Bernie Fineman, Original Motor Mouth Read online

  Through a friend of a friend I found a place on Bodney Road in Hackney where a guy had some garages. The rent was pretty reasonable, four pounds a week, which I could earn doing one job, so I took it. Word soon got around that there’s this guy on Bodney Road who does work cheap but does a good job, and I’m getting approached by all sorts of people.

  One night I’m in the Blind Beggar pub on Whitechapel Road and this guy called Al approaches me about doing some work. He’s a huge guy, looked like Lurch from The Addams Family, a real hard bastard but smart as you like in a black suit, white shirt and black tie, with Brylcreemed (smoothed down with hair-grease) hair. He had a scar running down from his left eye to his chin. When I asked my old mate from school Jimmy Nunn what Al did he said, ‘He collects debts, and if they don’t pay he kills them.’ Well, I was too scared to say no! We were in the Blind Beggar after all, and I knew the reputation that some of its patrons had.

  Over the years there I met the Lambrianou brothers, George Cornell, Mad Frankie Fraser – all the big names in the East End at that time. You’d think it was a dangerous place to be, but in fact it was anything but. It was a regular boozer, always clean and immaculately presented, and the atmosphere was always welcoming – so long as they knew you.

  If they didn’t recognise you or they didn’t like the look of you it would be: ‘Oi, fuck off!’ It was a jolly place, lots of laughing and joking and they’d have a musical-comedy turn every Saturday night, and there’d be sing-songs around the Old Joanna (piano) when the mums and dads would have a knees-up. Across the road was a fish ’n’ chip shop, so you’d go over and get your fish ’n’ chips, bring ’em back, have a pint, meet your mates and have a great night out.

  Most of the guys there had bent noses and cauliflower ears from boxing, but were always smart and always wearing suits, and the women looked as hard as the men half the time! But if your face fitted and they knew you, you always got a warm welcome. You could walk in with no money and there’d always be someone more than happy to buy you a pint.

  I suppose because of its reputation you were either on the inside or on the outside. If you were on the inside you were part of the family, and it was a big happy family, but if you were on the outside you knew to stay well clear of the place. So as a result of that there was never any trouble – not like in pubs today when you only have to look at someone the wrong way and you’ll get a bottle across your face.

  For instance everybody had manners. If you bumped into someone it was, ‘Ooh, sorry about that, let me get you another drink.’ There was no shouting and screaming, it was respectful. Everyone was there for a good time and that’s what they had, it was like a second lounge with all your mates there. It was Jimmy Nunn who first introduced me to the Blind Beggar. His dad had been drinking there for years and so we had no problems, and it was Jimmy who introduced me to Al (never Alan), who became one of my best customers for private work.

  I wasn’t naïve, I knew the kinds of people who owned the cars that Al brought to me, but my philosophy was ‘ask no questions, tell no lies’. And anyway, nothing was ever said but you knew you were far better off doing the work than not, and it was a brave man in those days who said ‘no’ to people like Al.

  Because of the clients I now had, my garage was full of Jags, Rolls-Royces, old MGs, a Triumph Mayflower, all this type of thing. One day the landlord came by, saw all this and said, ‘You’re obviously doing well for yourself, I’m going to have to put the rent up.’

  Later that week I was returning one of the cars to the Blind Beggar and I said to Al, ‘I’m sorry, it’s going to be tricky for me to do work in the future, the landlord has put my rent up so much I can’t afford to keep it.’

  Al was very disappointed.

  The next weekend I was working in the garage when the landlord came up to me, a bit sheepish, and said, ‘There’s no more rent. Don’t worry about it, you don’t owe me anything.’

  I was flabbergasted, but what a result! I worked out later that Al or one of his guys must’ve gone to see my landlord. He had several properties in the area and was always having trouble getting rent out of people. Being an expert debt collector, Al obviously did a deal with him, making sure he always got his money on time, so long as he kept Bernie’s garage open.

  A few months went by, I was rent free by now and there was a steady stream of work. Then one Friday night I get a telephone call at about one in the morning. I recognise the voice and he says, ‘Remember me, I did you a favour.’

  Now I realised that Al didn’t just sort out my landlord to keep my business going, he did it so that I was in his debt and the law of the East End says that he can call in that debt any time, and that time was 2 am tonight. All I have to do is collect a car from Surrey Docks at 2 am, ask for the guard by name, and tell him Tom sent me, take the car to south London at the address he gave me, and we’re quits.

  ‘It will be done,’ I say, and the call ends. I arrive at Surrey Docks, ask for the guard by name, he hands me a parcel, keys for the car, and I winch it up on the breakdown truck and get on my way to south London. All goes well, until I’m at Camberwell Green at about 4 am, and the Old Bill stop me and they ask me questions. I tell them my name, and who I work for, and explain some cock and bull story that I have to deliver the car before the client goes to work. They’re happy with the story, so with me sweating like a pig, I drive to my destination and tear back home, just in time to wash and go to work. I’m shattered, but relieved the job’s done and the favour has been returned.

  A week or so later I took some more cars back to the Blind Beggar. Al approaches me and I’m shitting it. He says, ‘Son, you done a good job, you never grassed or gave out names, take a ton, I can now trust you, you’re one of us, any problems you get, keep it in the family, tell me, and it’s sorted.’ Al handed over a hundred pounds in cash.

  RESULT!

  I regularly took cars that were fixed back to gangland haunts, including Esmeralda’s Barn, the Krays’ nightclub in Knightsbridge, and the Amherst Club, as well as various clubs and pubs in London’s East End. I met Diana Dors and her husband Alan Lake, and Barbara Windsor and Ronnie Knight. In fact, a few years later I moved into a flat across the road from Barbara in Hendon and she came to my place for dinner. A wonderful woman, great company.

  One day I returned a car to the Blind Beggar, a Mk 10 Jaguar. I went in and saw Al, he asked me how much he owed me, I told him, and he gave me the money, no questions asked. Then he said, ‘There’s a couple of people I want you to meet. This is Ronnie and this is Reggie; gentlemen, this is Bernie, the guy we use for some of our cars.’ They were both incredibly polite, said they were very pleased to meet me and that they’d make sure that any work came my way. They insisted I have a drink with them, which I could hardly refuse, so they ordered me a double whisky.

  Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m not much of a drinker, and whisky I cannot drink. I don’t know why, but there’s something about whisky that brings something like a cloud over me, I suddenly feel very angry when I drink it. So be warned, never buy me a whisky, it turns me into the Incredible Hulk! But on this occasion, I could hardly say no, so I accepted it and drank it politely and tried not to conceal how tipsy I was feeling.

  Then Reggie put his hand in his top pocket and pulled out one of the big old pound notes and handed it to me, saying, ‘Get your mum some flowers and your dad some tobacco.’ From that day on whenever I returned a car to the Blind Beggar, whoever it was I saw would always give me an extra pound to buy flowers for my mum and tobacco for my dad, and the Krays would always make sure I got a lift home.

  Other people I did work for around this time included Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, who was a real character. He was losing his hair so would always be wearing different hats, hence the name, and he was always pissed! He wasn’t a hard man like the others – he was a ducker and diver, a wheeler-dealer who’d rip you off any way he could to make some money. But he never ripped me off, he knew I did a good job for
him so kept me onside. There was one time when I returned the car and Jack didn’t have any money to pay me, so Jimmy Nunn laid it out for him and said, ‘Right, you owe me that money now, and I want it tomorrow.’ And, sure enough, Jack had the money the next day for him. He was that sort of character – someone who could find money when he needed to.

  Another person who I always thought was a really nice guy and always got on very well with was Frankie Fraser, who I did several cars for. We were never friends, it was a business relationship, but he always paid up, shook your hand and was very polite, and a pleasure to do business with. At least he was for me, though there may be others no longer with us who might disagree. One thing he always said to me was, ‘Never buy any jewellery. If you want something for your mum or your missus, you come and see me.’ That was his speciality, smash-and-grab from jewellery stores, though I never took him up on his kind offer.

  I was growing up. It took me a long time, what with discos, girls, snogging, the occasional bit of rumpy pumpy in the back of my new car (well a five-year-old Ford Zodiac, auto 6 cylinder).

  Then shit happened.

  It must’ve been late ’67, early 1968, and my landlord at the lock-up had been forced to sell so I had to move out. Via a friend of a friend I’d got speaking to the owners of a garage in Hackney and they let me lease some space from them to continue my out-of-hours work. I’m hard at it one Saturday morning, quite early, when a load of police cars pull up outside, about four of them. The coppers run into the garage, no messing about, shouting, ‘You’re wanted for questioning, you’re all coming with us, now!’

  Before we know what’s going on we’re all thrown into the backs of cars and transported to Stoke Newington Police Station, where we are interrogated. I was put in the back of a car with my mate Tony, and we were protesting, ‘What the fuck’s this about? What’s going on?’ The coppers in the front just said, you’ll see when we get there. Tony and I didn’t say a word the whole way there, we knew better than to open our mouths. But in fact there was nothing to say, we’d not done anything wrong, all I could think was there must’ve been some dodgy stuff going on, fiddling the books or whatever.

  There was a new inspector in town, ‘Nipper’ Read, who thought of himself as the big cheese and was determined to get the Krays locked up any way he could. Ronnie had shot dead George Cornell in 1966 and Reggie was said to have murdered Jack The Hat, but the Lambrianous got sent down for it instead. Witnesses were too scared to come forward, the Krays seemed untouchable, but ‘Nipper’ Read had other ideas and ran a campaign of pulling in just about everybody in the East End, including me.

  We were all taken to separate rooms. They told me to sit down and asked if I wanted a cup of tea. Yes please! I was interviewed by a detective sergeant who said he knew I’d done work for the Krays and asked me what I saw in the back of the cars. ‘The boot,’ I replied, and his words to me were, ‘Listen you cocky little fucker, this is a murder investigation, keep your smartarse remarks to yourself and answer the questions.’

  I then said, NO, I saw nothing but a toolkit and carpet in the boot. He asked me if I saw any guns, knives or axes, or blood, and I said NO, I am just a mechanic. So he goes on to ask, did you receive any cars damaged with blood on the bumpers? NO I replied, I am just a mechanic. He kept on, with words to the effect: ‘I know you know something, what are you withholding?’

  ‘NOTHING,’ I replied. ‘I am a mechanic, I do my job and do not take notice of anything else.’

  He then asks, ‘Are you being told not to say anything? Is someone paying you to keep your mouth shut?’

  ‘NO,’ I replied, ‘I don’t fear anyone, I do my job and I don’t hear or see anything else.’

  After twenty minutes of this, realising I wasn’t going to crack, he told me to piss off before he changed his mind.

  I’m shaken, but all I can think about now is: How am I going to get back to work? I’m in my boiler suit, my wallet was in my civvies (clothes that were back in the garage), so I ask the desk sergeant if I can get a lift. He just looks at me and tells me to fuck off. I’m the first one out so I have no choice but to start walking. Eventually the other guys are slowly released and we catch each other up and make the long walk back to Hackney in our steel toe-capped boots.

  Was it the truth? Was I hiding anything? Course I fucking was. We all knew what was going on but business was business and these people weren’t just loyal customers, they were dangerous ones too, so you just got on with it and kept your mouth shut. If you did see anything you not only didn’t tell the police, you didn’t tell the customer either. If they got a whiff you might blag you’d be well in trouble.

  The truth is I saw sawn-off shotguns, and I saw cars with blood on the grill. Because I was on call for them 24/7 I would get called day and night, and told there’d been an accident and a car needs moving. Even if it was three in the morning I didn’t hang around because I knew those guys needed it moving a.s.a.p.

  As an example of that kind of call, I remember once I had a request to attend to a 2.4 Jaguar which had hit a lamppost outside the Super Cinema, Stamford Hill. They said it had gone out of control, the keys were on the top of the back wheel, and they put the phone down. When I got there I couldn’t believe it – it was a total wreck. The Jag had hit the lamppost so hard it was like in a V-shape around it and the lamppost was almost touching the windscreen, with the engine virtually in the driver’s compartment. They must’ve been doing a hell of a speed to do that much damage, so I could only assume they were chasing someone.

  That’s the only reason you’d do that speed on that road, and of course the guys in the Jaguar couldn’t have been the ones being chased because they would’ve soon been caught after the accident. But as always, I asked no questions. I got it on the recovery truck, drove back to the garage, reversed it into the yard and locked up. One of the local scrapyards used to do pretty well too out of the Blind Beggar because that Jag and many others ended up there.

  Eventually, ‘Nipper’ Read got his men. Ronnie and Reggie, along with fourteen others from their firm, were sent down. What with them in prison, and with Jack the Hat and George Cornell dead, that meant bad news for business for me. I still did work for some of the locals who weren’t involved in the firm, but eventually the jobs from the Blind Beggar petered out, and it was never the same again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE LADIES IN MY LIFE

  I was introduced to my first wife, Jacqueline, through a friend. I was a grease-monkey mechanic and she was from quite a well-to-do area called Kingsbury in north-west London. I’d never been to bloody Kingsbury in my life, and thought I needed a passport to get there. Anyway, we hit it off straight away but her parents never liked me and I suffered them. We were nineteen or twenty and in those days when you got with a girl you were expected to get married at that age. So people would ask us, ‘Are you getting married?’ We’d say yes and before we knew it we were! But as I said, her parents never liked me and I wonder if that was my attraction for her.

  We were young, we got married, but we probably shouldn’t have done. Sure enough, in time we just began to grow apart. I was working long hours to keep the little house we had, wasn’t used to having responsibilities and we just drifted away from each other.

  For a while we tried to keep our marriage together and thought the way to do that was to have a baby. We’d been trying for a while but it didn’t happen, so I had some tests and it turned out I had a very low sperm count so was told I couldn’t have children. Fortunately we had some very good friends who had a friend whose family wouldn’t accept her back because she was pregnant out of wedlock. We were talking and the fact that we couldn’t have kids cropped up, and so they asked if we’d be interested in adopting. So we met the girl and she was very nice and was happy for us to adopt her baby. We spoke to our solicitor, did everything legally, and I was actually there when she gave birth. So she’s my eldest daughter, Lisa Marie, a wonderful girl and a fantastic mother, who�
��s given me two beautiful grandchildren called Daisy and Mia.

  Of course, having a baby didn’t save my marriage. I was with Jacqueline for twelve years and we finally divorced when I was thirty-two. I spent the next six years making up for lost time and sowing my wild oats, and then I met Lisa Blume – at the Middlesex & Herts Country Club of all places. She was like the ‘Geezer Girl’, wouldn’t put up with any of my shit, called a spade a spade, she just wouldn’t take any fucking nonsense.

  Lisa was working for a car dealership, on reception, so she knew how to handle blokes. I knew I liked her, but she was sort of seeing this other geezer who kept pestering her. So one day we were up the Country Club and I got him by the throat and he never pestered her again. After a few months of knowing her, we were getting on like a house on fire, and my mates booked a lads’ holiday to Thailand. Lovely-jubbly I thought!

  But Lisa found out about it and said, ‘You go to Thailand and that’s it, you can forget about me, Sunshine.’

  So I had to cancel the plans with my mates and I went with her instead. A few months in and I’m already taking this girl on holiday to Thailand, in a beautiful hotel overlooking Pattaya beach, not an everyday destination back in the early 1980s. I must’ve loved her!

  It happened to be her birthday while we were there, so I booked us into this beautiful hotel restaurant as a treat and ordered a birthday cake without her knowing. She’s always been slim, my missus, a great figure, no matter how much she eats. But when this cake was brought out it was massive! I was expecting a Lyons Corner House job but this thing was fucking huge! And she’s shovelling it away, getting right stuck into it. I’m sat there watching, stunned, and I just jokingly said, ‘If you think I’m going to marry a fat lump you’ve got another thing coming.’

  And she said, ‘You’ve proposed!’