The Final Explosive Secret about the Firm

Surviving the Krays

David Teale was born into a family of seven in wartime London's Holborn. One of three brothers whose lives were forever changed by the Kray Firm, David was a teenager when he first met Ronnie Kray and experienced his unspeakable cruelty first-hand. His older brother Bobby secretly turned informer on the Firm, and David was imprisoned by the State 'for his own protection'. He has spent years researching in the National Archives and previously classified documents to uncover the truth about the Krays.

David Teale: groomed by the twins, controlled by threats, raped by Ronnie, falsely imprisoned by the State for his 'own protection' as younger brother of Kray-informer Bobby. Turns out that's only half the story. 
 
David first met the Krays when he was seventeen years old. He was drawn into London's underworld, and became Ronnie's reluctant foot soldier, driver, errand boy. He was close to murder, and witnessed menaces and the increasingly psychotic behaviours of the most feared men in gangster land. 
 
Unbeknown to David, his brother Bobby had bravely turned informer at great risk to his own safety and that of his brothers. That had its own consequences. 
 
But why, when the police were being furnished with eye-witness statements, from an impeccable source, were they seemingly incapable of bringing the twins to justice? The Krays were untouchable. 
 
After tireless research through newly released documents in the National Archives, and piecing together previously classified information together with his own, first-hand knowledge of the time, David Teale uncovers the shocking new truth, revealed in this book for the first time. 
 
David's story rewrites True Crime history.

David Teale

Bobby Teale

Alfie Teale

Life in the Shadow of the Krays

Survivors from London's gangland 
 
The third and final chapter in Bobby and David Teale's powerful true story focuses on the shattering consequences of Bobby's secret decision to inform on the Krays, putting himself and his brothers David and Alfie in mortal danger. 
 
Sure enough, someone, somehow had told the murderous twins they had a spy in their midst. Suspicion fell on Bobby, and Reggie held him at gunpoint in a terrifying mock execution in Epping Forest, as a warning for what happens to 'informers.' 
 
Three days after that, Bobby, David and Alfie were arrested. Bobby had believed it was the Yard's way of making him and his family 'safe'. His brothers didn't have a clue what was going on. Bobby expected six months inside, maybe. They each got three years for 'demanding money with menaces,' a catch-all crime that required minimal evidence to convict. 
 
In Legacy of Menace, Bobby opens up on what he went through at the hands of the Krays and the police, how his economy with the truth was his attempt to protect his brothers, and why he vanished, fearful of gangland retribution, when he was released from prison. 
 
While David recalls the appalling confusion of brutal life in prison, not knowing why he was there, his brother refusing to speak to him, rumours swirling about the Krays coming for them. 
 
David, now aged 81, has remained profoundly angry with Bobby, 82, for abandoning him and Alfie to their fate. But the brothers, once close, are reconciling again, as Bobby provides full disclosure with new and dramatic details of his time in prison and his cross-border escape, helping David to understand the experience from Bobby's perspective for the first time. 
 
This extraordinary three-way narrative memoir provides fresh insights on a classic true crime story, wrapped in a compelling family saga of bitter estrangement and ultimate redemption.

David Teale

Books by David Teale

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