Gangsters' Wives (24 page)

He’d have these beautiful horn-rimmed glasses. I’d buy them for him and bump into someone who knew him and they’d say: ‘How much were those, then?’ I’d say, ‘£25’, or whatever. And they’d say, ‘I’ll pay for them. Just tell him Sam said hello’, or Joe or whoever.

Then he’d send me down Mile End Road to the tie shop. Ronnie would say, ‘I want six silk ties.’ ‘What do you want them for?’ I’d ask. ‘I’m giving them to the wardens as presents.’ He was very generous, was Ronnie Kray – much more so than his brothers – but then he never knew the value of money. He was like a little child. Everything he earned in Broadmoor he gave away. He had no concept of how much things were worth. I remember telling him a loaf of bread was fifty pence. He said, ‘What is fifty pence?’ He never got past crowns and shillings.

I had to go to Denmark Street once to buy him an electric guitar. I’d made the mistake one day of telling him that Denmark Street was the place where Eric Clapton and Bill Wyman and Pete Townshend bought their guitars. Next thing I knew Ronnie said, ‘Go to that shop.’ The money was left in an envelope for me at Broadmoor’s signing-out office. I said, ‘I don’t know anything about electric guitars.’ He said, ‘Just ask the man for the sort of guitar he would sell to Eric Clapton.’

I said, ‘But who’s it for?’ I thought he’d taken up the electric guitar. But of course it was for the boy, Charlie Smith. Beautiful, he was. Blond hair. Looked like James Dean but with long hair. In there for murder.

I went to the guitar shop with Charlie Kray and I said to the man behind the counter: ‘You do deliver, don’t you?’ He said, ‘Yes, madam.’ I said, ‘Well, I may as well tell you, it’s to go to Broadmoor.’ He looked a little surprised but he brought a guitar for me to look at. ‘And whom do we address it to, madam?’ he asked. I said, ‘Mr Ronnie Kray.’ Then the man looked at Charlie and said, ‘You’re the older brother aren’t you?’ Well, from that point on they couldn’t do enough for us. They were scurrying around, getting a lovely box. I said, ‘Well, how much is this guitar?’ The man said, ‘£350, madam’. I said, ‘I’ve only got £300.’ He said, ‘Done.’ I said, ‘It has to be delivered two days before Christmas.’ ‘No problem, madam, and we’ll waive our delivery charge.’ That’s the kind of reaction you’d get.

I used to go to this shirt shop in Jermyn Street. I’d go in there and the assistant would say: ‘Hello, dear. Ronnie, sixteen and a half neck, isn’t it?’ I’d say, ‘But how …’ and she’d say: ‘Oh, we’ve had a telephone call. He wants one blue, one white, and he said the lady would come in to pick them up and bring them to him next visit.’ They were lovely shirts too. Irish linen. He organised everything from his cell. You’d see the other inmates in Broadmoor with coffee stains and bits of food all over them. Ronnie was something else. When you went to visit, he’d always come out ten minutes late, so that everyone would be seated and looking at him. And he was always so beautifully dressed. You could put your make-up on in the shine of his shoes.

Poor Reggie, he could wear jeans or trackbottoms and that blue and white shirt. They used to have to wear shoes but in the end they changed it so they could wear trainers. Reggie didn’t know a decent pair of trainers was £70. I’d go into the pub and talk to different people and say, ‘I’ve got to get Reggie a pair of trainers to take in next week’ and they’d say, ‘Here’s £20’, or ‘Here’s £10’ and I’d get enough to pay for them. So you have to believe that in their early life the twins did a lot of good, because people wouldn’t have continued supporting them for thirty years otherwise.

In the early 1980s, two things happened to change how things were with me and Reggie. Firstly I left my husband because of the drugs. Also Mrs Kray died. That had a huge effect on Reggie.

The first marriage proposal was almost jokey. When I used to go to visit Reg, there was one guard who would always arrive with loads of paperwork under his arm. I had to apply for parole for Reggie every year – write letters – and of course you always got refused, but it didn’t matter, you still did it, so he’d bring it all with him. This warden was very nice – Mrs Kray used to make apple pies for him. He used to come in and put his tea and coffee down and say, ‘Oh, I see you’ve got your lovely lady visiting you again, Reg?’ And Reggie would go: ‘Yes, isn’t she lovely? Don’t you like how she’s done her hair?’ Silly things. He would see other prisoners looking at me, and they’d have wives and girlfriends kissing them, mums kissing him – and Reggie didn’t have his mum to visit after Mrs Kray died. The guard would say: ‘When are you two getting married? You should get married, Reg. That’d give you something to look forward to in here.’ I used to look across to him and laugh and say: ‘You won’t be getting married any more, will you, Reg?’ But I think he used to go back to his cell and think about it.

Then I’d go to Broadmoor and Ronnie would say, ‘You know, you should marry my Reggie. You’d be very good for him. You’d get him parole.’ I used to reply, ‘Well, I apply every year to the Home Office for parole for the two of you as it is.’

Ronnie would say: ‘Don’t bother applying for parole for me any more. I’m never coming out.’ He knew he was never coming home. He said: ‘Forget about me. Apply for Reggie.’

So I started applying for parole for Reggie and saying I was the fiancée, Reggie’s fiancée. Ronnie Kray wanted me to marry Reggie. He used to write to him: ‘Marry Flanagan. Why don’t you propose to Flanagan?’

The second time Reggie asked me to marry him, there’d been a joke going round right before I visited. All the other prisoners had been asking, ‘Why don’t you propose to her today, Reg?’ And when I walked in, one looked to the other – a big visiting hall with about twenty tables – and then they all started humming ‘Here comes the bride’. I thought: What are they doing that for? Then Reggie came in and they all called out, ‘Here’s the bridegroom.’

I had a friend from the East End with me that day, and my son JJ. Reg said: ‘They’ve all been singing, putting notes through my door, and warning me they’re going to start singing that and saying, “You should marry her. She’d be good for you.”’ Then he looked at my son and said: ‘How do you fancy me as a stepdad?’ The thing was, he didn’t even look at me, it was straight to my son. My little boy was used to visiting both the Krays. JJ said, ‘Yeah, that’ll be all right, Reggie,’ Reggie went on: ‘You be a good boy. Are you in a youth club? You continue with your boxing’, and all this. Then finally, he looked at me and said: ‘Well, what about it, shall we get married?’

I was really taken aback. I said, ‘You can’t marry someone you don’t love.’ And he said, ‘Who said I don’t love you? I’ve always loved you. My mum loved you and my brothers love you.’ I said: ‘I’m not marrying them, what about you?’ He said, ‘I’ve always loved you.’

I just laughed and changed the subject. Then six months later I walked in and they all started singing again. The guard was laughing, saying: ‘You’ve got a surprise today.’ When I sat down, Reggie said, ‘Right, no more beating about the bush now. I’m going to get married.’ I said, ‘Well, who are you getting married to?’ I thought he had another woman, because he had lots of visitors. He said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m going to marry you. My two brothers are driving me mad. Everyone in here is driving me mad. They all say I should marry you.’ I made a joke when the guard came. I said, ‘He’s proposed, but where is my ring?’ He started laughing then and again I changed the subject because I didn’t really know what to say.

At eight thirty the next morning, there was a knock on the door of the house I was living in in Victoria Park, and there was Charlie Kray with a caravan made of matchsticks, the kind they make in prison. He said, ‘I’ve been told I have to be here at half eight to give you this present from Reggie.’ I said, ‘Is that instead of a ring? I want a diamond ring, I don’t want a caravan made of matchsticks.’ He said, ‘He’s sat down for a month to make that.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I still want a ring.’

So Charlie said, ‘He knows that you’re going to court on Friday for your divorce and he’s sending half of Fleet Street there so that they can meet his fiancée. I said, ‘He’s in prison. How can he do that?’ But of course, he could do anything from his cell. He’d rung all the papers – the
Sun
,
Mirror
,
Mail
,
Standard
,
Star
. He’d said: ‘I’m getting engaged. She’ll be at the divorce court in the Strand, Friday morning to divorce her husband, and then I’m going to marry her.’

I didn’t really believe it and forgot all about it. So on the Friday I went to the divorce court with my two girlfriends. As we came out to go for a nice lunch to celebrate, there were all these photographers there. I couldn’t understand it, I thought someone famous must be getting divorced – a film star like Elizabeth Taylor. They all started shouting out, ‘Flan! Flan!’ They all knew me from the modelling, see. They were all shouting, ‘We hear you’re going to marry Reggie.’

I said: ‘Who said that? I didn’t say yes. I just asked for a ring.’

The guy from the
Sun
said, ‘If you marry him, Flan, you know you’ll have to marry him in handcuffs in prison.’ He wouldn’t be allowed out for the wedding as he still had fifteen more years to serve.

I replied: ‘Oh well, at least I’ll know where he is at night.’ That was the headline in all the papers. It was in seven newspapers, even
The Times
. ‘Model to marry Kray Twin. She says: “At least I’ll know where he is at night.”‘

We eventually got away, after they got me to say that I’d wait until the following week’s visit to see if he came up with an engagement ring. The next week I went to see Reggie and he asked: ‘What do you want an engagement ring for? You’ve got a beautiful ring on your finger from your second husband.’ I said: ‘I want another one.’ He said, ‘But you haven’t said “yes” yet.’

The truth is I was thinking of all the running around Mrs Kray had done over the years, which killed her. It definitely killed her. And all the running around I’d done myself with the twins. I thought: Do I really want my name to be Kray? My son would always be called Cox, but he’d have Reggie Kray as a stepfather and you never know what that might do to a little boy, how it might affect him at school. I talked to my sister and brother and was thinking: Do I really want this for another fifteen years? I’d be toing and froing. I wouldn’t even be young any more by the time he got out.

I didn’t mind doing the parole letters and putting on the functions they asked me to do to raise money, but it was all the other stuff I was worried about. When Ronnie was married to Kate Kray, she used to get calls all the time. You’d never know if he was going to overdose or anything so she couldn’t turn her phone off.

But I didn’t want all that. I’d been visiting prisons every month for fifteen years and it was enough for me. The next time I went to visit, Reggie didn’t mention the marriage thing and I knew it was because I kept harping on about the ring, so I thought I just wouldn’t bring it up. And it sort of died away after that, even though I carried on visiting just the same as before.

I took JJ to visit both Kray brothers between the ages of seven and twelve. Ronnie would always tell him: ‘Don’t take drugs, get off the streets, don’t join a gang.’ He’d say: ‘You don’t want to end up in here like me, do you?’ And always: ‘Look after your mother. She’s your best friend.’ JJ would say, ‘No, I’m good, aren’t I, Mum?’

Same thing with Reggie: ‘You look after your mum,’ he’d tell him. Mum was the fixation of their lives. I think they treated women as well as they did purely because of their mum, because she was a woman. Every woman was potentially someone’s mum and every child was somebody’s little child.

Women and children in need always affected them. I was forever taking money to the Repton boys’ club from Ronnie and Reggie. They did lots of charity work to send dying children to Disneyland. One time Ronnie saw a picture in the paper of an old lady who’d been mugged. He couldn’t fathom it at all. He told me to ring up the
Daily Mirror
, get the address and send her £10. She wrote to him at Broadmoor. ‘I got your £10. Thank you Ronnie Kray. That’s one good deed you’ve done.’

Hardship stories got to them. I’d say, ‘So and so has lost her husband, she’s got three kids.’ They’d say, ‘Send her £20.’ So they couldn’t have been 100 per cent evil, could they? That’s not to say they didn’t do evil deeds, mind. I never condoned them killing those men. Those men were somebody’s dad, somebody’s brother, somebody’s son.

After Ronnie died in 1995, we were all frightened to go to see Reggie. Poor Charlie Kray had to go the next morning. He said he was in a terrible, terrible state. But then Reg threw himself into organising the funeral. He started ringing me up saying “right Flan, you’ve got to be my eyes for this funeral.”

I had to organise all the flowers just so. He wanted a boxing ring in flowers on the top of the first car – one glove laying up, one glove laying down, and that was to say ‘To Ron from Reg’. Then on the right hand side of the funeral car, in writing, he wanted ‘To the other half of me’, and another wreath on the horse and carriage saying: ‘Colonel’.

I thought ‘that’s going to be expensive’. I had to go to the prison and get that money and take it to the florist. Then there were Charlie’s wreaths, then the cousins’ wreaths, then the 26 limos following the horse and carriage, all over Bow Flyover, all through Waltham-stow. If you think you saw something when Jade Goody died, you can treble that.

Reggie organised Ronnie’s funeral from his cell and he did it unbelievably. People said they’d never seen anything like it since Churchill’s funeral. I seated all the people at the church. I had it all on a list from Reggie where he wanted everyone to be seated. He picked the pall bearers, the music, the flowers. Nobody could sit on a seat that wasn’t allotted to them. He’d ring people and say: “When you go in, you’re to sit where Flanagan puts you. She’s got the book of where everyone is to be seated. It’s on my orders.”

He knew there’d be groupies who wanted to say they’d been to Ronnie Kray’s funeral so I had Dave Courtney with 100 security guards to patrol it. There were security guards on the gates, leading up to the door of the Church. And, of course, the whole of Bethnal Green was crawling with police. There was a helicopter following us all the way to Chingford. They were thinking Reggie was going to try to escape. He said “Are they mad?” I was nervous but it was so well organised, I knew no one was going to come in that church who wasn’t supposed to because of the guards.