to ask Tony to call me. Alan and I then walked away. Later that afternoon Tony did call and asked if we would go to his flat. When we arrived Tony said that he didn’t think it was right that Alan and I had turned up at his home earlier after taking a drink.
I agreed, but explained that Alan had come down from Edinburgh that morning. ‘We had gone for a drink and after discussing what Ronnie had asked me to do, we decided to warn you before somebody else did Ron’s dirty work.’ Tony’s mood changed at once and the conversation turned to Ronnie’s paranoia and how it would all blow over. I told Tony I would keep him informed about what was going on.
He thanked me and that was the end of the matter. No threats were made and no hammer was brandished, in spite of what Tony claimed in his book. In fact, Tony had posed for a photo with Alan. At the next visit, Ronnie asked me what had happened regarding Lambrianou. I told Ronnie that I had gone around to his flat but he wasn’t in. Ronnie seemed disappointed, but said that he had found out Lambrianou was holding a book launch in Epping and he was going to get him ‘pulled’ there. I mentioned this to Lambrianou and he immediately cancelled that particular event.
I saw Ronnie a couple of weeks later and I thought that he would have calmed down, but I was wrong. Tony had appeared in the News of the World claiming McVitie, whose body has never been found, was buried in a grave 50 miles from London.
Jack and his hat were dumped into the grave. Then his body was covered by a layer of soil. The next day an unsuspecting funeral procession pulled up at the graveside and a service was held. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, no one noticed that the hole was not quite as deep as it had been the day before.
Tony had not mentioned any of this in his book and Ron said Lambrianou was now making up stories to make money, stories that, he said, could damage Reggie’s chances of parole. I had never seen Ronnie so annoyed. He kept saying that Lambrianou was a ‘lackey’ and a ‘grass’. He said he was never in the fucking firm and he was a liar. I found this very hard to believe because Lambrianou’s book claimed that he was a ‘boss’ in the Krays’ firm and he and his brother had served 15 years because they had refused to tell police the truth about the McVitie murder.
If Tony had, as Ronnie claimed, grassed them up, then it was inconceivable that he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment and served 15 years. The judge would surely have shown Tony leniency for assisting the prosecution’s case against the Kray brothers. What Ronnie was claiming just did not add up, but when Tony and his brother’s statements were shown to me, I could not believe what I was reading.
In his book, Tony said that Reggie Kray had told him to invite McVitie to a party. ‘It was on Saturday night at a basement flat belonging to a girl called Blonde Carol in Stoke Newington, North London,’ says Lambrianou. ‘I knew there was a chance of him copping a right hander but I didn’t know someone had taken a gun.’
Lambrianou and his brother Chris, plus two brothers called Mills accompanied McVitie to the party. Waiting for McVitie were Reggie and Ronnie Kray, gangsters Ronnie Hart and Ronald Bender and two of Ronnie Kray’s young homosexual boyfriends called Terry and Trevor. Lambrianou says:
Ronnie pushed past me and did Jack right underneath the eye with a glass, ‘I’ve had enough of you,’ he said, ‘keep your mouth shut.’ Next thing Reggie was on him. This was the first time I had seen the gun. He tried to shoot him in the back of the head and I jumped, expecting an explosion but the gun wouldn’t work. As soon as Reggie pulled the gun I realised it had gone too far. My brother Chris and I had unwittingly set up Jack by taking him to Blonde Carol’s so now it was our row too. Jack would come back to us. When the gun failed to go off I said to Chris ‘Go and get one
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