The Ties That Bind by Erin Kelly

as the Grand Truss.
MEMORABLE QUOTES: ‘We never moved in on a man who wasn’t already half-crooked.’
     
NAME: Jacky Nye
BORN: 31 July 1932
DIED: 21 October 1968 (aged 36)
CONVICTIONS: 1957: Theft, possession of indecent images. Served in Lewes, Sussex.
KNOWN ASSOCIATES: Joss Grand, Dave Rosslyn.
TRIVIA: Once won the lease to a flat in Chelsea during a game of poker.
MEMORABLE QUOTES: ‘If you can’t eat it, drink it, nick it or f**k it, what’s the point?’
     
    Luke was suddenly on full alert. Why hadn’t he heard of this case before? Why hadn’t he come across this website before? Perhaps because it was such a mess, patchy and spare. Luke looked at the other entries in the self-styled encyclopaedia; even the big hitters warranted no more than a few hundred words. There was no ‘about the author’ page or byline photograph. This was unusual; often, true crime writers, even – especially – amateurs, were desperate to bask in the reflected notoriety of their subjects. (Luke wondered briefly and uncomfortably if this applied to him; he was sure it didn’t, but wondered if he might make a point of not having an author photograph on his books.)
    The next website he clicked through to was equally obscure, and also out of date; the most recent article was five years old, suggesting to Luke a neglected site, remembered only when the annual direct debit was deducted by the service provider. The click counter showed that Luke was only the 1004th visitor to the page.
     
www.coldcasesussex.co.uk/thewestpiermurder
     
On the wind-blown night of 21 October 1968, the Brighton crime lord Jacky Nye was strangled by person or persons unknown on Brighton’s West Pier. Who killed Jacky Nye? Theories abound but none has ever been proven.
 
Background
     
Gentle giant Jacky Nye was the puppet of his childhood friend Joss Grand, the convicted torturer. With his weaknesses for wine, women and song, he was as gregarious and extrovert as Joss Grand was dark and unreadable. Jacky liked to be known, with affection, as ‘The Guv’nor’. Even as a young man, Grand never settled for anything less than ‘Sir’.
In 1957 Grand was found guilty of torturing, for the purposes of extortion, local businessman Mario Zammit, who showed hardcore pornographic films above an innocent-looking coffee bar in the Lanes. Nye was not present at the violent attack, which arresting officer DC John Rochester described as the most vicious he had ever seen.
     
    Luke felt slightly faint to realise who he had been talking to. The opposing emotions of fear and fascination swirled within him.
     
But the police did find Nye in possession of cans of pornographic film, suggesting that he had been involved in some way – probably instructed by Grand to take away the films. The men often coupled physical punishment with removal of material goods for resale.
     
Free again at the age of twenty-eight they picked up where they left off, using fruit machines as a cover for a Brighton-wide protection racket and illegal gambling dens. When the UK Gambling Act was passed in 1960, the year of their release, their businesses acquired the sheen of legitimacy, their rule centring on The Alhambra casino (now the Ocean hotel) on Kingsway.
In these, their glory years, Jacky was the public face of the business. A practical joker with a taste for the high life, he brought the punters in while Joss controlled the purse strings and half the businessmen in Brighton.
     
    That Jacky Nye had a reputation as a practical joker told Luke more than any conviction could. He’d been on the receiving end of some ‘practical jokes’ at school – he still winced to recall the sign pinned on his back, an arrow pointing to his arse, or the sticky magazine hidden in his locker on inspection day – and he had never met a practical joker who wasn’t a sadistic cowardly bastard, hiding behind the unassailable defence: ‘You haven’t got a sense of humour.’ A man who loved practical