The Profession of Violence (15 page)

It was a success from the start. Reggie had a flair for knowing what cockneys wanted and was smart enough to see that the new affluent East End needed a West-End-style club of its own. He soon showed real talent for club life. He said ‘no hooligans' and meant it; the few who came were quickly dealt with. He said he wanted men to be able to bring their girl-friends; they did. Soon he had regulars who came because of him and suddenly the club was getting known as one of the ‘in' places on the East End circuit for people from the west. The first few lesser-known celebrities started to arrive in the Bow Road – a playboy or two, an up-and-coming starlet, journalists, an occasional film man in search of new locations. For them, this was the authentic East End they were looking for. For Reggie they were ambassadors of the good life, and started him on a love affair with the famous which the twins would share in the years ahead. The success was Reggie's, but Ronnie was not forgotten. The club combined their joint initials. Reggie christened it The Double R.

Unlike his brother, Reggie Kray had the makings of a first-rate businessman-gangster of the old school. Without his brother, he would have made a definite success of crime and almost certainly have been a rich man and a free one to this day. During his period of freedom from his twin Reggie took few risks, did nothing for the hell of it and shrewdly chose to work with just a few rich, semi-honest clients who needed him. He also showed that, without Ronnie there, he could hold on to his money.

During this period with The Double R, as Reggie got established as a character and showed that he was thoroughly at home in the limbo-land of crime and club life, he rationalized his criminal affairs. There was no need
to grab at anything to bring in £50. Crime and the club life went together. He could confine himself to working with a few men at a time who could be thoroughly exploited; he found he had a talent for spotting them. They were the men with money and with something else – greed, boredom with the straight world, a weakness for dishonesty. According to Reggie, ‘It's odd how you can pick 'em out at once. There's some rich people can't resist the idea of crime. You see them getting all worked up when they think they're with criminals. I s'pose it's because they've always longed to do something forbidden. But they seem to get a kick like sex out of the idea of crime.'

The way it was developing, The Double R was the ideal place for meeting men like this. The corrupt moneyed world could mingle easily with the criminal one; Reggie began exploiting both.

He could be vicious still – when necessary. On the few occasions when there were fights at The Double R he was as lethal as before. He was still cunning, too, and not the man to forget a grudge. Ronnie had to be avenged. A few months after Terry Martin went into the witness-box at the Old Bailey, fire swept through the drinking club owned by the Martin family in Poplar. At the time it happened, Reggie was fishing with a policeman friend in Suffolk. He had always been good with alibis; and he was clever about the threats that sometimes came his way. These usually came from people he had tricked out of money. One day he heard that someone who had threatened him was trying to buy a gun from one of the East End's illicit arms dealers. He spoke to the dealer, who sold the man the gun he wanted, but it was a special one – so special that when the man waited outside The Double R and took a shot at Reggie as he left, it exploded in his hand. He was in hospital a month, and nearly lost his hand.

Photographs of this period show Reggie smiling: the wariness has left his face. Despite the hours he was keeping,
he looked fit and well. He kept himself in trim, drank moderately and lived a very normal life. He liked young children, enjoyed the country, began riding at weekends.

Before long The Double R was bringing in a steady income and it was clear that he had hit on the formula for success – the orderly raucousness, the sentimental cockney songs of Queenie Watts, the villains mixing with celebrities and the regular presence of several large but well-behaved old boxers like handsome Tommy Brown, the ‘Bear of Tottenham', and ‘Big Pat' Connolly, the Glasgow doorman, who weighed twenty-one stone in his prime. Sometimes the gipsies came, and Reggie, remembering his own Romany blood, stood them drinks and told them they could stay. He now had real celebrities among The Double R's visitors – Jackie Collins, Sybil Burton, Barbara Windsor: he called them by their first names and drew a certain glamour from their presence. He looked like turning into something of a playboy, dressing well, enjoying an evening in a West End nightclub and, for the first time in his life, taking an interest in women.

This was the biggest break of all from Ronnie, who had always managed to keep him away from women. Bound by the ties that link a homosexual with his identical twin, Ronnie had always seen any show of interest in a girl by Reggie as rebellion – which it was – and treated it accordingly.

‘What you thinking of, goin' with a bloody woman? You're gettin' soft. Don't you know that women smell and give you diseases?'

Now things were different without Ronnie there, Reggie realized he was good-looking and that women found him attractive. Life at The Double R taught him what he had never understood before – that women are part of the good life and not to be ashamed of. Now, for the first time, Charlie Kray, the elder brother, really entered Reggie's life. He and his blonde wife, Dolly, fitted in naturally with the new life of The Double R. Reggie got on well with him.
although the relationship was different from the one he had with Ronnie. Charlie had nothing of Ronnie's viciousness or showmanship or dreams of glory; he was an easy-going man whose wife didn't get on with her in-laws, and so he had built a separate family life of his own with their two children in a modern flat in Stepney. He and his wife enjoyed themselves. He did well as a wardrobe-dealer. They often had a night out in the West End together. Dolly danced well, and Charlie was something of a gambler, like his father.

Now, with The Double R flourishing, Charlie Kray joined in the success. Had Ronnie been around, the money would have gone as fast as it was earned; the club would have become another battleground, and Reggie's energy would soon have gone into fresh wars and further gang alliances. With Charlie there, things were different. Charlie was shrewd. They found another drinking club at Stratford and bought it. They began their own car-site on the empty plot beside the billiard hall. Then Charlie heard of an empty house going for a nominal rent next to the car park of Bow Police Station. It was typical of Reggie to decide that this would be an ideal place for an illicit gambling club. Despite their neighbours, the Wellington Way Club, which they opened in the spring of 1957, became their biggest money-spinner so far. Blackjack, rummy and faro were bringing in a minimum of £50 a night in house money. The profits doubled when Reggie installed an illegal book-making business on the premises.

Despite the close proximity of Bow Police Station the only threat to the gathering enrichment of Reggie and Charlie Kray was not the Law but the prisoner in Wandsworth Gaol, who was just entering the fifteenth month of his sentence.

Ronnie Kray seemed fine. Now he had his small world under his control he was quite happily sitting out his sentence and hoping for remission for good conduct. He was
no trouble. He read a lot.
Boy's Town
was still his favourite book. ‘It's a lovely story. I used to dream of doing something like that for homeless boys when I came out. Not just because I like boys either. I wanted to do some good. Something that I could be remembered for.' He kept to himself, apart from his ‘pensioners' and a few close friends. The warders treated him warily. Reggie and the family wrote regularly. And he made a new friend, a good-looking giant of a man called Frank Mitchell. Ronnie had been reading
Of Mice and Men.
Mitchell reminded him of Lennie. He was a gentle psychopath, immensely strong, childlike with those he trusted, violent against authority. Warders kept clear of him, and although he had spent most of his life in institutions he was proud of taking any punishment he got. Ronnie admired this. He admired his body and his looks. He also liked to feel that he could care for him. He would try to cheer him up during recreation; when Frank was depressed Ronnie would send him presents of food and tobacco. Few people visited him, so Ronnie arranged with Reggie to get members of the Firm to come to see him. When they talked, Ronnie always promised Mitchell that he and his brother would look after him in the years ahead.

Then Ronnie Kray's routine was broken. Without intending it, his good behaviour had made him eligible for the easier life of a first offenders' prison and he found himself aboard the Solent ferry, bound for the Isle of Wight. The prison at Camp Hill was more humane than Wandsworth. There was a liberal-minded governor, prisoners mixed freely most of the day, and the whole prison staff made an attempt to teach these first offenders trades and stop them turning into hardened criminals. Ronnie hated it.

There were too many games, and far too many straight prisoners for his liking. In Wandsworth the old lags respected him. He had had prestige. Here he was nothing.
The Wandsworth tobacco circuit didn't operate. Instead of prisoners needing his help, most of these new ones kept clear of someone smelling so patently of trouble. He was still shy, still vulnerable, and found it hard to start a normal friendship. All his relationships beyond the family had been with the weird, the cowed or the small group of Bethnal Greeners he had grown up with. New friends appeared impossible.

He was entirely alone here: his family and followers were a continent away across the Solent. He had no aptitude to learn a trade. And for the first time he sensed that he was losing touch with the one being who had always been his firm link with reality. Reggie's success started to obsess him.

Gradually he withdrew into himself. He gave up the effort of talking to people. He stopped writing letters and seemed to lose the power to read. All he could do was watch, and he gradually became convinced that everyone was hostile to him. In the past he had controlled events; now he was helpless. People had feared him; now they were getting their revenge. During the night he would lie awake for hours, brooding on what he'd seen, trying to work out what had happened to turn everyone against him.

‘If Reggie'd been there, I'd have been all right. But there was no one. I started thinking there was someone there all set to do me in.'

The worst thing was not knowing what he had done.

‘Then I worked out what was behind it all. I was a bit barmy now. But I thought everyone was thinking I had grassed.'

This explained everything – the silences, the lack of friends, the sudden isolation. But it was terrible. Ronnie had spent his life loathing the Law: an informer was the lowest of the low. No one could seriously believe this of him. The suspicion turned to certainty. What other reason would a group of prisoners have for making him an outcast? He tried to face it calmly. If people thought like that,
so what? He knew the truth. He had less than a year to serve now; then he'd be back among people who loved him and respected him. The year soon proved too long.

‘I don't know what it was set me off, but I thought there was agents everywhere working a big plot to torture me.'

His only hope was vigilance – never trust a soul or give himself away. Somehow at night he had to keep himself awake. His survival depended on it now. He talked to no one, did nothing except concentrate on his battle to stay alive. People ignored him, but he knew that they were watching.

Then came the thought that finished him. Just suppose all his enemies were right – suppose he
had
been an informer without knowing it? How could he prove he wasn't? If only Reggie had been there, he would have known, but on his own like this how could he be sure of anything? Perhaps there was someone else inside him forcing him to do things he never knew. How could he know that he was Ronnie Kray at all?

Hardly sleeping now, barely eating for fear that someone might have poisoned his food, Ronnie spent most of each day huddled in his cell facing the door. The warders, worried that he might kill himself, kept him under observation, making him more nervous still. They noticed that the only time he moved was to go to the mirror. He spent hours on end watching himself. They thought it vanity. It wasn't. He was attempting to keep sane with the sight of the one familiar thing remaining – his own face. Even that was changing: there was a puffiness around the eyes, a faint thickening along the jaw-line.

This was the point at which he broke. The watching game could last no longer. If they were all against him, he would face them and get it over with. That evening, instead of staying in his cell he walked down to the recreation room. He stood apart from all the others, watching for a while. There were all enemies – he could see that now.
They were pretending to ignore him with their silly games, but he had had enough.

He began breathing deeply as he had done between rounds as a boxer to gain strength. He screamed, then charged, arms flailing, punching at everyone he could. He tipped a table over and hurt several prisoners before he was safely put into a straitjacket.

Later that night he thought he saw the man who had been plotting everything against him from the start. The governor of Camp Hill Prison had heard of the trouble at recreation and called into the sick bay to see if prisoner Kray were feeling any better.

‘Filthy old bastard,' screamed Ronnie, and spat at him. He felt better then.

Ronnie was moved to the psychiatric wing of Winchester Gaol for observation. The medical officer diagnosed an attack of ‘prison psychosis' – a term covering almost any form of violent mental disorder brought on by confinement – and had him heavily sedated. For a while he seemed to recover. He answered questions coherently, was pleased with news of the family and began eating again. Then came the news about Aunt Rose. The family had known that she had leukaemia for nearly two years, but had kept it from Ronnie for fear of upsetting him. Wild Aunt Rose who once beat two women in a straight fight in Vallance Road fought death as she had fought everything. Twice she dragged herself home when the doctors had given her less than a year to live. When she was too weak to stand, the family refused to let her back into hospital.