Cohen - Gangsters Wives (Underworld UK)

Tammy Cohen is an author and freelance journalist, living in London. She has written for numerous magazines and national newspapers, specialising in human interest stories as well as relationship, motivational and celebrity features. Author of eight books, including the bestselling The Day I Died, How I Made My First Million and Deadly Divorces, she currently writes for Marie Claire, The Daily Telegraph and Woman and Home.

GANGSTERS WIVES

Tammy Cohen

Quercus

For Otis, who can achieve anything

First published in 2010 by

Quercus
21 Bloomsbury Square
London
WC1A 2NS

Copyright 2010 by Tammy Cohen

The moral right of Tammy Cohen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 84724 978 4

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

What is a gangster?

The blanket definition a member of an organised gang of criminals is as wide-reaching as it is meaningless. Robin Hood was a gangster. The fourteen-year-old from the inner city estate with a flick knife in his back pocket hes a gangster too. Suicide bombers are gangsters, extended Shameless-style families who conspire to cheat the benefit system all come under the gangster umbrella.

Yet, ask the average person in the street to name a gangster and theyll say the Krays, or Al Capone. In the popular imagination, gangsters arent scared teenagers under pressure to belong or politically motivated idealists, convinced that violence can be justified as long as its for the greater good. The gangsters in our minds eye are hardened criminals operating under a specially adapted moral code. They are both beyond the law and a law unto themselves. They are streetwise and ruthless and uniformly, unequivocally male.

Which leads us onto

What is a gangsters wife?

She dresses in furs and carries a Prada handbag. She holidays in Mauritius and Marbella. She divides her mornings between the gym and the beauty salon and her lunchtimes between the Ivy and the Ritz. In the evenings, she chooses a designer dress from her walkin wardrobe and goes clubbing in Essex, sipping champagne in the cordoned-off VIP section with her girlfriends and sisters. Her blonde hair is expensively streaked, her nails encrusted with tiny jewels. She is the underworld equivalent of a footballers wife a GAG to their WAG.

Or so wed like to think.

In reality, of course, gangsters wives are as diverse as the men they love.

Sure, some park their 44s in front of porticoed neoRoman mansions on high-gated executive estates, but others wait out their days in squalid exile in poorly serviced tower blocks or live lives of blameless conventionality behind the windows of their suburban semis.

Just as there is no blueprint for a gangster, there is no such thing as a typical gangsters wife.

The women featured in this book come from every walk of life, every age and social group. They are mothers and grandmothers, newly-weds and widows. They are housewives, lap dancers, students, writers, even kitchen tilers. Theyre shy, outspoken, resigned, aggrieved. In short, they are impossible to pigeonhole and as resistant to conformity as the men whose lives theyve shared.

Some have been personally involved in their partners activities at one stage or another. Judy Marks went on the run with her drug smuggler husband Howard. She also couriered cash for him and travelled the world on a false ID. Carly stayed up all night in her seven-bedroomed villa-turned-prison, counting hundreds of thousands of illegally gained euros for her drug baron boyfriend and acted as interpreter on drug deals worth millions. Jackie Robinson stole to keep her jailed married lover, Johnny Adair, in designer clothes. Donna carried thousands of Ecstasy pills in her hand baggage just for the thrill of it.

Others operate a hear no evil, speak no evil system, turning a blind eye to their partners business affairs in return for the lifestyle it affords, or just to keep the status quo. After all, what you dont know cant hurt you, right? And besides, its a dog eat dog world out there, they say, and if it wasnt their men out there doing it, it would be someone else. Jennifer Courtney is phlegmatic about husband Daves claim to have killed the man whod just shot dead his companion. Id rather someone else was dead than have to read Daves obituary in the paper, she reasons.

Then there are the nouveau wives, the ones who arrived on the scene after the event, piecing together their new loves wrongdoings from yellowing newspaper cuttings and faded court records. Anne Leach, who met husband Carlton when his friends paid her to lap dance for him, first confronted his violent past on the big screen at a Leicester Square premiere of the film of his early life. Lyn McKaig didnt believe her softly spoken new boyfriend Terry was once an international cocaine baron until he showed her his prison release papers.

So whats it like, living with a gangster?

Popular culture would have it that life as a gangsters moll is an endless whirl of lunches, holidays and charity functions. Try telling that to Becky Loy, forced to live in her car with her Romanian gangster husband, or Judy Marks who spent eighteen months in prison, separated from her kids, because husband Howard refused to believe theyd ever get caught.

Falling for a gangster means never knowing whos on the end of his phone, or when hes going to nip off unexpectedly, or if hes ever coming home. Prepare to do a lot of waiting around. Prepare to do a lot of prison visiting. Jenny Courtney professes to have worn out several vibrators waiting for her man to get out of jail. Former model and Benny Hill girl Maureen Flanagan clocked up thirty years visiting Reggie Kray and brother Ronnie in prison after making a deathbed promise to their mum.

Life with a gangster isnt about spending money just as fast as he can extort it, its about uncertainty, whispered conversations behind closed doors, long periods of separation without a definite end in sight.

Writing this book, I expected to meet doormats or prima donnas, women whod traded their moral standards for a fridge full of champagne. I expected to find personalised number-plates and Rottweilers with diamond-studded collars, wall-to-wall jacuzzis and a big gaping void where a conscience usually goes.

Instead I found a group of women united only by their diversity and their links to men with a tenuous grip on right and wrong. In a vast but worn-out apartment in Mallorca, where the sun played on faded rugs and book-piled sofas, I met Judy Marks who paid the highest of prices for loving her husband so unconditionally. In a tiny local authority flat in the East End, 68-year-old former Page Three girl Flanagan, still oozing glamour, held court about her years as confidante to the Krays, the photos on her walls a shrine to an era long passed. In a terraced house in Worthing, under the shadow of the gas works opposite, Lyn McKaig told how, after a Barnardos childhood, shed finally found, with boyfriend Terry, a place she could call home. In a noisy bar in southern Spain, nervous, glossy-haired Carly kept one eye on the door as she remembered the Faustian pact shed entered into with her Irish gangster ex, whod rented her a luxury villa that nobody could visit and splashed out hundreds of thousands on her clothes, but wouldnt allow her out to wear them. If you could have seen my soul, it probably had a designer label on it, she told me wryly.