And it had been while I stood in Glasgow, wearing a demob suit that I otherwise wouldn’t have been seen dead in and holding a ship ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia, that I had first encountered the Three Kings.
There’s this misconception that all gangsters are the same. That all coppers are the same. Some people even believe, sometimes with a fair amount of justification, that all gangsters and all coppers are the same. The truth is that the underworld is a community like any other, with the same range and variety of personality, physical type and character that you find in any walk of life. You can’t even say that they are united in dishonesty or immorality. Some villains have a very strict moral code. Some don’t.
The Three Kings were a good example. What Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy didn’t run in Glasgow wasn’t worth running. In 1948, Glasgow’s three leading crime lords had sat down over lunch in a civilized manner in the elegant surroundings of the Regency Oyster Bar and discussed the future. The upshot was that, while they sat and divided the lunch bill equally between them, they had done pretty much the same to Glasgow.
There had been nothing elegant or civilized about what had preceded their lunch. A vicious gang war, Sneddon and Cohen on one side, Murphy on the other, had threatened to wipe them all out. Added to which, the first casualty of war was profit. By the time Sneddon, Cohen and Murphy emerged from the Regency, a coronation had taken place: the three crime lords had become the three crime kings.
But, like I said, no one is the same, and the Three Kings were very different people. Willie Sneddon was a truly nasty piece of work. Devious and malignant. Sneddon, the Gorbals hard man, had robbed, murdered and tortured his way to the top. But he was smart. Even subtle.
Subtlety was not something you associated with Hammer Murphy, in much the same way you wouldn’t associate camels with the Antarctic. Michael Murphy had gained the epithet ‘Hammer’ after pulping the skull of rival gang boss Paul Cochrane with a lead barrel-headed builder’s mallet, in front of the assembled members of both gangs. Murphy was a man of limited intellect but possessed a viciousness as truly, awesomely monumental as the chip on his shoulder. He had embraced his new nickname with enthusiasm and was known to wield a hammer against knees, elbows and skulls whenever a suitable opportunity arose. It was, he had once confided in me, good to have a trademark.
Jonny Cohen, the third king, was a perfect illustration of the variety of personality and type within the criminal fraternity. Known as Handsome Jonny because of his film-star looks, Cohen was a decent kind of guy and a devoted husband and father who lived a quiet life in Newton Mearns — Tel-Aviv on the Clyde, as it was known in Glasgow. Or at least he was a decent, quiet-living kind of guy when he wasn’t holding up banks, organizing jewel robberies, running illegal bookies, that kind of thing. It was also true to say that Jonny had moved a few souls closer to the Lord in his time, but they had all been competitors or active playmates in the big Glasgow game. No civilians. I liked Jonny. I had good reason to: he had saved my neck. And when I first arrived in Glasgow, it had been Jonny who first suggested he and his colleagues could perhaps make use of my skills.
Don’t get me wrong. I had known exactly the kind of people I was getting involved with. And I had known that some of the enquiries I carried out for them took me very close to, and often over, a very fudged border between the legal and illegal. I’d gotten involved in some seedy and unpleasant shenanigans and, as time had gone on, I had felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into a personality that I really didn’t care for. That’s why, over the last twelve or thirteen months, I’d been making a real effort to straighten myself out; and that meant having less to do with the Three Kings. Instead, I had been doing fine upstanding work for the community, mainly staging infidelities in seedy hotels for divorce cases. But the two cases I was now working on threatened to drag me back into the cosy embrace of Glasgow’s most dangerous men.
One thing that unites the criminal fraternity is that they don’t tend to keep banker’s hours. Extortion with menaces, vice, armed robbery and running brothels takes it out of you, and your average gangster tends not to be a morning person. So I decided to wait until the following afternoon before paying Jonny Cohen a house call, even though I knew that he, of all the Kings, had the closest to a normal daily schedule. I gave him a ring after lunch and we arranged to meet, conveniently, at the Pacific Club that evening about five.
I stood before the Pacific Club and contemplated glamour. It’s a funny thing, glamour. The word itself was as Scottish as they come, meaning a spell or an enchantment cast over someone to enrapture them. It was odd that, having invented the word, the Scots were totally at sea with the concept. Whenever they strived to achieve it, it just came out all wrong. No, that wasn’t entirely true. There were exceptions: Sheila Gainsborough had glamour in spades. Naturally and effortlessly. A rare achievement, given the lack of it in her origins.
The Pacific Club was intended to be glamorous. It failed. More than that, its failure was the kind that would have helped Neville Chamberlain feel better about Munich. The Pacific Club was the ground floor and basement of a soot-blackened building on Broomielaw, down on the north bank of the Clyde as it dissects the city centre. It was a gloomy place even in daytime, being almost tucked under the latticed ironwork of the rail bridge over the river. The sun was still blazing when I got there and it was a relief to step into the club’s clammy coolness, like walking into a subterranean cave.
Officially, the Pacific was a private, members-only club, a legal wriggle that allowed Handsome Jonny Cohen to circumvent most of the licensing laws. Like all such night-time venues, it had that depressing tacky look during the day. Like a seaside resort off-season. The air in the club was clear but the greasy odour of stale cigarettes clung to every surface. There were two dozen chair-stacked tables, a small stage and a bar in the corner. The nautical theme was represented mainly by ship life rings, emblazoned with ‘SS PACIFIC CLUB’, on the walls, and by some netting half-heartedly arranged over the stage. The small curved bar had a driftwood sign above it stating that it was the ‘HAWAIIAN HULA BAR’ and some more netting draped around it. There were crab shells dotted about the netting. Maybe it was just me, but I couldn’t image anywhere within the known universe and probably several parallel ones that could possibly be further away from some sun-drenched, azure-sea tropical island than the Broomielaw in Glasgow.
Although, I had to admit, the Pacific Club was probably as good a place as any to catch crabs.
I got there about ten before five just as the staff were arriving to unstack the chairs from the tables and start preparing for a long night of overpriced drinks, under-clad girls and mediocre jazz. Handsome Jonny was already there. He beamed a searchlight grin of perfect teeth above the Cary Grant cleft in his chin. He looked clean, cool and fresh. I am definitely no slouch at turning myself out, but I had the distinct feeling that Jonny’s tailor and barber had gotten together to conspire to give me an inferiority complex. I was suddenly aware that my shirt was clinging to my back with sweat. Jonny’s thick, dark hair had been immaculately cut and for a second I wondered how feasible it would be to travel to Hollywood from Glasgow once a fortnight for a trim. I decided to keep my hat on for the moment.