The Profession of Violence (37 page)

Eight months had passed since Nipper Read had taken charge of the inquiry against the twins, eight months in which his men had most methodically built up a dossier on their history and then ground to an almost total halt. There was a mass of detailed statements against them filed in Tintagel House, but until the twins were safely locked away none could be used. Also the great investigation, for all its thoroughness, seemed to have missed the biggest crimes: there was no evidence linking the twins with Cornell's or McVitie's murders; there was no hint of what happened to Jack Frost, Mad Teddy Smith or the Axe Man; no link had been established between the twins and the Clapham leader, Frederic Foreman, later to be charged with murdering Frank Mitchell and disposing of McVitie's body.

Hopeful as ever, the police were waiting for the twins to make their big mistake. Nipper was adamant that nothing must be done to scare them now or put them on their guard; the police were kept away from them, and the twins saw no sign that the whole of Scotland Yard was waiting to arrest them. As a result it seemed that they were living in a sort of limbo-land: they had their freedom but there was a shadow enemy who had to be imagined listening on every telephone, watching from doorways, never leaving them alone.

Reggie was rational enough but Ronnie made this limbo world his own, an airless, haunted place devoid of ordinary feeling: killing was normal, cunning and violence the only ways of striking at the unseen threat of an unseen enemy. As the twins stood in the bar of a pub in Bethnal Green with Cooper and Elvey, planning another killing, all Ronnie's fantasies seemed to have turned into reality. Reggie was opposed to the idea of killing Caruana but unable to stand up to his brother. Cooper could have been the stuttering echo of Ronnie's madness; Elvey was nothing but a bespectacled technician.

Ronnie had photographs of Caruana, a quiet-looking man with a plump face; next day he would arrange for someone on the Firm to take Elvey to see him in the flesh. Then the talk turned to the question of explosives. Ronnie explained that there was gelignite available: Cooper was not impressed. Gelignite was tricky stuff to use; dynamite was safer. He had a source in Scotland; Elvey could easily fly up to fetch it.

And so the plans for blowing up George Caruana in his Mini went ahead.

The next day Elvey, waiting in his raincoat outside the Dominion Cinema in Tottenham Court Road, was picked up by a former boxer from the Firm and driven through Soho. The former boxer showed him where the Mini was always parked; a little farther on a man was standing in the doorway of a club – George Caruana. They slowed down to let Elvey see the face he was to destroy with dynamite.

Two days later Elvey took the morning flight from Heathrow up to Glasgow, collected four sticks of dynamite from an address in the centre of the city and caught a taxi back to the airport. As he was boarding the London plane the police arrested him. Later that evening Nipper Read interrogated him.

The strange stalemate was over: the twins had made the blunder Nipper had been waiting for. Elvey confessed to everything, not just the plans for the Caruana murder but the suitcase murder and the crossbow killing. Nipper had known nothing about these murder plans and until he searched Elvey's house was inclined to treat him as something of a crank; but he found the crossbow, the suitcase with the hypodermic and the cyanide. Elvey named Cooper as the brains behind it all, so Cooper was brought in for questioning.

It was a stormy interview, with Nipper threatening to charge him straight away with three attempted murders and Cooper replying coolly that he could prove that for the last two years he had been working with the Yard.

Cooper's story was as follows; he admitted that his first contacts with the twins had been criminal, during the days when he was marketing stolen Canadian bonds for them through his European Exchange Bank; but soon after this, agents of the United States Treasury Department discovered proof of his activities as a gold-smuggler and offered him the choice of facing charges or working for them. He chose to work for them as spy and
agent provocateur.
He was controlled from Paris by an undercover agent attached to the United States embassy; this man controlled the Treasury Department's work in Europe. His chief concern was combating the narcotics trade to the United States.

The Krays' connections with the American Mafia appeared important in America, and the Treasury Department was disturbed. Cooper had already been minimally involved since the stolen shares originated from a Mafia subsidiary in New York. He agreed to keep in touch with the twins and keep the Paris embassy informed of fresh developments: meetings between the twins and Bruno and other leading
Mafiosi
visiting London were all reported back to Paris; so were the Krays' involvements with the Mafia over their London gambling interests.

According to his story, Cooper's American employers had allowed him considerable latitude in handling the Krays and he went to great lengths now to win their confidence. He said his Paris contact knew that he – a US agent now – supplied the twins with the two Browning machine-guns and paid for them from US government funds. He also claimed he had done his best to make sure that the other weapons he supplied were faulty: the .32 automatic which jammed when Reggie tried to shoot McVitie was one of his; so was the gun which failed to shoot George Dixon.

He said that at the start the US Treasury Department had informed the Yard of his presence with the Krays. Du Rose, he said, knew all about him. He also said that no one at the Yard had trusted him and Nipper had been told nothing of the plot. As a result he had found himself in the unenviable position of ‘the man on the tightrope', balancing between two homicidal gangsters who would kill him if they found out what he was and a police force who would do nothing for him. And all the time, the Americans in Paris wanted action.

At first he tried ‘setting up' the twins, involving them in some big crooked deal so that he could betray them to the police. Several times he seemed to have persuaded Ronnie, only to have Reggie stopping things from going any further. Then came the trip to Paris and New York, over which Cooper and the US Treasury Department took a lot of trouble. Cooper had flown several times to Washington to fix the details. The man in Paris arranged the visas and an actor friend of Cooper's played the part of the killer from San Quentin to perfection. Cooper was hoping that once they reached New York he could offer the FBI a grand slam of compromising link-ups with the top syndicate bosses of America – ‘We were counting on Ronnie meeting Meyer Lansky, the Las Vegas people, Angelo Bruno and the Gallo Brothers. But Ronnie was so hot that none of them would risk seeing him.'

As for the three murder plans. Cooper insisted that all of them had been essential to retain the twins' confidence. All had to be sufficiently feasible for Ronnie to think of Cooper as a fellow murderer. This was the basis of their friendship; it would have been fatal had he doubted him. The cyanide needed to be genuine, the crossbow capable of killing. Elvey, too, needed to be convinced that the murders were in earnest. Cooper could never risk taking an accomplice into his confidence, so he chose Elvey because he knew he was hard up but incapable of killing anyone. Elvey was such a bungler that anything he did was bound to fail.

Cooper had known the risks he was taking but his American employers still held the threat of possible imprisonment against him should he back out now. When he was with the twins he was entirely alone. ‘The Americans couldn't help me, the Yard didn't trust me, and I knew that once I slipped up with the twins, I'd soon be propping up a bridge.'

Read was furious; here was he working for eight months on a major investigation of the two most dangerous men in Britain only to discover that this so-called American agent had been quietly planning sophisticated killings totally without his knowledge. Backed by American government money, Cooper had supplied them arms and machine-guns, taken Ronnie to New York and encouraged them in countless crimes.

The truth of Cooper's story will always be something of a mystery. He claims that someone in the Yard supplied him information to pass on to the twins; the Yard denies this. One police view of him is that he was a lone operator who had the nerve to play off the Krays, the American government and Scotland Yard against each other for his private interests. What is quite indisputable is that he was employed by the US Treasury Department and that the killings and the crimes he helped set up for the twins could certainly have taken place with anyone but Elvey as the killer. It is also indisputable that part of Scotland Yard knew who he was. Cooper claims: ‘From the very start I was working for John du Rose.'

Quite how much that shrewd old man knew about Alan Cooper is another of the mysteries of the case. When asked, he smiled enigmatically.

Cooper is more specific. ‘Du Rose is straight and hard and a hundred per cent. He was the man who really caught the Krays.' But even so, Cooper admits he could not tell du Rose everything. Du Rose knew in advance about the New York trip; he knew the Paris agent personally and understood that Cooper was trying to implicate the twins. Beyond this Cooper had been on his own; he felt he could not risk telling even du Rose about the murder set-ups because of the danger of security leaks.

John du Rose, it seems, had tolerated Cooper's presence, and not trusted him. Nipper had not been encouraged to get near him; Cooper had been a spy. A keen fisherman, John du Rose had known when to fish with several hooks.

For all his resentment and undisguised dislike of Cooper, Nipper could not ignore him now, for Cooper had in fact succeeded. By leading Ronnie Kray to Caruana and helping him set up a murder, he had produced that final break in the twins' defences everybody wanted.

Cooper maintained it had been a blunder to arrest Elvey; but for this one mistake he could have delivered the twins red-handed to the Yard for attempted murder. Now they were warned; Ronnie's great mood of daring which Cooper had carefully built up was rapidly dispelled; Reggie was back in charge and pulling up the drawbridge; there would be no more mistakes as the Firm looked to its defences.

Cooper offered to go back to Bethnal Green and try to implicate the twins again; he was convinced he still possessed sufficient hold on Ronnie to make this possible. Nipper refused to let him go; now he had Cooper he was holding on to him. So while the twins were anxiously sending out their spies for news, Cooper, the ex-gold-smuggler, sat doing nothing in a small hotel in Kent. He had his wife, his Yorkshire terrier, a police guard on the door and a stock of Swiss cigars. Despite all this he was soon bored and frustrated; relations with Read deteriorated. Neither felt the need to be polite; Cooper believed Scotland Yard was ‘bone-headed, incompetent, inflexible'; Nipper made it plain that Cooper was under his orders, that he didn't trust him and was making sure from now on that he worked for him alone.

But Nipper knew that even now Cooper remained his best hope of catching the twins; for Cooper was still in touch with them. Every morning he had been ringing them from the hotel and telling them he wasn't well and was having a short holiday in the country with his wife. Nipper had listened in to all these conversations. There was no mistaking the twins' eagerness to see Alan Cooper now as soon as possible.

This was what Nipper banked on when he made his final plans to trap the twins. Cooper was told to exaggerate his illness when next he spoke to them, saying his stomach ulcer was causing him real pain. At the same time Nipper booked a pair of adjoining rooms in a nursing home in Harley Street. Cooper was brought up to the Burford Bridge Hotel below Box Hill. From here he rang the twins again saying that in the night his ulcer had burst. Ronnie was sympathetic and said he would like to come and see him. Cooper said that when he was a little better that would be wonderful. Next day he rang from the nursing home in London.

Nipper prepared the trap convincingly. Cooper was in bed in pyjamas, surrounded with flowers, medicine bottles, temperature charts. Nipper and his deputy, Frank Cater, were in the room next door recording everything from a microphone by Cooper's bed. Nurses and doctors were all taken in, but this time when Cooper rang the Krays, Ronnie was cagey and replied he might be able to come round. Cooper was set to do his best to incriminate him when he came, but late that afternoon it was not Ronnie but Reggie's friend Tommy Cowley who arrived. Cooper tried drawing him out about the twins but Cowley was too sharp. He went back and told the twins that Cooper's nursing home smelt of the police. From then on the line from Cooper to the twins went dead.

The one success Nipper could claim for all his trouble was with little Joe Kaufman. While in New York Cooper had made arrangements with him about another parcel of stolen securities from New York. Cooper was hoping he would bring them with him when he arrived in London. When Cooper spoke to him at the Mayfair Hotel he learned that they were being posted. When Kaufman came to the nursing home, the police in the next-door room to Cooper recorded the conversation.

By May it looked as if the twins had got away again. Every conceivable way of catching them seemed to have misfired. They were alerted now. Cooper could no longer get near them and the real crisis was not for the twins but for the police. Nipper's investigation was now in its ninth month, and seemed to have yielded all it could. The hope the twins would make some fatal error if the police were patient seemed no longer feasible. The twins were quietly confident and seemed to understand that they had been luckier than they had any right to expect. Reggie felt safer with Cooper off the scene; Ronnie had a new blond boy and was turning his attention to home-making – homicide could wait. The house at Bildeston was pretty in the spring. Reggie was confident that nobody would talk; furthermore he had been hearing rumours of a despondent Nipper Read. Maybe they were true. The twins spent the first weekend of May at Bildeston with several of the Firm. Violet as usual cooked them lunch; the sun shone, Reggie felt that now that Ronnie had his country house life could settle down. Ronnie's great friend ‘Duke' Osborne would soon be out of gaol; Reggie might yet marry blonde Christine, live in the country and have children.