so, farewell then tony......staunch defender of family values

So, farewell then Tony Lambrianou (click here for a true likeness of our Tony - he's on the left). Petty criminal and English Cypriot - not that being English of Cypriot origin is anyway synonymous with petty criminality. He should have remained in well deserved obscurity but during the 1990's he became a Z-list celebrity.......Why? Because he helped kill a man called Jack "The Hat" McVitie on behalf of the "Firm" lead by the Kray twins.

Let the author of Lambrianou's obituary in the UK's Independent take up the story:

In autumn 1967 Tony Lambrianou and his brother Chris, as junior members of the Kray firm, were tasked with luring Jack "The Hat" McVitie to a flat in Stoke Newington, London, for a party. McVitie had been a nuisance and embarrassment to the Kray twins for some time, and in the chaotic atmosphere that enshrouded the firm in the wake of the Kray-engineered escape and subsequent killing of Frank Mitchell, Ron's shooting of George Cornell and the suicide of Reg's wife Frances, a further violent escalation was inevitable.

McVitie had bungled a shooting for which the Krays had paid him, and his final mistake was in threatening the twins after ripping them off on a drug deal. Tony Lambrianou, along with most of the Kray firm, assumed that a punishment beating would take place, but Reg Kray first produced a handgun which failed to fire, and then proceeded to butcher McVitie with a carving knife. The Lambrianous assumed responsibility for getting rid of the body, which was wrapped in a bedspread and placed in McVitie's car. Tony then drove the car to south London where the body was later picked up and apparently given an informal burial at sea.

When, in 1968, the entire Kray firm was mopped up by a special squad of detectives, Tony Lambrianou found himself under a media spotlight seldom afforded to such a small-time criminal. The ensuing trial at the Old Bailey saw several key members of the firm turn Queen's Evidence, while the Lambrianou brothers remained staunch throughout, and received life with a 15-year recommendation.

I do like that bit - 'staunch' - the bloody idiot stood 'shoulder to shoulder' with the the Krays and got what was coming to him.

Anthony Lambrianou was born in east London in 1942, the third of five sons named after saints. His father Christopher was a Cypriot who had been sold into slavery at the age of 12. He escaped in Egypt and arrived in England as a teenager. He found work during the First World War in a Newcastle munitions factory, after which he trained as a chef in London.

So now we know the origins of the first kebab shop in Britain. However, the good old British public appeared not to have been ready for this post-pub delight. Consequently, his father turned to gambling and thus rekindled his Cypriot identity by reverting to a pastime so familiar to the Cypriot male....Suprisingly he appears to have made a success of this and became...

...A highly successful gambler...(and)...in the late 1930s Christopher Lambrianou bought a restaurant in Charlotte Street, in the West End. At this time he was also drafted into the RAF and was sent to work in the same Newcastle munitions factory, where he met and married Lillian, the daughter of a strict Roman Catholic farming family from Consett. By 1945 he had acquired another restaurant in Charlotte Street and seemed set for prosperity.

However, two years later a rat was discovered in one of the restaurants and Christopher killed it by pouring boiling water over it. At the High Court he was found guilty of cruelty and was forced to sell the restaurants to pay the massive legal costs. The family fortunes took a nosedive from which they were never to recover.

So, there we have it, we can point a finger at the unfortunate rat as having inadvertantly contributed to the death of Jack "The Hat" McVitie and set the 'Kray's as celebrities' band-wagon rolling......

Christopher picked up whatever casual kitchen work was available, but this did not prevent the family enduring a spell in a south London workhouse. In 1949 the Lambrianou family was re-housed in a flat in bomb-ravaged Haggerston, not far from Tony's birthplace in Bethnal Green. Despite Lillian's ferocious defence of her sons, immersed in poverty and the detritus of war, the Lambrianou brothers quickly acquired a reputation as toughs and petty thieves.

As a child Tony was not averse to hard work, and from the age of eight supplemented the family purse by working for a coal merchant, and by selling sheets of race results. By the time he left school at the age of 14 to work for a local bed manufacturer, the Lambrianou brothers, despite their hard-working, strict and religious parents, were well established as thieves and fighters, and a more exciting world of dancehalls, violence, scams and gangs beckoned.

Tony Lambrianou left the bed factory and made his money from thieving and protection, and eventually received his first conviction for burglary in 1960. The violence became more extreme and Lambrianou thrived as an all-purpose money-maker, stealing, running protection rackets, and working as both a bookmaker's runner and a Jew-baiting Mosleyite, at £50 per day. He received another conviction in 1961 for housebreaking, resulting in a three-year probation order.

£50 a day to be a 'Jew-baiting Mosleyite thug' seems a bit extravegant to me.....I am sure that there were plenty of other anti-semites in the East End who would have relished the prospect of being a 'Mosleyite thug' for a lot less than that, despite the conclusive outcome of the Second World War being widely known. Tony obviously backed the wrong horse even after the results were in - clearly not a very successful gambler like his old man.....

Tony married a cab-driver's daughter, Pat Strack, in 1962, and that year became a father for the first time.

The cab driving fraternity had to get a look-in did'nt they......

In 1963 he received his first prison sentence - 18 months for stealing a car - but was released on appeal nine months later. Tony's older brother Chris was busy forging an even more formidable reputation for reckless and violent adventurism, and both Chris and Tony eventually attracted the attention of the gangsters Reg and Ron Kray.

By the early 1960s the Krays were well established in the East and West Ends of London, and were always on the lookout for up-and-coming criminal talent. The Lambrianous could also appreciate the benefits of association with such a potent brand as the Kray twins, and they found that they could make good money with minimal effort by merely uttering the twins' names.

The Kray Twins as a 'potent brand', making 'good money with minimal effort' - why did'nt these boys get a 'Queen's Award for Industry'?

In 1965 Tony received a prison sentence of 30 months for assault with intent to rob, and on his release became closely associated with the event that was to mark the demise of the Kray firm.

At the start of his sentence for his part in the murder of McVitie, Tony Lambrianou was a 26-year-old father of two, and he proceeded to serve some very hard time. Three of his 15 years were spent in punishment blocks as a result of various assaults, riots and thefts.

On his release in September 1983 he faced a world more complex than the one he had left behind. Both of his parents were dead; his brother Chris, who had discovered religion while in prison, and was released on the same day, became a market gardener. Tony clashed with his wife and with his by then grown-up children. Divorce and serious illness followed, and in the late 1980s Tony Lambrianou began a relationship with Wendy Mason, whom he later married.

But crime had been his life, and in 1991 he published an autobiography, Inside the Firm: the untold story of the Krays' reign of terror, (so popular that at Amazon there are 35 Used & New copies available starting at the princly sum of £0.29) and more recently co-authored with Freddie Foreman Getting It Straight: villains talking (2001). The public's enormous fascination with 1960s gangland increased throughout the 1990s, and he became a highly visible celebrity at boxing matches and charity events. In 1995 he collaborated with a latter-day Kray associate, Steve Wraith, in raising thousands of pounds for the Gateshead burns victim Terry Moran.

A flood of books, tabloid 'exclusives', video nasties and Channel 5 programmes topped by the release of that lamentable film 'The Krays' rehabilitated the Kray's and their "Firm" as 'celebs with edge'. At the nastier end of this market were, and remain, a series of videos promising extreme violence, 'brutal unlicensed fighting' and topless women - all in the company of our friend Tony sitting ring-side while grown men knocked the shit out of each other.

Tony Lambrianou was a passionate keeper of the Kray flame, and was willing to defend their most indefensible crimes. He campaigned for the release of the twins and even after their deaths (Ron died in 1995 and Reg in 2000) was always available to speak to the mass media in never less than glowing terms on their behalf. He often spoke of a set of underworld ethics that now seem as dated as bowler hats and bubble cars.

Speaking to the BBC after the funeral of Reggie Kray, in 2000, our Tony defended their reputation by asserting that; "We should forget about the past." A bit rich coming from a man who was turning a pretty penny ramming his past reputation down our throats, kindly assisted by publishers, journalists and TV producers. The defence continued: "They were not evil men....They done unto those what they would have done to them, and this involved other villains." This from the man who, as the BBC records 'placed McVitie's body into a car and had it crushed into a three foot cube, which the twins called "the Oxo".' "It's not an excuse, that's just facts," he concluded.

Yes, Tony knew about families alright. As he said himself 'I was brought up with the Krays in Bethnal Green - we was all families and brothers, and that's where your power lay - within your family. And again here on 'traditional family values': "If you didn't have a family of brothers with you, you were nothing. Brothers were your strength." And also your downfall Tony.......time to get yer coat.