Autobiography

I make no secret of the fact I did not have a lot
of time for him for the way he treated my
mother, and I hated him when he left her, but,
the one thing I did admire about Godfrey Gold
was that he was no coward. He was only a
flyweight in boxing terms but he would not
tolerate bullies, and would stand up to guys
two stone heavier and six inches taller if they
tried to muscle in on our pitch down the local
market.
It was a trait I shared; not just in the way I’d
stood up to Pikey and Derek Moon as a young
boy, but the establishment who hounded me
for thirty years and later Combat 18 who
terrorised me for nearly a decade.
This however, was a different kind of enemy,
different to anything we had encountered
before.
This was the murderous criminal world of
Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Mad Frankie Fraser,
Jack McVittie, Charlie and Eddie Richardson,
and George Cornell; gangsters and villains who
ruled the East End and beyond. They
committed every conceivable crime, including
murder, and the fear they generated ensured
that the police would rarely have a witness
come forward.
Goddy told us he had arranged to meet Cornell
outside Bloom’s, the Jewish restaurant in
Whitechapel High Street the following day, the
10th of March 1966. The meeting would no
doubt be about protection money, the usual
story about not wanting your offices or your
warehouse burned down. The protection racket
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