Bringing Down the Krays (31 page)

The Krays boasting about getting away with it was in all the papers on 6 August 1966, along with big, grinning photographs taken round their mum’s. The next day, Alfie and David were both invited by me to this old guy’s party where we stayed the night. He ‘left by the rubbish chute’ and turned up with a load of police on his own doorstep early the next morning. We were all arrested, didn’t get bail – and ended up being charged with blackmail and going to prison, sentenced to three years. And I couldn’t tell them why.

So all these years later, we worked it out between us. David was like a terrier at the British National Archives where the police and prosecution records had been released over the years.

He found all our original statements to Read and Mooney in July 1968, what we’d said at the committal and at the big Old Bailey trial. He found what Pogue had said. He found the Butler file that Read said in his book didn’t exist (and may not have known existed), revealing that Butler gave up the pursuit of Ronnie and Reggie after the Lea Bridge Road raid and the Director of Public Prosecutions walked away – the week we were all arrested.

But a lot of it was still secret – and the dates on them for when they’re allowed to be opened to the public are for after we’ll all be long dead. The closed files include all the papers about our Old Bailey trial for blackmail. And why is that?

There are also boxes of evidence put together after the Cornell murder which still no one’s allowed to see. Where are the pictures that we saw of us in Tintagel House? Where is the photograph I got of Scotch Ian? Where are the pictures of David’s family with the Krays at Steeple Bay, the ones that the police took from Christine? Where are the surveillance photographs we saw of ourselves around Moresby Road? It’s as if we never existed.

And you know, in the Kray biographies, neither Reggie nor Ronnie ever mention the time in the flat with the Firm and all the children. They go straight from the Blind Beggar to being lifted and put on Butler’s identity parade. The three months in the middle aren’t mentioned. What were they so ashamed of? I’ll tell you. They were ashamed of hiding behind women and kids.

David thinks it was the police who were responsible for Moresby Road disappearing from the record and still being hidden. How would it look that they hadn’t arrested them there and then when so many more murders followed? They knew Ronnie had done it. They surrounded David’s place, Butler and his men. David says they told him at Tintagel afterwards that they planned to come in with all guns blazing. It was only down to the fact that the children were there that they didn’t.

But Ronnie was told that at the time by his police contact inside the Yard. Ronnie told David when they were all in the
flat that some copper had tipped him off: ‘Where you are now, we won’t come in, so don’t worry about it.’

What with all the people coming in and going out, and Reggie and Charlie meeting up with police, the Old Bill was getting information all the time. No wonder the official files about all this are sealed for seventy years.

But David managed to get one file opened. It’s a series of letters from July to August 1966 between officials in the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office – David Hopkin and David Prys Jones – about whether or not to go after the Krays. There’s a big note dated 18 July, reminding everyone that Butler, James Axon (the Whitechapel detective), and the commander of the CID, Ernest Millen (who had secretly investigated Leslie Holt’s connection with Boothby two years before), had had a meeting in March to urgently discuss the Cornell killing.

That’s what it says. March. Precisely when the Firm had taken over the flat and I’d made that first phone call to the Scotland Yard switchboard and asked to speak to Mr Butler.

In the note it’s clear that everyone knows that it’s Ronnie who did Cornell. Still these three very senior detectives think it’s not going to work, that the twins can keep the East End intimidated, no one will talk and they’re going to get off. And that will just boost Ronnie ‘in the eyes of the underworld,’ so they say. Which is exactly what happened, of course.

So their advice that March is to leave it alone. Just like always. But ‘there are other matters in the melting pot which may be successful,’ Butler says. That’s me.

The police are saying they can do nothing, while the DPP is saying they should go after the Krays because they must be seen to be doing something. It’s all political.

After that, there’s the raid on Lea Bridge Road and the cock-up at the identity parade. Everyone’s very embarrassed. But this law officer reports after it’s all gone wrong that: ‘One factor that has emerged is that Chief Superintendent Butler is satisfied from the description given to him
by his informant
that the second man involved is [Scotch Ian] Barrie.’

Well, that’s me again. And now the law officers in the Department of Public Prosecutions know that he’s got a spy in the Firm. That’s not police, that’s the government. Who else in the government knows?

Then a day later on 8 August, Butler says that there’s nothing more he can do. Within a matter of hours of him saying that, the police know that I’m with Wallace in Dolphin Square, and that Alfie and David are with me.

And who or what was Wallace? I’d met him, it seemed, by chance. He was friendly, accommodating, he lent me his car and didn’t mind too much when I got arrested in it. He was gay, but he didn’t try anything on me. He just seemed to like me being around. And it was very handy to have somewhere to lie low.

It was Wallace who took me in when I had nowhere to hide after Epping and the Firm was looking for me at Steeple Bay. But what was he really? The operation to bring us in had to be primed – with him as the ready-made ‘victim’ to get us all nicked.

The three of us were invited to stay the night. Next thing we knew we were all arrested, dragged off to court, stitched up
at the Old Bailey and dispatched to spend the next two years in prison as blackmailers of homosexuals. Who invented that one? The file on our trial is closed until the year 2037. I am told if I can produce my own death certificate (and Alfie’s and David’s) I might be allowed to see it.

So how, at the time, could I explain that to my brothers? How do I really explain it all these years later?

Of course there was suspicion and resentment between us after the initial joy of reunion, a sudden sidelong glance from David when he thought I wasn’t looking, a questioning look as if even now he was wondering whether to trust me. Alfie, too, in spite of his obvious affection for me, remained puzzled about some of my actions. Worst of all for me was the look in their eyes when they asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell us, let us in on what you were doing? We are your brothers, for God’s sake.’ In the Teale family, that means a lot.

I understand why they feel like this. I would too, if it had been one of them who had disappeared. But as Ronnie would have said, ‘What’s done is done,’ and all we can do is to look back and make some kind of sense of it.

Turning informer was one of the hardest decisions I ever had to make in my life. Having villains as our family friends at first had all seemed so glamorous, so exciting. But then I saw the violent reality, the fear, the cruelty. After Ronnie raped me on the Isle of Wight I couldn’t deal with it. And when I saw what they were doing to David, his children and our little brother, I knew I had to act. So I did what I did.

In vain I tell David and Alfie that it is because they are my brothers that I did all this. That I was trying to protect them and their families from what the Krays might do. I knew Alfie and David were on Ron’s dreaded list – we all were.

There is a quote from somewhere I’ve always remembered: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.’

I had to do something, and I did it, even at the terrible cost of losing my family for forty years. I’m not ashamed of that – I’m proud of it. And over the years to come I hope to be able to convince Alfie and David of it too
.

NOTE

Ronnie Kray married twice while in prison. He divorced his second wife, Kate, in May 1994. On 17 March 1995 he died of a heart attack in Wrexham Park Hospital, Slough. He was sixty-one. Reggie organised a quasi-state funeral for his twin from inside prison. He married his second wife, Roberta, while in Maidstone in July 1997. In June 1997 Charlie was sentenced to twelve years for conspiracy to supply cocaine. He died in April 2000. Then Reggie was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died on 1 October 2000. He was conveyed ten days later to Chingford Cemetery to be buried next to Ronnie with Frances besides them. Bobby was in America and did not follow events. Alfie and David Teale attended none of the Kray funerals.

Dad always had some kind of business on the go. This is his betting shop.

This is him with his beloved motor car outside Edmonton dog track.

Dad (left) and the many trophies they had down at the dog track.

Beside the seaside. (L-R: Dad, Paul, Mum and a family friend)

Me, having fun in the sun on the Isle of Wight.