You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair

• Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk
  Pan, 256 pp, £4.99, October 1992, ISBN 0 330 32284 2
• Gangland: London’s Underworld by James Morton
  Little Brown, 349 pp, £14.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 356 20889 3
• Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read by Leonard Read and James Morton
  Warner, 318 pp, £5.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 7515 0001 1
• Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld by Robert Murphy
  Faber, 182 pp, £15.99, February 1993, ISBN 0 571 15442 5

Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan. Reg was nicely cased in a blue three-piece by Woods of Kingsland Road. Dickie matched him. (The Twins were very influential that way. All the faces were expected to dress to a middle-management standard.) Reg was, as Tony acknowledges, ‘one of the smartest men London ever turned out’. But Ron, the younger twin? There he was, large as life, out and about in his own manor, wearing ‘slacks and an open-necked shirt’. He didn’t have a tie!