In this story we enter the sordid world of gangland London in the 1950s and investigate the murder of Tommy ‘Scarface’ Smithson in Carlton Vale, Kilburn.
After the War, the vice and
gambling industries in Soho were run by gangs: the main ones were the Maltese Messina
Brothers, and the London born Billy Hill and Jack Spot. They controlled their
interests by bribing the police, with the threat of a razor attack for anyone
who stepped out of line. As one gang member coldly put it:
‘People were paid a pound a
stitch, so if you put twenty stitches in a man you got a score. You used to
look in the papers next day to see how much you’d earned.’
One person who dared to defy the gangs
was Tommy Smithson. Born in Liverpool in 1920, the sixth of eight children, his family moved to
the East End of London two years later. Tommy served time for theft in a reform
school where he learned self defence and boxing. During the War he joined the
merchant navy as a stoker and served on ammunition ships to Australia. He returned to Shoreditch in 1950 and was soon sentenced
to 18 months for a robbery. In prison he got to know people who ran the Soho gambling
clubs. By 1954 he had his own gang which included the young Kray twins, Ronnie
and Reggie, who looked up to Smithson as a hero.
The Maltese gang members had taken
advantage of subsidised passages to England for as little as three pounds to establish a network of
gambling and drinking clubs, servicing a string of prostitutes. Smithson
decided to target the Maltese. He began by working as a croupier for George
Caruana in one of his clubs in Batty Street, Stepney. Caruana and his Maltese colleagues were keen to
avoid trouble and when Smithson set up a protection racket he was soon taking a
regular share of the takings in all their ‘spielers’. The club owners paid him
a shilling in the pound, it doesn’t sound much but Tommy was making up to £500
a night.
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| Tommy Smithson (Getty Images) |
He opened his own clubs, such as
the Publishers Club (supposedly for authors – but nobody was fooled!) Then
following police raids, he went to Brixton prison until a whip round of his
friends paid the fine. He started to seriously annoy people when he set up as a
bookmaker in Berwick
Street, in
competition with Billy Hill and Jack Spot. Then he got into a fight and cut
Freddie ‘Slip’ Sullivan in French Henry’s club. Sullivan had a brother in the
Hill-Spot gang and retribution was swift.
A week later Smithson was told a
peace offering was on the table and that there was no reason the gangs couldn’t
get along. He went to meet Spot and Hill behind the Carreras ‘Black Cat’ cigarette
factory in Camden Town. He was carrying a gun, but surprisingly handed it over when
asked by Billy Hill. The signal for the attack on Tommy was a cigar butt being
thrown on the ground. He was slashed in the face, arms, legs and body, then thrown
over a wall into Regents Park near Park Village East, to bleed to death. Amazingly, he
survived and 47 stitches were put into his face. As a reward for honouring the ‘code
of silence’ he was paid £500 from Billy Hill and earned his nickname of
‘Scarface’. Tommy opened clubs and fenced stolen goods for a time but he got another
set of stitches when the word spread that he was a ‘grass’. This ended his
entry into the big time and he decided it was safer to work as a protector for
the Maltese.
Tommy fell in love with Fay
Richardson, a mill girl from Stockport who came to London to work as a prostitute. The press described her as a ‘gangster’s
moll’ and a ‘femme fatale’. She was certainly dangerous to know; three of her
lovers were murdered and others suffered severe beatings. In his memoirs Commander
Bert Wickstead of Scotland Yard said: ‘She couldn’t have been described as a
beautiful woman by any stretch of the imagination. Yet she did have the most
devastating effect on the men in her life, so there must have been something
about the lady.’
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| Newspaper picture of Fay Richardson |
The handsome and dapper Smithson
appealed to Fay and they began living together. When she was held on remand for
buying clothes and records with bad cheques, Tommy raised money for her
defence. He collected £50 from his former employer, George Caruana, but complained
bitterly that it should have been a £100. On 13 June 1956 Smithson and two other men confronted Caruana and fellow
Maltese Philip Ellul (who ran a small prostitute racket) and asked for more
money. In the ensuing fight, Caruana was cut on the fingers as he protected his
face. Another £30 was produced at gunpoint and in line with standard gangland
practice, Ellul was ordered to start a collection book for Fay’s defence.
Tommy had gone too far this time.
Just two weeks later on 25 June 1956, he
was found dying in a Kilburn gutter. The rundown Number 88 Carlton Vale near
the junction with Cambridge
Road, was a
brothel or ‘boarding house’ owned by Caruana. Smithson thought he’d been sent there
to collect protection money. He was in the room of ‘Blonde Mary’ Bates when
Philip Ellul, Vic Spampinato and Joe Zammit came in. Ellul shot him in the arm
and the neck but the .38 revolver jammed. Smithson crawled down the stairs into
the street. Bizarrely, his last words to the people who found him were said to
be; ‘Good morning, I’m dying.’ He was a hard man. He was taken to Paddington
Hospital but died shortly after he arrived.
The hit men, who fled to Manchester, were reassured they’d only be charged with manslaughter if
they turned themselves in. But it was bad advice, they had been stitched up and
they were tried for murder. Spampinato told the court he was only defending
himself when Smithson attacked him with a pair of scissors. ‘Blonde Mary’
confirmed the story and he was acquitted. But it later emerged that Blonde Mary
was Spampinato’s girlfriend. Ellul was sentenced to death for murder. Then 48
hours before his execution, the sentence was commuted to life, of which he
served eleven years in prison.
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| Philip Elluh (Getty Images) |
After he was released, Ellul came
to London to collect the money had been promised by the organization.
Sixpence was thrown on the floor and he was ordered to pick it up. Then he was
taken to Heathrow for a flight to America and warned, ‘Don’t ever come back. If you do we have a
pair of concrete boots waiting for you’. He did as he was told and stayed in America.
Smithson’s funeral was an old
style gangster one: Rolls Royce hearses, elaborate floral tributes and members
of ‘the firm’ attending. Thousands watched as the coffin was taken to St
Patrick’s Cemetery in Leytonstone. The young Kray twins were there but Fay was
still under arrest and wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral. She sent a wreath
saying, ‘Till we meet again, Love Fay’. She
was put on probation that August and ordered to live with her mother in Stockport.
Pathe News has a film clip of the
funeral, (but there is no sound). About three and a half minutes into the clip,
the hearse has a flat tyre and has to be replaced!
Later, Smithson’s dear old mum who
was well respected in the East End, had a large statue of an angel put on the grave. One of
the firm said, ‘I had to laugh, a villain like Tommy Smithson with an angel
over his grave!’
As crime reporter Duncan Campbell
graphically says in his book, ‘The Underworld’, ‘There were almost as many
theories as to why Smithson had died as there were scars in his face’. And the
background behind Tommy’s killing didn’t become clear until 17 years later. In
October 1973 ‘The Old Grey Fox’ Bert Wickstead, one of the Big Five at Scotland
Yard, was leading the Serious Crime Squad. He decided to move against the
Syndicate who had taken over most of the vice in Soho after
the Messina brothers had been deported. Said to be earning as much as
£100,000 a week, the organization was run by Bernie Silver (the only
non-Maltese member), and 18 stone Big Frank Mifsud.
Just as the police raids were due,
Silver and Mifsud had taken off on an ‘extended holiday’ after being tipped off
by a member of Wickstead’s team. So Wickstead went through an elaborate
pretence of having the warrants withdrawn and leaked a story to the press that
he had given up the case. The papers responded with stories along the lines of,
‘The Raid That Never Was’. The ruse worked and members of the Syndicate started
to return to London. Bernie Silver was arrested while he was having dinner
with his girlfriend at the Park Tower Hotel on 30 December 1973.
Other members of the gang were seized
at the Scheherazade Club in Soho. In the early hours of the morning, Wickstead had stepped
on stage to announce that everyone was arrested. One person shouted out, ‘What
do you think of the cabaret?’ and another wit replied, ‘Not much!’ The guests,
staff and even the band, were taken to Limehouse police station where the band
continued playing and everyone sang songs. A total of 170 members of the
Syndicate were taken into custody but Frank Mifsud had been warned about the
raid and fled abroad.
Wickstead said that Silver and
Mifsud had ordered the murder of Tommy Smithson. The argument was that when
Smithson had demanded money for Fay Richardson’s defence and an increase in his
protection rate, it came at a bad time for Silver who was preparing to expand
his empire. He couldn’t afford to be seen as a weak man by giving in to a small
time crook like Smithson, so he told Ellul and Spampinato to get rid of him.
Wickstead and his team traced Spampinato
to Malta. Elluh was run to ground in San Francisco after ‘The Old Grey Fox’ had appeared on an American TV
show and a photo of Elluh appeared in the magazine, ‘True Detective’. Both men agreed
to return to London and testify against the Syndicate in return for police
protection. Spampinato gave useful evidence at the committal proceedings but
refused to attend the Old Bailey trial. Elluh did not give any evidence in
court. He managed to slip away from the police who were protecting him and returned
to America. The grapevine said the price of their silence was at
least £35,000 apiece.
Frank Mifsud was extradited from a
Swiss clinic after claiming he was mentally unfit. In December 1974 after a
long trial, he and Bernie Silver were given six years for living off immoral
earnings. Then in July 1975 Silver was sentenced to life imprisonment for Smithson’s
murder but a year later the Court of Appeal squashed the conviction, as they
said that the case had been built on the evidence of unreliable witnesses.
In 1976 Mifsud was also tried at
the Old Bailey for ordering Smithson’s killing. He said he was a property and
club owner earning £50,000 a year. He claimed that he was a friend of Smithson
and was sorry to hear he had been killed. When asked if he knew that Billy Hill
had occasionally employed Smithson as a gangster, Mifsud simply said that Billy
Hill was, ‘a kind gentleman who lent money’. Mifsud was acquitted of the murder
but sentenced to five years imprisonment for living off immoral earnings. This
was overturned by the Court of Appeal the following year.
In January 1977 the Thames TV programme
‘This Week’, broadcast a film called ‘An Exercise in Law’. They had interviewed
Elluh and Spampinato who both said they didn’t know Bernie Silver and that he
had nothing to do with Smithson’s murder. The programme implied that Commander Wickstead
had wanted to destroy the Syndicate and had falsely linked Silver and Mifsud to
the Smithson murder.
Friends close to Smithson always
maintained that the Maltese had become tired of paying him off and organized
his killing. One said the message to British gangsters was, ‘Watch out for the “Epsom
Salts” (Malts), they will retaliate.’
But according to Philip Elluh, the
motive was far more mundane. After Smithson had attacked him and George
Caruana, Elluh heard that Tommy was going to shoot him. So he went looking for
him, and when he found Tommy in Carlton Vale he simply shot him first.
