The Profession of Violence Read Free

with his partner, an Irishman named Sonny Kenny.
    Charles was small and dapper, and everything about him gleamed; his greased-back hair, his sharp black shoes and his quick smile. People in Hoxton said the Krays were gipsy folk, descended from horse-dealers who had settled here in the poorest part of London. Charles had the mistrustful dark eyes of a gipsy. So had his father, Jimmy Kray. The old man had kept a barrow in Petticoat Lane, and was a wanderer too. Otherwise, father and son were very different.
    Jimmy was an East End character: according to Charles, he was ‘A good-looking old boy. Bigger than me with thick grey hair. He always wore a white silk stock tied aroundhis neck and was proud of his appearance. In those days the men of the East End were very vain. He was a fighter and a drinker and was scared of no man living. He must have drunk with every villain who came out of Hoxton and Bethnal Green and he’d fight them too. When he fought he never cared what happened. He was called “Mad Jimmy Kray”.’
    Charles was cleverer than his wild old father. His mother had been in service with a well-off family in Highgate, a careful woman who spent her time worrying about her husband and keeping the family together. In many ways Charles resembled her: he was deferential, always careful to keep out of trouble and had a taste for money. He was no fighter but a talker with an instinct for buying and selling; in his teens he had started working on his own account. By twenty he was making a good living and generally considered one of the finest ‘pesterers’ around: for the door-to-door dealer, ‘pestering’ is the basis of success.
    His younger brother says of him, ‘He’d always be polite and never bullied but he knew what people would do for money. As soon as he found anyone with something to sell he’d keep on pestering until he got it. By rights Charles should be a stone-rich man today.’ Gold buying went with old clothes buying. ‘Once I had asked the lady of the house if she had any clothes to sell, I’d say, “Excuse me, madam, but I wondered if you’d any gold or silver you’ve no use for.” The first time they’d say no they hadn’t, and I’d say, “It doesn’t matter at all, madam, but it so happens I’ll be passing back this way in half an hour and call to see if you’ve found anything. It’ll be no trouble.” A bloody lie, of course. But then you gotta tell a few lies. That’s business. And when you came back you’d usually find they’d got you something.’
    In the mid thirties, silver was fetching two shillings and sixpence per ounce; eighteen-carat gold seven pounds an ounce. ‘I always sold to Abe Sokolok in Black Lion Yard, off Whitechapel Road, every Sunday morning, him beingYiddish. Most weeks I’d be making twenty or thirty pounds from the gold alone.’
    This was wealth in the East End, where family income averaged seventeen shillings a week; and Charles had a life he thoroughly enjoyed. ‘I’ve been a free man. That’s how I like it. I don’t believe in working for a Guv’nor. That’s a mug’s game.’ But at twenty-four the time had come to marry. With his looks, and his money, he had the pick of the local girls and chose a seventeen-year-old blonde with blue eyes called Violet Lee. They met in a dance-hall in Mare Street, Hackney. After the marriage they moved in with his parents over a shop in Stene Street, Hoxton. She was soon pregnant and the doctors told her to expect twins. Instead she gave birth to a single son, Charles David. She had been eighteen then. Now at twenty-one she was once again expecting.
    Charles Kray was not a family man. But when the midwife told him Violet would soon be giving birth, he decided to postpone his trip to Bristol. That Monday morning he went to King’s Cross to explain things to Sonny Kenny before