Bringing Down the Krays Read Online Free PDF Page B

call her Nell. He thought our mum was like his and Reggie’s mother, which she was. She was a very loving woman who adored her sons.
    As much as Ronnie would come to the 66, so Alfie and David would regularly be summoned to wherever he was. If they didn’t come immediately he’d send a car round for them. Sometimes it was to go to another club, sometimes to Vallance Road. Whatever it was the Colonel wanted, you couldn’t refuse. It seemed Violet Kray liked the idea of my brothers being there because it made Ron happy. She would greet the two of them with: ‘Oh, Ronnie will be pleased to see the pair of you. Come in the kitchen, and I’ll make you a lovely cup of tea.’ She would always steer them away from the room where the Firm would be meeting.
    ‘Do you want a sandwich?’ she would smile.
    ‘Yes please, Mrs Kray. Thank you so much, Mrs Kray,’ my brothers would dutifully reply.
    About this time, Reggie was released from Wandsworth Prison on bail pending an appeal. So where do the Krays come to celebrate? To the 66 Club, of course. And that was where Alfie and David first met Reggie.
    Reggie liked them both straight away. He was a lot like Ronnie, obviously. People thought he was the serious one, the not-quite-so-crazy twin who had ideas about running a legitimate club and entertainment business in a way that didn’t always end with someone being hit over the head or smashed in the jaw. But it was Ronnie who had the power. It was Ronnie who was the real ‘character’. He was the ‘Colonel’.
    Meanwhile I continued to stay happily down on the Isle of Wight working at the boat business. David and Alfie were now coming down to see me every couple of weeks, helping me with the work, and staying with me in the seafront flat that Johnny Quinn and I shared in Shanklin, above a place called the Radcliffe Restaurant.
    They’d come over even more in the spring, as that was when I really needed help getting ready for the summer season. They got themselves officially registered as ‘longshoremen’, meaning that if ever a boat got into trouble, the coast guards could call on us for help.
    While my brothers and I worked recovering deckchairs, or taking the launch out, we’d be chatting all the time about what was happening to them in London – about the latest doings of Reggie and Ronnie. I pretended not to be that interested, getting on with working on an engine or something without saying much. But in my mind I was becoming quite jealous. Theway Alfie and David told it, there were lots of women, loads of booze and lots of partying. I compared it to my own existence. Trips round the bay.
    It was around this time that the Krays made their big move Up West. London in the early sixties was all about gambling clubs. Changes in the law were supposed to clean up illegal gambling but the new laws made these clubs magnets for rakeoffs and extortion rackets, as the twins had already found to their advantage. This time they were going to run their own place and no one would be stupid enough to try to stop them. It was called Esmeralda’s Barn.
    There was the East End, there was Islington, there was Holborn and there was Soho – in a straight line, east to west. That was our universe, the London we knew best. But there was a world beyond that, too: Mayfair, Knightsbridge, the West End. Alfie got an old-fashioned Armstrong Siddeley limousine and used to drive around west London feeling quite at home. But it wasn’t all lords and ladies in that part of town.
    Around Bayswater and Paddington, there were lots of villains and lots of grafters. The Vienna Rooms in the Edgware Road is where the old faces like Jack Spot and Billy Hill used to hang out – and where the Krays used to come and learn from the masters. And then there was Notting Hill, filled with streets and squares of crumbling tenanted houses. This was the territory of Peter Rachman, the infamous slum landlord.
    To get in with the Krays – and you had to be in with