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the Krays – Peter Rachman had introduced them to a man called Stefan de Faye, who had a gambling club in Knightsbridge. TheKrays naturally enough just took it over. They had a new face around, a geezer called Leslie Payne who’d been a sergeant in the war. He was some sort of money-man adviser to the twins – what the Mafia in America called a ‘consigliere’. He helped them to run their new acquisition, Esmeralda’s.
    The club was in Wilton Place and the twins just took over the management one day with its staff and membership none the wiser. David and Alfie used to go there a lot. The casino was on the top of three floors with a restaurant beneath and the Cellar Club beneath that. That was a disco for lesbians.
    Reggie was away again (he was back in Wandsworth for six months, his appeal having been turned down) and Ronnie was not getting very far without him. He didn’t have clue about gambling. The customers kept coming, however. I suppose they found it amusing to be in a place run by gangsters. The men were in evening dress, black tie, and the women were in pearls. But if Ronnie didn’t like a punter, he’d be thrown down the stairs. It was all part of the entertainment.
    As Alfie and David would tell me, what Ronnie really liked about Esmeralda’s Barn was seeing what he’d call the ‘flash cunts’ losing money. Management was a joke, with all the decisions being based on Ron’s whims. Punters would have no credit left but Ronnie would still let them gamble if he liked the look of them. The club attracted lots of well-dressed women with their boyfriends, most of them Guards officers because the Household Division cavalry barracks was just round the corner. Alfie and David would look at the women and wonder who they were with, and whether they could try it on with them.
    They were pretty wild, the times at the Barn. There was one punter (whose face Ronnie later sliced open with a sword when he had failed to pay) who traded a gambling debt for a lease for Ronnie on a flat in Kensington. It was in Ashburn Gardens. It all seemed a long way from Bethnal Green. Ronnie set up there with his boyfriend, a face called Bobby Buckley.
    But it wasn’t long before Ronnie moved back to his mum’s house. Then Reggie came out of prison once more and the twins started arguing again. Ronnie put a caravan at the back of Vallance Road on some old bomb-site. It was like a garden shed, somewhere to go and sulk when they’d had a row.
    Meanwhile their business empire continued to grow. As well as running the gambling club, Leslie Payne’s main job was to supervise the Krays’ latest venture, an old fraud called ‘a long firm’. Leslie was the brains behind it. One day Alfie was taken to the front room in Vallance Road to meet him.
    Leslie looked the part, immaculately dressed and presented. He could have fronted anything. He was a smart, blond man of about thirty, with the good looks of an actor. He lived in south London, Tulse Hill, and had a family. He was going to teach Alfie everything he knew. And it turned out he was a master of his craft.
    It was a simple scam, really. There was a front man who would set up a business. He’d find premises, a warehouse, and he would get stationery printed, set up lines of credit and a bank account and then begin to trade.
    Alfie was one of the front men. He’d ring up a wholesaler and say: ‘I’ll have whatever it is in three colours, blue, green andwhite, and more in medium than large as that will sell more.’ The man at the other end would rub his hands in anticipation of the big deal, not knowing he was never going to see a penny profit from any of it. Thirty days’ credit was the usual.
    At first the transactions would be for relatively small amounts, with the front man building up trust with the wholesaler. When the time was right the operation would place larger orders with the suppliers. The stuff would then be sold off in a matter of hours for cash at any price, because