Джон Пирсон «The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins»

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Автор Джон Пирсон

JOHN PEARSON

THE PROFESSION OF VIOLENCE

The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins

TO FRANK TAYLOR

Contents

Introduction to the Fourth Edition

1 Violet’s Twins

2 Battle Training

3 The Billiard Hall

4 The Colonel

5 Gun Time

6 Twins Apart

7 Flight from Long Grove

8 Comeback for the Colonel

9 Barn of Gold

10 Organized Crime

11 Twins Victorious

12 A Marriage in the Family

13 Axe Man

14 The Murder Machine

15 Nipper’s Secret War

16 Arrest

17 Retribution

Postscript

Note on the Author

Introduction to the Fourth Edition

‘You can’t come to terms with criminals and there’s

no real excuse for doing so except total ignorance

of the real nature of their crimes. ’

H. H. Kirst, The 20th of July

It seems an age since I first met the Kray twins and was able to observe them at close quarters in their last extraordinary phase of freedom before their arrest in May 1968; and in retrospect I am slightly shocked by the naivety with which I agreed to write the story of their lives. Had they not been arrested when they were it would never have been possible, and had my ‘research’ continued, it would certainly have become dangerous.

But in early autumn 1967 I was bored and missing England after a spell in Italy. The name ‘Kray’ was only vaguely familiar from my days as a Sunday Times reporter, and when Frank Taylor – who as Editor-in-Chief at McGraw Hill had published my Life of Ian Fleming – arrived in Rome and suggested I write a book about ‘the top criminals controlling London’, with their full co-operation, it seemed an intriguing proposition. I was curious. After writing about Ian, I was probably hankering for a touch of action, à la Bond, and thought I’d get it. What I didn’t know was that the suggestion had originally reached McGraw in a roundabout way from a lawyer representing various Mafia interests in New York, that he in turn was doing a favour for the twins, who were hoping to extract a large sum of money from McGraw for ‘world rights’ in the story of their life, and that the twins had not the faintest intention of allowing anything except the most flattering picture of themselves to appear in print.

Certainly the next step in this whole bizarre adventure was extremely Bond.

Tickets to London were waiting in my name at Rome International Airport. At Heathrow I was met by a very silent ex-heavyweight boxer who drove me in a silver-grey Mercedes to the Ritz Hotel where a suite had been booked for me, and at ten o’clock next morning the world of Bond continued. The silent man in the Mercedes was waiting to drive me to an undisclosed destination in the country, and half an hour or so beyond Newmarket we went through a pair of elaborate park gates and drove towards a large Elizabethan mansion. Apart from horses grazing in the paddock there was no sign of life, and the car drove round the back of the enormous house. We stopped. The driver hooted and finally a door did open. Three men emerged to welcome me. They stood with some formality and my driver announced them like some old-school boxing referee, ‘Mr Charles Kray, Mr Ronald Kray, Mr Reginald Kray. ’ Luncheon was waiting and my book had started.