Bringing Down the Krays (21 page)

I had bought a caravan at Steeple Bay after all of this, Christine had said, where we’d all gone down. And I did have a car, a grey Ford, which in the end had either been stolen from outside the Regency Club or repossessed by the finance company – more likely the latter. So, as far as the coppers were thinking, all I’d said checked out.

But I could see the way Read was thinking. What sort of charges could be brought out of all of this? A defence could say it was all a great big party. Dancing, drinking, outings to pubs – all of which was true. That the police had come round to Moresby Road because of neighbours complaining about the noise. In fact, that’s exactly what they would say.

CHAPTER 17

ALFIE’S STORY

WHILE ALL THIS
was going on, Alfie was still holed up in Lewes Prison. David and I could have no contact with him. He also remembered what he was hearing on the landings around the same time that the Krays got nicked:

A lot of the Firm tried to visit me during the course of the two years that I was in Lewes Prison. I used to get called into the governor’s office and told: ‘You’ve had a couple of people try to visit you, Teale. But I’m afraid under the Home Office rules we can’t allow it.’

‘Why, sir, who was it?’

I worked out who they were from his descriptions. One was Dickie Morgan, another was Mad Teddy, and then there was Connie Whitehead. I knew, without seeing them, why they had come. They had been sent to tell me that if anyone asked about Ronnie or Reggie, to say I didn’t know anything. Reggie also sent me a couple of books. They were signed: ‘Reggie and Ronnie Kray.’ So I am getting the feeling someone wants to warn me off – but the books I was grateful for.

A little later I was also sent in a complete set of oil paints. To this day, no one has told me who these came from, but they did inspire me to start painting. I won a prize in a national prison art competition.

I knew, really, they could only have come from the Krays. No one else I knew could have afforded something like that. Nobody else would have bothered. Both the books and the painting actually gave me great comfort. I was missing my wife and children terribly and often cried myself to sleep in my cell at night. Then I got the news.

A friend of mine, Bob, an old con who’d done a lot of time, went on home leave in June 1968 and on his return came to see my cellmate, Georgie Mutton, and me in our cell, whispering something to Georgie so I wouldn’t hear. When I asked what they were talking about, Georgie said to Bob, ‘You might as well tell him’. Turning to me, Bob said, ‘I’m so sorry, Alfie. Your mum and dad’s been nicked – for doing Lady Hamilton’s place.’

I was astonished. I knew my mum had been working as a housekeeper for a toff family for a while but I also knew there was no way she would be involved in a robbery of all things. It was only later I found out what really happened. For now I was just told that my father had been interviewed at West End Central back in March. They’d let him go but told him: ‘We’re not charging you, but we’re charging your wife.’

Mum and Dad were then remanded until July. They’d never told me. I really felt life couldn’t get any worse. But Georgie reassured me, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Alfie. It’ll work out, I’m sure. Someone will get in touch with you.’

And sure enough, a few days after this, someone did.

I was called to see the governor. But instead of going to his office I found myself taken to a small private meeting room. ‘You’re allowed to smoke, Teale,’ I was told by the screw.

Suddenly two coppers walked in. One of them said, ‘Hello, Alf. Nipper Read sent us down from Scotland Yard.’ I knew Read’s name from that time with McCowan and the Hideaway. So he was back on the Krays’ case. Well, he would have to try harder than last time.

‘What do you want?’ I asked nervously.

‘Your mother’s been nicked, as you probably know.’ I did know. The whole prison knew.

‘Is she all right?’

‘Yes, Alf, don’t you worry. We’ll look after her for you. Here you are – twenty fags.’

I grabbed the packet of Senior Service gratefully, dreading what was coming next.

‘We might as well be blunt with you, Alf,’ the officer continued. ‘Your mother looks like getting five to seven years. We’ve been told by Scotland Yard that she’ll be put in Durham Jail with the likes of Myra Hindley and a few others… unless, of course, you want to help us with some information about the murder of George Cornell and a couple of other things about the twins. It’s up to you. If you want to write a statement we can more or less guarantee your mother will go free.’

My instinct was not to grass, under any circumstances. So I said to them, ‘See you later, mate. You must be on drugs or something telling me all this nonsense. I do know the twins; everyone knows them. But I didn’t have anything to do with Cornell or any of it.’ Then I asked the screw, a huge man from Dartmoor who’d been listening to all this, to take me back to my cell.

As I stood up to go, one of the policemen said, ‘Well, it’s up to you. But we’ve got three statements written by the Firm saying that you and your brothers were the ones who did Cornell.’

This really terrified me. I couldn’t believe that the twins would really try to pin this on us. But they had. It was true. I found out later that David saw the statement written by Ronnie at Tintagel House claiming that we were responsible.

I was taken through the prison gate and back to my block, and the policemen disappeared, probably off to have a drink, I remember thinking. When I got back to my cell, I told Georgie and asked for his advice. He didn’t say anything immediately but later in the evening after I’d had my tea, he sat down on the bed opposite mine. I stared around the cell looking at our books, the sugar and milk on the table between us, the fruit we’d bought out of our canteen money we always shared, and waited for him to speak.

‘D’you want some tobacco, Alfie?’ he asked.

Georgie always had a few quid and often gave me half an ounce of tobacco when I was low.

I asked him whether he’d thought about what I’d told him.

He nodded and said, ‘Let me tell you something. You want the truth? You would be a truly evil man if you allowed your mother to go away for five to seven years with that slag in Durham. Get the governor to get the coppers back down here and tell them you will help them. Because if you don’t, you won’t see daylight again, Alfie.’

There was another reason. I knew about the Krays being arrested in May. Everyone did. But I didn’t want to say anything then because they would have stopped my home leave, which was due on 18 May. They would have put me on ice.

When I did go out that weekend, I told my parents some of it. Mum was on bail – though at the time I didn’t even know she had been arrested – and said I should go the police. The Krays were in Brixton on remand but I was frightened of them and of the rest of the Firm obviously. Then one Sunday – 30 June 1968 – there was a story in the paper about a man being arrested at the British Oak pub in the Lea Bridge Road in connection with the Cornell murder. It had to be Scotch Ian Barrie, who I was especially afraid of.

So that morning I walked into the PO’s office and asked, ‘Can you make an arrangement for me to see the governor, please?’ He looked at me, and knowing exactly what was going on, answered quietly, ‘Certainly, Teale. I’ll do that straight away.’

A day later, down came the cops again. ‘All right, Alfie? What have you decided to do?’ and there was another twenty fags on the table in front of me. Again they promised me that our mother wouldn’t do a day in jail if I cooperated.

I replied, ‘Could I speak to one of my brothers, please?’

So they got David on the phone from Ford – and he told me they had been to talk to him too.

When I heard that I knew the game was up. I told David, ‘You might as well tell them everything you know because I’m going to. They’ve got Mum and I don’t see what else we can do. They must know about you and Christine and the flat, all of it.’

David told me they’d got photos and everything. I hadn’t seen my brothers for two and half years and I was pretty low, counting the days off until my release. And now this.

The next thing I know, I was being taken over to the remand wing, on strict instructions that I should tell other prisoners I was waiting to be taken to a prison in London. They were going to smuggle me out for a meet. I was taken to Tintagel House, a police office block on the south bank of the Thames. On 1 July 1968 I made my statement. Detective Chief Inspector Henry Mooney took it down.

I gave him a full account of the night of 9 March 1966. How I was having tea and watching television with David, Bobby and Christine, when Reggie had rung the flat in Moresby Road to invite us Teale brothers over for a drink at Madge’s.

I told him how when we got there, Reggie had got into the front seat of David’s car and said: ‘Cornell’s just been shot.’ How we’d driven to the Chequers pub in Walthamstow and how, when Ronnie, having received some sort of a message, said ‘He’s dead,’ and turned to David and said, ‘We’re all going to stay at your house.’

How Ronnie and ‘Ian Scott’ (that’s what I knew Scotch Ian Barrie as) had come into the flat. How Scotch Jack Dickson and Pat Connolly had left and come back the next morning. How shotguns, one of them a repeater, appeared all of a sudden but I wasn’t sure who had brought them.

I told Mooney how Bobby had been sent out to get the morning papers, which were ‘full of the Cornell murder’. How I’d been allowed home to get some clothes and had a row with Wendy because I’d been out all night. And how I told her I absolutely had to go back to David’s house.

I described the comings and goings over the next two weeks, how Firm members Harry ‘Jew Boy’ Cope and Sammy Lederman had brought in supplies of salt beef sandwiches. How I’d been sent to pay off Reggie’s furniture bill for fitting out his flat in Green Lanes at the Harrison Gibson store in Ilford.

I told him about an outing with the Krays to the drinking club at the Lebus furniture factory in Tottenham. And then how we’d gone for a drinking session in the Grave Maurice pub where Ronnie had set up the reconnaissance mission to Dartmoor with me and Fat Wally to find Frankie Mitchell.

I ended my statement by explaining that now me and my brothers wanted ‘to break away from the Krays – but gradually’. Well, that was true. We wouldn’t have minded breaking away pretty quick, to be honest.

CHAPTER 18

MY STORY

AS FOR ME
, I was still in Maidstone Prison after David was transferred to Ford. I think they wanted to keep me tucked up extra secure. All those months when we’d been in the same nick I’d shunned his company, really hurt him, and I couldn’t tell him why. By now it was summer 1968. I remember still feeling completely eaten up with anger.

I had made contact with Butler, put my life on the line for months, been through that nightmare as ‘Phillips’ – and then I’d been thrown to the wolves. I suppose I had brought it all on myself. In Maidstone Prison I had just withdrawn inside – I wouldn’t talk to David even. I just concentrated on doing my bird, wrapped up in my own anger, but I still heard whispers from outside.

I had heard about Jack the Hat from another inmate. Christine Keeler had visited him in Maidstone and had brought him a message from the twins. That’s how we all heard. I wasn’t so shocked about Jack being dead. In fact I’d warned him they’d do this and he wouldn’t listen. But I was sorry. He’d sort of helped me get Bobby Cannon out of it that time when Reggie
was going to do him. And now Reggie had done him instead. I would have saved Jack too if I could. But I was inside. What a disgusting way they killed him. It could have been me.

I heard about Frankie Mitchell the same way, through the same guy coming into my cell for a chat. The way I heard it, Big Frank had become a liability. Albert Donoghue told David a little later that when he had visited Frank in hiding somewhere – I think it was Barking in east London – Frank had said to him: ‘Go back to the twins and tell them if Ronnie doesn’t come to see me straight away, I’m getting out of here, that’s it.’

I heard that when Albert took the message to Ronnie, Ronnie said: ‘We’ve got to get rid of him. We can’t handle him any more. He’s too much for us.’

Frank was as strong as a bullock and the twins knew the only way to get rid of him was to shoot him. So they arranged it with whoever it was who did it. Some say it was Freddie Foreman, but that’s all hearsay. Poor Frank didn’t even have a Christmas out. They did him on Christmas Eve.