ABSTRACT
On 8 March 1969, at the conclusion of the longest trial in the history of British criminal justice, Mr Justice Melford Stevenson pronounced sentences of life imprisonment for murder on both of the Kray brothers with the added caveat ‘ . . . which I recommend should not be for less than thirty years’. That thirty years has slowly reached its conclusion. And although Ronnie Kray always seemed destined to die in Broadmoor, his paranoid schizophrenia tempered by constant medication, and Reggie Kray appeared equally likely to serve out every day of those predicted three decades of incarceration, given the constant refusals to grant his parole, the ‘Twins’ remain immanent in the public imagination. The Krays have provided a constant source for media stories. They have seeded an extensive bibliography comprising autobiographical accounts, biographical reconstructions, commentaries, analysis, fiction and mere speculation; and they have been the source and topic of feature films, audio tapes, walking tours and parody. Through the agency of these and many other
cultural formations they retained, with a passive appreciation, the magnetism and public agitation that they actively sought and engendered in the heyday of their nefarious careers.
