Beckenham, South London, November the 20th, 1972. A funeral at St. Edmund’s Roman Catholic Church. The mourners are the kind of men who do not appear on electoral rolls, who have multiple names across multiple documents, who have been in police files since before the war, and who have spent 40 years making sure those files never amounted to anything actionable.
Among the flowers sent to the church, a wreath. The card attached reads, “To a fine gentleman, from Reg and Ron Kray.” The Kray twins, Ronnie serving life for murder, Reggie serving life for murder, sending a wreath from their respective prison cells to the funeral of a man they had both feared, respected, and spent years trying to replace.
The wreath does not make it into the church. Friends of the family intercept it at the door. They destroy it, because even in death, even at a quiet suburban church in South London, association with the Krays is considered too shameful to tolerate. Think about that for a moment. Not the other way around. >> >> Not the Kray family rejecting association with a criminal, a criminal’s family rejecting association with the Krays.
His name was George Alberto Arthur Dimeo, born in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, to an Italian father and a Scottish mother. Known to every criminal in London, and to the New York Mafia, and to the Corsican underworld, and to Scotland Yard, by two words, Albert Dimes, Italian Al.
The man who ran Soho for 20 years before the Krays were old enough to try. The man who held the knife in Frith Street and nearly killed Jack Spot with it, and walked free. The man who brokered a meeting between American organized crime and the most dangerous smuggling operation in Europe in a London hotel over lunch. The man who has been almost entirely erased from British criminal history, despite being by any objective measure, the most internationally connected criminal Britain ever produced.
This is his story. Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, 1914. He was born with one foot in two worlds and spent his entire life using both. His father was Italian. >> >> His mother Scottish. The family moved south to London when Albert was still a child, settling in Clerkenwell, >> >> the tight cluster of streets in north-central London that had been an Italian neighborhood since the 19th century.
Little Italy. It was not a metaphor or a tourist name. It was a specific geography. Saffron Hill, Clerkenwell Green, the streets around the church of St. Peter, where the Italian community had worshipped since 1863. First-generation immigrants and their children and their children’s children packed into terraced houses and running cafes and ice cream businesses and the kind of small trades that immigrant communities build when the larger economy doesn’t want them.
The Italians of Clerkenwell had been in London long enough by 1914 to have their own internal hierarchies, their own power structures, their own men who enforced the community’s interests against everyone outside it. The most powerful of these families in the years before the First World War was the Sabinis.
Charles Sabini, known as Darby, ran the racecourse protection operation that controlled legal and illegal bookmaking at every major track in southern England. Brighton, Epsom, Ascot, Lewes. The bookmakers who worked those tracks paid for their pitches through the Sabinis or they didn’t work them. It was not a request.
It was an arrangement. The Sabinis were the template. The proof of what was possible. And young Albert Dimeo, growing up in the streets where the Sabinis held court, absorbed every lesson they offered. By the time he was a teenager, he was already fighting. By the time he was a young man, he had a name in the community that was not the name on his birth certificate.
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Albert Dimes. The Anglicisation of Dimeo, the specific act of making yourself legible to the world you were going to operate in, >> >> was deliberate. Calculated. Dimes understood earlier than most men of his generation that the criminal world he was building his career in was not only Italian.
It was polyglot. Jewish, Irish, Scottish, English. And navigating it required the ability to be trusted by all of them. Italian AL. Not Italian only. Italian first. London, 1939 to 1945. The war did something to the Italian community of Clerkenwell that nobody who lived through it ever fully recovered from.
When Mussolini entered the war on Germany’s side in June 1940, >> >> the British government moved immediately. All Italian nationals in Britain, regardless of how long they had been here, regardless of whether they spoke Italian, regardless of whether they had sons in the British Army, were classified as enemy aliens and interned.
The Sabinis went to the camps. The men who had controlled racecourse bookmaking across Southern England, who had been the dominant force in London’s Italian criminal world for 20 years, were shipped to internment on the Isle of Man and left there. While they were gone, their racecourse pitches, the ones at Brighton and Epsom and Ascot that they had spent two decades protecting at the cost of considerable violence, were taken over by Jack Spot, Jack Comer, born Jacob Comor in Mile End to Polish Jewish immigrants, a man who had
spent the 1930s fighting Mosley’s blackshirts on the streets of the East End, and earning his reputation the specific way men earn reputations in that world, by being the one who didn’t step back. Jack Spot took the racecourse pitches while the Italians were interned. And when the war ended and the Italians came home from the camps, they found their operations occupied.
Albert Dimes was their man. Not interned, he was British-born, legally protected from internment, and had spent the war years building exactly the kind of position the community would need when it tried to reclaim what had been taken. He was also, by 1941, already in the criminal records. A conviction for attacking a man at a Soho club on Wardour Street.
The same incident, in which a man named Harry Little Hubby Distleman was stabbed to death by Dimes’s associate Antonio Mancini. The recorder who sentenced Dimes, bound over for 3 years, noted specifically that the incident took place under the shadow of a graver offense. Dimes walked. Mancini hanged.
The pattern, Dimes present at serious violence, Dimes not facing the ultimate consequence, was establishing itself early. London, late 1940s into the 1950s. The post-war London underworld organized itself around two men. Jack Spot, who held the East End and the racecourse pitches he had taken during the Italian internment, and Billy Hill, the self-described boss of Britain’s underworld, a man who said so in court in 1956 with a straight face and was not contradicted.
Hill was from Seven Dials off New Oxford Street. A natural criminal in the specific sense, he had worked out very early that violence was a tool rather than an end and that the men who accumulated real power were the men who used it surgically rather than constantly. He had run black market operations through the Blitz, organized the East Castle Street mail van robbery in 1952, 287,000 pounds, >> >> the largest in British history at the time.
He had connections that stretched from London’s West End clubs to the corridors of Fleet Street where he cultivated journalists who wrote about him the way sports writers cover champions. Hill needed an enforcer, someone who could stand between him and the violence without touching it himself when possible and could touch it with complete efficiency when necessary.
He found Albert Dimes. The specific qualities Dimes brought to Billy Hill’s operation were these. He was trusted by the Italian community of Clerkenwell >> >> in the way that only a man born into that community could be trusted. He had the connections through the networks of second generation Italian families that stretched from London to the Italian criminal world beyond that made him valuable as a diplomat as much as a fighter.
He was running Soho, the clubs, the bookmaking, the loan sharking, >> >> the protection of businesses that needed protection from the Maltese gangs moving through the area, from the Messina brothers who ran vice operations across the neighborhood, from everyone who saw the same geography Albert Dimes saw and wanted a piece of it.
And he was physically formidable in the specific way that mattered. Not large, not theatrical, still cold. The kind of dangerous that doesn’t need to perform itself. Together, Hill and Dimes controlled more of London’s criminal economy in the early 1950s than any organization before the craze.
And they did it without making the newspapers every week. Without the celebrity. Without the suits and the show business friends and the photographers. Quietly. The way real power operates. Frith Street, Soho. August 11th, 1955. Here is what the fight was actually about. The racecourse pitches the bookmaking operations at Epsom, Ascot and Brighton.
That had been Italian territory before the war, had been taken by Spot during the internment, and that the Italian interests through Dimes, through Billy Hill, had been systematically reclaiming in the years since. Spot knew the reclamation was happening. He’d been watching his own power erode for 3 years as Hill’s operation outmaneuvered him.
As the men who had been loyal to Spot drifted toward Hill’s more sophisticated organization. As the pitches slipped away one by one. On a warm August afternoon in 1955, Spot walked into Frith Street. He was carrying a knife. He found Dimes on the street. What happened next was described by journalists as the Battle of Frith Street, which makes it sound like something it wasn’t. It wasn’t a battle.
It was two men in a Soho street with one knife between them. Cutting each other to pieces in daylight. Spot attacked first. Dimes took the knife from him. They slashed each other into a greengrocer’s shop on the corner of Old Compton Street, fighting through the vegetable displays, both of them bleeding heavily.
Until the owner of the shop, a heavily built woman named Sophia Hyams, ended the confrontation by bringing a large pair of weighing scales down on one of them. Both men staggered out. Spot collapsed in a nearby barber’s shop. Dimes was rushed to hospital by his associates. Both men nearly died. Both men recovered.
Both men were charged with affray. Neither man was convicted at their separate trials. Neither was willing to give evidence against the other, because the specific code that operates in that world does not permit it, regardless of what you’ve done to each other in a greengrocer’s shop. Jack Spot walked free.
Albert Dimes walked free. But the fight had a result that no court recorded. Jack Spot’s power in London’s underworld ended on Frith Street that afternoon. He spent the following year being attacked, ambushed outside his flat, slashed with razors by associates of Billy Hill and Dimes. Reduced from the man who had controlled London’s racecourse economy to a frightened figure consulting lawyers. He lived until 1996.
He spent the last 40 years of his life in quiet retirement running a small stall in the West End, recognized occasionally by people who knew the story. Albert Dimes never spoke publicly about what happened on Frith Street. He didn’t need to. Soho was his. London. Late 1950s into the 1960s. With Spot gone and Billy Hill retiring to Spain in the late 1950s, the landscape of London’s underworld shifted.
The Richardsons were building their empire south of the river. The Kray’s were consolidating the East End. And Soho, the square mile of nightclubs, gambling dens, clip joints, restaurants, and vice that generated more criminal income per acre than anywhere else in Britain, was Albert Dimes’s. The Kray’s knew this.
Ronnie and Reggie were ambitious men. They wanted everything London had. They had the East End. They had interests north of the river. They were pushing into the West End. But Soho had Albert Dimes. And for years, concrete, documented, historically verified years, the Kray’s did not move into Soho. Not because they weren’t capable of violence, not because they were they were afraid in the ordinary sense, because Albert Dimes was there.
One name. One man’s presence in a geography sufficient to keep the most feared criminal organization in London out of the most profitable criminal territory in Britain. Think about the specific weight of that fact. The Kray’s sent a wreath to his funeral. His family destroyed it because they found the association shameful.
The Kray’s thought he was worth commemorating. His family thought the Kray’s weren’t worth the association. That is the precise measurement of Albert Dimes’ position in the hierarchy of British criminal history. London, 1966. What Albert Dimes did in 1966 is the thing that separates him completely from every other figure in British criminal history.
He brokered a meeting, not between London gangs, not between British firms sorting out territory disputes over a table, between the New York Mafia and the Corsican underworld. Specifically, between American organized crime figures connected to the Lucchese family, one of the five families that controlled New York, and the Francis brothers, the most powerful criminal organization in Corsica, whose smuggling networks connected the Mediterranean drug trade to the American market, and whose operations stretched from Marseille to
Havana. The subject of the meeting, investment in London casinos. The context, the British government had legalized casino gambling in 1960. London had become almost overnight the most attractive legal gambling market in the world. American money wanted in. The question was how. The answer required someone who was trusted by the Americans, who had connections to Italian-American criminal networks through the Italian community of Clerkenwell, and trusted by the Corsicans, whose operations had intersected with European Italian
criminal networks for decades. It required Albert Dimes. >> >> He arranged the meeting. He attended it. He sat in a room where the New York Mafia and the Corsican Syndicate discussed business in London in 1966. There is no other figure in British criminal history who had the connections, the trust, and the operational reach to have been in that room.
Not the Kray’s, not the Richardson’s, not Billy Hill, Albert Dimes, the son of an Italian father and a Scottish mother from Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, who had grown up in Clerkenwell and spent 30 years building the kind of reputation that put you in rooms where the New York Mafia and the Corsicans negotiated over casino investments.
The meeting was reported by intelligence sources, but never prosecuted. Dimes was never charged with anything relating to it. Beckenham, November 1972, he died of cancer at home in a comfortable house in Beckenham, South London suburbs, a long way from Clerkenwell, the kind of quiet residential street where nobody knows what the man three doors down spent his life doing.
>> >> He was 57 or 58 years old. He was survived by his wife and three children. The film character based on him, Johnny Banyan, played by Stanley Baker in the 1960 British film The Criminal, outlasted him in a way. A character actor’s interpretation of a man the public was never quite allowed to see directly.
The Kray’s sent a wreath to a fine gentleman from Reg and Ron Kray. It was destroyed at the church door. Here is the full list of what Albert Dimes accomplished in his criminal career. He took the knife from Jack Spot in Frith Street and nearly killed him with it. He kept the Kray twins out of Soho for the better part of a decade.
He ran the most profitable criminal geography in Britain through its most valuable period. He brokered a meeting between the New York Mafia and the Corsican underworld on British soil. He was never convicted of any serious crime. He was never imprisoned for anything meaningful. He died in his bed.
The British criminal history books give the Krays their films and their exhibitions and their documentaries. They give the Richardsons their torture trial and their legacy. They give Billy Hill his memoir and his reputation as the boss of Britain’s underworld. They give Albert Dimes a footnote. The man who was there before all of them, who was more connected than any of them, who died respected enough that the Krays sent flowers from their prison cells, and whose family considered that association beneath them.
