The price we paid for bringing down the Firm
Legacy of Menace
David, Bobby and Alfie Teale
Legacy of Menace
Life in the Shadow of the Krays
David, Bobby and Alfie Teale
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First published by Ebury Spotlight in 2025 1
Copyright © Bobby Teale, Alfie Teale and David Teale 2025
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Also by Bobby and David Teale:
Bringing Down the Krays Surviving the Krays
Abbreviations
CID Criminal Investigation Department
CRO Criminal Record Office
DCI Detective Chief Inspector
DCS Detective Chief Superintendent
DI Detective Inspector
DPP Director of Public Prosecutions
DS Detective Superintendent
MPS Metropolitan Police Service
WDC Woman Detective Constable
WDS Woman Detective Sergeant
Author’s Note
Alfie Teale: Holborn, London, summer 2024
This is a story long in the making. When we brothers were small, I was in charge. Now, at the end of a long life, it’s come back to me again to try and keep us together. It’s been difficult. As family sagas go it’s certainly unusual. We were born into a rackety London family where nothing was quite what it seemed. And we were barely out of our teens when I met Ronnie Kray in an East End club in 1959 and fell in willingly with the funloving celebrity criminals of the sixties. My brothers, David and Bobby, would fall for it too.
It turned dark. The Cornell murder in March 1966 in the Blind Beggar pub was shocking. Ronnie and his twin, Reggie, the lovable, bollock-chops hilarious Mike and Bernie Winters of crime, were no longer at all funny. The party was over. The killing time had begun; first George Cornell, then Frank Mitchell, who was smuggled out of Dartmoor prison then disappeared, and finally – in October 1967 – Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie, stabbed in the stomach by Reggie.
After Ronnie shot George Cornell, the whole ‘Firm’ (the Kray gang) were holed up in David’s tiny north London flat with his wife and young kids as hostages. Bobby was brave. He told Scotland Yard what was happening in a desperate, dangerous phone call and secretly met a contact throughout
that summer to pass information to a senior detective. Our brother called himself ‘Phillips’. We didn’t know.
It went wrong. There was a corrupt copper in the Yard with a line back to the Firm. Bobby was in the gravest danger of being exposed as a police spy. To get us off the streets (we were thought to be in danger too) we were arrested at a ‘party’ in a posh west London flat, tried on a charge of ‘blackmail’ and sentenced to three years in prison. We were young men with families. We were sent down, but the Krays stayed free to kill again.
David and Bobby were on the same wing in Maidstone Prison, but Bobby avoided contact. I would hear about that later. Then we were released, and at the July 1968 committal hearing (held in secret) and the big Kray trial that followed six months later, it was publicly revealed that, three years earlier, Bobby had been acting as an undercover police spy within the Firm.
After the verdict that at last put the Krays away, Bobby vanished. David and I assumed he must be dead. Then, 40 years later, we met again (it happened first with a Facebook post) for a joyful reunion in London. The result was a bestselling book.* But there were still plenty of questions.
Conversations were difficult. I was prepared to leave it alone, David less so. In 2021 he wrote his own book, Surviving the Krays, which both named a Security Service recruit within the Firm looking to head off a big potential sexual scandal involving politicians, and revealed the identity of a senior policeman whose corrupt line to the twins had so imperilled Bobby’s life.
* Bringing Down the Krays, Ebury Press, 2012.
David managed to contact a long-retired detective sergeant who’d been on the Krays’ case from that time. He suggested he contact the Independent Office for Police Conduct for a proper investigation. After a while (the pandemic intervened), they made a judgment, dismissing our complaints (see p. 258). There were still plenty of riddles and contradictions that only Bobby could solve. In early 2024 he travelled from his home in the mountains of Utah to London to face difficult truths before it was too late. We met for sometimes tearful confessionals of intimate secrets about things that happened long ago.
There was one big unanswered question. Who had smashed up our young lives? Was it the murderous Kray twins? Or was it the police, cynically using the criminal justice system to hide their own failure?
Bobby could only tell what he knew – and to talk about his young life as he had never done before. This book is the result.
Prologue: Sent Down
Alfie: London, October 1966
‘Alfred William Teale, David Charles Teale, Robert Frank Teale, I am sending each of you to prison for three years. Take them down.’
No. 1 Court, the Old Bailey, is well used to the theatricality of sentencing, the dramatic climax of any trial. But three brothers in one go? That’s a bit unusual. His Honour Judge Alan King-Hamilton, hammer of all things ‘permissive’, seems especially pleased at the size of the catch as he intones our names and our allotted punishment with years behind bars.
I had turned it all over in my mind every night while on remand in Brixton Prison. Nothing made sense. One minute David and I are having a drink with some man our brother Bobby had met in a pub and the next we are about to be banged up for three years.
What the fuck is happening here?
The shock of the sentence is total. We’re innocent, you see. Honest, guv, we really are. This farce of being accused and tried for ‘demanding money with menaces’, what did that mean?
The court officers move to get us down to the cells. We hang on to one another. I can’t stand the thought of letting David and Bobby go. All my life I had been the one to take care of my younger brothers and I’m not about to stop now.
It’s being the eldest of the three Teale brothers, you see. I was first into this world just before the Second World War kicked off, first out of school, and I was first into the big bad business of being a proper grown-up. At least, I thought I was. But there’s nothing I can do to turn this round. I still don’t know what brought us here but at least I know now where we’ll be going.
‘Teale, Alfred, you’re for Wandsworth, your two brothers are off to the Scrubs,’ shouts the custody sergeant. It could not be worse. Wormwood Scrubs is tough, Wandsworth is tougher, I know that. With my supposed ‘violent’ record woven round me in the court proceedings, that’s where I’m going.
A Black Maria takes me south. Going through the gates of Wandsworth Prison is like stepping back into Victorian London. I feel as if I’m going through the gates of hell. And in a way I am.
Some bleak prison or other is going to be my way of life for the next three years. All I can think of is my wife, Wendy, and my sons, Michael and Mark. How will they manage without me? I’m a family man and have responsibilities to them as well as to my two younger brothers.
I’m taken straightaway to the reception area before going to the bath house. Like other new prisoners, I’m told to strip off and then we are hosed down like a pack of animals.
‘Here, you, Teale, there’s a box there for you …’
I look back blankly at the screw, not knowing what he’s talking about.
‘It’s your prison clothes! Get them on now!’ he barks at me.
Slowly I take out the contents of the box and start to dress. Grey socks, grey pants, grey overalls, everything was grey, then a pair of big boots with the laces removed (to prevent us either killing ourselves or one another).
Turning to the screw, I start to say, ‘I don’t even know why I’m here, officer,’ but I don’t get to finish the sentence. I had accidentally stepped over the yellow line painted on the floor: the line that was supposed to separate the prisoners from the screws. Suddenly a whistle blows and four or five burly screws with truncheons launch themselves at me while one bellows, ‘Get back over that line, Teale!’
Next, I am marched to a cell where the screw throws open the door to reveal two enormous Black guys, playing draughts. They don’t look best pleased to see me. If I was frightened before, I am now terrified.
‘What are you in for, whitey?’ one asks.
I start to say, ‘I don’t know. I’m innocent!’ but they just laugh.
‘Everyone in here say they were fitted up, whitey! Don’t you know that?’ I guess they were right.
I look around the small cell, the size of the two men in with me, and the three chamber pots which are all we have to relieve ourselves until morning. Somehow, I must survive this. I keep thinking of Wendy and the boys, and my two younger brothers in Wormwood Scrubs.
That night I sleep in my clothes after lights out, too intimidated by my cell mates to get undressed in front of them.
Every time I try to close my eyes, they say, ‘Are you asleep, white man?’
The next morning a screw bangs on the door and we all file up to ‘slop out’, a disgusting process where we have to throw the contents of our chamber pots into a recess before rinsing them out and returning to our cells.
Suddenly I see in the line of men a face I recognise, a friendly one this time. Scouse Micky sees me too and, as soon as I can get close, I tell him what has happened, how I don’t know why I’m in here, and how, with years ahead of me, I am completely terrified, not least of my two outsize cellmates.
Scouse Micky is sympathetic.
Two days later I’m transferred to another cell with two other cons, much older than me and who between them have done plenty of bird. Once they know that it’s my ‘first time’ they tell me what to do and how to behave for the rest of my time inside.
‘You have to do what you’re told. If a screw doesn’t like you, they’ll let you know … in a bad way.’
That night and every night I cry like a child. In my head I keep going over how we’d got here. Who is this man who had apparently set us up? And why?
All I remember is Bobby acting out of character when he found us in our usual Holborn pub. Then he took us up west to meet someone called Wallace ‘for a party’ at a posh flat. We’d all had a few drinks and our generous host (he sure kept the drinks flowing) had offered to help us with money to set up a new market stall.
Then we’d all gone to sleep and woken up to find ourselves arrested. This Wallace geezer had sneaked out in the middle of
the night to tell the police to raid his flat. But why? What was in it for him?
And why had we ended up being sentenced to three years at the Old Bailey for a crime we had never committed?
None of it made any sense. But there had to be an answer. Somehow, I just wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. Time passes. After a few weeks I’m set for a new destination.
‘Teale, you’re for Lewes tomorrow,’ says a screw.
I don’t even know where Lewes is, but my cellmates reassure me that it’s ‘Brighton way, Alf – you’ll be alright down there’.
Although I still have no idea why any of us had gone to prison in the first place I am, thank God, at least getting out of Wandsworth. The day of my departure cannot come soon enough. David, as I would discover, had had it pretty much the same.
David: Wormwood Scrubs Prison, October 1966
I haven’t done anything! Over and over again, that thought keeps running through my head. How am I to explain to my wife Christine why I am here when I don’t know myself? I can’t even send a letter to her as I can’t read or write …
‘Three years!’
Up until the judge said those words, I’d still got some hope. The whole thing is a joke, a trumped-up charge dreamed up by the police for whatever reason which should never even have got to trial. Even after all this time, the script keeps running in my head as if it’s still happening live.
I am a 23-year-old husband and father of two daughters with another on the way. Now I am standing in No. 1 Court in the Old Bailey being told by a stern bastard in a wig that
my brothers and I are being banged up for three years for ‘demanding money with menaces’. And I don’t have the slightest idea why.
I am still in shock as we turn from the dock. There’s no public, no newspaper reporters. The whole thing’s closed, in secret, to protect whoever it is accusing us. Our brief stares at the floor before scuttling off. The steps down to the cells are incredibly steep, more like walking down a ladder than a staircase. I feel at any minute I will topple forwards onto my brothers Alfie and Bobby, and we will all go over like ninepins. But I am determined to keep my dignity and, taking my example from Alfie, we three walk down with our heads held high.
When we reach the bottom of the stairs we instinctively cling together. As Alfie puts his arms round Bobby and me, he starts to sing, ‘When you walk through the storm …’ Bobby and I join in straightaway with ‘Hold your head up high …’ and, to the amusement of the screws (they clap us), we continue to sing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ so loudly that a court officer is sent to shut us up. It had been a big Merseybeat hit three years before for Gerry and the Pacemakers and become the Liverpool FC football anthem. We just like the sentiment.
We hold on to one another for as long as we can until, finally, they prise us apart, frogmarching us into separate cells where I collapse onto a bunk in tears. I cry for myself, for Christine, my wife, and our two baby daughters. I want to be there when Christine gives birth to our youngest child, not to hear about it afterwards from a screw.
When they finally come to fetch us an hour or so later, they tell me that Alfie is being sent to Wandsworth and Bobby and I
are to go together to Wormwood Scrubs. Although upset that Alfie is not coming with us, I take some comfort from knowing that at least Bobby and I aren’t being separated.
Not for long though. A meat wagon picks us up in the early evening from the Old Bailey and takes us both straight to the Scrubs. By around seven we are at the prison, a filthy soot-blackened Victorian building with facilities to match. Bobby and I are taken into reception and from there to a sluice room where we have to strip all our clothes off (to make sure we aren’t concealing any weapons) and then get hosed down. They hand us our prison uniforms. It feels like we are in a concentration camp.
Thinking that Bobby and I, being brothers, will automatically be ‘two’d up’ together in one cell, I’m disappointed when we’re taken to two separate cells – Bobby down by the screws’ office, normally reserved for ‘special’ or violent prisoners who need ‘keeping an eye on’. What the hell is going on? My brother Bobby wouldn’t hurt a fly.
I look around at the four walls of my cell that night and despair. High up in the wall a small rectangular window shows me all I can still see of the outside world, the light slowly fading on my last day of freedom for the next three years.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The sound cuts through the miserably poor sleep of my first night in prison. A screw banging on the door shouts, ‘Slop out on the twos,’ referring to the second landing of the prison. We then file back to our cells. At about 7.30 we go down to breakfast, a disgusting plate of what is meant to be scrambled eggs and baked beans alongside a slice of stale white bread. The tea is so weak that it looks like piss.
Bobby and I have both been assigned to the carpentry workshop. But before that we have to go and see the governor, who gives us a provisional release date that is still so far in the future it feels like a hundred years. We are also reminded that ‘if we behave ourselves’ we might get our sentences reduced, but if we don’t, we could end up serving even more time. Once a month our wives and children will be allowed to visit, a privilege we will lose if we are in any trouble.
I sit through all this with a feeling of utter disbelief and sadness; I feel as if I have just witnessed an atom bomb going off, destroying all life as I have previously known it.
After this it’s back to the cell before being sent to the carpentry workshop. At least, I think, I’ll be with Bobby now. Except that whenever I go anywhere near him, he blanks me, or deliberately drops something on the floor so that the screw comes over, destroying any chance we have of chatting together.
What the fuck’s going on? Why won’t my own brother speak to me? Does he know more than I do about why we are here? The thought occurs momentarily. Whatever his reason, it feels to me like abandonment.
After the workshop, we must go back to our cells again before going down to lunch, this time a plate of something that is meant to be meat and mashed potato followed by something else covered in custard.
Then it is briefly back to the cells again before another session in the workshop until 4pm. Dinner at 5pm is the same as lunch, before another lock-up. At 7pm we are allowed ‘association’, a chance to mix with one another and with prisoners from different landings. I, of course, go straight down to the first landing to see if I can at last get to talk to my brother.
There he is sitting in his cell, but when I ask him: ‘Coming out?’ he shakes his head and turns away. The other prisoners don’t believe we are brothers and keep asking me what is up between us. All I can say is the truth – that I have no bloody idea. No more than I have about why I am in prison in the first place.
But back to that first day. At 8pm it’s back to the cell again before final lights-out at 9pm when I am banged up for the night. Staring up at that tiny square of night sky through the window, I think about Christine, about our daughters, and how I sincerely wish I was dead.
Bobby: Maidstone Prison, November 1966
After the shock of sentencing, my brother David and I are taken from the Central Criminal Court to the Scrubs. It’s utterly degrading. Horrible. After a month we are both sent to Maidstone and assigned to a cell block called ‘Thanet’. It’s where, so I’m being told, the worst of the worst are sent. Here we both are, now alongside the highest-risk murderers. I guess that the Yard is controlling our treatment in some way, but I don’t know what their plan is – if there even is a plan. Look how the last one turned out.
I’m burning with rage; this is not how I was told it would be – but I reckon that at least if they are putting Dave and me in a high-security block, they are in some way trying to look out for us.
The sentencing and the way we were bundled into prison is still a big shock – but I at least know why we had been lifted. Alfie and David don’t have that dubious comfort and I’m not about to tell them.
How could I begin to explain? That I had ingratiated myself with their pals Reggie and Ronnie Kray only to decide one day to be a police informer? A grass? How I’d merrily fed information on the twins’ doings to a big-shot detective at Scotland Yard via a cut-out named Sergeant Joseph Pogue in the backs of cars? Tell them how it had all blown up in my face and I’d become the twins’ number-one target? With David and Alfie surely next. And that the reason this is happening is because it was part of a plan to somehow make us and our families safe? It’s all laid out in the narrative that follows but right then my brothers don’t have a clue. And they mustn’t, in case it puts them into greater danger.
So that’s why, from the moment we are sent to our cells in Maidstone, I expect to be hit at any minute by someone sent by Ronnie. The fact that I am put in a cell next to the screws’ office proves that I am a high-risk inmate.
Now, as the cell door slams shut, I know I won’t sleep. Instead, I think back to our arrest, that farcical episode in Dolphin Square with the party-loving Mr Wallace, trying to work it out.
On that frantic morning at Rochester Row nick, I had told DS Michael Maidment, the arresting officer, that I’d been working with Sergeant Joe Pogue for months previously. I was one of the good guys! I really thought that as soon as he heard what had happened, we’d be freed. But then Maidment came back and told me that Pogue had dismissed me as unimportant, a ‘common informer’ – just get on with it and send me to jail. And now here I am.
I still don’t understand. What are the police playing at? Not only had I been giving information about Ronnie to the police, but the police suspected that at least one of their own
was corrupt. So, the cops had been feeding me planted information for me to get to the twins, then see if it came back to them from one of their own.
It’s so complicated it makes my head hurt. Everything that had happened between me and Pogue so far had been done via a series of hints. There I would be, sitting in the car, passing information, and one of them would suddenly say: ‘We should make sure you are secured somewhere … at least for six months, maybe nine …’
Now I slowly begin to get it. Maybe the Yard never realised how long it was going to take them to get the twins to trial. So, when they first thought about getting me off the streets, they probably thought they would do it for a couple of months. Then they suddenly figure out that it’s going to take them a hell of a lot longer to get anything to stick to the Krays. Which is why we’ve now gone down for three years. No words were ever spoken outright to say that I was going to be sent to prison. At no stage had they ever mentioned that David and Alfie were going to be included. After months of passing information, I got the shock of my life when one of Pogue’s pals told me at a meet on 8 August that my brothers were to be part of the great plan. So here we all are in nick. If you let your cell door stay open, other cons can walk in and out. I don’t want that as it puts me at risk. Friends of the Firm are banging on the door asking me what’s going on and I won’t answer them. David too is banging on the door, asking, ‘What are you doing, Bobby? What the fuck are you doing?’ And I can’t say anything to him either, not even to my own brother.
Dave doesn’t know a thing about me and Pogue. I have no idea what his reaction will be if he finds out. I’ve broken that
code: whatever you do you never, ever grass. But a voice inside my head tells me if I hadn’t gone to the police, my brothers and I would be looking at a 15-year stretch each for our association with the Krays.
Can I trust Dave not to panic? If I tell him and he decides to tell the other crims what I’ve been up to, I could be dead by nightfall and our whole family will be in danger. I’m not about to risk that.
No, I need Dave to be as much like his usual self as possible while we are in prison and, right now, he is. He may be as mad as hell with me of course, but that doesn’t matter.
I love studying music and I love chess. So, I decide to focus on these in prison as a means of survival. I am amazed by how immaculate David manages to look in jail, earning the nickname Dapper Dave from the other cons. Looking good restores his self-confidence. I understand that is my brother’s particular way of coping, as I have mine.
What also keeps me going is a kind of visualisation that I am doing what makes me feel safe, if only for a few precious moments. When the screw looks in the window to check on me, there I am sitting on the floor imagining I’m in a boat in the ocean (charting a course for the horizon towards freedom, even if it is only in my head).
The screw looks baffled and asks, ‘What are you doing down there, Teale?’ and I reply, ‘I’m in my boat.’ The screw probably thinks I’m mad, but that’s what’s keeping me sane.
Meanwhile, all there is to do is wait, to endure, to stay safe, to say nothing – until one day a policeman by the name of Leonard Read comes calling …
Chapter One The Krays Begin to Cast Their Spell
Alfie: The Double R Club, Bethnal Green, London, 1959
This is how it all began – it was Mad Teddy Smith who led me astray, if that’s what you call it, one day in 1959. London, a city of bomb sites and gloom, was blinking into life. Bits of it were, anyway. Teddy was older than me, and gay. He was great company.
I was having a drink in Jack Murray’s bar in Soho, usually a lively enough spot but completely dead that night, when Teddy comes in and suggests we go to see some friends he thought I’d like. They were called Reggie and Ronnie Kray. They had their own club, the ‘Double R’, somewhere down the East End. Did anybody, seriously, ever go down the East End? We were Holborn boys. If we were going anywhere to look for excitement it was up west – Soho.
Smithy was already an habitué of both. He was everywhere and into everything back then.
So, Teddy and I jumped in a cab and headed for the Mile End Road – and went into a disused shop. But when we got inside it was dead smart, all red flock wallpaper and chandeliers, exquisitely dressed-up men and women, with waiters in bow ties mincing around the tables.
I wanted to be one of those customers. I was a goodlooking 20-year-old who thought he was a pop star. We’d all had to grow up fast. As children we’d learned how to make it on our own terms. I’d been in trouble for nicking things, and more besides, but didn’t fancy crime as a career.
We were all clever but barely educated. We had to adapt to survive. If that meant pretending we were something we were not, then it had to be that way.
I’d been out street trading since I was nine years old, starting with rain hats for sixpence, working my way up: jewellery, perfume, wind-up toys, anything. I left school aged 14 and got a job as a butcher’s boy. I soon found quicker ways to make money than cycling round Holborn delivering lamb chops.
I’d left the family flat we had above the club Mum ran and was living in Millman Street, Holborn. I loved it. I soon got in with some serious drinkers.
But for now, here I am with Teddy Smith in the Double R. Sitting up at the bar was a heavily built man about six years older than me, with a fleshy, sensual face. Dressed in a navy mohair suit, he was sitting half-turned so he could see the people coming in. He looks ’eavy, I thought. ‘Cor, ’ere we go … he’s as big as a house, better be nice to him.’ It was Ronnie Kray.
Ronnie was observing everything and everyone in the club. He kept staring hard at me. He’s either going to kiss me or hit me, I thought.