Читать книгу Me and My Brothers - Robin Mcgibbon - Страница 13

With Esmeralda’s – and other projects dreamed up by Leslie Payne – bringing in hundreds every week, it wasn’t long before we decided to open another club in the East End to replace the much-missed Double R. We called it The Kentucky and it was packed every night after it opened early in 1962.

I must admit the way the twins chucked money around worried me and, since the Betting and Gaming Act had made gambling legal, I suggested investing some of our profits in betting shops, which were springing up all over the country. But Ronnie and Reggie did not fancy the idea.

What we did agree on, however, was using some of our money and growing business and showbusiness contacts for charity work. The three of us had always been eager to help old people and children and now we took huge pleasure in organizing fund-raising activities for Mile End Hospital, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for children, the Repton Boys’ Club and various other organizations.

One of Reggie’s promotions at the York Hall in Bethnal Green was unique. He matched Bobby Ramsey – who had been responsible for the ill-fated bayonet attack in 1956 – as a properly gloved boxer against a judo and karate expert called Ray Levacq. Although the ‘anything-goes’ bout lasted only a few minutes – Ramsey winning by a second-round knockout – the star-studded audience loved it, and local charities benefited by several hundred pounds.

The Kentucky had a colourful, if short, life. A number of international stars – including Billy ‘That OF Black Magic’ Daniels – came there for a few drinks after their shows and the club even provided the setting for a film, Sparrows Can’t Sing. The mayor of Bethnal Green, Mr Hare, asked if we could help him by selling tickets for the charity première at the Empire Cinema opposite The Kentucky. We bought £500 worth – and sold the lot. Later, people would say this was ‘demanding’, but it wasn’t. East Enders were keen to support charities, always had been. And anyway, people liked a good night out. After the première we threw a party for the whole cast that was talked about for months. Throughout 1962 and early 1963 the East End in general, and The Kentucky in particular, was the place to be.

You could never be quite sure what was going to happen. One night, for instance, a midget singer called Little Hank took the stage for a cabaret spot when Ronnie suddenly emerged from the wings, holding a donkey on a leash. Little Hank – no doubt as surprised as the rest of us – gravely climbed on it and sang his opening number as Ronnie stood alongside with a straight face. After Hank’s performance, Ronnie led the donkey down to the bar and it waited next to him patiently while he had a few drinks. Later he gave the donkey to a club member for one of his children.

At around three in the morning, Ronnie was woken up by a knock at the door in Vallance Road. The recipient of Ronnie’s thoughtful gift was extremely grateful, but wanted to know what to do to stop the blessed animal’s deafening hee-haws, which were keeping everyone awake.

‘Put its bloody head in a sack,’ Ronnie offered, and went back to bed.

Charitable Ronnie even gave some local buskers a chance to take the Kentucky stage. We were walking along Bethnal Green Road one day when Ronnie pointed at four or five blokes playing trumpets and various other instruments on the pavement.

‘They’re terrific,’ said Ronnie. ‘I always give ‘em a few quid.’

I nodded. A few quid probably meant ten.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he added, ‘I’ve told a couple of them to come to the club tonight and play us a tune. I said we’d give ‘em a few quid.’

‘Do me a favour, Ron,’ I said. ‘They’re amateurs.’

‘They’re very good, let me tell you,’ Ronnie said indignantly.

‘You can’t have them in the club,’ I told him.

But, of course, he did. They played a tune and Ronnie paid them. That’s how he was.

Both the twins had a lot of will-power, but Ronnie’s was phenomenal. He had a sort of obsession about it: if you really wanted to do something, he’d say, nothing should be able to stop you.

One night in The Kentucky, Ronnie was at the bar, having a heated discussion about will-power with a much younger guy.

‘I’ll prove you can do anything you want,’ Ronnie was saying. And he took a knife out of his pocket and plunged it into his left hand. Blood spurted everywhere. Reggie and I looked at each other, not believing what we had seen. We ran behind the bar and got a towel and wrapped it round Ronnie’s hand, which seemed nearly cut in half.

‘What were you doing?’ Reggie yelled. ‘Are you mad?’

Ronnie just said he was trying to prove a point.

‘Fantastic!’ I said. ‘You’re so bright.’

We took him to The London Hospital at Whitechapel and a doctor told him he had come within a fraction of an inch of losing the use of the hand.

Ronnie said he had put his hand through a window, but the doctor did not believe him. When we got home, Mum broke her heart. She kept asking Ronnie why he had done it, but all he would say was, ‘To prove a point.’

When I told him I thought he was barmy trying to prove a point to some idiot, Ronnie said, ‘Shut your mouth. It’s done now. It’s finished.’

You could never tell Ronnie anything.

Both he and Reggie could not bear anyone who took liberties, particularly where women were involved. One afternoon, some girls from a dress-making factory hired The Kentucky for a firm’s party. The twins and I greeted them, then left them to enjoy themselves. Later we learned that two brothers named Jordan had gone to the club and made themselves busy with the girls, grabbing them and generally trying it on. The bloke in charge of the club had not tried to stop the brothers because he feared they would smash the place up.

We hit the roof. I was happy to find the brothers and warn them verbally but the twins didn’t think that was enough. The next morning Ronnie got up at five o’clock to go to Smithfield market where one of the brothers worked; he told Reggie and me to go to a local glass factory to find the other one.

When we got there, Reggie told me to leave everything to him because two on to one wasn’t fair. One massive punch to the jaw did it: Jack the Lad Jordan didn’t know what hit him. But, as usual, Ronnie was not able to throw just one and walk away. Apparently, he charged around Smithfield and when he found his Jordan, knocked him all over the place, leaving him in a right mess. The brothers never came into The Kentucky again.

Sadly, it was only a few months later that no one came to the club at all. Mysteriously, our request to have our licence renewed was turned down by the local justices. The club had been run properly, with no complaints from anyone, and applications for extensions had always been granted. But our renewal application was thrown out anyway. The local justices were not obliged to say why, and they didn’t.

It did not need an Einstein to work out the reason. Because we refused to give the police back-handers to leave us alone we were still marked men. The daft charges of fiddling with car doors and robbing defenceless old-age pensioners had blown up in the police faces, so other tactics had to be used. They had easily closed The Double R without good reason, and they did the same with The Kentucky.

The closure had a bad effect on all of us, but particularly Ronnie. He hated the police aggravation and the violence. He would often say to Mum, ‘I’m going to move. I can’t stand it any more.’ He wanted to get away from an area that bred violence and people who revelled in it. Ronnie, of course, was violent himself. But afterwards he would hate what he had done. I remember once he got extremely depressed and said, ‘That’s it. I’ve had enough.’

Leslie Payne had come running to the twins asking for help because Bobby Ramsey had taken a pop at him. Ronnie and Reggie were going to see Ramsey at a garage in Stratford and they asked me to go with them; why, I can’t remember.

Ramsey came out into the courtyard. Ronnie told him not to take liberties with Payne, then laid him out with a right to the jaw. As Ramsey went to get up, Ronnie picked up a shovel and raised it menacingly. Reggie and I were convinced he was going to kill Ramsey before our eyes, but he calmed down and later went into the office to apologize. But he told Ramsey he had been wrong to hit Payne.

In the car going home, Ronnie was extremely depressed. ‘I’m sick of all this,’ he said. ‘I had to go and hit Ramsey on the chin because of Payne. I’m sick of the whole life. I want to get out. I’ve had enough.’

When he got like this he would go to Turkey or some other sunny place to get away from it all. But he badly wanted to move away for good.

Eventually he was to buy a place in that part of England he had loved so much as a war-time child. But by then it was too late.

We were sorry to see The Kentucky go: it was well liked and well used by respectable local people, and enhanced the area. But if the police thought the closure would put the Kray brothers out of business they couldn’t have been more wrong. Esmeralda’s Barn, which now had a basement disco, had enabled us to buy into other, smaller West End clubs. The twins also bought a small hotel, The Glenrae, in Seven Sisters Road, North London. And Leslie Payne, who was buying a controlling interest in The Cambridge Rooms on the Kingston bypass, was about to launch a legitimate company, The Carston Group, with a posh Mayfair office.

The police may have hit our East End connection. But up West, the money was rolling in.

To three East End blokes in the nightclub business, Leslie Payne’s scheme sounded senseless. He had returned from the Eastern Nigeria city of Enugu and partly committed us to building a new township in the bush. It was a project more suited to merchant bank investment, but the more Payne explained the financial possibilities the more excited we all got. Ronnie and Reggie flew to Enugu with Payne and Gore to see the development site and when they returned plans were made to approach wealthy and influential people for investment. One of these gentlemen was Lord Boothby; another was Hew McCowan, son of a rich Scottish baronet and landowner.

What we did not know at the time was that Ernest Shinwell, son of the late, much-respected Labour MP, had hawked the proposition round for a long time without finding any takers. He must have gone to Payne as a last resort. Blissfully unaware of this, we happily poured money from our. various London enterprises into the Great African Safari – GAS for short – confident that Payne knew what he was doing. As 1964 wore on, however, we became worried: not only was more and more money being swallowed up by GAS, we also got word that the police were taking an even closer interest in our activities. So it was with some relief that we greeted Payne’s assurances in October that it was pay-off time and we would soon all be rolling in money again. Four of us – Payne, Gore, a well-connected Canadian called Gordon Anderson and myself – flew to Enugu full of hope.

It took me just three days to sense that all was not well.

Payne, as usual, strutted around like a Great White Chief – the faithful Gore forever in his wake – but I could not fail to notice he was always avoiding a native building contractor who, I knew, had paid us a £5,000 introductory fee months before. The man wanted to get on with the building work and was always in the foyer of the Presidential Hotel looking for Payne who, in turn, was forever dodging him. I talked to Payne about it but he told me not to worry.

Payne gave the impression he knew what he was doing. But he didn’t. That contractor got fed up and opted out of the scheme. He managed to track Payne down and demanded his £5,000 back. After a blazing row in which Payne said he didn’t have the money, the man went to the police. Payne and Gore were arrested and thrown into jail.

Overnight the warm, friendly atmosphere became cold and frosty: no more smiles, polite bows and handshakes from Government officials; no more smart cars with motorcycle escorts at our disposal.

Payne was still playing the Great White Chief in his prison cell, vehemently insisting that he and Gore would join us at the airport as soon as he’d put the local police chief in his place. When they didn’t show up, I told Anderson to go on to Lagos while I dealt with the matter. The only way to sort it out was to pay back the £5,000, so I rang the twins and told them to wire the money at once. I sat by the phone for the next twenty-four hours until I had absolute confirmation that the cash was on its way. Then a solicitor I’d met on previous visits found a judge who would sign the necessary bail forms if I arranged for £5,000 to be paid.

The journey to that judge was a nightmare. The solicitor and another black guy drove me off into the jungle, along a narrow road that looked as if it didn’t lead anywhere. The solicitor assured me we were going to the judge’s house but the way Payne had behaved made me fear for my life. As we drove deeper into the jungle I had visions of being bumped off and dumped – just another mysterious disappearance. But after the longest fifteen minutes of my life, the jungle opened up and there was the judge’s bungalow, set in beautiful gardens. I showed the relevant documents, signed some forms, tingling with relief, then went back to get Payne and Gore out of the nick.

They were filthy, thirsty, hungry and exhausted. Gore was demoralized; Payne on the brink of a breakdown. I didn’t give either of them any time to say much: I spelled out the seriousness of our predicament and told them we were leaving – right then. It was not until the plane had left the runway at Lagos Airport that I was able to relax for the first time in three days.

The GAS had blown up in our faces and, once back in England, the twins and I gave Leslie Payne the elbow.

Towards the end of the Nigerian affair, the Boothby Photograph ‘Scandal’ hit the headlines. What a storm in a teacup that was! The whole nation, it seemed, was led to believe that Ronnie and the charming, multi-talented peer were having a homosexual affair. But nothing was further from the truth.

Ronnie went to Lord Boothby’s home in Eaton Square just twice – on business. Boothby seemed keen to invest some money in the Nigerian project, but ultimately wrote to Ronnie saying he did not have the time to devote to it. That’s where the matter should have ended. But Ronnie’s passion for having his photograph taken with famous people set off a dramatic chain of events that ended with Boothby being paid £40,000 libel damages by the Sunday Mirror.

The photograph in question – one of twenty or so taken during Ronnie’s second visit to Boothby’s flat – was an innocuous one, showing the two men sitting side by side on a settee. They were both dressed in suits and, since they had been discussing a multi-million pound business proposition, they looked fairly serious. Keen to make a few bob, the photographer showed a print to the Sunday Mirror and on 12 July the paper ran a sensational frontpage story – under the headline PEER AND A GANGSTER: YARD PROBE – alleging ‘a homosexual relationship between a prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld’.

The story did not name Boothby or Ronnie, but claimed that a peer and a thug had attended Mayfair parties, that the peer and prominent public men had indulged in questionable activities during weekends in Brighton, that the peer was involved in relationships with clergymen, and that people who could give evidence on these matters had been threatened.

Not surprisingly, the Sunday Mirror story – based on little fact – blew up into a major scandal. The questions on the lips of the nation, it seemed, were: Who is the peer? And who is the gangster?

Well, the satirical magazine Private Eye did its best to put people out of their misery by naming Ronnie as the thug. And then Boothby himself brought the whole thing into the open in a frank letter to The Times, in which he referred to the Sunday Mirror story as ‘a tissue of atrocious lies’.

On 4 August, both Ronnie and Boothby agreed for The Photograph to appear in the Daily Express, and the next day the International Publishing Corporation, which owned the Sunday Mirror, paid Boothby £40,000 compensation for the paper’s unfounded and libellous story. IPC chairman, Cecil King, also made an unqualified apology. Ronnie was given no cash compensation but on 19 and 20 September the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror did allow four column inches to apologize to him.

To celebrate the end of the affair, Ronnie threw a party at a Bethnal Green pub. Boothby didn’t come; nor did Reginald Payne, who was fired as editor of the Sunday Mirror on 14 August. But many celebrities were there. And among those who showed no fear at being photographed with the so-called thug, Ronnie Kray, was someone who was to become a dear, dear friend: Judy Garland, the Hollywood moviestar.

The spider spinning a web to trap the twins made his first move in January 1965. Detective Inspector Leonard Read – known as ‘Nipper’ in criminal circles – walked into the basement bar of the Glenrae Hotel and charged Ronnie and Reggie with demanding money with menaces from a Soho club owner. They were said to have threatened Hew Cargill McCowan with violence unless he gave them a percentage of the takings of the Hideaway Club in Ger-rard Street. When McCowan refused the twins’ offer, the prosecution alleged, a drunken writer called Teddy Smith smashed some bottles and glasses at the club, causing twenty pounds’ worth of damage.

The evidence was wafer-thin and, thankfully, Ronnie and Reggie were acquitted. But they were subjected to two Old Bailey trials and three months on remand in Brixton before being cleared. Police objected to bail four times because they feared Ronnie and Reggie would not turn up to stand trial. But the twins offered to give up their passports, report to the police twice a day and undertake not to interfere with witnesses – all this in addition to sureties of a staggering £18,000. The court’s refusal to allow bail caused widespread controversy and Lord Boothby was so incensed he asked the Government in the House of Lords whether ‘it is their intention to imprison the Kray brothers indefinitely without trial’.

The trial took place at the Old Bailey in March 1965, but after a nine-day hearing the jury failed to agree. The retrial started on 30 March, and I was spending money and time trying to find witnesses who could help the twins. I went to the solicitors’ at 9 A.M. every morning to tell them what I was doing. I had a private detective running around all over the place. And I had a tape on my phone, to cover every call.

The police had the hump with me for trying to help the twins and tried to fit me up one night.

I arrived home and Dolly told me a man had just phoned from Finchley saying he had some information that would interest me; he was going to ring back. About fifteen minutes later, the phone went. The guy was at Aldgate; could I meet him there? And would I be in my white Mini? I smelled a rat. How did he know what car I drove? And if he had rung from Finchley the first time, how had he got to Aldgate in fifteen minutes? I pulled him on this and he gave me some story, but I wasn’t fooled. I told him I knew he was a copper and if he thought he was going to fit me up he had another thought coming. Both conversations had been taped, I said, then I put the phone down. I did not keep the appointment. And I never heard from the guy again.

I was spending so much time on the case – chasing witnesses, helping the private detective or attending court – that I had no time for my work as a theatrical agent. No work meant no bookings. And no bookings meant no money. But money was what was needed if the twins were to get off; for lawyers want paying, no matter which way the verdict goes.

I had been dipping into my savings and was absolutely boracic when I got a call from the solicitor representing the twins. The legal costs had been paid up front, but they had run out, the solicitor said. He wanted £1,500 for the next day’s hearing, or he and the barrister were pulling out of the case.

I was owed money that would have more than covered the required amount, but I would not get it until the end of the week. I needed the £1,500 urgently and racked my brains for someone who had that sort of money at the drop of a hat.

I could think of only one person: Lord Boothby.

I rang his Eaton Square house and Boothby’s charming butler arranged for me to see the noble lord that afternoon. Boothby was very pleasant: he offered me a drink and allowed me to say my piece. I explained why I needed the money so quickly and stressed that I wasn’t broke, just in a tight financial corner.

I honestly felt Boothby would agree to a loan: he’d just been awarded £40,000, and he knew the ‘menaces’ charge against the twins was nonsense. So I was shell-shocked when he said, ‘I’m sorry, my dear boy. The forty thousand’s all gone. I owed so much.’

I was choked. I didn’t know what to say; there wasn’t anything I could say. I’d blown out. I needed to get out of there quickly and try someone else, or else the twins would find themselves with no legal brief the next day – which would almost certainly mean a verdict of guilty and a prison sentence.

I left Eaton Square a very worried man, and not a little disappointed in Lord Boothby who, I’m sure, could have found £1,500 if he had really wanted to.

Of course, I got the money in the end; you always find a way when it’s critical, don’t you? And then I got on with the business of tracking down witnesses willing to tell the truth and get the case against the twins kicked out once and for all.

They did get off. But, sadly, I wasn’t there to hear the Not Guilty verdicts.

On the sixth day of the retrial I went to see a possible witness instead of going to the solicitor’s office first. When I finally turned up an hour or so later to tell them I’d found someone willing to give evidence, one of the clerks said, ‘That was good, wasn’t it, Charlie?’ I didn’t know what he meant. A minute later, in an upstairs office, a solicitor said, ‘Congratulations.’

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘Your case,’ he said. ‘It was thrown out this morning. Your brothers have been cleared.’

I was pleased, of course. But also cheesed off. It was the first day of the case I hadn’t been in court, and I’d missed the best moment. By the time I got home to Vallance Road, the Fleet Street hounds were outside the house and the twins were having cups of tea – free men for the first time since their arrest three months to the day before.

That homecoming made even bigger headlines than the trial itself and when all the reporters and photographers and well-wishers had left Vallance Road, I took the twins in the front room and gave them some strong advice that, had they heeded it, could have changed the tragic course their lives were to take. They had proved their point, I said. Once again, the police had tried to put them away on trumped-up charges – and failed. But Nipper Read and his men would not give up; if anything, they would take the latest setback to heart and try even harder next time. Whatever the twins had in mind, I said, they should stop and think and be very careful. If they stopped now we could go on for ever and be looked on as respectable businessmen; we could have everything we ever wanted, with no villainy, no worries, no police harassment. Having won a few battles, we could go on and win the war.

Ronnie and Reggie nodded. What I said was right, they agreed. They had indeed proved their point to the police. It was time to quieten down and become respectable businessmen. Reggie even admitted that he and Frances were getting married.

But already it was too late. Reggie’s marriage was tragically doomed. And in Westminster’s corridors of power, one of the top men in the country was preparing a Top Secret document that was to lure the twins into the spider’s web and trap them for ever.