The Profession of Violence (32 page)

From then on the Firm became an isolated world of violence and mistrust, with each man for himself. The man who left the Firm received various threats and a dead rat in the post; on his birthday there was a funeral wreath outside his door. But despite the danger and the atmosphere, there remained definite attractions in the Firm. Money was one: the twins could still ensure that everyone in favour collected a minimum of £40 a week in personal protection money. Prestige was another: the twins were still the most feared gangsters in the country. Anyone working for them could do much as he liked in gangland, drink what he felt like for free, cadge money on the side, never go hungry for a woman.

For some of the Firm this was enough; they were quite ready to desert when the time arrived but not before. Some of the younger ones genuinely lived for the excitement
and intrigue. There was the twins' own cousin, Ronnie Hart, a big, good-looking one-time sailor from the merchant navy. As he explained, his greatest aim in life was ‘to be different from the ordinary person. Best of all I'd like to have been a mercenary in the Congo.' Being with the twins was easier. ‘It's the adventure that I really go for. With them it's just like being a spy or something in the underground movement.' The secrets and intrigue had their own fascination; so did the air of danger and depravity round the Colonel. One of Hart's favourite duties was to take the twins' special guests for a drink at the saloon bar at The Blind Beggar. The place where George Cornell was shot was becoming one of the sights of the East End.

There were a lot like Hart who hung around the twins for the kicks and the adventure – and because Ronnie was a murderer; this had become his principal social asset. That autumn a pair of unemployed half-Greek brothers called Lambrianou tried to become accepted in the Firm. Ronnie said they must prove themselves first.

Ronnie never understood the ordinary person's ambivalence over murder. Most people seem fascinated by it but never dream of doing it; he dreamed of little else. For him the terrible taboo between the idea of murder and the reality did not exist. Life was far simpler without it. The nearest he came to giving an excuse for shooting George Cornell was to shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Well, it needed to be done, didn't it? Can't see what all the fuss was about.'

It was because he couldn't see, that further tension built up in the Firm, as he began persuading others to kill. Hart was one of the first; Ronnie seemed to think that because his young cousin wanted adventure, he felt as he did. But when he sent him off to kill a man for him in Romford Market, Hart fired a shot in the air, dropped the gun and ran for it. It was worse with Reggie. Time after time their
arguments came back to the point that Reggie must ‘do his one'. But Reggie found that while he could shoot a man in the leg or cut him in the face or break his jaw, he drew the line at murder. This saddened Ronnie; ‘I have to do the dirty work for everyone. Somebody else should have a go.'

That autumn Ronnie felt increasingly put upon. There were a lot of people needing to be killed – the list was lengthening. Payne was on it now that he had left them; so was Freddie Gore. The man in Romford Market had been included as a favour to a friend in Broadmoor, whose wife he had slept with. Besides him there were the potential traitors, the competitors, the ‘liberty takers'. There was work for everyone, and Ronnie had the idea now of using murder as a test of loyalty. Since all the talk of traitors on the Firm, he remembered what he had learned about the Leopard Men when he was in Nigeria: the secret brotherhood of killers who had terrorized the countryside with ritual murders. With them murder was used as an initiation to the gang; later it formed a bond of loyalty between the murderers.

Ronnie became excited at the idea. Reggie would have to kill; as his twin brother, his other self, it was imperative, for he and Reggie always shared their secret life. Only when he had killed would they be properly united. But this would be just the beginning. In time the whole Firm could be ‘blooded', all share in the strange brotherhood of killing, all become equally involved.

When Ronnie first used Jack ‘the Hat' McVitie he had seemed ready for any villainy. He was a well-known East End character, as strong as a dray-horse, and he used to boast that nothing frightened him. He was an old-style fighting man. Only that spring a gang had tried to teach him a lesson by smashing up his hands with a crowbar but as soon as they were healed he was brawling again. In fact,
though, Jack the Hat was nowhere near as tough as he appeared. He was a drunk. His nerves had gone; his courage came from the bottle or from enormous pep pills called ‘black bombers'.

Much of the time he was a cheerful soul, erratic, generous and kind to children. He was vain enough to have earned his nickname from the hat he always wore to cover his baldness, and was proud of his success with women. He treated them in the old East End manner. He casually pushed one mistress he was annoyed with out of his car while travelling at speed and broke her back. This caused him some remorse, but in a day or two he found another girl to live with. Jack was like that.

That summer Ronnie had employed him in the purple-heart business; it appears he cheated Ronnie on the money but Reggie, who liked him, smoothed things over. In September Ronnie became convinced that Leslie Payne had made a deal with the Law and realized that he would be a dangerous witness for the Crown. That same week Ronnie had a drink with Jack the Hat; he gave him £100, a gun and Leslie Payne's address. He explained that the £100 was payment on account. There would be £400 more when Leslie Payne was dead.

When Reggie heard, he disliked the idea. He disliked most of Ronnie's ideas, but lacked the power to oppose him: he was deep in his own hell and past the point where he could do much against Ronnie. The only peace he knew now was the hour he spent each day by Frances's grave. He had had it planted with red roses and was convinced that something of her spirit lingered there to listen to him. Each day he talked to her and each day he returned to Ronnie. There was no one else with Frances gone. Ronnie was someone to lean on; when he had drunk enough Reggie took on his power; when he indulged his hatred and his violence they became one person. Sober, it was not so easy. There were still moments every day when he
was sane and weary with a deep longing to have finished with it all.

Jack the Hat went off to kill Les Payne one September evening and bungled it, as Reggie had predicted. He promised he would try again, but Payne had become wary. The days went by; Les Payne was still alive; McVitie still had Ronnie's £100. Threats followed. Ronnie heard that Jack had made a scene at the Foremans' 211 Club in Balham. This was ‘a diabolical liberty', as Foreman was an old friend of the twins. Once again Reggie smoothed things over. There was a meeting at The Regency. Jack, sober and repentant, told him about his nerves, his debts, his child who was ill. A soft touch as usual, Reggie lent him £50.

‘You should've paid George Cornell as well,' stormed Ronnie when he heard, and sent fresh threats to McVitie about his money. McVitie, thinking Reggie had let him down, took several bombers, got himself drunk and staggered into The Regency, hat askew, waving a sawn-off shotgun. Next day someone made a point of telling Ronnie how Jack the Hat had threatened to shoot the twins.

The Carpenters' Arms is a small pub in a dingy street near Vallance Road. The twins bought it that autumn. During these months of crisis they had not been able to keep their clubs going. This was the last place of their own. But here in Bethnal Green where they had grown up they felt secure and knew that they could drink in safety. There was a narrow doorway to the street, a narrow bar; one could see everybody who was there.

On weekdays the Firm assembled here for orders; at weekends there was sometimes a party for the Firm and friends, with womenfolk invited and drinks were on the house. The last Saturday in October The Carpenters' was crowded.

Violet was there. She had left her house just round the corner for a new council flat in Braithwaite House in
Shoreditch, but she missed Vallance Road and loved a night out with the twins. She kept herself smart for them – a blonde rinse for her hair, a big gold pendant round her neck. Sometimes she laughed and said the worry of the twins helped to keep her young; she was immensely proud of them. Charlie's wife Dolly was there too. She loathed the twins and they returned the compliment, but on this family occasion she had her place, standing aloof from them and very cool.

These ladies' evenings were extremely formal: the women sipped their Babychams beneath expensive hairdos and kept their places in the old East End manner, genteelly twittering among themselves. All the men would be uncomfortably smart – small, strangled knots to ties, stiff white collars, gleaming shoes. They took their style from the Colonel and with his mother present would be painfully restrained.

Reggie was an accomplished host. He was attentive to the women and drank little; the serious drinking would start later, after the pubs closed. There was a party at the house of a girl called Blonde Carol in Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington; the Firm was welcome.

Ronnie was the only person at The Carpenters' that night who seemed out of things; most people recognized the danger signs and left him carefully alone. When Reggie talked to him he found him brooding about McVitie. Since Reggie would not do anything, Ronnie was going to deal with him as he had dealt with George Cornell. McVitie would be at The Regency around eleven.

Several people in the bar that night remember how quickly Reggie changed. He started drinking heavily and at closing time drove off to The Regency.

The Regency – ‘North London's Smartest Rendezvous' – was very different from the down-at-heel illicit gambling place the twins had had a share in seven years before but they had no connection with it now. Two brothers, John
and Tony Barry, had stepped in, both of them smart young businessmen. John was the elder and the tougher – broad-shouldered, short, with an assured manner and a white Mercedes; his brother was skinnier and shyer, very much the junior partner. They worked well together, had installed the big upstairs bar, dance-floor, restaurant and the gaming-room in the basement. It was a lively place. Much of the Barrys' success came from the way they could keep order without asking questions: tact was their stock-in-trade.

This was how John Barry had managed to disarm McVitie when he was waving his shotgun and looking for the twins a few days earlier. Still greater tact over the years had saved The Regency from having to pay regular protection money to the twins, although they took the place for granted as their preserve. They and the Firm would often visit; when they were there the regulars would be a little careful how they spoke and who was standing near. Drinking men would tend to stand in groups, ready for trouble – the sort of trouble that occurred that night just before 11.00 when Reggie burst in with several of the Firm, looking for Jack the Hat.

It should have been a simple death. Reggie had heard so many times how Ronnie had murdered George Cornell, and endured so many taunts about the proper way to kill a man, that it seemed perfectly straightforward. Now he was drunk and violent he had no scruples about killing; he could not go on letting Ronnie down for ever. If he let Ronnie kill McVitie, how could he face himself afterwards? There was no possible alternative. He had his .32 automatic. When he saw Jack the Hat he would quite calmly shoot him through the head as Ronnie had shot Cornell. That was what Ronnie wanted; twins had a duty to each other.

But slowly it dawned on Reggie that McVitie was not in The Regency at all. He searched the gaming-room, the bar,
the restaurant. Ronnie Hart was with him and a man called Bender; the Lambrianou brothers joined them. They went to the Barrys' office to ask where McVitie was. Tony Barry was there and asked why they wanted him. Reggie told him. Barry would have known better than to argue had it been Ronnie. With Reggie it was different. He begged Reggie to be sensible. He knew McVitie; the man was a fool, a drunken nobody. He wasn't worth the trouble that would come from murdering him.

Reggie made no attempt to answer. Instead he stood chewing his lower lip and scowling as he always did at moments of uncertainty. Then he handed Tony Barry the .32, asked him to mind it, and quietly invited the Lambrianous to the party at Blonde Carol's. Hart and Bender were to come too. The violence had gone from Reggie's face. Barry put the gun in the drawer of his desk, thinking another spot of bother had been tactfully averted. He failed to notice that the man called Bender had a long knife tucked in the waistband of his trousers.

Blonde Carol was the sort of woman Ronnie approved of: a thin, pale woman in her middle twenties, she did as she was told, never complained and kept her mouth shut. The truth was she was scared of him. She had two young children from a broken marriage and lived with them in a basement flat in Cazenove Road, Stoke Newington, together with a man who ran a spieler for the twins. Sometimes she had nightmares about Ronnie.

The night of her party he arrived just after 11.00 with several of the Firm and two young boys. He didn't speak or even look at her but stood there scowling in the hall as one of the men explained that Ronnie required her flat for a private party of his own. She knew better than object and told the guests who had already arrived that they were moving to another party across the road. Nobody complained: everyone knew Ronnie.

As Blonde Carol's guests were leaving, Reggie arrived
with Hart, Bender and the Lambrianous. There were two women with them – Hart's girl-friend, Vicki, and a young red-head called Carol Thompson. The red-head was a girl Reggie had met at Steeple Bay. As they came down the basement steps they all seemed ready for a good time but Blonde Carol heard Ronnie tell his brother that this was no place for women. The women were to go with her.

Ronnie was taking charge. Without bothering to ask, he knew Reggie had failed him yet again. If things were left to him he would end up buying Jack the Hat a drink and lending him another £50; Ronnie was not leaving anything to him in future. If Reggie wouldn't kill McVitie, he would have to do it personally.