Kray Reginald - The profession of violence : the rise and fall of the kray twins

The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins

TO FRANK TAYLOR

You cant come to terms with criminals and theres
no real excuse for doing so except total ignorance
of the real nature of their crimes.

H.H. Kirst, The 20th of July

It seems an age since I first met the Kray twins and was able to observe them at close quarters in their last extraordinary phase of freedom before their arrest in May 1968; and in retrospect I am slightly shocked by the naivety with which I agreed to write the story of their lives. Had they not been arrested when they were it would never have been possible, and had my research continued, it would certainly have become dangerous.

But in early autumn 1967 I was bored and missing England after a spell in Italy. The name Kray was only vaguely familiar from my days as a Sunday Times reporter, and when Frank Taylor who as Editor-in-Chief at McGraw Hill had published my Life of Ian Fleming arrived in Rome and suggested I write a book about the top criminals controlling London, with their full co-operation, it seemed an intriguing proposition. I was curious. After writing about Ian, I was probably hankering for a touch of action, la Bond, and thought Id get it. What I didnt know was that the suggestion had originally reached McGraw in a roundabout way from a lawyer representing various Mafia interests in New York, that he in turn was doing a favour for the twins, who were hoping to extract a large sum of money from McGraw for world rights in the story of their life, and that the twins had not the faintest intention of allowing anything except the most flattering picture of themselves to appear in print.

Certainly the next step in this whole bizarre adventure was extremely Bond. Tickets to London were waiting in my name at Rome International Airport. At Heathrow I was met by a very silent ex-heavyweight boxer who drove me in a silver-grey Mercedes to the Ritz Hotel where a suite had been booked for me, and at ten oclock next morning the world of Bond continued. The silent man in the Mercedes was waiting to drive me to an undisclosed destination in the country, and half an hour or so beyond Newmarket we went through a pair of elaborate park gates and drove towards a large Elizabethan mansion. Apart from horses grazing in the paddock there was no sign of life, and the car drove round the back of the enormous house. We stopped. The driver hooted and finally a door did open. Three men emerged to welcome me. They stood with some formality and my driver announced them like some old-school boxing referee, Mr Charles Kray, Mr Ronald Kray, Mr Reginald Kray. Luncheon was waiting and my book had started.

It was one of the more memorable meals of my life. There was a large panelled dining-room with a baronial fireplace and a number of bogus-looking ancestors round the walls. There was cold tongue and coleslaw salad and a choice of Yugoslav Riesling and brown ale. On the moat beneath the windows swam three black swans.

There was quite a gathering of heavy-looking characters, clearly on very best behaviour but, Krays apart, the only one I really remember was the man I soon discovered was my host. This was a portly, personable businessman friend of the Krays with a pale blue Rolls, a large cigar, and two extremely pretty wives (one ex, one current, both cheerfully in residence) who had lent the twins the house for the weekend. He told me he dabbled a bit in property which was more or less the truth: he was something of a specialist in high-grade arson and some years later went to prison after collecting a quite extraordinary amount of money from a number of insurance companies on a series of large country houses which went up in smoke the one that we were in included.

As for the Krays, Charlie, the elder brother, seemed distinctly ill-at-ease and rather jumpy. He had a habit of agreeing with everything one said, and the twins were obviously in charge. Ian would have relished Ronnie, who would have made a most convincing Mr Big. Like his twin he wore a dark blue suit, white shirt, very tightly knotted tie, and solid gold bracelet watch and managed to look permanently nasty. He had a slow, faintly sneering way of speaking that sounded threatening even when it wasnt, and his eyes bulged too much for comfort.

Although they were obviously identical twins, Reggie was very different thinner, quicker, with a certain shifty charm. He made most of the conversation which to tell the truth was slightly heavy going speaking in a rapid, almost inaudible monotone. I noticed his right hand was bandaged. (He had cut his thumb rather badly murdering Jack the Hat McVitie a few weeks earlier.)

How did you hurt yourself, Mr Kray? I inquired brightly.

Gardenin, he answered.

But small-talk and a great deal of brown ale apart, we did manage a fairly businesslike discussion. Reggie explained that he and his brothers were planning to retire: he made this sound quite normal, as if he and Ronnie were selling up a profitable haulage business and settling in Surrey. And like many businessmen tired of making money after the rough and tumble of an interesting career in industry, they wanted someone to record the range of their achievement.

So much rubbish gets written about our sort of people that me an Ron both think its time the truth was told for once.

An with no messin about, said Ronnie.

Quite, I said.

I raised the all-important question of how much they imagined they could tell me. Reggie answered airily that there were just a few things we must hold back sos not to get other people into trouble. Youd not want to make trouble for our friends, now, would you?

Perish the thought, I said.

Reggie nodded and explained that as he and Ronnie planned to disappear from circulation now for good, they felt at liberty to tell the truth about themselves.

Weve not been angels, but weve done some interesting things and met a lot of interesting people. This book could be something quite out of the ordinary.

Upon this modest note of hope and mutual trust, collaboration started.

The twins and their world were fascinating, and during the following few months I saw them fairly regularly. They found me a basement flat off Vallance Road in Bethnal Green where they had grown up. Part of a late Victorian tenement improbably entitled The Albert Family Dwellings, it was nicknamed by the twins the Dungeon, and they said I could stay there whenever I was in London. The curtains were permanently pulled, the windows screwed up, and after the twins arrest, the police took up the floorboards, searching unsuccessfully for corpses.

But I rather enjoyed my periods in residence at the Dwellings: the Krays took a lot of trouble over me and were conscientious hosts. Their power and influence in this part of the East End was extraordinary. They had the use of innumerable pubs and houses, and there was one pub in particular, a discreet, low-ceilinged Victorian alehouse with a piano and a personable landlord, which was something of an exclusive club for the Krays and their Firm when they felt like entertaining. Whenever the Krays were there, the locals got the message to keep clear, and the twins held court with considerable style and lavish hospitality to much of the criminal fraternity in London.

It was at these sessions that they often talked about the past. Both were good raconteurs with extraordinary memories. Ronnie could be moody, but here he would relax, and he was often genuinely funny as he talked about his childhood and his apprenticeship to crime. They had considerable nostalgia for the old East End, and enjoyed discussing the methods and morality of what they would refer to as our way of life. They were highly sociable and certainly knew everyone worth knowing in the London underworld. Through them I met quite a gallery of assorted criminals of the sixties: Billy Hill, back briefly from his house in southern Spain and reminiscing about the twins in their early twenties always a little wild, but willing to be educated and along with him a whole range of burglars, bruisers, former boxing champions, conmen, pickpockets, ponces, fences, professional gamblers, crooked club-owners, shady financiers and visiting Americans in dark glasses.