Page 72 - Once a copper 10 03 2020

earlier profanity was soon forgotten when I heard the filth that came out of
her mouth.

“You can fuckin well think again if you think you’re going to charge my boy
with anything, you’ll fuckin well see.”

I warned her about her language, and she laughed in my face.

“Look sonny, there will be a Detective Chief Inspector here any minute and
you’ll be told to let my boy go.”

I asked her to take a seat. Still cursing, she sat in the waiting area.

Whilst conducting background checks on my prisoner, I was again called to
the front office. This time a distinguished man in a suit was talking to the lad’s
mother. She remained silent but I noticed a satisfied smirk on her face as the
man showed me his police warrant card and I saw he was a Detective Chief
Inspector on the Serious Crime Squad. I showed him through to an interview
room where so we could talk privately.

He said that I would have heard of Reggie and Ronnie Kray.

The twin brothers were foremost perpetrators of organised crime in the East
End of London during the 1950s and 1960s. The Krays were involved in murder,
armed robbery, arson, protection rackets and assaults. In March 1969, both
were sentenced to life imprisonment, which they were now serving at Her
Majesties pleasure. Reggie had brutally murdered Jack "the Hat" McVitie, a
minor Kray gang member who had failed to kill the twins’ financial advisor,
Leslie Payne. Ronnie Kray shot and murdered George Cornell, a member of a
rival South London gang (the Richardson Gang), in the Blind Beggar pub in
Whitechapel on 9 March 1966. This was a gang reprisal killing after an
associate of the Krays was shot dead in a Catford night club.
Of course, I’d heard of the Krays, their exploits were the stuff of folk law in
both criminal, police and public circles. But what had the Krays got to do with
my first prisoner, a teenage kid stealing silverware from a church?

He DCI then dropped the bombshell. “That little woman out there was in with
the Krays back in the day, you’d be surprised at the jobs she gives me and
the villains she gives up. She has some heavy stuff to give me thanks to her
brats’ light fingers”. The foul mouthed bee-hive was this DCI’s informant.
“What about my prisoner?” I asked. “Sorry son, I’ve already cleared it with
your seniors, you got the stuff back, he won’t be charged”. He said.

And that was that, the full weight of the law was not to drop on my first arrest.
Having checked with my supervision, the decision was reached to release my
kid pending the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service, who would of Page72
course be appraised of the ‘heavy stuff’ his mother would reveal to the DCI. I