Статья на английском. Автор - John Pearson
Оригинал - dailymail.co.uk
читать дальшеRonnie Kray, the nastier of the twin gangsters who ruled the East End, was in a particularly evil mood.
He'd been to see Dot Brown, his favourite clairvoyant, who told him he was the reincarnation of Attila the Hun and therefore invincible, but, being a paranoid schizophrenic, he was not reassured.
The voices in his head told him differently. He needed to kill.
Just then he got the news that a small-time villain named George Cornell was drinking in a nearby pub, the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel.
Sleaze: Lord Boothby, left, and Ronnie Kray with croupier Leslie Holt, who had a relationship with both men
Many years ago, Cornell had given Ron the hiding of his life, one of the few times he had taken a beating rather than dishing one out. The humiliation still rankled and now, madder than ever on a cocktail of alcohol and anti-psychotic tranquillisers, he would have his revenge.
The Blind Beggar was all but empty when Ron arrived, preceded by a henchman firing warning shots into the ceiling.
'Well, look who's 'ere,' Cornell just had time to sneer before Ron lifted a Luger pistol and, at point-blank range, put a bullet into his forehead.
Surprisingly, given that Ron and his brother Reg had been inflicting every form of grievous bodily harm on their enemies (and even a few of their friends) for a dozen years or more, the killing of Cornell in March 1966 was the first time either of them had actually murdered someone.
But now that line had been crossed, and a spree of fatalities followed before the twins were brought to justice.
But the fact is that the Krays should never have been at liberty to carry out these killings. By rights, they should have been locked up years earlier for extortion and all their other violent gangster activities.
What kept them out of a jail and free to murder was protection they received from a political establishment terrified by what the Krays had on some of its most prominent figures.
In a cover-up that I can reveal went to the very doors of 10 Downing Street, the police were told to back off.
The Krays were deemed untouchable, and, with no one able or willing to rein them in, they ran amok.
The key figure in this scandal was Bob Boothby, an outrageous old scoundrel but probably the most popular political celebrity of his day.
He had a chequered career as a Tory MP for 34 years and was then ennobled to the House of Lords, despite his reputation for accepting money in return for political favours.
His emergence as a radio and TV personality was a late-life boost to his ego. But there was always a hidden side to the debonair and vain Boothby.
Behind the famous bow-tied public figure with his unmistakeable deep voice and a fund of good stories was a drunk, a liar, a reckless gambler and a bisexual.
He had a long affair with Lady Dorothy, the heavily-set wife of Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan. It was an odd attraction.
'She had thighs like hams and hands like a stevedore. She reminded me of a caddy I once seduced on the golf course at St Andrews,' he once said by way of explanation.
But his real taste was for rough-trade sex and teenage boys, and it was this that brought him into contact with the Krays, both of whom were homosexuals.
Solicitor: Arnold 'two dinners' Goodman made sure the story was buried
At a time when such activity was a criminal offence, they knew all the secrets of his lordship's sordid double-life.
Boothby met the Krays through another rogue politician and homosexual, Labour's Tom Driberg, a man who relished the company of criminals and rent boys and often had to be pulled out of scrapes by powerful friends.
He took Boothby to the gambling club the Krays ran in Knightsbridge, where the peer was instantly besotted by a good-looking teenager called Leslie Holt, a croupier there (as well as a cat burglar and male prostitute).
Holt was also one of the rapacious Ron's band of boy lovers. When he reported back that he had just hooked Boothby, Ron ordered him to get to know him better. Boothby might be useful.
So it was that the politician and the gangster became friends. The roguish Boothby even dared to take Ron to dinner at the House of Lords and afterwards on to that pillar of the establishment, White's club in St James's, for drinks.
Boothby asked Ron what he would like to drink. 'I've always wanted to try one of those prawn cocktails,' replied Ron.
But transgressing socially by bringing violent criminals into contact with law lords, civil service mandarins and other VIPs wasn't Boothby's primary concern.
Transgressing sexually was his real obsession, and Ron was ready to oblige, though not in person.
Neither he nor Boothby wanted sex with grown men. It was young men aged between 16 and 18 they went for, and Ron had his very own vice ring of them to share.
At private flats and houses he would arrange sex shows, starting with blue movies and moving onto performances specially tailored to the tastes of those he wanted to impress.
Boothby's particular perversions - too shocking to describe in a newspaper even now - were met in full.
Ron had a purpose in this beyond sex. He enjoyed the sense of power he got from indulging powerful politicians like Driberg and Boothby.
He also believed that the upper classes always saved their own, which was why it was wise to be in with them. Who knew when help from such a quarter might be useful?
For his part, Boothby was on dangerous ground, and not just by playing masochistic sex games in the company of the seriously scary Ronnie Kray.
His reputation was on the line. As an instantly recognisable public figure, he must have known that his blatant presence in the company of criminals would be noticed.
But Boothby was so conceited that he thought no one in authority would dare to do anything about it. And if they did, he had the right contacts in high places to sort things out for him. His assumption was correct - but at enormous cost to the well-being of Britain and its people.
The police had indeed cottoned on to his close relationship with Ron and a considerable dossier was building up at C11, Scotland Yard's intelligence section, as it tracked the Krays' involvement in protection rackets, extortion, organised crime and major fraud.
By early summer 1964, the Yard was on the point of launching a major offensive against the twins. Had this occurred at this stage it would have been the end of them and their threat for ever.
A Fleet Street crime reporter, Norman Lucas, got wind of this impending police investigation, along with information about public figures and politicians involved with one of the twins in a homosexual vice-ring. Confident of his sources, he prepared to publish it in the Sunday Mirror.
Simultaneously, it later turned out, senior politicians were also alarmed about Boothby and his links with criminals.
Alec Douglas-Home, the Conservative prime minister, conscious that it was a barely a year since the damaging Profumo scandal, ordered a secret investigation into his antics before they caused any more embarrassment.
He sent his Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, to question Boothby. The answer that came back from his lordship was a total denial of any involvement with the Krays.
The Home Secretary then had a word with the commissioner for police, Sir Joseph Simpson - a man who knew how to stay on the right side of politicians - who told him, in defiance of the facts, that there was 'no ongoing investigation of any organised criminals'.
Crime scene: Ronnie Kray shot dead George Cornell at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, East London, confident that he had protection from political friends
The Prime Minister heaved a sigh of relief that his fears were apparently unfounded. But, in reality, the seeds of a high-level cover-up had just been sown and they would grow into an almighty scandal.
It was at this point that Lucas's story hit the newsstands, with a front page story proclaiming: 'Peer and gangster - Yard inquiry'.
Neither man was named but simply identified as 'a peer who is a household name' and 'a leading thug in the London underworld, involved in protection rackets'.
The police were said to be investigating an alleged homosexual relationship between them.
It was a sensational story, which the Mirror's proprietor, Cecil King, had personally authorised in the belief that its publication would be to the advantage of Harold Wilson and the Labour Party, then all set to oust the Conservatives in the forthcoming general election.
But King was wrong in his assumption. Labour leaders were acutely aware that exposing Boothby would inevitably lead to the outing of their own man, Driberg.
They wanted the story killed just as much as a horrified Douglas-Home did, choking over his Sunday breakfast at Chequers when he saw the paper.
Boothby, like the old scheming liar he was, played the innocent, coolly declaring himself 'completely baffled' by who the anonymous 'famous peer' in the story could be. He was insistent that it couldn't possibly be him.
In reality, though, he was in a state of panic, particularly after the Home Secretary and the Conservative chief whip arrived on the doorstep of his home in Eaton Place with orders from the Prime Minister to ask what he intended doing about the Sunday Mirror's accusations.
But he kept his head and denied everything. They departed, though clearly still harbouring doubts.
Another caller that morning was businessman Harold Kissin, a friend of Boothby but also, it turned out, of Wilson. He calmed Boothby with the assurance that everything could be sorted out if he called in the services of the country's leading solicitor, Arnold Goodman.
It was always a puzzle why Goodman, with his close Labour Party connections, came to represent the arch-Conservative Boothby. When, in 1968, I asked Boothby to explain this conundrum, he told me it was on the instructions of 'the little man' - Wilson.
Then he clammed up, leaving the mystery of why the Labour leader acted so decisively to save an old Tory scoundrel.
It was not for 30 years that I would find the answer, in newly-released Cabinet papers. Wilson, it turned out, was seriously worried that Driberg - one of his oldest and most trusted friends in politics, a man he would eventually ennoble and make chairman of the Labour Party - would be drawn into the affair.
With a general election in the offing, he couldn't risk a scandal that might diminish his party's chances of winning.
Thus it was that both the Conservative government and Labour opposition shared a common interest - to make absolutely sure that the Sunday Mirror story was buried.
The job of ensuring this fell to 'Two Dinners' Goodman, as the lawyer was known because of his immense appetite and girth.
Normally in such circumstances, Goodman would have launched a writ there and then and let the matter be settled in court.
But that course would mean putting Boothby in the witness box - and Goodman, conscious that the allegations against his client were broadly true, was not going to take that risk.
So he turned to the Mirror's editorial director, Hugh Cudlipp, who had been on holiday when the Sunday Mirror story ran. Goodman's agile brain worked out that the ambitious Cudlipp, embroiled in a power struggle at the Mirror with the proprietor, King, who had sanctioned the story in his absence, would seize the chance to spike his rival's guns.
Krays
'Legends': Reggie (left) and Ronnie Kray became heroes in the East End of London for their gangland activities which went largely unchecked for years
I believe that Goodman and Cudlipp now reached an understanding to batten down the hatches. Sunday Mirror reporters embarking excitedly on gathering more information to nail Boothby suddenly found, to their amazement, that there was no more interest in the story.
'It just died,' one recalled. 'We were baffled and frustrated, but there was nothing we could do. Orders had come down from on high.' And that was that.
But killing the story was not enough for Goodman. He wanted it utterly discredited and so, with remarkable audacity, he had Boothby make a public declaration of his total innocence in a letter to The Times, the tribal notice board of the Establishment.
At Goodman's personal dictation, Boothby wrote: 'I have never been to all-male parties in Mayfair. I have met the man alleged to be King of the Underworld (Ron Kray) only three times, on business matters. I am not, and never have been, homosexual.'
Goodman then rang King and, knowing that the newspaper investigation to prove the allegations against Boothby had been halted by Cudlipp, demanded retraction of the story, exoneration of his client and substantial damages.
Otherwise, he said, Boothby would sue. It was a bluff but a good one. King hadn't a leg to stand on and agreed to a £40,000 out-of-court settlement and a front-page apology.
The sum of money - nearly £1 million at today's values - was unprecedented in a libel case at the time, deliberately so, as a warning to other newspapers. Goodman's stitch-up was complete.
Wilson, saved from any possible embarrassment over Driberg, was left free to go ahead and win the general election that October.
For Goodman, the reward was an almost instant peerage from a grateful Labour government and his confirmation as the unassailable ‘Mr Fix-It’ of the Establishment for years to come.
What nobody appeared to notice, however, was that Goodman’s actions had not only given the law’s protection to an elderly ennobled catamite, but also to a psychotic and potentially homicidal gangster.
The devious old lawyer had got Boothby, Driberg and a lot of other very worried politicians off the hook. But, in the process, he also saved the Krays.
Over the next four years their megalomania and madness would grow apace. As we have seen, George Cornell would die at their hands, and so too would Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the ‘Mad Axeman’ Frank Mitchell and Teddy Smith, a one-time boyfriend
of Driberg.
That they were all East End criminals makes no difference. Because the Krays’ reign of terror went unchecked, the very fabric of law and order in the country was undermined.
Though Boothby told people his £40,000 pay-out had gone to charity and into trusts for his godchildren, the reality was that a large chunk of it went to the Krays.
It came in very handy two years later when, despite the instinct of the police commissioner to let sleeping gangsters go on sleeping, they were arrested for intimidating a Soho club owner who refused to pay them protection money.
It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but they used Boothby’s thousands
to hire the best lawyers in the land and to bribe jury members not to find them guilty.
They walked free from the Old Bailey to carry on their violent business.
The twins’ victory was even greater than it seemed. Not only had they avoided imprisonment, but they had completely scared off Scotland Yard.
The senior detectives who brought the case were moved to other duties, as far away from London and the Krays as possible.
Ronnie Kray
End of an era: Thousands lined the streets to see Ronnie's coffin after his death in 1995
With Boothby totally in their pockets, they leant on him whenever they needed a word in the right places. It was not until 1969 that the Krays were at last brought to justice, thanks to a new commissioner at Scotland Yard and the persistence of Detective Superintendent ‘Nipper’ Read, who had pursued them for years and refused to give up.
But even now the prospect of what might be revealed in court was a worry to those involved in the hushed-up scandal four years earlier. Wilson, as prime minister, and Goodman, larger and more influential than ever, had much to lose if the faintest flicker of the cover-up they had initiated were to emerge.
What they needed was to eradicate the twins entirely with a life-long prison sentence in maximum security.
I believe that is one reason why, in order to secure a conviction, authority was given to offer even the guiltiest criminals immunity from prosecution if they would turn Queen’s Evidence. Such immunity was granted on a scale unseen before.
Astonishingly, long after they were convicted and jailed, the Boothby cover-up continued.
I wrote a book about the Krays, initially at their request and with their cooperation. By the end of 1971 it was all but finished.
My publisher, Jonathan Cape, liked it and the Observer newspaper was offering me £20,000 for the serial rights. Then came trouble.
'But it was obvious from what I saw that the relationship went way beyond the three business meetings that Boothby had staked his reputation on in his letter to The Times'
Ron told his mother to hand me a small brown suitcase he had given her for safekeeping containing a personally signed copy of Boothby’s memoirs along with photographs of him with Ron.
There were also notes from Boothby to Ron on crested paper. None of this was in any way salacious.
There was no mention of rent boys or rough-trade parties — Ron would never have wanted his mum to know he was involved in such things. But it was obvious from what I saw that the relationship went way beyond the three business meetings that Boothby had staked his reputation on in his letter to The Times.
In my book, I therefore wrote about the real extent of his friendship with Ron and the previously undisclosed occasions when they had met.
I went on holiday and returned to discover that my house had been broken into and my study ransacked.
The letters from Boothby to Ron were missing, as was a copy of the manuscript of my book. (Fortunately I had duplicates.)
Then my agent told me that she too had been burgled and her files on my book taken.
The phone rang. Goodman was on the line. ‘I think you should know’ — a favourite phrase of his when he was putting the frighteners on someone — ‘that I’ve read parts of the manuscript of your book that contain highly libellous allegations against Lord Boothby.’
I asked him to explain what allegations he was referring to but he rang off.
Goodman’s next call must have been to my publishers because shortly afterwards I heard that they were now rejecting my book on the grounds of libel.
The Observer — on whose trust Goodman sat as chairman — also withdrew their serialisation offer.
I was utterly relying on this book deal. When it fell through, it was financially ruinous to me and I was forced to sell my house.
The publisher George Weidenfeld came to my rescue by taking my book over and publishing it late in 1972 under the title The Profession Of Violence. But all references to the Boothby case were removed.
It was not until 1984, after Boothby’s death, that I was able to outline the scandal involving him and Ronnie Kray.
Since then, papers released at the Public Record Office have not only confirmed everything but revealed irrefutably the involvement of senior politicians in suppressing the truth.
This involvement of politicians with known criminals was scandalous enough, but I find the cynicism with which it was brushed beneath the carpets of Westminster much worse. To this day, it offends me.
Extracted from Notorious : The Immortal Legend Of The Kray Twins, by John Pearson, published by Century on September 2 at £11.99. © John Pearson 2010.