A weekly tour of their old stomping ground will start as usual this Saturday at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, east London, where Ronnie murdered George Cornell in 1966, although it does not yet extend to the Stoke Newington house where Reggie killed Jack “the Hat” McVitie the following year. There have been more than 50 books by or about the Krays the latest, published this summer, was One of the Family, by Maureen Flanagan, a former model who used to cut their mother’s hair. Last month another film, The Rise of the Krays, was released on DVD and later this year its companion, The Fall of the Krays, will arrive. Another documentary, The Krays: Kill Order, is released on DVD next week. A new documentary, The Krays: the Prison Years, featuring some of their surviving henchmen, will shortly be shown on the Discovery Channel. T he film Legend, starring Tom Hardy as both twins, has its premiere today, and it opens in cinemas next week.
Nonetheless, all these years later, the fascination with their story remains undimmed.Īn extraordinary Krays revival is now under way. Ronnie died aged 61 in Broadmoor in 1995, and Reggie, released very briefly from prison on compassionate grounds, in 2000. They may have been failures as professional criminals, but by the time they were sentenced to life in prison at the age of 35, their brand was already a phenomenal success. The Krays, of course, wanted everyone to know who they were. “If you’re a real gangster nobody knows who you are.”
“Their big mistake was posing for me,” Bailey told the BBC last year. They aspired to be as famous as Al Capone and Legs Diamond, and were gratified when one of Bailey’s pictures of them, with their brother Charles, appeared later the same year in Bailey’s Box of Pin-ups, his document of 1960s celebrity culture, alongside the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Rudolph Nureyev, Lord Snowdon and Jean Shrimpton.
The portrait became gangland’s Mona Lisa: copied, pirated and imitated, it was central to their image and their brand. At the time, they were not the notorious gangsters they were to become, but former boxers who ran nightclubs and collected protection money from people in awe of their reputation as a two-headed fighting machine. I n 1965, David Bailey, already Britain’s most fashionable photographer, took a portrait of the gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who looked fiercely well-groomed in suits and narrow ties.
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