My Story Read online

  My Story

  by Ron Kray with Fred Dinenage

  I dedicate my story to my wife Kate,

  my brother Reg, and my friends Irene Hart,

  John Griffiths, Mai Kirk, Charlie Smith, Dot Welsh,

  Geraldine Charles, Wilf Pine, and Stephanie King.

  OUR MUM

  Mum you are like a rose.

  When God picked you, you were the best mum he could have chose.

  You kept us warm when it was cold With your arms around us you did fold.

  For us you sold your rings of gold.

  When you died, I like a baby cried.

  When I think of you it is with pride,

  So go to sleep mum I know that you are tired.

  God pays debts without money.

  Our dearest mother always used to say that. I believe it. I have to.

  Ron Kray

  ABOUT THE CO-AUTHOR

  Fred Dinenage is a former journalist. He was the main presenter on two Olympic Games for ITV; for nine years he was main presenter on Coast to Coast, the TVS nightly news programme which twice won the Royal Television Society award for Best Regional News Programme. No other programme has ever won this award twice. He was also main presenter on Meridian Tonight, the nightly news programme in the south produced by Meridian Television. In February 1994 this too was named by the Royal Television Society as Best Regional Programme in Britain. He was co-author, with Reg and Ron Kray, of Our Story.

  Prologue

  They were the best years of our lives. They called them the Swinging Sixties. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the rulers of pop music, Carnaby Street ruled the fashion world … and me and my brother ruled London. We were fucking untouchable.

  Nothing happened, especially in east London, that we didn’t know about first. No crime was committed unless we said okay. If anyone in our ‘manor’ had a problem, they would come to us. They knew we would sort it. I’ll give you an example. One day a friend of mine called ‘Buller’ Ward came to see me. He told me his son’s nose had been broken in three places by a feller called Billy Blake. I knew about Blake. He was a flash, arrogant bastard; he was a bully. Not only had he disfigured the kid, but the lippy bastard was going around the East End boasting about hurting this kid.

  The boy’s father was upset about it. He didn’t see how it was that Blake was getting away with it. He told the police but they didn’t want to know. So I phoned this bully, Blake. I told him I wanted to see him about some business. I told him to meet me in a club which we owned. I knew he would come, because he was greedy and he could smell money.

  When he came into the club I grabbed him round the throat with my left hand, and with my right I pushed a white-hot poker down the side of his face. He screamed like a stuffed pig, and I could smell the flesh on his face burning.

  At the time Blake and some people like him in the East End were starting to take liberties. So I made an example of him. He had to be shown that you never hurt women, or children, or old people. Or anyone who isn’t involved in the underworld.

  And you never crossed me or my brother, Reg.

  Blake was lucky. I could have killed him. I have killed a man, and so has my brother. We’ve paid a high price for it - half our fucking lives, locked away. Was it worth it? I don’t know. We just did what we had to do. It was all a long time ago.

  But people still remember us, don’t they?

  Introduction

  A judge called Melford Stevenson made his name when he sent me and my brother down for thirty years. It made him the most feared judge in Britain. He loved it.

  But he lived to regret it. He paid for it with a gypsy’s curse that cost him his sight.

  Melford Stevenson was an old bastard. It wasn’t the terrible sentence that upset us. We weren’t surprised at that because our lawyers had told us we’d get at least twenty years. No, what upset us was the way he showed us no respect, no dignity. He treated us worse than animals. During the trial he tried to make us wear placards, pieces of card with our names on, hung round our necks by a piece of string. Just like cattle at a market.

  I wasn’t having any of that. I told him to go and fuck himself. Later, I got a Romany friend of mine to put a curse on him. Not long after that he went blind. The Romany is a good friend of mine. I’ll call her Dot, I won’t give her proper name. But she said that Melford Stevenson was a spiteful and vindictive man, and so she cursed him. He went blind, and later he died.

  Melford Stevenson paid for not showing us respect, but he was never the all-powerful figure he thought he was. No. It took people far more powerful than him to bring our Firm down. It took the full might of the British government to do that. The government had to bring us down. They feared us, they couldn’t control us, and they knew we were getting too powerful. We controlled London. We ran the gambling, the clubs, we knew about everyone and everything. We had MPs and lords and churchmen in our pockets, but we never took advantage of the likes of MPs like Tom Driberg, or lords like Effingham and Boothby. We could have done, though.

  Harold Wilson and his government knew they had to smash us or, in the end, we would destroy them. It really was them or us. We were beginning to cause mayhem. They tried everything. They set the Fraud Squad on us, Scotland Yard, even the Inland Revenue. They thought the tax men would bring us down, just like they did Al Capone in America. But even that failed. It looked like we were indestructible.

  In the end the police only brought us down because of the weakness of the men around us. And because of a pack of lies. In the end we were done because the police were more corrupt than we were.

  Harold Wilson must have breathed a sigh of relief when we were put away. We scared him and his mates shitless. I remember going for a drink one night at Quaglino’s, a club in the West End. I stood at the bar and noticed Harold Wilson was sat on the stool next to me, talking to another man. Wilson looked round and saw me. He put his drink down and fucked off out. He couldn’t get out quick enough.

  At that time me and my brother Reg could’ve bought Harold Wilson and his bloody cabinet ten times over. We had earned millions. Millions. And we gave most of it away, to charity and to people who needed it. Me and Reg never worried about money. If we wanted it we just went and got it.

  CHAPTER ONE: The Early Years

  I can remember precisely the moment my mental illness started, the moment I first became mad. I was twenty-two and in Wandsworth Prison, in London, doing three years on a charge of GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm). They said I’d beaten up a man called Terry Martin in a pub called the Britannia, in Stepney.

  I was doing all right at Wandsworth. Then, one day, a prison warder came into my cell and told me, completely matter- of-factly, ‘Kray, your auntie Rose is dead.’ The news just shattered me. My auntie Rose was my mother’s sister and we had always been very close, she had been good to me when I was a kid. But I never got any sympathy or understanding from that screw. I’ll never forget what the bastard said when he saw how upset I was. He said, ‘Well, she was getting on, wasn’t she?’ Getting on? My auntie was only in her forties. I could have killed him. But you do get some real bad bastards working in prisons.

  When I heard about my auntie Rose it completely turned my mind. I got very depressed, I really went downhill. They sent me to Camp Hill, a soft prison on the Isle of Wight, but that made it worse because I felt far away from London and my family. I became withdrawn and very disorientated and had a breakdown. They sent me to the psychiatric wing of Winchester prison, but I couldn’t get my mind straight, I couldn’t get things under control. Once they even had to put me in a strait-jacket.

  They certified me insane in February 1958, and sent me to Long Grove Mental Hospital, as it was then called, at Epsom in Surrey. I escaped from there and gradually began to s
ort myself out. But I know I’ve never been right in the head, not since that bastard told me my auntie Rose was dead. I’ve had problems ever since.

  Once, when I was a kid, aged about ten, I thought about trying to commit suicide, but that was different. I’d had a row with my twin brother, Reg, and it had upset me. Even though we were identical twins and we were very close, we were different in many ways. Reg was always a mixer, always had a lot of mates around him. Me, I was more of a loner. I wasn’t bothered so much about the other kids. I preferred to go off with my Alsatian, Freda, walking across the bomb sites in the East End of London, seeing what we could find. Anyway, one day me and Reg had had a row and I stood on top of a roof overlooking a tube train yard near our house in Vallance Road and I thought I would chuck myself down on to the railway lines and under the wheels of a train, but I never did it.

  Really, we had a happy childhood. We were poor and it was hard, but it was the same for everyone in the East End in those days. We were born on Tuesday, 24 October 1933, in Stene Street, Hoxton, which is now called Shoreditch. Reggie was born at eight in the morning and I was born ten minutes later. We were identical twins except for a mole below the collar line on my neck. It was the only way you could tell us apart.

  We had an older brother, Charlie, who was born in 1927. We should also have had a sister. Our parents did have a daughter, named Violet after our mother, but she died when she was a baby. It would have been nice to have had a sister, but thousands of kids died in the East End in those pre-war days. I read somewhere that out of every thousand kids bom, more than a hundred never reached their fifth birthday. Pneumonia and tuberculosis were the biggest killers, and diphtheria and malnu¬trition caused a lot of deaths. Both me and Reg caught diphtheria when we were quite young. Reggie recovered okay but our mother was really worried about me and she brought me home from hospital and nursed me herself.

  Before the war we moved from Hoxton, one mile south across the Hackney Road, to 178 Vallance Road, in Bethnal Green. Number 178 isn’t there anymore, they knocked it down for new development, but it was a little bit bigger and better than our other house. It was just part of a terrace but we always thought it was a lucky house.

  I can remember it had a big coal fire in the kitchen which we used to sit in front of while our mother did the ironing. I can remember the big viaducts, covered in soot, which stood above all the houses. I can remember the trains which used to go along the lines at the end of our backyard on their way in and out of Liverpool Street station. And I can remember lying in bed early in the mornings in the back bedroom me and Reg used to share, listening to our mum singing in the backyard as she hung out the washing. She had a lovely voice. Our mother was always happy, even though she had to struggle so hard and times were really bad for us and the other families in the East End.

  Our father was called Charles, though everyone knew him as Charlie. He made his living as what they called a ‘pesterer’. He would go around the better areas buying bits of gold and silver, and sometimes clothing, which he would then re-sell for a profit. He was very good at it.

  Our parents weren’t what you’d call religious, but they did encourage me and Reg to pray. We would pray for the sick and the suffering and the weak people all over the world, and for our family and friends. Over the years, in my time spent in prisons and institutions, I’ve come up against a lot of flash, big-headed so-called hard cases who have scorned and ridiculed people who believe in prayer. I’ve always put this down to their own ignorance because some of the greatest people in the history of the world have believed in the power of prayer. People like Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon of Khartoum, Admiral Nelson and John Brown, who helped free the slaves. And great men I have known personally have believed in the power of God, including two heavyweight boxing champions of the world, Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali. And many leading men in the Mafia have also been great believers. I know this because they have told me.

  Our parents also encouraged us to be kind to animals. We kept chickens in the backyard and, just after we started school, we had a little mongrel dog which used to come and meet us from school.

  About the same time me and Reg went to the cinema to see a film called Lassie the Sheepdog. We liked it so much that when we came home we put olive oil on our mongrel’s coat and brushed him till he shone, and we changed his name to Lassie. I have always loved all animals and I get furious at the stories I’ve heard saying that I am cruel to them. I would not like anyone to believe I would ever hurt or mistreat an animal.

  When me and Reg were young we used to like to listen to the radio and our favourite programmes were Dick Barton, Special Agent, Just William and Forces Favourites. With our mother, we would also sit and listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary, which was about a doctor’s family.

  The first school we went to was Wood Close School, in Brick Lane, which was near to our home in Vallance Road. There was a pub on the corner of Brick Lane, which we used to pass every day on our way to school. It was called the Carpenter’s Arms and, many years later, we bought this pub. We were happy at school, and also at Daniel Street School, where we went to later.

  We weren’t brilliant but we weren’t dunces, either. We were both good at sport, and good at fighting. There were quite a few scraps and the kids in our street used to have brick battles against gangs of kids from other streets. It was a tough area and they used to say that if you came from the East End you finished up either a villain, a thief, or a fighter. Most people finished up one of those three things. Me and Reg had a pact - we decided we were going to be fighters, to try and make our names in the boxing ring. But if it didn’t work out, we had made up our minds to be villains.

  There were some good fighters in our family. Our grandfather on our mother’s side was called John Lee. He was also known as the Southpaw Cannonball, because he could punch so hard, especially with his left hand. He lived over a cafe he owned on the other side of Vallance Road. Even when he was an old man he used to enjoy punching an old mattress slung over a clothes line in the backyard. When we were small, he used to put me and Reg on his knee and tell us stories about the East End and its great fighting men. Our heroes were always fighters. The greatest of them all was Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, who was champion of the world at three different weights. He grew up near our home in Vallance Road, but even though he was a big name he never forgot his roots and his old friends. We also admired the famous local villains, men like Jimmy Spinks, Timmy Hayes, Dodger Mullins and Wassle Newman. They were like legends in the East End.

  Our family life was based around Vallance Road. Our mother’s two sisters lived in the two houses next to ours. They were Auntie Rose and Auntie May. I was very fond of them both, especially my auntie Rose. She was as tough as any man, tougher than most, but with me she was always very gentle. My auntie Rose knew about things. One day at school some kids had been taking the mickey out of me because my eyebrows seemed different to theirs. Mine seemed to go straight across the bridge of my nose, without a gap in the middle. I came home from school and told my auntie Rose what had happened. I asked her why my eyebrows were like that. She said to me, ‘It means you were born to hang, Ronnie love.’

  That was one thing the film about us, The Krays, got right. But they got a lot of things wrong, they made them up. I have not been allowed to see the film in Broadmoor but other people have told me exactly what was in it. The film was released in 1990 and it was very successful. It was a big hit, they tell me, in America. But, like I say, they got many things wrong. There is a scene with me and Reg talking to my auntie Rose about a dream we have had, about a bird with no wings which flies up into the sun. This never happened. In another scene a teacher asks me to give him a ‘wonderful word’, and I say to him, ‘Crocodile.’ This, also, never happened. Neither did we ever shoot up a pub with machine guns. These things did not happen but, because it is in a film, some people believe it.

  What they never touched on in the film was the event which changed all our live
s - the Second World War. For a start, our father wasn’t around. He was called up, and ordered to report to the Tower of London. But our father wasn’t having any of that, so he went on the trot, and he was on the run from the army for the next twelve years. It’s a funny thing, but when he and all the absconders got their amnesty from the Queen, me and Reg were on the run from the army ourselves.

  With our father away life was very hard for our mother. A lot of the time he was away he spent at the house of a friend of his in south London, a pickpocket called Bob Rolphe. We would go and see him sometimes, with our mother, and take him clean clothes and food. Sometimes he would come home for a day or two, and before he left he would send me and Reg down to the comer shop to make sure there were no police around. Once when he was at Vallance Road the police came. He was hiding in the coal cellar and one of the policemen was going to open the door leading down to it. I said to him, ‘Our dad is not a fool, he wouldn’t hide down there, would he?’ And the policeman shrugged his shoulders and turned away. But the police made us hate them in those times. They were always coming round to our house, banging on the door in the early hours of the morning, waking everybody up, looking for our father. But they never found him. I hated the police and I hated Hitler and the Germans. They destroyed ten thousand houses in Bethnal Green alone, and they killed and injured hundreds of innocent people.

  Once a bomb fell underneath the railway arch half-way down Vallance Road and, as it exploded, it demolished a block of flats. Our own house shook and things went flying. Me and Reg were thrown out of our beds. A lot of people were killed and some were trapped underneath the rubble. I can remember the firemen and the rescuers tearing at the bricks and mortar with their bare hands, trying to get people out.

  The war was exciting for me. I can remember the glare of the big searchlights looking for German bombers, for dogfights in the sky, the explosions, the fires. Our mother used to tell us to pray for the war to end. I was praying for Hitler to get smashed by a bus, but our mother told me it was wrong to pray for things like that, even though Hitler was a bad man. When the air-raid siren went off our mother would grab me and Reg and our brother Charlie and take us to the air-raid shelter under the viaduct. It was nice in there, with fires going, and everyone was friendly. Our grandfather, John Lee, used to put on a show on a little wooden stage. He would lick a white-hot poker and balance on a pile of bottles which he placed on top of one another to form a sort of glass wall. There was dancing and music and singing and every time a train passed over the top of the viaduct the whole place would shake and fill with black smoke.