London's Gangs at War Read online

  LONDON’S GANGS AT WAR

  DICK KIRBY

  has also written

  Rough Justice

  Memoirs of a Flying Squad officer

  The Real Sweeney

  You’re Nicked!

  Villains

  The Guv’nors

  Ten of Scotland Yard’s Greatest Detectives

  The Sweeney

  The First Sixty Years of Scotland Yard’s Crimebusting

  Flying Squad 1919–1978

  Scotland Yard’s Ghost Squad

  The Secret Weapon Against Post-War Crime

  The Brave Blue Line

  100 Years of Metropolitan Police Gallantry

  Death on the Beat

  Police Officers killed in the Line of Duty

  The Scourge of Soho

  The Controversial Career of SAS Hero

  Detective Sergeant Harry Challenor MM

  Whitechapel’s Sherlock Holmes

  The Casebook of Fred Wensley OBE, KPM,

  Victorian Crimebuster

  The Wrong Man

  The Shooting of Steven Waldorf and

  the Hunt for David Martin

  Laid Bare

  The Nude Murders and

  the Hunt for ‘Jack the Stripper’

  Praise for Dick Kirby’s Books

  Rough Justice ‘. . . the continuing increase in violent crime will make many readers yearn for yesteryear and officers of Dick Kirby’s calibre.’

  Police Magazine

  The Real Sweeney ‘His reflections on the political aspect of law enforcement will ring true for cops, everywhere.’

  American Police Beat

  Villains ‘This is magic. The artfulness of these anti-heroes has you pining for the bad old days.’

  Daily Sport

  You’re Nicked! ‘A great read with fascinating stories and amusing anecdotes from a man who experienced it all.’

  Suffolk Norfolk Life

  The Guv’nors ‘They were heroes at times when heroes were desperately needed.’

  American Police Beat

  The Sweeney ‘. . . thoroughly researched and enjoyable history, crammed with vivid descriptions of long-forgotten police operations . . . races along like an Invicta at full throttle.’

  Daily Express

  Scotland Yard’s Ghost Squad ‘Dick Kirby . . . knows how to bring his coppers to life on each page.’

  Joseph Wambaugh, Author of The Choirboys

  The Brave Blue Line ‘. . . simply the best book about police gallantry ever written’.

  History By the Yard

  Death on the Beat ‘I am delighted Dick Kirby has written this book.’

  Michael Winner

  The Scourge of Soho ‘Dick Kirby has chosen his fascinating subject well.’

  Law Society Gazette

  Whitechapel’s Sherlock Holmes ‘Dick Kirby has done an excellent job.’

  The Ripperologist

  The Wrong Man ‘Dick Kirby gives us the gritty reality of this subject. I did not put this book down, reading it in one day, deep into the night.’

  Paul Millen, Author Of Crime Scene Investigator

  Laid Bare ‘. . . Dick lays out the evidence and challenges you to come to a conclusion regarding the culpability or otherwise of the suspects . . . he holds our hand in search of the answers to this mystery.’

  London Police Pensioner

  To my friend, Brigadier Henry Wilson:

  I hope there’s sufficient ‘blood, snot and guts’ in here to appease you!

  And to Ann – all the way to the moon, and back.

  LONDON’S GANGS AT WAR

  DICK KIRBY

  With a foreword by Lord (Peter) Imbert CVO, QPM, DL Commissioner, Metropolitan Police 1987–93

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  Pen & Sword True Crime

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Dick Kirby, 2017

  ISBN 978-1-47389-476-1

  eISBN 978-1-47389-478-5

  Mobi ISBN 978-1-47389-477-8

  The right of Dick Kirby to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation, Pen & Sword Family History, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military, Pen & Sword Discovery, Pen & Sword Politics, Pen & Sword Atlas, Pen & Sword Archaeology, Wharncliffe Local History, Wharncliffe True Crime, Wharncliffe Transport, Pen & Sword Select, Pen & Sword Military Classics, Leo Cooper, The Praetorian Press, Claymore Press, Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing.

  For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact

  PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED

  47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS,

  England

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Prelude Little Hubby and the Babe

  Chapter 1 Tommy Smithson – ‘A Perfect Nuisance’

  Chapter 2 Tommy Smithson – the Maltese Syndicate

  Chapter 3 Jack Spot & Billy Hill

  Chapter 4 Strange Happenings in Frith Street

  Chapter 5 A Very Dodgy Clergyman

  Chapter 6 The Attack outside Hyde Park Mansions

  Chapter 7 Revelations in Dublin

  Chapter 8 A Busted Brief

  Chapter 9 A Bloody Interlude

  Chapter 10 A Revenge Attack

  Chapter 11 Gangsters – Exit Left

  Chapter 12 The Pen Club Murder

  Chapter 13 The Pen Club Murder – the Trial

  Chapter 14 The Krays

  Chapter 15 The Richardsons

  Chapter 16 The Murder at Mr Smith’s Club

  Chapter 17 The Torture Trial

  Chapter 18 Monkey Business

  Chapter 19 Richardsons – the Aftermath

  Chapter 20 The Krays – Revisited

  Chapter 21 Re-enter Nipper Read

  Chapter 22 The Mitchell Murder Trial

  Chapter 23 Time to Leave the Stage

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  A quatrain from Kurt Weill, Elizabeth Hauptman & Bertolt Brecht’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera)

  For in this life (I wish there was another),

  Victuals are scarce and men are such brutes, you know.

  We’d love to live in peace and worship one another,

  But circumstances just won’t have it so.

  Acknowledgements

  Firstly, my thanks go to Brigadier Henry Wilson for his enthusiasm and assistance; next, to Lord Imbert for his splendid foreword and George Chamier for his superb editing.

  I should also like to thank the following for their administrative assistance: Bob Fenton QGM, honorary secretary to the Ex-CID Officers Association; Susi Rogol, editor of the London Police Pensioner; Beverley Edwards, Chairman of the Metropolitan Women Police Association; Mick Carter from The ReCIDivists’ Luncheon Club; Barry Walsh from the Friends of the Metropolitan Police Historical Collection; Martin Stallion, secretary of the Police History Society; Paul Bickley, Curator of The Crime Museum, New Scotland Yard; and Alan Moss of Histo
ry by the Yard.

  I received a great deal of help from people who delved into their memories for the compilation of this book. Some wished to remain anonymous; others were not so shy and they appear here in alphabetical order: John Barnes, Richard ‘Dickie’ Bird, Mike Bucknole FNAVA, BA (Hons), PgC, Peter Burgess, Janet Cheal, Pat Collins, Jack Cooper, Dave Coppen, Ron Cork, Roger Crowhurst, Jeff Edwards, John Farley QPM, Dr Ken German, Martin Gosling MBE, Bob Hancock, Tom Hassell, Doug Hoadley, Graham Howard, George Howlett OBE, OStJ, QPM, Robin Jackson, John Lewis, Alick Morrison, Tony Osborn, Hugh Parker, Arthur Porter BEM, Pat Pryde, Dave Puntan, Kenneth David ‘Taff’ Rees, John Simmonds, Roger Stoodley, George Taylor, John Taylor, Bernard Tighe, Max Vernon, Mike Warburton, Ed Williams, Layton Williams, the late Bill Waite BEM, Keith White, Bryan Woolnough. My thanks for the use of photos go to Alick Morrison, Bernard Tighe and Ken German; others come from the author’s collection. Whilst every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, Pen & Sword Books and I apologise for any inadvertent omissions.

  There were some who could have provided pertinent information but for reasons best known to themselves chose not to do so. Bereft of their input, I have endeavoured to ensure that the content of this book is as accurate as possible and acknowledge that any faults or imperfections are mine alone.

  By now I should have mastered the mysteries of cyberspace but due to a misspent old age I have neglected to do so. Fortunately, my daughter and son-in-law, Sue and Steve Cowper, have been on hand to rescue me, often from the most mundane of computer-generated cock-ups, and I am very grateful to them.

  To them, and to the rest of my family, I pay tribute for their unfailing help, love and assistance: to my sons, Mark and Robert, my youngest daughter and her husband, Barbara and Rich Jerreat, and my grandchildren, Emma Cowper B.Mus, Jessica Cowper B.Mus, Harry Cowper, Samuel and Annie Grace Jerreat.

  Most of all to my dear wife of more than fifty years, Ann, who thankfully has stuck by me, during the good and the not-so-good times.

  Dick Kirby

  Suffolk, 2016

  Foreword

  Dick Kirby, undoubtedly using the experience of his years as a working detective in the Metropolitan Police has, since his retirement from the Force, written a number of successful and popular books.

  This book, London’s Gangs at War, is an account of real-life (as they sadly were then) criminals, their exploits and their almost unbelievable violence to one another and to anyone else they considered to be standing between them and their dominant hold on the leadership of the most lucrative criminal enterprises in the West End of London and particularly in the streets and shady clubs of London’s Soho district.

  Some of those he writes about were what we might call ‘household names’, albeit for the worst of reasons. Their villainous exploits made good stories for the media, and I recall as a boy doing my daily paper round in my quiet country town and taking the opportunity to devour the reports of the activities of such well known rogues as Jack Spot, Billy Hill, Albert Dimes and, somewhat later, the infamous and equally violent Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie. Even then I marvelled at the courage of the police officers who had to counterbalance and neutralize such violent and bloodthirsty gangland killers, who fought to control crooked clubs, fraudulent betting and gaming premises and prostitute rings.

  It was only when I joined the Metropolitan Police myself and gained credibility with experience that I became aware of the courage of the officers who ran great risks to get inside information about these murderous individuals and groupings and their activities by cultivating and running informants, and the very brave undercover officers who, to gain vital information and evidence, posed as fellow villains. I never met any of the villains mentioned in this well written and very well researched book but am proud to have met and known a number of those who Dick has acknowledged as assisting with their own information about, in some cases, very risky and dangerous involvement.

  This book will fill many a gap in the knowledge of serving detectives, their uniformed colleagues and all those fighting such violent miscreants now and in the future, and I congratulate and thank Dick Kirby for his patient, deep and thorough research into this subject. A book well worth reading.

  Lord (Peter) Imbert CVO, QPM, DL.

  Commissioner, Metropolitan Police 1987–93

  PRELUDE

  Little Hubby and the Babe

  With the arrival of the Second World War, the British authorities decided that the time had come to rid themselves of a gang who had been a thorn in their sides for many years – the Sabinis. These brothers from Clerkenwell had been responsible for racetrack protection and gang warfare since the 1920s, but by virtue of their Italian heritage, the leader, Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini, and some of his brothers and associates with Italian-sounding names were incarcerated in 1940 as ‘enemy aliens’. This was a pyrrhic victory for the Home Office; it was also certainly unlawful. Firstly, the Sabinis were only half-Italian; their mother had been English and none of the brothers had even been to Italy. Next, Darby Sabini’s twenty-one-year-old son, Flight Sergeant Harry Sabini, was killed whilst on active service with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. And lastly, Sabini himself was a spent force. He was a middle-aged man with no stomach for further confrontations of any kind.

  During the Sabinis’ internment, some of the criminal activity in London’s Soho was run by racketeer ‘Big Alf’ White. Sentenced to five years’ penal servitude in 1922 for shooting with intent (the conviction was overturned on appeal), shortly afterwards he was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labour for attempting to bribe a prison warder. A hard man in his prime, he had been beaten up by a gang of tearaways outside Haringey Greyhound Stadium in 1939 which rather knocked the stuffing out of him. Although he had formed an uneasy alliance with some Italian gangsters, he was prudent enough to keep at arm’s length the gangs of Italians and Jews who ran many of the clubs. The Messina brothers, a band of violent Maltese pimps, had their girls working for them flat out (no pun intended) during wartime, but the brothers themselves kept a very low profile indeed. Prior to the outbreak of war, in order to prevent their being deported should they be convicted of a criminal offence, the Messinas had thought it prudent to take out British citizenship. This ruse now rebounded on them, since as British citizens they were subject to conscription into the armed services and warrants had been issued for their arrest; hence their self-enforced shyness. But neither the absence of the Messinas nor the nightly bombardment by the Luftwaffe meant a cessation of gang violence. Far from it.

  *

  Situated on the first floor of 37 Wardour Street, Soho was ‘The Bridge and Billiards Club’ – known to its habitués as ‘The Old Cue Club’ – and just before midnight on the evening of Thursday, 1 May 1941, Eddie Fleischer, aka Eddie Fletcher (who had been heavily involved with running protection rackets and who ten years previously had been arrested with Harry White, Alf’s son, for maliciously wounding a Soho club owner), was attacked in the billiard hall, and not for the first time either. Ten days earlier, at three o’clock in the morning, Fletcher and an associate, Joseph Franks, had been involved in a fight with Bert Connelly, the doorman of the Palm Beach Bottle Parties Club, which was situated in the basement of the Wardour Street premises. Fletcher had taken a beating – two men were charged with causing him grievous bodily harm – and he had been barred from the club.

  Now Fletcher returned to the Italian-run club and was playing pool when he was set upon by three men – Joseph Collette, Harry Capocci and Albert George Dimes (otherwise known as Alberto Dimeo or ‘Italian Albert’). Dimes (with a Scottish mother and Italian father) was then twenty-five years old and at six feet two, a good-looking man and an adversary with a powerful reputation. Not only had he served short prison sentences, including one for breaking a police officer’s jaw, it was also rumoured that in 1939 he had murdered a fellow gangster named Charles ‘Chick’ Lawrence in the East End.

  At the time of the confrontation
with Fletcher, Dimes was absent without leave from the RAF. But now his reputation was about to be considerably enhanced, because a pitched battle began in the billiard hall and, according to a very few of the forty customers who later made themselves available to the police as witnesses, it was Dimes who coordinated the violence. The five billiard tables were wrecked, the light shades above them were torn down and smashed, billiard balls were hurled around the room and Fletcher was attacked by the gang with coshes, cues and fists. A former club owner and a friend of Fletcher, thirty-sixyear-old Harry Distleman – otherwise known as ‘Scarface’ and ‘Little Hubby’ – came to his aid. The three attackers vanished and Distleman took Fletcher, bleeding profusely from a wound on the side of his head, to Charing Cross Hospital to have the cut attended to.

  And all might have been well, had Fletcher not insisted, an hour later, on returning to the billiard hall – ‘In order to retrieve my coat’, he said. Unfortunately for Fletcher, so did his three attackers.

  *

  By now, the sometime manager of the Palm Beach Bottle Parties Club had been alerted. He was thirty-nine-year-old Antonio ‘Babe’ Mancini and he had a hatred of Jews; whilst serving a twelvemonth sentence of hard labour in 1939 for stealing a wallet, he developed the unpleasant habit of spitting in Jewish prisoners’ food. This incurred the displeasure of the Jewish gang leader, Jack Spot, on remand for grievous bodily harm, who executed what was thought to be a suitably violent punishment on Mancini for his antisocial habits. Since Sabini’s internment, Mancini had been partly responsible for the unity of what remained of the Italian gangs.