We've just murdered your dad - but cheer up, here's a puppy

BRINGING DOWN THE KRAYS BY BOBBY TEALE (Ebury Press £14.99)

Unhappy ever after: Ronnie (left) toasts Frances and Reggie on their wedding day

Unhappy ever after: Ronnie (left) toasts Frances and Reggie on their wedding day

Monty Python made fun of Ronnie and Reggie Kray as Doug and Dinsdale Piranha, who - though they’d nail people’s heads to cake stands and blew up Luton with a thermonuclear bomb - nevertheless always remembered to buy their dear old mum a bunch of flowers.

Bobby Teale, in this exciting book (which would make a great film), is rather sickened by the way the Krays have been ‘idolised, turned into folk heroes’ - as if they were nothing more than loveable rogues and Swinging Sixties icons, always being seen in the company of Danny La Rue and Barbara Windsor.

It is true, however, that when Reggie married teenager Frances Shea, whom he later told a cellmate had been murdered by Ronnie (the official verdict was suicide), ‘fashion photographer David Bailey took the wedding snaps’.

And when the twins died, Ronnie in 1995 and Reggie five years later, they were treated as East End royalty, with state funerals involving a horse-drawn hearse and mounds of wreaths.

Murder scene: The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel where George Cornell was murdered

Murder scene: The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel where George Cornell was murdered

The Queen Mother was laid to rest with less pomp.

Yet in fact, as Teale reminds us, the Krays were sordid and evil psychopaths, who’d lock people in cellars and shoot their feet off.

Ronnie, a sadistic homosexual rapist, shot George Cornell when Cornell dared call him ‘a fat poof’.

Reggie stabbed Jack the Hat McVitie and the body was buried in the concrete foundations of a supermarket.

After they’d murdered someone, the twins would give a puppy to the victim’s children:  ‘Here, this will take your mind off your dad.’

Bobby Teale and his brothers, David and Alfie, were petty thieves who were initially seduced by the glamour of the Krays’ cruelty and intimidation - ‘If you go out with Ronnie and Reggie to a club, everyone just gets out of the way and clears the best table for you. It’s brilliant.’

The Teales were happy to tag along as errand boys and drivers.

At the Krays’ request, they’d visit a casino or billiard hall and ‘smash it up, start a fight, get drunk’. The twins would then materialise, to offer the proprietor protection.

‘You give us a little pension, we’ll sort all that out. You won’t have any more trouble.’

The reign of terror was successful. ‘You had to do what you were told,’ Bobby Teale reflects, ‘or else something very unpleasant would occur. Everyone knew it.’

Ronnie might torture a person in full view, yet ‘nobody moved to stop him, nobody said it was wrong’.

The Krays were often in the public eye because of the charity functions they organised. ‘They wanted pop singers, film stars, people their old mum had seen off the telly.’

There was hell to pay when the twins had expected Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Margaret, yet the only vague celebrity to turn up at one of their functions was Tommy Steele’s brother.

Needless to say, charitable donations were immediately siphoned straight into Ronnie and Reggie’s own pockets.

What is utterly amazing is that the Krays were at liberty for so long, from their dishonourable discharge from the army after National Service in 1952 until their trial at the Old Bailey in 1969.

Seduced by the glamour: The Teale brothers, Alfie (left), David and Bobby (right)

Seduced by the glamour: The Teale brothers, Alfie (left), David and Bobby (right)

If they were a law unto themselves, it was because they operated hand-in-glove with the police, who were more or less their accomplices.

Indeed, reading this book you gain the impression that Scotland Yard was funded by organised crime.

The line taken by the bent cops was this: ‘I will help you. I will leave you alone. If you are going to be raided, I’ll let you know in advance.

‘But I need a pension for that ...’ It worked both ways.

According to Teale, the Krays had paid informers at every level inside the force. They’d meet detectives in a hotel in Jersey, where carrier bags of banknotes would change hands.

Furthermore, ‘if the Krays did a job with someone who then didn’t give them the lion’s share of the readies, a couple of weeks afterwards the former partner would find himself arrested’.

There was even an Establishment connection and cover-up.

Though the bisexual Conservative peer Robert Boothby had a relationship with Ronnie, attending gay orgies with him, the authorities didn’t want Boothby investigated in case his affair with Harold Macmillan’s wife came to light.

When a newspaper dared hint that Boothby was linked with the underworld, he collected £40,000 in an out-of-court libel settlement - money that was passed on to the Krays in bundles of cash.

Similarly, when Tom Driberg, a Labour MP and KGB agent who wore fishnet stockings, got involved with the Krays, telling them ‘about the houses of rich friends they could burgle,’ again the government suppressed any inquiry, as they didn’t want to have to cope with the damaging revelations.

The media were further intimidated and silenced when Boothby and Driberg used the Krays ‘to turn anyone over who had crossed them’.

More pomp than the Queen Mother: Reggie's funeral parade

More pomp than the Queen Mother: Reggie's funeral parade

As Teale says, ‘the police, the straight ones that is, seemed to just give up’.

No witnesses would ever come forward to testify - they were too frightened to speak out. Juries were routinely nobbled.

Victims suddenly failed to recognise the Krays in identity parades. Time and again they were left to carry on being gangsters.

Eventually, Teale himself ‘peached’, i.e. became a police informer or grass.

‘It was absolutely terrifying,’ he says. At any moment the Krays could find him and kill him in slow and horrifying ways.

The only way new broom Detective Superintendent ‘Nipper’ Read could guarantee Teale’s safety (at least until he’d given evidence and the twins were sent down) was to put him and his brothers behind bars for three years on a trumped-up charge of blackmail.

Ronnie and Reggie convicted at last, Teale was ‘installed in an anonymous safe house in Ipswich’, before hiding in Canada for a further 40 years under a new identity.

The files detailing the extent of the police corruption and Establishment hypocrisy and deceit are sealed until the year 2037.

The comments below have not been moderated.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

We are no longer accepting comments on this article.