Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror (24 page)

The biggest regret of my life is that I wasn’t a free man when my parents died. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my mother and father. Had they been alive today, we could have given them back a little bit of what they gave us. My mother did her best for us; she couldn’t have done any more. But she never lived to see any of the boys making something of their lives.

At least my father lived to see his other sons making some success of themselves while Chris and I were away. They put him on a pension of their own. Every week he used to go and collect it, and if one of them didn’t have the money for him, he’d go and complain to the other one! He was totally honest, a good man; and he just loved his sons – he loved the boys around him. We’re forever on about him today. We never talk about our mother – somehow it still hurts too much – but we’re always saying things like, ‘If the old man was here….’ His death came as a devastating blow to all of us, and Chris saw it as the end of the family. He was in a tragic state for a long time after that.

I always worried throughout my sentence that if my father died the authorities would refuse me permission to attend the funeral, as they had after my mother’s death. I could never have handled that again. But in the event they were very understanding. They promised that the police and screws would keep a low profile so long as the funeral was kept within the family and there were no press involved. The same applied to Chris.

It took place at the Greek Orthodox church in Camden Town. But first the family got together at my parents’ home in Belford House, Queensbridge Road. When my car pulled up at the door, the first people I noticed were Leon and Chris. I was pleased to see Chris standing there: I hadn’t set eyes on him in three years. All the relatives had arrived, and everyone was putting wreaths outside the
door. We went into the house, and I didn’t want to believe the old man was dead.

It was the first time we’d all stood together in our old home in eighteen years. Everything was in the same place – the table in the middle of the living room with the chairs round it – but nothing looked the same as I remembered it. It seemed a lot smaller.

We five brothers went and sat in our parents’ bedroom. Jimmy went out and got a bottle of vodka, and we toasted the old man. I knew, looking round the room, that it was the last time the five of us would be together in that house. It turned out to be the last time the five of us would be together at all. I’d like to think we could rectify that in the future. We had our picture taken that day; the only one there is of us together. My uncle John broke down and cried to see the five boys reunited.

There were about twenty cars in the funeral, and the prison authorities did their best for us. They allowed us our dignity and a limited freedom, and no great presence was seen around us. (This is in direct contrast to what happened when the twins attended Violet’s funeral. What became of that was a shambles and a circus, with police, screws, newspaper reporters, television cameras and crowds of people milling around them.)

We went to the church in Camden Town. Lady Sainsbury was there with other members of her family, and we saw a lot of people going back many years, all assorted friends from our past. The service was all done in Greek, as the old man would have wanted it, and everyone went up and kissed his coffin. The proudest moment of my life was when the five brothers, with our eldest nephew Paul, carried our father to his grave.

Back at Featherstone I was broken up for a long time, but gradually life began to pick up. I was given what is called an F75, which was the first step towards my parole: it’s an internal assessment of your
circumstances in prison and your suitability to be released. Every lifer, after the first couple of years of his sentence, is given an annual F75. In dispersal prisons it is a purely routine matter, because none of the cons are likely to qualify for parole. Once, in Gartree, the landing officer who was asking me questions for my F75 had the audacity to write my answers down on the back of a cigarette packet. He said, ‘Where are you going to live when you get released?’ A bleeding joke. I was in Category A at the time!

In Featherstone, a Cat. C prison, they obviously took the F75 more seriously. They considered the inmate’s situation very thoroughly, and I was asked to appear in front of a board to put my case for parole. I had to stand up and say, ‘I’m fit to be released’, and give them some very solid evidence. By this time I had acquired some support. Ian Mikardo, my MP, was very good to me, and my probation officer, Mrs Jean Heath, was a tower of strength and encouragement.

I duly appeared before the board, which comprised the Governor, a psychiatrist, a doctor, an education officer, a welfare officer, my probation officer, the works instructor and a PO. I sat in the middle while they fired questions at me, and I talked about Jack The Hat. By this time Reggie had admitted the murder, so I no longer had to protect him – there was no point in me continuing to say I had nothing to do with it.

I said, ‘Yes, I felt sorry for McVitie. Yes, it was a terrible thing to happen. Yes, if I could turn the clock back I would. Of course I felt about his family, and of course I regretted that a man’s life had been taken. I didn’t actually commit the crime, but I was there when something happened and, yes, I do feel responsible.’ I also told them, ‘The sentence I’m doing, whether it carries on for a short time or a long time, will never alter what I feel inside about what happened that night. I’ve lived with it, and I’ll go on living with it for the rest of my life, whether I’m in prison or not.’

They asked about my attitude to release, my views on the outside world, how I would take to someone shoving me in a bus queue. Would I throw violence or would I turn the other cheek?

My answer was: ‘I think I would value freedom enough to want to keep it, not throw it away by having an argument with someone getting on a bus.’

I was asked about my plans. Did I have a home to go to? Would I stay in the area I went out to?

I said, ‘I can’t plan the future until I get a date of release. I’ll take the steps one at a time.’

And that was more or less it.

It was now up to the board to decide whether or not they would recommend me to the Local Review Committee, which consisted of the same people plus a magistrate, a judge, a high-ranking police officer and a Home Office official. The Review Committee would consider my case to see if it was worthy of recommendation to the Joint Committee. And if the Joint Committee ruled in my favour the whole thing had to be assessed again by the Parole Board, which would make the final recommendation to the Home Secretary.

It would take the best part of a year for my case to go through all these channels, and the more I thought about it, the more worrying it became. It was like a tree, and to reach the top, you had to climb up every branch without falling. Would I make it?

I tried to put myself in the Home Secretary’s shoes: ‘If I was the Home Secretary and I had Tony Lambrianou, a member of the Kray firm, would I want the responsibility of signing that bit of paper?’ And I started to have my doubts.

For the next ten months I was living on my nerves. I’ve seen men driven potty by this. One Thursday lunchtime, I walked into the PO’s office to get an application form for batteries. There were two POs in there with the welfare officer and about five screws. No one said a word. I looked up and they were all smiling at me. I heard the
welfare officer say, ‘Shall we tell him?’, and I instantly knew they had my answer.

I said, ‘Don’t tell me anything bad.’

He handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘Just read that bit there.’ It was my date of release: 29 September 1983.

I didn’t know what to do – laugh, cry…. It just seemed like one hell of a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. My first reaction was to ask about Chris – if he’d been given a date too. But nobody knew. Then I went back and told the others. Ian Barrie was overjoyed for me, Les Long was smiling, everybody was coming over and shaking my hand. I couldn’t believe it. I went to work that afternoon, and all the security was off me. I was allowed to wander out into the yard. No one cared any more.

I had a year to go until my full release. First, I had to serve six months in Leyhill open prison and six months in a prison hostel. Leyhill was one of only two open prisons in the country which would accept lifers. There, what restrictions they had were as flexible as possible. We were trusted not to escape, given a great deal of freedom within the prison compound and allowed out of the grounds on working parties.

Those six months flew by. So did the next six at Maidstone prison hostel. The rules gave me the freedom to go out on my own during the daytime so long as I signed in and out, returned at a certain time in the evenings and reported to the screws on a daily basis. I was allowed to spend weekends with my wife and kids. Yet, for all this privilege, I still felt very much tied to the apron strings of the prison system.

And then, suddenly, my last week arrived. The authorities had to reclothe me, and I was given a grant of about £600. A screw took me into town to do my own shopping. I had to see the doctor and the Governor. I had to draw out money from a special bank account where my hostel wages had been deposited for me, pending my
release. It worked out at about £760, and I was given an extra sum of £150.

More than fifteen years had passed, and I was about to go back into society. But my head was still back in 1968. That was the difference, as I was to find out.

T
he night before my release, I couldn’t sleep. The whole of the past week had been sheer murder. For years, I’d had the security of the prison wall around me. Now I was in a prison hostel, and although I’d been able to go out into the world at large, I was still under supervision; I still had that security. During my weekdays at the hostel I would never, ever leave the vicinity of the prison. It was like a home to me.

Now my thoughts went, ‘You’re on your own, how do you feel about that?’ Everything I’d looked forward to was beginning to collapse around me. How would I react to being at home for good? To my family? I knew I couldn’t afford to make an error, couldn’t break the rules of the life licence I was going to be living under, or I’d be inside again. The pressure was back on, every bit as much as it had been in prison. My excitement had given way to a great anxiety: I was gripped by worries about the outside.

I climbed sleeplessly out of bed at six in the morning on 29 September, and realised that my links with everything familiar were about to break. I was frightened, unsure. I was called down to the office and told to sign for my bank book and all the possessions I’d
had when I was arrested – a ring, some clothes. Later that day I ripped the clothes up. They were part of history.

I didn’t have any breakfast. I kept drinking tea. I must have had about nine cups in two hours.

The Assistant Governor came to see me. He said that that day, no matter what happened, I had to report to my probation officer, Mr Goode. He also passed me my life licence, and asked me to sign. I was told I had to read it carefully. A lot of people seem to think a life sentence finishes when the prisoner is released. Far from it. A life sentence is never over. You are only released on licence, and if you get arrested again for so much as a fight in a pub you can be recalled to prison to finish serving life.

The licence carried my name at the top, and it stated the conditions I was going to live under for the rest of my life: I was to be under the supervision of a nominated probation officer, report to him as often as he told me to, receive visits from him at home, live and work only in places approved by him, and get his permission before I could travel anywhere outside Great Britain. At the bottom was a sentence which summed up the absolute power this document would have over me: ‘Unless revoked this licence remains in force indefinitely’. In other words, if I broke any of the conditions I would have my licence withdrawn and I’d be straight back in the nick. And it would only take one person with a grudge to pick up a phone….

It was twenty past nine in the morning, and I was standing at Maidstone prison gates. I was about to walk out for the last time when PO Sneed called me back. He said, ‘You forgot your rail ticket. Remember this is a one-way. No return.’ My brothers had offered to pick me up, but I didn’t want that. I didn’t want any crowd outside the gate. I just wanted to walk away from it on my own. It was important that I did this.

I wandered down County Road to the station. It was a nice, summery day, pretty mild, and I sat down with a bag and a case at Maidstone East, waiting for the train to come in. In my mind, I was thinking about the past. Would there be any comebacks from what had happened? Did people still remember? What would be their reaction to me around where I lived? What was Chris doing? He was being released on the same day from Wormwood Scrubs hostel, and going to live in Banbury, in Oxfordshire. He wanted nothing more to do with London. I was going back to the East End because I considered it my home. It was where I had been brought up; it was what I knew and it was where my wife and kids were living.

My marriage itself had, however, died a long time back. It was just a convenient thing at the time to keep it going, however superficially, because of the terms of the licence and the condition that I had to have an approved address. I didn’t know what to expect from Pat when I moved back in. I just wanted to push the problem to the back of my mind.

I arrived at Victoria Station and, for the first time in fifteen years, I was a free man in my own eyes. That’s when it hit me. In Victoria. I was back in the city. I thought, ‘Things haven’t changed that much,’ although it was certainly a hell of a lot faster.

It was about 11.30, and I was starving. In prison, you got your dinner about that time. I didn’t want to booze, like I thought I might. I just walked around Victoria, and went over and had a coffee beside the theatre. All I could smell was food, and I realised I could have it. For the first time in years, I could have things. I could buy a paper without having to wait for someone to bring it in, hours late. I could actually smell women around, the femininity, without seeing them. I still couldn’t help staring. Everything was a novelty, even after six months of semi-freedom at the hostel.

I took a tube to Mile End, and when I got there my son David was waiting with about eight of his mates outside the station. One of
them had a book about the Krays and he was looking at it, trying to recognise me. David spotted me, and one of his friends, Raymond, took my case. Scott, his brother, took my bag. We all walked along towards where we lived, and every time I turned round, David and his pals were looking at me. I said, ‘Are you going to have a drink with me?’ They were only sixteen or seventeen years old, and there I was wanting to take them into a pub. By now I was on a high, and I didn’t want to go back to the house.

We went into the Coburn Arms off Mile End Road. I pulled out a £20 note for a round of drinks, and the barmaid gave me about £8 back. I said, ‘Have you made a mistake?’

The boys were looking at me – ‘What’s he on about?’ When I went away, 1s 9d got you a bottle of lager, 2s 9d got you a packet of Benson and Hedges, and 4s 6d bought a gallon of petrol. The currency had gone decimal since then and the money we handled in prison was black market, worth about half of its face value, so I didn’t understand the worth of money in the real world at all.

There I was sitting in the pub with all David’s lot. Not one of them asked me a thing! We left there and went to the house, and Pat was there. So was Karen. We sat indoors. Pat said, ‘Do you want something to eat? It’s nice to see you home.’ It was no great big thing to her. There were no banners out or anything.

I had a cup of tea and then I slipped out to see John Goode, the probation officer, in his office in Mile End Road. I’d met him before in the hostel. He said the police had been informed I’d been released, and he told me: ‘For the foreseeable future, you’ll be reporting to me once a week. You know the rules. You’ve got to live like I tell you. If you’re going to get a job, I have to be told immediately. You’ve got to tell me more or less everything. Any problems, get in touch immediately.’ There was something about him that I wasn’t sure about, something which told me that he and I weren’t going to see eye to eye….

I wandered back to the house at about five, and watched the six o’clock news. And I thought to myself, ‘What am I going to do now?’ For years, all I’d been thinking about at this time of the evening was getting ready for bed, collecting the papers and the boiling water for the flasks, maybe getting a sandwich. Six months in a hostel was hardly what it took to break the habits of what seemed like a lifetime. It certainly didn’t prepare me for what I was facing now. Here I was, a free man without limits on my first day of proper freedom, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was bored. Lost. I didn’t have any of the boys around me.

I thought, ‘I’ll go and have a drink,’ but I didn’t want to walk out of the house. It was my security. Unbeknown to me, I was making other prisons for myself. I had become institutionalised and as the weeks went by, the symptoms became apparent. I wouldn’t come out of the kitchen, because it was the smallest room. It became a cell to me. I wanted to be alone for periods of time. I would get very tired around nine at night, and I was always awake by 7.30 the next day. Your day is very short in prison, and I wanted my days to be the same out here.

I had brought so many of my prison habits home with me. I’d keep a flask around me, which I didn’t need. If I bought more than two ounces of tobacco, which was the regulation limit in the nick, I’d hide the extra in a cupboard: I carried on smoking roll-ups: it didn’t occur to me to buy cigarettes for eighteen months. I’d go mad at the sound of a loud radio. I’d make my bed in the prison way the instant I got up, with the sheets and blankets boxed up and the pillow sitting on top. I used to watch policemen. To me, they were screws. Many a copper said to me, ‘What do you think you’re looking at?’ I still tend to avoid uniforms.

Quite a few of these old prison habits have remained with me to this day. I still mash my food up, and I’ve got to have a good supply of tinned soup. I’m as fanatical as ever about cleanliness. Every last
spoon has to be washed up after dinner, my bathroom is always spotless, and I cannot stand dirty ashtrays: I have to keep getting up to empty them.

My first few weeks of freedom were much the same as the first day: empty. Leon would come down, Jimmy would come down, they’d stay a few hours and then they were gone. I was with a wife who had become a total stranger to me and a son and daughter who didn’t know me. I couldn’t act naturally around women I met in the course of everyday life. I was frightened of them. I’d get very, very embarrassed and find nothing to say. But the strangest feeling of all was that I had nothing to hate any more.

I was confused, too. I’d come out to a different world. Going dutch? I didn’t know what the bleeding hell they were on about. I didn’t know what women’s lib was. I’d been brought up to believe that the old man was King of the Castle. I couldn’t understand why people weren’t giving their seats to ladies on the bus. Men were swearing in front of women, and women were drinking as hard as the men. Women were making approaches. I couldn’t believe the sort of crime that was going on, the raping and mugging and the extent of it. In my own way I was still twenty-six, the age I went away at, and I was still in the sixties. Prison suspends time. And I was finding it very difficult to adjust to life out of prison.

I started drinking. I went out to pubs with Jumbo, who was married to Pat’s Aunt Gladys, and another bloke called Ronnie Lloyd. They were hard, decent, working people, rough and ready and totally honest. They loved their drink, loved their fag, loved their bet. They lived their lives to the full the way they wanted. When I came out of prison I was A1, in top condition. Within six months I had ballooned up to sixteen stone. They were professional drinkers, and I just couldn’t keep up with them. But it was by being in their company that I started to feel accepted again. And I
stumbled across a very interesting truth indeed: people were falling over themselves to give me money. For nothing. It all began when I started having a Sunday lunchtime drink with Jumbo and Ronnie in the East End. That’s when I realised how legendary the twins and the firm had become. People really wanted to know me. Some of them thought that by giving me money they could buy my friendship, which would give them ‘prestige’ in the eyes of their mates. Some of them thought that by slipping me a few quid I might be able to do them a favour one day. But others genuinely did believe I had felt the rough end of British justice, and wanted to see me get on in life. They all had one thing in common: they wouldn’t take no for an answer.

One Sunday dinnertime, in a pub called the Bancroft Arms in Mile End Road, I was handed a brown envelope containing £500. It was from a building contractor called Joe The Beard. I was told that an envelope would be left behind the bar for me every Sunday. People just don’t give you £500 for nothing every week. I didn’t even know the bloke, but when I did get to know him he told me: ‘I wanted to give you this money as a sign of my respect. I couldn’t have done what you did – fifteen years for keeping your mouth shut.’

I met bookmakers, club owners, business people, all asking, ‘Do you need a few quid?’ As it happens, I had a little bit left from before I went away, although not a lot, and I didn’t ask any of these people for a penny. If I refused their money, they’d give it to someone else to give to me. I was given a car by five different people. I was offered two pubs and a business, none of which I accepted. At that time I couldn’t have run a scooter, never mind a business. I would go into restaurants and clubs and I wouldn’t be given a bill. I suppose the owners thought that the very fact that I was there might stop problems. I would have been a fool not to take advantage of it. If people wanted to shower me with things, who was I to
refuse them? Especially when I was, and still am, what they call ‘unemployable’.

By law, I had to go and ‘sign on’ after I was released from the hostel. I was given a letter and told to take it with me to the office. This I duly did, and I was told to sit down and wait. Ten minutes later, I was called into an upstairs room to talk to three men. Their attitude towards the idea of me finding a job was this: ‘Go away, we’ll send you a giro, don’t worry about it.’

One of them said, ‘In my experience of dealing with the unemployed, I’m at a loss with you, Mr Lambrianou. One, what have we got to offer you in your line of business? And two, who in their right mind would employ you?’

I must admit, I had to agree with him.

Things were getting very hard to handle in my home life. On paper, everything was lovely. But something was missing between me and Pat. My daughter had grown up into a woman of twenty-one with a very strong personality. David was fifteen, and he saw me as a challenge. If I sat down next to Pat, he’d get up and walk out of the room. I tried in my own way to be friendly, and I put up with weeks of being stared at by David and his friends. Every time I came into the room, it was like walking into six pairs of eyes. I expected David to do my running around. I’d say, ‘Shoot round and get me a paper.’ He started giving me these looks, half taking me on. If I wanted an ounce of tobacco, I wanted it there and then. I could lose my temper very quickly. What I’d done was transfer my prison into the home. Looking back on it, I can see that. At the time, I didn’t.