Free Inside the Firm - The Untold Story of The Krays' Reign of Terror by Tony Lambrianou

meeting, at which I said: ‘We’re on strike, call the management in and tell them we want to join the union.’ We had already told this lorry driver we intended to come out, and the Meat Market had trucks parked up and down Queensbridge Road. We set up a picket line straightaway – me, Jimmy and the boys, andLeon too. A union representative gave Carlo Gatti the message: ‘The boys are definitely not going back. Not a lorry is going to pass the picket.’
    Gatti wasn’t giving in. He thought that he could beat the unions, but he was a doomed man. The six employees who were against the strike were just standing around doing nothing. Four of them were told what would happen to them if they went in there again, and immediately left their jobs. Spike and his brother were not so easily intimidated, but after we bashed them up they left too.
    We had support from everywhere. No lorries attempted to cross the picket lines, except for a few frozen-food firm vehicles. We approached them, threatened the drivers and punctured the tyres. Other than that, we didn’t take a lot of notice of them. They had no power anyway. The strike lasted for five months, during which time the Meat Market was having a whip-round for us, plus we were nicking food from the cold store.
    It all ended up with us getting our tickets into the Meat Market, so Jimmy, Leon, Timmy Reynolds, Ted and I and a couple of others left the depot and started work at Smithfield. We left Carlo Gatti to pick up the pieces of a completely ruined firm. He lost all his contracts, and the strike sent him virtually bankrupt.
     
    It was during our time at the Meat Market that we became involved in the Oswald Mosley riots in London. We were approached by a friend of ours who was a minder at a dancehall in Dalston and also a Meat Market man. He was very friendly with Mosley; a Nazi who was notorious for his anti-Semitic rants and the violent confrontations they provoked with members of the Jewish community. This bloke said to us one day, ‘You know the area really well. Mosley wants to do a bit of talking in Dalston. You could have a few mates up there to create a fracas while he’s talking.’
    Mosley was a guaranteed crowd-puller, and he’d have heaviesscattered throughout the gatherings to get everyone going. His aim was to attract publicity.
    Next thing, we were in Dalston Junction with the Meat Market boys in a crowd of about a thousand; there were riots going on, mass fights with all sorts of weapons, and Mosley was on the news. We weren’t in it for anything other than the money. On that occasion, and on several others afterwards, we were getting £50 a time to be out there Jew-baiting . There’s a lot of money in racial issues. Mosley was never short of a bob or two, and he always found money to throw around.
    I have never, ever liked what they did, the Nazis. Anybody who could approve of the terrible things they were responsible for has got to be sick in the mind. It just didn’t occur to us at the time that by being at the rallies we were supporting them. To us it was just a few quid. We treated these people purely on a financial basis – we were in it for what we could get out of it.
    Jimmy and I and our friend Davy Sadler were also picking up a bit of cash for going on Nazi manoeuvres which were organised by Mosley’s right-hand man, Colin Jordan. These often took place in Dorset, sometimes on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Occasionally, he’d have his fifty or sixty men marching around Dartmoor.
    We got into this by accident; through Davy Sadler. He was a giant, about six feet seven, though his father Jimmy was a midget of four feet ten. We used to go round to his flat in Hoxton to play cards; we’d all be sitting there gambling while his father, this midget, would be running round getting teas and drinks.
    A fanatical SS lover, Davy used to collect uniforms. You very rarely came across a genuine Gestapo or German uniform; if you did, it was a collector’s