The History of British Organised Crime - State Containment and Subtle Collusions
Billy Hill: Godfather of London (2008)
Wensley Clarkson
Notorious: The Immortal Legend of the Kray Twins (2010)
John George Pearson
Peaky Blinders: The Aftermath - The Real Story Behind the Next Generation of Gangsters (2021)
Carl Chinn
I have a reasonable library on crime, organised
crime rather than the individual evil-doer though I have a few of those as well. These three books give us a general picture of the history of organised crime in Britain, largely but not exclusively in London. I will start in the middle of the story with the weakest book just to set the scene. Clarkson's Billy Hill is a pot boiler but anything that helps us understand the nature of
the human condition has some value. This story of one of London's major
gang lords does just this - despite itself. It is a weakly written book for the true crime market which
seems to take villains' own tales at face value, over-relies on
secondary evidence, fails to maintain continuity and gives little social
context or background after the early chapters. It even feels as if a
more thoughtful first few chapters got pushed aside in the rush to meet
some deadline. Nevertheless, it is on our shelf as a basic
account of the nearest thing London had to a criminal godfather between
the age of the racecourse rackets of the pre-war era (which are the
basis for Pinky's world in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and which are covered in part below in Chinn's Peaky Blinders: The Aftermath) and the rise
of the Krays in the 1960s (covered by Pearson's angry Notorious before that).
The subject is Billy Hill and, indirectly,
his less intelligent rival from the earlier period, Jack Spot. Unlike
America, guns were rarely used by British gangsters - the instrument of terror was the razor
blade (or 'chiv') designed to mark a man (or woman) for life but not
(or rarely) kill. The money came from the usual sources - especially
from protection and illegal clubs - but the Second World War created a
massive disruption in the laws of supply and demand and so immense
opportunities for capital accumulation. In a sense, Billy Hill was just a
businessman trying to survive under socialism. His type of calculated
sociopathy (which included a sort of benefits system for imprisoned or
injured associates) is found often enough wholly legitimately in
business within laws that permit supply and demand to work with minimal
hindrance - without the violence, of course. Even Capone adopted a degree of populist welfarism on occasions in Chicago and urban gangsterism is always only two steps from becoming a warlord territorial operation that might one day become a State.
Billy, who did his time as if it was just an occupational hazard, actually came out of it all rather well - if only because he had the ability to out-class Spot and then give way at the right time to the next bunch of entrepreneurs, the quasi-psychotic Krays. But what is really interesting about this story (and best pulled out of the early chapters) is that the good society can be a bit of a noble lie. The poverty stricken milieu of migrant London (Billy was of Irish extraction) was really engaged in a permanent class war without the politics - no different from the sort of gangsterdom in any society where very intelligent and ruthless males are given no opportunity and so find their chances in ordering their own world, creating no-go areas (in effect) for a policing system that might be about containment and little else. In the end, in such disrupted systems (such as significant parts of the Middle East today), order can only be found by integrating these poor males with weapons into the system through buying their time in some way - in essence, full employment.
Crime and punishment in such societies becomes largely a matter of cat-and-mouse played out over the heads of the respectable with, on one side, a form of criminal terrorism raising funds from the people as taxes and services and state terrorism (the sheer brutality of prison regimes must only have created a more effective esprit de corps amongst the criminal classes) seeking to deter all but the most desperate and determined. And, of course, gangsters cannot exist without the respectable buying their dodgy goods and services. The story in this book provides an unintended argument both for social democracy (to remove the incentive for crime in the poor) and for social liberalism (to remove the market for criminals). This argument is one not to be glossed over with liberal romanticism but rather sees society as a form of elaborate protection racket in which the State buys off the poor to stop them becoming a problem to the 'respectable' (an alternatives, of course, iare to enroll them all in some foreign war or send them off to a colony).
This is much like the use of 'aid' to buy off warlordism and insurgency in the emerging world. In the end, the gangsters are deprived of the sea in which to swim by the State (or the 'international community') providing an alternative welfare state that removes the need for 'protection' and clientage and which makes the State a better patron and adjudicator of conflict than the local warlords. Then, in times of austerity or loss of political will (as in, possibly, the Sahel today), it all breaks down and the warlords get their chance to build statelets. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Billy Hill's story is the role of the media, especially competing crime reporters whose interest in running down an exclusive to sell newspapers led to what can only be described as active complicity in the 'marketing and PR strategies' of the top gangsters who used publicity effectively to gain competitive advantage. Indeed, on the evidence of this book, the crime lords are the unsung heroes in the history of effective public relations technique. For those naive liberals who retain a touching faith in a free media, this account of the conduct of some crime reporters in London in the 1950s and 1960s should soon remove some illusions.
The level of 'terrorism' - state against the poorest and gangsters against society - became much reduced once the Krays and Richardsons were removed in the next generation. Both police and newspapers cleaned up their acts with the rise of investigative reporting in the 1970s (now in decline because of economic pressures) and, slowly, a new breed of police officer. Prison reform and the extension of the welfare state into slum clearance in the 1960s also helped. Even today, though, positive sentiment for the gangsters remains in parts of the white working class because of the order they brought. There are signs now that things are darkening once again as the slow degradation of social democracy (ironically begun under a centre-left Government) have left large segments of the population unprotected from economic crisis while the protection money paid to the masses (the benefits system) grows out of control and becomes subject itself to manipulation by organised crime. The middle class myth that the poor are always more stupid than they are because they did not go to the great acculturation centres called universities is simply a sign that education should not be confused with intelligence.
Billy, who did his time as if it was just an occupational hazard, actually came out of it all rather well - if only because he had the ability to out-class Spot and then give way at the right time to the next bunch of entrepreneurs, the quasi-psychotic Krays. But what is really interesting about this story (and best pulled out of the early chapters) is that the good society can be a bit of a noble lie. The poverty stricken milieu of migrant London (Billy was of Irish extraction) was really engaged in a permanent class war without the politics - no different from the sort of gangsterdom in any society where very intelligent and ruthless males are given no opportunity and so find their chances in ordering their own world, creating no-go areas (in effect) for a policing system that might be about containment and little else. In the end, in such disrupted systems (such as significant parts of the Middle East today), order can only be found by integrating these poor males with weapons into the system through buying their time in some way - in essence, full employment.
Crime and punishment in such societies becomes largely a matter of cat-and-mouse played out over the heads of the respectable with, on one side, a form of criminal terrorism raising funds from the people as taxes and services and state terrorism (the sheer brutality of prison regimes must only have created a more effective esprit de corps amongst the criminal classes) seeking to deter all but the most desperate and determined. And, of course, gangsters cannot exist without the respectable buying their dodgy goods and services. The story in this book provides an unintended argument both for social democracy (to remove the incentive for crime in the poor) and for social liberalism (to remove the market for criminals). This argument is one not to be glossed over with liberal romanticism but rather sees society as a form of elaborate protection racket in which the State buys off the poor to stop them becoming a problem to the 'respectable' (an alternatives, of course, iare to enroll them all in some foreign war or send them off to a colony).
This is much like the use of 'aid' to buy off warlordism and insurgency in the emerging world. In the end, the gangsters are deprived of the sea in which to swim by the State (or the 'international community') providing an alternative welfare state that removes the need for 'protection' and clientage and which makes the State a better patron and adjudicator of conflict than the local warlords. Then, in times of austerity or loss of political will (as in, possibly, the Sahel today), it all breaks down and the warlords get their chance to build statelets. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Billy Hill's story is the role of the media, especially competing crime reporters whose interest in running down an exclusive to sell newspapers led to what can only be described as active complicity in the 'marketing and PR strategies' of the top gangsters who used publicity effectively to gain competitive advantage. Indeed, on the evidence of this book, the crime lords are the unsung heroes in the history of effective public relations technique. For those naive liberals who retain a touching faith in a free media, this account of the conduct of some crime reporters in London in the 1950s and 1960s should soon remove some illusions.
The level of 'terrorism' - state against the poorest and gangsters against society - became much reduced once the Krays and Richardsons were removed in the next generation. Both police and newspapers cleaned up their acts with the rise of investigative reporting in the 1970s (now in decline because of economic pressures) and, slowly, a new breed of police officer. Prison reform and the extension of the welfare state into slum clearance in the 1960s also helped. Even today, though, positive sentiment for the gangsters remains in parts of the white working class because of the order they brought. There are signs now that things are darkening once again as the slow degradation of social democracy (ironically begun under a centre-left Government) have left large segments of the population unprotected from economic crisis while the protection money paid to the masses (the benefits system) grows out of control and becomes subject itself to manipulation by organised crime. The middle class myth that the poor are always more stupid than they are because they did not go to the great acculturation centres called universities is simply a sign that education should not be confused with intelligence.
Measures such as ID cards introduced under
cover of anti-terrorism (which excuse few should believe) failed on the rock of liberal anxiety and the failure in retrospect is probably why organised criminal contributions to net migration of half a million souls go unchallenged. This failure now, with more irony, threatens to
undermine working and lower middle class tolerance for a finely balanced system that
Government might argue was for their protection from seething chaos. Government dare not tell too many truths about the limitations on their powers under liberal democracy in case the electorate asks too many
questions about the real extent of state authority and undermines the very liberal democracy that the political class and its upper middle class clientage system depends upon. We are drifting towards a world where the unspoken containment strategies to deal with illegitimate entrepreneurship are failing while the respectable middle classes put up with more and more largely futile time-wasting regulation. Why this is happening is a discussion for another occasion.
But we run ahead of ourselves. Billy Hill retired to Spain. The Krays ended up with very long stretches. The next generation learnt to be more discreet and not cattle prod the authorities. Subsequent generations of gang boss are well known to the authorities yet have created massive fortunes from drugs (which Billy would not touch), smuggling, identity fraud, robbery, money-laundering and (of course) protection and now people trafficking. The police are now committed to 'intelligence-based policing' (accumulating evidence to take the gangsters out, Capone-style, on some major financial infringement that they can prove). And so the cat-and-mouse carries on ... with the fear that, this time around, without more authoritarian laws which place the ordinary citizen perilously close to direct oppression from the State for political reasons, the sheer scale of criminal capital accumulation makes the gangsters quite capable of mounting and sustaining extreme reprisals as they have done recently in Italy and Croatia. This is the dilemma. Liberal economics and globalisation have permitted insurgent and criminal forces to build strength as an alternative to the State. They can only be defeated, it would seem (if liberal economics are to be preserved), through illiberal methods that threaten the citizen from future state terrorism as much as he or she is threatened from criminal terrorism now. The arguments for social democracy quietly pile up as the only alternative. Billy Hill was a thug but an intelligent one. He would be classed as far too 'nice' to have been a gang boss in the 21st century. That, in itself, is worth thinking about.
But we run ahead of ourselves. Billy Hill retired to Spain. The Krays ended up with very long stretches. The next generation learnt to be more discreet and not cattle prod the authorities. Subsequent generations of gang boss are well known to the authorities yet have created massive fortunes from drugs (which Billy would not touch), smuggling, identity fraud, robbery, money-laundering and (of course) protection and now people trafficking. The police are now committed to 'intelligence-based policing' (accumulating evidence to take the gangsters out, Capone-style, on some major financial infringement that they can prove). And so the cat-and-mouse carries on ... with the fear that, this time around, without more authoritarian laws which place the ordinary citizen perilously close to direct oppression from the State for political reasons, the sheer scale of criminal capital accumulation makes the gangsters quite capable of mounting and sustaining extreme reprisals as they have done recently in Italy and Croatia. This is the dilemma. Liberal economics and globalisation have permitted insurgent and criminal forces to build strength as an alternative to the State. They can only be defeated, it would seem (if liberal economics are to be preserved), through illiberal methods that threaten the citizen from future state terrorism as much as he or she is threatened from criminal terrorism now. The arguments for social democracy quietly pile up as the only alternative. Billy Hill was a thug but an intelligent one. He would be classed as far too 'nice' to have been a gang boss in the 21st century. That, in itself, is worth thinking about.
Pearson's Notorious is quite an angry book from a man who,
clearly with some regret, kick-started the popular fashion for true
crime in the United Kingdom with his first biography of the Kray Twins
back in the 1960s. Pearson's The Profession of Violence is, like the The
Wicker Man in film and The Communist Manifesto in politics, an
example of the remorselessness of the law of unintended consequences. This
later book should now be read as the 'most considered' account of the Kray Twins
thirty five years on but also as an exercise in self-reflexion on the
popular biographers' art by a doyen of the trade. His anger may be a little with himself but it is most reasonably expressed as anger at the two sides of the Kray Twins' coin.
This is an anger with both the sheer violence and (certainly in Ron Kray's case) psychopathy of the Krays' world and with the way that the establishment connived at their celebrity game in order to avoid scandal. Sometimes, it is hard to know which is more evil - the thuggery of the Krays making their way up from the slums or the protection of truly psychopathic, narcissistic and weak men like Driberg and Boothby by their own class in both major parties. If I had to choose a poster boy for true social evil, I am afraid that I would have to choose Arnold, Lord Goodman over Reg Kray any day. Goodman epitomises the intellectual manipulation of power and rules to protect a pack of social jackals - Ron's perverted desires seem small feed in comparison. These ruminations are not merely historical. Very recently good policemen and women and journalists were digging in the slime of similar cover-ups related to child abuse only a decade or two later only to be brilliantly outplayed by the system in ways that remain as mysterious today as they were then. The problem could be batted to the great and the good so that sufficient reform could try and close down deeper debate as to causes and networks. As so it goes.
The child abuse scandals of the 1970s and 1980s (and perhaps beyond as they morph into internet rings) can now be seen as natural extensions of a total world of abuse in which the Krays are really a mere incident. What underlay the exploitative evil of the Krays was the convergence of a culture of sexual repression (in terms of homosexuality) where the laws were not always fully enforced where they existed within a hypocritical ruling order where 'bad' conduct needed to be repressed to satisfy editors, churchmen and the respectable but was otherwise accepted amongst their own. For some, there was a usefulness in working class outsiders, raised in social neglect to be totally self-regarding, as allies and tools and providers of 'services'. This was a culture that pragmatically kept a lid on things that perhaps could not have been ordered in any other way given the society and politics of the country but which became extremely deviant at its dark edges.
This is an anger with both the sheer violence and (certainly in Ron Kray's case) psychopathy of the Krays' world and with the way that the establishment connived at their celebrity game in order to avoid scandal. Sometimes, it is hard to know which is more evil - the thuggery of the Krays making their way up from the slums or the protection of truly psychopathic, narcissistic and weak men like Driberg and Boothby by their own class in both major parties. If I had to choose a poster boy for true social evil, I am afraid that I would have to choose Arnold, Lord Goodman over Reg Kray any day. Goodman epitomises the intellectual manipulation of power and rules to protect a pack of social jackals - Ron's perverted desires seem small feed in comparison. These ruminations are not merely historical. Very recently good policemen and women and journalists were digging in the slime of similar cover-ups related to child abuse only a decade or two later only to be brilliantly outplayed by the system in ways that remain as mysterious today as they were then. The problem could be batted to the great and the good so that sufficient reform could try and close down deeper debate as to causes and networks. As so it goes.
The child abuse scandals of the 1970s and 1980s (and perhaps beyond as they morph into internet rings) can now be seen as natural extensions of a total world of abuse in which the Krays are really a mere incident. What underlay the exploitative evil of the Krays was the convergence of a culture of sexual repression (in terms of homosexuality) where the laws were not always fully enforced where they existed within a hypocritical ruling order where 'bad' conduct needed to be repressed to satisfy editors, churchmen and the respectable but was otherwise accepted amongst their own. For some, there was a usefulness in working class outsiders, raised in social neglect to be totally self-regarding, as allies and tools and providers of 'services'. This was a culture that pragmatically kept a lid on things that perhaps could not have been ordered in any other way given the society and politics of the country but which became extremely deviant at its dark edges.
Narcissistic
gay psychopaths converged on one another and built networks and
alliances which the 'establishment', where it knew of these things,
preferred to turn a blind eye. It became too easy for the deviants to
exploit the vulnerable and to feel that they could do so with impunity. This is Poliakoff country. Naturally ordinary homosexual people were left unliberated, frightened, bullied, subject to blackmail and exploited in such a system. The reforms of Roy Jenkins in the 1960s and the slow but steady acceptance of sexual difference (now sadly degenerated into excitable identity politics under exploitative activism) was not only about decency and kindness but about limiting the room for manouevre of criminal systems and pushing them from the centre to the periphery. For be in no doubt that the Krays were
'peculiar' in many senses. There are other gangland familes and
networks which are perhaps only now being addressed by the formation of
the National Crime Agency but these never sought the celebrity of the
Krays. They were and are primarily 'business men' not
'legends'.
Pearson is good on the influence of the American gangster film and the allure of the mafia (this was the mafia's high point of global influence) for Reg and Ron but it is clear that our native born thugs were little more than occasionally useful tools for their sophisticated counterparts from New York - somewhat of a metaphor for the British relationship with the US after Suez! The only caveat I would have with the book is that the psychological profiling of the Twins, while plausible in many ways, is over-played. Pearson is part-establishment himself - he was famously biographer of Ian Fleming and 'James Bond' - and he remains, like all his journalistic ilk, rather weak on the 'sociology' of resistance to the system implicit in organised crime. Yes, organised crime is wolf-like, opportunistic and psychopathic but it does not arise from nothing. These systems are businesses organised by the more or less intelligent to provide real services for alienated and bullied populations as well as cruel and vicious exploitative ones. Narcissistic wealthy demand for those services (drugs, cheap labour or whatever) is the high margin cherry on the cake.
Even the cruelty and exploitation is more morally ambiguous than any abstract believer in justice may think. Famously, Capone did more to eliminate adulteration of milk for children than the lack-lustre local government. If the State dumps disturbed kids in hell-holes and abandons them, then being noticed by gangsters and given a chance to relieve their misery or get money may still be preferable to being trained to be a grunt in the military or a shelf-stacker in a retail chain. Even sex workers who were introduced to the 'industry' by these grim routes are not simple victims but have sometimes seized a chance to use their assets for lives that they would now consider themselves to have chosen. Indeed, many now fear that criminalisation of their trade by do-gooding establishment dim-wits whose cruelty is no less than the gangsters will slash their incomes and throw them back into the hands of the underworld.
Gang and state, state and gang, sometimes two sides of the same coin, drones and pub-shootings, taxes and protection money, the law of the street and no snitching or the law of the state and no whistleblowing. The real route to crime of the Krays was their own natures as violent psychopaths but in the context of localities completely abandoned by the middle classes but where enough of the middle classes still wanted things that their own 'values' denied them. Repressive cultures combined with class neglect inevitable lead to collusive relationships between weak ruling classes and the wolves at the bottom. In this case, we had the collusion extending to the narratives of eager journalists, photographers and film-makers who wished to tell the tale in terms of glamour - of Camelot, if you like.
Pearson cannot be accused of this - or, if he once glamourised the Krays, it was out of youthful naivete. This book makes ample amends. He writes well. The account of the murder of Frank Mitchell is genuinely moving and has all the hall-marks of a Greek tragedy. Even the Krays, without moral complicity (and when he is not getting angry and spouting cod-psychology), come across as complex persons rather than mere monsters. That is no mean achievement. He adds as an appendix photographs of his own correspondence from Ron Kray in prison. His poor education, street intelligence and sentimentality cast a different light on the man without diminishing the horror of his conduct as killer and exponent of GBH. But the question remains, while other gangsters run multinational businesses and prepare for war with the National Crime Agency, there is no doubt that the Krays are not forgotten in the white working classes of London, even today.
Their funerals were pure theatre, 20,000-40,000 being prepared to attend the last one. Their criminal associates and rivals have given themselves pensions on well-selling true crime memoirs. Figures like Freddy Foreman and 'Mad' Frankie Fraser developed iconic status and even some sympathy when true tales of 'toughness' in standing up to the old prison system are recounted. If people can think like that - as they think of the murderous Salvatore Giuliani in Sicily - then something is going on that must be understood before it is condemned by armchair moralists. 'Cop killings' in the UK in the first decade of the century exposed a culture of hate for the police at the margins of society (quickly self-censored in the second decade unless it was associated with particular urban identities approved of by the middle classes). The official news narrative was briefly countered with a social media narrative of deep resentment and a preparedness for self-immolation that reminds one of Jean-Paul Belmondo's last scene in 'Breathless'.
There is a dialectic here between popular culture (film and now video games) and criminality that is not a simple one of cause and effect. The 'rage' in the machine is prior to the popular culture which lives off it - the popular culture merely gives it theatrical form in real life. Millions can lose themselves in the rage or the fantasy without acting on it in the world. A few are so filled with anger and resentment that they code their suicidal actions in the language of the Joker or Get Carter. This should not be taken overly seriously but it should also not be ignored or over-simplified. Something is going on 'out there' and the London Riots, a narrative heavily suppressed and rewritten in the decade since, were part of the story. John Pearson gives us no answers here but his personal re-evaluation of his own relationship with these iconic organised crime figures must be added to the raw material from which an analysis will come.
And not only in relation to the origins of resentment but also to the handling of collusion. The Boothby-Driberg scandal involving the undoubted sustained sexual exploitation of teenage boys must be put in the scales with Kincora as a sexual exploitation story in which some people at very high levels were collusive and complicit in covering up what took place. In our own time, child abuse investigations extended from the celebrities who were permitted excesses by a 'see no evil' BBC to the care home system which we have all known for far too long have been grooming grounds for the underground sex industry. The question is not the free choice of disturbed youngsters to engage in that industry as their way into the world but the collusion of their carers in driving them into that world without informed consent and of sections of the political and law enforcement community in protecting and even providing custom.
Beyond that, despite the publicity, the 'establishment' still shies clear of investigating too deeply the cruelties and brutalities not only within the Catholic Church but other institutional structures that are politically powerful. The technique is not to go deep but to punish those who it is easy to punish on the evidence (in an initially rather laggerdly way) and then use a combination of fear and shame to get the managerial classes to become social engineers and policemen. At a certain point the true story can be opened up as 'shameful history with much breast-beating and still no serious understanding of causes and structures. To be fair, under an increasingly weak State with a quietly resentful and distrustful population, there is probably little alternative.
Pearson is good on the influence of the American gangster film and the allure of the mafia (this was the mafia's high point of global influence) for Reg and Ron but it is clear that our native born thugs were little more than occasionally useful tools for their sophisticated counterparts from New York - somewhat of a metaphor for the British relationship with the US after Suez! The only caveat I would have with the book is that the psychological profiling of the Twins, while plausible in many ways, is over-played. Pearson is part-establishment himself - he was famously biographer of Ian Fleming and 'James Bond' - and he remains, like all his journalistic ilk, rather weak on the 'sociology' of resistance to the system implicit in organised crime. Yes, organised crime is wolf-like, opportunistic and psychopathic but it does not arise from nothing. These systems are businesses organised by the more or less intelligent to provide real services for alienated and bullied populations as well as cruel and vicious exploitative ones. Narcissistic wealthy demand for those services (drugs, cheap labour or whatever) is the high margin cherry on the cake.
Even the cruelty and exploitation is more morally ambiguous than any abstract believer in justice may think. Famously, Capone did more to eliminate adulteration of milk for children than the lack-lustre local government. If the State dumps disturbed kids in hell-holes and abandons them, then being noticed by gangsters and given a chance to relieve their misery or get money may still be preferable to being trained to be a grunt in the military or a shelf-stacker in a retail chain. Even sex workers who were introduced to the 'industry' by these grim routes are not simple victims but have sometimes seized a chance to use their assets for lives that they would now consider themselves to have chosen. Indeed, many now fear that criminalisation of their trade by do-gooding establishment dim-wits whose cruelty is no less than the gangsters will slash their incomes and throw them back into the hands of the underworld.
Gang and state, state and gang, sometimes two sides of the same coin, drones and pub-shootings, taxes and protection money, the law of the street and no snitching or the law of the state and no whistleblowing. The real route to crime of the Krays was their own natures as violent psychopaths but in the context of localities completely abandoned by the middle classes but where enough of the middle classes still wanted things that their own 'values' denied them. Repressive cultures combined with class neglect inevitable lead to collusive relationships between weak ruling classes and the wolves at the bottom. In this case, we had the collusion extending to the narratives of eager journalists, photographers and film-makers who wished to tell the tale in terms of glamour - of Camelot, if you like.
Pearson cannot be accused of this - or, if he once glamourised the Krays, it was out of youthful naivete. This book makes ample amends. He writes well. The account of the murder of Frank Mitchell is genuinely moving and has all the hall-marks of a Greek tragedy. Even the Krays, without moral complicity (and when he is not getting angry and spouting cod-psychology), come across as complex persons rather than mere monsters. That is no mean achievement. He adds as an appendix photographs of his own correspondence from Ron Kray in prison. His poor education, street intelligence and sentimentality cast a different light on the man without diminishing the horror of his conduct as killer and exponent of GBH. But the question remains, while other gangsters run multinational businesses and prepare for war with the National Crime Agency, there is no doubt that the Krays are not forgotten in the white working classes of London, even today.
Their funerals were pure theatre, 20,000-40,000 being prepared to attend the last one. Their criminal associates and rivals have given themselves pensions on well-selling true crime memoirs. Figures like Freddy Foreman and 'Mad' Frankie Fraser developed iconic status and even some sympathy when true tales of 'toughness' in standing up to the old prison system are recounted. If people can think like that - as they think of the murderous Salvatore Giuliani in Sicily - then something is going on that must be understood before it is condemned by armchair moralists. 'Cop killings' in the UK in the first decade of the century exposed a culture of hate for the police at the margins of society (quickly self-censored in the second decade unless it was associated with particular urban identities approved of by the middle classes). The official news narrative was briefly countered with a social media narrative of deep resentment and a preparedness for self-immolation that reminds one of Jean-Paul Belmondo's last scene in 'Breathless'.
There is a dialectic here between popular culture (film and now video games) and criminality that is not a simple one of cause and effect. The 'rage' in the machine is prior to the popular culture which lives off it - the popular culture merely gives it theatrical form in real life. Millions can lose themselves in the rage or the fantasy without acting on it in the world. A few are so filled with anger and resentment that they code their suicidal actions in the language of the Joker or Get Carter. This should not be taken overly seriously but it should also not be ignored or over-simplified. Something is going on 'out there' and the London Riots, a narrative heavily suppressed and rewritten in the decade since, were part of the story. John Pearson gives us no answers here but his personal re-evaluation of his own relationship with these iconic organised crime figures must be added to the raw material from which an analysis will come.
And not only in relation to the origins of resentment but also to the handling of collusion. The Boothby-Driberg scandal involving the undoubted sustained sexual exploitation of teenage boys must be put in the scales with Kincora as a sexual exploitation story in which some people at very high levels were collusive and complicit in covering up what took place. In our own time, child abuse investigations extended from the celebrities who were permitted excesses by a 'see no evil' BBC to the care home system which we have all known for far too long have been grooming grounds for the underground sex industry. The question is not the free choice of disturbed youngsters to engage in that industry as their way into the world but the collusion of their carers in driving them into that world without informed consent and of sections of the political and law enforcement community in protecting and even providing custom.
Beyond that, despite the publicity, the 'establishment' still shies clear of investigating too deeply the cruelties and brutalities not only within the Catholic Church but other institutional structures that are politically powerful. The technique is not to go deep but to punish those who it is easy to punish on the evidence (in an initially rather laggerdly way) and then use a combination of fear and shame to get the managerial classes to become social engineers and policemen. At a certain point the true story can be opened up as 'shameful history with much breast-beating and still no serious understanding of causes and structures. To be fair, under an increasingly weak State with a quietly resentful and distrustful population, there is probably little alternative.
A culture of exploitation was, in fact, endemic at the margins of most institutional
life until recently and the victim ignored and bullied for far too long. In
this brutal context of humiliation and abuse, the Krays start to look
like minor (if deeply unpleasant) excesses in a rotten system, even perhaps as a form of
undirected revenge by the humiliated as a class on their ultimate
humiliators, the worst parts of the ruling order. We might sometimes expect attempts at cover-ups and damage limitation (and weaselly demands
for 'closure' and 'drawing a line under the past'), but the story is
out. Perhaps, at the end of all this, we will see the gangsters
at the top and those at the bottom for what they really are ... somehow,
I think both sets of hyena will survive all crises and reappear in a
different form. For that is the way of the world ...
Chinn's Peaky Blinders: The Aftermath takes us back to the beginnings of organised crime and fills a nice gap
in the story providing a history of the transition from the race course
gangs to the world of organised crime as we would come to understand it
in the age of the Krays. It is one of several books on pre-war and earlier organised crime by an
academic who knows something of the cultural milieu of gangland because
of his own family's past involvement in the illegal betting game in
Birmingham in the interwar period. One of the virtues of the book is
original research and interviews. It is, of course, a spin-off
from the popular BBC TV series. I have to admit that I have not seen
this series partly because I have an aversion to fictionalised history
(e.g. Downton Abbey) but there is no reason to bring such prejudices to
the evaluation of this book.
The book can be 'bitty' (especially in the
earlier period covered - the 1920s - but he has dealt with these periods in earlier books), the characters pop in and out in a
somewhat haphazard way, there is probably an inadequate analytical
framework and there is no index - a major fault if you are to keep track
of individuals. Still, the book is written for a mass audience. A
mass audience tends to demand the piling on of incident rather than an
overly academic approach. Without that mass audience, we might not have
got this easily accessible book and its (as yet) unread companions so I am grateful to it. Despite
the intellectual flaws caused in part by popularisation (I have no
quarrel with the factual basis of the book and Chinn is adept at
stripping away romantic sensationalism from the story), we can get a
good understanding of the transitions within criminality over a long
period.
The book concentrates on the interwar years and introduces the beginnings of the likes of the Krays and 'Mad' Frankie Fraser (with whom I shared a space in a small Chinese restaurant in Islington once upon a time) but also takes us back to the origins of 'thuggery' in the late mid nineteenth century. Indeed, what strikes one is a sense of 'lineage' in time and of competitive association and mutual awareness stretching from the 1870s through to the arrival of the Krays and beyond. This is an anarchic and complex alternative culture with its own codes and shifting allegiances. Part of the fascination of organised crime and its development is how it 'matures' and how it parallels legitimate society so that one can see both how it can infiltrate a weak state (with the ever-present problem of police and local government corruption as well as, much later, the suborning of parts of the financial services, logistics and legal sectors) but also how close it might be to the thugs and war bands that create new states out of old, a point made earlier in this review.
Chinn does not dwell on the role of the State throughout this period. Observed on his evidence, it appears to be both weaker and more sensible (about its own reach) than we might expect and it confirms the evidence of the two previous books of containment and avoidance by a State that knows the limits of its powers in a liberal democracy. The habit of leniency is embedded because 'bourgois' society is fearful of the consequences of other measures. In a few cases, gangsters go over a red line and are hanged but it is surprising just how much obvious crime took place because the State's resources were limited and the evidential requirements too great. Mussolini did not have this problem with the Mafia.
The book concentrates on the interwar years and introduces the beginnings of the likes of the Krays and 'Mad' Frankie Fraser (with whom I shared a space in a small Chinese restaurant in Islington once upon a time) but also takes us back to the origins of 'thuggery' in the late mid nineteenth century. Indeed, what strikes one is a sense of 'lineage' in time and of competitive association and mutual awareness stretching from the 1870s through to the arrival of the Krays and beyond. This is an anarchic and complex alternative culture with its own codes and shifting allegiances. Part of the fascination of organised crime and its development is how it 'matures' and how it parallels legitimate society so that one can see both how it can infiltrate a weak state (with the ever-present problem of police and local government corruption as well as, much later, the suborning of parts of the financial services, logistics and legal sectors) but also how close it might be to the thugs and war bands that create new states out of old, a point made earlier in this review.
Chinn does not dwell on the role of the State throughout this period. Observed on his evidence, it appears to be both weaker and more sensible (about its own reach) than we might expect and it confirms the evidence of the two previous books of containment and avoidance by a State that knows the limits of its powers in a liberal democracy. The habit of leniency is embedded because 'bourgois' society is fearful of the consequences of other measures. In a few cases, gangsters go over a red line and are hanged but it is surprising just how much obvious crime took place because the State's resources were limited and the evidential requirements too great. Mussolini did not have this problem with the Mafia.
It is an
axiom that the poor prey on the poor or rather, in this case, the
sociopathic elements at the very bottom of society (most people were
never criminals no matter how poor) would prey on bookies, small traders
and the lower middle classes in poor areas and then on whoever they could get their hands on as marks. Of course, there is
another world sitting alongside the early race track and extortion
gangs, one of organised robbery and fencing which did prey on the higher
levels of a highly classed society but this only becomes the subject of
the book when one of its hard men arrives, Billy Hill. We can go back to Clarkson's book at this point.
The story starts (though this appears at the end of the book) with small armies of thugs, prepared to travel cross country to disrupt and extort from the liminal world of race track betting (horses and then dogs). Chinn is very good on the evolution of these 'race gangs' from the invasions of race tracks to the carving up of territories through fear and violence with the razor blade (and other nasty instruments). The gun does emerge later but British gangsters, although many young toughs emulated the filmic gangsters on the 1930s, were simply not organised or strong enough against even a weak police to carve out the same sort of territories - and there was no trigger like prohibition for growth. The British wisely avoid banning pleasures until they have to and the bans on drugs have probably played the role of alcohol in the US in the much later construction of powerful organised crime structures. Borders that cannot be controlled seem to be permitting a new wave of criminal capital accumulation.
If organisation starts as simply the organiation of mass terror raids on race tracks (and the subsequent fencing), it eventually evolves into symbiotic relationship between certain gangs and the 'industry' (racetrack betting), always in a grey area of respectability. One of the fascinating aspects of the story is the three-way negotiation between the more intelligent thugs, (again, sociopathy and intelligence are not incompatible), the private sector and evolving and rather intelligent monitoring and management of the urge to bet by the authorities. There might be said to be a peculiarly English adaptive approach to vice very different from the black and white approach of American culture - wait for a problem to appear, analyse the problem and resolve it through low-cost compromise. Basically, accept and manage human weakness. This is the other side of the strategy of containment.
With the race track betting industry increasingly legitimised (eventually to become fully legal and recognised to the point that licences were eventually given only to candidates proven to have engaged illegally!) some gangsterdom was effectively integrated into enforcement. Perhaps the drugs problem could be solved in a similar way if middle class morality did not stand in the way. At the beginning inchoate roaming underclass gangs could come from anywhere and turn up anywhere (with Birmingham lads the undoubted leaders and the source of the 'peaky blinders' saga) but the human instinct to war and territorialism will always out. We can see little difference between these inchoate gangs and the war bands of young warriors trying to plunder the Roman Empire until someone had the bright idea to pay them to defend it. If the British State had ever collapsed, gangs might have created new States.
The London-based Sabini gang and Kimber's Birmingham mob fought for national control, the latter lost (though Kimber was spending most of his time in London by then) and the country was carved up between the two, with the Sabinis taking their turn from the lucrative Southern race tracks. Chinn traces how the Birmingham gangs collapsed over the interwar period for lack of sustained and organised leadership after Kimber was no longer in play so the book is largely about London as centre of a network of competing gangs out of which the Krays and Richardsons would emerge. Although there are ethnic elements to the story, Italian, Jewish and antisemitic South London, what is striking is that (as with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in New York), ethnicity did not count for as much as many believe. Italian gangs were as much English as Italian, if not more, over time. One exception was Jack Spot, friend and then rival of Billy Hill, who consciously travelled the country to help Jewish small traders and interests to fight off local extortionists and who claimed (almost certainly incorrectly) to have been instrumental in the Battle of Cable Street.
In fact, the territorialism of gangs has also been exaggerated. Yes, they often came out of particular 'hard case' localities in places like Hoxton but they often travelled across country. Birmingham boys gravitated towards London and Soho was often shared competitive territory as race tracks had been. The transition from the pure race track gangs to Jack Spot as dominant London gangster (although Chinn is careful to dismiss any idea of some 'Mr. Big' running organised crime across the capital or the country) and then to Billy Hill is fascinating.
As we saw at the beginning, Billy Hill was a thug but an unusually intelligent one who came not out of the violence and fisticuffs of the tracks but from the world of burglaries, requiring a much greater awareness of the need for stealth, organisation and not to embarrass the police and draw attention to one's actual work. His technique was curious - to hide in plain sight by cultivating crime journalists and claiming leadership of the underworld in public, confident that nothing could be pinned directly on him under English legal procedures. The claim, of course, irritated Spot. It was this conflict that helped the Krays to smell blood like the sharks that they were but there was much less of that generational slaughter normal in New York. More of the youngsters slowly grabbed rackets while the older generation either went respectable or slipped into decline.
While Spot ended up a forgotten meat packer, gangsters like Sabini and Hill came to live a comfortable and respected life, seemingly not unhappy to see younger gangsters take their place on the more obvious rackets. This is a story of considerable violence that horrified and titillated on occasions the British public through its pre-tabloid media and crime correspondents whose role was more than ambiguous on occasions. The theatre of it all is part of the interest. The one great lack in Chinn's book is the evolution of police corruption, always present. Somewhere in this period or soon after, police corruption became highly institutionalised and is only fully being rooted out this century. We need a history of that phenomenon - difficult to research, of course, but necessary if we are to understand the porous relationship between State and People then as now.
The story starts (though this appears at the end of the book) with small armies of thugs, prepared to travel cross country to disrupt and extort from the liminal world of race track betting (horses and then dogs). Chinn is very good on the evolution of these 'race gangs' from the invasions of race tracks to the carving up of territories through fear and violence with the razor blade (and other nasty instruments). The gun does emerge later but British gangsters, although many young toughs emulated the filmic gangsters on the 1930s, were simply not organised or strong enough against even a weak police to carve out the same sort of territories - and there was no trigger like prohibition for growth. The British wisely avoid banning pleasures until they have to and the bans on drugs have probably played the role of alcohol in the US in the much later construction of powerful organised crime structures. Borders that cannot be controlled seem to be permitting a new wave of criminal capital accumulation.
If organisation starts as simply the organiation of mass terror raids on race tracks (and the subsequent fencing), it eventually evolves into symbiotic relationship between certain gangs and the 'industry' (racetrack betting), always in a grey area of respectability. One of the fascinating aspects of the story is the three-way negotiation between the more intelligent thugs, (again, sociopathy and intelligence are not incompatible), the private sector and evolving and rather intelligent monitoring and management of the urge to bet by the authorities. There might be said to be a peculiarly English adaptive approach to vice very different from the black and white approach of American culture - wait for a problem to appear, analyse the problem and resolve it through low-cost compromise. Basically, accept and manage human weakness. This is the other side of the strategy of containment.
With the race track betting industry increasingly legitimised (eventually to become fully legal and recognised to the point that licences were eventually given only to candidates proven to have engaged illegally!) some gangsterdom was effectively integrated into enforcement. Perhaps the drugs problem could be solved in a similar way if middle class morality did not stand in the way. At the beginning inchoate roaming underclass gangs could come from anywhere and turn up anywhere (with Birmingham lads the undoubted leaders and the source of the 'peaky blinders' saga) but the human instinct to war and territorialism will always out. We can see little difference between these inchoate gangs and the war bands of young warriors trying to plunder the Roman Empire until someone had the bright idea to pay them to defend it. If the British State had ever collapsed, gangs might have created new States.
The London-based Sabini gang and Kimber's Birmingham mob fought for national control, the latter lost (though Kimber was spending most of his time in London by then) and the country was carved up between the two, with the Sabinis taking their turn from the lucrative Southern race tracks. Chinn traces how the Birmingham gangs collapsed over the interwar period for lack of sustained and organised leadership after Kimber was no longer in play so the book is largely about London as centre of a network of competing gangs out of which the Krays and Richardsons would emerge. Although there are ethnic elements to the story, Italian, Jewish and antisemitic South London, what is striking is that (as with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in New York), ethnicity did not count for as much as many believe. Italian gangs were as much English as Italian, if not more, over time. One exception was Jack Spot, friend and then rival of Billy Hill, who consciously travelled the country to help Jewish small traders and interests to fight off local extortionists and who claimed (almost certainly incorrectly) to have been instrumental in the Battle of Cable Street.
In fact, the territorialism of gangs has also been exaggerated. Yes, they often came out of particular 'hard case' localities in places like Hoxton but they often travelled across country. Birmingham boys gravitated towards London and Soho was often shared competitive territory as race tracks had been. The transition from the pure race track gangs to Jack Spot as dominant London gangster (although Chinn is careful to dismiss any idea of some 'Mr. Big' running organised crime across the capital or the country) and then to Billy Hill is fascinating.
As we saw at the beginning, Billy Hill was a thug but an unusually intelligent one who came not out of the violence and fisticuffs of the tracks but from the world of burglaries, requiring a much greater awareness of the need for stealth, organisation and not to embarrass the police and draw attention to one's actual work. His technique was curious - to hide in plain sight by cultivating crime journalists and claiming leadership of the underworld in public, confident that nothing could be pinned directly on him under English legal procedures. The claim, of course, irritated Spot. It was this conflict that helped the Krays to smell blood like the sharks that they were but there was much less of that generational slaughter normal in New York. More of the youngsters slowly grabbed rackets while the older generation either went respectable or slipped into decline.
While Spot ended up a forgotten meat packer, gangsters like Sabini and Hill came to live a comfortable and respected life, seemingly not unhappy to see younger gangsters take their place on the more obvious rackets. This is a story of considerable violence that horrified and titillated on occasions the British public through its pre-tabloid media and crime correspondents whose role was more than ambiguous on occasions. The theatre of it all is part of the interest. The one great lack in Chinn's book is the evolution of police corruption, always present. Somewhere in this period or soon after, police corruption became highly institutionalised and is only fully being rooted out this century. We need a history of that phenomenon - difficult to research, of course, but necessary if we are to understand the porous relationship between State and People then as now.