A tale of two dodgy Knights

They just don't make them like John and Ronnie Knight any more. Time was when the East End of London was teeming with rascals like these two, twinkle-toed chancers who were up for anything at all as long as it did not involved regular hours spent in strictly honest toil.

Five Tons of Cash (Five) was a documentary which aimed to set the record straight about these brothers and the part they played in the Security Express robbery which netted the sum that gave the programme its title. The only problem was that John and Ronnie, try as they might to keep on the straight and narrow, had a tendency to goose the truth at every opportunity.

This pair came straight from central casting. John was a proper bad boy cast in the villainous mould. He had the gaunt features of a man who has looked long and hard at the bad side, and a mouth that was incomplete without a cigar.

Ronnie, on the other hand, had a face of the purest innocence. If you looked closely at his eyebrows, you would see that they spelt out "What, me?" His voice was also curiously light in pitch when set against the gravelly tones of John. Among the women in his life was Barbara Windsor, which added to the conundrum.

The two men shared some key characteristics. They both shared an evident relish for the good life, which to them meant a nice place or two on the Costa del Sol and a steady diet of champagne and caviar. John and Ronnie also had faith in the power of the wad of banknotes in the inside pocket to cure all life's evils. Lastly, they both treated the English language with the gravest suspicion, as if it might rat on them if not watched carefully and give the whole game away.

This gave their speech a rare sort of clumsy delicacy, in which euphemism and charming obfuscation played a crucial part. Even when they had done something, they had never done nothing, which is the same thing.

The story of the Knights had it all, beginning with Ronnie's friendship with Ronnie and Reggie Kray, those renaissance men of crime. Back in the early days there was a spot of nastiness when youngest Knight brother David was stabbed to death by an Italian bouncer named Zomparelli.

After a little light prison, Zomparelli was shot to death, and Ronnie was placed squarely in the frame. He admitted giving one of the shooters £1,000 - part of the wad action - to "have a drink with", but denied any actual involvement in the murder until admitting it very much later in a book.

Ronnie got off the charge at the time because of a bravura performance by Barbara Windsor in the witness box. All the elements were in place: carry on cocking a snook at the law.

The centrepiece of the tale was the Security Express robbery, a heist that was meticulously planned by John using the pool balls in a pub he owned called The Fox - what else? - in the East End - where else? Ronnie was not involved at all, according to John, because he was not "the robbery type".