Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins by John Pearson

Author:John Pearson [Pearson, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, General
ISBN: 9780099505341
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-07-26T04:00:00+00:00

16

Exit the Axeman

BY NOW THE Twins had reached a point where their lives were changing fast and, as Ron’s madness grew, Reg’s problem was to keep so many different shows upon so many roads. First and foremost came what Reg was good at, ‘doing the business’ and keeping the money rolling in from the rackets he’d been busily creating, like the long-firm frauds, the currency scams and the European sales of stolen securities, not to mention the ‘pensions’ from the clubs and businesses that they protected.

As well as keeping all this business going, early in 1966 Reg became actively involved in acquiring a fresh interest in various West End gaming clubs to take the place of Esmeralda’s Barn. Had Reg been left to get on with this in cooperation with Leslie Payne things could still have been fine. And had he not merely listened to the advice of Billy Hill but been able to build on what he told him, who knows what Reggie might have done. There was just a chance that he might have even sorted out his life with Frances instead of stuffing her with yet more pills from Doc Blasker and leaving it too late to get her into hospital.

All of this could just have happened if it hadn’t been for Ron. But then, if it hadn’t been for Ron and his erratic bouts of madness there’d have been little to recall about the Twins today: no legends, no iconic photographs, no British gangster movies, none of the myths surrounding these two celebrity criminals to liven up the image of the Swinging Sixties. Without Ron’s madness and the ensuing killings it would have been like Jack the Ripper without his murders. Which gives the strange, sick tale of Frank Mitchell, also known as ‘The Mad Axeman’, a special place in the twisted saga of the Twins.

Much of the fascination of this whole disastrous affair comes from the way it started off as one of those highly publicised good deeds that the Krays made such a meal of. But, as Gore Vidal once said, ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ particularly a good deed by the Krays, which in this case ended up killing the recipient.

It was Ron’s combination of homicidal arrogance with his abject fear and bouts of wildest fantasy that had a way of leading him and those around him up so many dangerous paths. And what marked him out from most other paranoid schizophrenics and made his flights of fantasy so memorable was not only the determination with which he pursued them but the way he ended up imposing them on Reg and the rest of the Firm by force of will. In the process it was Ron’s unpredictable behaviour that became the source of much of his charisma, together with the positively Gothic shroud of mystery that dangerous madmen often weave around them. Certainly in the Mitchell case it was the strange psychotic mess of one of Ron’s wilder excursions into wilful unreality which

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