Joseph Henry Pyle (2 November 1937 – 17 February 2007), known as Joey Pyle or Joe Pyle, was an English gangland boss, convicted criminal, and pioneer and promoter of unlicensed boxing, who operated in London from the 1950s until his final arrest and conviction in 1992. An associate of the Krays and the Richardsons, and "one of the most feared members of the London underworld",Woodland, 2015, p. 65. he was known as the "London Don of Dons" by the New York Mafia.McKay and Ferris, 2005. Less well known to the general public than many of his contemporaries in the underworld, Pyle was a key police target during his criminal career, but although arrested and charged many times, he was seldom convicted, unlike many of the gangland figures with whom he was associated.
Early life Joey Pyle was born on 2 November 1937Davidson, 2005, p. 3 (his tombstone in Merton and Sutton Cemetery gives his date of birth as 1935) in The Angel, Islington, London, the son of Arnie and Cath Pyle, and the youngest of their three children after his brother Ted and sister Jean. The family moved to Carshalton when Pyle was a teenager, although he retained links with his friends in the East End of London. Among his friends at this age were Jack McVitie and Johnny and Jimmy Nash.Davidson, 2005, p. 4.
At the age of 14, Pyle, already proficient at petty thieving and shoplifting, stole £5,000 from a TA centre in Hackbridge, near his home in Carshalton.Davidson, 2005, pp. 1–2. At this age he had a Saturday job at a metal factory,Davidson, 2005, p. 1. and he was later to meet Eddie Richardson through the latter's work in scrap metal. He sold Richardson silver ingots that another acquaintance had stolen from the railways.Davidson, 2005, p. 77. Pyle became a boxing instructor at Sandhurst during his National Service, and joined the army's Southern Command Team.Davidson, 2005, pp. 6–7 He was kicked out of Sandhurst following his theft of a brigadier's car; rather than being court-martialled, he was put through the criminal justice system and given three months of the newly introduced short, sharp shock, a replacement for Borstal.Davidson, 2005, pp. 7–8.Connett, 1992.
In his late teens, Pyle faced the choice of being a professional boxer – he paid his dues in boxing booths at travelling fairs, and contested over 20 professional fights – or a career criminal. He chose crime. Pyle's father, a thief as well as a sportsman, asked him when he was nineteen whether he wanted to be a boxer or a thief. Pyle replied, "Dad, I think I want to be a thief."Davidson, 2005, p. 11.
Criminal career Armed robbery Pyle, together with his friends Peter Marshall, Peter Tilley and Tony Baldessare, undertook bank robberies, wages theft and raids on security vans, but when they moved into safe-blowing they required an expert and worked with George Medicine, one of the acknowledged leaders in the use of gelignite, which he would detonate using an everyday light socket.Davidson, 2005, p. 12. After coming out of prison for the Pen Club murder, however, Pyle decided that he would "[move] away from jobs across the pavement", although he said, "I was still involved in little things every now and then."Davidson, 2005, p. 132.
Extortion and protection rackets Like the Krays, Pyle ran extortion and protection rackets, particularly in the pub and nightclub trade. Protection rackets at the time usually involved a gang of heavies wrecking a venue, then reappearing and assuring the owner that his place would be safe, on payment of a fee. Pyle's approach, along with the Nashes, was a little more sophisticated, simply relying on the owners' fear of his violent reputation.Davidson, 2005, pp. 13–14. While the Krays held sway in London's East End, and the Richardson gang and Freddie Foreman ruled the south of London, during the 1960s Pyle and the Nashes dominated the part of London to the west of the Krays, around Islington and the West End.
After the Richardsons were jailed in 1967, the Krays, the Nashes, Foreman and Pyle came to an informal agreement after a series of meetings about splitting the proceeds from their various protection rackets (whether it was simply from their most recent ones, or from ones that were long established, was a moot point), with Ronnie Kray talking about a "federation" of gangs.Davidson, 2005, pp. 83–4. As Pyle said, "It made sense to set things up so it worked like one big strong firm rather than a few little ones, otherwise people would have been running all over the place." Among those who worked for Pyle in this period was prolific armed robber Ronnie Field: "Right from the start, once I was with Joe [Pyle] I was treated very differently. I was on the firm, if you like. I was one of those chaps that people in the boozer looked over at now. Very few people of my age would chance their arm with me, not only because I already had a growing reputation for violence, but they also feared crossing anybody that had any connections to Joey Pyle whatsoever."Field and Knight, 2024, p. 68.
Cooney murder Along with Jimmy Nash and James Read, Pyle was tried at the Old Bailey in April 1960 for the murder of Selwyn Cooney, the manager of Billy Hill's New Cabinet Club on Gerrard Street, who was shot at the Pen Club nightclub on Duval Street near Spitalfields Market after a bar brawl in the early hours of 7 February 1960. At a meeting at The Regal, the Krays' snooker club, later on the day of the murder, Ronnie Kray offered to help Pyle and the two others leave to country if they'd wanted, but they'd already decided to stay and face the music. If found guilty, Pyle knew that he would be hanged, and his first trial collapsed after jurors were intimidated, two key witnesses – Johnny Simons and his girlfriend Barbara Ibbotson – had their faces slashed, both needing 27 stitches, and the woman who originally identified Pyle at the ID parade, Fay Sadler (an ex-prostitute known as "The Black Widow"), disappeared.Davidson, 2005, pp. 24–6. (Sadler was manager of the Pen Club and the girlfriend of Cooney, making him her third boyfriend who'd been murdered. She miraculously reappeared at the end of the second trial.)
On 25 April 1960, only four days into the trial, Mr Justice Gorman halted proceedings, saying, "Certain information has been brought to my notice which makes it impossible for this case to be continued for trial before this jury."Davidson, 2005, p. 35. After a second trial at the Old Bailey, Pyle, along with Nash and Read, was acquitted of murder, but he was given an 18-month sentence for assaulting Cooney before he was shot. When later asked who killed Cooney, Pyle would say that "Cooney must have walked past a passing bullet".Field and Knight, 2024, p. 62.
The Cooney case had wide-ranging ramifications, not only marking Pyle out as a criminal with considerable underworld connections and a man not to be trifled with, but also playing a role in the formation of the Criminal Intelligence Branch (then C11, now SO11) within Scotland Yard.Campbell, 2019. The police did not want a repeat of a situation in which organised crime held sway over the British legal system due to a lack of intelligence on the side of the forces of law and order, so from that time on detectives were posted at all similar trials to gather information on the key faces present.Davidson, 2005, p. 39.
Gambling When Pyle came out of prison he decided to move into the illegal gambling game, reasoning that because government plans were afoot to modify gambling's legal standing, if he had familiarity with the processes, ran appropriate premises and gained a reputation as a reliable operator, then he would be in an excellent position to take advantage of any future relaxations in the law.Davidson, 2005, p. 45. He spoke to Billy Hill and Waggy Whitnall, who advised him on the best way forward, and he first set up a dice table at German Harry's in Balham, then expanded to The Crown in Croydon. Soon he was "looking after" other dice clubs and more upmarket casinos, ensuring that no scams were being attempted, that chips were not bought with fake money and that any cash that was owed was paid, otherwise he and his firm would move in and sort things out. As a debt-collection enforcer, and often working alongside Johnny Nash, among the people that Pyle encouraged to cough up their money was James Bond film producer Cubby Broccoli, who owed £40,000 and whose minders Pyle had to get past first ("The funny thing is, the minders knew us and once Broccoli realised that, he knew that he had no protection at all. He paid up in full the same day").Davidson, 2005, p. 54.
Pyle, a keen gambler himself, tried to move into fixed greyhound racing, where several of the dogs had their food doped and were thus unable to run competitively, if at all. Having persuaded Bruce Reynolds to give him £3,000 (a fraction of the proceeds of the Great Train Robbery) for his bet, Pyle's first and last attempt at a big win on a race involving doped dogs at Wembley Greyhounds went disastrously wrong when he put his entire stake on a dog suffering from rheumatism.Davidson, 2005, pp. 68–71.
Joe Nesline, a Washington gambling king pin and one of a number of Americans who crossed over to London to get involved in the casinos, asked Pyle and Nash to protect the Colony Club, a casino in Mayfair he had invested in, whose host was the actor George Raft. Pyle and Nash, and Nesline, for that matter, were unaware that Dino Cellini had asked Albert Dimes to sort out protection, and he had approached the Krays. When Pyle saw Ronnie Kray at the club, who told him he had got a good bit of business running the place and that "Me and Reg are right in here," Pyle turned to Nash and said, "Fuck me John, looks like we've got a couple of partners and we didn't even know about it." Pyle reflected: "I was a bit taken aback at first but it didn't take long to sort it all out."Davidson, 2005, p. 105. Further contacts – and protection arrangements – were made between other American casino owners, the Krays, the Nashes and Pyle. Not long after, Raft and Cellini were deported from Britain following government concerns about Mob involvement in West End casinos.
One of Pyle's gambling scams was to take high-rollers for week-long trips to a Joe Nesline casino in Yugoslavia, and using a number of means – crooked dice, bringing his people along to pose as gamblers, assuring the gamblers that the dealer would feed them chips – by the end of the week the high-rollers had lost everything. To make things look legitimate, there were plenty of winners at the casino among the British visitors, but they were all employed by Pyle.Davidson, 2005, pp. 120–3.
Underworld fixer Known as a diplomat and a fixer among the criminal fraternity, Pyle straddled all sides of feuding gangland London, being associated with both the Kray and the Richardson families as well as the Nashes. As The Who vocalist Roger Daltrey said, "Joey wasn't high-profile in the public's eye, but he was a mediator between the big crime families. He was the one who sat with them and sorted out the grudges ... He was good at it."Daltrey, 2018. Armed robber Ronnie Field said of Pyle: "Working with and for Joey Pyle was also something I valued very highly. The older I got, the more I realised what a special person he was. He spoke words of wisdom, was a diplomat and a smart businessman. Had he been born in different circumstances – in a different area at a different time – he'd have been the managing director of a company quoted on the Stock Exchange, I'm sure."Field and Knight, 2024, p. 112. John Pearson, author of the first and most critically acclaimed book on the Krays, stated that "Joe Pyle had been the closest thing to the godfather of British crime for nearly three decades."Pearson, 2003, p. 323.