The Profession of Violence (25 page)

‘In short, the whole affair is a tissue of atrocious lies.'

The letter concluded with a challenge to the
Mirror
newspapers. If either of them possessed documentary or photographic evidence against Lord Boothby, ‘let them print it and take the consequences'.

The letter was signed, ‘Your obedient servant, Boothby.'

This attempt to clear his name by a direct challenge in
The Times
was unprecedented but was typical of Lord Boothby's directness. And it produced results. Just five days after the letter appeared, the
Daily Mirror
was carrying a new headline: ‘LORD BOOTHBY. An unqualified apology.' All imputations made against Lord Boothby in the original
Sunday Mirror
article were unreservedly withdrawn. The International Publishing Corporation also paid Lord Boothby forty thousand pounds in compensation plus legal costs.

It was one of the largest settlements of the day – half a million pounds in today's devalued currency. And what made this so extraordinary was that the
Sunday Mirror
story had been broadly true, and Boothby had in fact lied repeatedly in his famous letter to
The Times.

He was homosexual. He had a close connection with Ronnie Kray which extended back for at least a year before the
Sunday Mirror
broke its story. And behind the whole affair lay a scandal involving Ronnie Kray and Boothby almost exactly as the
Sunday Mirror
had suggested.

Had their story been substantiated, Boothby would have been a ruined man, and the Krays' criminal activities would have been seriously curtailed. Instead an extraordinary establishment cover-up occurred, which earned Lord Boothby a small fortune for his lies, stopped a Yard investigation in its tracks, and gave the Krays virtual immunity
for several years – from the attentions of New Scotland Yard, from the British press, and from the politicians at Westminster.

Boothby had actually been introduced to Ronnie Kray early in 1963 by their mutual friend, and fellow homosexual, Tom Driberg (later Lord Driberg of Bradwell-Juxta-Mare and Chairman of the Labour Party). For Boothby, as for Driberg, the chief attraction of Ronnie's company was the excitement of being introduced to the boys he used to have around him.

In return Lord Boothby offered Ronnie Kray a somewhat different sort of excitement, by showing him the world of privilege and politics, even taking him on one occasion for dinner at the House of Lords, and on another dropping in for drinks at the most prestigious of London clubs – White's in St James's.

As a gangster in a Savile Row suit, Ronnie felt very much at home in White's.

‘Nice place,' he said when telling me about it. ‘Interesting people. Thought of joining it myself.'

He was always fairly cynical about Lord Boothby, knowing him for what he was, and sometimes calling him ‘the Queen mother', or ‘that daft old idiot'. But he undoubtedly enjoyed the smart life Boothby could offer him, and realized that in a crisis, a friendly member of the House of Lords might come in useful. Accordingly he made a fuss of him.

On one occasion he arranged a party in Boothby's honour at one of his favourite West End haunts, the old Society Club in Jermyn Street – at which Boothby was photographed with Ronnie sitting on either side of a teenage boy, along with two members of the Kray Firm, Billie Exley and Charlie Clark. On other occasions, he arranged for sex shows for Boothby and his friends in various locations in the East End of London.

Early in 1964 Scotland Yard's Criminal Intelligence
section, C11, began targeting the Krays' activities – and as well as details of their frauds and West End protection rackets, they inevitably picked up details of Ronnie Kray's relationships with men like Boothby. This was a matter of police concern because of the obvious possibility of blackmail.

The
Sunday Mirror
's veteran crime reporter, Norman Lucas, had close connections with members of Cll. One of these officers showed him C11's surveillance reports on the Krays, and told him that a full-scale Scotland Yard offensive against the gang would soon be mounted. This was the basis of the
Sunday Mirror
story, which Lucas wrote and which was published with the enthusiastic backing of its then proprietor, Cecil King.

Lord Boothby was on holiday in France when the story broke, and always claimed that he had no idea who the ‘unknown peer' could possibly have been. On his return to London on 16 July he rang Tom Driberg to find out, and it was Driberg who told him – ‘Bob, it's you.'

Driberg, of course, knew that the
Sunday Mirror
accusations were true. Boothby, staring ruin in the face, was suicidal. And Driberg, as a highly influential member of the Labour Party, seems to have done his best to save him.

As events were to prove, he was successful. A general election was in the offing which Labour, led by Harold Wilson, hoped to win. After the Profumo scandal the previous year, it was not in Labour's interests to be seen to be cashing in on an even murkier sexual scandal so soon after, involving as popular a former Tory as Lord Boothby.

So with Boothby now denying all the
Sunday Mirror
accusations, Driberg was able to convince his leader, Harold Wilson, to support what seemed to be a grossly libelled public figure. It clearly suited the Labour leadership to be strongly sympathetic to Lord Boothby's case, and to help him clear his name – which he did extremely quickly. On Harold Wilson's suggestion, Boothby consulted Wilson's personal ‘Mr Fixit', Arnold Goodman, and assured
him that the
Sunday Mirror
story was untrue. Believing him, Goodman took on the case, and brought in Labour's future Lord Chancellor – the celebrated barrister, Gerald Gardiner – as adviser.

With such extremely high-powered backing all the support for the
Sunday Mirror
's accusations promptly faded. Scotland Yard denied all knowledge of C11's investigation, so that when the
Sunday Mirror
tried to get C11's evidence to back its story it was unsuccessful. It was equally unsuccessful when it sought evidence from those around the Krays. Hardly surprisingly, a wall of silence suddenly descended, leaving the
Sunday Mirror
defenceless.

It was then that Arnold Goodman suggested that, rather than engage in a lengthy libel action, Lord Boothby write his famous letter to
The Times,
which earned him £40,000. Once the original story was retracted, the
Sunday Mirror
editor, Reg Payne, was fired – and Cecil Harmsworth King apologized personally to Lord Boothby.

But for the Kray twins, this was by no means the end of the story. With their keen eye the twins had spotted some of the possibilities in the incident and did their best to make the most of them. Up to the point where the
Mirror
settled with Lord Boothby, Ronnie had not been named directly. Just as Lord Boothby had originally been ‘a peer who was a household name' so Ronnie had remained ‘a leading thug in the London underworld'.

When Ronnie was named it was entirely by his own decision and on his own terms. After the publication of the Boothby letter in
The Times,
Ronnie appeared to change his mind and personally selected the most flattering of the photographs which were then taken to the picture desk of the
Daily Express
– the hottest photograph in Fleet Street – the peer and the gangster sitting on the sofa in Lord Boothby's flat. The
Express
paid £100 for the right to publish and it appeared on 6 August on the front page beneath banner headlines. Nothing could have made it clearer that the ‘leading thug' was Ronnie Kray.

Ronnie's main motive in having the picture published was undoubtedly to try to cash in on the settlement. He was considerably aggrieved when he had to content himself with an apology – and nothing more. But the indirect benefits the
Sunday Mirror
libel brought him were considerable.

The first was with the press. There had been the beginning of a press campaign on ‘the frightening growth of lawlessness, extortion, blackmail and intimidating in London' in the
Sunday Mirror
in the week following the libel, and for the first time the twins were being brought to the attention of the public. Once the libel case came up, all this was over. Had the
Sunday Mirror
pursued its investigations of the Krays' criminal affairs it could have been legally dangerous for them, breaking the spirit of their apology to Ronnie, and bearing the appearance of revenge. Not surprisingly, the editors of other papers, having no desire for legal trouble either, kept off the subject of the twins as well. For the next three years the Krays were to be immune to press investigation, and on the few occasions when they were mentioned they found themselves referred to as ‘those well-known East End sporting brothers'.

With the police the effects of the libel were more subtle and still more far-reaching. Though Sir Joseph Simpson had made a public denial of a police investigation into a relationship between ‘a peer and a man with a criminal record', there emphatically had been an investigation of the Krays and their activities – protection, fraud, blackmail, wounding and intimidation. This had been in progress since the start of 1964, when Nipper Read had been promoted Detective Chief Inspector and attached to West End Central Police Station under Chief Superintendent Gerrard.

From all he had learned, Read had few illusions about the twins and knew that they were no ordinary gangsters. The flat at Cedra Court was under observation; their parties
and unusual social connections had all been duly noted. With the people they were meeting and their backstairs influence at all levels of society, the twins were moving towards the invulnerability of the big-time organizing criminals of the States. If this continued Read feared they might soon be too powerful to touch. Unsuspected by the twins, the police had a case virtually prepared when the
Sunday Mirror
sounded the alarm with its first article. Once this had happened, the twins were warned. More important still, thanks to the Commissioner's denial of the investigation, much of the earlier evidence against the twins became unusable. Largely because of this, much police work against the twins and their organization had to stop.

Despite these difficulties. Superintendent Gerrard and Inspector Read still hoped for a chance to catch the twins, although since the
Sunday Mirror
libel, potential witnesses were warier than ever of speaking out against them.

Just after Christmas it seemed that the twins had suddenly slipped up and Gerrard and Read made ready to stake everything on one last throw; orders had reached them from above that the Kray case was to be settled one way or the other quickly.

Most of Read's hopes rested on a man called Hew McCowan. Son of a wealthy baronet, he was a well-known West End figure. The twins had known him at Esmeralda's Barn and tried to borrow money from him for their Nigerian scheme. McCowan put his money into a club instead – The Hideaway in Soho.

Soon afterwards he was in touch with Read, claiming that the twins were asking for a half-share in his profits. It was unique to find the owner of a club willing to stand up to the twins, but there was no corroboration of McCowan's story until one night in January 1965. There was an upset at The Hideaway with pictures smashed and threats before witnesses. Police were called and a man was arrested; Read sensed that here he had the basis of a charge against the twins at last, for the man who caused the
trouble was their friend and drinking partner, ‘Mad' Teddy Smith. Smith had given a firm impression that he had come on behalf of the twins and was demanding money for them. This, with McCowan's previous deposition, seemed enough. On 10 January the Kray twins were arrested and accused, ‘with Edward Smith, writer', of demanding money with menaces from Hew Cargill McCowan at the Hideaway Club. Bail was refused.

It was a flimsy case, at best a feeble substitute for the full-scale police persecution ruined by the earlier publicity, but there was a good chance it would succeed. Read knew the odds, and as the policeman closest to the twins was banking something of his reputation on it. Similarly the twins prepared to make the case a final showdown with the Law.

The twins left nothing to chance. They engaged the finest criminal lawyers they could find – Petre Crowder and Paul Wrightson, QC: Wrightson had impressed Reggie when he prosecuted him in the Shay protection case four years earlier. They also hired one of the best private detectives in London; he was to find out all he could about the prosecution witnesses, particularly McCowan. Simultaneously messages were passing out of Brixton Gaol from the twins to all the members of the Firm, which was kept very busy in the next few weeks; it requires hard work and good organization to rig a trial at the Old Bailey.

Before the trial there was a battle over bail. The Old Street magistrate refused their first request; so did a judge in chambers, but the twins did not give up. They tried Judge Griffith-Jones at the Old Bailey and finally the Lord Chief Justice, offering him sureties of eighteen thousand pounds. He, too, refused and the trial was fixed to start on 28 February.

It was always a mystery where the twins were getting so much money from, and although both they and Lord Boothby always denied it, there seems little doubt that some of it must have come from him. As Ronnie had letters
and photographs which proved their friendship, he could always threaten to expose him as a liar if he wanted to. Certainly some sort of outside pressure is the only explanation for Lord Boothby's irregular and highly suspect action when the twins took their bail application to the House of Lords. Against all precedent he intervened in a law debate to inquire if it was the government's intention to keep the Kray twins indefinitely without a trial.

At the time, Boothby was strongly reprimanded, and his intervention did nothing to prevent his former counsel, Gerald Gardiner, from rejecting the bail application out of hand. But it was a significant example of the growing power of the twins, when they could get a member of the House of Lords to ask a question in Parliament on their behalf.