The twins
Everybody has heard of the Krays. Ronnie and Reggie are the names people reach for first when they talk about London's underworld, and for a spell in the sixties there was no doubt about it: they were the most feared men in East London. Their mother's house in Vallance Road sat at the centre of everything they believed about themselves. Family, loyalty and reputation.
They did not start at the top. Before they were bosses, the twins were heavy enforcers for the likes of Jack Spot. Both of them had boxed professionally, and both of them were very violent. Plenty about their lives is open to question, but their standing in their own part of London is not. Even hard, capable men of their era worked with them on the more violent bits of work.
Building a firm
The Krays had lofty ambitions. They wanted to control the London underworld, and they had to settle for ruling their own part of East London with a rod of iron. They pulled in the local toughs until they had a fierce and feared crew, and that crew stood over other criminals and took a corner of any deal the twins got to hear about.
They were not good money getters themselves. Harry Roberts, the armed robber, once told Enquirer 2.0 exactly what he thought of them: they were parasites. He also told the story of his own run-in with Reggie over the weights in a prison gym.
They had to be content with ruling over their part of East London with a rod of iron.
Not everybody bent the knee. Henry "Buller" Ward had been feared and respected on the streets of London long before the twins began carving out their name. He grew up around the old gangs, the Sabinis and the Whites through to Billy Hill and Jack Spot, and he was confident the new breed held nothing for him to worry about. He was wrong, and a string of incidents built towards a violent clash between Buller and the Krays.
Nosher Powell, the boxer, bouncer and stuntman, kept the West End clubs he minded safe, and under his watch you played by his rules. That went for the Kray twins too. According to his book, he once confronted the Krays and Jack Spot after they insulted his woman. In Birmingham, the club king Eddie Fewtrell is said to have driven the Krays out of the country's second city altogether.
War with the Richardsons
South London belonged to the Richardsons, Charlie and Eddie, and the two firms were heading for a collision. On the night of the seventh of March 1966, a row at Mr Smith's club in Catford turned into a shootout. Richard Hart was a friend of the Kray twins, and everybody called him Dickie. He was shot in the chest, and police found his body in a garden at the back, under a lilac tree.
Two nights later, Ronnie Kray walked into the Blind Beggar on the Mile End Road and shot George Cornell dead. Cornell was a Richardson man. The Krays and the Richardsons were now at war, and the police were coming for every man in both firms.
Roy Shaw had done time with Cornell, and with Jack "The Hat" McVitie and Frank Mitchell. He once saved Cornell from a beating inside Parkhurst. All three were tough fighting men, and all three would be killed by the Krays or on their orders.
The Mad Axeman
Frank Mitchell was Britain's most feared prisoner, a man so strong and so unpredictable that twelve police officers and guards once had to pin him to a courtroom floor. Ronnie had known him from Wandsworth in the 1950s and was fascinated by him. Breaking him out of Dartmoor would humiliate the authorities and prove the twins' reach went far beyond pubs, clubs and protection rackets. Reggie was less sure.
On the twelfth of December 1966, Mitchell was out on the moor with a work party. He asked a guard if he could go and feed the ponies, walked to a quiet road, and got into a waiting car. It was more than five hours before anyone noticed he had gone. While Royal Marines and an RAF helicopter combed Dartmoor, he was already hidden in a flat on Barking Road in East Ham.
That is where the plan fell apart. Mitchell could not go out or see his family, and Ronnie never came to see him. His minders were frightened of him. When he threatened to turn up at Vallance Road and tell the twins' mother how he was being treated, the problem became unthinkable. The firm sent him a nightclub hostess for company, and he fell for her, which only made him want more.
On Christmas Eve he was told he was being moved to the countryside, and that Ronnie would finally be there. He climbed into the back of a van. According to accounts given later by men from that world, he was shot inside it. His body was never found.
Inside
When the Krays went to trial, Mitchell's disappearance was part of the case. Murder without a body is hard to prove, and the twins were acquitted of killing him. Reggie was convicted of conspiring to help him escape. Ronnie claimed to the end that Mitchell had never been murdered at all, and had been smuggled out of the country.
By 1972 the Krays were inside, and so were the Richardsons. The men who had worked for them found their work had gone too. Jimmy Moody, a friend to the Krays and an enforcer for the Richardsons, came out that year into a London that had moved on without them.
The twins never left the story, though. When people talk about the old days they call it the Kray era, a time when lords and ladies hobnobbed with the criminal fraternity. Kate Kray went on to profile the country's hardest men in her Hard Bastards book. And when Moody went to ground in London in the late 1980s, calling himself Mick the Irishman, he chose Hackney, in the middle of old Kray territory. Other men made more money and ran bigger empires. Nobody else became the name that every other villain is measured against.