Bringing Down the Krays (28 page)

Platts-Mills asked questions about the surveillance of the twins and the story about Violet Kray bringing tea on trays to the police watching outside Vallance Road, making it all sound ridiculous. Read couldn’t comment. He had not been involved. That was Butler’s or the local police’s operation. It was all before his time.

Much more to the point was the matter of somebody actually coming forward to tell the police that there were guns in some flat in March 1966, as the defence put it. ‘Is it really conceivable that the police did not act? Isn’t that because the informer and the information [he allegedly gave] was utterly worthless?’ so Platts-Mills asked Nipper Read.

He meant me, of course. Read didn’t have an answer. He hadn’t been involved back then, he kept saying.

Did Inspector Butler ever go to David Teale’s flat? ‘Not to my knowledge,’ said Read. ‘I wasn’t concerned with the case.’

Ronnie’s brief reeled off a list of members of the Firm whose names this ‘Bobby Teale’ might have revealed – Sammy Lederman, Nobby Clark, Billy Exley, Harry ‘Jew Boy’ Cope, Big Pat Connolly, John Dickson. Was there any record of them?

‘No,’ said Read.

‘Of course that means, doesn’t it,’ said Platts-Mills, ‘that Mr Bobby Teale did not mention any of their names?’

‘He certainly did not speak to me about it in 1966,’ said Read.

The defence were very well informed. I could tell they’d spent a lot of time working out lots of things about me and my brothers: ‘The Teales at one time shared lodging with Mr McCowan?’ asked Platts-Mills. ‘Not to my knowledge,’ said Read. ‘Mr Hew McCowan [who was] the principle witness in the 1965 case of my client…?’ It was all going round and round in circles. Read clearly wanted as little said about me and Butler as possible. Having used me to get the other Firm members to come over, he now wanted to keep me right out of the way. Everybody did.

After Cornell, the court got on to Jack the Hat, in which we Teale brothers had not played any part. We’d all been inside, although I’d given Read my accounts of how Ronnie kept urging Reggie to kill, just as I’d been telling Pogue and Butler fifteen months before Jack got it.

Then Ronnie made his own speech from the dock. There was no gang – all that stuff about the ‘Firm’ was an invention
by the prosecution. ‘All we have is our drinking friends we go out with in the evening,’ Ron said. Mr Read had had it in for him since the McCowan case, he said. The police had bought all their evidence – including ours.

Ronnie had never spent any night at David’s flat. It was all lies by the Teales about any murders. Our mum was on a £25,000 jewel robbery conviction, said Ronnie. ‘She got a suspended sentence. The tale goes round that they [the Teales] are giving evidence against us so that their mother would get off that charge,’ he said.

We’d have done anything to keep our mum out of prison, of course we would. But that was not why we were doing this. The Krays had to be stopped. And we’d stopped them. But at what cost to ourselves?

This time the jury had not been nobbled. History knows the rest. The twins got life imprisonment, with a non-parole period of thirty years for the murders of Cornell and McVitie, the longest sentences ever passed at the Central Criminal Court for murder. Charlie got ten years. Ian Barrie got twenty.

The Mitchell trial followed just over a month later. There was a different judge and a different jury. Albert Donoghue gave evidence for the prosecution. And Alfie gave evidence about his day out to Dartmoor. Platts-Mills could not resist reminding him of the evidence he had given in the previous trial, telling everyone that he’d told the court in the Cornell case that Ronnie Kray had gone into hiding at David’s flat on 10 March 1966. Alfie had told the police in his statement that the Dartmoor episode was in May. But the prison visitors book showed the visit of a ‘Mr Walker’ on 21 March.

Was Alfie Teale – Mr Walker?

Alfie had to admit that he was.

And was it March when he had made this visit, or was it May as he had told the police? Did the witness lie like this about everything?

‘Are you now telling the jury that when he [Ronnie] was in deep hiding with you and your brother because of the killing … in the Blind Beggar, he was drinking with his brother and lots of other friends in the Grave Maurice within ten days?’ Platts-Mills asked Alfie.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘It is just stuff and nonsense, isn’t it?’

‘No, it is not nonsense,’ Alfie told him.

I suppose it was beyond Alfie – it might be beyond anyone – to explain what had really happened in those two weeks. How could you explain the madness of that fortnight, the sense of invincibility that the twins had at that time? It was as if they could do anything they liked. And then Alfie said it out loud: ‘I didn’t get Ronnie Kray out of deep hiding. You couldn’t tell Ronnie Kray what to do.’

Alfie was right, of course. That is what it was all about. The rule of fear. But we had, each one of us, found our courage. We had faced the Krays and told the truth.

CHAPTER 23

THE DEAL

AT THE END
of the Mitchell trial, on 16 May 1969, everyone was acquitted except Reggie, who got five years to run concurrently with the McVitie sentence for aiding the Axe-Man’s escape.

It was over. But it was certainly not over for us. I dropped out of sight again. I was good at that. I didn’t go back to the Isle of Wight or anything like that. My marriage was long over – Reggie Kray had made sure it was. David and Alfie still had families, though. They weren’t going to do a runner. The Krays lodged an appeal. Nothing was over till it was really over. David recalled what it was like for him:

After the trial, Alfie, Christine and I were all given police protection, two men for us, and a woman to protect my wife. Bobby had two to himself, as he was considered to be at higher risk. I knew why after what he’d said in court. I knew he’d been a grass since that day in the committal proceedings the summer before when Scotch Ian’s brief asked him when he’d ‘first considered giving evidence’. And he’d told them. What I didn’t know was that it was Bobby who’d triggered the raid on Lea Bridge Road and how we’d walked into the trap with that Wallace geezer.

We didn’t see him more than once or twice following the trial. But at this stage, we weren’t too worried. Bobby had always done his own thing, and it wasn’t at all unusual for him to disappear for several weeks at a time without saying anything. We were used to him vanishing. And I could see why he’d want to.

It was a strange time for us. We knew we’d done what no one in the underworld ever does – break the code never to grass up our friends. We’d done so under the utmost pressure but that made no difference.

What I did in giving evidence against the Krays had to be done. I’m not a grass, although I did feel like one at the time. I always think it was Ronnie himself who put me there. It was very frightening standing there in court looking at them. They thought they could walk on water. But you can’t let someone go round killing and torturing people without trying to do something to stop them.

We knew we had no choice, and I wasn’t prepared to live the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. You can’t live your life being frightened all the time, and it wasn’t in my nature to skulk around the place being scared.

The big problem for Alfie and me was that we couldn’t get work. We couldn’t go and get a job in Marks and Spencer, so we went back to doing what we’d always done, street trading, often with police at our side, trying to look the other way. When the police came with us, they used to have their daily wages out of it as well. Give them a fiver or ten quid, and they’d take it all right.

Alfie felt exactly the same. He says:

It wasn’t like when a witness gets given a new identity and plenty of money. You just had to take your chances. So after a while I had to tell the police that David and I were going to go back out street trading.

I’d been doing that since I was nine years old, starting with rain hats for sixpence and working my way up, looking out for my uncle George who was selling brooches for two shillings and sixpence, half a crown. David used to look over to me and shout, ‘Alfie, up for your life,’ which meant the coppers were coming, or ‘Alfie, slow up,’ which meant I could serve the customers but that there was a policeman further up the street. If he said, ‘Up for your life,’ I’d pack everything up quickly and run into Oxford Street Marks and Spencers.

Once we were up in court in front of a judge who pointed out: ‘These people pay their rent for working – look what they’ve paid over their last offences – two and six, five shillings, ten shillings, and two and six again.’ Once I even asked a police officer to lend me half a crown to pay my fine, which he did. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘don’t forget to pay me back tomorrow.’

Our days of excitement – and terror – in running with the Krays were over. There were new temptations – like selling our story to a newspaper. I’d gone well to ground by now but the papers knew where to find my brothers. David got an offer.

Dick De Lillo, the policeman David had talked to, the one who knew about his statement saying Ronnie had raped him, told him a man named George Martin from the
Daily Mirror
wanted to talk to him. This was just a few weeks after the end of the trial.

So David went up to the
Mirror
’s offices in Holborn and met him. Martin talked to him and then asked him to come in again to meet their chief crime reporter, Norman Lucas, who had broken the Boothby story in 1964 – thus fatally compromising the police investigation. He told David he could make a lot of money if he chose to sell his story, giving the intimate details of our lives with the Krays. But in the end David decided not to, or at least for the time being.

That might have been just as well. Something big was going down.

Have you wondered why, having given evidence against the Krays, David and Alfie didn’t have to do like I did, and get out of the country afterwards? Even the villains round here and up in the West End didn’t frighten them. They would drink in villains’ pubs and clubs round Charing Cross and Gray’s Inn Road and never feared any reprisals. Occasionally, in the months and years after the trial when Alfie or David were recognised they might be asked: ‘Would you mind drinking up and getting out?’ Some people even thought they must either
be mad, or worse than the Krays themselves. But generally they didn’t get bothered.

The reason why they didn’t have to run out was because they did a deal with the Krays.

The only people who knew about this were David and Alfie. I had no idea till years afterwards.

There had been a deal. It was like a miracle. It could have made all the difference to how my life would have turned out, but
I didn’t know
. David tells how it happened:

One day, about two months after the trial, Alfie and I were having a drink, along with Dick De Lillo and another policeman, outside a pub called The Queen’s Larder in Queen’s Square, Holborn, when a geezer pulled up in a car. I thought he was asking for directions and walked over.

I recognised Patsy O’Mara in the passenger seat. He was a bookmaker and very good friend of Freddie Foreman and the South London Firm. He was a money-getter, a lovely man who was liked by everyone. The man driving I didn’t know. Patsy wound down the window and called me over and, while Alfie stayed drinking outside the pub with the two coppers, Patsy said to me: ‘I’ve got a message for you from the Colonel.’

My heart was in my mouth. ‘Tell me,’ I said.

Patsy answered: ‘If you don’t say anything, about Ronnie, or his family, about anything personal, anything private and you know what he means, nothing to the press or in print, he will let sleeping dogs lie, and leave you and yours alone too.’

It was true we knew a lot about the Krays on a personal level, the sort of stuff the papers would have loved. As Ronnie’s driver I’d been everywhere with him, often on ‘meets’ that no one else ever knew about. But I knew what this was about.

When I was raped by Ronnie in Vallance Road I promised him that one day I’d tell everyone what he’d done. Back then I’d been hysterical. I was an acute danger to myself. But I’d said nothing. I didn’t tell Alfie. I didn’t tell Christine. As time went on I suppose I’d become even more of a liability. So all I could think of right then was to tell Patsy O’Mara, ‘I’ve got to talk to Alfie,’ who was by this time already walking over to join us.

Still I didn’t tell Alfie what had happened in Vallance Road. Nor what Charlie Kray had done to Christine. How could I in that moment? Alfie and I told one another most things but that was just too humiliating for me as a man. Not only that I’d been raped, but that I hadn’t been able to look after my own wife. I felt too embarrassed and too ashamed even to confide in my own brother.

But Alfie knew there were loads of things that Ronnie wanted kept quiet. As far as Alfie was concerned, the deal was about not giving away any of the other personal stuff we knew, like the rent boys Ronnie ordered him to get – or using my family, my children, to protect himself when he’d just done Cornell. That was hardly the act of an East End hard man.

‘Tell my brother what you’ve just told me,’ I said to Patsy.

And so he did. After he’d told Alfie, we looked at one another in desperation. Both frightened, we started to walk away from the car to discuss his offer. But as we did so, Patsy called us back, saying: