My life with the Kray twins

Ten years later, he was their trusted advisor, and today he publishes a book on the their North-East links. Nick Morrison meets the man who helped run the twins' business empire.

THERE'S no disguising Steve Wraith's obsession. If the picture of Ronnie and Reggie Kray taking pride of place on the living room wall doesn't give it away, then the bookcase surely will. Books about the Krays jostle for space with the memoirs of their associates, from Frankie Fraser to Dave Courtney - every volume an homage to gangland culture in Steve's very own library of convicts.

It's not unusual, of course, for young men to be fascinated by gangsters in general, and the Krays in particular. What makes Steve's fixation a little different is that it is not confined to the wall and the bookcase. He didn't just read the book - he stepped straight into it.

Not content with worshipping his heroes from afar, Steve went to visit them in prison. While most teenagers might have been intimidated by this, Steve seems to have taken it all in his stride. And not only did he become a regular visitor, he was also a trusted business advisor to Ronnie and Reggie, and put out statements to the Press on their behalf.

His interest in the Krays began when he was 15, and he came across a book about the Krays, The Profession of Violence, by John Pearson. Attracted by the iconic David Bailey image of the twins on the cover, Steve, from Felling in Gateshead, included it in his coursework for his English GCSE. When he passed, he wrote to the twins in jail to tell them, receiving a letter in reply saying they were glad he had passed but they could not keep up the correspondence.

The real breakthrough in Steve's relationship with the twins, however, came when he left school and started a business printing T-shirts.

"I thought I would write to them and propose a business deal - 'How about putting your faces on T-shirts?'. They wrote back. It was like throwing a hook to a fish, because business was business to them," he says. "Reg loved the idea. He asked us to send him some designs and I started selling the T-shirts."

Steve, now 30, had no qualms about going into business with the Krays, who presumably were happy with their 70 per cent share of the profits. As well as T-shirts, he also produced shopping bags and tea towels, although he drew the line at condoms, despite having the neat tag-line 'the ultimate protection racket'. As sales took off, he was invited to meet Reg in Gartree prison. Steve was 19.

"I had gone past the hero worship stage by then. It seemed like a natural progression, but when it came to the visit I was nervous. I had never been to a prison before," he says.

"At first I didn't recognise him - he was so small, but stocky with it. It was not until he got to the table that I knew it was him. He had a very strong handshake and there was an aura about him. He was full of conversation, you couldn't get a word in edgeways with Reg. You would maybe get a couple of lines out, and he would start on what he wanted to tell you."

At the end of the visit, Reg suggested that Steve met Ron, who was then in Broadmoor hospital, and that proved an altogether different experience.

"Ron was dressed exactly as you would expect he was in the 1960s - a suit from Savile Row, brand new white shirt, silk tie, solid gold tie pin, nice gold rings, Cartier watch, Gucci shoes, hair slicked back, gold-rimmed spectacles.

"He shook hands and he was very softly spoken, a lot quieter than Reg. He put his hand on my knee and the first thing he said to me was 'Steve, you don't mind that I'm bisexual, do you?' I said 'As long as you don't expect anything off me', and he just laughed and said 'Good, good'. He often used to say 'Good, good', in that quiet tone.

"We hit it off straightaway. He was more interested in me and what I had to say."

While Reg was very business orientated, visits to Ron were more personal. And while Reg would never dwell on the past, Ron would talk about events such as the murder of George Cornell, shot in the Blind Beggar pub.

Steve made over 50 visits to Reg but only about a dozen to Ron. But, although he hit it off better with the elder of the twins, Ron's paranoid schizophrenia seems to have added an extra frisson to the visits. "There were a couple of times Ron lost his rag," Steve says. "On one occasion another inmate knocked my chair, and Ron was just going 'I can't believe he has done that'. One of the nurses said 'Ron, are you ok?' and he said 'I'm not f***ing ok. I can't stand that slag'. Eventually the nurse calmed him down."

The inmate who had incurred Ron's wrath turned out to be Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper.

As Steve's work for the Krays continued, he was introduced to eldest brother Charlie, regularly looking after him when Charlie visited Newcastle. Steve also rubbed shoulders with the likes of Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman, Tony Lambrianou and Dave Courtney.

He also became one of the Krays' business advisors, travelling the country to assess the various deals being offered to the twins. "There were a lot of people trying to make a fast buck off the Krays," he says. "It was my job to check these people out. I was not the only person doing this, and I was not single-handedly running the Krays' empire, but I was someone the Krays trusted."

He also had the temerity to say no to the Krays, turning down a request to keep money for them. And he says his involvement with the twins kept him out of a life of crime.

"They always used to preach to me 'Don't go the same way we did - there is nothing clever about going to prison'. My involvement with the Krays taught us how to be an entrepreneur but it kept me out of crime," says Steve, who now has his own personal security business.

But doesn't all this rather ignore the fact that the Krays had a nasty side? Both were jailed for life for murder: Ron for shooting Cornell and Reg for stabbing Jack 'the Hat' McVitie. They may have loved their mother, but theirs was a brutal regime.

"I have never, ever condoned what they did. I would not condone anyone walking into a pub and shooting someone's brains out, or luring someone to a basement and stabbing them," Steve says.

"There is nothing wrong in having an interest in the Krays, but it doesn't mean you agree with the violence or the extortion or the murders, it just means that they had a distinct impression on somebody at a very young age."

Reading books is one thing, but becoming friends with the Krays and making money for them is something else. While it doesn't mean you support everything they did, it does suggest turning a blind eye to their misdemeanours.

Steve insists: "I met them as rehabilitated prisoners, and it would be wrong for me to comment on them in the 1960s."

But after Ron's death, in 1995, Steve's relationship with Reg started to unravel. He was given the job of looking after Charlie at Ron's funeral, but then Reg became more withdrawn and the visits more infrequent, although they were still friends at the time of Reg's death from cancer, in October 2000.

"It was a bit disappointing the way the whole story ended," Steve says. "I kept up with Reg all those years and I tried to contact him in hospital but I never got the chance to say goodbye."

The Krays - The Geordie Connection is published by Zymurgy (£6.99). Steve will be signing copies at Waterstone's, Emerson Chambers, Newcastle, on Thursday, November 5, at 7pm, and at the MetroCentre branch, on Tuesday, November 12, 12.30pm.