The Profession of Violence (20 page)

A big man with pale hair and eyes rose and shook hands.

‘And these are the Kray twins, Reginald and Ronald. You'll find them very useful friends to have.'

Introductions over, the commander departed; business started. The twins both smoked and remained silent. The man called Payne did the talking – softly and with a hesitant, apologetic charm. It was as if he hated having to tell de Faye how much he knew; he was extremely accurate. He had the whole story of his club, called Esmeralda's Barn. It was in Wilton Place and had enjoyed a period of success as a night-club for the bright young things of the early fifties – Cy Grant was among the performers, the young Duke of Kent among the guests. What a waste to let a place like this go to seed. How very smart of Mr de Faye and his friends to see its possibilities now that the Gaming Act was law. The club looked very good, and with roulette and four chemmy tables in operation they should be clearing …

The big man paused, then named a figure so near the mark that de Faye could only nod in agreement. This was not all that Payne knew about the place: somehow he had gleaned details of the unusual company structure controlling it. He knew that there were four principal shareholders drawing profits from the gambling. He also knew the fact that caused Mr de Faye so much concern – that Esmeralda's Barn was controlled in turn by a holding company called Hotel Organisation Ltd. Hotel Organisation had one effective shareholder – Stefan de Faye. As Payne explained this, both twins smiled.

Payne's proposition was eminently reasonable. He had heard that Mr de Faye was no great gambler – why not exchange his vulnerable position for hard cash? In the long run it would save a lot of worry. Payne was offering £1,000 down. The sale could take place at once with a simple entry in the company minutes; it would be perfectly legal and would not affect de Faye and the two other directors, who could keep their directorships and profits from the
Barn. Once de Faye relinquished his control he would be surprised what a weight would be off his mind.

If he decided not to?

Leslie Payne made no reply, but looked towards the twins.

Stefan de Faye decided to take his £1,000.

At this point Leslie Payne becomes a key figure in the rise of the twins, and it was natural for Ronnie to go to him for advice when Rachman offered the information about Stefan de Faye's controlling interest in Esmeralda's Barn. Reggie had only just come out of Wandsworth on bail after nine months of his sentence. Thanks to the skill of his lawyers and a dispute about the evidence on which he had been convicted, his case had been reopened. In the meantime he was free. While he had been away Payne had become Ronnie's own personal adviser, fixer, front man and father figure. When Ronnie put his faith in anyone the trust was total while it lasted. Health, finance, sex life, business, law – whatever Ronnie's problem and whatever time of day or night, Checker Berry would be sent off in Ronnie's car and Leslie Payne, the omniscient ‘man with the briefcase, brought back to Vallance Road to confer.

And yet in many ways Payne was a most unlikely man to have been mixed up with the Krays – a cultured, humorous character with a sharp brain, very pretty wife and two small daughters all living cosily in a suburban house in Dulwich. But Les Payne and the twins saw something that they thought they needed in each other. At that time Payne was a bankrupt and had watched fourteen of his associated companies float off into liquidation. He could see the twins' potential from the start. For Ronnie, who was often morbidly unsure of himself, Payne had the poise, the confidence and inside knowledge that he lacked. Some called him ‘Payne the Brain'.

***

At about ten o'clock that evening Stefan de Faye met Payne and the twins, and the new proprietors of Hotel Organisation Ltd drove to Wilton Place to see their property. Everything had been legally tied up and signed: Payne didn't make mistakes. It was an interesting evening; interesting for the twins, who gazed with mounting avarice and awe as the earliest of the night's gamblers seated themselves at the rich baize of the tables and the chips began travelling; interesting for the club's manager and principal shareholder who was waiting to meet the night's big punters, ignorant of what had happened; most interesting of all for Leslie Payne, who held the company minutes of Hotel Organisation Ltd in his ever-present briefcase, and was waiting for a good moment to tell the manager and his co-directors that they had some new and unexpected partners.

Payne did it very well: nothing disturbed the ritual of the gaming-room as he informed the manager that the ownership of his club had changed for good. The manager showed no emotion as he glanced at de Faye's signature and casually remarked that he would fight the legality of the deal to the last lawyer in the land. Of course, said Payne (who had a pleasant smile for such occasions), by all means try, but he hardly thought that it would do much good. He had consulted the best company lawyers in London already.

He looked round him at the small bar, the softly lighted gaming-room, the restaurant where club members could eat well through the night, the roulette wheel in the anteroom. The place was filling fast now and he called a waiter, ordered a bottle of champagne, told him to put it on his account and asked his two friends what they'd like to drink.

The night the twins and Payne walked into Esmeralda's Barn the club seemed heading for success. It had been quicker off the mark than any other club when the new Gaming Act legalized gambling and had maintained its
lead. Croupiers were still scarce – Esmeralda's Barn had the best in London. Gamblers were an unknown quantity, but the manager's personal friends, rich London restaurant-owners, were the one group who played big and always met their debts. The address was perfect.

This was the gold-mine that the twins suddenly found they owned a stake in. Payne and his lawyers soon restructured the business side of the Barn. De Faye's name stayed on the directors' list for two more years, but he never appeared and never collected a penny. The two junior directors were eased out, while the manager, the mainstay of the club and the one man to have invested real money in it, stayed on with a fifty per cent stake in the profits and the twins absorbed the rest.

During the first few months the twins made no great difference to the running of the club. For both of them it was a new toy. They had identical dark-blue dinner-jackets made in Savile Row and would arrive shortly before midnight, drink, order a steak in the restaurant, then watch the money roll in.

There were three chemmy tables, each with nine players, operating from 11 P.M. Until 3 A.M. each player paid at the rate of £3 per shoe to the house. From then to 6 A.M. shoe money rose to £6 each. After 6 A.M. it rose to £10. A good croupier takes roughly four minutes for a shoe. The senior croupier did it in less. Shoe money was straight profit to the house. When the twins came the Barn was drawing something over £10,000 a week from the tables. This meant that thanks to Rachman the twins suddenly possessed assured incomes of something like £40,000 each a year with nothing to do for them except wear dark-blue dinner-jackets.

Just before Christmas Reggie's appeal against conviction in the Shay case failed. Despite the efforts of his lawyers he went back to Wandsworth for the following six months.
Ronnie was left to make the most of wealth and Esmeralda's Barn alone.

He enjoyed sitting in the bar at night, knowing that people wondered who he was. He enjoyed the money. He enjoyed the sense of ownership. But there was nothing in the whole club for him to do: had there been, he might have learned just how delicate a business big-time gambling can be. He never did learn this. He was a villain, not a bank clerk. He hated gambling and despised the rich. He was incapable of sitting back and accepting £800 a week for doing nothing. For Ronnie there was something wrong with money that was not dishonestly acquired. He had to have a racket of his own. Not for the money; he had more than enough by now. But racketeering was a habit and a way of life. He could feel superior to those he cheated. Soon he was ‘nipping' the cashier for small amounts and fleecing the occasional client. Then he found something neater. It was exactly what he wanted, since it enhanced his sense of private power.

Like any gambling club, Esmeralda's Barn was obliged to pay winnings straight away and bear any losers' cheques that bounced. Success depended on keeping the margin of dud losers' cheques to a minimum; the manager was extremely strict over the credit he would grant within the club. Ronnie was different. Whenever the manager was away or off duty, Ronnie as a director had the right to say who should have credit; he began granting it quite freely, seeing that it placed the gambler firmly in his debt. If the man won, Ronnie had done him a favour and would expect a good commission in return. If he lost, the house might have to carry the bad cheque; Ronnie would settle privately for whatever he could recover. Provided Ronnie could scare the man into paying him a few pounds, he would be satisfied.

The manager soon saw what was happening when cheques marked ‘return to drawer' flooded the office. When they came to over £2,000 in one week, he
mentioned it to Ronnie. Ronnie laughed. Why should the manager worry, when there was more play than ever across the tables? The manager tried explaining that no club could carry such losses. As a last gesture he offered the twins £1,000 a week to stay away. Reggie was still in Wandsworth; Ronnie replied that they weren't interested.

So the manager, good gambler that he was, saw that the time had come to cut his losses, forget the money he had invested in the club and place his bets elsewhere. He was scrupulously polite to Ronnie; he could afford to be. When he set up his new club in Curzon Street his richest clients followed; the cheques no longer bounced. Today his club remains what Esmeralda's Barn would have been – one of the four top gambling clubs in London. The twins could still have had a permanent share of the profits.

At the time, nobody worried. If the manager left, so much the better. His share of profit could now go to Leslie Payne and the twins. They had to bring a new manager in to run the gambling, but he had no say over credit; if something like £15,000 of bad cheques piled up in the cashier's office during the six months, who cared? Play was increasing all the time.

What Ronnie really wanted was a plushier version of the billiard hall, a headquarters where he could come on show with all his followers and be himself before an audience. This seemed impossible at first. Everybody in the Barn appeared so confident and rich. But Ronnie despised them. ‘They're such a lot of cry-babies, frightened of what their old man will say when he finds out what they've been up to. So when they're in a mess they come crawling. They'll do anything then to save themselves, even pretend to like you. But they're not sincere like East End people. When it comes to it they always let you know your place.'

The chip on his shoulder showed; the urge to humiliate was irresistible. One of the Barn's most regular losers was a dead-beat peer. Ronnie knew he was on the edge of bankruptcy but always gave him credit to play. When he
had lost again the old man would ring him up at Vallance Road and threaten suicide. Ronnie enjoyed this and would say, ‘All right, you silly old bastard. Don't waste the gas by putting your head in the oven today. You can't afford it. Come round to Vallance Road when I've had my shave and I'll see what I can do. Don't be late.'

The clientele was changing as the dedicated, big-time gamblers started to keep away. Now came the playboy gamblers, gambling addicts, chancers and the chronically in debt, people the manager would have headed off; Ronnie welcomed them. If they got deeper into debt so much the better. The house could carry them and this would mean more people under his control. Violence crept in. Several drunken losers at the Barn were thrown down the stairs, and occasionally Ronnie instructed East End villains to call on members he considered ‘cheeky' about their debts. What happened then was not his business: if somebody was hurt, an empty flat smashed up, this had nothing to do with him.

But on the whole Ronnie knew better than to use violence to get back money he was owed. He wanted power and status. There was a sort of devious flirtation in the way he played those who feared him: smiling one night, meeting them with a blank stare and a demand for money the next.

He began getting what he seemed to want – the pretence of friendship, the appearance of respect, even of social success; these were people who could introduce him to the smart life if he wanted it. They took him to their homes, their London clubs, dined him in the House of Lords, introduced him to celebrities. It was surprising how cheap the rich world was, and it gave Ronnie a new role – the playboy gangster in a sophisticated world.

As usual he began dressing for the part – sharper suits, heavier jewellery, better-cut overcoats. Then he moved into the West End, taking the lease on a top-floor Chelsea flat in payment for a gambling debt. He took the whole
place over – furniture, pictures, the former tenant's young boyfriend. Then for a while he became something of a character on the Chelsea scene, the King's Road's own gangster-in-residence.

He was the showman once again, conscious of his public. Sometimes he played the heavy gangster, sometimes the clown. One night he brought a chimpanzee in evening dress into the Barn, sat him down at the tables and had him paid his winnings. Another night when things were dull he announced that he was marrying one of the girls in the club. This was a novelty at least; like everything with Ronnie it had to be done at once. Payne suggested holding the marriage aboard ship. He knew somebody with a boat moored off Chelsea Reach. It was 2 A.M. but the man was fetched, guests summoned; Payne was appointed best man, the wedding party started.

It was a great affair. Word soon got round that there was free champagne at Esmeralda's Barn; Ronnie was suddenly in earnest, drinking toasts and talking about the children he would have. The one thing he refused to do was kiss the bride. Not that this mattered. Long before dawn broke, Ronnie was slumbering quietly on a couch at the far end of the restaurant, the girl on one side and the man who was to have married them on the other. They woke up with the cleaners.