There were twenty tapes in all: some were recorded from transmitters concealed on Jack’s body, others on the phone. On most of them, I was told, me and Ronnie Field could be heard offering to supply Jack and his two mates, Brian and Ken, with five kilograms of cocaine every two weeks for two years.
After Judy left, I sat in my cell and let my mind drift back over the summer months to that Thursday evening in May when I’d met Jack for the first time in The Wake Green Lodge Hotel. I needed to know why the police had slipped Jack into me to set me up, and who had helped them.
My old mate, Patsy, had made the introduction at the hotel, but he would not have known Jack was old Bill, I could bet on that: we went back more than thirty years; and anyway Patsy had no reason to cause me any aggravation.
I could picture the other two guys with Patsy that night, but, for a while, I couldn’t remember their names. Then they came back to me: George and Deano. Funny, I thought now: neither Patsy, nor I, had thought of asking their surnames. And, on reflection, Deano was an odd name. Why wasn’t it just Dean? That night was the first time I had met him, but I’d met George at Gary’s grave. I vaguely remembered Patsy saying that George had driven them down in Indian Joe’s Jaguar. Now, sitting in my cell in Ilford nick, I started wondering what that had all been about. George had never known Gary. Why had he made a two hundred-mile round trip to be at his funeral? And, by the sound of it, he had never met Patsy before, either.
And what about Deano, who was supposed to be George’s brother, slipping me that fifty quid. It hadn’t struck me as odd at the time: I thought he was just a lovely fella with bundles of money, who liked me. But now, trying to piece it all together, it sounded iffy.
Patsy’s birthday present, for instance: Jack had met Patsy for the first time that Thursday night and George and Deano had known him only a matter of weeks, yet they had splashed out on a music centre that must have set them back two hundred quid, not to mention the Simply Red CD. In view of what had happened, it did not take me long to work that one out. They had massaged dear old Patsy’s ego to get to me. The fifty quid from Deano was just a little taster to whet my appetite; I would soon be getting a birthday present, too. My mind went back to the same little hotel, almost two months to the day later. George and Deano were off the scene by then and Jack was there with Brian, another mate he’d introduced me to along the way. I remembered Jack handing me the gold cigarette lighter, neatly wrapped in colourful paper, smiling: ‘Happy birthday from Brian and me, Charlie.’
At the time, I was flattered.
Now, I felt sick.
My mind was in such turmoil that Friday morning of 2 August that I did not fall asleep until the thin grey light of dawn began to brighten the darkness of my cell. I kept thinking over and over again about all the meetings I’d had with Jack and his pals over the past two and a half months: The Wake Green that May, the Selsdon two weeks later, the Mermaid ‘do’ on 2 June, the trip to Newcastle later that month and the Selsdon again on 25 July. It had not crossed my mind that he was an undercover cop, taped up to record anything that might incriminate me in something unlawful. All he seemed was a wealthy wheeler-dealer with a bottomless well of cash; a soft touch who might be able to solve my desperate financial problems.
What was on those tapes? I wondered.
And what price would I have to pay for all that free champagne Jack and his pals had poured down me since that fateful meeting on Patsy’s sixty-sixth birthday?
Later that morning, I was taken to Redbridge Magistrates’ Court in Ilford, but it all felt so unreal it might just as well have been Mars. One minute, I’d been settling down to watch telly with the woman I loved; the next, I was standing in a crowded court, with a mass of newspaper, radio and TV reporters staring at me as though I was an alien from outer space.
I looked towards the public seats and was relieved to see Judy, with a couple of our friends, who had travelled with her from Croydon. It was a hell of a journey, particularly in the morning rush hour and I was so grateful for the support. I gave her a brief, faint smile, trying to convey, in a fleeting second, that I was sure everything was going to be all right. Bad as I was feeling, my heart went out to her; she must be worried sick. At the end of her row, nearer the dock, was an old man, with a copy of the Sun on his lap. On the front page was a photograph of me, under the headline: CHARLIE KRAY IN £78 MILLION COCAINE STING. My mind flashed back to the sixties when me and the twins were pulled in. The newspapers had had a field day then, too, making it seem like we were all guilty of the most heinous crimes before we’d even been charged with anything.
There I was, standing in a court, with holes in my shoes, wearing a ten-pound watch and not a penny in my pockets, and I’m supposed to be involved in some multi-million pound drug operation.
Still feeling removed from what was going on around me, I stood in the dock with Ronnie Field and Bobby Gould. The three of us were each charged with conspiracy to supply two kilos of cocaine, worth £63,000, and conspiracy to supply 520 kilos of the drug. Me and Field were also accused of conspiracy to supply 1,000 ecstasy tablets worth £20,000.
Next on the agenda was bail. Not surprisingly, it was refused. I was seventy years old with no money or assets and no risk to anyone, but my name was Kray. Guilty or not, I was going to be treated as if I was a dangerous terrorist, evil killer and ruthless rapist rolled into one. I was convinced I’d be holed up in a top-security prison and I was right. They chose Belmarsh, near Woolwich, in South East London, where they cage callous IRA murderers. I thought I’d be put on Category A security, but I was wrong about that. The powers-that-be felt I was such a danger they put me on an even higher security.
In case anyone missed the point that the police had nailed one of the most dangerous men in the country, armed police in flak jackets manned the rooftops of Barkingside Magistrates’ Court – the venue for the next committal proceedings on 9 August. And I was driven there from Woolwich at high speed, with police motorcyclists riding ahead to clear the traffic. The only parts of the circus missing were the deafening klaxons and circling helicopters that had accompanied me and the twins and their so-called Firm to the Old Bailey in 1969.
Thankfully, someone saw the stupidity in carting me from South East London to Essex, and arranged for the next committal hearing to be held at Woolwich Magistrates’ Court, which is on the same complex as Belmarsh prison. Instead of having to be driven through South London, under the Blackwall Tunnel and through a busy part of East London, all I had to do was walk along a tunnel – escorted by prisoner officers – and up into the court. It took about twenty minutes, compared to more than an hour on the road to Essex.
Despite offering to be electronically tagged on both feet, not just one, I was still considered too much of a risk to be allowed home. Where they thought I’d go, with no money or passport, no one was saying. If it wasn’t so awful, I’d have laughed. Could the magistrate have really believed in the Kray fantasy; that I was some superhuman being with hidden millions and the contacts to spirit me away at the drop of a generous backhander? As it was, I had no inclination to try to escape. I’d thrown in my lot with Judy and the kids and I was not going to abandon them now.
One of the reasons they felt I might try to escape was that, at seventy, I would not want to risk a long jail sentence. That showed the ignorance of the police and judiciary. Anyone who knew me was aware that, despite having a name synonymous with all that is evil, I am a man of principle, who faces up to his accusers and does not run away from them.
I was warned that my trial would not start until the following summer. That September, summer seemed light years away. I wondered how I would get through it.
The three of us – me, Ronnie Field and Bobby Gould –were locked up in the High Security Unit, Category A, with IRA hit men, PLO terrorists, ruthless Yardie killers and a gold bullion robber.
There was another gentleman in there, too: David Courtney, a bubbly Cockney in his thirties, who had been on remand for two months, awaiting trial on an alleged drug smuggling charge. Me and the twins had known Dave for about twelve years: he ran a security company, employing heavies, who manned the doors of nightclubs. We had used him to take care of security at Ronnie’s funeral. I was pleased when I met Dave in Belmarsh: he has an agile brain, a sharp wit and a positive attitude, and I knew he would be good for me; a loyal ally.
Dave told me that when he was sent to Belmarsh, a prison official had told him, ‘Mr Courtney, I don’t care who you know outside, what finances you’ve got or what you think. This place is designed to break you.’
Dave laughed. ‘Wait a minute,’ he told him, ‘you don’t even know me. This place isn’t going to bend me a little bit, let alone break me. I’m going home in a few months. I’m going to use this as a learning experience and have a good time.’
And that’s what he did. He took it on himself to be the court jester for the whole unit and tried to make each day memorable by getting up to the most outrageous antics to give everyone a giggle. Once, as an ironic gesture to the prison’s Fort Knox-like security, he stripped naked, wrote his address on his stomach, stuck a stamp on his forehead, then lay in the mail tray, waiting to be posted. The prison’s writing paper gave him an idea for his own headed note paper. At the top of the prison paper, where it left a space for the prisoner to write in his relevant wing, Dave wrote ‘Commander’, and had some fancy letter-heads made up, saying, ‘Wing Commander David Courtney’, with his cell as his office number. Then he started sending off to companies, asking for sales literature on dozens of bizarre products, because he knew that all his mail went to the Home Office and had to be read before being forwarded to him. The thought of someone having to plough through hundreds of pages of literature that he had no intention of reading himself gave Dave a buzz, and helped break up the monotony of hum drum prison life.
Dave, more than anyone, helped me adjust to life in that claustrophobic, security-conscious unit. But there was someone else I turned to in order to keep my sanity – Gary. Even now I could not bring myself to accept that he was gone, and I would look at his photos in my cell and talk to him as if he was there with me.
What, I’d ask him, do you think of the mess I’ve got myself into? What do you make of this tiny, spartan cell that’s going to be my home for the best part of a year? It was roughly ten feet by six: the bed was a metal slab jutting out of the wall and the mattress and pillow, flattened by dozens of prisoners before me, were not worth having. A table and chair, also metal, were attached to the wall and another piece of metal, highly polished admittedly, served as a mirror. In Category AA, no one was taking any chances that anything in the cell could be broken and used as a weapon on himself or a guard.
The doors of the twelve cells – six opposite each other in a rectangular block about twenty yards by twelve – were opened at 8 A.M. Half an hour later we had breakfast: cornflakes, porridge, one rasher of bacon, or one fried egg.
At 9 A.M. we were allowed to walk around an exercise yard, which was about a quarter of the size of a football pitch, for an hour. I wanted to see the sky, but it was blotted out by a roof made of bomb-proof wiremesh, designed to make it impossible for a helicopter to drop down and pluck a dangerous undesirable like me to freedom! In case someone thought of a way round that, the exercise times were staggered with those of the other thirty-six prisoners in the other three high-risk units, so that no one with ideas of escaping could be sure he would be in the exercise yard at a set time.
Such was the paranoia over security that, while we were on exercise, all twelve cells would be searched and anything we’d written down – particularly pertaining to legal matters – copied by a prison officer on a portable photocopier. I’m not sure whether the authorities wanted to keep this secret, but the cells were so tiny and sparse that most of us could tell at a glance whether anyone had been in there. And, besides, the smell of the photocopier – and the paw-prints of the officer’s dog, used for sniffing out possible drugs –was a giveaway!
By the time we had been through the electronically-controlled doors and strip-searched, it would be around 11 A.M. We were normally allowed to watch TV or make phone calls until midday, when the caterers came in with lunch. We would collect our meals and we were then banged up until 2.30 P.M., when we were let out again for three hours. At 5 P.M. we were banged up for the night.
Cameras were on us twenty-four hours a day – even in the toilet – but we would regularly be moved from one cell to another. If a prisoner had the inclination to try to dig a tunnel in his cell, it would be pointless; he’d never have time to finish it before he was moved to another.
There was even less privacy on the phone. I was allowed to make calls at certain times of the day, but the phone faced a bullet-proof screen, behind which a prison officer watched me as he tape-recorded every second of my conversation.
I would long for visiting times.
Only Judy, Robin and John Corbett were cleared to see me – once a week – in the first six months of my remand. I wished away the days to their visits so that I could have what I call a ‘normal, everyday’ conversation, without reference to prison or anything criminal.
Getting to the visiting cubicles took half an hour, which was tedious. I had to go through all the doors again and be strip-searched, but it was always worth it because I’d go back to my cell, feeling more positive about things. It didn’t matter that the hour-long visits were filmed and taped, because nothing remotely dodgy was ever discussed.
I was determined to keep myself fit by going to the gym regularly for a work out. Prisoners are allowed fifteen minutes every day, which can be enough if you’re doing the right things. But getting to the gym was a drag. Each time, I had to go through ten electronically-controlled doors, taking my clothes off twice to be searched by guards with metal detectors. It took three times as long to get to and from the gym, as the time I spent there and, in the end, it gave me the hump and I knocked it on the head.
That was my life on remand until 14 April this year, when, at long last, my trial was due to begin next door. Thankfully, the charges had been significantly changed: I was now accused of offering to supply cocaine and supplying two kilos of the drug.
I was relieved that the time had come, but I was not without a few nerves. I had read and digested all the incriminating tapes and was under no illusion that I had a huge battle on my hands.
I was confident, however, that I had one of the country’s top barristers in my corner, who was going to fight my case as vigorously as he could. His name was Jonathan Goldberg. He had been called to the Bar in February 1971 and made a QC in April 1989. He was a dapper, elegant man, just turned fifty, with close-cropped steel-grey hair, and an abrasive manner, bordering on rudeness. That bothered me little. What he lacked in bedside charm, he made up for with a brilliant legal brain, gritty determination and an impressive track record of dazzling courtroom triumphs against the odds.
I felt in the best possible hands. Whether Mr Goldberg believed my version of what had happened between meeting Jack on 9 May and my arrest on 31 July, the previous year, I didn’t know. But he seemed to like me.
I had faith in him.