Gangsters' Wives (21 page)

Because there was an interdiction order against him, Alex kept having to go back to Romania for three months at a time. I really missed him when he was gone. One time I even flew him back to Spain on his brother’s passport, just to see him. Ironically, he was completely clean while he was in Romania. You don’t do those kinds of crimes there unless you want to go to prison for twenty-five years.

When he came back to Spain we moved back in together and while I was working at anything to make money, he soon fell back in with the gang. Most of the time he was involved in drugs. He’d never carry drugs. He’d be involved in the transport. He was very careful. He never wanted to do really big deals, although he wanted the big money. He acted really big, but inside there was a lot of scared little boy.

Our relationship started changing. He’d always had a violent temper but it became more and more out of control. One minute we’d be having the most fantastic time, and the next he completely lost it – mostly about money. Things got so bad that I paid for him to have brain scans done and it turns out he actually has what’s known as Intermittent Explosive Disorder – a malfunction of the brain that can lead to impulsive outbursts of anger. That’s from damage he’s had before.

Through reading up about it, I learned to recognise the trigger – the telltale sign that he’s about to get violent. He’d start repeating a phrase over and over again and then his mind would go black and he’d have no idea what was happening to him or what he was saying or doing. So as soon as he started repeating himself I learned to get out of the way.

But when things were good with Alex, they were very very good. He was much like my escort in many ways. He could make me feel a million dollars. When we went out to clubs I loved to see the jealousy on other women’s faces and to think: Hands off. He’s mine. While the relationship was volatile, it was also very romantic. The sex was good, and I loved the fact that he was a good-looking guy. I wanted to be seen with him, I felt safe with him, I felt protected.

And he did really love me in his own way. I was badly ill once and he carried me to the car, took me to the hospital, grabbed a doctor by the scruff of the neck and said, ‘My wife is sick. You come now. She’s priority.’ That’s when I felt loved. He sat by my bed for five days and five nights and didn’t move.

The problem is, you never feel secure with a gangster. If Alex disappeared for three or four days, I’d convince myself he wasn’t coming back. His phone would be off and it would feed my insecurities. Every year I was getting older. Him disappearing would leave me feeling neglected and deserted. I’d had a difficult childhood – I’d been deserted by my father and had been abused. I don’t care what people say, it doesn’t matter how good your therapy is, that kind of experience leaves scars. So both Alex and I had scars and sometimes those scars just opened up and all the shit would come back.

But while I kept trying to understand him, he couldn’t always understand me. He couldn’t understand how my childhood sometimes made me react badly towards him, and tempers would become frayed. It was a case of a couple of very peculiar people coming together.

Sometimes when he disappeared, I’d think there must be another woman. Because our sex life was quite active, I didn’t know how he could cope without sex while he was gone. I’d torture myself by imagining him with a gang of guys who all decided to go to a whorehouse. How would he be able to say no?

The only thing that slightly reassured me was that he was absolutely obsessive about cleanliness and paranoid about AIDS. I think that comes from living on the streets and being in prison.

Money was a constant source of friction. I was working at anything to get money. There used to be a lot of scams operating on the Costa del Sol, mostly to do with timeshare, and I was guilty of working them without knowing. We all do these jobs unwittingly and then discover they’re scams. You either don’t know or you don’t ask. At the end of the day, everyone has to have a roof over their heads and food on the table. You do what you do to survive over here. It’s dog eat dog. I call it the Costa del Bullshit. If I had a hundred Kalash-nikovs full of bullets, it wouldn’t be enough to wipe out all the twats over here.

Out of desperation I went back to live with the guy who’d turned me into the dominatrix. It’s a complicated arrangement I don’t really want to go into, but Alex was left on his own in a studio apartment, which he hated. That was about three years ago, and Alex and I have never had a home together since. It was really difficult for him, especially when the money ran out and I couldn’t pay the utilities so he had no electricity and no hot water. We were just spending probably an hour together once a week and it was getting to him.

The illegal stuff started to dry up. Alex had been quite a big boy down here, he was well respected in criminal circles. Although he was young, they knew that if he said he could do something, it would be organised and it would go without a hitch. They never ever got caught so they knew he was a good organiser and they knew everyone around him could be trusted and there wouldn’t be problems, and no one would dob them in.

But gradually it all started to change. Nowadays you don’t know who’s who any more. The police are a lot sharper, they infiltrate the gangs. People who have problems with the police turn informant to get a reduced prison sentence. The fraud squad have opened up an office in Málaga and are trying to close down all the scams, which is good. It’s about bloody time.

Alex became increasingly isolated and frustrated as he struggled to find anything to do – legal or otherwise. He started getting very aggressive and was spending long hours at the gym. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was getting hooked on steroids which were radically affecting his personality.

One day we had an almighty bust-up. I found out he’d got some money and he never told me. He finally admitted he’d done a job for someone but hadn’t wanted to tell me in case I was angry. He wouldn’t tell me what it was and, to be honest, I didn’t want to know. I was upset because he didn’t offer me any money, and I needed it at the time.

We were at this pizza restaurant we always went to and we had a big row and Alex threw the tables and chairs around. I really shouted at him, yelling, ‘You’ve got to get away. I don’t want to know you. It’s over.’ He disappeared and this time I didn’t even try to find him. I was too angry. The next thing I knew I had a phone call from Romania. Alex was there and he’d lost the use of his arm.

That’s when I discovered Alex had been abusing steroids while he was in Spain. Then when he went back to Romania and couldn’t get hold of them any more, he’d had an almighty reaction. They didn’t know whether it was a brain tumour, a stroke or what. So I borrowed some money and got him into hospital over there and I haven’t seen him since although we talk twice a day. He’s out of hospital now and his arm is almost recovered, but he’s still over in Romania.

As for me, I’m still living with the guy in the villa, but it’s not a good situation. He’s a control freak and, it also turns out, a Satanist. If ever I mention God he always says, ‘What has HE ever done for you?’ I don’t know if I can stay there much longer, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s scary.

But I’m a survivor, and I’m philosophical. I’m one of those people who believes you have to go through certain things to get to the right place. I believe something will come along eventually. Maybe this stage is a bit of comeuppance. I did have a very good life in the UK and I wasted a lot of money. I could go out with £500 in my pocket and not worry about it. Maybe this is payback time.

Mind you, I don’t regret the divorce and I certainly don’t regret meeting Alex. It’s almost as though we were fated. I still believe we were destined to meet and destined to go through all this.

One time I asked him what he thought when he first met me. He said, ‘You know when you do camera with a special light and it goes “boom”? The first time I saw you, something in my head went “boom” because I could see your soul was good.’ He always says to me my soul is good. I know I have got a good soul although I’m not always easy to live with. Equally I know his soul is good. He may have a terrible temper, but his heart is as big as the world.

If I’m honest, I’d like Alex to do just one more job – a big one just to get us back on our feet. I’m scared of the future. I’m fifty-nine years old and I haven’t got a penny. Can I go on indefinitely working twelve hours a day doing two jobs?

But I know that big job is not going to happen. Alex just won’t do the really big stuff. He’ll do ‘B’ but not ‘A’ or ‘C’. I think his time in prison scared him too much.

I still love Alex, absolutely. And I still feel married to him. I’d love for us to be together again. If I made money again he’d come over. I’ve got friends with nightclubs who’d give him a job. If not, maybe we’d get a bit of money together and go to England. You take every day as it comes over here. You take every minute as it comes.

I don’t know where our relationship will go. I don’t know if we’ll end up staying together. He says he wants to stay with me. He says, ‘I don’t care if you’re in a wheelchair, I don’t care if I have to feed you, I don’t care if you do pee-pee in the bed. I want to be with you.’ I do know at one point in his life he was with a woman who got cancer and he stayed with her through to the bitter end, so I think he’s probably telling the truth.

It’s a loving relationship, but it’s a long-distance one and it’s easy to have a relationship over the phone. I’m very independent. I like my own space now. If we do get back together it’s not going to be easy. There’ll have to be a lot of adapting.

I’ll always love Alex, but whether or not I can cope with living with him permanently again, I don’t know. It’s no good me saying that it’s all going to be lovey dovey. Sure, we might go out to a club and have a dance or a lovely meal. But I like to get up in the morning and have a cigarette; he likes to get up and have his coffee and his crap and
then
he has a cigarette. Little things like that can cause friction.

Alex doesn’t really understand how dire things are financially for me. He thinks I can do anything. Sometimes he puts too much pressure on me and I can’t do it and then he thinks I’ve let him down. He rang me up the other day and said he’d found land ideal for a golf course, and asked me to find someone here to finance it. I said, ‘Where am I going to find someone with that sort of money?’ He said, ‘Of course you can. There are loads of people with money there. You find one.’

Because of his gangster past, he thinks he can just snap his fingers and things will come to him. Because that’s how it used to happen for him. If he wanted something, he’d rob it and if he had to take money from a prostitute who’d worked all night, he’d do it. His philosophy is you do what you need to survive.

I’m often tempted to go back to England. My son, who’s twenty-eight, has had a child so I’m a grandmother now, although my son and I don’t always see eye to eye. I’ve got a job waiting for me in the UK as a PA to a friend of mine who’s got his own business, but he wants more than just a working relationship and I don’t. I’m still married to Alex. I’ve never even so much as kissed another man.

I try to stay positive because you never know what’s around the corner. You don’t know what tomorrow might bring. You just have to live for today. If you can’t eat one day, you don’t eat one day. If you do you do. It’s how most of the world lives. I’m no different to millions of others.

What disappoints me is that Alex and I wanted to improve life for Romanian children. When I went round that hospital I just wanted to get my nurse’s uniform on again and help them.

And Alex has got that sort of heart too. We’re destined to do something together. God knows what it is. We might do something fantastic, or we might kill each other. The way my life is at the moment, nothing would surprise me.

Ask anyone to name a quintessential gangster, and they’ll probably say the Krays – the iconic twin brothers who ruled the East End in the 1960s with threats and violence. Ask that same person to picture the quintessential gangster’s moll, and they’ll probably describe someone like Maureen Flanagan. Now sixty-eight, but still oozing glamour from the top of her peroxide blonde hair to her perfectly painted toenails, Flanagan (as she is universally known) was a child of her time. During the 1960s, as the Krays built their empire, setting up nightclubs and protection rackets, Flanagan was a top model, zipping around London in her Mini, trademark long blonde hair flying behind her, wearing hot pants and knee-high boots. She appeared on television, often skimpily dressed, in skits for
Monty Python
or
Benny Hill,
and was one of the pioneer Page Three girls
.

Flanagan first met the Krays after striking up an unlikely friendship with their beloved mother Violet in a
hairdresser’s. She would remain firm friends with them until they died, but it was Reggie to whom she was closest. Violet Kray apparently harboured a secret wish to see the two of them married, but though Reggie proposed to her three times and she was sometimes described as his fiancée, Flanagan never officially accepted him, and he went on to marry someone else. The Kray twins were arrested in 1968 and later imprisoned for life for two murders – George Cornell who was shot dead by Ronnie in the Blind Beggar pub in 1966, and Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie, who was murdered by Reggie at a party in Hackney in 1967. Ronnie, who was a paranoid schizophrenic, died in Broadmoor, the infamous hospital for the criminally insane, in 1995. Reggie would serve over three decades before being released on compassionate grounds just before he died in 2000. Flanagan now lives in a flat in Hackney, not far from the Krays’ old stomping ground. Her walls are crammed with photographs from her modelling days, and pictures of celebrities she has known, including, of course, Ronnie and Reggie. Though fresh from her job working in a local charity shop, on the day we meet she is immaculately dressed, and hardly seems to draw breath for hours on end as she charts her relationship with the most feared men in Britain
.