asking for help because Bobby Ramsey had taken a pop at him. Ronnie and Reggie were going to see Ramsey at a garage in Stratford and they asked me to go with them; why, I can’t remember.
Ramsey came out into the courtyard. Ronnie told him not to take liberties with Payne, then laid him out with a right to the jaw. As Ramsey went to get up, Ronnie picked up a shovel and raised it menacingly. Reggie and I were convinced he was going to kill Ramsey before our eyes, but he calmed down and later went into the office to apologize. But he told Ramsey he had been wrong to hit Payne.
In the car going home, Ronnie was extremely depressed. ‘I’m sick of all this,’ he said. ‘I had to go and hit Ramsey on the chin because of Payne. I’m sick of the whole life. I want to get out. I’ve had enough.’
When he got like this he would go to Turkey or some other sunny place to get away from it all. But he badly wanted to move away for good.
Eventually he was to buy a place in that part of England he had loved so much as a war-time child. But by then it was too late.
We were sorry to see The Kentucky go: it was well liked and well used by respectable local people, and enhanced the area. But if the police thought the closure would put the Kray brothers out of business they couldn’t have been more wrong. Esmeralda’s Barn, which now had a basement disco, had enabled us to buy into other, smaller West End clubs. The twins also bought a small hotel, The Glenrae, in Seven Sisters Road, North London. And Leslie Payne, who was buying a controlling interest in The Cambridge Rooms on the Kingston bypass, was about to launch a legitimate company, The Carston Group, with a posh Mayfair office.
The police may have hit our East End connection. But up West, the money was rolling in.
To three East End blokes in the nightclub business, Leslie Payne’s scheme sounded senseless. He had returned from the Eastern Nigeria city of Enugu and partly committed us to building a new township in the bush. It was a project more suited to merchant bank investment, but the more Payne explained the financial possibilities the more excited we all got. Ronnie and Reggie flew to Enugu with Payne and Gore to see the development site and when they returned plans were made to approach wealthy and influential people for investment. One of these gentlemen was Lord Boothby; another was Hew McCowan, son of a rich Scottish baronet and landowner.
What we did not know at the time was that Ernest Shinwell, son of the late, much-respected Labour MP, had hawked the proposition round for a long time without finding any takers. He must have gone to Payne as a last resort. Blissfully unaware of this, we happily poured money from our. various London enterprises into the Great African Safari – GAS for short – confident that Payne knew what he was doing. As 1964 wore on, however, we became worried: not only was more and more money being swallowed up by GAS, we also got word that the police were taking an even closer interest in our activities. So it was with some relief that we greeted Payne’s assurances in October that it was pay-off time and we would soon all be rolling in money again. Four of us – Payne, Gore, a well-connected Canadian called Gordon Anderson and myself – flew to Enugu full of hope.
It took me just three days to sense that all was not well.
Payne, as usual, strutted around like a Great White Chief – the faithful Gore forever in his wake – but I could not fail to notice he was always avoiding a native building contractor who, I knew, had paid us a £5,000 introductory fee months before. The man wanted to get on with the building work and was always in the foyer of the Presidential Hotel looking for Payne who, in turn, was forever dodging him. I talked to Payne about it but he told me not to worry.
Payne gave the impression he knew what he was doing. But he didn’t. That contractor got fed up and opted out of the scheme. He managed to track Payne down and demanded his £5,000 back. After a blazing row in which Payne said he didn’t have the money, the man went to the police. Payne and Gore were arrested and thrown into jail.
Overnight the warm, friendly atmosphere became cold and frosty: no more smiles, polite bows and handshakes from Government officials; no more smart cars with motorcycle escorts at our disposal.
Payne was still playing the Great White Chief in his prison cell, vehemently insisting that he and Gore would join us at the airport as soon as he’d put the local police chief in his place. When they didn’t show up, I told Anderson to go on to Lagos while I dealt with the matter. The only way to sort it out was to pay back the £5,000, so I rang the twins and told them to wire the money at once. I sat by the phone for the next twenty-four hours until I had absolute confirmation that the cash was on its way. Then a solicitor I’d met on previous visits found a judge who would sign the necessary bail forms if I arranged for £5,000 to be paid.
The journey to that judge was a nightmare. The solicitor and another black guy drove me off into the jungle, along a narrow road that looked as if it didn’t lead anywhere. The solicitor assured me we were going to the judge’s house but the way Payne had behaved made me fear for my life. As we drove deeper into the jungle I had visions of being bumped off and dumped – just another mysterious disappearance. But after the longest fifteen minutes of my life, the jungle opened up and there was the judge’s bungalow, set in beautiful gardens. I showed the relevant documents, signed some forms, tingling with relief, then went back to get Payne and Gore out of the nick.
They were filthy, thirsty, hungry and exhausted. Gore was demoralized; Payne on the brink of a breakdown. I didn’t give either of them any time to say much: I spelled out the seriousness of our predicament and told them we were leaving – right then. It was not until the plane had left the runway at Lagos Airport that I was able to relax for the first time in three days.
The GAS had blown up in our faces and, once back in England, the twins and I gave Leslie Payne the elbow.
Towards the end of the Nigerian affair, the Boothby Photograph ‘Scandal’ hit the headlines. What a storm in a teacup that was! The whole nation, it seemed, was led to believe that Ronnie and the charming, multi-talented peer were having a homosexual affair. But nothing was further from the truth.
Ronnie went to Lord Boothby’s home in Eaton Square just twice – on business. Boothby seemed keen to invest some money in the Nigerian project, but ultimately wrote to Ronnie saying he did not have the time to devote to it. That’s where the matter should have ended. But Ronnie’s passion for having his photograph taken with famous people set off a dramatic chain of events that ended with Boothby being paid £40,000 libel damages by the Sunday Mirror.
The photograph in question – one of twenty or so taken during Ronnie’s second visit to Boothby’s flat – was an innocuous one, showing the two men sitting side by side on a settee. They were both dressed in suits and, since they had been discussing a multi-million pound business proposition, they looked fairly serious. Keen to make a few bob, the photographer showed a print to the Sunday Mirror and on 12 July the paper ran a sensational frontpage story – under the headline PEER AND A GANGSTER: YARD PROBE – alleging ‘a homosexual relationship between a prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld’.
The story did not name Boothby or Ronnie, but claimed that a peer and a thug had attended Mayfair parties, that the peer and prominent public men had indulged in questionable activities during weekends in Brighton, that the peer was involved in relationships with clergymen, and that people who could give evidence on these matters had been threatened.
Not surprisingly, the Sunday Mirror story – based on little fact – blew up into a major scandal. The questions on the lips of the nation, it seemed, were: Who is the peer? And who is the gangster?
Well, the satirical magazine Private Eye did its best to put people out of their misery by naming Ronnie as the thug. And then Boothby himself brought the whole thing into the open in a frank letter to The Times, in which he referred to the Sunday Mirror story as ‘a tissue of atrocious lies’.
On 4 August, both Ronnie and Boothby agreed for The Photograph to appear in the Daily Express, and the next day the International Publishing Corporation, which owned the Sunday Mirror, paid Boothby £40,000 compensation for the paper’s