, the other side of the Borough.
They put it on my plate. They were supposed to go round Cazenove Road, near where Jack the Hat was murdered, and throw the body onto the railway track – that’s what Ronnie Kray told them to do. But instead of that they drove him from Stoke Newington, through Dalston and Bethnal Green, right down through the Rotherhithe Tunnel via Commercial Road, out through the tunnel, and dropped him right round the corner from my pub!
How they did it at two or three in the morning and got away with it, I don’t know. They just dumped him outside this church, where there had been a wedding the previous weekend.
The Krays went mad when they found out what they’d done. That’s when they knocked up Charlie and got him out of bed to come over to tell me.
Hart couldn’t possibly have seen this happen from where he said he was. He said I’d put my head out of a window, which was screwed down, where it was used as a broom cupboard. He knocked on the door of the pub, which never had a knocker on it (it had a bell at the top, which you had to stand on the step to reach). There were so many discrepancies. It was impossible, given the map of it all, for him to see round corners. Where he said he’d parked was too far back, so all his evidence was fucked.
But they accepted his evidence, and then Harry Hopwood came in afterwards and said that, after the murder, Reggie Kray went back to his flat with a cut hand. They bandaged his hand up and then Hart fell asleep on the settee. He stayed there all night and didn’t get up till the morning – and yet he’s supposed to be coming over to my pub.
It was that little bastard Cowley – and they got the information out of him because he walked out of the case and got about six months. So he definitely rolled over and helped them, without a doubt. I never saw him again.
Bender made a statement as well, about bringing the body over and leaving it there. But they’re all in the nick with me, making out that they’re shtum and have said nothing. All three of them had made statements, and it didn’t come out until all those years later when it came into the public domain. Fido got it from the Home Office. If they’d have produced that evidence, it wouldn’t have been a premeditated murder: it would have been a row at a party that went wrong. But they never produced the prosecution statements, which was wrong. They should have given it to the defence counsel – that’s how the Guildford Four would get out, because the prosecution never produced their statements.
And the fucking forensic evidence was laughable! The forensics officer said they dragged the canal, but got to a bridge and couldn’t move because the council had put bollards there. But the firm went down there and threw the gun and the knife, wrapped in a tea towel, into the canal.
The divers go down there and come up with a gun with a hollow wooden barrel. It had a faulty mechanism. If that gun had been in there for the eighteen months since the crime was committed, it’d been in there twenty years and eighteen months! Someone must have thrown it away after the Second World War. It had disintegrated, whereas the gun would have been in one piece and the butt would still have been intact.
The things the prosecution got away with were unbelievable. The trial was a farce from start to finish. I was amazed at the evidence they were bringing against me from this bloody Hart. I knew he hadn’t been there and it was completely false. Okay, the rest of it was true, but how did they fucking know this? It had to have come from Tommy Cowley, who ended up in Brixton Prison with Charlie. Reggie, Ron, myself and all the others were put into Wandsworth. Simply put, Cowley was a spy for the police.
As for Jack, he got a burial at sea.
Later, they even tried to put Lord Lucan down to me! John Pearson said he left his car at Newhaven and that was the last they saw of him. He left ten grand behind to pay off these criminals to get him out of the country, and he left across the Channel. But supposedly he was shot, and Pearson referred to this little ‘facility’ of Freddie Foreman’s in The Times. There was a picture of me and everything, trying to put it on my plate!
I was in the nick when it happened, doing a ten for Jack the Hat.
FRANK: Freddie was a schtummer. Even Nipper Read, who nicked the Krays, didn’t know who Freddie Foreman was – that was how deep he was. And if he had a big tickle, say, for fifty grand or a hundred grand of gold bars, he’d keep the same old car, wouldn’t look flash, do his own thing.
He had his pubs and mansion houses, he’d stick money into them, but everyone who didn’t know him just thought he was a good bussinessman. He never let on; he kept a low profile.
In his book, Gangsters, Guns and Me, Jamie Foreman blames Reggie and Ronnie for getting him nicked with The Hat. It was all a fit-up, but he got away with a lot of other things.