Re: Roger visiting Reggie

[WanChef@aol.com]

LONDON (Sept. 6) - Reggie Kray, a frail, soft-spoken 66-year-old suffering 
from bladder cancer, is the most popular hospital patient around. He has 
received so many calls from well-wishers that a separate phone line was set 
up to handle the flood.

He also is a convicted murderer, a former gangland boss paroled from prison 
last month so he can die in freedom. Kray's lawyer called his release ''a 
moral victory'' - and many here seem to agree.

For a younger generation, Kray and his brothers represent an ideal of 
razor-sharp '60s style, a vicarious underworld glamour. For some older 
Britons, they recall a simpler time - an era when even criminals looked after 
their own.

Kray is an icon of gangster chic, the last in a dynasty.

In the 1950s and '60s, the Krays - twins Reggie and Ronnie, abetted by older 
brother Charlie - were kings of the Cockney underworld, with a network of 
protection and extortion rackets stretching across London's rough-and-tumble 
East End.

They ran West End nightclubs, wore sharp mohair suits, rubbed shoulders with 
lords and rock stars, gave generously to charity - and ruled their empire 
with the threat, and sometimes reality, of fearsome violence.

Nowadays, in addition to calling the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital to wish 
Reggie well, thousands of people from as far afield as Canada and New Zealand 
have left cheery messages on a Web site set up by his wife, Roberta Kray. 
''Pity there weren't more guys like you!'' reads one.

Equally enthusiastic are Kray's celebrity supporters, who include the veteran 
British comedienne Barbara Windsor, once married to a Kray associate; former 
Who frontman Roger Daltrey, who once owned film rights to the twins' story; 
and Mike Tyson, who publicly thanked Reggie Kray for writing him a supportive 
letter during his own imprisonment for rape.

''They treat me like a dog in America, but I have friends like Reggie Kray in 
England,'' Tyson said earlier this year.

This is the same Reggie Kray who in 1967 murdered bungling hit man Jack ''The 
Hat'' McVitie, stabbing him so viciously that his liver fell out.

Brother Ronnie, who died in 1995 in the Broadmoor institute for the 
criminally insane, was a paranoid schizophrenic with a hair-trigger temper. 
When rival gangster George Cornell called him a ''fat poof,'' Ronnie marched 
into the Blind Beggar pub and shot him in the head as the jukebox played 
''The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More.''

Those acts of violence proved the twins' undoing. In 1969, they were 
sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 30 years.

Three decades later, their supporters express outrage at a system that kept 
them in jail for so long, and nostalgia for a vanished England. Unlikely as 
it sounds, the Krays have become poster boys for old-fashioned family values.

''Among some of the older people, there's a hankering after an old England, a 
'60s when London was much more Cockney, and about looking after your own. An 
age when life was simpler, less complicated,'' said Piers Hernu, editor of 
the men's magazine Front, which has run a column by Reggie Kray and lists one 
of his former henchmen as a regular contributor.

''There's always been a very strong sense of family in the East End, and it's 
the same with the gangsters,'' Hernu said.

''It's not that Reggie was so great and such a nice guy and only killed other 
gangsters - though there's an element of truth there. The people he killed 
were unsavory hoods - much as the Krays were. He wasn't a serial killer. He 
wasn't a pedophile.''

In recent years, magazine spreads of models in tapered '60s suits and films 
such as ''Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' have mythologized the 
sharp-dressed Cockney ''hard man'' epitomized by the brothers.

The Krays' own media savvy helped boost their appeal.

Even while in prison, they turned their family name into a lucrative cottage 
industry. The twins reportedly received $375,000 for a 1990 film version of 
their lives. An autobiography, ''Our Story,'' was published in 1988. 
T-shirts, recordings and even books of the twins' poetry followed.

Now Ronnie is gone, followed in April by older brother Charlie, who died 
while serving a sentence for drug dealing. And Reggie has ''days, rather than 
weeks'' to live, according to his lawyers.

Reggie's funeral is likely to draw even bigger crowds than that of Ronnie, 
whose coffin was carried in a coach driven by six black horses through the 
streets of his native East End - an East End where Bengali restaurants, 
dot.com start-ups and trendy bars now outnumber the Victorian pubs and 
pie-and-mash shops of the Krays' youth.

''When Reggie dies, east London will be lined with thousands of people 
mourning the passing of an era - in much the same way they did with Princess 
Diana,'' Hernu said.

 AP-NY-09-06-00 0753EDT