Bringing Down the Krays Read Online Free PDF Page A

meet your mum and dad. Do you mind? We’ll take a couple of friends up and have a nice drink with them. That will be nice, won’t it?’
    Alfie wasn’t dumb. He knew what Ron had on his mind, and realised that he was thinking of the 66 for little private meets. But he couldn’t see the harm in it. In fact, Ronnie quickly made the club his second home. My parents didn’t mind either. Dad used to sit down with Ronnie and tell him stories about all the old gangsters he had known.
    Ronnie was intrigued, saying: ‘I knew a few of them.’ And Ronnie did. When he was still a teenager he used to work for Jack Spot and Billy Hill. It was his apprenticeship. Jack Spot taught him the golden rule: ‘Only nick from thieves; that way you’ll never get nicked.’
    So that’s what the twins did – they moved in on anyone who was vulnerable. They called it a ‘pension’, a slice of every bit of dodgy business, every tickle, every bit of profit from a deal. Their main interest was clubs.
    Clubs were everything in London at the time, the way the laws on prostitution and gambling had changed in the late fifties. Grafters [prostitutes] couldn’t pull their punters on thestreets any more without being arrested, they’d do it indoors, and at the same time you could now gamble in ‘licensed premises’. You could make big money. To run one you just had to find some premises, get a drinks licence and square the local coppers. Then there was the little matter of ‘protection’ – keeping out troublemakers. But who was it making all the trouble?
    If you had an interest in a club and had a criminal record you didn’t want anyone knowing about, you were easy meat. Anyone who had their own reason not to involve the police could be got at. And that was a lot of people.
    Putting out the deckchairs in the Shanklin sunshine, it all seemed a world away from my quiet life. But every time Alfie came out to visit me he would regale me with stories of going out with his new friend. Soon Ronnie was phoning him up all the time. He would tell him: ‘Come on, we’re going to the Pigalle, or Churchills, the Astor, the Celebrity, the Society, Danny La Rue’s…’ Alfie’s favourite place, which he used to go to four or five times a week, was called Talk of the Town. It had a stage that came up out of the floor and swirled round. Alfie swore that the women in there were the most beautiful he’d ever seen.
    Going out to a club with Ronnie was like being with royalty, Alfie said. If a place was full, an empty table, freshly laid, would magically appear. Service was instant. When that first happened to Alfie, he thought he was a big boy, one of the chaps, one of the villains. ‘We’ll pay for it later,’ Ron would say at the end. But no money would ever change hands. And it went on from there. First it was protection, a club owner having to pay theFirm to make sure there was no trouble. Then the Firm would become ‘staff’. Then all of a sudden the place would be theirs.
    Well, we, the Teale family, were in the club business, even if I didn’t have much to do with it at the time. That’s how Mum and Dad made their living. And now we were on the Krays’ takeover list.

CHAPTER 3
    DOWN THE 66 AND UP THE WEST END
    SO THAT’S HOW my brother Alfie met the big bad Ronnie Kray. While I was scraping barnacles off the bottoms of pleasure boats, he was now one of ‘the chaps’, posing around the West End clubs with his new friends. Meanwhile, my younger brother, David, had also had his first big meet with Ronnie. It was at our mum’s club, the 66, where he was looking after the door. It was David’s job to let the right people in and keep the undesirables out.
    One night there was some loud banging on the door at the bottom of the stairs. Our mum called out to David: ‘We’re closed.’
    David opened the door to the street and said to the two men standing there, ‘No, you can’t come in,’ and shut the door in their faces. But they banged