Joey Pyle
Joseph Henry Pyle, known as Joey Pyle or Joe Pyle, was an English gangland boss, convicted criminal, and pioneer and promoter of unlicensed boxing, who operated in London from the 1950s until his final arrest and conviction in 1992. An associate of the Krays and the Richardsons, and "one of the most feared members of the London underworld", he was known as the "London Don of Dons" by the New York Mafia. Less well known to the general public than many of his contemporaries in the underworld, Pyle was a key police target during his criminal career, but although arrested and charged many times, he seldom was convicted, unlike many of the gangland figures with whom he was associated.
Early life
Joey Pyle was born on 2 November 1937 in The Angel, Islington, London, the son of Arnie and Cath Pyle, and the youngest of their three children after his brother Ted and sister Jean. The family moved to Carshalton when Pyle was a teenager, although he retained links with his friends in the East End of London. Among his friends at this age were Jack McVitie and Johnny and Jimmy Nash.At the age of 14, Pyle, already proficient at petty thieving and shoplifting, stole £5,000 from a TA centre in Hackbridge, near his home in Carshalton. At this age he had a Saturday job at a metal factory, and he was later to meet Eddie Richardson through the latter's work in scrap metal. He sold Richardson silver ingots that another acquaintance had stolen from the railways. Pyle became a boxing instructor at Sandhurst during his National Service, and joined the army's Southern Command Team. He was kicked out of Sandhurst following his theft of a brigadier's car; rather than being court-martialled, he was put through the criminal justice system and given three months of the newly introduced short, sharp shock, a replacement for Borstal.
In his late teens, Pyle faced the choice of being a professional boxer – he paid his dues in boxing booths at travelling fairs, and contested over 20 professional fights – or a career criminal. He chose crime. Pyle's father, a thief as well as a sportsman, asked him when he was nineteen whether he wanted to be a boxer or a thief. Pyle replied, "Dad, I think I want to be a thief."
Criminal career
Armed robbery
Pyle, together with his friends Peter Marshall, Peter Tilley and Tony Baldessare, undertook bank robberies, wages theft and raids on security vans, but when they moved into safe-blowing they required an expert and worked with George Medicine, one of the acknowledged leaders in the use of gelignite, which he'd detonate using an everyday light socket. After coming out of prison for the Pen Club murder, however, Pyle decided that he would " away from jobs across the pavement", although he said, "I was still involved in little things every now and then."Extortion and protection rackets
Like the Krays, Pyle ran extortion and protection rackets, particularly in the pub and nightclub trade. Protection rackets at the time usually involved a gang of heavies wrecking a venue, then reappearing and assuring the owner that his place would be safe, on payment of a fee. Pyle's approach, along with the Nashes, was a little more sophisticated, simply relying on the owners' fear of his violent reputation. While the Krays held sway in London's East End, and the Richardson gang and Freddie Foreman ruled the south of London, during the 1960s Pyle and the Nashes dominated the part of London to the west of the Krays, around Islington and the West End.After the Richardsons were jailed in 1967, the Krays, the Nashes, Foreman and Pyle came to an informal agreement after a series of meetings about splitting the proceeds from their various protection rackets, with Ronnie Kray talking about a "federation" of gangs. As Pyle said, "It made sense to set things up so it worked like one big strong firm rather than a few little ones, otherwise people would have been running all over the place." Among those who worked for Pyle in this period was prolific armed robber Ronnie Field: "Right from the start, once I was with Joe I was treated very differently. I was on the firm, if you like. I was one of those chaps that people in the boozer looked over at now. Very few people of my age would chance their arm with me, not only because I already had a growing reputation for violence, but they also feared crossing anybody that had any connections to Joey Pyle whatsoever."
Cooney murder
Along with Jimmy Nash and James Read, Pyle was tried at the Old Bailey in April 1960 for the murder of Selwyn Cooney, the manager of Billy Hill's New Cabinet Club on Gerrard Street, who was shot at the Pen Club nightclub on Duval Street near Spitalfields Market after a bar brawl in the early hours of 7 February 1960. At a meeting at The Regal, the Krays' snooker club, later on the day of the murder, Ronnie Kray offered to help Pyle and the two others leave to country if they'd wanted, but they'd already decided to stay and face the music. If found guilty, Pyle knew that he would be hanged, and his first trial collapsed after jurors were intimidated, two key witnesses – Johnny Simons and his girlfriend Barbara Ibbotson – had their faces slashed, both needing 27 stitches, and the woman who originally identified Pyle at the ID parade, Fay Sadler, disappeared.On 25 April 1960, only four days into the trial, Mr Justice Gorman halted proceedings, saying, "Certain information has been brought to my notice which makes it impossible for this case to be continued for trial before this jury." After a second trial at the Old Bailey, Pyle, along with Nash and Read, was acquitted of murder, but he was given an 18-month sentence for assaulting Cooney before he was shot. When later asked who killed Cooney, Pyle would say that "Cooney must have walked past a passing bullet".
The Cooney case had wide-ranging ramifications, not only marking Pyle out as a criminal with considerable underworld connections and a man not to be trifled with, but also playing a role in the formation of the Criminal Intelligence Branch within Scotland Yard. The police didn't want a repeat of a situation in which organised crime held sway over the British legal system due to a lack of intelligence on the side of the forces of law and order, so from that time on detectives were posted at all similar trials to gather information on the key faces present.
Gambling
When Pyle came out of prison he decided to move into the illegal gambling game, reasoning that because government plans were afoot to modify gambling's legal standing, if he had familiarity with the processes, ran appropriate premises and gained a reputation as a reliable operator, then he'd be in an excellent position to take advantage of any future relaxations in the law. He spoke to Billy Hill and Waggy Whitnall, who advised him on the best way forward, and he first set up a dice table at German Harry's in Balham, then expanded to The Crown in Croydon. Soon he was "looking after" other dice clubs and more upmarket casinos, ensuring that no scams were being attempted, that chips weren't bought with fake money and that any cash that was owed was paid, otherwise he and his firm would move in and sort things out. As a debt-collection enforcer, and often working alongside Johnny Nash, among the people that Pyle encouraged to cough up their money was James Bond film producer Cubby Broccoli, who owed £40,000 and whose minders Pyle had to get past first.Pyle, a keen gambler himself, tried to move into fixed greyhound racing, where several of the dogs had their food doped and were thus unable to run competitively, if at all. Having persuaded Bruce Reynolds to give him £3,000 for his bet, Pyle's first and last attempt at a big win on a race involving doped dogs at Wembley Greyhounds went disastrously wrong when he put his entire stake on a dog suffering from rheumatism.
Joe Nesline, a Washington gambling king pin and one of a number of Americans who crossed over to London to get involved in the casinos, asked Pyle and Nash to protect the Colony Club, a casino in Mayfair he'd put money into, whose host was the actor George Raft. Pyle and Nash, and Nesline, for that matter, were unaware that Dino Cellini had asked Albert Dimes to sort out protection, and he'd approached the Krays. When Pyle saw Ronnie Kray at the club, who told him he'd got a good bit of business running the place and that "Me and Reg are right in here," Pyle turned to Nash and said, "Fuck me John, looks like we've got a couple of partners and we didn't even know about it." Pyle reflected: "I was a bit taken aback at first but it didn't take long to sort it all out." Further contacts – and protection arrangements – were made between other American casino owners, the Krays, the Nashes and Pyle. Not long after, Raft and Cellini were deported from Britain following government concerns about Mob involvement in West End casinos.
One of Pyle's gambling scams was to take high-rollers for week-long trips to a Joe Nesline casino in Yugoslavia, and using a number of means – crooked dice, bringing his people along to pose as gamblers, assuring the gamblers that the dealer would feed them chips – by the end of the week the high-rollers had lost everything. To make things look legitimate, there were plenty of winners at the casino among the British visitors, but they were all employed by Pyle.
Underworld fixer
Known as a diplomat and a fixer among the criminal fraternity, Pyle straddled all sides of feuding gangland London, being associated with both the Kray and the Richardson families as well as the Nashes. As The Who vocalist Roger Daltrey said, "Joey wasn't high-profile in the public's eye, but he was a mediator between the big crime families. He was the one who sat with them and sorted out the grudges... He was good at it." Armed robber Ronnie Field said of Pyle: "Working with and for Joey Pyle was also something I valued very highly. The older I got, the more I realised what a special person he was. He spoke words of wisdom, was a diplomat and a smart businessman. Had he been born in different circumstances – in a different area at a different time – he'dhave been the managing director of a company quoted on the Stock Exchange, I’m sure." John Pearson, author of the first and most critically acclaimed book on the Krays, stated that "Joe Pyle had been the closest thing to the godfather of British crime for nearly three decades."
Pyle was best man at both Ronnie Kray's first wedding and at Charlie Kray's wedding, and he often visited both of the Kray twins in prison and Charlie Kray in Parkhurst Prison. Ronnie asked Pyle to set up his second wife, Kate Kray, with a bodyguard, and Pyle recommended Ronnie Field, who assumed the position for a number of years. Along with Freddie Foreman, Charlie Richardson and Dave Courtney, Pyle was meant to be a pallbearer at Reggie Kray's funeral, but Reggie's young wife Roberta refused to let them as she wanted Reggie to be remembered as a family man not a gangland boss, so Pyle sat outside the church in his car for the duration of the service. Pyle would later say: "Though I was never part of the Firm, never getting a pension from the Twins, I was more than pally with them... It was the same with me and the Richardsons and no one ever had a problem with that. Sometimes the Twins and the Richardsons would be at the same club at the same time but nothing ever sparked off while I was around." When asked why the Krays were so notorious while he and his firm were virtually unknown among the wider public, Pyle said: "Let them have as much of the limelight as they want. We’re happy in the shadows with the money."
Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery, contacted Pyle several weeks after the robbery asking for a place to hide. Despite the fact that every policeman in the country was looking for him, Pyle fixed Reynolds up at his brother's in Cobham, but the train robber was soon in touch again, complaining that "it's too fucking quiet. It's frightening the life out of me." Reynolds moved in with Pyle in Clapham South at the end of August 1963 and stayed until November that year, when he moved in to a flat in Croydon above a dry-cleaners that Pyle jointly managed. When police raided the flat after an earlier visit on an unconnected matter, Reynolds had already fled, and would remain free for another year, but Pyle's albeit tangential involvement in the then biggest robbery of the century was noted by the authorities.
Pyle was thought to have assisted in the escape from prison of his friend Jack "The Hat" McVitie and Frank Mitchell, the Mad Axeman of Broadmoor, from Dartmoor Prison, and he admitted trying to help John James Buggy, who was serving a nine-year sentence for shooting a man in Piccadilly, to escape by throwing a weighted rope over the prison wall.
Pyle also assisted John McVicar in his escape from Parkhurst Prison in 1966; McVicar had attended a spurious trial with twelve other inmates at Winchester Law Courts, and they'd overcome their guards in the prison van at Bishop's Waltham on the way back to the Isle of Wight. All the other prisoners were soon re-arrested during a massive police search operation, but McVicar, still at large, contacted Pyle in London, who drove down with Peter Tilley and met him in Portsmouth. Returning up the A3 with McVicar, Pyle got as far as Dorking, where there was a police roadblock. He sped around the police but was eventually cornered in a cul-de-sac in the town. McVicar managed to jump out in time and evade capture.
Occasionally, Pyle's wide circle of acquaintances in the criminal underworld and his power within it had deadly consequences. On one occasion in 1976, Pyle was driven by Terry Marsh to the airport to fly to Monte Carlo to watch the Monzón–Valdez fight. While in Monaco he received a message saying that "Mad" Ronnie Fryer had stabbed and killed Marsh following a bust-up in Tooting. The cause of the argument had been Fryer's jealousy that Pyle had asked Marsh to drive to the airport, not him. Several weeks later, Fryer committed suicide in his Brixton Prison cell.
Pyle was charged with being an accessory after the fact in murder for his involvement in paying off Lenny Osborne, a friend of the actor and hired muscle John Bindon, after the fatal stabbing of a police informer named John Darke on 20 November 1978 at the Ranelagh Yacht Club in Fulham. Bindon was badly cut up, with knife wounds all over his body and face, and fled to Dublin for three days; Osborne, also in the fight, fled to Amsterdam, where Pyle met up with him to help Bindon, who wanted Osborne paid to stop him testifying against him. So bad were Bindon's wounds that he needed medical assistance, and on his return to Britain and treatment he was held in Brixton Prison. A wide-ranging search was mounted to find anyone who had assisted him in his escape, and Pyle was arrested, with a whole range of charges levelled against him – including stealing £1 million of travellers' cheques at Heathrow Airport and paying Osborne. When Bindon, pleading self-defence, was found not guilty of murder after his trial in November 1979, one of the charges against Pyle, who'd been held on remand for seven months, was likewise dropped, as there had been no murder to which he could have been an accessory. When he came to trial for the stolen travellers' cheques, he was fortunate that the prosecution were relying on the testimony of Mickey Francis; Francis was easily shown to be an unreliable witness by Pyle's barrister, and Pyle walked free.