The World's Most Evil Gangs (11 page)

I
n a reign of terror that marred the memory of the ‘Swinging Sixties’, Ronnie and Reggie Kray became the most notorious gangland bosses of London’s underworld. The twins’ merciless violence silenced rivals and bred respect by fear. Their tight control of the East End also, oddly, earned them local loyalty, some regarding them as ‘Robin Hood’ characters who maintained gangland peace and kept the seedy streets safe.

In their heyday, they were photographed with the famous, fêted by showbiz personalities and were generous in their support of charities. They were also feared like no other criminals of the time. In every way, they were a British version of America’s Thirties’ gangsters, whose exploits they studied and copied slavishly.

Ronnie and Reggie were born on 17 October 1933, at Hoxton in the East End of London. Ronnie was the elder;
Reggie arrived 45 minutes later. They also had an older brother, Charles. The boys had Jewish, Irish and Romany blood in their veins. Their father Charles, who was 25 at the time of the twins’ birth, was a dealer in old cloth, silver and gold. Their mother Violet was just 21. Shortly before the outbreak of World War Two, the family moved a brief distance to one of the toughest, most run-down areas of Bethnal Green, soon to become even more dilapidated, thanks to visits from the Luftwaffe. Ronnie and Reggie became known as the Terrible Twins because of their love of fighting, at first with fists and later with bicycle chains and flick-knives.

By the age of 16, they were carrying guns. A year later, they made their first appearance in court. They were accused of seriously beating up a 16-year-old rival but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

The boys were fighters in every sense. At 17, they became professional boxers and it looked at that stage as if their route to the top would be via the ring. They had been taught their pugilistic skills by brother Charlie, who had joined the Royal Navy and won a reputation as a forces boxer. When on leave, he hung a canvas kit bag from a ceiling of their home and let the twins use it as a punch bag.

In the spring of 1952 the twins received their call-up papers for National Service and joined the Royal Fusiliers. But only a few hours into their Army careers, Ronnie punched the recruiting corporal on the nose. Their subsequent military service was remarkable for their violence, serious trouble with the military authorities and periods in custody. Following dishonourable discharge in 1954, they went into the ‘protection’ business. If a bookmaker, store or club owner wanted to ensure ‘troublemakers’ did not target his
establishment, a weekly payment to the twins would do the trick. As the easy money rolled in, so their gang of collectors grew. Their territory covered the East End and much of North London. They founded their own clubs, at first in the East End, where a sports hall provided a front for their rackets, and later in fashionable Knightsbridge, where the West End found the pair a rough-and-ready attraction.

Ronnie, who was known as ‘the Colonel’, had a brutal and unstable nature which Reggie, ‘the Quiet One’ with a good business brain, tried to keep under control. Still operating from their modest home in Vallance Road, known locally as ‘Fort Vallance’, the Krays could be magnanimous, loyal and charming. They could also be frighteningly, unpredictably brutal – a trait mainly initiated by Ronnie, who would egg his brother on to prove himself by being as tough as his twin.

The swaggering Ronnie was in trouble with the law again in 1955 when he shot a man in the leg. Ronnie had gone to confront the victim, a local dock worker, who was demanding his money back from a car dealer, who was paying the twins for ‘protection’. By the time Ronnie tracked him down, the docker had changed his mind and wanted to keep the car – but Ronnie shot him anyway. He was subsequently arrested and picked out at an identity parade but avoided being charged by claiming he was Reggie, thus making nonsense of the evidence.

The following year, Ronnie was re-arrested and this time convicted. He received a three-year sentence for stabbing a man with a bayonet in a raid on a rival gang’s territory. Having Ronnie locked up was, ironically, good news for the Krays’ businesses. In his brother’s absence, Reggie expanded the rackets and sought new clubs in which to invest.

But inside prison, Ronnie’s dangerous instability became
apparent. He grew obsessively fearful that someone was trying to kill him – he even had to be shown his own reflection in a mirror to prove he was still in one piece. Finally, in December 1957, after receiving news that a favourite aunt had died, Ronnie went berserk. He spent a night in a straitjacket and the following morning was certified insane and sent to a mental hospital.

Long Hill psychiatric unit in leafy Epsom, Surrey, was no high-security prison. One Sunday, Reggie paid a visit and swapped clothes with his brother. When Ronnie was safely away, Reggie owned up to the stunt but was not prosecuted. Ronnie remained free for some weeks, during which time his sense of bravado induced him to make surprise calls on East End pubs to taunt the police. But his strange state of mind worried his family and, after a suicide attempt, they allowed the police to recapture him and he was returned to prison. After further treatment, he was deemed fit to be released in the spring of 1958.

Now the duo could enjoy the riches that Reggie had been accumulating while his brother was ‘inside’. Reggie had a good business brain and the family’s commercial enterprises had flourished during Ronnie’s spell in jail. There was the original Double R Club in Bow, a new club in Stratford, a car sales business and even an illegal gambling club a stone’s throw away from Bow police station. But the unpredictable Ronnie was far from cured and no one knew it better than Reggie, who realised that a return to heavy-handed gangsterism would be bad for business.

The pair argued about the running of their ‘firm’, but when in 1960 Reggie was jailed for 18 months for demanding money with menaces, it was his brother’s turn to have a free hand at
the family business. Ronnie took a contract from the notorious slum landlord of the time, Peter Rachman. The Krays’ hoodlums would guard Rachman’s rent collectors in return for a healthy commission. The result was not only added riches for Ronnie but an introduction to a more upmarket circle of acquaintances. His new Knightsbridge club, Esmerelda’s Barn, became a favourite rendezvous for sportspeople and entertainers like world heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, singer Judy Garland and film stars George Raft and Diana Dors.

Esmerelda’s Barn also became a haven for young men willing to sell their bodies – a clientele encouraged by Ronnie, who was by now openly homosexual. Reggie was otherwise inclined. After being freed from prison in 1961, he fell for a 16-year-old East End girl, Frances Shea, whom he married in 1965. Tragically, she suffered Reggie’s strange way of life for just two years before committing suicide.

The brothers’ lifestyles were now widely different. Ronnie veered towards his ‘Swinging Sixties’ West End friends while Reggie returned to his East End roots. Suffering the strain of his failed marriage, Reggie seemed no longer able to control the Al Capone fantasy world of brother Ronnie, and the reputation of the Krays became even more brutal in the second half of the Sixties. There were beatings, brandings and knifings. One former friend who drunkenly insulted Ronnie needed 70 stitches to face wounds. There were also at least three unsuccessful attempts on the Krays’ lives, and Ronnie took to sleeping with a gun under his pillow.

In December 1965 the Krays felt they needed the protection of an especially violent bodyguard, Frank Mitchell, known as ‘the Mad Axeman’, whom Ronnie had met in
Wandsworth Prison back in 1956. Mitchell was now in
top-security
Dartmoor Prison – from which the twins helped him escape. They supplied him with a flat as a hiding place but eventually found him not only violent but unstable. He disappeared. The Krays were subsequently cleared of his murder but the body was never found. Another member of ‘the Firm’, Freddie Foreman, later revealed that Mitchell was shot and his corpse dumped at sea.

The main reason for springing Mitchell had been a flare-up of warfare between the Krays and rival gangsters Charles and Eddie Richardson, based in South London but intent on muscling in on West End protection rackets. George Cornell, a small-time ‘heavy’ working for the Richardsons, had allegedly upset Ronnie Kray by calling him ‘a big fat poof’. One March evening in 1966 Cornell strayed into Kray territory and was perched on a stool in Whitechapel’s Blind Beggar pub when Ronnie arrived with two henchmen. Cornell remarked: ‘Well, look what the dog’s brought in!’ Ronnie walked calmly to the bar and, as he later described, ‘put a gun at his head, looked him in the eyes and pulled the trigger. His body fell off the stool and I walked out.’ Later he justified the murder by saying: ‘Cornell was vermin. He was a drunkard and a bully. He was simply nothing. I done the Earth a favour ridding it of him.’

The following year, Reggie made his own violent contribution to the murder statistics. By then, the brothers’ business had expanded to drugs and pornography, areas that did not endear them to their traditional East End friends. Ronnie’s homosexual proclivities were the talk of their ‘manor’, quite apart from his now obvious paranoia. Meanwhile, the more moderate Reggie had taken to drink since his wife’s
suicide, and when fired up with alcohol, he would take
pot-shots
at the legs of people who offended him.

The Krays were becoming bad news. Their instability was damaging their image as reliable ‘protection’ racketeers. To restore their reputation, they decided to hold a very public test of their 150-strong gang’s loyalty – a meaningless murder. The victim was to be Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, so called because of the hat he wore to hide his baldness. McVitie’s crime was to owe the brothers £500 and to have insulted them in their absence during a drunken binge. Four of the Krays’ men lured McVitie to a ‘party’ in a borrowed house in Stoke Newington, where Ronnie, Reggie and two henchmen lay in wait. As their victim entered, he realised his impending fate and turned to flee.

Ronnie pinned him against a wall and told him: ‘Come on, Jack, be a man.’ McVitie said: ‘I will be a man but I don’t want to die like one.’ Ronnie led him into a basement room, where the killing became near farcical. As McVitie walked through the door, Reggie pointed a pistol at his head and pulled the trigger. But the gun did not fire. Ronnie then picked up a carving knife and thrust it at McVitie’s back but it failed to pierce his thick coat. McVitie made a dash for the window. He dived through, only to be grabbed by his feet and hauled back in. Ronnie pinioned his arms from behind and screamed at his brother: ‘Kill him, Reg! Do it. Don’t stop now!’ Reggie picked up the knife and stabbed his pleading victim in the face and then through the throat. The knife passed through his gullet and pinned him to the floor. McVitie’s body was never found.

The twins planned three more ‘hits’ – the first steps in their formation of a ‘Murder Incorporated’ style organisation along the lines of the American model. A witness at an Old Bailey
trial was to be killed by a crossbow or a syringe of cyanide. A Maltese club owner was to have his car bombed. A gambler who owed money to a Kray associate in Las Vegas was also to be eliminated.

However, a Scotland Yard team led by Detective Superintendent Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read was now watching every move the gang made. Read’s case against the Krays was not strong but he knew that unless the twins were safely behind bars, prospective witnesses would suffer ‘loss of memory’ or would simply vanish. Then the police got lucky. A Kray associate was stopped while about to board a plane from Glasgow to London. He was carrying four sticks of dynamite, presumably destined for the Maltese club-owner’s car. Detectives raided his home and found the crossbow and briefcase complete with poisonous syringe.

On the night of 8 May 1968 Ronnie and Reggie went drinking at the Old Horn pub in Bethnal Green. They continued on to the Astor Club in fashionable Berkeley Square, Reggie having brought along a young lady while Ronnie enjoyed the company of a young man. They all returned to their mother’s new council flat in Shoreditch at four in the morning. An hour later, at dawn, Read’s men used a sledgehammer to open the door of the apartment – a particularly startling awakening for the boyfriend in Ronnie’s bed.

The twins were charged with the murders of George Cornell and Jack McVitie. Eight other members of their ‘firm’, including their brother Charlie, were charged with various lesser crimes. The twins pleaded not guilty but after a sensational 39-day trial at the Old Bailey, they were jailed for life with a recommendation that they should serve no less than 30 years. They were 35 years of age when the trial ended on 8
March 1969, which meant that they would be pensioners before they ever had the chance of being released.

Ronnie and Reggie were sent to separate top-security prisons. In 1972 they were briefly reunited at Parkhurst jail on the Isle of Wight. But in 1979 Ronnie was again certified and sent to Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane. Reggie found his sentence harder to take than his brother. He was classified as a Category A prisoner: highly dangerous and liable to escape. Shadowed at all times by two prison officers, his movements were monitored and his visits were screened and limited. While of Category A status, no parole board could consider his case. All his appeals fell on deaf ears. In 1982 he unsuccessfully attempted suicide by cutting his wrists.

Ronnie was luckier in his time behind bars. Being an inmate of Broadmoor, he was allowed more privileges than his brother. He received visits from old East End associates and from showbusiness and sporting friends. They brought him parcels of food from Harrods – smoked salmon and game pie – and classical records for the hi-fi in his cell. He also had a colour television set.

The brutal twin would regale visitors with details of his exploits in the days when he and his brother wrote headlines in blood. In 1983 the self-justifying gangster told a visiting journalist: ‘We never hurt ordinary members of the public. We only took money off other villains and gave a bundle of that away to decent people who were on hard times. I look back on those days and naturally remember the good times. Then people could take ladies into pubs with them without the risk of their being insulted. Old people didn’t get mugged either. It couldn’t have happened when we were looking after the East End.’