Ronnie, upon being certified insane, was committed to Broadmoor Hospital in 1979 and remained there until his death on 17 March 1995 from a heart attack; Reggie was released from prison on compassionate grounds in August 2000, five weeks before he died of cancer.

with a fondness for heavy drinking; his work led him to live a semi-nomadic lifestyle as he travelled all over southern England looking for junk to sell, and even when he was in London he frequented pubs more often than his home.

Mrs. Kray was regarded as a minor celebrity in Bethnal Green for giving birth to and raising a healthy pair of twins at a time when the child mortality rate was high among the British working class.

[16] The Krays' biographer, John Pearson, argued that their mother planted the seeds of the malignant narcissism that the twins would display as adults by encouraging her sons to think of themselves as being extraordinary while spoiling their every whim.

"[17] The influence of their maternal grandfather, Jimmy "Cannonball" Lee,[18] caused the brothers to take up amateur boxing, then a popular pastime for working-class boys in the East End.

After being quickly recaptured, they spent their last night in military custody in Canterbury drinking cider, eating crisps and smoking cigarillos courtesy of the young national servicemen acting as their guards.

[25] Raban called Ronnie the "dimmer" of the two twins, writing that he was "a man whose grasp on reality was so slight and pathologically deranged that he was able to live out a crude, primarily coloured fiction, twisting the city into the shape of a bad thriller".

A large part of their fame was due to their non-criminal activities as popular figures on the celebrity circuit, being photographed by David Bailey on more than one occasion and socialising with lords, MPs, socialites and show business characters, including Frank Sinatra, Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Judy Garland, Diana Dors, George Raft, Sammy Davis Jr., Shirley Bassey, Liza Minnelli, Cliff Richard, Dusty Springfield, Jayne Mansfield, Richard Harris, Danny La Rue, and Barbara Windsor.

[31] The scholars Chris Jenks and Justin Lorentzen wrote that there was "a popular mistrust of the Establishment" in the 1960s and that as many young people "laughed Prime Minister Macmillan and President Johnson, their teachers and university lecturers and priests and moralists off the stage", the Krays were seen as folk heroes.

[33] The Kray twins greatly valued their image and cultivated the media by inviting journalists to take photographs of them with other celebrities at nightclubs or in donating to charity.

[35] The Krays were the owners of four nightclubs where gambling was permitted, which not only allowed them to be seen as successful businessmen but also to socialise with 'decent' people who would have previously shunned the company of gangsters running a 'gambling den'.

[36] The British scholar Ruth Penfold-Mounce described the twins as a classic example of the social bandit, criminals who became folk heroes because of the belief that they were standing up to a corrupt Establishment while also paradoxically being seen as upholding the better part of society's values.

[41] Conversely, the Krays were seen in other quarters as symbols of moral decay and evil, with the famous photographs of the brothers taken by David Bailey being viewed as "the phrenological archetypes of proletarian villainy".

[42] Jenks and Lorentzen further maintained that the Krays' close association with the East End, an area viewed as a centre of "social disorganisation and moral decay", further contributed to the negative picture of the brothers.

Finally, Jenks and Lorentzen argued that the rareness of identical twins made the brothers seem especially malevolent, giving them the "freak show" image as many found viewing two men who looked and sounded precisely the same to be disturbing and unnerving.

[51] In July 1964, an exposé in the Sunday Mirror insinuated that Ronnie had begun a homosexual relationship with Boothby,[52] at a time when sex between men was still a criminal offence in the United Kingdom.

[56] Ronnie had also launched a libel action of his own against Sunday Mirror columnist Cecil Harmsworth King for calling him a "homosexual thug" in one of his columns, but the judge dismissed the suit under the grounds that it was a "fair comment".

The brothers were in contact with Meyer Lansky and Angelo Bruno, two New York mafiosi who were looking to invest in London's nightclubs and casinos to engage in money laundering.

[65] Lacking the necessary connections with the City to keep redeeming the stolen bonds on their own, the Krays turned to Alan Bruce Cooper, a disreputable American businessman living in London.

[67] According to some sources, Ronnie killed Cornell because he referred to him as a "fat poof" (a derogatory term for a gay man) during a confrontation between the Krays and the Richardsons at the Astor Club on Christmas Day 1965.

[25] Freddie Foreman, a friend of the Krays, claimed in his autobiography Respect that he shot Mitchell dead as a favour to the twins and disposed of his body at sea.

In an interview in 2000, shortly after Reggie's death, Freddie Foreman revealed that McVitie had a reputation for leaving carnage behind him due to his habitual consumption of drugs and heavy drinking, and his having threatened to harm the twins and their family.

[84] Ronnie and Reggie Kray were allowed, under a large police guard, to attend the funeral service of their mother Violet on 11 August 1982, following her death from cancer a week earlier.

He was eventually certified insane, his paranoid schizophrenia being tempered with constant medication; in 1979 he was committed and lived the remainder of his life in Broadmoor Hospital in Crowthorne, Berkshire.

"[93] In his biography of the twins, The Profession of Violence, Pearson claims that Ronnie Kray admitted that he and Reggie discovered they were both gay in their adolescence and would often have sex together, an activity which continued into their later life.

Bradley Allardyce spent three years in Maidstone Prison with Reggie and explained, "I was sitting in my cell with Reg and it was one of those nights where we turned the lights down low and put some nice music on and sometimes he would reminisce.

[105] The fame/infamy of the Krays is such that as Jenks and Lorentzen noted that even today a "vast number" of East Enders "continue to claim an association with the Twins or their family (often despite impossible biographical or temporal discrepancies)".

[109] However, the fact that the Krays' criminal career came to an end with their convictions in 1969 allows their story, however unsavory and unpleasant it might be, to be presented on a reassuring note as the forces of law and order finally did triumph.

Pettey wrote: "In general, twins' lives fascinate because of their rarity in culture; their singularity forms the stuff of foundational myths, and lends itself to speculations about repetition, dualities and paradoxes.

For Ron and Reggie Kray, local East End and London media lore hinted at two personalities, the gangster and the gentleman, the schizophrenic sadist and the clear-headed businessman, and the promiscuous homosexual and the monogamous married man.