Wannabe in My Gang? Read online

  There was a wooden stake lying by the side of the road. I picked it up and began to beat him . . . I’m not a violent person, but something in me snapped. By now, the police had arrived and they pulled me off him. Good job too – I think I could have killed him.

  Mrs Kray could have kept her sordid secrets to herself, but the whole point of mixing with the Krays, for most of their fans, was to tell people how hard you are or how close to them you were. Given the opportunity of seeing a combination of the two in print was obviously too much of a temptation for Kate. Ronnie divorced her, but Kate chose to hang on to his greatest asset: the Kray name.

  I went into the funeral parlour and saw Reg standing in an office with a female prison officer. He was reading a meaningless framed certificate on the wall. Reg looked vulnerable, a broken man, his twin brother’s death having devastated him. I asked his prison escort if we could have a few seconds alone. The officer said that she couldn’t leave Reg, but she would not intrude. With that, she walked to the window and looked out, leaving us looking at her back. I was in no doubt that she thought we wanted to share a few private words, which we did, but first I whipped out a metal flask of brandy and offered it to Reg. He smiled, gulped down what he could and gave it back to me.

  ‘Thanks, Bernie,’ he said, ‘you’re a good friend. I will need that to get me through today. It’s going to be hard saying goodbye to Ron, but I’ve got to keep my composure because so many people are going to be there.’

  I told Reg he would be OK. He embraced me and invited me to go in to see Ronnie. I entered the Chapel of Rest and approached Ron’s coffin. He looked extremely peaceful which, to me, seemed odd for such a violent man. Ron looked older and thinner than when we had last met. His hair, brushed back in the familiar style, had turned white. In his coffin, people had placed mementos – a packet of cigarettes, photos and the odd red rose. I brushed Ronnie’s face with my hand, said goodbye and walked out. I couldn’t feel sorry for Ronnie, a man who had inflicted fear, pain and even death on others. He chose the path he took and revelled in it. I did wonder if behind the face of ‘The Colonel’ was a man who would have lived his life differently if he had known what was in front of him. Despite what Reg had told the media on a regular basis about having no regrets, I knew he did have them and that, given the choice, he certainly wouldn’t have taken the same path.

  When I walked out into the reception area, there seemed to be more bit-part bouncers around than genuine friends and family. The kings of the London underworld, who seemed to have everything, at the end didn’t have anything or anyone. I looked around at my fellow mourners. When they weren’t flexing their muscles and trying to look mean for the cameras they were laughing and joking amongst themselves. It was obscene.

  The prison officer told Reg we would all have to leave soon. I looked across at Reg then nodded towards the Gents. Reg asked the officer if he could use the toilet and she said, ‘OK’.

  Once Reg had disappeared inside, I went in and once more produced the flask of brandy. He held it, raised it, said, ‘To Ron’, and took three or four mouthfuls. Walking outside the funeral parlour, I was amazed at just how many people had now gathered. Bethnal Green Road was a sea of people; the bouncers stood in a row outside the funeral parlour, now buried in a mass of flowers. As soon as Reg stepped outside, Courtney, who was dressed in a long coat more suitable as a prop on a sci-fi film than for use at a funeral, began to usher him through the well-wishers as if he were incapable of walking the ten or so steps from the undertakers to his car. When Reg reached the car Courtney continued to move through the crowd, organising men who didn’t need organising. He was trying to look busy and important, trying to be a somebody. The fact that we were at a man’s funeral was totally overlooked. A mass of bouncers pushed people back as if their very presence posed a threat to Reg. Some were shouting at people who looked back at them in total bewilderment.

  On a visit a few days earlier, Reg had asked me if I would remain with him and Charlie throughout Ron’s funeral, as he was concerned ‘some nutter’ was going to cause a scene and he didn’t want the service disrupted. For that reason, I agreed I would.

  Now that the macabre circus was on the move and I had witnessed the legions of fools trying to promote themselves, I decided there and then I wanted no further part of it. I was sure the prison officers, police officers, countless journalists, underworld cronies and hordes of Courtney’s merry men would be sufficient to ‘protect’ hard man Reg Kray.

  I saw Annie Allen (Geoff’s wife), Alan Smith and John Masterson getting into a limousine and so I joined them. Tony Lambrianou and his wife Wendy didn’t have a car and so they also joined us. The journey from Bethnal Green was something that I don’t think Londoners have ever witnessed, or will ever witness again. I saw EastEnders actress Patsy Palmer, who played Bianca, at various points along the route. As soon as Ron’s coffin and the limousines carrying the invited guests had passed, Patsy would jump into her jeep and reappear somewhere further along the route. People ran up to our car, wanting to shake Tony Lambrianou’s hand; a few asked for his autograph. There was only one brief incident. Two women, their faces contorted with hate, screamed, ‘Fucking murderers,’ but their voices were soon drowned out by the clapping and cheering of others. It was a bizarre cavalcade, like one of those Victorian travelling freak shows where the locals would come out to gaze in wonder at weird and dysfunctional people.

  My thoughts turned from the crowds to the man sitting opposite me – Tony ‘the gang boss’ Lambrianou. What must be going through his mind, I wondered. These people are cheering, these people think that he is one of the men who held his silence, when both of us know that’s total nonsense. How could he attend Ronnie Kray’s funeral and pretend to mourn, when Ronnie had bullied him and his brother into accepting a life sentence? How could Lambrianou show anything for this man who had allowed him to rot in prison while his parents died? How could this man opposite me tell the press that the Krays were men of respect, men of dignity, men who looked after their own? Together we sat watching thousands and thousands of people, cheering and clapping the corpse of a schizophrenic homosexual who had shot a man through the head, butchered another and ordered the murder of at least one other. What was it about these Krays? What was it about these people that so many found glamorous?

  I know people will call me a hypocrite because if I felt that way I should not have been there. A failed friendship is no different to a failed marriage. Everything goes well at first, but when you really get to know the other person, their faults and failings begin to annoy you. They eat away at you whilst you do your best to dismiss them. Eventually, reality hits you and you have to accept your life has to take a new direction because you have grown to loathe those you’re with. That is just how I felt maintaining my friendship with these people. Knowing the truth about them made it feel so wrong. I would tell myself that nobody is perfect, but their deeds and words would keep gnawing away at me.

  I began to look at myself. I thought long and hard about what I had become and what I was involved in. The members of the Essex firm I was part of were no more than latter-day Kray hoodlums. Outwardly, they commanded the same respect but within, the same bitterness, backstabbing and disloyalty were rife. It was survival of the fittest, every man for himself. The rules and criminal codes that both firms preached were fabricated, produced for the benefit of the media and those whom they didn’t want to betray them. Both firms were criminals, by definition: they broke rules, laws and had no intention of abiding by anything that didn’t suit them. The criminal code was as dead as the corpse of Ronnie Kray.

  When I got home from Ronnie’s funeral I got washed and changed and went straight into work. To be honest, I didn’t really fancy it. There had been a private get-together at Lenny McLean’s pub after the funeral and I’d had a fair bit to drink there. I now had the taste for it and fancied going out, but decided against it. I could, after all, continue to drink when I got to Raquels. By the time I g
ot home from work that night I was drunk and Debra, understandably, was annoyed. We began to have a heated row and the next thing I knew there was a knock at the door. It was two police officers from Basildon. I wasn’t in the mood for them and became quite abusive. They said they had received a complaint about a disturbance. I told them to go away and leave me alone but they kept saying they wanted to come in and talk to me. I told them that there was no way they were getting into my house, adding that if they fucked off now there wouldn’t be any disturbance, as I was going to bed. The officers tried stepping into the hallway, but I pushed them out. Debra got quite upset and stepped outside to talk to them. Again they tried to come into the house and I blocked their way. ‘If you want to talk to them, then talk to them, but I’m going to bed,’ I told Debra. I slammed the door and went upstairs.

  I had weapons in the house, including a gun, and I began to panic. The gun was fairly well hidden in the ceiling in the kitchen but there were bayonets, knives, CS gas and ammonia around the place. I thought I had better get rid of the gun and the gas, as they were the only two things that I could be arrested for possessing illegally. I looked out of the window to see if the police had gone and it appeared they had. I removed the gun from the ceiling in the kitchen and the gas from the cupboard near the front door. I knew I had to get them out of the house because the police would probably return mob-handed before too long.

  I felt like Saddam Hussein waiting for the weapons inspectors to arrive. Should I ditch the hardware or should I take a chance and hide it? I looked out but couldn’t see where Debra or the police had got to. I guessed Debra had gone to her mother’s, so I rang and asked if she was there. Her mother said she hadn’t seen her. Ten minutes later her mother rang back and said that Debra had rung her from the police station. She said that Debra was upset and would not return home because she had rowed with me and I had turned on the police. I decided to go and sort things out with her, so I rang a taxi, switched off all the lights and went outside. I hid the revolver and the gas canister under a large plant pot and went back into the house to wait for the taxi, which arrived a few minutes later. When we got to Basildon police station a police van swung in front of the taxi and another pulled up at the side. A third police vehicle pulled up immediately behind us. I got out of the car and officers in blue overalls with Koch machine guns crouched down behind a van, their weapons pointed directly at me.

  They shouted, ‘Put your hands in the air and kneel on the floor.’ When I did so I was handcuffed and led into the police station where I was told that they had received information that I was in possession of a gun. They said I would be held in custody whilst a search was conducted at my home. I didn’t get much sleep that night or the next morning. I don’t know what it was, I just knew the police would find the weapons I had hidden in the garden. Detectives finally came to interview me at about 3 p.m. the following afternoon. I was told that they had searched my home and in the cupboard immediately behind the front door had found a bayonet which was approximately 18 inches long and in a sheath. They also found a rounders bat with the word ‘dentist’ engraved on it.

  While searching the main bedroom they said they had found an eight-inch sheath knife bound in blue tape. Finally, they said, at the edge of the lawn at the end of the path in the garden they had found a small aerosol can and a small leather holster which contained an automatic handgun. I was told the items would be sent off for forensic tests and I was bailed to reappear at the police station in a few weeks’ time. I got back home at about 6 p.m. that evening.

  I had been due to visit Reggie that day. However, the police had been kind enough to ring the prison to tell him that I was otherwise detained. I sat in the house considering my position. If I couldn’t get out of this mess, I would get convicted, lose my door licence and as a consequence of that, lose the security contract at Raquels. I began to wonder if that was such a bad thing. Perhaps this was the excuse that I had been looking for. Then again, I had to provide for myself and my family. I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I sat reading the newspapers, which were full of stories about Ronnie Kray and his funeral. The amount of publicity the event generated had propelled Dave Courtney into the media spotlight. He had paraded up and down the street in his ludicrous long leather coat looking like Wyatt Earp, eager for any photo opportunity, and the photographers had not disappointed him. His face was splashed all over the newspapers and Dave Courtney really thought he had arrived.

  Shortly after the funeral, the News of the World revealed that some of the people who had elected themselves to guard Ron Kray’s corpse at the funeral parlour had been involved in a series of sick and disturbing incidents. The article claimed that they had snorted lines of cocaine off Ronnie’s half-open coffin, set up a Ouija board next to his casket and tried to contact his spirit.

  They had then put a Sony Walkman on Ronnie and laughed at him. One is said to have remarked, ‘Don’t he look stupid with the earphones on?’

  Reggie was quoted as saying, ‘I’m not happy: I’ve heard some stories and I’m disgusted.’ Reg had heard that staff at the funeral parlour in Bethnal Green discovered tell-tale smudges on Ronnie’s highly polished oak coffin. They also found pieces of paper with letters scribbled on them used for the Ouija session. What sort of scum would do such a thing to a corpse? It was beyond me. The very same people who had done this had attended the funeral, pretending to pay their respects to a man they aspired to be. The funeral had been more of a circus than I had imagined. When I spoke to Reg he was deeply hurt by what people had done to his twin brother. He said he was determined to find out which individuals had done what and get them tidied up, as he put it. The phone calls to my house came almost on the hour, every hour, for a week, but fortunately I had refused to have any part in guarding the dead man at the funeral parlour and so I was unable to assist. So much for these people having respect and looking after their own. The man Reg should have been asking was Dave Courtney, who had put himself and his cronies in the undertakers to guard Ronnie’s corpse. If they were not directly responsible, they were certainly guilty of failing to do their job efficiently. How hard is it to guard a dead man?

  The Kray firm and their fans had become as depressing as their Essex firm counterparts. A particular thorn in my side was one of Reggie’s more avid fans, a man named Bradley Allardyce. I had met him whilst visiting Reg in Maidstone Prison where he was serving a sentence for robbery. Recently he had been moved to Whitemoor Prison in Cambridgeshire where Pat Tate was also serving his sentence. Reg had asked me if Tate would look after Allardyce, as he was rather vulnerable.

  I was reluctant to ask Tate, but I did so as a favour to Reg. Soon Tate and I were both regretting ever hearing the name Allardyce. Tate rang me a few times, saying, ‘Who the fuck is this person you’ve put on to me? He’s becoming an embarrassment.’

  Allardyce would ring or write to me, asking why I hadn’t bothered visiting him. It was as if he thought he was a somebody because he knew Reg Kray. He told anybody who would listen that he was Reggie Kray’s ‘right-hand man’. Allardyce would reveal years later that Reggie was using him for more than just his right hand. The caged love birds were in fact an item. In one letter Allardyce, believing he was a fully fledged Kray firm gangster, wrote to me about an associate of Reggie’s called Gary Piper claiming he had cheated Reg on a deal:

  Gary Piper is in a lot of trouble, Bernie. He’s used us and I will never let that go unpunished. Never. I’ll bide my time, but when I get out, Bernie, he will be finished. Nobody crosses Reg without crossing me. I will make that cunt pay for what he’s done. I am not stupid, Bernie, he will be finished. I do not intend to end up back in prison down to him. But he will be sorry he ever crossed us. Reg means the world to me, Bernie. A lot of people think he has a lot of friends, but you and I know different. It’s up to us to protect him. He is like a father to me, Bernie. I love him very much. Gary Piper is finished. Take it from me; Reg listens to me, Bernie, and he will always do
as I ask. Because he knows I will only do what’s best for him. Sometimes people take advantage of him. Well that’s all stopped now because I am his right-hand man. You’re a good friend, Bernie, and Reg knows that. I’ve seen Pat Tate, he sends his very best to you.

  In another letter he sent me a visiting order pleading with me to visit him. He asked if I could bring some ‘birds’, slang for doves, a type of Ecstasy, and some ‘Mickey Duff’, Cockney rhyming slang for puff, or cannabis as normal people call it. He also said he would get phone cards and start up his own ‘food boat’, prison slang for contraband which is then used as currency. Censors who read his letter would hardly be fooled by somebody saying ‘could you bring “birds” and “Mickey Duff”’. I am surprised the police were not kicking my door down.

  Reg had another prison friend from the Midlands, whom I shall call ‘Ryan’ as he has suffered enough as a result of his association with the Krays. Reg had also had a sexual relationship with him despite the fact Ryan was below the age of consent. Everybody had known Ron was homosexual, but few suspected Reg had such tendencies. One day Reg rang me and asked if I would travel up to the Midlands as a matter of urgency as Ryan had been arrested and needed somebody to stand surety for his bail. I had never met the boy in my life, but when you’re wrapped up in that gangster shit you tend to give the required answer rather than the sensible one. ‘No problem,’ I said, ‘I will help him out.’ I travelled up to the Midlands from Essex only to find out that Ryan was in custody and the police had no intention of giving him bail. I contacted his solicitor and was told Ryan was due in court the following morning and a bail application was going to be made then. The solicitor said, if needed, I would have to offer the court something substantial if I was to stand bail for him. The only substantial thing I had to offer as surety was a house I owned in south London. The solicitor said the courts preferred cash, but added, ‘We will see what we can do.’