Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (6 page)

I was standing on a street corner just outside the Cornwallis pub in Bethnal Green Road when an American car drove by. Reggie Kray and Frankie Shea were in it. Frankie shouted out at me, ‘Okay, Tone?’, and I yelled back, ‘Nice car, Frank.’

He shouted, ‘It’s Reggie’s.’ Then he said something about me to Reggie.

Three weeks later I was in Bethnal Green Road again, in Pellicci’s Café, which was one of the places that the twins used to hold their afternoon meets. I’d seen them there on and off since I was a boy, two very smart young men who always had a few people around them. Neville, the guv’nor of Pellicci’s to this day, often jokes about the number of people Ronnie knocked through the window. On this particular day I was sitting in there with a mate of mine, Timmy Reynolds, when Reggie and Ronnie walked in with several characters I would later come to know as Big Pat Connolly, Teddy Smith, Tommy Cowley, Sammy Lederman and Harry Jew Boy.

Reggie came over to me and said, ‘You’re Tony, a friend of Frankies. He’s going to be my brother-in-law.’ He added, ‘Don’t forget us, come and see us … and I’ll do this, Neville.’ With that, he paid our bill.

They were good-looking men, obviously very fit, and well known for being clean-living. That day I sensed an aura about them, a certain danger. You instinctively knew they were
something different, and you knew they were men you didn’t take liberties with.

Chris and I often sat and talked about them. We began to see more of them in Bethnal Green over the next year, and we got to know them well enough to have occasional dealings with them. If we went to the twins, we could always get a little bit of help. They had an open door, and all they asked in return was a bit of trust and a bit of respect. They worked on a basis of: ‘Look, if we can do a good turn, come and see us, and if you can ever do one in return, fair enough.’

They had so many car dealers in their pocket it was untrue, and they could use their influence to get you a motor. You paid a deposit on it and signed up legally. Then it was yours, and you would just forget about the following payments. Only when the case went through the civil courts could they order a snatch-back on it, so you would keep it for two, three years until the finance company repossessed it. The twins would send you to certain car dealers who would sign you up straightaway; you couldn’t do that without their help. Sometimes you didn’t even need a deposit.

But our connections with the twins at this time were very slight. Chris was off doing his own thing, and I was doing mine. He was always a bit aloof, Chris, and never went out of his way to get on with us like brothers normally would. For example, if we were all playing cards he had to win. He always wanted to show that he was the tough one among us, and Leon and I were a challenge to him. I had a fight with him one day and he threw a knife at me. It went in my leg, so I let one go at him with a shotgun. Luckily for him, I missed. It took a bleeding great lump out of the wall.

Chris was capable of doing anything. He was a man of very changeable moods, and if someone upset him he didn’t think, he acted. He wasn’t a man you could turn your back on, and he would
hold a grudge badly. He was big, about six feet two, well-built and very smart – a Savile Row man. He had to have the best things in life, and he had to have them right away. If he wanted something, he just went and got it. While I was growing up, I always looked up to him, because he was the livewire of the family.

Despite the fact that we usually worked independently, in 1961 Chris and I joined forces in a disastrous escapade. He wanted to do a post office. He’d got hold of some explosives and he was talking about, blowing a safe. We decided to go to the post office in Stoke Newington. I went round to the alley at the back to keep a look-out while Chris broke in. He got inside and rummaged around, but we must have made a noise and disturbed somebody, because the next thing was that the police arrived.

They decided to let me go and to charge Chris with breaking into the post office and having explosives in his possession. They just wanted Chris: they saw something in him, and the Old Street and Dalston police had it in for him. My mother was convinced that Chris was being picked on. He was the one my parents doted on: for them, Chris could do no wrong. I saw the other side of him. He was sentenced to two years in a corrective training centre in Verne prison, Portland, a small island joined to the Dorset coast by a causeway.

Chris was at that time courting a girl called Carol. He’d met her about six months before he went away. She stayed on at Queensbridge Road with my Mum and Dad, Jimmy, Nicky, Pat and me. Leon had moved out to a flat in Blythe Street, Bethnal Green, after marrying June that year in Bethnal Green church. Carol visited Chris regularly and so did Pat and I, in a car which Carol bought me, a Mark I Zodiac. Carol went on to marry Chris when he came out, two years later.

Meanwhile, I’d started making money in the West End for the first time, along with my Jimmy, the Venables brothers – Terry and Tiny – and Terry Smith. We knew a Greek who had a basement
snooker place in Soho, in a narrow alley running between Wardour Street and Dean Street. He was known as Nick The Greek, and he was the only man I ever met who could bend a penny with his fingers. His brother was on the door of the Society Club in Jermyn Street. The girls from the clip joints around Frith Street, Greek Street and Dean Street used to go in and out of there and we would get talking and have a laugh with them. I remember three in particular, called Carol, Dawn and Kim, and it was through meeting them that we got the openings.

The set-up in every clip joint is the same. The customer, or john, picks the ‘hostess’ he wants to sit with. The man buys her drinks all night, and the promise is that he gets sex afterwards – he makes a private arrangement with the hostess. The whole operation is geared to making as much money as possible in a very short time. The drink is usually watered-down scotch – the john could be paying more than £500 for a bottle’s worth – and each drink is served with a stick. The girl returns the sticks at the end of the night and cashes them in for money. Some of the men would spend a fortune on alcohol and cash gifts to the girls.

Afterwards the girl would tell the punter she would meet him down the road in ten minutes. She didn’t, of course. Our job was to have a car standing by to get her away from the club. For this, we received 50 per cent of what she had earned. I can only once remember a girl actually going with a bloke, when she happened to meet a millionaire. I took them to the Russell Hotel in Russell Square. But the biggest coup I ever knew was when a girl called June clipped a wealthy old farmer for about twenty grand. He’d come to London for the Agricultural Show at Olympia and he was so delighted to be promised a night in a hotel with a pretty girl that he lavished her with cash and champagne, for which she later picked up the rewards. Needless to say, she did a runner before the farmer even saw a hotel. They did need protection, the girls. If any of the
men got troublesome, we’d give them a kicking. We were always four-or five-handed.

We began to build up a lot of contacts in the West End, and we became known in the clubs round there. I started to see quite a bit of the twins, especially Reggie Kray, who was always around. He was very active at that time, very smart, a man about town. The twins were running Esmerelda’s Barn, a gambling nightspot in Wilton Place, Knightsbridge, and they were into all the best places. I used to bump into them in the Regency in Stoke Newington, in the City Club in the Angel and generally around the West End in the Pigalle, the Bagatelle, Churchills, the Stork and the Society Club. I joined their company on these occasions, and I came to know virtually everybody around them.

In October 1961 I got nicked again, and again it was with Phil Keeling. He was a gelly man – a gelignite expert – and he drove me to the West Country, where we headed for two small Somerset towns called Ilminster and Chard. Phil was into blowing safes, and he had heard of one in the Ilminster Co-op department store. It was like a post-box: people used to post their money into it.

As we were driving along, Keeling pulled out a packet of three. I thought, ‘What does he want them for?’ That’s when I learned that French letters and balloons are ideal for keeping gelignite in. When you do a safe you have to put the explosive to the weakest point, which is usually the lock. You have to get a thin layer of gelly round the door, you have to goo it up into the keyhole itself and you’ve got to get as much as you can into the safe. When you’re laying the gelly, you pierce the end of the rubber and squeeze it out in a thin line like you do with pastry or icing. Then you can cover it with Plasticine. You set it off through a detonator, a battery with a wire on it. You cross the circuit, and that’s what causes the explosion. But you’ve got to know what you’re doing.

We got into the store at midnight and ran round the different departments, picking up fur coats and carpets to cover the safe with so as to muffle the bang. But gelignite has got to be kept cool and dry, and the heat was making ours start to run. It was too dangerous to use – we would have blown half of Somerset away. So we had to find another way.

I went for a walk around the Co-op and found a 14lb sledgehammer. But the safe had a steel door, solidly built into concrete. The counter was built round it. I was smashing this hammer into the concrete and making no impression whatsoever. Then we went right to the back of the store, by the railway, where we found an oxy-acetylene bottle and a flame gun. So we set about cutting the safe. We were half an inch away from getting the door open when we ran out of gas….

We read in the next issue of the local paper that the safe had contained nine grand, which was a lot of money in those days. Before we’d left the store, however, Keeling had picked up a little jewel box with two diamond rings in it. When we arrived back in London, he gave one to me and one to a girlfriend he was having an affair with. She put it on, not realising it was worth £6,000. She was in a café one day when the guv’nor, a Jewish guy called Day, said to her, ‘That’s a lovely ring.’

She said, ‘Phil gave it to me.’

Obviously he knew a bit about jewellery, so what did he do? He picked up the phone.

Just after this I walked round to Great Eastern Street, near the City, where Keeling lived. His wife was in tears, saying, ‘The police have taken Phil away.’

I went home, got my ring and immediately had it valued: it was worth £2,600. I got rid of it through certain channels, and two days later I was nicked. Keeling’s wife had obviously mentioned my name.

They picked me up at my father’s house in Queensbridge Road and took me to Cannon Row police station. I was brought to the Flying Squad offices and from there I was taken by train from Paddington to Taunton, cuffed up to an officer throughout the journey.

I was held at Taunton police station for two days pending an appearance at Ilminster Magistrates Court. Keeling was charged with the explosives side of it, and I was charged with shopbreaking and breaking and entry. Keeling was pleading guilty, which left me nowhere. His girlfriend pleaded guilty to receiving stolen property. I was kept in custody for another week without bail. Then I was granted bail, and finally I was given three years’ probation.

But that wasn’t quite the end of the story. Two officers involved in arresting me turned up at the house not long afterwards in a grey Rover. The heavy one was an out-and-out bruiser who was as bent as a nine bob note, as was publicly proven later.

They said to me, ‘We want you to go and pick up some insurance money.’

What happens when property is stolen is that the insurance companies pay a reward when there’s a conviction. It’s supposed to be paid to the person who gave information to the police, leading to the conviction. In this case I committed the crime, the two officers solved it and now they were putting me up as a beneficiary so I would sign for the money. Then I was expected to hand it over to them.

I didn’t know what was going on at the time. I just went with them to the insurance claims building off Albert Embankment and received an envelope with money in it, which the policemen took off me. They couldn’t claim for it because they weren’t allowed to. They were supposed to give it to the person who put them on to the recovery of the property, but it ended up in their pockets. That’s how naive I was in those days. I didn’t realise what was happening until it was over.

Just before they left me, they said: ‘Thank you very much for your help. You got
your
result in court….’

And so I walked away from the whole episode a wiser man, at least as far as the law was concerned.

Life carried on as normal with the rackets and the clip joints. I was running around in my own Zephyr, I was always dressed smartly and I was never short of a few bob, but my parents never asked any questions and I never felt that I had to explain where I got my money from.

My mother and father were straight people. My brothers and I, on the other hand, had our fingers in the pie. If my mother had known we were giving her money gained from crime, she wouldn’t have wanted it. Yet she wasn’t a fool. She saw the type of people we were mixing with, she saw that money was coming into the house and she knew that we were up to no good in some way. But she just never said anything about it because I feel, deep down, she didn’t want to know.

I think my Dad knew a little bit of what was going on but, like any father, would tend to ignore it until we brought the problem home. He’d voice his opinions, especially if he didn’t like someone in our scene, and we’d argue with him, but at the end of the day we respected and listened to him.

But by and large he wasn’t a man to interfere. His sons were six feet tall, looking for trouble all the time, fearing no one. Because of his lack of English he didn’t understand a lot of it. But he understood it when we got into trouble, and if trouble came, he was there regardless of what. We were his sons and that was it. He was very, very proud of us. Same with my mother. She believed that her boys were being singled out by the police, that there was a vendetta going on about getting Chris put away, and she lost a lot of respect for authority.