Bobby Teale shares his harrowing experience of growing up in the shadow of the Kray Twins, detailing how he became entangled in their criminal world and the ultimate betrayal that led him to expose their horrific crimes.
The phone-box in North London stank of stale sweat and fag-ash mixed with the smell of my own fear as I dialled 999 and asked to talk to Superintendent Tommy Butler at Scotland Yard.
Bobby Teale with his brothers, Alfie and David. The three brothers found the courage to tell the truth about the KraysThen 24, I had spent the last six months fawning over both Ronnie and Reggie, flattered that the twins seemed to think well of me. But all their charisma, if they ever had any, meant nothing now.
Because Eileen was that much older, and girls weren’t allowed in our gang, Alfie, David and I were always the closest. Ronnie and Reggie Kray with their mother Violet and grandfather James Lee outside their home in Bethnal Green, east London Reggie was then in prison but Ronnie could not have been nicer to Alfie, especially when he told the gangster that our parents ran a club in Islington. Big mistake.
Alfie and his wife Wendy would be in the big double bed in one room with their two sons beside them. Wendy absolutely hated it, but Alfie was too scared to refuse.During Ronnie’s trip to the Isle of Wight, we were drinking at the Castle Hotel in Ryde. I was told to join the group upstairs where ‘a few of us are going to continue the party’. Ronnie went first, stomping up the narrow staircase, me following. There was no way out.
Visiting London to run little errands for Reggie was a big improvement on tending deckchairs, but my wife Pat couldn’t understand why I was hanging around with these creeps and eventually filed for divorce. God knows what David told his half-awake wife, Christine. Their daughters were only one and two, and she was not happy.
By Sunday, we needed more food. Christine and David were allowed out to the local shop but on one sickening condition. One of the little girls had to stay behind, as hostage. Ronnie grunted something along the lines of: ‘There’s a nice boy.’ The danger had passed but I knew I had to do something. The twins needed to know exactly who’d been in the Blind Beggar that night – who’d seen Ronnie, who to put the frighteners on. So there was a constant stream of people coming and going under a cloud of cigarette smoke.
One Sunday morning, Reggie insisted we go for a drive to Epping Forest on the edge of the city. It was a place I knew well because my brothers and I hid there after running away as kids once. You could hide anything in Epping and, as we drove through the north-east London suburbs, I felt sure I was going to my death.
I’d known from my early adult life that I was bisexual, though I wouldn’t have dared tell my brothers at the time. I had met James several weeks before in a queer-friendly bar in Mayfair, where I’d been told to go by my Yard contact, called ‘Don’. The next morning I met ‘Don’ who told me not to panic and that the Yard had a plan to keep me and my brothers safe.
I couldn’t say anything, not even to my own brothers. I had no idea how they would react. I’d broken the code: whatever you do you never, ever grass. If I was honest with them and they told other prisoners what I’d been up to I could have been dead by nightfall and our whole family would be in danger. I wasn’t about to risk that.
He left Nell to take the blame but hadn’t reckoned with the police using this as a bargaining chip – persuading me and my brothers to give evidence against the twins on condition that our mum was given a suspended sentence and avoided jail. The thought of our mother going to prison outweighed even our fear of the Krays.
This was no empty threat. I later learned that Ronnie had planned to kill Cornell’s widow Olive by poisoning the milk bottle left on her doorstep as she’d smashed the windows at the Krays’ family home in retaliation for his murder. Ronnie let it be known that if David and Alfie kept quiet about the rapes and his trips to the meat-rack, he would leave them and their families alone. There was no such deal for me.
KRAY TWINS GANGSTER VIOLENCE ABUSE BETRAYAL
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