Gangsters' Wives
Authors: Tammy Cohen
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Specific Groups, #Crime & Criminals, #Women, #True Crime, #Organized Crime, #Criminals
Tammy Cohen is an author and freelance journalist, living in London. She has written for numerous magazines and national newspapers, specialising in human interest stories as well as relationship, motivational and celebrity features. Author of eight books, including the bestselling
The Day I Died
,
How I Made My First Million
and
Deadly Divorces
, she currently writes for
Marie Claire
,
The Daily Telegraph
and
Woman and Home
.
GANGSTERS’ WIVES
Tammy Cohen
Quercus
For Otis, who can achieve anything
First published in 2010 by
Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS
Copyright © 2010 by Tammy Cohen
The moral right of Tammy Cohen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84724 978 4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Chapter 4 - Jackie ‘Legs’ Robinson
What is a gangster?
The blanket definition – a member of an organised gang of criminals – is as wide-reaching as it is meaningless. Robin Hood was a gangster. The fourteen-year-old from the inner city estate with a flick knife in his back pocket – he’s a gangster too. Suicide bombers are gangsters, extended
Shameless
-style families who conspire to cheat the benefit system – all come under the ‘gangster’ umbrella.
Yet, ask the average person in the street to name a gangster and they’ll say the Krays, or Al Capone. In the popular imagination, gangsters aren’t scared teenagers under pressure to belong or politically motivated idealists, convinced that violence can be justified as long as it’s for the greater good. The gangsters in our mind’s eye are hardened criminals operating under a specially adapted moral code. They are both beyond the law and a law unto themselves. They are streetwise and ruthless and uniformly, unequivocally male.
Which leads us onto …
What is a gangster’s wife?
She dresses in furs and carries a Prada handbag. She holidays in Mauritius and Marbella. She divides her mornings between the gym and the beauty salon and her lunchtimes between the Ivy and the Ritz. In the evenings, she chooses a designer dress from her walkin wardrobe and goes clubbing in Essex, sipping champagne in the cordoned-off VIP section with her girlfriends and sisters. Her blonde hair is expensively streaked, her nails encrusted with tiny jewels. She is the underworld equivalent of a footballer’s wife – a GAG to their WAG.
Or so we’d like to think.
In reality, of course, gangsters’ wives are as diverse as the men they love.
Sure, some park their 4×4s in front of porticoed neoRoman mansions on high-gated executive estates, but others wait out their days in squalid exile in poorly serviced tower blocks or live lives of blameless conventionality behind the windows of their suburban semis.
Just as there is no blueprint for a gangster, there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ gangster’s wife.
The women featured in this book come from every walk of life, every age and social group. They are mothers and grandmothers, newly-weds and widows. They are housewives, lap dancers, students, writers, even kitchen tilers. They’re shy, outspoken, resigned, aggrieved. In short, they are impossible to pigeonhole and as resistant to conformity as the men whose lives they’ve shared.
Some have been personally involved in their partner’s ‘activities’ at one stage or another. Judy Marks went on the run with her drug smuggler husband Howard. She also couriered cash for him and travelled the world on a false ID. ‘Carly’ stayed up all night in her seven-bedroomed villa-turned-prison, counting hundreds of thousands of illegally gained euros for her drug baron boyfriend and acted as interpreter on drug deals worth millions. Jackie Robinson stole to keep her jailed married lover, Johnny Adair, in designer clothes. ‘Donna’ carried thousands of Ecstasy pills in her hand baggage just for the thrill of it.
Others operate a ‘hear no evil, speak no evil’ system, turning a blind eye to their partner’s ‘business affairs’ in return for the lifestyle it affords, or just to keep the status quo. After all, what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right? And besides, it’s a dog eat dog world out there, they say, and if it wasn’t their men out there doing it, it would be someone else. Jennifer Courtney is phlegmatic about husband Dave’s claim to have killed the man who’d just shot dead his companion. ‘I’d rather someone else was dead than have to read Dave’s obituary in the paper,’ she reasons.
Then there are the nouveau wives, the ones who arrived on the scene after the event, piecing together their new love’s wrongdoings from yellowing newspaper cuttings and faded court records. Anne Leach, who met husband Carlton when his friends paid her to lap dance for him, first confronted his violent past on the big screen at a Leicester Square premiere of the film of his early life. Lyn McKaig didn’t believe her softly spoken new boyfriend Terry was once an international cocaine baron – until he showed her his prison release papers.
So what’s it like, living with a gangster?
Popular culture would have it that life as a gangster’s moll is an endless whirl of lunches, holidays and charity functions. Try telling that to Becky Loy, forced to live in her car with her Romanian gangster husband, or Judy Marks who spent eighteen months in prison, separated from her kids, because husband Howard refused to believe they’d ever get caught.
Falling for a gangster means never knowing who’s on the end of his phone, or when he’s going to nip off unexpectedly, or if he’s ever coming home. Prepare to do a lot of waiting around. Prepare to do a lot of prison visiting. Jenny Courtney professes to have worn out several vibrators waiting for her man to get out of jail. Former model and
Benny Hill
girl Maureen Flanagan clocked up thirty years visiting Reggie Kray and brother Ronnie in prison after making a deathbed promise to their mum.
Life with a gangster isn’t about spending money just as fast as he can extort it, it’s about uncertainty, whispered conversations behind closed doors, long periods of separation without a definite end in sight.
Writing this book, I expected to meet doormats or prima donnas, women who’d traded their moral standards for a fridge full of champagne. I expected to find personalised number-plates and Rottweilers with diamond-studded collars, wall-to-wall jacuzzis and a big gaping void where a conscience usually goes.
Instead I found a group of women united only by their diversity and their links to men with a tenuous grip on right and wrong. In a vast but worn-out apartment in Mallorca, where the sun played on faded rugs and book-piled sofas, I met Judy Marks – who paid the highest of prices for loving her husband so unconditionally. In a tiny local authority flat in the East End, 68-year-old former Page Three girl Flanagan, still oozing glamour, held court about her years as confidante to the Krays, the photos on her walls a shrine to an era long passed. In a terraced house in Worthing, under the shadow of the gas works opposite, Lyn McKaig told how, after a Barnardo’s childhood, she’d finally found, with boyfriend Terry, a place she could call ‘home’. In a noisy bar in southern Spain, nervous, glossy-haired ‘Carly’ kept one eye on the door as she remembered the Faustian pact she’d entered into with her Irish gangster ex, who’d rented her a luxury villa that nobody could visit and splashed out hundreds of thousands on her clothes, but wouldn’t allow her out to wear them. ‘If you could have seen my soul, it probably had a designer label on it,’ she told me wryly.
Researching the book, I stroked lapdogs, pored through photo albums and perched gingerly on a fur-covered swing in a garden-shed-come-sex-dungeon in the depths of South London.
I met women whose smiles warmed a room, and others who only realised they were crying when the tears splashed on the table in front of them. Some spoke with words spiked through with bitterness, others without a trace of regret.
Some had remarkable insights, others seemed, even years after the events, to be almost wilfully blinkered.
From Becky Loy who was facing homelessness for a second time when I met her in a dusty Fuengirola café, where plastic tables lined the traffic-fume-filled main road, to Anna Connelly, now a busy working grandmother, but still fiercely protective of the memory of her fiancé Viv Graham, gunned down in a Newcastle street on the very last day of 1993, the women in this book gave generously both of their time and themselves.
Shameless self-promotion? A chance to set the record straight? A means for revenge? Absolution? Apology? The savouring of old memories? Whatever the motivation, the stories were told with honesty and without conditions.
Behind every good man is a good woman and behind every gangster is a woman with a good story to tell.
And here are some of them …
Dave Courtney holds the dubious title of Britain’s number one celebrity gangster. According to his own website, his pedigree is impeccable: ‘In his time, Dave has been shot, stabbed, had his nose bitten off (they sewed it back on) and has had to kill to stay alive himself. Dave Courtney has been involved in debt collecting, minding clubs, assault, contraband and murder, to name but a few things.’ Dave has also been referred to as the ‘Yellow Pages of the Underworld’ due to his criminal connections. He’s been up in court on numerous occasions – sometimes appearing in front of the judge clad in a court jester’s outfit – yet only been found guilty once, after attacking five Chinese waiters with their own meat cleaver. On trial in 2001 alongside corrupt policeman Austin Warnes, accused of plotting to frame a London woman by planting drugs in her car – a charge he flatly denied – Courtney was so incensed by suggestions that he was a police informant that he attacked Warnes in the courthouse. He knew that being labelled a ‘grass’ put his and his
family’s lives in danger. Dave’s flamboyant public life is matched by his private life. He and his wife Jenny have talked openly about swinging, and once had a break-up so nasty that she accused him in court of wife beating
.
The first time I came across Dave and Jenny was at a wedding in the early 1990s. Jenny, an eye-catching black woman, sported a leather corset, shaven head and studded dog collar. Dave was the best man and presented the happy couple with a gold-plated knuckleduster. A week later, Dave turned up at our front door with a big unsmiling friend in tow. He hadn’t come to compare wedding photos either. Someone at our address had been writing dodgy cheques and, completely coincidentally, he’d come to collect. Well, thankfully it turned out that someone at a very
similar address
had been writing dodgy cheques, but it was a close call
.
Fast forward nearly two decades and I am walking uncertainly down a nondescript road in Plumstead, South London, convinced I’ve got the wrong address. Surely Dave and Jenny can’t live in a place like this? You’d expect such unconventional characters to be living it up in a penthouse pad in Soho. And yet here in Plumstead the houses appear to be bog-standard terraces, running on, one after the other, in an unbroken line … until I round a bend, and suddenly there standing in front of me is undoubtedly, unmistakeably Camelot Castle, home of Mr and Mrs Courtney. Twin majestic gateposts flank the entrance from which fly two flags of St George. The top of the house is fringed with battlements
,
between which life-size models of American civil war soldiers peer bravely out, muskets at the ready. The side of the house is covered entirely by a mural of Dave as King Arthur, surrounded by his trusted knights of the Round Table. Dave comes to the door wearing just a shirt and explaining that he’s only just got in from a party the night before. I follow him to the kitchen, where Jenny is making tea for the builders who are fixing the conservatory where the ceiling seems to have fallen in. Where Dave is larger than life, in every sense of the word, Jenny looks tiny and slightly on edge. Dressed in androgynous black T-shirt and jeans, she doesn’t look any different from when I first saw her at the wedding seventeen years before, except that instead of having a completely shaved head, she’s now sporting a tuft of hair on the top. She looks tired, but still nowhere near her thirty-nine years. With her slight frame, it’s hard to believe she’s a mother, let alone a grandmother. Leading the way into the living room, which is painted black and dominated by a giant portrait of Dave, complete with angel wings and gold-leafed knuckleduster, Jenny is polite, but weary, as if there are plenty of other things she ought to be getting on with – like tiling a kitchen or two (she has just qualified as a kitchen tiler). As she starts talking, however, her reservations seem to melt away. She’s unguarded, funny and disarmingly frank. She takes me on a tour of the house, finishing up at the end of the garden where, guarded by a life-size model of a guardsman in a sentry box, the Courtneys have built their very own sex dungeon. Inside there’s a red velvet throne, a
pole-dancing pole, a fur-covered swing and a variety of objects with ropes and buckles attached that I decide not to ask too closely about
.