Up West (43 page)

Although snooker was a minority sport in those days, there were people who were prepared to back their own skill, or someone else's, with hard cash. Father was one of them: he liked to play snooker for fun, but he'd bet on other players. Even now I can see the smoke-filled air at the Empire snooker hall, smell the cigars and hear the sharp click of ivory balls crashing in to one another. I remember it as an almost entirely masculine place, apart from me and one or two women who came in with their men friends: the women didn't play.

Like the Americans, with their ‘bathtub gin' joints that sprang up during the Prohibition years to give your ‘average Joe' a drink when he wanted one, the would-be punter showed boundless resourcefulness in getting in on ‘the action' during the years of repressive gaming laws in Britain. The message is clear: men and women will drink and they will bet and nothing the authorities do will stop them.

Tolerant of human frailty to the last, the West End in general, and Soho in particular, has always been willing to accept people's foibles and to exploit them where possible.
Gambling is no exception. Even on the Sabbath day in the fifties, when everything of a mercantile nature, save for pubs and restaurants, went quiet, and attending church was the big event of most people's day, a body could get a punt on if he knew where to look. Alberto Camisa remembered how, after Mass, his family would take a stroll around Soho and frequently came across an extracurricular Sunday activity. ‘Up at the top of Berwick Street, behind the pub, the Blue Posts, there was a dead end alleyway, and they used to do hare coursing there. With rats. Because they had all the market stalls there, in lock-ups, with fruit and veg on them, there was always rats. The stallholders caught them during the week, kept them in boxes. Sunday morning people come along with little terrier dogs, and they used to release the rats, and release the dog, and obviously money changed hands.'

I can't help but find in this bloody activity a faint echo from Soho's distant past, when hounds regularly chased hapless hares across Soho Fields.

The West End in general, and Soho in particular, has long been associated with crime. Certainly the words ‘Soho Slaying' on a news-stand in the fifties and sixties sold more papers than ‘Hoxton Homicide', ‘Marylebone Murder' or ‘Camden Carve-up'. It didn't matter how sensationalist the facts of the case were; the mere mention of Sinful Soho suggested juiciness.

This may have been because certain sorts of criminal – pickpockets, con men, black market dealers, jewel thieves and fur thieves (a crime far more fashionable in the forties than it is today) – always gravitated towards the West End. It's where crowds, money and luxury goods have met and mingled for generations, and where that lot linger, thieves are never far behind. The crimes these people committed could be seen as particularly urban ones, and the West End is, of course, the epitome of urban. The thronged pavements and shops of the West End have ever been a busy dip's natural habitat. Jewellery
shops and furriers clustered in the same few shopping streets were too much temptation for smash-and-grabbers, as well as more sophisticated thieves, who specialized in lifting sparklers and minks and knew just where to off-load them.

In Soho, the hardcore criminals fell largely in to two categories: those who ran and worked in the local rackets, and those who came to spend the fruits of their labours rather unimaginatively on drink, gambling and women. Very few criminals actually lived there. They had their own manors south of the river, like the Richardsons, or in the East End, like the Krays: when they got really successful they rented apartments in Bayswater and Knightsbridge, or moved to the stockbroker belt in Surrey, like Charlie Richardson. According to my father, who knew and drank with Richardson, this upscale relocation wasn't a success. Once he'd settled in to his new home in Virginia Water, Charlie thought it would be nice to invite the neighbours in for a cocktail and a ‘getting to know you' party, and duly sent out the invites. When the great evening came, not one neighbour graced the Richardson party with their presence. Sensing a hint of snobbery in this snub, Richardson vacated the house and let it for a peppercorn rent to a large, extended family of immigrants. I hope the locals found it in their heart to offer a friendly welcome, but in the times when this is supposed to have happened, I doubt it.

Some criminals targeted Sohoites who were operating beyond the law and so were unlikely to report them to the police. Such criminals might run a regular ‘protection' racket, pocketing fixed sums each week to leave an illegal
drinking club unmolested; or they would simply crash in and take what they wanted when they felt like it. This method was particularly popular with British criminals, who would victimize the Maltese community, seeking easy money.

Tommy ‘Scarface' Smithson was typical, as his sometime henchman, Jim Barnett, remembered in a TV interview.
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‘The Maltese were frightened of Tommy. If they opened a drinking club, spieler, whatever, they'd always be frightened that we'd walk in. Every club, every street, is full of weapons. A wall is a marvellous weapon. You ram somebody's head in to a wall, that's a pretty heavy thing to hit them with. Tables? Just look around you. Heavy ashtrays? Chairs? Your hands, your feet, your elbows? Your head?' In the same programme, Barnett offered a defence of Smithson's behaviour: ‘I think that a bully is somebody that hurts little people just for his own gratification. Tommy Smithson hurt people, bloody right he did, but he hurt people who were going to hurt him, or he hurt them for money.'
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In the late forties and fifties, there were criminal types you simply do not find today, such as ‘peter men' – safe-cracking burglars, with the expertise to use a stethoscope to crack a combination or choose the right amount of ‘jelly' to open a safe's door without destroying its contents – smash and grab boys, and ‘jump-up men'. Smash and grab particularly appealed to young thieves who were in it as much for the adrenaline as the money. All they needed was a fast car – usually nicked for the purpose – and a brick. The latter would be heaved through a jeweller's window, then a gloved hand would grab everything within reach before a tyre-squealing getaway through what were then relatively empty streets. In certain circumstances, you didn't even need a car, as Charles Hasler, who joined the Metropolitan Police after serving in the Second World War, remembers: ‘The London fogs were thick, dirty, yellow. You couldn't see across the road. The minute you got the fogs, you started getting more smash and grabs. Anybody could heave a brick through a shop window and disappear in the gloom.' It didn't have to be a jeweller's window: ‘In the forties and fifties, everything was scarce, so everything had a value. Whatever they could lift, they could sell. So they did.'

The same principle applied to jump-up men, who worked in teams. They drove around looking for a delivery lorry, then followed it, waiting for the driver to get out and go in to a shop. As soon as he was through the door, one or two would swarm up over the tailboard, grab cartons of cigarettes or
anything else they could sell on the black market, and chuck it down to their mates below, who threw it in to their car and zoomed away while the jump-up men legged it. Jump-up men often graduated to hijacking lorries – sometimes waiting for the driver to get out of the cab and sometimes simply dragging him out – and driving them off to a pre-arranged spot for swift unloading.

Crime thrived in certain places in the West End simply because of the presence of another, legal activity. In the forties and fifties second-hand car dealers operated largely out of Warren Street, where cars were displayed in the street and business was done on the pavements. Where better to trade in dodgy petrol coupons, stolen parts, tyres and so on? Most of the car dealers operated on the far-flung fringes of legality anyway, and some weren't too fussed about leaving it behind altogether.

And then there was the little matter of the recent war. The Blitz and the blackout proved heaven-sent for opportunistic thieves and fraudsters, while the black market in rationed and just plain unavailable goods transformed London. Just as Prohibition had done in America, it made everyone who resorted to buying ‘on the black' a criminal. Although policemen were never called up to fight, many volunteered, depleting the force, while deserters and those fleeing the call-up swelled the ranks of the gangs that were springing up to loot the capital. As Frankie Fraser wrote, wartime London ‘was a thieves' paradise, and everyone was a thief'. The Blitz also ensured that there were empty
buildings available at London's heart to provide shelter to these runaways, as well as bases from which to commit the crimes that funded their life on the run. Nothing was safe, and there was a market for everything, as any enterprising spiv could tell you.

And just as rationing continued after the war, so did the crimes associated with it, which were mainly fraud and theft. Another thing the war gave criminals was the chance to update their weaponry, as Charles Hasler remembers. ‘Virtually every one of us had a service pistol. Of course you brought back souvenirs from the war. I've known blokes have a sub-machine-gun in their kitbag. Also there were an awful lot of souvenirs from the First World War floating around, especially the German Luger, with the long barrel. They were all over the place, in people's drawers and so on.'

Despite the availability of firearms, high profile cases, such as the murder of a motorcyclist, Alec de Antiquis, after he attempted to block the getaway of some jewel thieves in Fitzrovia in 1947,
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or the killing of a police officer by a sixteen-year-old gunman in Croydon in 1952, were high profile largely because they were so shockingly unusual. In the latter case, a ‘gun battle' between a teenager with a few rounds of modified ammunition and some armed police who supposedly never fired a shot brought headlines such
as ‘Chicago comes to Croydon' in the newspapers.
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‘Criminals did use firearms,' Charles Hasler remembers, ‘but not as much as now. The penalty if you got caught with them was pretty stiff. You could expect double the sentence for a robbery involving firearms than for an ordinary blagging. But they were certainly using them. My first two years, there were two police officers killed, shot, in London.' Perhaps it was these heavy sentences that kept the razor or knife, the cosh and the knuckleduster as the weapons of choice for most villains. They were easy to get, for one thing. Coshes were typically made from cut-down starting handles† sleeved with rubber, while cut-throat razors and knives could be bought in any high street. One way to tell who had been a criminal in Soho for some time was the scars on their faces; they were almost a badge of honour.

An event that has taken a leading place in the criminal history of the West End is the Spot–Dimes fight. Two old-school villains, associated with rival racetrack gangs, Jack
‘Spot' Comer and Albert Dimes (born Dimeo) cut each other up in a fight that had dozens of witnesses. Later, however, no one could agree about what had gone on, although all concurred that it ended in the Continental Fruit Store on the corner of Frith Street and Old Compton Street. The small shop belonged to ‘Hymie' and Sophie Hyams and it was Sophie who brought some order to the proceedings by bringing the heavy metal pan from the potato scales down on Spot's head, while demanding that they should ‘Stop it, you silly boys.' Eventually, Dimes was whisked off to hospital in a taxi and Spot tottered in to a barber's shop up the road and told the nervous barber to fix him up.

Everyone who was in Soho at the time, no matter how young, has some memory of the fight, which shows just how rare any serious unpleasantness actually was, despite reports to the contrary. I did not see it, but heard about it from Father and his friends. John Carnera had a similar memory. ‘I was there in the street when it was going on, but I didn't exactly see what happened, because there was all crowds all round. I was a kid: I couldn't see anything.' Owen Gardner believes that Jack Spot bought the knife used in the fight that very day at Page's.

The one closest to the action was probably Leo Zanelli, but he didn't see anything either. ‘I was in the Bar Italia when there was a big commotion, and in the Bar Italia was a fellow called Bert Marsh, a very nice fellow, but tough, he was an enforcer for one of the Italian gangs. I was a young lad, and I wouldn't go up and talk to him. I remember someone coming
in and saying Albert Dimes was in trouble in the grocery place on the corner. I saw Bert rush out and hail a taxi, and I understand he took him to the Middlesex Hospital. Marsh and Albert Dimes were part of the same racetrack gang. Marsh had been a boxer, and eventually got in with a bad crowd . . . If he hadn't, let's face it, he would probably have ended up sweeping the streets. It was Bert who put the first fruit machine in my dad's club in Gerrard Street.'

A blade wasn't enough for everybody. According to my father, Frankie Fraser, whom he knew through Richardson, liked to tell people that he always carried five bob. When asked why, he'd explain that it was the price of an axe, one of his favourite tools when he was called upon to frighten people in to submission or to teach them a lesson. How true this is, I couldn't say, but what I can say is that as a small girl I found Frankie Fraser's eyes very scary, especially as my father used to say that it didn't do to attract this man's attention, and if his eyes were on you . . .

Among the really hard men, gunplay was always a possibility. Leo Zanelli remembers a double shooting that took place in January 1963. ‘Next to the French House, on the first floor, was Tony Mulla's club. Tony Mulla, the Lone Wolf. It was called the Bus Stop, a clip joint, but there was an authentic club up there as well, the villains used to go up there. Now Tony Mulla . . . Years before, a gang had put him in hospital really badly. The rumour was that they'd stuck an open razor up his backside. He was always saying what wonderful people nurses were. Anyway, he was a real hard villain.