The Gangster and the Pervert Peer (Blakeway Productions. British Channel 4 TV, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube posting of a 20090 British documentary called The Gangster and the Pervert Peer, produced by Blakeway Productions in association with Channel 4 (one of the inde3pendent commercial-funded British TV stations), directed by Richard Bond and narrated by Mark Strong. This appeared as part of a major collection of films about the twin brothers Runald (“Ronnie”) and Reginald (“Reggie”) Kray, twin brothers from the East End of London (the scuzzier working-class half of the city) who in the 1960’s became notorious gangsters who used their base of operations, Esmeralda’s Barn, to run a series of protection rackets under the cover of a legitimate gambling casino. The British government legalized casino gambling in 1957 and the Krays’ club became known as a place to see and be seen.. Studying the methods of American gangsters in general and Al Capone in particular, the Krays sought and ultimately achieved total dominance over organized crime in London and throughout much of the United Kingdom. One of the recipes for Capone’s success, they learned, was his careful cultivation of friends in high places, including politicians and media owners. The Krays had an interesting advantage in that, though they were twins, they had different sexual orientatoins:L Reggie was straight and Ronnie was Gay.

Through his connections in the Gay world, Ronnie Kray wasw able to supply jadedd upper-class closeted Gay British politicians with the sort of lower-class “trade” or “rent boys” whom they found especially exciting as sex partners. In fact, they were able to cultivate friends and allies in both of Britain’s major political parties. Their point man in the Conservative Party was Robert John Graham Boothby, who was Bisexual (though according to his online biography at https://thekraytwins.fandom.com/wiki/Lord_Boothby, he never had sex with a woman until he was 25) and had a kinky attraction to working-class men. Boothby was also one of those people who, according to this documentary, was into what is called “scat.” He would lie under a glass table and get younger men to sit on it and watch them shit – a perversion I first heard about from my late partner, John Gabrish. John told me while we were together that years before he had gone home with someone who had had a similar fetish: he wanted John to sit on his glass table and take a dump, which he would watch through the glass as he laid under it. John politely declined and got out of there as quickly and diplomatically as possible.

The Labour MP who was under Ronnie Kray’s influence was Tom Driberg, who had a “thing” for cruising restrooms and even having sex in “lifts” (Brit-speak for elevators). Driberg was also a gossip columnist for over 30 years in the British newspapers published by press baron Lord Beaverbrook – who allegedly had a file on Driberg documenting every scrape with the law Beaverbrook had used his power and influence to make sure he was never held accountable and certainly not punished for it. Driberg was also supposedly a spy for both British and Russian intelligence. One journalist who got wind of the story and tried to get it in print was Michael Thornton of the Sunday Express, but because his paper’s publisher was aligned with the Conservative Party he couldn’t get his own paper to publish his story. Later it was picked up by the Labour-aligned Daily Mirror, who in 1964 published a veiled story that didn’t name either Lord Boothby or Ronnie Kray but made accusations to the effect that the gangster and the pervert peer were closer friends and associates than either of them had publicly acknowledged. Boothby and his powerful friends – including Harold Macmillan, then Britain’s Prime Minister; and his wife Doroithy, who’d been having a long-running affair with Boothby since 1930 – came down hard on the Mirror, and ultimately the paper backed down. Under pressure from Boothby and his influential friends – including Harold Wilson, who was running for Prime Minister on the Labour Party and didn’t want a sex scandal that would jeopardize his own party’s chances as well as his opposition’s – the Mirror caved completely. They ran a front-page retraction of the story, paid Boothby a £40,000 out-of-court settlement on his threatened libel suit, and fired the editor who had green-lighted the original story.

While the Krays stayed invulnerable for a few more years – in 1965 they beat the rap and were acquitted of brutalizing a rival nightclub owner who had refused to pay them “protection money,” allegedly due to bribing or intimidating members of the jury (also a strategy used by their role model, Al Capone) – they were finally convicted of murder in 1969 and sentenced to life in prison. (Britain had abolished the death penalty a few years earlier.) But Lord Boothby lived on and was protected by powerful friends. He also made a public splash when he married Wanda Senna, a woman 33 years his junior, and the film contains a film clip in which he’s asked about his previous statements that women were “a bother” in light of his just having married one. Boothby died in 1986 without ever being called to account for his involvement with the Krays or his own attempts to cover for them. One man who attempted to expose him publicly was journalist and novelist John Pearson, who wanted to follow up his books on racing car and boat driver Donald Campbell and James Bond’s creator, author Ian Fleming, with a book about the Krays. Pearson was able to develop a working relationship with the Krays’ mother Violet, who gave him a series of papers and photos documenting the intense friendship of Lord Boothby and Ronald Kray – but both his home and office were burglarized and most of this evidence was stolen. If nothing else, The Gangster and the Pervert Peer is a timely warning that there are certain people who cal literally do anything and not face the consequences people with less power and influence would for the same actions, which we’re seeing a quite clear demonstration of in the U.S. right now: does the name “Donald Trump” mean anything to you?