Kray twins

• 1. The Kray Twins

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  The Kray twins were convicted of murder in 1969, yet crowds of thousands lined up to applaud when Reggie Kray was buried at Chingford Mount Cemetery in October 2000. Ronald and Reginald Kray were identical brothers from Haggerston in East London. From the late 1950s until their arrest in 1968, they led a gang known as the Firm. Its trade included armed robbery, arson, protection rackets, gambling and murder. The same brothers were photographed by David Bailey and interviewed on television. How did two violent men become fashionable? Why did witnesses stay silent for so long? And why do the Krays still stand out, when other East End brothers in crime have been forgotten?

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• 2. Mother And Twins

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  Ronald and Reginald Kray were born on the 24th of October 1933 in Haggerston, with Reggie arriving ten minutes ahead of Ronnie. Their father, Charles David Kray, was a rag-and-bone man who drank heavily and roamed southern England looking for junk to sell. Their mother, Violet, ran the household. The twins had an older brother, Charles James, and a sister, also named Violet, who had died in infancy. At the age of three the twins caught diphtheria.

  In Bethnal Green, Violet Kray was something of a minor celebrity for raising two healthy twins. Between the wars, working-class families commonly lost one twin before adulthood, so two survivors drew admiration. Neighbours sensed an almost unnatural closeness between the boys and their mother, who avoided other people. Ronnie later said: "We had our mother, and we had each other, so we never needed no one else". A cousin and schoolmate, Billy Wilshire, recalled: "It's hard to say exactly what it was, but they weren't like other children". The biographer John Pearson blamed Violet for planting the malignant narcissism the twins showed as adults. In his view she told her sons they were extraordinary while indulging their every whim.

  In 1938 the family moved from Stean Street in Haggerston to 178 Vallance Road in Bethnal Green. Charles Kray senior was conscripted into the British Army in September 1939 and promptly deserted. He lived as a fugitive for 15 years and was finally arrested in 1954. Meanwhile the twins, their mother and their older brother were evacuated to East House in Hadleigh, Suffolk. They stayed about a year before Violet, missing her friends and family, took them back to London. In a 1989 interview, Ronnie remembered Hadleigh as their first taste of countryside, with quiet, fresh air and winter sledging on Constitution Hill. As adults, the twins bought two homes in nearby Bildeston, one for themselves and one for their parents.

  Their maternal grandfather, Jimmy "Cannonball" Lee, steered the boys into amateur boxing, then a popular pastime for working-class East End boys. Rivalry between the brothers pushed them on, and each had some success. Ronnie was the more aggressive, forever in street fights as a teenager. The scholar Jonathan Raban described him as a boy of low IQ but an avid reader, drawn to books about T. E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate and Al Capone. Raban also traced much of Ronnie's teenage rage to having to hide his bisexual tendencies. The brothers also hung around the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel.

  In March 1952 the twins were called up for National Service and reported to the Royal Fusiliers depot at the Tower of London. Within minutes they tried to leave. When a corporal tried to stop them, Ronnie punched him on the jaw and seriously injured him. The next morning police arrested the brothers at home and handed them back to the army.

  In September, absent without leave again, they assaulted a police constable who tried to arrest them. They became among the last prisoners held at the Tower, then spent a month in Shepton Mallet military prison in Somerset awaiting court-martial. There they met a fellow inmate, Charlie Richardson, who would later form a rival gang. After their conviction the twins were sent to a jail in Canterbury, Kent.

  Once it was clear they would be dishonourably discharged, their behaviour in Canterbury grew worse. They threw tantrums, emptied a latrine bucket over a sergeant and tipped a canteen of hot tea over another guard. They handcuffed a guard to their bars with stolen cuffs and set their bedding on fire. After assaulting a guard with a vase, they escaped but were quickly recaptured. Their last night in military custody passed with cider, crisps and cigarillos supplied by their young national service guards.

  Raban wrote that prison psychiatrists found Ronnie "educationally subnormal, psychopathic, schizophrenic and insane". Even so, the brothers came home with a militaristic swagger. Ronnie took to calling himself the Colonel, and 178 Vallance Road became Fort Vallance.

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• 3. Nightclubs And Celebrity

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  A run-down snooker club in Mile End was the Krays' first purchase once their criminal records and dishonourable discharges had ended their boxing careers. The brothers used it to launch several protection rackets. By the end of the 1950s they were working for Jay Murray of Liverpool, hijacking trucks, committing armed robbery and setting fires. These crimes won them other clubs and properties.

  In 1960 Ronnie was jailed for 18 months over a protection racket. While he was inside, the landlord Peter Rachman sold Reggie a nightclub called Esmeralda's Barn, on the spot where the Berkeley Hotel now stands. The sale was meant to ward off further extortion threats. Owning the club extended the Krays' influence into the West End and made them celebrities as well as criminals.

  Laundering money through dog tracks, horse tracks and ordinary businesses drew investigators to several of the twins' associates in the mid-1960s. Ronnie consciously modelled the Firm on the Chicago underworld of Capone's day. Having read that 1920s Chicago gangsters had barbers visit them at home, he had his own barber come to his flat. Raban called Ronnie the dimmer twin, a man living out a crude fiction who twisted the city into the shape of a bad thriller.

  The year 1960 also made gambling in clubs legal in the United Kingdom. The Krays owned four nightclubs where gambling was allowed. That let them pass as successful businessmen and mix with respectable people who would once have shunned gangsters.

  David Bailey photographed the brothers more than once. Their circle took in lords, MPs and stars such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Liza Minnelli and Barbara Windsor. They belonged to the Swinging London scene. Many saw them as men who had climbed out of poverty by their own efforts, a perverse example of the meritocracy that was to replace the old class system. The scholars Chris Jenks and Justin Lorentzen note that the 1960s brought widespread mistrust of the Establishment, and the Krays were seen as folk heroes.

  The twins courted journalists, inviting them to photograph the brothers with celebrities in nightclubs and publicising their donations to charity. The sociologist Dick Hebdige credited them with a sophisticated awareness of public relations. They dressed as films had taught the public to expect gangsters to dress, in dark double-breasted suits, tight-knotted ties and shoulder-padded overcoats. They added large gold rings and diamond cuff links. The scholar Ruth Penfold-Mounce called them classic social bandits, criminals admired as Robin Hood figures who stood up to a corrupt Establishment. They also stressed their respect towards women, knowing the public disliked men who lacked it.

  Tony Lambrianou, a former member of the Firm, called the positive image a myth. He said the only people the brothers ever cared about were themselves. Jenks and Lorentzen agreed that the folk-hero picture had little to do with who the brothers were, and found them far more vicious and selfish. The East End had its own rules, including a deep distrust of the Metropolitan Police summed up in the saying "thou shalt not grass".

  Others read the same pictures differently. Bailey's famous photographs were described as the phrenological archetypes of proletarian villainy. The rarity of identical twins gave the pair a freak-show quality, since many viewers found two men who looked and sounded alike unnerving. Lambrianou recalled in 1995: "You were never, ever on solid ground with them". He added that they had an unspoken language of their own.

  Ronnie flaunted his relationships with men at a time when homosexuality was widely considered abnormal, especially in the East End underworld. Reggie was ostensibly heterosexual, with one known relationship with a woman and a brief marriage. This indeterminate sexuality added to the sense that the twins were somehow unnatural. The sordid facts presented at their murder trial would eventually eclipse the folk-hero image with a folk-villain one. Before then, Ronnie's private life tied him to a Conservative peer whom the public knew as a celebrity guest on talk shows.

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• 4. Powerful Friends

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  In July 1964 the Sunday Mirror ran a story under the headline "The Pictures We Must Not Print", with the subtitle "Peer and Gangster: Yard Inquiry". The peer was Lord Boothby, a Conservative. Tom Driberg, a Labour MP and gossip columnist for the Daily Express, knew Boothby through dinner parties hosted by the newspaper's proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook. Through his friend, the theatre director Joan Littlewood, Driberg had met Reggie, who introduced Boothby to Ronnie. Ronnie and Boothby began a relationship, and Ronnie hosted parties for Boothby and other upper-class gay men. He wanted both blackmail material and the sense of power that came from knowing powerful men.

  Police had leaked photographs to the Sunday Mirror showing Ronnie with Boothby. Others showed them with Boothby's chauffeur Leslie Holt and Teddy Smith, a member of the Firm who was also Driberg's lover. Sex between men was still a criminal offence. The photographs were never printed, and no names appeared in the piece. Even so, the Krays threatened the journalists. Boothby threatened to sue with the help of Arnold Goodman, solicitor to the Labour leader Harold Wilson.

  The newspaper backed down. It sacked its editor, printed an apology and paid Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement, worth over £1 million in 2024 values. Other newspapers were then unwilling to expose the Krays. Boothby called the money "tainted money", and it appears the Krays took the bulk of it. One of his first acts after the settlement was to write Ronnie a cheque for £5,000. Ronnie launched his own libel action against the Sunday Mirror columnist Cecil Harmsworth King, who had called him a "homosexual thug". The judge dismissed it as fair comment.

  Police investigated the Krays several times, but their reputation for violence frightened witnesses. Both main parties also had reasons for caution. The Conservatives feared that the Boothby connection would be publicised again. Labour held a very thin majority, faced the prospect of a snap election, and did not want links between Ronnie and Driberg made public. Decades later, Channel 4 established the truth of the allegations in a documentary called The Gangster and the Pervert Peer, released in 2009.

  The Krays' supposed hold over political figures like Boothby also caught the eye of the American Mafia. During the 1960s the brothers formed an alliance with the Commission, the Mafia's governing body. Meyer Lansky and Angelo Bruno wanted to invest in London's nightclubs and casinos and use them for money laundering. Havana's establishments had long served that purpose, but the Cuban Revolution of 1959 closed them. Lansky and Bruno were considered the diplomats of American organised crime, and so the best fit to negotiate with the mercurial and irascible Krays.

  George Raft, a declining Hollywood actor, was the go-between. The Krays idolised him for playing the hitman Guino Rinaldo in the film Scarface, made in 1932. Raft had moved to London in 1965 hoping for roles in European films. Lansky had opened the Colony Sports Club in London and installed Raft as its nominal owner, partly to avoid the attention of British authorities. The club courted older, wealthy American tourists. The Krays were hired to supply security, paid £500 per week. A planned meeting between Ronnie, Lansky and Bruno in New York was aborted when US immigration authorities denied Ronnie entry.

  The following year, a Montreal branch of the Royal Bank of Canada was robbed of C$50,000 in bearer bonds. Similar robberies in Montreal brought the total haul to C$1 million. The Cotroni crime family, the Canadian satellite of New York's Bonanno family, chose to sell the bonds in Britain through the Krays. The twins sent Leslie "the Brain" Payne, a corrupt businessman, to collect them. He cashed them at a London brokerage house and made a handsome profit for the Firm. The Krays became the preferred British partners of the Mafia.

  Payne then demanded a larger share, since he took all the risks of smuggling and redeeming the bonds. The Krays refused, and he left the Firm. He never went to the authorities, but the mere chance that he might testify led the Krays to plot his murder. Payne had fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944 and laughed at their threats, which only made the twins angrier. That plot against Payne would later cost a different man his life.

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• 5. Three Killings

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  Ronnie shot George Cornell, a member of the Richardson Gang, at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel on the 9th of March 1966. The day before, a shoot-out at Mr. Smith's, a nightclub in Catford, had left Richard Hart, an associate of the Firm, dead. The shooting led to the arrest of nearly all the Richardson Gang. Cornell, by chance, was absent from the club and was not arrested.

  Ronnie was drinking in another pub when he learned where Cornell was. He went to the Blind Beggar with his driver, "Scotch Jack" John Dickson, and his assistant, Ian Barrie. Ronnie walked straight up to Cornell and shot him in the head in full public view. Barrie, confused by what had happened, fired five shots in the air to warn onlookers not to tell the police. Cornell died at 3:30a.m. in hospital.

  According to some sources, the motive was an insult. Cornell had allegedly used a derogatory term for Ronnie's sexuality during a confrontation at the Astor Club on Christmas Day 1965. Frankie Fraser of the Richardsons was tried for Hart's murder and acquitted. Witnesses would not co-operate because of intimidation. In his 1988 memoir, Ronnie wrote that he had never felt so alive, and that he could still recall every second of the killing 20 years on.

  The Krays' Mafia associates were unhappy, feeling it reckless for Ronnie to shoot someone in public instead of handing the job to a junior man. With Raft's help, Reggie kept the alliance alive. He argued that the Firm was still the best partner the Mafia had in London, since not one witness at the Blind Beggar would testify. Shortly afterwards, a Home Office order listed Raft as an "undesirable" and kept him from returning to the UK. That cost the Krays their strongest ally within the Mafia.

  On the 12th of December 1966, the Krays helped Frank Mitchell, "the Mad Axeman", escape from Dartmoor Prison. Ronnie had befriended him in Wandsworth Prison. Mitchell wanted the authorities to review his case for parole, and Ronnie thought he was doing him a favour. The plan was to highlight Mitchell's case in the media and force the authorities to act. The Krays hid him in a friend's flat in Barking Road, East Ham. Mitchell was a large man with a mental disorder, and he was hard to control. He disappeared, and the Krays were acquitted of his murder. Freddie Foreman, a friend of the twins, claimed in his autobiography Respect that he shot Mitchell as a favour and disposed of the body at sea.

  In October 1967, four months after the death of his wife Frances, Reggie was allegedly urged on by Ronnie to kill Jack "the Hat" McVitie. McVitie was a minor member of the gang who had failed to carry out a £1,000 contract to kill Leslie Payne, their former financial adviser. He had been paid £500 in advance. He was lured to a rented basement flat in Evering Road, Hackney, home to Carol Skinner, known as "Blonde Carol", on the pretence of a party.

  Inside, McVitie saw Ronnie seated in the front room. Ronnie abused him and cut him below the eye with a piece of broken glass. As the argument grew heated, Reggie pointed a handgun at McVitie's head and pulled the trigger twice, but it failed to fire. The twins' cousin, Ronnie Hart, then held McVitie in a bear hug. Reggie was handed a carving knife and stabbed McVitie to death. Many in the Firm felt he had not deserved to die. In a 2000 interview, Foreman said McVitie left carnage in his wake through drugs and heavy drinking, and had threatened the twins and their family.

  Tony Lambrianou, Chris Lambrianou and Ronnie Bender cleared up the evidence and tried to dispose of the body. It was too big for the boot of the car, so they wrapped it in an eiderdown and put it on the back seat. Tony drove, with Chris and Bender following. In the Blackwall tunnel, Chris lost Tony's car and spent up to 15 minutes searching around Rotherhithe. He found Tony outside St Mary's Church, where the car had run out of fuel with the body still inside. They left it there and went home. Bender phoned Charlie Kray to say it was dealt with.

  When the twins learned where the corpse had been left, they were livid. They phoned Foreman, who was running a pub in Southwark. At dawn he found the car, broke into it and drove the body to Newhaven. There, with the help of a trawlerman, the body was bound with chicken wire and dumped in the English Channel. This killing began to turn many people against the Krays. Some were now ready to tell Scotland Yard what had happened, fearing the same could happen to them. At Scotland Yard, a detective known as Nipper had been waiting for such witnesses.

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• 6. Nipper Read's Case

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  Detective Chief Superintendent Leonard "Nipper" Read of Scotland Yard was promoted to the Murder Squad, and his first assignment was to bring down the Kray twins. During the first half of 1964 he had already investigated them. But publicity and official denials of Ronnie's relationship with Boothby made the evidence he gathered useless. Read tried again in 1967 and kept running into the East End wall of silence. By the end of 1967 he had built up enough evidence to move.

  Early in 1968 the Krays employed Alan Bruce Cooper, who sent Paul Elvey to Glasgow to buy explosives for a car bomb. Elvey, a radio engineer, had put the pirate station Radio Sutch on the air in 1964, and it was later renamed Radio City. Police detained him in Scotland, and he confessed to involvement in three murder attempts. Cooper weakened the evidence by claiming to be an agent of the US Treasury Department investigating links between the American Mafia and the Kray gang. The attempted murders were his way of shifting blame onto the Krays.

  Scotland Yard decided to arrest the Krays on the evidence already collected, hoping that more witnesses would come forward once the twins were in custody. On the 8th of May 1968, the Krays and 15 members of the Firm were arrested. Exceptional measures were used to stop collusion between the accused. Read then interviewed each prisoner in secret and offered every member of the Firm a deal in return for testimony against the others.

  Albert Donoghue, Reggie's right-hand man, told the twins to their faces that he would not be cajoled into pleading guilty, which angered them. He then let Read know through his mother that he was ready to co-operate. His testimony led to the arrest of Ronnie Hart, who had not been a name the police were seeking. Offered the same terms, Hart told Read everything that had happened during McVitie's murder, though he knew nothing of what became of the body. "Scotch Jack" Dickson, who had driven Ronnie and Barrie to the Blind Beggar, also turned over all he knew about Cornell's murder. He had not seen the shooting, but he was an accessory. The police still needed an actual witness to that killing. Evidence about Frank Mitchell's escape and disappearance proved much harder to obtain, since most of those arrested had no part in it.

  The trial ran from January to March 1969, and it was a media sensation. Demand to attend was so high that a black market developed, with seats in the public gallery selling at £5 a day. It was the longest murder hearing in the history of British criminal justice. Nemone Lethbridge represented the brothers in court. Their defence under counsel John Platts-Mills consisted of flat denials of every charge and attempts to discredit witnesses by pointing to their criminal pasts. Justice Melford Stevenson told the defendants: "In my view, society has earned a rest from your activities".

  In March 1969 both brothers were sentenced to life imprisonment, since death had been abolished as the mandatory sentence for murder four years earlier. The judge recommended a non-parole period of 30 years for the murders of Cornell and McVitie. Their brother Charlie received ten years for his part in the murders. Years later, the brothers would need a large police guard just to attend their mother's funeral.

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• 7. Life Behind Bars

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  Violet Kray died of cancer in early August 1982, and on the 11th of August the twins attended her funeral under a large police guard. They were not allowed to attend her burial in the family plot at Chingford Mount Cemetery. Celebrities such as Diana Dors came, along with underworld figures. When their father died in March 1983, the twins did not ask permission to attend, hoping to avoid the publicity that had surrounded their mother's funeral.

  Ronnie was a Category A prisoner, denied almost all liberties and not allowed to mix with other inmates. He was eventually certified insane, his paranoid schizophrenia held in check by constant medication. In 1979 he was committed to Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire, where he lived the rest of his life. Reggie spent eight years in Maidstone Prison as a Category B prisoner. In 1997 he was moved to Wayland Prison in Norfolk, a Category C prison.

  In 1985 Broadmoor officials found a business card of Ronnie's. It led to evidence that the twins, from separate institutions, were running Krayleigh Enterprises, a bodyguard and protection business for Hollywood stars. Their partners were their older brother Charlie and an accomplice at large. Among the clients was Frank Sinatra, who hired 18 bodyguards from the firm for his visit to the 1985 Wimbledon Championships. Documents released under Freedom of Information laws showed that officials were concerned but believed they had no legal basis to shut the business down.

  A long-running campaign, with some minor celebrity support, sought the twins' release. Successive Home Secretaries vetoed it, largely because both men's prison records were marred by violence towards other inmates. The campaign gathered momentum after the release of the film The Krays in 1990, produced by Ray Burdis. The Spandau Ballet brothers Martin and Gary Kemp played Reggie and Ronnie. Ronnie, Reggie and Charlie received £255,000 for the film. Reggie wrote that he seemed to have walked a double path through most of his life, and that one more step in either direction might have made him celebrated rather than notorious. Others point to his violent prison record and argue that the twins' temperaments differed little.

  In his autobiography My Story, published in 1993, Ronnie stated that he was bisexual, not gay. In the 1960s he had planned to marry a woman named Monica, whom he had dated for nearly three years. He was arrested before the wedding, and she married his former boyfriend. Even so, 59 letters he sent her between May and December 1968 show his feelings had not faded, and she still cared for him too. The letters were auctioned in 2010. Ronnie later married twice. He wed Elaine Mildener in the Broadmoor chapel in 1985, with Joey Pyle as best man, and they divorced in 1989. He then married Kate Howard and divorced her in 1994.

  Reggie married Frances Shea in 1965, and the marriage lasted eight months before she left. She died in 1967, and an inquest concluded that she had taken her own life. In 2002 an ex-lover of Reggie's alleged that a jealous Ronnie had murdered her. A fellow inmate, Bradley Allardyce, who spent three years with Reggie in Maidstone Prison, claimed that Reggie had confessed the same thing to him. In 1997 Reggie married Roberta Jones, whom he met while still in prison. She was helping to publicise a film about Ronnie.

  Ronnie suffered a heart attack at Broadmoor on the 15th of March 1995 and died two days later at Wexham Park Hospital in Slough, aged 61. Reggie was allowed out of prison in handcuffs to attend the funeral. Charlie Kray had been released in 1975 after serving seven years of his ten. In 1997 he was sentenced to 12 years for conspiracy to smuggle cocaine in an undercover drug sting. He died in prison of natural causes on the 4th of April 2000, aged 72, and Reggie was again allowed out to attend.

  In prison, Reggie became a born-again Christian. In 2000 he was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer. Home Secretary Jack Straw directed his release from Wayland Prison on compassionate grounds on the 26th of August 2000. After a stay at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, Reggie spent his last weeks with his wife Roberta in a suite at the Townhouse Hotel in Norwich. He died of cancer on the 1st of October 2000, aged 66, eight weeks after his release.

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• 8. The Kray Legend

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  The scholars Chris Jenks and Justin Lorentzen argue that the Krays have entered the realm of popular myth. They borrow a definition from Peter Burke's 1989 essay "History as a Social Memory". Burke used the word not for inaccurate history but for a story with symbolic meanings, built from stereotyped incidents and larger-than-life characters, whether heroes or villains. In this sense the Krays embody a particular version of East End history and a symbol of its dark criminal past.

  The East End of the 1950s and 1960s was full of gangster brothers, including the Richardsons, the Nashes, the Dixons, the Woods, the Malones, the Webbs and the Lambrianous. Only the Krays live on in popular memory. Jenks and Lorentzen note that a vast number of East Enders still claim some link to the twins or their family, often despite impossible dates. The American scholar Homer Pettey observes that more films have been made about the Krays than about any other British gangsters. He argues that they stand for the dark side of British national identity, in sharp contrast to the usual positive images. He adds that their criminal career ended with their convictions in 1969, which lets the story close on a reassuring note of law and order prevailing.

  Pettey also sees twin lives as fascinating for their rarity. East End and London media lore hinted at two personalities in the pair: the gangster and the gentleman, the schizophrenic sadist and the clear-headed businessman, the promiscuous homosexual and the monogamous married man.

  The twins seeded a large bibliography of autobiographical accounts, biographical reconstructions, commentary, fiction and speculation. A 1970 Monty Python sketch, the Piranha Brothers, was inspired by the Krays. Legend, a 2015 biopic, cast Tom Hardy as both Ronnie and Reggie. Low-budget films followed, including The Rise of the Krays in 2015 and its sequel The Fall of the Krays in 2016. The Krays: Dead Man Walking, released in 2018, focused on Frank Mitchell's escape and death. Code of Silence, from 2021, followed Nipper Read's final push to convict the brothers. James Fox met Ronnie at HM Prison Brixton while researching his role in the 1970 film Performance. Richard Burton visited Ronnie at Broadmoor to prepare for the violent gangster he played in the 1971 film Villain.

  Theatre took up the story in the 1970s. Howard Barker wrote Alpha Alpha in 1972, and in 1977 Snoo Wilson wrote the musical England England, with Bob Hoskins and Brian Hall in the lead roles. Both used thinly veiled versions of the twins. In 1989 Morrissey released "Last of the Famous International Playboys", inspired by what he saw as the media's glamourisation of the Krays. Reggie said in his autobiography that he liked the tune but found the lyrics lacking. Morrissey replied that he could not get away from critics. The post-punk band Idles closes the opening track of its album Joy as an Act of Resistance with the line "I'm like Reggie Kray".

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