In late 2007 I was employed as an investigative researcher for National Geographic television. I was working on a programme on the global trade in counterfeit products, everything from fake automobile parts to fake medicines. One such research trip was to Milan. The reason I travelled there was to look into the grip the Camorra held over the city, and in particular, its port. Milan’s port is a hub of container traffic, and like all such centres of global trade, smuggling is a real issue. Travelling into Scampia, the crime-ridden housing estate in Campania that has been the site of many shootings, I had to be discreetly escorted at all times by private detectives. Whether this was absolutely necessary, or the channel covering its backside in case of financial liability, I can’t really say. I suspect the latter. But regardless, the feel of a locale outside of the state’s control was very real.
Of course, I digress, for the point of this anecdote is that upon my return to the UK, I experienced something I often felt when returning from research trips to such places: relief at being home, yes, but also I’m ashamed to say, a certain smugness. For what are British values? What do we mean by Britishness? This is a question that is asked increasingly these days by the likes of Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. They speak of British values as something immigrants might lack. These values are often ephemeral, but when nailed down they relate to a sense of fair play, of order, of a lack of corruption. Things that happen over there, in those countries near the equator, couldn’t possibly happen here. We roll our eyes at tales of Greek economic woe, of the dire state of Italian politics. At the corruption of their police and courts. And yes, I admit it, this view is as hard-wired into my psyche as anyone else’s.
Occasionally, however, something comes around to prick this balloon of collective national bullshit. Just after the dawn of the millennium, two books were published on the Metropolitan Police’s fight against corruption within its ranks. The first was Bent Coppers by the BBC’s Graeme McLagan. The second was Untouchables by Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn, two former Guardian journalists. Broadly speaking, Bent Coppers argued that the corruption had been a blip and one that the police had dealt with. Move on, nothing to be seen here, the status quo returned. Gillard & Flynn’s, on the other hand, was a longer and more in-depth volume. It was also far more disturbing. Not only did it argue that the Met had failed to root out corruption, it argued that those tasked with doing so were themselves corrupt, albeit in different ways. This was a book that dared to challenge the cozy view we British have of ourselves and our country. Sorry, the authors basically said, we’re not better at this than those foreigners. Our country is just as mendacious, just as corrupt.
Since then, Gillard has kept at it. Freelancing for the Sunday Times and Private Eye amongst others, over the years he’s made a career of harrying those in power and with vested interests, unearthing the stories they would rather remain buried. With this latest book, Legacy, he equals Untouchables in wading through the bullshit of national myth. For as with police corruption, the British don’t like to believe that there are untouchable crime lords walking the land. Such figures are for other countries: the US with its Five Families, third world nations with their cocaine cartels, corrupt countries like Italy, and in particular the island of Sicily, with its infamous mafias. But not Britain with its honest bobbies who would put a stop to such nonsense, oh no. The Krays and Richardsons are once again seen as a blip, and while we logically know there is organised crime in the UK, the Adamses have been reported on over the years, after all, generally, we kind of collectively ignore it.
But before we go on to Legacy itself, the book to which this review relates, we need to recap some history. In 1999 an intriguing article was published in the Observer. Titled “London’s new Kray’s take Soho,” it told of the “Hunt gang”, which it depicted as a vicious gang of criminals who controlled east London in the same way that the notorious Adams crime family controlled the north of the city. The article’s author, Tony Thompson, didn’t identify the gang further than this, he didn’t name David Hunt. But he did tell of how this gang had seized control of the Soho sex trade through violence and intimidation. A further five years later the same author wrote a second piece, also for the Observer. This article detailed the publication of a novel, Judas Pig, by a gangster writing under a pseudonym. This novel was set to blow the lid on gangland and expose his former partner, a very violent criminal. Though this second article didn’t name the Hunts at all, it wasn’t long before the talk on internet forums was linking them, and in particular outing David Hunt as “Danny”, the evil character at the centre of the novel.
In the years that followed Judas Pig became something of a cult success. While Danny was quickly named as David Hunt, the identity of the novels’ author, Horace Silver (Billy Abrahams in the pages of the book) was a subject of much speculation. In some ways why Judas Pig became such a phenomenon is difficult to understand. It’s not a particularly well-written book. It doesn’t have a coherent narrative to speak of. There are no sympathetic characters whatsoever. Even the “hero”, Billy Abrahams (the author himself as the novel is a Roman á Clef) is a deeply unpleasant and vindictive human being. The violence is extreme. These are racist, misogynistic, misanthropes; psychopaths and sociopaths to a man.
But that all said, there was something honest about the book. Ninety percent of what passes for true crime is unforgivable rubbish. Apart from the first book ever to be written about the Krays, John Pearson’s The Profession of Violence, virtually ever other text written about them has been hero worship and hagiography. The same goes for all the titles written about Mad Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman, and Joey Pyle. These books are dire. They whitewash their subjects crimes under a thin veneer of explanation. There’s a certain publisher (not Bloomsbury, the publisher of Michael Gillard’s book) that specialises in this nonsense. Churning out titles by so-called celebrity gangsters and football hooligans. And this was what the author of Judas Pig set out to correct, even stating so in the few interviews he gave before going into hiding. Criminals really were scum, was his message. And his book was proof.
The years went by and Judas Pig had sunk into obscurity. The publisher had gone out of business and while Horace Silver self-published the title once again, and brought out a follow-up, The Charity Committee (which was soon taken down by Amazon after threats from Hunt’s lawyers) on the whole it was forgotten. It was kept alive however on a true crime forum where its adherents spent hours trying to work out Horace’s real identity. At one point they concluded the author was really J.J. Connoly, the author of the brit crime novel Layer Cake.
Hunt had similarly returned to the shadows, though he was named occasionally. Roughly the time of Judas Pig’s original publication, Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn brought out their book Untouchables. Amongst its pages, Hunt and his gang made the occasional appearance, something that was not lost among the denizens of the Judas Pig forum. And there the story would have ended. Hunt shunned publicity like any other organised crime figure worth his salt. Horace Silver had disappeared. While those obsessed with the book were busy chasing their tales.
But then Michael Gillard struck once more.
Titled Taxpayers Fund Land Purchase from Crime Lords, the article he wrote for the Sunday Times explained how a strip of land in Newham had soared in value in the run-up to the Olympic games. Various crime families were vying for the land and were in conflict. He named names, most notable Terry Adams and David Hunt. David Hunt sued for libel. He lost and both the Sunday Times and Gillard were vindicated. An aside here is that the libel trial finally revealed to the world the identity of the author of Judas Pig, a man named Jimmy Holmes. In the years that followed Gillard penned a number of articles digging deeper into Hunt’s past but it wasn’t until this book’s publication that the whole story could be told.
There are three strands that run through Legacy. The first is that of David “Mac” McKelvey. What a tabloid might call an “old school copper”, he was a Detective Inspector in Newham who headed up the Borough Crime Squad and dared to take on Hunt in the early noughties. Despite Hunt being a criminal of national importance, who’s reach was international, David’s local Crime Squad became a thorn in his side and came closer to bringing him down than the national squads such as SOCA or its successor, the NCA (often referred to as Britain’s answer to the FBI).
The second strand, which I found to be the most fascinating, is an account of Hunt’s rise to power. These chapters will also be of most interest to those Judas Pig cultists who were so obsessed with the book online. (Please note, this is only a slightly disparaging description, for while I didn’t post to the forums myself, I did read them avidly, and admit to having had great interested in the book and the story behind it). Finally, those interested in the tale will have their answers. Gillard details the story of David Hunt and Jimmy Holmes's partnership in-depth and clears up a number of issues. For a start, it becomes apparent that the events of Judas Pig and its sequel, the Charity Committee, overlapped somewhat. Then there is the incident detailed in the book where acid is thrown in the face of a police officer. In Gillard’s later work - the article, the libel trial, etc - it became apparent there was concern that Hunt had corrupt officers in his pocket. I always wondered how they would countenance working with him when his gang was assaulting police so viciously. But it turns out this event was early on in Hunt’s career when he was just starting out and before he and Holmes were established in Soho, so before the events of Judas Pig.
But this second strand of the book will be of interest to far many more people than just those who read and obsessed over Judas Pig. For a start, there is Soho itself. In the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Soho was synonymous with vice and crime. Then it was supposedly cleaned up. There is a myth now, long-established, that Soho is now nothing more than a gentrified theme park, an area of advertising and marketing firms and fancy restaurants. One could no more find a spieler or gangster here than one could find one on the moon, so the reasoning goes. To a large extent, this is true. Certainly, the area is far cleaner than it was back in the day. And the process is accelerating, what with most people getting their porn online and no longer needing to visit a dank and dark video store. But I used to drink and party in Soho in the 1990s, and it seemed safe then. Yet we now know, first from the articles penned by Tony Thompson, then by Judas Pig, and finally, and in much more detail, thanks to Gillard, that in fact there was still significant violence and villainy in 1990s Soho. There were illicit fortunes to be had and Hunt and Holmes took them. There are still brothels in Soho to this day (less it has to be said, thanks to enforcement action and trends in the vice industry, but they remain) and one wonders who owns them now and whether a future Hunt and Holmes are battling it out for supremacy.
Then there are the particular details of Hunt’s rise and how similar it is to the street gangs of today. Since the current epidemic of knife crime hit Britain’s streets, commentators have fallen over themselves to explain how different it all is to gangsters of old. Indeed, even Freddie Foreman, the old Kray henchman, said in an interview with the Guardian that the kids of today’s gangs were completely different from his day. But is that really true? The infamous Adams brothers started off by extorting money from market traders (why a journalist of Gillard’s ilk hasn’t penned a proper, journalistic account of the Adams family, I just don’t understand) and from what’s little known of them they were very akin to a street gang back in the day. Hunt’s rise was even more explicit. His organisation was a street gang. They even had a name: The Snipers. They very quickly became more than a street gang, roaming the country to commit robberies, but this is no different from some of the current crop. Take the Tottenham ManDem (TMD) as an example. After Mark Duggan was shot dead by police (police say he was a member of TMD), it emerged in both the IPCC report into the police shooting and the Inquest report, that the Metropolitan Police believed 48 key members of the gang to be some of the most violent gangsters in Europe. Furthermore, like the Snipers before them, the Met says that TMD’s reach now stretches across the country, and internationally, through drug trafficking. Reading Legacy, it is difficult to see much difference between the TMD and the emerging Snipers, and thus one has to wonder whether the Hunt of the future will emerge from this or another such gang.
The third strand of Legacy details the political and economic corruption Hunt and other crime families in the Newham area have incubated. He paints a picture of a borough riven by corruption, and again this is something that we British don’t like to believe of ourselves. Political corruption is the thing of tinpot dictatorships and banana republics, not the UK. While Gillard makes no suggestion that the rot has spread to Westminster, and I doubt he would deny that the UK’s political system is far cleaner than many countries, that is hardly the point. One could say the same about police corruption and the number of untouchable gangsters, but who are we comparing ourselves to, Mexico? The reality is this stuff exists in Britain, however much we want to deny it. Indeed, it’s dangerous to bury our heads in the sand. Which is what those myths of what it means to be British, of British values, have us do. They stop people from taking these problems seriously. Like my complacent smugness when returning from Camorra infested Naples, even after reading a book like Untouchables or Legacy, the myth lingers. Can it really be as bad as Gillard suggests? Well yes, it can, as the high court found when the evidence was tested. After examining and testing all the evidence, Hunt lost and Gillard and the Sunday Times won.
So, there’s a lot of reasons to buy and read this book. It reveals in painstaking detail the rise of a real-life untouchable gangster, the police corruption that protected him, the political corruption that he and his allies bred. But there’s a further reason to buy this book and it’s this. True Crime is an example of what happens when journalism dies. In the early 1970s, The People newspaper exposed the head of the Flying Squad, Commander Ken Drury, for holidaying in Cyprus with a Soho pornographer. The resulting scandal led to his prosecution for corruption. The People is now a tabloid that regurgitates celebrity gossip and it is difficult to imagine it taking on such a story. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine The People printing any serious story. But the death of journalism has spread further than just one title. The reason most true crime books glamourise their subjects are for two reasons. The first is that such books undoubtedly sell, the second is that proper journalism is expensive and risky, as Gillard’s work will attest. And it’s not just true crime. Real journalism covering sport, royalty, business, politics, all are falling by the wayside. Instead, we have redrafted press releases and puff pieces. One can count the number of proper journalists on the fingers of one hand.
There is only one solution to this problem: money. Publishers and outlets need to know there is a market for books such as these. That the public wants to read real investigations and is willing to pay for them. Only then will media organisations put their money where their mouths are and take the risk of funding such work. So I implore anyone reading this review to buy Michael Gillard’s book. To tell their friends and family about it. To preach its praises. For only when books such as his fly off the shelves will we see more investigations like these and will more people like David Hunt have their actions exposed to the light.
5 out of 5 stars
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