I went in the Army on 7 May 1957. I used to come down to London from Leeds a lot because my Auntie Frances lived in Kensington – when I was a kid she wanted to adopt me. So, I used to wander round London when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen … I would buy my shoes and shirts in good shops; my parents were tailors, so I was always suited and booted, always smart.
I did my National Service from 1957–59. I first used to go into the Krays’ Double R club in ’57. I went in there with a couple of younger lads, who were stationed with me. That was the first time I saw Reg and Ron. When I went to the toilet and one of them was there, I couldn’t work out how he beat me back so quickly; he just seemed to appear. That was the first time I set eyes on both of them.
And I kept going down to London – I used to go to my auntie’s if we had a forty-eight-hour leave pass. I’d go down to the club where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies worked.
When I came out of the Army, I went back to training a little bit, played a bit of rugby. But I got out of that as I was coming to London too much. I found a mentor called Joe Freeman – ‘Cockney Joe’ – who used to be a very good card sharp. He used to work card games in clubs all over Britain; he’d put a ‘combination’ in a shoe – in a baccarat shoe or a chemy shoe there are about eight packs, but he used to do combinations so he knew what was coming out and he’d always win.
That’s what I used to do for years and years – Jack Spot was his minder before me, during the war. So, I’m staying down in London with Joe. He’d tell me, ‘See me later, see me sparingly.’ He never wanted me to get too pally with the Krays: ‘Keep them at arm’s length ’cos they’ll turn on you.’
‘I’m not bumming myself up, but I can take care of them!’ I said.
I didn’t see the strength of them, but I said if they were street fighters I could bang ’em both. But I used to listen to him and, when I’d see them, after ten minutes I’d have to step away from them. I always had a few quid on me, but they could never get into me. I’d never get involved because I could always make my own money. Even then, when they were in their twenties, I could see the way they were going; the only thing the Krays did was use. They used you and abused you, and that was all they ever did.
When the Krays started the firm, they all said that they demanded the first billiard hall and blagged that fellow. But I’ve got the contract at home where the Krays signed for the billiard hall on a proper deal. It was never blagged, they never fannied him, they paid him so much a week – but that was the only time they ever did.
In the other club they had, The Hideaway, they were like squatters. They were taken to court over Hew McCowan (the twins were remanded on a charge of demanding money with menaces in 1965). They had cards printed – ‘Ronnie & Reg Kray’ – but they never put any money in. I want to put this over so you can get the size of them: they were just thugs. People talk about the Regency Club, where they lured Jack the Hat from, but that wasn’t theirs: it was run by two brothers called Barry. The Krays blagged them, they were frightened to death. The twins just used to move in and take over. The only club where they put anything in – it was a grand, God knows how – was Esmeralda’s Barn. Freddie can tell you: he got them that club, not their financial adviser Leslie Payne.
I met a chap who was their godfather, name of Geoff Allan. He was a builder in Surrey, Essex, all over the place. His buildings were all grand but occasionally he’d set fire to one and burn it down. He was their mentor and any time there were any murders – McVitie or any of the others – they’d go to see Geoff at his mansion.
Geoff died in ’98. I got most of the photos in this section of the book from him.
When Ronnie escaped from Long Grove mental hospital in Epsom in 1958, he stopped at Geoff Allan’s. They had a photo of them in a big farm kitchen. In those days Ronnie had his hair cut short at the sides and so did Reggie, so that they could swap places (Ronnie’s escape from mental hospital was effected by Reggie pretending to be him).
Geoff was the man who told them what to do. The morning they got nicked in ’68, Mrs Kray phoned him up because she was staying at his big mansion in Hadleigh, Suffolk, in a cottage in the grounds. The twins were at her London flat – that was where they got nicked. She said, ‘Can you get down here, Geoff? There’s loads of stuff of Reggie and Ron’s, all photos.’ If the police had got hold of them, it’d be like having a birthday.
So he sent Terry Stace down, who was his right-hand man. They kept the photos and eventually Geoff bestowed all 300 to me. Most of them have never been seen.
Geoff Allan bought Gedding Hall, a big mansion in Suffolk. Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones’ bassist, lives there now. In his book, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss, he says that when he went to buy the house he looked on the mantelpiece and there was a photo of the Kray twins. Geoff said, ‘I’m their godfather.’
He bought the house for £42,000 in 1969, and it’s worth about £8 million now. But this is the strangest thing: when The Hat was killed in the basement where they were having a party, there were about twenty other people there, including Geoff Allan and his wife, Annie. They left the party about an hour before the murder.
But, when he found out what Reggie had done, Allan went berserk: ‘You fucking clowns! What are you doing?’
There were two ‘Kray firms’, as the papers called them. The first was from 1960–65, and then there was a second, from 1965–68. But I must say many of the stories were smoke and mirrors; a lot of it didn’t happen. They wanted to put out that they knew John Bindon, but they never did. I knew John well – coming out of borstal, getting nicked for this and that. He’d just got into films in ’65 when they started murdering and Bindon didn’t want to know them.
(Bindon was a thug, convicted killer and sometime lover of Princess Margaret. But he was also a character actor, taking supporting roles in the classic Brit-gangster movies Performance and Get Carter, and also appeared in The Sweeney TV series.)
The original Kray firm at the Double R club was the two Osbournes: George ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne and Colin ‘Duke’ Osbourne, who was known as Pasha. He was Freddie Foreman’s pal but they almost got nicked together over a consignment of puff (Freddie later found out in the newspaper that he’d killed himself). Then there were John H. Squibby, Dicky Moughton, Billy Donovan (who was at the billiard hall when they went there to fight with some dockers – he was one of them and some were badly hurt), Fat Pat Connolly, Tommy Brown, Dickie Morgan and Mickey Fawcett. Fawcett wrote a book (Krayzy Days, 2014) that’s really thin, but tells a lot of stories. He was close to them, as was Teddy Smith, but pulled away after the first murder when he realised he didn’t want to know. They tried to kill him after that.
The second Kray firm was from 1965–68: Chrissie and Tony Lambrianou, Ian Barrie, ‘Scotch Jack’ Dickson, Cornelius Whitehead, Ronnie Bender, Albert Donoghue and Ronnie Hart (who used to work together) and the three Teale brothers: Bobby, David and Alfie.
Then there were ‘floaters’, who weren’t on the firm but did their own thing: Harry ‘Jew Boy’ Cope, Bobby Clark, Billy Exley, Eric Mason (who was a pal of mine), the two brothers Teddy Berry (the boxer, who had his leg shot off) and ‘Checker’ Berry, whose proper name was Henry – he used to go checking the merchandise on boats on the Thames.
Bobby Teale wrote a good book (Bringing Down the Krays, 2013), but he said Frosty, Ronnie’s driver, was killed – Frosty was still alive a fucking year ago! I’ve got the trial papers here and I can see what’s happened: on the day after Ronnie killed George Cornell, the oldest Teale brother went secretly to the law and grassed ’em. He got hold of Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, who did the Train Robbers. All they kept saying to him was, ‘Don’t mention homosexuals in your statement’ because of what happened with Lord Boothby and Tom Driberg (respectively, Conservative and Labour MPs, both part of Ronnie Kray’s gay underworld – Boothby notoriously so, as he was brazen enough to win a £40,000 libel payout from the Sunday Mirror for associating him with the Krays in 1964).
There was a big fear the Boothby story could bring the Government down. There was a news editor, Derek Jameson, who said, ‘We’ve got the Krays, we’ve got ’em now!’ And his editor said, ‘Don’t do anything, leave ’em alone’ – and the police backed off for two years. But Tommy Butler was into it; he got a load of information and all of a sudden, after a year, it went missing. It rattled him; it shocked him. Nobody mentioned it in court in ’69, but they should have asked Nipper Read, ‘Why didn’t you have a statement from the man who was dealing with the inquiry before you?’
I was minder for Danny La Rue (he was a popular English variety artiste and drag queen) for seven years, and I took the job off the gangster Billy Howard. But I used to nip off to see the twins and sorted one or two people out for them, ‘straight’ people. One was a really big titled man, who was having it off with a bloke called Clive Peterson, who Ronnie Kray was also having it with. He didn’t get a slap, just a really nice warning.
Danny used to say, ‘Frank, I don’t mind you mixing with ’em, but you do realise …’
When Danny got his own club – from 1964–72 – they moved in to get protection money. It’s in Nipper Read’s book that an actor and his manager were about to open up to him, but, the next time he went, their solicitor was there and they wouldn’t say anything. That was Danny, and that was when I pulled away from him because I didn’t want to get in the middle of Reggie and Ronnie and him. I got pally with ’em all, but I stepped away from that.
Danny got chinned one night by Charlie Mitchell, who would turn Queen’s evidence against the Krays (for the rest of his life Danny would have a big scar on his chin). Mitchell was the one who stood up in court and laughed at the twins. He was a very wealthy man, who went to Nipper Read when he nicked ’em – ‘I’ve gotta tell you this, I’ve gotta get out of this: they’ve given me £5,000 so they can get a hitman to kill you.’
Mitchell later got killed in Spain.
I earned plenty of money with the twins, both when they were free and in prison. For the film The Krays they got a big lump, but they should have got more. They went through a couple of businessmen and me in Yorkshire; Lloyd Hume and I even had property with them in Puerto Banús.
I would go to see Mrs Kray with Cockney Joe. I used to go with him to stay at nice hotels, stop at the racecourse, and one day he said, ‘Do you want to come and see Violet?’ He used to help her out with money. He told Reggie to write to me but I couldn’t go to see him when he was in Parkhurst. He couldn’t have visitors unless they were relatives.
I started doing business with the twins again after their first book Our Story was published. It wasn’t a success, and Noelle and I had to sell a van full to market traders and second-hand book shops. But then he did others: Reg Kray’s Book of Slang (1989), Born Fighter (1991), Thoughts of Reg Kray (1991) and then, in 1993, Villains We Have Known, with me. When they were in the nick, I used to help them out left, right and centre – but you had to keep on top of ’em.
‘[Frank Kurylo] was one of the best knuckle fighters from the fifties to the seventies, and his attire was immaculate. Frank came from Leeds, so in a way it was quite unique how the London crowd took to him … Frank was a good and loyal friend to Ron and I, and still is to the present day.’ Reg Kray in Villains We Have Known (N.K. Publications, 1993)
These pictures of the twins as babies are all from the family collection. They were born on 24 October 1933, in Stean Street, Hoxton. In the previous year, their mother, Violet, had given birth to a beautiful little girl with thick black hair, who died very soon afterwards. They named her baby Violet, too.
The story is told in a book by the twins’ cousin, Rita Smith (Inside the Kray Family, 2008), but I first heard it from Laurie O’Leary, who’d written a book, A Man Among Men (2002), about his friend Ronnie. It’s believed the baby died because Charlie Kray Senior was knocking his wife around. He used to batter her, which was why Reggie and Ronnie didn’t like him. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t kill their dad – if somebody did that to my mother, I know what I’d have done to him.
The twins had healthy childhoods until they contracted diphtheria, from which Ronnie nearly died. One year later, the family moved to 178 Vallance Road, Bethnal Green.
This picture shows Ronnie and Reggie, aged eleven, on the boxing team at Daniel Street School in 1944. They’re sitting either side of the trophy holder; Reggie has a straight back.
Above left Ron and Reg are fighting each other, three years before Reggie became Great Britain Schoolboy finalist. Above right records their first public bout in Stewart’s Boxing Booth at Victoria Park in the East End, an all-comers prize-fighting contest.
One of Reg’s favourite punches was the cigarette punch. He would offer the person a cigarette and as they leaned forward for a light he would throw a left hook. But, if he looked like he was going to try it with me, I’d have a vein in my head standing out at the side when I used to tense my jaw. I knew all about boxing, inside and out.
The Krays’ pro boxing careers lasted less than six months. They turned professional on 3 July 1951 and their last fight was at the Albert Hall on 11 December 1951. About six months after that they went in the Army.
Reggie had seven fights; Ronnie had six and lost two. Later in the fifties our paths kept crossing – I couldn’t understand why they never kept training. I think Reggie would have been British champion; I don’t think he’d have been a European champion. Charlie never trained and that’s why he lost more fights than he won.
Ronnie was just wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am aggressive, didn’t put any thought into anything. Reggie was a classy boxer – he could move, slip punches, turn you round on the ropes. He had a right good trick as well: as he bounced off the ropes he would use the momentum from the ropes and meet his opponent halfway with serious force. I used to see them at the fights at York Hall and various places.
Reg and Ron with their mum, Violet, in the backyard of Vallance Road in 1950. And overleaf is the twins shortly after turning pro (1951). That’s Teddy Berry on the right, a good boxer himself, who later had his leg shot off.
Ronnie (right) aged twenty-one at the Regal Billiard Hall in 1954, with young friends. Laurie O’Leary grew up with him and he used to say to me that he could never understand the young boxing lads that he bedded, who were straight.
Reggie was fighting it. Geoff Allan said he used to take his boyfriends to whatever house he was staying at, whether Gedding Hall or in Walthamstow. They were both homosexuals, but Reggie was trying to fight it all his life. Ronnie didn’t give a shit. He once made a pass at me.
‘I’m not like that, leave me alone or we’ll end up falling out,’ I told him.
‘I was only kidding.’
‘Yeah, like fuck you were kidding!’
When I was with Danny La Rue I used to see all sorts of things – Ronnie had an affair with Danny too.
When I was managing a cabaret club in Leeds I had a singer in called Clive Peterson. He was one of Ronnie’s paramores and Ronnie was looking for him; he’d come up noth to get away from them. Clive asked me if I could straighten things up between them.
So I paled them up for a while and they had an affair for a bit. Ronnie was very jealous: if he met someone, he wanted to be with them 24/7, but he loved them to death. He was very domineering, strong, but he could never get to the next stage. In the 1973 book The Brotherhood by Leslie Payne, he says that, if they left Ronnie, he went to pieces.
He was an enigma: will the real Ronnie Kray please stand up, which is it? He was perplexing. If Ronnie made an arrangement to meet you in London in two years’ time at the cathedral, he’d be there.
With Reggie, if he made a plan, forget it! Reggie would let you down. If Ronnie made an arrangement, if he wasn’t in that state of paranoia he’d be there. Even the lads, all the villains, liked Ronnie better than Reggie.
Reg was sneaky. He always looked quizzical, always looked as if he was up to something. Ronnie was potty as heck. But Freddie Foreman said this: when Reggie hit someone on the jaw he’d always get the first punch in. Someone who could hit him back wouldn’t dare because the whole gang would jump on him. They were only 5 foot 8, 5 foot 9; they weren’t big fellas, but the two of them together were lethal.
It wouldn’t be a fair fight – I’ve seen them do all sorts.
This is Ron (overleaf, second from left) and Reg (right) when they’ve gone AWOL from National Service, on Brighton seafront. Second from right is Dickie Morgan, who turned grass on them. He laughed like a hyena, a right funny man. I didn’t see him after they went to the nick – he just disappeared. They met him in the Army and when they deserted they went to his house in the East End.
Pat Butler is left and Pat Aucott centre. Billy Webb took the photo – he did a good book (Running with the Krays, 1995), but there’s a lot of shit in it! He wrote that Ronnie killed George Cornell because Cornell once battered him in a club in the East End. That never happened. Webb was a big bull of a man, with a huge scar on his face. They battered him in a pub once, but he went on the run with them from the Army.
I did a book of twenty photos of the twins, a big leather-bound album, about 8 inches by 12. There’s a good one of them with baby Patsy Kensit (Reggie’s holding the baby) – they were friends with her dad, Jimmy.
This is the twins with their pal George Osbourne (overleaf, left), from the earliest days of the firm. Another friend stands between the two of them (Ronnie is cropped off to the right). They blagged a fella for money in Swiss Cottage – he got three years and Reggie got two for demanding money with menaces. That was when they had Esmeralda’s Barn. Ozzy used to own Le Monde club – he was to die after going swimming on Brighton Beach and choking on his own vomit.
Ronnie Kray (overleaf) on holiday in the South of France in the late 1950s. He looks very slim here. What he’d later do was drink about ten to twenty bottles of brown ale a night, and he shouldn’t have. But I always thought that nobody seemed to eat well. When I used to go out when I was young, I liked to have a meal and a few beers, but all the lads seemed to do was drink, drink, drink! And if they ordered anything it was a double spaghetti bolognese – always a double, never a single one.
They put Ronnie on pills for his schizophrenia, which may have altered his appearance, too. There was a bent doctor who used to live on the Isle of Dogs, and Ronnie used to go down there for his tablets.
This is little Gary Kray (bottom), Charlie’s boy, outside Fort Vallance, aged nine or ten, with Tommy ‘the Bear of Tottenham’ Brown. Gary was a troublemaker – I never liked him. He was always pinching off Violet and his aunties, blagging money off people.
As he got into his teens and twenties he thought he could say anything, thought he was untouchable because he was a Kray. I remember telling him, ‘If you keep saying that you’re going to get yourself and your uncles into a lot of trouble.’ He got a bit nasty with a pal of mine: he tried to borrow some money off him and said, ‘I’m going to get my uncle to shoot you.’
‘You’re going to say that to the wrong people,’ I told him.
But Mrs Kray thought the world of him.
Tommy Brown was of Gypsy stock. His wife was a fortune teller and they lived in a caravan. Before he died, he used to have a greyhound he took to Gedding Hall to see Geoff Allan.
This is Cousin Rita (right) – who later wrote a book (Inside the Kray Family, 2001) – with Mrs Kray and Reggie at the Double R club in the late fifties. Violet was a lovely lady, but all the books say she didn’t know – of course she knew what was going on! But it was sad to see her sons later go missing from her life. Rita, you couldn’t get to know – she was a bit snobbish. She used to leave you alone so I didn’t bother with her.
Reggie is with George Osbourne and Tommy Brown at the Double R in about 1960. By this time it was a very successful club.
Violet and Charlie Senior are handing over money to the British Empire Cancer Campaign in 1961. The charities were all a scam – it was all to be Mr Nice Guy! It was bollocks: half of it never got there. If they handed two grand over, the Krays would have kept a grand. But they weren’t greedy that way, if you were in with them. I had a Rolex watch given to me by Ronnie that I’ve got in my safety box now. If you showed respect for him, provided you didn’t take a liberty, he was all right. But if he could walk all over you then he fucking well would! Both of them would.
The Double R club, around 1959–60. Tony Snyder (left, with his poodle) was always pulling a gun and threatening to shoot somebody. Reggie chinned him and knocked the fuck out of him in the billiard hall. Georgie Woods (standing next to Ronnie) has a glass in his hand and a broken nose. He was a right good robber and got put on Dartmoor for ten years. See Ronnie’s hand on his shoulder: that’s to say, ‘I’m with him.’ They weren’t anybody then and Woodsy was a main face at the time.
This was at the opening of the boxing gym above the Double R, in 1961. Henry Cooper was European heavyweight champion, famous at the time, but he always claimed he didn’t know the Krays – yet there he is standing right in the middle of them. He later denied opening the club. I’ve got another few photos with Henry in them. He’d have known what they were doing, but of course they didn’t start killing till ’66.
This is an official function at Esmeralda’s Barn on the middle floor, in 1961–62. I went there a few times. It’s the site of the Berkeley Hotel now. There’s the Lord Mayor in the centre; Checker Berry on the far left; Ronald Stafford (next to him) was a county surveyor, a big pal of Freddie Foreman’s, who used to get them bullion jobs because he knew the runs, but he got nicked in 1967 when a plane in Jersey with a load of bullion was put down to him.
The Krays used to do charity shows for people – boxing charities, spina bifida charities, they’d do anything to jump in. But they’d take half the fucking money anyway! Royal Navy Commander Diamond (to the right of Ronnie) helped them get the Barn.
A drinking club in the West End, 1963. Back row, from left: Pat Butler, George Osbourne, the twins, pop singer Terry Dean and Curly King, who had a little gang of his own. Front row: Ronald Stafford, Mad Teddy Smith (behind Charlie Kray’s arm), actor Tom Yeardy, who finished up working with Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser, and Limehouse Willy – who got slashed by Teddy Berry after a falling-out at a club.
I knocked Mad Teddy Smith out. I used to go out with a girl called Cathy Donoghue (her sister Annie married Tommy Steele). She used to have a flat in Great Newport Street, just off Trafalgar Square. By this time we’d split up and I didn’t see her much. I got a call from the Black Angus steakhouse underneath Cathy. The manager says, ‘She’s upstairs, they’re having trouble with a chap.’
She had her boyfriend with her and Teddy tried to pal him up. She wanted him out of her flat. I said, ‘It’s not the Teddy Smith of the Krays, is it?’ This was after their 1965 court case.
So, I went up and said, ‘’Ello, Teddy, it’s time you were going.’
If he took his jacket off there was nowt about him, it was all fucking pads. So, when I chinned him, I wasn’t chinning someone who was a tearaway – my daughter’s lad would beat him even now. It was a little flat and I thought he was going to come back in, so I hit him with a smart left hook.
The stairs were like a spiral staircase on a lighthouse. He went down three or four of them and I kicked him down a few more.
‘I can’t see, I can’t see!’ he said.
You had to press a button and a light would come on for twenty seconds. When he thought he couldn’t see, the lights had gone off! By the time I put the light on he’d pissed off. And then he disappeared altogether.
The Krays put a lot of things about – they said they shot Teddy Berry’s leg off. It wasn’t them! They said they knew Peter Rachman (the notorious Notting Hill slum landlord) and he was 5 foot 10 – I knew Rachman well through my auntie, he was 5 foot 3 if he was stretching – and that they got five grand off him. It was bollocks!
When you put a load of shit into good stories, people believe it. Like when Selwyn Cooney was killed: Freddie Foreman said he got everybody on board to make sure they all ‘saw’ the same thing. It was also said that the Nash brothers went to the Krays – they had nowt to do with it. Freddie said the Krays were too young, they were just up and coming, they didn’t know anybody then.
Teddy Smith went to Australia after he disappeared in 1967, but everybody said he’d been killed and buried in Steeple Bay. I’ve got a friend Ray Rose, who went to see him and took photos. He said, ‘Who do you think this is?’
‘That’s Teddy Smith, but he’s old and bald!’
He had done some TV work, and even written a TV play in Australia. He’d done well for himself – he had a taxi firm and I think he wrote two children’s books. It’s just that, when he left, he never mentioned to anybody where he was going. He came home to London in 2000, before dying of cancer.
Reggie with his childhood friend, Laurie O’Leary, and Curly King (right) – a Teddy boy who wasn’t much of a fighter, just a toerag, really. But it was he who first called the Krays’ home ‘Fort Vallance’.
At the Society Club in Jermyn Street: if you look back at it as a snapshot of the sixties, you’ve got Jimmy Nash (second from left), you’ve got Christine Keeler and of course Ronnie Kray – it’s almost like you’ve got the people there whom the Establishment would see as threatening the fabric of society. (They say Jimmy Nash is Freddie Foreman in some books and Freddie goes mad about that. That’s Johnny Davies next to Nash.)
Next to Christine is Leslie Holt, who introduced Ronnie to Lord Boothby – because Boothby was having Holt. So, Ronnie said, ‘Let’s get ’old of ’im and ’ave some photos taken.’
Holt went to have a verruca taken off his foot but he died – the doctor gave him too much gas and he didn’t come round. The twins and Charlie (far right) with the actor Victor Spinetti and the Labour MP Tom Driberg (third and fifth from left) – two of Ronnie’s homosexual clique. Then you’ve got the boxers Terry Spinks and Len Harvey (fourth and sixth from left). Dave Foreland (before Reggie on the right) was running long-firm frauds – he was a pal of Leslie Payne’s. He shouldn’t have been with him as he’d been a right straight fella.
(Payne asked me to do a long firm. He told me all about it and I had a meeting an hour later with Peter Rachman. Peter told me, ‘You don’t need it. You’ll finish up wearing a paper hat.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Like a clown. Leave it alone.’)
The Clark brothers (black guys on the right) were dancers – they used to have a studio at Tottenham Court Road. That’s how the Krays got to know them, and they knew all the theatre people and a lot of boxers too. Reggie said in one of his books how not many people knew that they went for lessons at the Clark brothers’ dance school. I think he made that one up, but he certainly shot their namesake Nobby Clark (second right) in the leg.
Mad Teddy Smith, Ronnie and Lord Boothby, at Boothby’s house in Eton Square, Belgravia.
I looked after Danny La Rue for seven years and saw things I’d rather not mention. Everybody who was gay could get nicked then. There was an underground for homosexuals. People were ‘cottaging’ in the toilets.
Lord Boothby got a big whack of cash for ‘The Picture We Cannot Print’, ‘The Story We Can Never Tell’ in the Sunday Mirror. Who do you think finished up with the money? The Krays! Boothby was so much in debt that Geoff Allan said they got every fucking penny of it: ‘If you don’t pay, we’ll shop you altogether’ – and that would have been the end of him. Geoff got a whack of it; he said, ‘I’ll tell you, Frank, they had him by his bollocks!’
Just after that he married a young woman called Wanda Sanna to prove he wasn’t homosexual. He also made a speech in Parliament, asking how long they were going to keep the Krays in prison on remand for the money-with-menaces charge.
This is Fred’s loyal friend Bill Curbishley (manager of The Who) with Fred outside Roy Shaw’s house on the morning of Roy’s funeral. He went down for fifteen years for armed robbery at one point; I think Roy was on the job with him. Reggie helped get him out after a good few years. They all said he was set up.
On the right is Freddie’s godson Christian Simpson, and Steve Wraith from Newcastle is also pictured.
Ronnie is with the racehorse he bought for his mother, Solway Cross. On the left is the heavyweight Canadian boxer Larry Gains; on the right is Johnny Davies, who used to be a minder for Eddie Johnson, who owned the Two Puddings pub in Stratford.
Johnny and Micky Fawcett had to have it on their toes once to David Litvinoff’s flat in Kensington. Litvinoff, a Jewish bohemian from the East End who associated with both the Swinging London set and the underworld, was always in trouble with people but Reggie and Ronnie didn’t slash him: he got slashed outside a tube station. Reggie said, ‘We sent someone at him’ – but they didn’t. In some books it says they put a sword in his mouth – that never happened. Me and Johnny Bindon’s pal used to see him a lot. In the film that Mick Jagger did with Bindon, Performance (1970), he was credited as technical consultant. Chas, the gangster character played by James Fox, is reputedly modelled on Freddie Foreman’s enemy, Jimmy Evans.
Bobby Ramsey (left) got nicked with the Krays when they smashed up the Watney Street mob in 1956. Ronnie got three years and Ramsey got seven. After that he was Billy Hill’s minder, then he worked for Billy Walker’s brother George. He was a good fighter, but he used to write poetry and letters too. By this stage he was stuck into the unlicensed boxing circuit.
Eddie Pucci (overleaf, left) was a big American football star turned hitman for the Mafia. He was shot on a golf course in the States; they assassinated him.
Ex-world heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano (second from left) came over with Frank Sinatra Junior – he was minding him when he appeared at the Talk of the Town. I don’t know who the couple in between are, but the man on the right is the former gangster movie star and Colony Club host George Raft, a friend of the twins.
The first time I ever saw the Krays in ’57/’58, they were wearing big overcoats that touched the ground – ‘gangsters’, both of them. They had great big padded suits. They were smart, but not city-smart, like bank managers and doctors are. Gangster-smart. When I befriended Ronnie he used to talk about Al Capone.
You never knew which one you were going to get: Ronnie could be teary-eyed and crying, a complete bastard or the strong and silent type (he just didn’t know what to say unless he was doing business). He got on with Freddie Foreman when they were doing bad deeds.
Ronnie with Frank Sinatra Junior at the Rainbow Club, Finsbury Park, in 1963. Frank was pursuing a career like his sister Nancy, who was doing a bit of singing. He wasn’t up to his dad or the other fellas, though.
Sammy ‘The Yid’ Lederman had an agency and Charlie Kray jumped in to take it over. He started getting stars coming across because he knew Barbara Windsor. Charlie just thought he’d have to go drinking with them – he didn’t think it’d be a lot of hard work, signing cheques and reading contracts. Eddie Pucci and Rocky Marciano came through George Raft’s Colony Club. They all just leapt up together. Geoff Allan had a big place he was doing up as a club for Raft and the Mafia to take over. He got nicked for setting it on fire a week after Raft was kicked out of the country.
Reggie Kray and his girlfriend, Frances Shea (centre right of table), at the Stork Club, Regent Street, London, in about 1963. Left of the table is William Frost – ‘Frosty’ – who was Ronnie’s driver. He was supposed to have been killed in ’67, but he was still alive in 2000. Connie Whitehead (third from left) used to run a long-firm fraud and the twins took it off him. He was in trouble, he got panicky, so he thought, ‘I’m going to get nicked here.’ But it was a bit of a torpedo for them. For some reason one of the firm was going to kill him, but the police stopped it.
This is Reggie at Vallance Road. He’s got a great big gash on his lip – he’d had a fight with Ronnie the night before. Reggie said, ‘You silly cunt, you’ll get us all hung!’ It must have been ’64. They used to fight like fuck – ‘You fucking slag!’ they would call each other. But, once hanging got scrapped, they started killing people.
Frances Kray (née Shea) was very quiet. I couldn’t understand why she wanted Reggie; even the vicar said their marriage (in April 1965) shouldn’t take place. And Ronnie was always having a dig at her. Frances used to go up to Steeple Bay with the twins (as seen overleaf with Reggie). He could be a bit nasty to her, and tell her to leave his brother alone.
Just before they got nicked, Reggie had another girl, a blonde. But Reggie never made love to Frances. He liked women and he had plenty of birds, but Frances was a lovely girl and she shouldn’t have been with him, ever.
Ronnie had tried to rape Frankie Shea, Frances’s brother, just before she married Reggie. Frankie should have told his sister to leave them alone.
Over the years I used to visit Reggie in prison. He seemed to think the world of her. Then a woman wrote a book about Reggie and Frances (Frances: The Tragic Bride, 2014) – the things he’d done to her! He put her in a hotel in Hyde Park and didn’t go home for two days. What he wanted, I don’t know.
She was a typist at an office, he used to go and meet her. But he wouldn’t let her get a job after they got together. He did her in with his pushiness. She never used to take drugs but he got her into it.
Reggie had other girls straight after Frances killed herself. After Charlie got his ten years, he came out before everybody else; he had photos of Reggie and a woman called Christine Boyce. Christine wrote to him all the time – just before he died she was still writing to him in prison. I think she was the love of his life, not Frances, because Frances was treated like shit. He really did treat her badly.
Reggie and Frances Kray’s wedding: 19 April 1965. Charlie and Dolly Kray and their son Gary are in the front row with the twins and the bride. Middle row: Mrs Shea (centre) and Violet. Back row: Frankie Shea Junior, Charlie Senior and Frankie Shea Senior.
I knew her old man – a very quiet man who worked for the Krays now and again. Mrs Shea was a bit of a loud-mouthed mother. Frances’ brother was quite successful but, after the Krays got nicked, he finished up an alcoholic. He killed himself a few years ago.
World heavyweight champion Sonny Liston (centre) was allegedly killed by the Mafia via lethal injection; he died in 1970. Henry Simmonds (standing, left) was a big pal of Reg and Ron; he, Frank Warren and Jarvis Astair had the boxing tied up. His sister married Mickey Duff, the boxing promoter. Years later Johnny Davies (sitting, left) got a right tanning from the Tibbses, while he was in Spain waiting for his trial to come up. The Tibbs family were at one time considered the Krays’ East End successors after the twins’ 1969 conviction.
The twins on their way to court with John Squibb, on trial for demanding money with menaces from Hew McCowan at the Hideaway club in 1965. ‘Squibby’ came from a Gypsy family; his father was a boxer. As a pal, he went back a long way with them. He went in and out of the firm.
Ronnie Kray with Mickey Morris (overleaf) at La Dolce Vita nightclub in Newcastle, 1966. That was when the murders started. I’ve got transcripts of the trial and one of the prosecutors said George Cornell was killed because he went to Mickey’s brother and said, ‘Do you know why he took him to Newcastle? He only went to bed the poor sod!’
After what happened at the Mr Smith & the Witchdoctor club in Catford, Cornell was the only one of the Richardson gang left at liberty. When it was all done and dusted, they knocked on Freddie Foreman’s door: ‘Let us in, there’s been a bit of trouble!’
‘Dickie Hart’s been killed; Eddie Richardson’s been shot; Frankie Fraser’s dead’ – they didn’t know he wasn’t. So, Freddie put them in flats all over London and one or two in caravans he had on the coast. Fraser always said Freddie set the whole thing up, but Freddie insisted he didn’t.
As soon as the twins started killing, the original Kray firm made themselves scarce too. After the Cornell thing, Checker Berry and Billy Exley went missing. Exley had to have a gun at the side of him. The others went looking for him and asked, ‘Why don’t you join us anymore?’
‘Fucking hell, they’ve started killing everybody!’ he said. Straight lads, who were workers, had to physically prevent Ronnie from killing people every fucking night.
And that’s why at the same time, in ’66, they should never have lost Leslie Payne – because he was the man who got them all their money. He stepped away. Between Payne and Bobby Teale, they sent the Krays down with what they knew about them. Payne put himself in it: ‘If you don’t charge me, I’ll tell you what I know.’
Little Geoff Allan was about 5 foot 2. He had a big mansion at Saffron Walden, Essex, with a load of antiques. You can see the twins there, and Bobby Teale says in his book, Bringing Down the Krays, that he went to the mansion after McVitie’s murder.
Geoff was into frauds; he was into anything he could make a quid at. He was into doing up old houses, restoring them to their former glory, but then one would get burned down accidentally. Before he died, he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a last go at what I used to do with Reggie and Ron. I’ll tell you how it works: I’ll buy a property, I’ll put it in your name, say you buy it for twenty grand, we’ll insure it for a hundred and twenty grand. Do a bit of work on it, and after three months it goes up and you get your money.’
So, we went looking and he said, ‘This is a lovely one.’ I’ve got a photo of the one we were going to set light to.
But I said, ‘There’s people living round ’ere, kids playing in gardens. If you set this alight, you’ll catch all that.’
‘Fuck it, we’ll go somewhere else.’
We found a nice little one in Norwich and we had it all set up but he died just before we were going to do it.
Geoff was a villain, through and through. He liked to do insurance frauds above everything, but he had straight businesses: farms, shops, smashing restaurants.
I read in Jimmy Evans’s book (The Survivor, 2002) that Ronnie shot a pig at Geoff Allan’s farm. They supposedly didn’t like the country, didn’t know the country – they were in the country all the time! With Evans you’ve got to know how to pick out what’s right and what’s not. There’s a lot of bollocks! Ronnie loved animals, so did Reggie. That’s why we’ve got Ronnie with his dogs; when he was younger and he was pulled by the police he gave his occupation as ‘dog breeder’.
That’s former world heavyweight champion Joe Louis with his arm around Reggie, at a personal appearance in a North East workingmen’s club in 1967. Looking over Louis’s shoulder is Alex Steene, a ticket tout from Leeds, who later passed his business onto his son, Greg. On the right, next to Ronnie, is Charlie Kray’s pal, Tommy Cowley. He was a little sneak, a gambler – I never liked the fucking weasel!
On the left is Joey Pyle. He was a big guy, a fighter close to the Nashes. I got to know him eight years later. He was with the Nashes when they killed Selwyn Cooney at the Pen Club in 1960. Cooney was born in Leeds. There were two brothers, Selwyn and Laurie, and Laurie was my pal. I only told Joey I knew Selwyn later, before he died.
I was with Selwyn the night before he was killed. He had a gun with him and said, ‘This is my equaliser.’ He’d had a fallout with the Nashes over a prostitute girlfriend who’d bumped Nash’s car. It was only seven and a half quid’s damage, and that’s what he got killed over – he’d given her a slap or something. That afternoon I rang Margaret, who he lived with, and she said, ‘He’s been crying all morning. The Nashes are after him.’ So, why he went to the fucking club … But he could fight, he was a street fighter.
He was in the Pen Club with Billy Ambrose, Freddie Foreman’s best pal – who was in Dartmoor and kept coming home on weekend leave when he’d opened the club. Selwyn was shot with his own gun. When it was all over, Freddie went to the Nashes and got everybody on the same page about what had happened.
Ronnie with friends in Barcelona in the early sixties. Pat Butler (white shirt) was the kid who screwed the takings from the collection box at the church where the Krays all got married and buried. I think Bobby Buckley (right) was in military prison with them, but The Sun later ran this photo and wrongly said he was the Bill actor Billy Murray.
At that time Ronnie could get nicked over here for being homosexual so he’d have more freedom in a place like Tangiers, where he was photographed being driven by Ian Barrie in Billy Hill’s MG, in 1966. Christine Boyce took that photo. I’ve got another one where they swapped over and she’s in the driver’s seat.
I met Billy Hill twice, with Cockney Joe. I just shook hands with him and he said to me, ‘I’m sorry about what happened to your pal, Selwyn Cooney.’ Hill said Selwyn would have been next in line – never mind the Krays, he’d have taken the lot of them. I had more to do with Jack Spot than Hill because he used to look after Cockney Joe, though I don’t know how the fuck Spot got to be considered a tearaway.
There was nowt about Billy Hill – he was a user of other people, but he’d slash them as well. He was really successful after doing about twenty-five years in the nick in dribs and drabs. He was a somebody, but to me he looked like a nobody. In terms of villains, the top man is Freddie. Hill was a smart man with a lot of good minders – he had Bobby Ramsey, George Walker, so it wasn’t a matter of him, it was the people he had.
Ronnie and Dickie Morgan with Tony Bennett. The twins had just been locked up in the nick but were released in the mid-sixties. They weren’t really villains as such. It’s a contradiction, but they liked to be seen doing glamorous things with stars. If someone had brought Rin Tin Tin along, they’d have wanted their photo taken with him – they just wanted to be seen.
As Freddie says, they didn’t really like being villains, though they were in the nick all the time. They were disdainful of the middle class, of clerical workers or people from a family of substance, but the hierarchy of stars they had respect for. If you were a film star or a singer, they’d like to be with you. But I know Eric Clapton came to play at Esmeralda’s Barn one afternoon, when he was with the Yardbirds, and Ronnie said, ‘Fuck off, all of you! We can’t hear ourselves speak upstairs!’
Eric Mason (author of Inside the Underworld, 2007) got the twins into La Dolce Vita in Newcastle. The three with their backs to us were a Newcastle firm. This was the year before Dennis Stafford got done for the ‘one-armed bandit murder’, the killing of Angus Sibbet (the 1967 inspiration for Ted Lewis’s 1969 novel, Jack’s Return Home – which in turn provided the basis of the classic 1971 British crime film, Get Carter).
I knew Angus, did a lot of business with him. The Krays were on a retainer with the bloke who used to supply the clubs with one-armed bandits in London and Newcastle. He found out Sibbet was pinching money from him and he got shot. I know the Krays were there a couple of days before it happened – they didn’t do it, but I got the feeling they were involved in it. All his life Reggie Kray slagged Stafford off – ‘That cunt!’ – and Stafford never liked Reg and Ron.
But he got fitted up. They couldn’t even prove he was in the place at the time. He and his brother came back from Majorca that week, and that’s when Sibbet got killed. I’ve got photos of the other guy who was done for the killing, Michael Luvaglio, at the gym where Reggie’s standing next to him in ’61.
Ronnie at the Talk of the Town (now the Hippodrome), for the birthday of former welterweight Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis (overleaf, right). He’s with his old pal Sophie Tucker, an American singer, who was kind of a Mae West figure. Lewis was world champion when she was at the top of her form. To the far left of them is Duke Osbourne. I knew him – my pal used to buy drugs from him. Just like Fred, he could tell a good story. He came from a good family but he was a bum chum of Ronnie; they were fucking each other.
Winston’s club, 1968 (overleaf): just before the Krays’ final arrest. Left to right: singer Leapy Lee (‘Little Arrows’); actor/singer Tony Mercer (The Black and White Minstrel Show); Christine Boyce – who was in Reggie’s bed when they woke him up and arrested him that morning; Reggie; Joe Wilkins, the club owner; Jimmy Evans, Wilkins’s best pal; unknown; Tommy Cowley.
Evans was so lucky. Billy Howard was angry with him for what he’d done to George Foreman: ‘Give that fucker a hiding!’ He slipped out of Winston’s just before we got there. He was a smallish fella but he was a dangerous little fucker. He had the needle, I think, because he was in a Mickey Mouse firm and he thought the Foremans were involved in the Train Robbery: ‘He was giving my wife ten-shilling notes to change.’ Evans wasn’t in the same class as Freddie in terms of being a top villain.
Ronnie in New York with Dickie Morgan (overleaf, left) and boxer Willie Pep, who was involved with the Mafia; they had him under their wing. The fellow on the end with the moustache grassed them up: Alan Bruce Cooper was an informer for the American police, trained up to get them nicked.
Everybody was shopping each other at the end. If you look at the Krays’ case, everyone but the dog gave evidence against them. The Lambrianous did after they got weighed off: ‘We shouldn’t have said what we said, Ronnie did it and Reggie did it.’ They turned after the case. Ronnie Hart shopped them, Donoghue shopped them, the Teale brothers shopped them, Exley shopped them … They all bloody shopped them!
Ronnie in New York with Mafia man Joe Kaufman (he got nicked with them). Reggie broke Kaufman’s jaw in the nick because he turned on them. He was reading a paper when Reggie did it.
Charlie Kray (right) got a ten for supposedly disposing of the body of Jack the Hat. It was ’69 when he got weighed off, and he did seven. This photo came at Tony Lambrianou’s (left) release in 1984, after he did his full fifteen. I met him once or twice, but I could never understand Freddie doing a book with him; he was a nobody. He did a job and went down for it – robbing a Wimpy Bar. But he was so unlucky to get fifteen years. He wasn’t on the firm that long, and, instead of turning Queen’s evidence like Donoghue, he kept quiet. Okay, he and his brother took Jack the Hat to get murdered, but he was just an also-ran. Had he turned QE and shopped them, he’d have got out of it.
But he got a living as soon as he got out the nick. Reggie phoned me and said, ‘I’ve just seen an article on that cunt. He gave evidence against me at the end! After he got weighed off, he fucking went in with his brother and came out with the truth.’
Freddie didn’t find out till after they’d done their book (Getting It Straight: Villains Talking, as told to Carol Clerk, 2002). Lambrianou started crying when they were working on it in his flat: ‘I didn’t mean to do it …’
‘What made you do a book with Lambrianou? He wasn’t in your league,’ I said.
Freddie said he just wanted a partner to bounce questions off – a double act of comedians, one serious, one funny. ‘What do you think, Fred?’ he would say. Freddie would tell the story and Lambrianou would say, ‘Yeah, that was it.’
Reggie Kray training in Parkhurst prison, Isle of Wight, 1991. I started visiting Reggie on the mainland because he could have visits only from his family when he first got weighed off. I went everywhere you can imagine – Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham, about ten different prisons. I’ve got letters from him at every prison.
In Nottingham prison, I’d gone to visit him with Charlie and another fella called Brown – he was about 6 foot 2, he looked like Tommy Brown, a big lad. He was on the visit to try to get Reggie to sign an agreement for him to run a security business, at nightclubs, in their name. I got involved when he was guarding factories and warehouses.
Reggie wanted a private visit in the chapel. At the back was a big colour painting of Christ. He had his shirt wide open and we could see his six-pack. He was brown because he used to sunbathe. He never swore on prison visits, but he did this day: ‘What ’ave you been fuckin’ doin’?’
He was getting ready to have a go and pushed the corner of the table at me.
‘What’s your problem, Reg?’
It turned out that I’d taken a fella in with me who’d done a book and ripped them off. He thought I was covering for him, which I wasn’t.
‘I’ll fuckin’ knacker ya!’
‘It won’t do you any good in ’ere,’ I said, because I had that big fella with me. ‘If you let go at me, forget it.’
So I got up and walked away.
‘Don’t go, don’t go!’
He followed me out and said he was sorry, so I went back and sat with him.
One other time he did that and I turned on him – told him to fuck off or I’d rip his head off. He said to my wife, Noelle, ‘That husband of yours, he’s a nutter!’
I have got a quick temper, but there was one thing going through my mind: you have to stamp on ’em before they stamp on you. He was fucking screaming at me – but maybe it was all bravado.
I thought he was going to put one on me before I sat down, but he didn’t – he sat down too.
I visited Ronnie in Broadmoor dozens of times. Broadmoor isn’t a prison, it’s a hospital and they can get dressed up in their normal clothes – they have big, strong guards, that’s all. Anything you had for him, you could leave at the desk: ‘I’ve got a thousand cigarettes for him.’
‘Just sign there and pass them over.’
(Ronnie Kray’s death from heart failure, on 17 March 1995, has been attributed to his habit of chain-smoking between sixty and a hundred roll-ups per day.)
So, it was just a hospital they couldn’t get out of. He had his suits on.
‘What you want, Frank?’ he used to say to me.
I’d have a coffee or a non-alcoholic beer. This fella in a white jacket would be working for Ronnie.
‘Put it on my bill.’
Obviously he had his moments, but you saw him all dressed up in the best Savile Row suits, ties and shirts. I bought him three or four sets of ties and shirts but I made sure I was paid the money early. He’d always have a different suit and watch on – and his watches were nothing cheap. I had one given to me when he went to the nick, but he gave a lot away when he was in there. People thought he was doing it for favours, but he wasn’t
He was a giver; he was a contradiction.
Ronnie used to say to Reg, ‘Fuck prison, get in ’ere with me, it’s in a different class!’ But Reggie wanted to get out. Deep down, he thought he would. He said, ‘If I get in there, Frank, I’ll never get out.’ But he’d have had an easier time.
Ronnie once said to me, ‘I couldn’t ’ack it in nick any more, I ’ad to come ’ere,’ because he was getting into fights. He’d have either got killed or he’d have killed somebody. He lasted only about five or six years in regular prison.
When he was in Broadmoor, Ronnie wanted some ties made with ‘Krays’ on. So, I contacted a tie maker and shirt maker called Frank Rostron for him: he wanted a few samples done.
‘We’ll get ’em done in different colours, iron the exes out and send ’em in to Ronnie,’ I said.
He got on the phone and bollocked me.
‘These are samples, we’ve got to see if you like ’em,’ I explained.
‘I don’t fuckin’ like ’em!’
He put the phone down.
Next thing he’s sending flowers to my wife, apologising: ‘Sorry for what I said.’
But they needed me; I didn’t need them. I used to get a lot of grief from Ronnie but it was the illness that did it. And Reggie had a bit of an illness – after thirty years it can’t do your bloody brain any good.
FREDDIE: In Broadmoor, Ronnie did a painting of a cottage with a picket fence and a pathway – and a black sun. It was psychological. He dreamed of a white cottage home with a picket fence, but there’s no sunshine.
FRANK: When Ronnie fell out with anyone, everybody was a slag: ‘You slaaag!’ I once went on a meet with Ronnie at Broadmoor and he said, ‘What’s that fucking slag doing?’ This fella Pete Gillette had been sleeping with Reggie in prison, got out, and ended up with Ronnie’s wife, Kate Kray.
But, really, I used to feel sorry for them when I drove away. I don’t know how they did their time.
Ronnie wanted Lambrianou killed before he died. There were stories going round that either he’d slagged Kate Kray off or they’d found out he’d made a statement later on. Ronnie was going on about this, but then he died.
A lot of people got in to Ronnie’s funeral that shouldn’t have, I don’t know how. But it was a well-attended funeral. It was a lot better than Reggie’s – that wasn’t as big. Around the coffin at St Matthew’s Church, Bethnal Green, are Charlie, Reggie, Johnny Nash, Freddie in the corner (second from right) and Ginger Dennis with his back to us. (Dennis was the one who slashed Jack Spot.)
On Bethnal Green Road it was just as if royalty had died; you couldn’t move. We went just out of London to Chingford cemetery, but it took us an hour to get there. Everything was stop-stop-stop. I had a good talk with Steven Berkoff, the actor who played George Cornell, who got shot in the pub. Freddie was there, with his son Jamie.
I’m standing on the left of Reggie, who you can see in profile talking to my wife, Noelle (left). Les Berman was on the Kray firm – I think he worked as a market trader. That’s him with his back to us in the green mac. Facing him to the right is Lambrianou. The guy with the beard on the right is a prison warder. Flanagan, with her back to us in the blue dress, was a hairdresser to Mrs Kray and also the first Page 3 girl.
I couldn’t have done his time; I’d have ended it. All the shit you’re in with, you can’t pick the people you’re stuck with for years. On the outside you wouldn’t give them the time of day, never mind talk to them! How he got through it, I don’t know.
Reggie had a few affairs in there. He had a gash on his eye from when a young bloke he was sharing a cell with threw a pot at him during a lover’s tiff.
I used to get him some spliff. I had to spend about fifty quid on a big lump that was shaped like a cigar in plastic, so it could go up his arse. I used to take it to the nick but I would not take it in – I’d pass it to someone and, if they got caught, it was up to them.
On the mainland I saw him in every prison you could go to, right to the end. He used to ring me up because I had cancer at the time. I’d started chemotherapy in ’97 and I was just getting over mine.
The authorities knew he had cancer but they weren’t treating him, they were giving him Gaviscon. That was all they were giving him in the nick. It was a terrible death that he had. In that TV programme that they did, The Krays: The Final Word, he was drinking whisky and morphine. I lived every second of it because I was like that when I had it bad.
I lost all my hair. I had mine for four years but now I was putting weight on – he used to ring me up and I’d say, ‘Reggie, I can’t tell you because it’s a different type of cancer.’ Mine was lymphoma and his was different altogether. (Reggie was suffering from cancer of the bladder and bowel, which eventually spread to much of his body.) So, I wrote a letter to the governor and we got a lot of people to write to the British Government.
The next thing is he’s in hospital and they’ve set him free. The Government were trying to look nice, but they killed him off. He might have lived another year if they’d looked after him, but it was horrible what they did: he was in a cell without home comforts. I had my wife looking after me; I used to have my pet dogs around me. He was in a cell on his own – with nobody to cuddle, to kiss, to cry to … because you cry a lot.
I’m not excusing what he did in his life but he had a rough time, the poor sod. I’ve got a record, Tom Jones’s ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ – I put it on sometimes and I cry when it says, ‘I was only dreaming’; he was still in prison.
I always think of Reggie.
I went to the hospital on the day Reggie was dying, at Norwich. Bradley Allardyce (Reggie’s gay prison lover in his later years, younger than him by decades) kept coming in and out. Serving nine years for armed robbery at the time, Allardyce has now been sentenced to life for murder.
‘Can you tell ’im to fuck off when I’m talkin’?’ I said.
He kept coming in to where Reggie was in bed, from a hallway in another part of the hospital. He’s got newspaper people he’s giving a story to, and photographs of Reggie. I told Reggie this just before he died.
‘What are you fuckin’ makin’ excuses for this cunt for?’
He knew all the wrong people and they all abused him. At the end of the day Reg followed his true nature by being bisexual. Geoff Allan said to me, ‘His fuckin’ melon’s gone!’ (he called his head a ‘melon’). He wasn’t like the man I used to know, but that’s what the nick must have done to him.
Freddie went there to speak to him and hold his hand on the day, 1 October 2000, with Joey Pyle and one of the Nashes.
FREDDIE: Reggie Kray died in my arms. The wife (crime fiction novelist Roberta Kray, née Jones) fucked off out of the room, as did Allardyce, that poofy bastard Reggie was having it with. Him and her had been sitting on the edge of the bed. We’d been in there a couple of minutes, talking to Reggie – me, Johnny Nash, Joey Pyle and Wilf Pine.
We’d bought tickets to go to Norwich and she kept blocking us. Each time she knocked us back. Wilf said, ‘We’ve gotta get down there, he ain’t gonna last much longer.’ So we sort of gatecrashed – she didn’t want us there at all.
‘Wipe his lips – his lips are dry and he’s trying to talk,’ Johnny said.
‘I know how to look after him!’
She went right on the turn. The next thing you know, she and this Bradley have got up and walked out the room.
So, I went and took her place, where she’d been sitting on the side of the bed. He was trying to make a conversation.
‘You ’ad a place up the road from ’ere – you’re back on the old turf,’ I said.
Which it was, they had a house in East Anglia.
He was saying, ‘’Ow did ya get down? ’Ow’s Jamie?’
Then all of a sudden the doctor came in: ‘I need to see the patient, I’ve got to give him an injection.’
‘Don’t go, don’t go!’ Reggie pleaded.
‘We’ll go in the bar an’ ’ave a drink,’ I said.
‘I’ll see ya later. Don’t go, though!’
The doctor gave him his jab. When we go back up again, he’s unconscious – he’s gone. One minute he was talking rationally, the next he was non compos mentis, right out of the game.
So, I sat there and he was still trying to talk. I suppose he must have had his five jabs and the sixth one does you – that’s what they reckon with morphine. You could see he wasn’t going to come out of it. It was a terrible thing – he’d gone down to a skeleton by now.
He came round again; he looked at me and he tried to talk.
‘Don’t fight it, Reg, let it go! I’ll see you another time and another place, mate,’ I said.
I was trying to comfort him, holding him round the shoulders at one stage. He was silent for a little while. Wilf, Johnny and Joe were all standing by the bed.
All of a sudden he went, ‘Uhh!’ – and they all fucking jumped!
‘I thought you’d gone,’ I said.
But that was his last breath, the finale: he was finished.
Of course she came back in, and the doctors. We went downstairs and when we came out, all the press were waiting outside. I made a couple of comments and came back home.
She hated it. But how could a woman fall in love with Reggie Kray? He was homosexual anyway, and he was the most unlovable person you could ever fucking meet!
I’d spent time with him in Maidstone, when Ronnie died, consoling him – the screws came and got me because he was in another wing from me.
‘Would you go over and keep him company because of the bad news he’s had?’
‘Certainly.’
So, I went over and stayed with him all day – it was St Patrick’s Day, all the hooch that the cons had made was coming in, coloured green.
He had a little cry, talking about Ronnie, but you couldn’t get close to him.
And then all the wife was doing was making trouble for everybody over the funeral. I couldn’t go to it – I was in Horseferry Road, being interviewed by the fucking murder squad over Ginger Marks, more than thirty-five years after it all happened. And they wanted to know who was shot on the Battle of Bow – because Dighton, the guard who fired the shots, was worried he’d killed someone.
‘No, tell him not to worry,’ I said.
FRANK: There were a lot of people at Reggie’s funeral but those who should have been in the church weren’t there. The wife didn’t want them there; she didn’t want them carrying the coffin. Roberta organised it all, even down to the pall-bearers, and she didn’t want any of the old firm there. It definitely wouldn’t have been what Reggie wanted. Whereas Dave Courtney – who’s a smashing lad, plenty of chutzpah and bottle, good sense of humour – was the head man when Ronnie died, she got another one and it was a bit of a mess.
Half of the people didn’t even turn up. She wanted Reggie to die as a nice reformed gangster but he wasn’t like that – just a few months before he died, he wanted somebody killed.
It was a fella called Gillette who Reggie was having an affair with. Reggie’s slagging Gillette off and he says, ‘Come down and visit me – I want ’im done.’
But I said, ‘I’ll have to pay for what’s got to be done – have you got any money left?’
‘I’ve got fifteen grand left.’
I had it all set up – I was going to get Gillette a tanning. I wasn’t going to kill him, but the money didn’t come forward and Reggie half-backed off.
It was going to take me a week to get him into the right place where we’d do what we were going to do. But it died a death – and that was just before he died! So don’t try to make out, ‘He’s got God in his life.’ He did have God in his life. He had to lean on somebody so he leant on God, but he still had all that devilment in him.