Scarface and Ronnie Kray
The concluding part 2
If you’ve been enjoying these stories of life from a photographer, please consider sharing this post with someone you feel may enjoy them. There’s a first part of this story, the episode just prior to this. It’ll help what I’m about to tell you make a lot more sense, so for the context alone, it’s worth skipping back, as they say.
Pic: Tim Hüfner
Having said that, I’m imagining you might be on one of your multitasking days and have no time for skipping, or maybe you’ve just stumbled across this episode and are just intrigued by today’s title thinking you’ve happened across true crime, or perhaps, and I think this is statistically more likely, you’re in a car somewhere on the A14 with a pasty in your lap and your full concentration somewhere else entirely. So, let me do one of those short TV recaps, as they do in grown-up drama.
I got a job as a weekend DJ in a nightclub in Waltham Abbey near to London, aged 19, showed up thirty minutes late for my audition, and met a man, the ‘head doorman/security/I’ll do anything for the boss’ man, with a scar the full length of his face who in a ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ style, introduced himself simply as Scarface.
This was also a man who, as you’ll discover, had historical associations with Ronnie Kray, one of the most feared gangsters (one half of the Kray Twins) to have walked through East London in the 50s and 60s, oh and one more thing: Scarface, at this audition, had my hand in a squeezy death handshake and told me he was ‘going to look after me’. I had absolutely no idea what that meant, but I had a fairly strong feeling that I was about to find out.
TV drama recap done, let’s start and end this story here, in part 2, appropriately titled Scarface and Ronnie Kray.
My audition at the nightclub just about in the grip of London, ten miles from where the Krays had control of their manor, as it’s known, went well.
Well, I say well, I messed up some mixes, sounded like a ‘sh*t scared teenager’ on the microphone, according to Scarface, and temporarily broke the door to the DJ booth as I thought it opened inwards and not outwards.
“You never have a DJ booth door open inwards,” explained Scarface, as if it were obvious, “because that way when someone gets pi**ed off you’re not playing their song, they can’t push the door in to get at ya.”
That all made perfect sense to me, apart from the fact I’d just pushed the door inwards and pulled the two hinges out, without too much effort at all, and I certainly wasn’t an unhappy Sex Pistols fan.
I moot the Pistols, because the only time I’d seen real trouble on my watch as a DJ to that point, was at the John O Gaunt pub in my home town, just across the road from my school, right next to the tax office, which is a story for another time.
I’d been holding off playing the Sex Pistols all night, a threatening demand being made by the town’s thug, a thug with the worst name a thug could possibly have, Eggy. I thought Edgy would have been more appropriate for this reasonably unpredictable basket case, but Eggy it was. I’m thinking he once tried to etch the name Edgy into a table at school with a crayon, but couldn’t spell it. And so Eggy was born, like the nasty emotional smell he left wherever he went in the town.
He’s no doubt got a proper, respectable job now, so for the first time in a long while, I feel I can release my inhibitions and share, or perhaps overshare. Thank you for listening. I feel so much better now, as they say in counselling.
“Play Sex Pistols, or I’ll hit ya,” was his opening, middle and end gambit.
I’d plucked up the courage and said ‘no’ to Eggy a number of times, knowing full well it was on the blacklisted account of songs or bands in that pub, not because they didn’t appreciate them, I’m sure, but because usually, prohibited songs or bands were tried and tested fight starters. Play one of those and you wouldn’t be asked back to play, ever.
But with the threats thick and fast from Eggy’s seven-word request strategy, I eventually caved and played that very nice song about love, peace and harmony, the Good Ship Venus.
Eggy prowled the dance floor as it started up, and actually, if you know the song, it is in part a bit of a singalong, sort of, unlikely punk karaoke, until about a minute in, when all hell breaks loose, and anyone and anything is fair game.
Eggy grabbed a poor unsuspecting tax assistant, I did say we were the pub adjacent to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs at the time, and threw him clean through my disco unit, which despite being fashioned out of mum and dad’s old rigid mahogany sideboard, folded, like a deck of cards. The Squire bass bins I had, one for the DJs in here, were pushed over, all the wires were ripped from their casings and that was that, night over, as was my residency at the John O Gaunt pub.
Rules are rules for a reason. Although my face did at least stay intact that night. I’d not been egged, as I recall the threat as being. Egged. Honestly.
Anyway, 3, 2, 1, back in the room and back at the club in 1986, I’d got the DJ job.
Having been successful at the audition, it didn’t take long until John, the manager you met in the first episode informed me, I couldn’t have the weekend gig, because I was essentially not very talented in the conventional sense, but being nineteen, he reckoned the ladies (his words now) would love a sacrificial nineteen year old lamb on every Friday for the popular Divorced Separated and Singles night.
“Lucky for you, Scarface is on the door those nights, and I hear he’s said he’ll look after you.”
“Lucky for me,” I thought.
I’ll save the many stories of what opened my eyes in the late night to early morning hours of the dingy red club under the snooker club and in those hidden away booths where I’m sure they enjoyed quiet games of scrabble and Mahjong, but needless to say, the nearly two years spent there were like a finishing school of one where the curriculum included the etiquette of knowing when to turn the lights fully up during a contretemps, the correct response when someone produces an illegal pint of ale on the dancefloor, and a working knowledge of exactly how much trouble a man in a good suit and bad intentions can cause before Scarface materialises, apparently from nowhere.
Scarface was fearless. He liked a good roughing up, although he did the roughing, even when it was two on one. And over the months he did indeed “look after me,” but not in a face-filling, hang-you-over-the-side-of-the-building-by-your-foot way.
I think he took me somewhat under his wing really. I was rather hoping Eggy might turn up at one of my gigs so I could refuse to play Sex Pistols and point him out to Scarface with my security torch I’d been given to point out trouble.
He also carried my record boxes out to the car each night while I parked up at the rear exit fire doors, to make sure the local louts didn’t touch me, or my red Vauxhall Astra 1.3 estate. Actually, he put word out that if my car was so much as looked at by those smoking whatever in the darker recesses of the ground floor car park, where the street lamps had all been knocked out, they’d be answering to him. Needless to say, my car was never touched. In fact it was more likely to be polished than scratched.
It was during one of our Friday night, early Saturday hours decants from the club, about six months in, that Scarface announced he had a present for me.
He went back into the club, and came back a minute or two later with a shoebox.
“Ere you go son,” Scarface said, “the missus gets a bit funny about me havin this in the house, so you look after it for me.”
I went to open the box.
“Don’t open it ‘ere,” he hissed, “take it home wiv ya.”
The drive home that night on the Great Cambridge Road out of London had me looking down at the box for the entire journey. Why I didn’t pull over and have a look, I have no idea. I’d learned a little bit about Scarface’s colourful background, you don’t get to earn a moniker like that, despite such a life-changing scar, without the universe delivering back what you dealt out, well, the East End universe at any rate.
All I was hoping was, that it wasn’t a shooter, as the gangsters might say. If Scarface’s missus didn’t want it in her house, I hardly think my leafy Hertfordshire parents would want it either. Besides, where would I hide it? I actually considered behind the rabbit hutch thinking it could go into Munchy’s straw, making sure from now on, I was the only one to clean him out each weekend.
“But you hate cleaning the hutch out,” my Mum might say.
“Oh I don’t mind Mum, you take a weight off and I’ll mow the lawn for dad while I’m about it.”
It turned out, to be a shoebox of letters from Ronnie Kray, infamous London gangster. They were to Scarface as far as I could work out, although some could have been for other members of maybe a gang, perhaps the gang, or the inner fraternity of their business interests.
A graphologist would no doubt have a lot to say about the increasingly slanted handwriting, which seemed to stay neatly and obediently within the lines, ironically not something that was echoed by his life, unless his he was with him mum, Violet. He was polite, letters always started with dear as a salutation, and he seemed to, from memory, mention home cooking and food a lot, and cardigans. I do remember he’d miss words out, which became a bit of a deciphering exercise at times, and here and there, he’d get busy with big capital letters, which lent an angry feel to his prose. Remind you of anyone?
The box resided on my desk in my bedroom, hardly hidden away, for weeks, and I was fascinated by the letters within, reading them probably every night. They were certainly not something that would withstand the damp of Munchy’s hay store in the back garden.
It was only a matter of time, before it was investigated by prying eyes, when the cleaning squad aka my Mum took the hoover on a mission through my bedroom while I was out.
And so we return to the first words of part one of this piece.
“You take that bloody box of letters out of my house and don’t ever mention his name again,” barked my father, surprisingly angry about what was essentially a shoebox of scrawl from Ronnie Kray, the infamous East London gangster.
I returned the box that Friday night to Scarface, sharing the truth of my Mum’s flying squad find.
“You nutter,” he said. “Should’ve hidden ‘em away. They’ll be worth a fortune one day.” And he snatched them out of my hands.
I had no idea, this had been Scarface’s idea of a gift, or investment, as he clearly thought of this box full of letters from one of England’s most notorious criminals. And he wasn’t wrong. I did some cursory research, and that box could have been worth an easy five-figure number.
At this moment, perhaps one of you might be thinking, or asking, “Well, what was his name? Scarface, that is. I’m sure he wasn’t called Scarface.”
And you’d be right, this mystery man who’d been facially striped as it was known, who ‘looked after me’ for two years and gifted me a box that could have been historically and financially important, was indeed mentioned by his first name, a name it turns out was connected to some of the more interesting times during the Krays’ 60s crime spree.
I’d tell you, of course, but to use the words often used during that time, in that part of London, so as not to attract the claw-hammer knee-capping, chivving or striping activities of one Ronnie Kray and his brother Reggie, “I ain’t no grass.”
As a footnote, YouTube has been doing its usual thing over the last few days, since I’d been researching a little more about the Krays and their quite literal death grip over the capital.
Ronnie died in March 1995, having had a heart attack at Broadmoor, and Reggie was brought out of prison in handcuffs to attend the funeral. Thousands lined the streets of the East End for a horse-drawn cortege through Bethnal Green, the kind of send-off normally reserved for heads of state or beloved entertainers, which tells you something fairly pointed about how the public had decided to remember a man who had, amongst other things, shot someone in the head in a pub in front of witnesses and seemed to find the whole experience rather satisfying. Actually, the story goes that he went home to his Mum’s house immediately afterwards for tea and cake.
There’s a YouTube video that includes news reports from the day of Ronnie’s funeral. One of the men interviewed in the wake at the Blind Beggar pub, still open today, a man called Frankie, where that infamous shooting happened, says on camera, “Well, they were good guys, they were good gangsters really.” He goes on to say, “They wouldn’t harm women or children, because they were untouchable.”
Oh that’s alright then Frankie, or should I call you by your name from the time, ‘Mad Frankie Fraser,’ known to pull teeth from his victims during acts of torture, who lived to be 90, although nearly half those years were spend ‘doing porridge,’ at Her Majesty’s pleasure.
The eulogies at Ronnie Kray’s funeral and the general street-corner consensus that day leaned heavily on the Robin Hood mythology, the unlocked doors, the looking after your own, the code, all of it polished up and presented as though the inconvenient business of the extreme violence, torture, extortion and fear, had simply been mislaid somewhere between the flowers and the horse brasses.
I watched the footage available from that day, which is a bit grim, to close this chapter of the story.
Interesting when I look back at those attending, including celebs and a sprinkling of gangsters, old-school and modern. I don’t see Eggy anywhere. I guess you need something scarier as a name, really, and Mad Frankie Fraser was clearly taken.