A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

In Winchester jail it became clear that Ronald Kray was mentally unstable, and he was transferred
to a mental hospital in Epsom. One day, Reggie came to visit him. It was Ronnie who walked out
with the other visitors. Then Reggie established his own identity, and had to be allowed to go. The
journalist Norman Lucas finally persuaded the Krays that Ronnie should give himself up. He was
sent back to the mental hospital. Freed in the spring of 1959, he went back into partnership with
Reggie, and they opened the Double R club - the initials intertwined like those of a Rolls Royce - in
Bow. They also opened a West End night club and restaurant called Esmeralda’s Barn, off
Knightsbridge, and began to acquire a certain celebrity as they mixed with show business people
and politicians. The food was excellent (I once ate there myself), but their hospitality was too
lavish, and it collapsed. A venture called the Kentucky Club in the East End was more successful.
In 1959, Reggie was sentenced to prison for eighteen months for demanding money with menaces;
but he was soon out again, and the life of celebrity - and violence - continued as before.
The twins seemed to be dual personalities. Their cousin Ronald Hart, who had spent some time in
prison, went to work for them in the mid-1960s, and described his impressions to Norman Lucas.
Socially, the twins were charming; they dressed well, their manners were excellent, and their
famous friends found it impossible to believe any ill of them. Yet both were capable of unprovoked
violence; Ronald, in particular, was given to fits of hysterics in which he seemed to become half
insane. One man who placed a hand on his shoulder and said jokingly that he was getting fat had
his face slashed open so that it needed seventy stitches. A customer in a pub who asked for change
was beaten up. A man who was suspected of cheating the twins was shot in the leg; Reggie Kray
told Hart, ‘You want to try it some time. It’s a nice feeling when you shoot someone.’ Hart told
Lucas: ‘I saw beatings that were unnecessary even by underworld standards and witnessed people
slashed with a razor just for the hell of it.’
In 1965, Reggie Kray married his childhood sweetheart, Frances Shea, seven years his junior. The
marriage was a disaster from the beginning. On their honeymoon, he locked her in the bridal suite
in Athens and went to get drunk. She claimed that the marriage was never consummated. Two
years later, she left him, and two months after that, killed herself with an overdose. She was
twenty-three.
It was also in 1965 that the Krays were arrested and charged with demanding money with menaces;
they were refused bail on the grounds that they might ‘seek to interfere with prosecution witnesses’.
Lord Boothby - an acquaintance of Ronald Kray’s - caused something of a sensation by asking in
the House of Lords how much longer they were to be held without trial. After ninety days and two
trials, the twins were acquitted.
The chief rival of the Krays were the Richardson brothers, Eddie and Charles, who dominated
crime on the south side of the river. The rival gangleaders had nothing but contempt for one
another. The chief lieutenant of the Richardsons, a man named George Cornell, was also hated by
Ronald Kray; he had openly taunted Ronald with being a homosexual, and had warned the father of
Kray’s nineteen-year-old boyfriend of the nature of the relationship. By March 1966, most of the
Richardson gang was in custody. Only one prominent member had escaped arrest - George Cornell.
And on the evening of 6 March he walked into a pub called the Blind Beggar, in Bethnal Green -
the heart of the Krays’ ‘manor’. Half a mile away, at the ‘Lion’, in Tapp Street, Ronald Kray was
informed that Cornell was on his territory. He left immediately, in company with a henchman
named John Barrie, a Scot. At 8.30, he walked into the bar of the Blind Beggar. It was a quiet
evening and the bar was almost empty. As Barrie fired warning shots at the ceiling, Ronald Kray
drew a 9 mm Mauser pistol and shot Cornell above the right eye. Then the two gunmen walked out.