Bringing Down the Krays by Bobby Teale Read Free Book Online Page A

would be as good as his word, David slammed the door shut in their faces. The following day David ran into his friends again near Cambridge Circus. They started to have a go at him, saying, ‘That’s a nice way to treat your old friends, to slam the door in our faces!’ David told them the Krays had been there and asked them if they’d ever heard the name before. His friends said they hadn’t. David told them that they were lucky to be alive. It was true.
    Ronnie’s capacity for violence, as the whole world would hear one day, was unusual to say the least. Years before, in prison on assault charges, he had been transferred from Winchester Jail to a mental hospital. Here the doctors decided he had suffered a schizophrenic breakdown, which powerful drugs might be able to treat.
    The doctors missed the paranoid bit. Ronnie absconded with Reggie’s help and managed to hide in a caravan on a farm in Suffolk owned by an insurance fraudster called Geoff Allen (whose house I would later visit). Mad Teddy Smith fetched and carried for him. It couldn’t last long. After a few weeks he went back to prison and after a few months more, Ronnie was ‘returned to society’. That was back in 1959. But his instability was always smouldering just beneath the surface.
    In 1961 Reggie found himself arrested again, for housebreaking this time. But the woman who had filed the charges failed to identify him in court and the case was dismissed. They had a big party. There was always a party. Then a few weeks laterthey were charged with ‘loitering with intent to steal’ – by trying the doors of cars somewhere in Hackney. As if they’d do that. Again they got off, claiming police harassment. There was another big party that night, 8 May 1961, at Esmeralda’s Barn.
    Ronnie proposed a toast to ‘British Justice’ and all the journalists and photographers were given champagne. The Krays for the first time were national news. The papers the next day carried a big article about ‘the celebrated boxing twins’, which was what they were famous for at first – they had once had some success as boxers before their criminal record and dishonourable discharge from the army brought an end to their careers. The papers proudly proclaimed their declaration to ‘go straight’.
    And this time it seemed Reggie really seemed to want to go straight. He spent much of the summer at a place called Steeple Bay, on the Thames estuary in Essex, where the family had a caravan. I’d get to know about it one day. There was girl called Frances Shea from Hackney who came down for weekends. Alfie knew her brother, Frankie Shea. She was sixteen and Reggie was twenty-seven. She seemed to offer Reggie the opportunity to make a different life.
    But it was clear to Alfie that Ronnie, who disliked all women except his mother, saw Frances as a threat. She would tell his brother what time to come home in the evening – just like Charlie’s wife, Dolly, did – much to Ronnie’s disgust. The way he saw it, that’s what all women did.
    The next summer, 1962, the twins opened their latest club. It was called the Kentucky, and it was located in Stepney, just across from the ABC Empire cinema at 106a Bow Road. Itwas supposed to be a posher version of the Double R, which had shut down when its drinks licence renewal was refused. The East End was suddenly getting a bit trendy. But to prove it you had to get faces in – proper faces, not just some old boxers like the Krays were always being photographed with. They wanted pop singers, film stars, people their old mum had seen off the telly.
    They employed their old army chum, Dickie Morgan, to cruise the West End to persuade celebrity customers to head east. From what Alfie told me, Dickie was dreadful at it. My brothers were meant to do the same, to get faces in. David managed to get Colin Hicks (Tommy Steele’s brother) and two tap dancers from America called the Clark Brothers. They used to sing as well, but Ronnie