The Profession of Violence (41 page)

That day he was happier than I'd ever seen him, painting the shelves in what was to be the ‘library' and talking about the film and who would play the part of himself.

He was quite happy to be portrayed as homosexual. ‘It's nothin' to be ashamed of. But I don't want to be made to seem a cissy – 'cos I ain't one' – which was true. He wasn't.

Nor did he seem remotely troubled by the problem of the police who were closing in and waiting for the moment to arrest him.

Reg was more realistic. A few nights before he was arrested he asked me if I thought he could go to fight in Vietnam for the Americans.

‘You're too old,' I said. (He was thirty-four.)

He nodded.

‘It's too late, anyhow,' he answered. ‘And someone has to keep an eye on Ron.'

***

During these last few years in which the twins have made their comeback as criminal celebrities, they have also succeeded in creating certain myths about themselves, some of which require correcting.

The first of these is that during their years of power, they were not so much criminals and gangsters as a sort of East End Benevolent Society, pledged to protecting orphans, single mothers and old ladies.

This was in fact a fairly common theme one heard about the twins before they were arrested, and much of it was put around either by the Krays themselves or by their followers. There was one old gangster who used to hang around the twins; he enjoyed telling anyone who cared to listen that they weren't dangerous at all, but kind and good and caring.

‘Benefactors,' he used to say, ‘that's what those two boys are. They're not criminals at all. They're public bloody benefactors. One day, mark my words, there'll be a statue erected to them both in Bethnal Green.'

Possibly there will be. But the point about the twins' ‘benevolence' is that, like all good gangsters, they were generous with ‘their own', and great free spenders. The booze flowed freely in their presence, and for the ‘aways' (their friends in prison), they would ensure that their families were paid for and protected. But I never heard of them doing any favours for their victims' families or for ordinary people.

The second claim one hears is that the Krays ‘kept London clear of crime'. To the extent that few other criminals dared to raise their heads above the parapet when the twins were around, this was true. But as their ‘power' involved recurrent gang wars, with knifings, shootings and killings – not to mention bribing the police – it is hard to take them all that seriously as a force of law and order.

The most misleading myth of all is the one that the increasingly violent films about them will perpetuate as
they portray the twins simply as sadistic killers in ever more violent situations.

It was bad enough watching pretty boys like Martin and Gary Kemp indulging in designer violence in
The Krays.
But there will undoubtedly be worse to come, with the film-makers now convinced that the box office appeal of the Kray twins is exclusively confined to blood and violence.

They may be right. The pornography of violence may yet make everybody's fortunes – the twins' included. But if it does, it will mean that the real lesson of the Krays has been forgotten.

When I wrote this book I tried to show that the most important thing about the twins was not violence for its own sake, but the use they made of it. They were clever criminals who did many more important things than simply murder people. Their true significance was as organizing criminals, and the real lessons that they left were not what they did to Cornell and McVitie, but the vulnerability they revealed in a society that permitted them to build an empire such as theirs. They were not just bloodstained monsters, any more than they were old-style cockney villains with hearts of gold.

They were something much more dangerous.

JP, 1995

John Pearson was born in 1930, and educated at King's College School and later at Cambridge, where he read history.

In the early years of his career, Pearson worked on various newspapers including
The Economist
,
The Times
, and
The Sunday Times
– on which he was an assistant to Ian Fleming. He went on to write the first biography of Ian Fleming in 1966. He would also become the third official James Bond author of the adult Bond series with his first-person biography of the fictional agent,
James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007
. During the span of his career, he has written multiple novels and many more works of non-fiction.

Pearson now divides his time between London and West Sussex.

Discoverbooks by John Pearson published by Bloomsbury Reader at
www.bloomsbury.com/JohnPearson

Arena
Biggles
Bloody Royal
Crusader in Pink
Edward the Rake
Facades
Painfully Rich
The Bellamy Saga
The Kindness of Dr. Avincenna
The Life of Ian Fleming
The Private Lives of Winston Churchill
The Profession of Violence
The Ultimate Family

For copyright reasons, any images not belonging to the original author have been removed from this book. The text has not been changed, and may still contain references to missing images.

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain 1972 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Copyright © 1972, 1973, 1984, 1995 John Pearson

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eISBN: 9781448211401

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