The Profession of Violence (24 page)

Once they were back in London, Payne quickly set up a subsidiary of Carston to handle the financing of the new scheme; Ronnie, believing in a new life round the corner, put down the deposit on a brand-new Rolls.

It was a shade improbable: gangsters don't build cities, nor do penurious African politicians hand out instant fortunes. The idea of the town was viable; all that it needed now was long-term money. But it would be many years before it made Ronnie Kray the white king of Enugu. He wanted instant profits, and had no capital of his own to invest. A Nigerian contractor demanded £5,000, which he
claimed was due to him under agreement. Payne, who was in Enugu, found himself suddenly in gaol. In England the twins had to find the money to get their friend released. This was not difficult, but they felt angry and betrayed – Ronnie in particular. Greatness had seemed so close.

Joe was a boxer and an old friend of the twins. He met Ronnie one night in a Fulham Road club just after his Nigerian hopes had folded; without knowing what had happened, he tried borrowing £5 – ‘With all that weight you've put on, Ron, you look as if you could afford it.'

No one laughed: most people knew the signs when Ronnie was depressed. Ronnie said nothing, gulped his drink, called for his coat and left. He had his boy with him, his car outside ready to take him to The Cambridge Rooms for dinner. The car had reached the Kingston bypass when he changed his mind and told the driver to go back. Joe was still drinking at the bar.

‘I want a word with you in private.'

‘What about, Ron?'

‘You'll see.'

Everyone in the club was watching now as Joe followed Ronnie into the washroom. Joe did nothing to defend himself. Ronnie used his favourite knife. Joe did not cry out. When Ronnie had finished he paused to wash his hands and straighten his tie before walking back through the bar. His car was waiting outside and he told the driver he had better hurry or they'd be late for supper.

When he had gone and the washroom door was opened, Joe was found in the corner, conscious and ‘with half his face beside him on the floor'. The surgeons at St Stephen's Hospital used more than seventy stitches to sew it back in place. The police spent the whole night beside his bed waiting for him to talk.

Reggie heard what had happened straight away. He said that Ronnie must be off his head to do a thing like that. The police were waiting to pin something on the twins;
once Joe or any witness from the club talked to the police, Ronnie was finished.

‘You'd better make sure no one does talk, then,' said Ronnie.

No one did, although it took Reggie and the Firm the whole night checking who was in the club and making sure that everyone understood just what was good for him. Joe knew this of his own accord. The policeman by his bedside was unlucky.

For a long while afterwards Joe was known as ‘Tramlines' to his friends, and that autumn Ronnie forgot his politicians and his frauds and dreams of power to begin a brief and therapeutic splurge of sadism.

The Jonathan affair came soon after Joe's injury. Jonathan was a hard, good-looking little man, another old friend of the twins, and one night at the Barn the twins heard he had picked a fight with a young man who was the son of one of their allies. This was an indirect challenge. Jonathan should have known better. Reggie was for caution; Ronnie worked himself into a rage. There had to be a showdown. It was 3 A.M., but Ronnie rang Jonathan, saying there was something to discuss, and he would be grateful if he would take a taxi round to Wilton Place at once.

The Barn was closing, the gaming-room almost empty. Ronnie was in the kitchen. Jonathan was shown in. When he saw Ronnie he tried to run. Somebody tripped him and the kitchen door slammed in his face. There was a sturdy kitchen chair; Jonathan found himself dumped in it and heard Ronnie tell his brother to hold him down. Then Ronnie took a steel knife-sharpener which he had placed in the gas flame. Three men remaining in the gaming-room heard muffled screams as Ronnie branded Jonathan along each cheek.

Soon after this the twins left Esmeralda's Barn for good; the gold-mine was in debt, the tax-man at the door. The twins had other things to worry them. Ronnie was becoming
dangerous again; Reggie was doing his lame best to keep him in control. This was hard. Sometimes he found himself involved in the excitement and needed all his strength to remind himself of where the twins' true interests lay.

Left to himself Ronnie would destroy all they had created. All he could think of was his enemies; all that he wanted was to murder them. Half-drugged or drunk, he spent his time trying to decide who was against him.

In Nigeria he had been fascinated by reports of the bestialities of the local Leopard Men. He began studying them, keeping the pictures of their mangled victims carefully mounted in his scrapbook, ‘their livers and hearts removed', according to the caption, ‘to make magic medicine'.

One night at The Kentucky he was drinking with two boys. One of them asked how he would like to suffer the sort of pain that he inflicted. Instead of answering, he took out his favourite knife and slowly sliced across his own hand. Someone had to drive him to hospital to have it stitched.

Reggie's chief problem was to keep Ronnie away from the police. Argument was useless. Much time that he could ill afford seemed to be spent in keeping him amused. Business began to suffer. There was the perpetual fear that Ronnie would land everyone in some appalling situation.

Ronnie's depressions were the greatest hazard; afterwards his nightmares started and he could easily go berserk. Reggie did all he could to keep him happy. There were his boys and there was drink; after sufficient gin or brown ale, Ronnie could forget his troubles and doze away safely in the big four-poster he had bought for Cedra Court. He also needed people round him, especially since he now enjoyed meeting celebrities. The parties started.

Soon they were getting known in certain circles. One night a well-known television don turned up at Cedra Court. So did a famous disc-jockey. Driberg was a regular
visitor. Then came actors, a world-famous painter, several boxers, the chairman of an engineering firm, an assortment of men from the City, and two young men in dark suits who turned out to be Church of England clergymen.

During his Chelsea days Ronnie had learned enough of homosexual togetherness to know what was expected: entertainments were laid on. Some of the success of these ‘at homes' must have been due to Ronnie's boys, some to the novelty of the locale. But by far the greatest draw was Ronnie himself. His appearance, his reputation as a criminal, his adroit mixture of sadism and perversion made him a creature of limitless appeal; he exploited the sexual overtones of violence with the same sly gusto that he brought to his more conventional acts of extortion.

None of the guests seemed put off by the chance of blackmail or by the dangers of flirting with a potential killer. Presumably this added to the excitement. Soon Ronnie was in demand as a guest at certain country houses round London. One he enjoyed was close to Brighton; it was after a weekend here that he first conceived the ambition for a country place of his own. The set-up of wealthy, upper-class country living appealed to him; he was enjoying his success and the surprising range of intimate friends in high places it afforded.

Around this time a different group of men was taking an interest in him: one was a small man called Read who had recently arrived in the East End. He had previously been in Paddington, where the name Kray occasionally cropped up among the criminals he knew. Now that he was a detective inspector at the early age of thirty-six and attached to Commercial Street Police Station, Leonard Read was anxious to meet the twins. He had found them elusive, yet the more he learned of local crime, the more important they appeared to be.

Witnesses were clamming up. Whenever he asked old East End informers about the twins, they changed the
subject. A policeman likes to know what he is up against. When someone told Inspector Read that the twins often used The Grave Maurice, a pub by Whitechapel underground station, early in the evening, he decided to go along.

Normally the twins both had a sixth sense about the Law, and would never enter a pub where police were present. But Read was new to the district; and when Ronnie strode into the saloon bar of The Maurice, gazing round to check on unwelcome visitors, he didn't spare a glance for the man in the grey cap sitting in the corner with a Worthington and the racing edition of the
Evening News.

‘PEER AND A GANGSTER: YARD INQUIRY' shouted the headlines, and the story, splashed across three quarters of the front page of the
Sunday Mirror,
explained that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Joseph Simpson, had ordered a top-level investigation into the alleged homosexual relationship between a peer who was a ‘household name' and a leading thug in the London underworld, who was involved in West End protection rackets. The investigation was being conducted by Detective Chief Superintendent Frederick Gerrard, who was inquiring into Mayfair parties the thug and the peer had been to, the peer's weekend visits to Brighton along with a number of ‘prominent public men', his relationships with certain East End gangsters ‘and a number of clergymen', and allegations of blackmail.

Within forty-eight hours, warned the
Sunday Mirror,
Sir Joseph would be meeting the Home Secretary to give him details of what the
Sunday Mirror
was revealing to its readers. Gerrard would get his marching orders; then the peer, the gangster and the erring clergy had better watch out.

With this front-page salvo in the
Sunday Mirror
the so-called ‘Case of the Brighton Peer' began.

This was 12 July 1964. Things soon began to happen. Early next morning a photographer called Bernard Black from Clapton came to the
Mirror
picture desk claiming to have a reel of photographs of the peer and the gangster, and that day at New Scotland Yard, Sir Joseph Simpson
prepared a public statement denying the suggestion that Her Majesty's Commissioner of Police was starting a private witch-hunt against titled homosexuals. It expressed pained surprise at the suggestion that he personally ordered an investigation into a relationship between ‘a peer and a man with a criminal record'. It denied that he was giving the Home Secretary details from such an investigation. It denied that such an investigation had ever taken place.

Just after tea-time Bernard Black, the photographer, returned to the
Mirror
offices at Holborn Circus asking for his pictures back and saying that the copyright was not his to sell. The
Mirror
refused to return them. Next morning Black was in the High Court applying for an injunction forbidding the
Daily Mirror
or the
Sunday Mirror
to publish his pictures under any circumstances.

That Tuesday Superintendent Gerrard, the man the
Mirror
named as head of the officially denied investigation, asked to see the
Mirror
's dossier in which the allegations were made. There was no dossier; editor Payne admitted as much, although a phalanx of reporters had been working hard since dawn trying to make good the deficiency.

On Thursday, 16 July, the
Mirror
led with massive headlines on ‘THE PICTURE WE DARE NOT PRINT'. It described how this picture on its files showed ‘a well-known member of the House of Lords seated on a sofa with a gangster who leads the biggest protection racket London has ever known'. Then an article appeared on 22 July in the West German
Stern
magazine, entitled ‘Lord Bobby in Trouble'. Unworried by the distant hazards of the English libel law the magazine named Boothby and Ronnie Kray as the subjects of the
Mirror
story and published a picture of both twins in boxing kit alongside an early photograph of Boothby and Winston Churchill.

Lord Boothby retained Arnold Goodman, Harold Wilson's personal solicitor, now Lord Goodman, and Gerald Gardiner, QC, who later became the Labour government's Lord Chancellor.

Normally when an individual considers himself libelled, he seeks redress at law, but Lord Boothby's new advisers suggested a more direct course. Under their supervision he wrote a 500-word letter to
The Times,
which finally appeared on 2 August, openly identifying himself as the subject of the
Sunday Mirror
's smear campaign and denying in detail all the allegations.

The letter was a model of precision, describing how Lord Boothby returned from France on 16 July to find Parliament, Fleet Street and other ‘informed quarters' seething with rumours that he had had a homosexual relationship with a leading thug from the London underworld; that he had been to all-male Mayfair parties with him; that he had been photographed with him on a sofa in a compromising position; that there was a homosexual relationship between Lord Boothby, East End gangsters and a number of clergymen in Brighton; that various people knowing about these relationships were being blackmailed; and that Scotland Yard, after watching meetings between Lord Boothby and the thug for several months, had reported on them to the Commissioner of Police.

Lord Boothby went on to describe how he was once photographed ‘with my full consent, in my flat (which is also my office) with a gentleman who came to see me, accompanied by two friends, in order to ask me to take an active part in a business venture which seemed to me of interest and importance.' He explained how he had turned the proposal down, said that anyone was welcome to publish any photographs taken of him, and added that although he had since learned that the man he was photographed with had been guilty of a criminal offence, he emphatically had no knowledge of this at the time.

He then refuted the
Sunday Mirror
allegations quite specifically. ‘I am not a homosexual. I have not been to a Mayfair party of any kind for more than twenty years. I have met the man alleged to be “King of the Underworld” only three times, on business matters; and then by appointment
in my flat, at his request, and in the company of other people.' He never had been to a party at Brighton with any gangsters – still less with clergymen. No one had ever tried to blackmail him. The police denied making any report to the Home Secretary in connection with him.