It looked ordinary enough, a regular stamp and my name and address. Postmarked "Newport", a yellow recorded delivery label gave it a little colour. Opening it at the kitchen table, a photograph fell out. Black and white, it was recognisably 1960s vintage with two suited men with slicked-back hair framing a painted, elfin woman. I went back to the letter, ruled and imprinted H.M. Prison Parkhurst, Newport.
"Dear Patrick . . . ,"
The almost illegible scrawl waltzed across the paper. I wasn't really interested in the contents, but needed to see whether it was really from him, and not a prison official warding me off. But it ended as I had hoped: "God Bless, your friend Reg Kray"
The Krays loomed large in my teens. Born and bred in the East End, I walked their old parade ground, Whitechapel Road, every day. My uncles and their associates were their contemporaries and shared bar space with the terrible twinsome. On weekends I went on the prowl with my mates to the pubs that the twins had used all those years before.
The Blind Beggar where Ronnie plugged George Cornell back in 1966 still sat squat in red-bricked magnificence at Mile End Gate. Although much revamped, if you knew the code, you could still sit astride your bar stool on the spot where George met his end at the curved end of the long bar, but the Walker Brothers hit, The Sun ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, which played him out on that October night, had long been deleted from the jukebox.
If any place held a flavour of the twins' era, it was the Grave Maurice pub, a few hundred yards up the road. With its darkwood panelling, subdued lighting and red velvet banquette seats, it still had that gentleman's club-like atmosphere that the twins yearned after. The Maurice was where Ronnie held court, erupting through the door clad in an ostentatious neck to heel cashmere overcoat, and with those sinister gold-framed spectacles he wore to convey an air of respectable gravitas, but merely made his bloated face look even more sinister that it already was.
I liked the Maurice; it still had style that the East End no longer possessed. For this was the late 1980s boom and Thatcher's Docklands Enterprise Zone was knocking the stuffing out of the people like the Luftwaffe had 40 years before. Ronnie and Reggie, frozen in time, pickled in mohair and Brylcreem, seemed to offer an appealing certainty that had evaporated, to certain people. They were a reminder of the brief period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the East End had prosperity and a near cachet of respectability, with stylish new flats and beehive hairdos erupting through the post-war rubble of the bombsites that still pockmarked the area.
Grimly handsome in their funereal suits, the twins played host with a garish gimcrack at their clubs, "The Old Kentucky" and "The Double R", to a coterie of boxers, celebrities and even minor royalty as they scaled heights well beyond their dreams and capabilities.
And then they were gone - silence. Since the trial of 1969, no news, no images. Reg was Category A in Parkhurst, Ron certified in Broadmoor. Elder brother Charlie was released in 1975 and drifted south of the river, into obscurity.
Only through Bailey's iconic portrait did the twins still exist. It was the frontispiece to John Pearson's seminal The Profession of Violence, which charted their careers, and I approached the book with a fascinated horror. In it I found further locations and associations with these monsters about whom everyone had something to say, but no one had seen in decades. For if you were to believe it, the East End was the twins' "manor", which they controlled like feudal chieftains, with every East Ender queuing up to pay fealty for their continued wellbeing and protection. This was one of many myths about them.
The East End was and still is too singular and volatile a place for one gang, no matter how ruthless to control. Sure, the twins held some power, but mainly on the northern fringes of the area, their home patch of Bethnal Green and amongst the petty criminals that permeated it. Poplar, Stepney and Wapping, the dockside where I grew up, was a no-go area for them. More than once, the London Irish dockers of the Watney Street mob put manners on what they considered were "a pair of mummy's boys".
So it was out of an intense curiosity that I'd written to Reggie, like a historical researcher mapping out a common, if not shared, past. After his reply, a correspondence ensued for over a year. We talked of boxing; East End characters and forgotten venues, yet never broached the subject that fascinated me most, their story, the real story. This was long before either of them had published the long stream of confessorial books that are now part of their canon.
But when I felt confidant enough, I did ask after the fate of the other members of "the Firm" the Lambrianous, Ronnie Bender et al, who'd been sent down with them. Reggie filled in the details, some released, some paroled and others, like him, still inside. He asked for little, a few photocopies of old boxing cuttings and if I would make sure that any article on the twins that showed a negative bias didn't go unchallenged. And then, another letter arrived with different handwriting.
"Dear Patrick, I wonder if you would call to see me. My brother Reg gave me your address. It's important I tell you."
It was from Ronnie. "My brother and I need your help badly. God Bless, Ron Kray."
I knew I was in too deep, that if I replied, they'd snare me like so many others over the years. "Would you mind us having our photo taken with you?" was the innocent line they used on unsuspecting celebrities back in the old days. An enforced compliance led to many stars been branded "friend of the Krays" and frozen for all time in the sort of photograph that closed rather than opened doors.
Although I was excited by my clandestine correspondence with "Gangster Number One", I was street smart enough to know that I was in danger of contamination by association. Letters and a photo were one thing, but my leading their freedom campaign, which, buried further in his confused letter, was Ronnie's request, was another thing altogether. I would be sinking deep into the mire of the twins and their ragbag of supporters and cronies. I never replied, and the correspondence stopped.
Years passed, the books and film heightened their profile, and at the various funerals where they emerged from their cocoon of incarceration, East Enders, indeed the world, saw what the years had done to them. They were now shrunken, confused old men. The "glamour", always based on show rather than taste, was not so much tarnished as totally eradicated.
They didn't look so hard now, but then they never were. The real hard men of the East End were its manual workers, whose trade shaped them and kept them in prime physical condition. Failed boxers, the twins were only ever daunting when mob handed or tooled up, and that in itself stunk of cowardice to most east enders.
I got close to Reggie once more amid the gaudy splendour of Ronnie's funeral in 1995. A ghastly spectacle, most of the crowds were there out of a horrified curiosity, rather than the "respect" that every villain yearns for. We all knew, and now it was openly said, that the Krays left a stain on the East End we could do without, and the sooner they were all gone the better. Reggie stood by the black, plumed horses that pulled his twin's hearse, gently patting their noses. Although power dressed in padded black overcoat, he cut a lost figure. His face was ravaged by grief, but also had the embalmed look that is the pallor of prison.
Grey hair and the shrinking of the years had decimated the almost sensuous but brutal beauty of his youth, and his nose, ears and teeth now looked over-prominent. Only the baleful olive black, dead-fish eyes made a recognisable connection with the 1960s.
Like so many ageing gangsters, he affected a mild remote air among the Praetorian Guard of steroid thugs that surrounded him. "God bless you," he shook hands and smiled vacantly. I smiled and nodded back mutely.
Since Ronnie's death, the Krays' stock has risen considerably. The glut of gangster films and Reggie's completion of his 30-year sentence has led him to become like Mad Frankie Fraser and Freddie Foreman, a "celebrity gangster", albeit in exile. At elder brother Charlie's funeral earlier this year, he looked better, a fashionable crop and a grey double-breasted suit added optimism to his prepared statement that was read out to mourners by a minder. "On behalf of Reg, he would like to thank everyone for showing their respects.
He's pleased to see you all here and hopefully he will be amongst you soon". He would be out it seemed and just in time to capitalise on the "gangster" chic that is at present shoring up the British film and fashion industry.
Reggie and, in death, Ronnie had found a new generation of lackeys and apologists who were keen to make the profession of "gangster" seem acceptable and more importantly, respectable: faux "geezers" such as Lock Stock director Guy Ritchie, who has dropped his middle-class drawl and speaks in a laughably archaic rhyming slang that no East Ender, myself included, understands.
Another fan of the twins is pseudo hardman-cum-actor, Vinnie Jones. Enough said. There has been over the years, a concerted effort by Kray supporters to "downsize" the twins' crimes. "They only killed their own," is the oft heard cry. The less heard reply is "Yes, human beings".
And maybe the East End was a safer place when Ron and Reg prowled, but so was everywhere, and no thanks to them. The fact that the world is a seemingly more violent place now, might have something to do with the continued elvation elevation of criminals like such as the Krays. It may also interest some of their apologists, who believe the twins were lovable rogues with a strong sense of honour and community spirit, to know that Ron and Reg had forged strong links with the New York Mafia to flood the UK with its first wave of hard drugs when Superintendent Nipper Read pounced on them in May 1968. So much for the Robin Hood tag. If I did have any sympathy for Reggie's plight, and momentarily I did, looking at the huddled old man at Ronnie's funeral, it disappeared with his willingness to be adopted and elevated by this motley "Mockney Aristocracy". But then he couldn't really help himself, both he and Ron, and indeed Charlie, had all their lives chased and basked in the obsequious servitude of others they mistook for "respect" and "fame".
And it was precisely that "fame", the desperate need for recognition, and above all, the Bailey portrait, that killed Reggie in the end. He didn't serve 32 years in prison for his one and only sordid murder of "Jack the Hat" in 1968, but for the "legend" that he built and maintained over the decades. Since imprisonment, every book, interview and public utterance from the twins cut another notch into their sentence. Ronnie would never have been released; he was certified, sedated and died in the asylum that is Broadmoor. And Reggie only made it out in order to die. He didn't have the intelligence, or perhaps the humility, to do what every sensible con does when they get a stretch, and acknowledge the golden rule that is "keep your head down and do your time".
Reggie Kray's first and last victim was Reggie Kray. Gangster Number One killed himself.