The part of London once known as “Little Italy” has said farewell to the last of its gangster past.
The funeral of Bert “Battles” Rossi, once an active criminal figure on both sides of the Atlantic, marked the end of links going back to the days when the Sabini gang controlled prewar Clerkenwell and disputes were settled with cut-throat razors and clubs rather than guns and injunctions.
Rossi’s death earlier this month came as he was about to publish his memoirs, Britain’s Oldest London Gangland Boss, and was scheduled to sign copies of his book at an event earlier this month. But, after a fall in which he broke two ribs, he died at the age of 94.
The service was held at St Peter’s Italian church in Holborn, and the crematorium ceremony was bookended by theme music from the films The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America.
Rossi, whose full first name was Roberto, got his nickname because his mother would shout “Berto!” from the window when he was playing football in the street – with her Italian accent, it sounded to the English boys like “Battles”. Since he was constantly at war – on one occasion splitting open another boy’s head because he had mimicked his mother – the name stuck.
“That boy was in hospital for 10 days,” he said in an interview with the Guardian towards the end of his life. “Through an incident like that people say ‘be careful’ of him, so I gained a reputation. I wanted to kill him but Albert Dimes [one of 1950s London’s biggest gangsters] was there and he grabbed my hand and stopped it.”
His own family were law-abiding. “I was the only villain,” he said. “Our parents couldn’t buy us a bike and I thought – this won’t do me, I’ll go out and nick a few quid. Then you get recognised by the Sabinis [who ran a protection racket] and they say, ‘This kid’s a tough kid’. Clerkenwell was like a large family – there were straight-goers working in asphalt and marble but one or two families took up another way of life and were gangsters.”
As a young man, Rossi acted as a driver for “Harryboy” Sabini and was close to the gangster Bert Marsh, who had changed his name from Pasqualino Papa.
Many Italians were interned during the war and the windows of their shops broken. “Shopkeepers put up signs – ‘we’re Swiss’,” he recalled. His brother, Peter, was killed at Dunkirk, but Rossi absconded from the Royal Army Service Corps five times and eventually slit his wrists to avoid service, ending up “in the nuthouse”.
He was jailed, along with “Mad” Frankie Fraser, in 1956 for attacking the Soho gang leader Jack “Spot” Comer as part of a feud between Spot and Dimes. “He was given a hiding, blood all over the pavement. He needed about 70 stitches at the end of it but I never thought he’d grass us up.” Rossi was convicted of causing grievous bodily harm and sentenced to four years.
In Winchester prison, Rossi met Ronnie Kray – “mad as a hatter” – but was unimpressed by the Kray twins. “They were a joke. They wanted the limelight. It’s like these people who go on television these days and call themselves celebrities. They wanted to be gangsters and show-offs at the same time,” he recalled in his memoir, written with James Morton. Rossi spent his life avoiding publicity: “To all extent I’ve been a ghost,” he said.
“I was the mafia’s man over here,” he claimed, but was cagey about what his work for them involved. He said he would receive a call to visit the US where he was put up in a hotel. “Next morning someone would pick me up and drive me wherever and then point out the subject. It might be the day after that I’d get a call: ‘Nice bit of work.’ I’d be picked up, given an envelope and driven to the airport.”
He was also involved with George Raft, the Hollywood actor with gangster links, when he set up the Colony Club as a London gambling venue in the 1960s. Interviewed by the police over many murder cases, he was charged along with another man, John Heibner, with the murder of Beatrice “Biddy” Gold in 1975 in the basement of the clothing business she ran in Clerkenwell.
The prosecution suggested Rossi gave the murder weapon to Heibner, who was convicted. Rossi, defended by Jeremy Hutchinson QC, was acquitted after he claimed the package he had been seen handing to Heibner contained jewellery rather than a gun.
He also ran illegal gambling clubs, recounting that Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were frequent visitors. Rossi claimed Freud offered him the famous “Big Sue” portrait for £30, but he declined: “That painting only went and sold for £35m at auction.” He also acted as a minder for the boxer Rocky Marciano when he was in London.
By the time of his death both Clerkenwell and Islington, where he lived, had been gentrified beyond recognition. “Who’d have thought that an Italian boy from the Saffron Hill slums would end up living next to Boris Johnson?” he asked. What he would have felt about the ceremony at St Peter’s, which in the 19th century catered to Italian prisoners in two nearby houses of detention, is another matter. “I’m an atheist – not good for an Italian fella to say,” he said.