Transcription
[Bernard] Villains, gangsters or faces as they prefer to be called, are the men that have been making newspaper headlines for all the wrong reasons over the past 50 years. Some are instantly recognisable, but many are not.
I mean, if I stick a gun in your face, you're gonna open up the door. I've got no worry about... even if the glass is bulletproof and you know it's bulletproof, you're still gonna open up that 'cause you're not gonna trust your life against a bit of glass.
[Bernard] Men like Eddie Richardson, Paul Ferris, Frankie Fraser, and Walter Norville who have inspired fear and respect in equal measure for decades.
People did fear me yeah, because I was dangerous.
[Bernard] In this new series, some of Britain's most infamous and influential characters have agreed to go on camera and tell it how it was and is.
All of a sudden I went, "Ch-ch-ch." I went, "You move, I'll blow your fucking head off." Obviously like I didn't know, they put a big gun in me head like that. I went, "Argh!"
So I took a dive when the shot went off, obviously they get behind me motor. And if I got behind me motor, I've waited two seconds and I took a dive for the front door and I slammed the front door behind us and got behind the brickwork. And that's when bullets started coming through the front door.
I've had aggravated burglary, torture, people being kidnapped and broken legs, broken arms, blackmail, racketeering, extortion. I've been done for everything you can think of.
I'm not an electrician or a plumber or a dentist or anything like that. I'm a crook and I get back into serious crime and it paid dividends for the next five years.
My name is Bernard O'Mahoney. I was a friend of the Kray twins and a member of the infamous Essex Boys firm. I know this world, I know the faces and I'm going to give you a no-holds barred history of the British criminal underworld. London has plenty of previous when it comes to gangs, mobs, and firms. For decades names like Sabini, Cortese, Richardson, and of course Kray, have become synonymous with crime and violence. In every firm there were ruthless enforcers. One man in particular stands out, Mad Frankie Fraser. Born in 1923, he earned his moniker after slashing gangland boss Jack Spot. He went on to become a key member of South London's most infamous gang, The Richardsons. Fraser's role was to offer protection to pubs and clubs in exchange for Eddie's one arm bandits being installed. Failure to do so meant running the risk of having the landlord or the pub damaged.
Well, I'd come outta prison doing seven years and I was introduced to 'em and liked 'em immediately and that was it. Then I teamed up with 'em.
In the '60s, it was great because when it was good, it was very, very good. I mean, a nice Bentley car, pulled up nightclubs and all this and that. Everything was going on. It was great. It was great, you know.
If you had the West End, that's the jewel in the crown in London. Not the pubs, not this, not that, the West End. The West End is a money-making machine and they had their finger in every pie. If the machine went into a club, they was basically minding the club without having putting anyone on the door or whatever. But they were very honest and very good with everyone. They weren't greedy. They invited if they, if anyone went to work with them, they put 'em in on the coup and give them a fair share. And that's what made my dad and Eddie so good.
[Bernard] Fraser and his two sons have spent over 70 years behind bars. Fraser Senior had a terrifying reputation as an inmate, repeatedly refusing to submit to custody and protesting about conditions. He started the infamous Parkhurst riots and was accused of kidnapping and hanging the governor of Wandsworth Prison.
I was a right headache to 'em in prison. I would never give in. I've done more bread and water than any man alive. They don't have it as a punishment now in prison. And I got an extra five years at Parkhurst an' all for leading the riot. And they thought by certifying me, I'd go to Broadmoor and it gets me out the system. 'Cause the prison officers would be going, "We've gotta get rid of him. We either gotta kill him or certify him. He's making our job hard." And that's why they certified us insane. And it suited me, I could put up with that 'cause Broadmoor then was much better than prison. Course I'd first punched a prison officer when I was very young. You can see how small I am and I was about as fat as me finger then. And when they see me, the prison officers, you could read their face, they'd be going, "The little cockney so and so, we'll put him in his place," and they'd make life very hard for me, and I would just retaliate. I'd fight back.
[Bernard] On one occasion, Fraser viciously attacked a guard at Parkhurst Prison.
Well this prison officer said I'd cut one of his ears off and they couldn't find it. Well the reason they couldn't find it was put down the toilet, I flushed a chain and it's floating somewhere off the Isle of Wight. And for the rest of his career he was known as Ere Ear Harry.
Well, Fraser had a quite a notorious reputation, mainly gained by his imprisonment. So when he come out of prison, you know, I mean he'd done all sorts of things, you know, so he had a reputation from the prison. I must say, that he was game. If there's anything to do, I had to see someone or do anything, you know, I used to say, "Frank, we've gotta go somewhere." He never hesitated. He jumped in the motor and, you know, so he was game enough. That's all I'd say.
[Bernard] Eddie Richardson was once described by, not one, but two home secretaries as one of the most dangerous men in Britain. Together with his older brother Charlie, they controlled South London.
Eddie Richardson was more of the muscle man, Charlie was a businessman and Eddie teamed up with Mad Frankie Fraser and started a company called Atlantic Gaming Machines. And they put in fruit machines in various pubs and clubs round Soho, which they made money from, but they also got protection from those premises and made quite a lot of money out of it.
It was, there was bits of violence. Yeah, of course there was. I mean there was everywhere in't there everywhere, and especially more so in them days because as I say, more people used to look after their self in them days much more than what they do, you know, today.
[Bernard] Can you think of any like particularly bad incidents up there?
Well, there was some people did get chopped up a bit with a couple of choppers, you know, on their legs, mainly on their legs. I think they was Polish, that tried to encroach on someone's property. So they did get, you know, chopped up a bit. But no one got arrested for it. It didn't happen in them days like that. Nowadays, I mean it's all on film, these cameras, videos from the cameras now. I mean there's nothing in them days. You were as lucky to find a phone box that worked.
[Bernard] Across the river from the Richardsons in the East End of London, Charlie Kray and his younger, identical twin brothers, Ronnie and Reggie, had formed their own gang, which came to be known as The Firm. Ronnie, a paranoid schizophrenic, suffered from delusions of grandeur and had planned to not only control the East End, but to have influence in every major city in the country.
It was a mixture of fear and respect. Respect because women and children, untouchable. Ordinary guys who went to work and that, untouchable. Any rows we had was only amongst ourselves and if we hurt or killed one another, so what? And therefore people did have a lot of respect, yeah.
Well they was two poofs, wasn't they? To be quite honest. I mean, Reggie Kray never come out 'til late. I was away with Reggie Kray for quite some time. He'd never come out but at the end he did come out, right? He was a poof, same as his brother, so...
[Bernard] But violent but violent homosexuals.
[Eddie] Oh they was violent, yeah, yeah.
[Bernard] But that didn't...
In their own little way I suppose they was violent, yeah. So was we, wasn't we? So you know.
[Bernard] But that didn't worry you and your brother 'an all, when you...?
Never. I tell you again that if they put me and my brother in a cell with them two, there's only two people coming out, that's me and my brother. No brains, both of them. I mean, they both, no brains. What I would say no brains, you know?
[Bernard] Yeah.
They wanted to be gangsters. They set out to be gangsters. They used to read gangster magazine, gangster comics and things like that. You understand what I mean? I mean, never happened with me. I mean, I'm running the business and trying to get a few quid and, you know, make yourself successful, bit of ambition. But with them, that's what they wanted to be.
Oh I never trusted Reggie. I thought he sat on the fence and he would go whatever way suited him. Whereas Ronnie was more, if he give his word, he would stick to his word, though he was the nuttiest one of the two. And he was on this drug, the horse tranquilliser, it'd knock a horse over what he used to take, you know. But he needed that every day to keep himself 'cause he was manic depressive, you know? And he thought if people looked at him too long, he thinks they're gonna attack him or something you know? He was one of those very insecure people. Or if he went to the toilet and someone followed him into the toilet, he'd think they'd come in to do him or something, you know? And he'd probably attack them first, you know, so he wasn't right in the head. He definitely wasn't right in the head.
He was all right. Ronnie was a bit funny, like, you know. Ronnie had to get up in the morning, yeah? And some mornings he'd come down and he'd be all happy, ha, ha, ha. Another morning, he'd come down and sit in the chair and pull a face and he'd sit there and you couldn't talk to him. 'Cause he used to say, "Meditating."
[Speaker] He ain't took his pills yet. 'Cause he used to say, "Meditating."
And he used to, yeah, he used to have loads of... I used to have a couple meself sometimes, used to give me a buzz (laughs) and that's how he was. And if he was nice in the morning, he'd have a go at someone on the night. And if he was horrible in the morning, he'd be all happy on the night.
[Bernard] Both the Richardsons and Fraser were accused of torturing their enemies, severe beatings, cigarette burns, teeth being ripped out with pliers and being electrocuted into unconsciousness, were all on their menu of pain.
They called it a torture trial because people was making all sorts of accusations, right, and getting believed? Anything went at the time.
Like attaching clips to their nipples and sending electric shocks through 'em doesn't seem your style, do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Well...
Charlie would have 'em for days. He would have 'em for hours and hours. I know once that he got broken into, and he had quite a lot of his suits nicked and all that. And he had half of the fucking villains in South London in, didn't he, under questioning (laughs).
The guy who said I pulled his teeth out with pliers, he approached my sister, said, "If you gimme a £1,000 Eva," when that was a hell of a lot of money then, "I'll tell the truth. It never happened." So Eva took him to a solicitor, Albie Woods was the chauffeur. Took him to a solicitor and he made a statement saying he told the police a pack of lies and dropped him home. He then went straight to the police and said she threatened him. She was nicked, and for conspiring to pervert the course of justice and got three years when she was just absolutely innocent, yeah.
[Bernard] And what about...?
And he swore her life away.
[Bernard] What about all the other stories about electric boxes and...
No, a lot of it, all rubbish son. They could say that then and get away with it, but I only wished it had've been true. When I was doing me 20 years, wouldn't it have been lovely if I could have been going, "Ah, what a good job I made of that back molar. I wished I'd have turned up that machine a bit better." That wasn't true though. And poor Eddie and Charlie, the Richardsons, they got all that time and all, for absolutely nothing.
Found a little generator in the scrapyard and he used to attach it to people's nuts and everything and electrocute 'em. And one guy tells the story where he sat him down, hit him on the head with a bayonet and one of the crowd said, "Look at that, looks like a mouth opening." So he rubbed a pie in, give it something to eat. He's a fucking lunatic.
What give him, like the right that he has got a lot of arse hole with him you know? And I've served several sentences in a nick with him, Fraser, and he is gotta be loopy loop.
[Bernard] Freddie Foreman, considered by many to be the godfather of British crime, was one of the few men that the Krays respected. His name rightly or wrongly, is firmly attached to almost every unsolved gangland murder in the capital over the last 50 years. As well as robbing banks and blowing safes, he provided muscle and firepower to Ronnie and Reggie.
My memories wasn't really happy memories. Every time I saw them, there was always a problem or something, you know, or they was never, I went, the only good memories I've got is going around to their house and with my kids and meeting their mother, you know, Violet, and she would take the kids, she was a lovely, lovely woman, and she'd take the kids in, "I'll take them, hello Freddy and Jamie and Gregory, and she'd take them in the kitchen and give him a sandwich or, you know, drop of lemonade." And she was a very beautiful woman, lovely typical cockney mother, you know? And the old man used to keep it out the back. He'd never seen much of him, the father, but the twins... And it was always the house was always full of different people, you know, The Firm laying around in the vicinity. They was never on their own really. There was always someone about.
[Bernard] Like many faces, Foreman's reputation was forged with his fists both in the ring and on the streets.
I used to go to Covent Garden a lot and they had a bit of a straightener there with a fella, and we had a bit of a tear up in a cafe, and that it went down a little bit of history, you know, when we had this fight in this cafe.
[Bernard] Did you have a reputation then?
Yeah and then reputation started building up, you know, and I could, I was like, I could have a fight on the streets, the street fighter sort of thing. And at the coffee stalls, they would say there was one at Clapham Common, I know I had a...they used to sort of have people challenge you and say, you know, "Oh, you fancy your chances, or in fact we've got someone here who fucking can beat you." And all that as it used to go on, you know, it was a sort of...that meant it was all the macho fucking stuff, you know? Excuse me swearing. But it was the old Alpha male coming out in you, you know, and that, I finished up every... We used to go round to these coffee stalls, and I can tell you this now, quite honestly, the Elephant and Castle had a coffee stall, Camberwell Green had a coffee stall, Clapham Common had a coffee stall, Wandsworth Road had a coffee stall World's End, Chelsea had a coffee stall, Tooting Bec had a coffee stall, and I had a fight in every one of em, yeah. We used to go down the side street and have a straightener. But that, you know and then you go back and have a meat...cup of a tea and a meat pie and a sausage sandwich afterwards. You know, it was...there was no animosity, you know, it was, "All right, well he won." Take your coats off, they used to make a circle and you'd have to get at it, you know, but this is how we used to be and that sort of reputation and I suppose that's what, you know, made you who you were, you know.
[Bernard] As the Krays became more successful, they branched out from the East End and bought a club called Esmeralda's Barn in Knightsbridge.
I was there on the meeting when they took it over, but they took the East End to, to Knightsbridge, you know, all them ugly-looking bastards with their cuts down their faces and all that, and flat noses, and they should have left the club as it was, and run it as...without, and just sat back and got the, collected the debts that was owed, and that's all they needed to do. But of course, they ruined the place, like they ruined every fucking thing, you know.
[Bernard] Tensions between the Krays and Richardson firms boiled over one night when one of Foreman's staff, Kenny Hampton, was beaten up by members of the Richardson gang at The Astor Club in the West End.
He got bashed up down in the toilets for no reason or other. They kicked the shit out of him and he never turned up for work. I would go round and see his mother, and his mother said, he... and I saw him, his head was like a football," where it was, you know, enlarged, and he was all bruised and battered. And I said, "Get him up the hospital and have an x-ray. He's probably got concussion or something like that." Anyway, I find out that what Eddie and Fraser them had done and they was all in a group, and I went up, went over and I pulled 'em. I pulled Eddie about it and I stuck this 38. up his nostril, you know, up his nose. I said, "And that kid worked for me." I said, "And he's like going to the hospital." And they made out, it was nothing, but it wasn't nothing. It was a liberty and I saw it that way.
[Bernard] In 1965, Freddie Foreman's brother George was shot in the groin by East End villain Jimmy Evans, who would accuse him of having an affair with his wife. Not surprisingly, when Freddie found out, he vowed bloody revenge. Evans and his associate Ginger Marks were ambushed in the street. Evans escaped by hiding under a car. The body of Marks has never been found.
All I knew was someone come round to me and I got the message that George was in hospital, in St. Thomas's Hospital, and someone had shot him, where on his doorstep while he was having a meal with his wife and kids. Someone, Ginger knocked at the door. He went and answered the door and all the light had been taken out outside on the landing and it's all pitch black. And then someone stepped out the shadows with a shotgun and blasted him in the lower area, in the top of the... caught him in the top of the leg. And of course, I go up, I go to the hospital and the police were there on the bed and they went and had a cigarette and I said, "Who was it?" and he just said, whispered, "Ginger Tom," and that's the only name I had. Well, the twins knew everyone in the East End and so when I went to see the twins, they told me who Ginger Tom was, you know? And so that was Tommy Marks, and that's how I come to. Then I found out through that, who the other fellow was. I didn't know about the relationship he was having with this girl. I had no idea he'd been carrying on with somebody else's wife, you see? So that was something that, it was a shock to me. And we so now naturally I had to take revenge, you know?
So Freddie was always trying to track him down. But Ginger Marks was commonly called Gin. Jimmy Evans was commonly called Jim. So they pulled on him one day in Cheshire Street, and they hollered out, "Jim." They wanted Jimmy Evans but Ginger Marks turned around thinking he'd called "Gin" and they shot Ginger Marks, dragged him in the motor and whipped him off. And that was the last we ever saw of him.
[Bernard] Do you know what happened to his body?
No.
[Bernard] Matters came to a head in March, 1966 when a shoot out took place at Mr. Smith's Club in Catford between members of the Kray and Richardson firms. Eight people were shot that night, including Frankie Fraser and Eddie Richardson. One man loyal to the Krays, Dickie Hart was killed. The battle of Mr. Smith's, as it became known, would prove to be a turning point in London's gangland history.
We went over there and was unaware that other things had been going on and people thought we was going over there to put it on 'em when we wasn't at all. We were just going over there to feel the ground out and things like that. Anyway, they had two guns. We never had no guns. So, and then one of them wanted to have a fight with me, wanted to have a straightener with me, right?
[Bernard] Was it Dickie Hart no?
No, not Dickie Hart, no. Can't remember his name now. Quite a big lump anyway. So we had a fight on the dance floor. I done him on the dance floor, sat astride of him, I want to really punch his head through the fucking floorboards to be quite honest, but I've been waiting to get shot in the back. My mate had already been shot in the arm, Harry Rawlings, blood come out, spurting out everywhere. No, I'm waiting to get shot for beating him, to be honest. So I didn't go too strong. He's crying out, "That's it, I've had enough, I've had enough." So I got up and left him. Then there was a bit of movement from outside. Someone tried to get outside, get out the back door, right? So they run out the back door, so everyone run out the back door. And that's where Dickie Hart lost his gun. And he'd already shot Fraser with it and Harry Rawlings with it. It was quite a big 45, you know, and he finished up getting the gun and he got one from the gun, but he didn't survive it.
It's a great night, a great fight in there, Mr. Smith's, yeah. Very terrific fight. Knives, guns, everything.
Eddie and Fraser and all the rest of firm have been down there and it had kicked off and few people, about four people been shot, you know, one shotguns and everything, and they'd been killed. The little fella Dickie Hart and he was the casualty, but the actual person who actually did it wasn't arrested, wasn't captured and he fucked off. He went out the country and ain't never been seen again you know. But he...Fraser likes to make out he did it, but he didn't do it at all 'cause they had to carry him out with his leg shattered and everyone was like and Eddie was shot up the house and another one was shot in the arm and he was in a bad way...artery was pumping out of him. But it was just, it was just one of those things that kicked off and of course that was like an open warfare now. It was sort of, and that kicked the... that was the beginning of all the trouble.
[Bernard] Ex-professional, lightweight boxer, Jimmy Tippitt was one of the doormen at the club that night and had tried to take the gun off Dickie Hart.
I walked up to Dickie, I said, "What you doing?" He's gone, a Luger, honestly a Luger, it was a Luger. He said, "Jim, it's gonna be war tonight." He said, "And I'll be." I said, Dickie, I said, "Don't be silly." Took the gun off him. Put it in the girl's bag that I was with right? Then, boom, boom, boom, all everything else happened. Then Dickie Hart somehow or other got the gun. 'Cause I said to the girl when we was going over the... at Lewisham, going over the bridge like up to Ted's place to drop him off. He said, what was it, what did he say? Oh yeah, I said, to the girl, "Give us that gun. I'm gonna sling it over the bridge." There was a bridge there in Ladywell and I was gonna throw it. She went, "Oh, someone took it. It got...someone, I dunno, it must have gone." You know, she had a big bag, you know, and I said, "Oh, don't worry." Come back, got indoors, we're having a chat and cup of tea and that. And all of a sudden the phone went. I went, "Hello, it's Ted." He went, "Jim, Dickie Hart's dead, got killed." I said, "Oh, I'll see you in the morning." I thought, God, no, that was... that was it.
[Bernard] Frankie Fraser was charged with the murder of Dickie Hart, but found not guilty. However, both he and Eddie Richardson were convicted of causing afray and sentenced to five years in prison.
The jury retired, the hours went by, the cell doors are unlocked. Jury back, up them 12 steps into the Old Bailey court. Court number one, “Clerk of the court, Mr. Foreman Have we reached the verdict on count one, murder?" "Yes, sir." "Is that the verdict of you one and all?" "Yes sir." "What is that verdict on count one, murder, guilty or not guilty?" As the foreman went, "Not guilty." He sort of winked. I winked back. We went to the same school together and played in the same football team, St. Patrick's Roman Catholic School in Waterloo. Oh, lovely guy. You don't forget days like that. If found guilty well I'd have been sentenced to death, hung.
[Bernard] To avenge the murder of Dickie Hart, Ronnie Kray and Ian Barry walked into The Blind Beggar pub in the East End and shot Richardson henchman George Cornell through the head as he sat at the bar.
Well, he'd supposed to have insulted him and called him a fat poof or something like that. You know, I dunno what the truth of the matter was, but Ronnie Kray used to get the ump with people for very little reason you know, he didn't need a lot of excuses to get the ump with people. And this was a bad thing about him because of his mental state, you know? He wasn't a well person, he wasn't well at all. Georgie Cornell was from East London, and he'd gone over to South London to join up with the Richardson firm and he... so they felt that he'd...he was...he's not, he's just changed, his loyalties from east to south, you know. And I told Ronnie Kray afterwards, I said, "He should never done that or gone in that pub." It's like their front room. They lived above it. They had their kids above it and they had a shop, and Ian Barry's shots in the ceiling could have gone up and injured their family upstairs. You know what I mean? And you should never go in a person's house, should have waited for him, for Georgie Cornell to come out if they wanted to shoot him. And wait 'til he come out and got in his car or something. Not in the pub, in front of witnesses and other people and barmaids and everybody else. And I said it was a stupid thing to do.
[Bernard] Ronnie Kray was out of control, he was prepared to maim or murder people for the slightest misdemeanour. After a dispute at a nightclub involving a friend of the Krays and a burglar named Lenny Hamilton, Ronnie ordered Hamilton to attend a meeting.
So I go up there, get a cab, black cab, and go up there. They showed me in the kitchen and Ronnie was standing with his back to...I didn't know, but it was a gas stove. He sat me down in the chair, said, "All right, then?" I said, "Yeah," he said, "All right you can go now."
[Bernard] He said, "All right" what?
He said, "All right you can go now." I thought, "What you got me up here for?" I'm thinking. Then he told two people, two fellas to get hold of me and they got hold of me, like, and that's when I see the pokers on the gas. Well, you know what they sharpen knives on, cold steels? That's what he had on the gas.
[Bernard] And were you standing up or sitting down?
Pardon?
[Bernard] Were you standing up?
I was standing. They was holding me you know.
[Bernard] Right.
So as he's come towards me, I thought, "He's trying to fire me, what for?" Anyway I had black curly hair then and he started burning me hair off of me, you know, Fucking man's crazy like, you know, and then he put the pokers across. He was gonna burn me eyes out. And as he's coming towards me, someone shouted out, "No, Ron not that!" And he just stopped. He walked, as he walked away he turned round and said, "All right you can go now."
[Bernard] When bank robber, Albert Donoghue heard what had happened to his friend, Lenny Hamilton, he said he would shoot whoever was responsible, unaware of course, that man was Ronnie Kray.
Somebody's come to me. I was in The Black Swan in Bow and they said, "The Firm's looking for you." I said, "Oh well where are they?" So they said, "A little pub down off Valance Road." So I went round there and I was leaning on the bar and I noticed everybody moving away from me so I thought, "Oh there's some shit going on here." And the next thing, bang! I've got one in the leg. Reggie's crept up behind me and gone wallop.
After the shooting, Donoghue went to meet the Krays to settle their differences and shortly afterwards, he was invited to join their firm.
I was invited to go round the house one day, and I went down there and they're all sitting, the twins and Charlie sitting there, and then Charlie stood up and he said, "Welcome to The Firm," like some fucking board meeting. And he said, "We want you on our firm to earn money with us. Forget all them bank robberies and shit like that," so...
[Lenny] That's true what you're saying.
And then they put me on a succession of doors in different clubs. And so you become a face, they use you because you're a face. They know that people will respect when you're on the door. to go, "Oops, don't start fucking about in here, it's The Firm, belongs to The Firm." A regular thing was Reggie and Ronnie would have a bet between themselves. "I bet you a tenner, I'll get more money today than you."
[Lenny] Oh yeah.
And then Ronnie would take Scotchie and Reggie would take me and off we'd go and visit different people and just demand dough off them. And whoever got the most, nicked the tenner. A tenner wasn't worth two bob in them days.
[Bernard] The Krays employed their terrifying reputation to extort money. One tactic was to send someone to trash a premises before offering their victim protection for a fee the following day.
They would send in a troublemaker first, someone like Teddy Smith, who was easily, two light ales, and he was drunk as a skunk. And then he'd smash the place up. Then the next day, the briefcase man went in and said, "Look I can put a stop of all this shit for you. You just give us a pony a week and we'll forget about it."
Well, if you didn't fear 'em, you either was very brave or stupid or...
you was telling lies.
You was telling lies if you said you'd never feared 'em.
[Bernard] Why?
Because they were really frightening, if you really knew 'em when they threatened you.
[Bernard] In 1966, the notorious Axe-Man, Frank Mitchell, escaped from Dartmoor Prison, and the Krays agreed to put him up in a small flat in the East End. However, it was a decision they would quickly regret as Mitchell turned psychotically violent, threatening to take hostages and kill people. The twins called Freddie Foreman to try and sort out the mess.
So they had minders looking after him day and night, and they was all terrified and shit scared of him, and they wasn't...they was complaining all the time. And so, they got me over, asked me to come over, and I went to see Reggie and Charlie, and they said, "Can you get us outta trouble here and help us?" and they had rings under their eyes and that. He's threatened to go round and take their mother hostage. and he knew what to do to blame 'em if... and he would take six coppers with him if the police turned up, he would shoot his way out. Now they're really worried now. So now they've gotta get some help from somewhere and they come to me again. So I go over and see 'em. So I've made arrangements to pick him up and take him out the country, you know, take him away down the country.
[Bernard] One of the Kray firm, Albert Donoghue was there that night and escorted Frank Mitchell to a waiting van.
Gerry Callaghan was on Foreman's firm. He opened the back doors. I got in and they sent me up the front of the van, and there was a small partition between the back of the van and the driving, the cab. So I sat down and, Gerard... ...Callaghan has shut the back doors, and he walked round and got in the passenger seat and slammed the passenger door. I didn't know 'til later, when he slammed that passenger door, that was the signal that everything's all right. That is when the guns opened up. They was pumping shots into him and he was, "Oh, oh," groaning. He wasn't dead, they didn't kill him. And then Gerard said, go on, "Fred, give him another one. I'm empty." So Foreman put his muzzle under his ear and gone, "Badang." That was it. He flopped over then. He was dead, obviously. He had, he must, I worked it out as to say revolver at maximum six shots, automatic anything up to 30 and then badang, bang, bang, just pumping shots into him. So God knows how many shots it took to kill him.
[Bernard] Foreman was also implicated in the murder of a small time crook, Jack "The Hat" McVitie. Reggie Kray, who was by now mimicking his twin brother's psychotic madness, decided to kill McVitie after a trivial dispute about money. And how did they kill Jack?
Well, they got lured him to a party, and the Lambrianou brothers took him to this party, and when they got him down there and there was a...they just fucking challenged him, and finished up stabbing him to death. Reggie stabbed him to death. Ronnie was holding him and this guy, Ronnie Hart, the cousin, their cousin was involved in it all, stabbing him and holding him and it was a messy, really messy job, what they did of him anyway. Took a long time to kill him apparently. It was a bad scene.
[Bernard] His body's never been found either has it?
Oh no, no. Well, they took him across and dumped him right on my fucking doorstep, round the corner from my pub and left him there in the back of a car, you know, covered up in a bed, in a fucking candlewick bedspread on the back seat of a car. I mean, what a thing to do, you know? I mean, and there's right outside a church where there'd been a wedding take place, you know, After that, after that incident, there was no report, you know, everyone was missing. He was missing. Jack was missing. He, Mitchell was missing and Marks was missing. So, you know, there was all pointing a finger at me all the time, you know, and that, of course there was, you can imagine what was going on in a, you know, at Scotland Yard and places like that. What they was all thinking, so, but they, you know, they got a lot of things wrong. They wasn't right what they were thinking. Anyway, we won't go into that.
[Bernard] The reason so few people were ever found is that the Krays had a Polish body-man who used to dispose of their mutilated victims.
He used to break lorries up, smelter ali and he had a big aluminium smelt.
[Bernard] Like a furnace?
[Billy] Yeah and what he what he used to do, he used to have an old chest freezer. He used to put 'em in there.
[Albert] Freeze them up.
[Billy] Then he'd cut 'em up. And put 'em in the smelt.
[Albert] Yeah.
[Billy] And if there was any bones left, we used to crush 'em all up and then go and throw them in the river. And that's how, where we disposed of the body.
[Bernard] The Krays had become so out of control, It could only be a matter of time before they were killed or arrested. In fact, Scotland Yard had formed a special squad of officers to end their reign, led by Detective Chief Inspector Leonard "Nipper" Reed. Even their own firm were concerned about their random acts of violence and were conspiring against them.
When Ronnie Kray sat in the car, he always wanted to sit in the passenger seat. So we just sort of larking about, we said, "Be so easy to just sit behind him, when you find a nice corner, pop him in the back of the head and chuck him out and let him roll down the bank or something." It would've been so easy.
[Bernard] Much of the talk about the twins demise was little more than wishful thinking, but some of their most trusted associates did actually meet at Simpson's restaurant in London to discuss the best way of removing them for all time.
[Freddie] I thought they should be ironed out, to be honest.
[Bernard] You thought the Krays should have been shot?
Yeah, the two of them, yeah.
Why did you think?
Because they was too, they was dangerous to everybody. And if they hadn't been arrested when they were, that's what would've happened.
Was that...?
Yeah.
That had been...?
That was on the cards yeah.
That the two of them would be shot?
Yeah, yeah, not Charlie, but they would yeah. That's in the Simpson's in the Strand that took place, you know, discussion.
The Krays were eventually charged with the murders of Cornell and McVitie and sentenced to life imprisonment. Their plans to control cities as far north as Newcastle were never to be realised. The Geordies with their own bloody crime history are adamant that they would never have had a chance anyway.