The Maltese Mobsters who Ruled London's Empire of Vice
50:19 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat that's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

Tommy Smithson's nickname in post-war gangland London is Scarface. A more accurate name, if one that would require a fluency in ancient Greek legend rare on the streets of Stepney, Shoreditch or Soho, might have been Orpheus. Because Tommy, raw bone, drawn faced and slick haired, has stared death right in its ugly sanguine face, bungeed down into the underworld and come rebounding right back.

Only Tommy's done it in 1954, and this wasn't Hades, but somewhere, if not similar, then at least grimy, in the snug alleys that snake around the back of a hulking Camden Town cigarette factory. By this time, Tommy's already a fixture in the vice scene of Soho, in the British capital's neon-soaked West End, where cool girls and exotic dance halls rub shoulders with upscale Mayfair townhouses and the city's famed theatre land.

Tommy doesn't even come from London. He's a northerner. A scouser, to be precise. Born just off the Liverpool docks in 1920, several decades before the Beatles ever stepped foot in the Cavern Club. But in the post-war United Kingdom, despite its battering at the hands of German doodlebugs, V2s and Heinkels, London is where the money's at. And the gang's.

By 1950, a glut of them controlled brothels and boudoirs whose seams years previous had almost burst, figuratively, of course, from wave upon wave of lovelorn American GIs, with time and cash to kill.

Among them, the most powerful is a family of Maltese migrants called the Messinas, but over the years, modern migrants they claim to be, they've given themselves strange English names. Not that you'd call them strange to their faces, of course, as one hoodlum tells a local paper, quote, people were paid a pound a stitch, so if you put 20 stitches in a man, you got a score. You used to look in the papers next day to see how much you'd earned.

The score's a £20 note, by the way. Still is now. Although the value of a score in 1954 is a monkey these days, which is around 500 quid. Tommy moves to London's crime-ridden East End as a child, a long-time Seven Siblings, and he gets thrown into a reform school for theft where, of course, he learns not to mend his ways but to break people's faces. Boxing, self-defence, street smarts.

During the war, he ships out to Australia but returns to Shoreditch, where the East End meets the ancient financial heart of the city in 1950. Cops ring him up on a robbery and he spends 18 months in prison. That's when he gets in with London's black market movers and shakers, including a young pair of twins named Roddy and Reggie Cray.

but it's the Maltese Tommy targets and he sets up a rival bookmaker before getting in a spat that ends with a Maltese associate being slashed across the face. Soon after, Tommy's told there's a peace offering and he heads to the back of the Carreras Black Cat Factory, a monstrous art deco masterpiece just a block away from Mornington Crescent tube station, but it's a trap.

Rival mobsters cut Tommy across the face, arms, legs and body and leave him to bleed to death in the street. But Tommy, Orpheus Scarface, survives.

And in a gangland twist, the Maltese give him £500, a princely sum at the time, for refusing to rat them out to London's notoriously corrupt Metropolitan Police. Not only that, but Tommy joins his former foes as an enforcer, scaring the Crown Jewels out of would-be assailants with the bright pink fleshy slugs scrawled all over his skin from before. But fool Tommy once, shame on you. Fool him twice...

Well, less than two years later, on July 25th, 1956, Tommy is waiting in the Soho room of one of his boss's sex workers when three rival Maltese goons, Philip Ellul, Vic Spampanato, and Joe Zamet, stroll in. Ellul pulls a revolver and shoots Tommy in the arm and neck before the gun jams. Tommy makes it out into the street but collapses in the gutter. As a crowd of people gathers around him, Tommy looks up and utters his final words.

Good morning, he says. I'm dying. This is the Underworld Podcast.

Hi guys, and welcome to another episode of the show that goes where other true crime podcasts never will. So it's good stories and fact-checking, basically. I'm your host in OTRO in New Zealand, Sean Williams. I'm now well-versed in Screaming Children and Nappies Full of Crap, and I'm joined today by reporter and documentarian Danny Gold in New York City. It's summer there, but it's winter here. Isn't the world a crazy place? Oh, what about those damn Yankees, eh? Couldn't buy them. Yeah, I mean, they're not doing so good. Uh...

That intro too, that was the most British thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I understood maybe like half of it, maybe two thirds and less than one third of the references, but I'm sure it made the guys who like your cricket jokes and all that pretty happy. So yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. Which we know the majority of listeners. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to have to do footnotes for that intro, but if you sign up on the Patreon, then you'll see them. But anyway, we're under new management. We're happy and we're producing a ton of bonuses and we've got really good ones too. I've been speaking to experts on...

Ecuadorian assassinations, trade for corruption. I read it. They even did this brilliant bonus show on what's going on with fentanyl and homeless encampments in the Pacific Northwest, which is, of course, insane and pretty harrowing. Anything I'm missing? Yeah, I mean, patreon.com slash underworld podcast or iTunes, you can sign up for it too. We just have a bunch of bonuses. I did want an update on the situation in Trinidad with the gangs and all that. But yeah,

I think we've got a lot more coming. It's almost like one a week for the next few months. So plenty on there. And here, well, Tommy Smithson, Scarface.

owner of some of the best and most British final words I've ever come across, of course, but you may have already figured out because you literally have to search for this show before you download it. Today's episode isn't really about him, but the folks who killed him and the ones he worked for, because strangely, the vice of London's West End, this is your Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Chinatown, but of course, in post-war blitzed out Britain, so smoggy, smouldering and jam-packed with crime.

This is all dominated by gangsters from a Tiley Island nation in the Mediterranean. And like I mentioned a few minutes ago, of these interloping pimps, one family rises way, way above them all. And that is the Messinas. Yeah, I don't actually know too much about Malta. All I know is my brother took his family on vacation there this summer and he loved it. So...

A little different from this subject matter, but yeah, I got nothing, man. I'm excited to learn about it. Yeah, it's cool. It's really, really fascinating. Soho has always been like this, by the way. There's plenty of that going on today. I mean, when I was about 13, I used to bunk off to school and head into Soho, see the sex shops, pay a quid for the peep shows on Compton Street, rifle through reckless records on Berwick Street.

There's another CD store on Kingley Street down the road. But if anyone can remember the name of that place, I'd love to know. You could just sit there and listen to anything on your headphones. And there was a cellar with really random old vinyl from a million years ago. You listen to Red Bus Memories, by the way, guys, a new series on Radio 4. Jesus, settle down. It's like the British Wonder Years over here right now. Yeah, it really is. Now,

Before we dive into the history of the Messinas and their legacy in London, which, by the way, is still going strong now over 70 years after they showed up, let's do a bit of Maltese trivia because I know how much Danny loves pub quizzes. He's constantly pinging me on WhatsApp about another one of his hoods. I mean, it's getting a bit old, isn't it? I'm anti-pub quiz. I do not. I'm not looking to gain knowledge when I drink. Drinking is for forgetting things, not learning new things. Yeah. Anyway, Malta...

For those of you not in the know, Malta is an archipelago, five islands in the Mediterranean, about the size of New Mexico between Sicily and Libya. As you'd imagine, because of that, this has made it a prized possession of just about any major empire worth its salt, and everybody from the Romans, Arabs, Normans, to the French, and of course, who else, the British, have occupied it at some point in time.

It's also historically totally fascinating from megalithic temples, the oldest in the world, among the oldest in the world, to the Order of St. John, a.k.a. the Knights Hospitalia, which, well, we don't have time to get into, but I'm sure the BBC have done a 28-parter on them. So I guess you could head elsewhere for your Crusades pub trivia. I actually might. I kind of want to know more right now. Yeah, it's like super interesting stuff. Maybe we could do a show on the Templars and all that. I don't know. Are they a gang? Kind of.

Today Malta is a big time holiday destination for Europeans but in terms of crime I mean it's basically Europe's mecca from online gambling to mob money laundering and a completely corrupt political and judicial class. It's been a laundromat for Italian and Russian organised crime for decades and of course it is a deadly place to be a journalist. In 2017 the writer Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in a car bomb and the killing has caused all kinds of muck to come bubbling up in Maltese society.

It took until last year for main suspect, George DiGiorgio, isn't that George of George? Anyway, to admit killing Carolina Galizia, telling a Reuters podcast that if he'd known who she was, quote, I'd have gone for 10 million euros, not 150 grand. For me, it was just business. Yeah. Business as usual. Of course. I feel sorry. Wait, what? That happened on a podcast? That's a...

That's way better than our podcast. Was he locked up already? Or was that just like a random interview she got? Like found him, I don't know, in hiding or something? I guess he's locked up. I don't know. Maybe they were just like smoking blunts or something. But yeah, it's a pretty good, pretty good scoop. That's way better than anything we've done.

Come on, man. Here's local website The Shift News from January this year. Quote, the EU's smallest member state, Malta, has become the Mafia's El Dorado or Mecca, guys. This was the shocking conclusion of a study commissioned by the European Parliament's Martin, oh God, Scheerdeven.

The report shows how Italian mafia clans lauded billions of euros through online gaming platforms in Malta between 2015 and 22. That's 4 billion euros of assets that were confiscated for investigations into online gaming related to Malta,

And the study found that criminals, including those from Calabria's Indrangheta and Sicily's Cosa Nostra, had become part of the Maltese gaming sector through companies they set up, which they used to launder huge sums of money. Actually, just a little hat tip to a story that I've got coming out in a couple of weeks, which is on a similar sort of thing than that. Anyway, that is another show altogether. But yeah, I'm not really sure we can add about that.

Carolina Galizia on Underworld. Yeah, I mean, we did do some Andrangheta episodes, not about Maltese stuff, obviously, but I've got something coming up on the Camorra just to

round out the sort of Italian organized crime trio. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is all related to the online gaming there, which is obviously corrupt as hell, but there is another side to Maltese gangs, and it's focused on a different set of islands, colder ones, with better sport, but worse coffee. Yeah, it's Britain.

And we're going to come back to our pal Tommy Smithson from the cold open in a wee bit. But first of all, we've got to find out where the Messinas actually came from, because it's a fascinating tale. And like I said, one of whose influence runs all the way up to, well, the time when I'm rifling through records. Sorry, you guys don't want to go there again. Anyway, through a guy named Big Frank Mifsud and even our best friends, the Albanians pop up. But anyway.

The story of the Messina family actually doesn't begin in London at all, or Britain, but in Sicily. Of course it's Sicily. That's where in 1878 or 1879 Giuseppe Messina is born into a peasant family in the village of Lingoglossa.

His name weirdly means tongue tongue in both Latin and Greek, but that's kind of apt because the Messina's lie about everything. Sounds like my ex-wife. Oh, wow. Is that too corny even for us? No, no, no, no. Keep it, keep it. Is it? It might be too corny. Dale, if it's too corny, delete it. If it's corny, but it works, add in like a, but I'm like simple drum thing afterwards, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And first up, I'm going to use a lot of info from a book called The Mayfair Mafia, The Lives and Crimes of the Messina Brothers here by Dick Kirby. And he goes pretty hard on this concept of the Messina's being born liars. And fair enough, too. When we get deeper into this episode, you're going to find out. Kirby writes, quote, The Messina's lied about everything, their names, their dates and places of birth, their addresses and their occupations.

Others were drawn into their net. Their legal representatives lied for them, and the prostitutes they rang not only lied for them, but they went into courts of law and perjured themselves as well. I mean...

I guess you don't need to listen further on to find out why that's pretty comprehensive. Anyway, by 1896, Giuseppe is pimping and he's getting on the wrong side of the burgeoning Sicilian mafia who aren't best pleased with him. And police are cracking down on the mob. So he flees. He sails 58 miles south to Malta and he claims to be a carpenter and a furniture restorer.

He sets up shop not in the capital Valletta, whose narrow straight street, aka The Gut, is a thin vein of bars, brothels and flophouses, but in Hamrun, a sleepy suburb a couple miles inland that not uncoincidentally is heavily populated by Sicilians.

But of course, there are brothels here too, and Giuseppe gets to work on one of them as an assistant, marrying a local girl and having a son named Salvatore in 1898, then, in 1901, another son, Alfredo.

The 1814 Treaty of Paris, signed by Napoleon after defeat in a series of conflicts, including most notably the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, which is my chance to shout out the Volkischlachstein, it's probably the maddest monument I've ever seen in my life. It ends up handing control of Malta to the British Empire, which means, among other things, that Giuseppe and his growing family can now get British citizenship. But Giuseppe has other plans.

In 1904, he has to Alexandria, Egypt, which is at this point under the colonial administration of, well, you know who. That year, the British authorities reverse anti-prostitution law set out by the Ottoman ruler. And by the way, something I didn't know, Albanian, Mohammed Ali Pasha, allowing brothels to apply for permits and subject to weekly health inspections. You know, when you scratch the surface under a lot of things, it's all run by Albanians, every country.

Yeah, is Pharaoh Albanian? Is Martin Luther King Albanian? I don't know, maybe. This is manna from heaven, of course, for Giuseppe. And he gets to work building a string of Egyptian bordellos, servicing, among others, British troops despised for their drunkenness and penchant for girls, some of them young.

Giuseppe's family balloons alongside his business concerns and he has three more sons, Eugenio, Atilio and Carmelo, and a daughter, Margarita. But since citizenship of Egypt is only granted if a child's father has been born there, their time seems to be at a premium.

Now, Giuseppe is no benevolent magnate. He's a pretty low down pimp or to put it in the Arab vernacular, a sahabat, someone who manipulates, assaults and even rapes women into the trade. This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. You know, when you're really stressed or not feeling so great about your life or about yourself, talking to someone who understands can really help. But who is that person? How do you find them? Where do you even start? Talkspace.

Talkspace makes it easy to get the support you need. With Talkspace, you can go online, answer a few questions about your preferences, and be matched with a therapist. And because you'll meet your therapist online, you don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare. You'll meet on your schedule, wherever you feel most at ease. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or if you want some counseling for you and your partner, or just need a little extra one-on-one support, Talkspace is here for you.

Plus, Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a $0 copay. No insurance? No problem. Now get $80 off of your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. But something even more violent is about to break out. The First World War.

And that is when Giuseppe's chain of brothels becomes an empire, spreading from Alexandria into Cairo, Suez and Port Said, and outside Egypt to Morocco. By the late 20s, the Messina sons are getting in on their father's act, and they hold bank accounts across North Africa and Europe.

But in 1932, Egypt establishes something called the Public Morals Police. This is, of course, around the time the Muslim Brotherhood is spreading across the Arab world from a Cairo mosque, and pan-Arabism is rallying against colonial forces and their nominally secularist societies. Egypt's cops don't need an excuse to kick out the Messinas. They're considered pests, and Eugenio is already being apprehended on charges of guns and drug running.

Court sentenced Salvatore Messina to six months in prison for, quote, living on immoral earnings. And the family get British passports, probably bribing officials considering they were either Sicilian, Maltese, or Egyptian. Man, the world is a fascinating place, like the early 20th century with all that happening. I mean, the first half of the 20th century, probably the most fascinating time in world history, to be honest with you. Yeah, I mean, imagine the stories that we've done that basically originate at this exact moment in time. It's pretty crazy. Yeah.

So, from Egypt, the Messinans then make their way across the region. Salvatore visits Madrid, then Marrakech and Casablanca, and he marries a French woman. Others head back to Malta, but eventually they all wind up in London, which at the time is the most popular city on earth, with almost 8 million people, and it's just ahead of New York and Berlin.

London also, vitally, has a big, fat, underworld vacuum. And to understand this, let's take a step back and examine the city between the wars. Now, it goes without saying that there are racial and fascist panics kicking off all over the continent, not least, of course, in Germany. And London has its own moral scares. Here's an excerpt from a 2013 essay called Pimps, Police and Fide Joy. Quote,

In April 1936, the News of the World asked, "Is there a Jack the Strangler at large?" The panic ensued as a result of two murders in Soho on 4 November 1935 and 16 March 1936.

Both victims were women of quote-unquote uncertain virtue. A reign of terror was believed to hold sway over the West End following the murder of Dutch Leah, an English prostitute from East Ham on the 8th and 9th of May, also in 1936. Her body was found in a flat in Old Compton Street, Soho. Allegedly, her tongue had been deliberately mutilated. The press inferred, darkly, that she knew too much.

Indeed, it was believed that all three of the victims knew too much. However, it was not the murders themselves that fuelled such salacious stories. It was the alleged connection of these women, believed to be prostitutes, with a certain Max Castle, a Latvian pimp.

Castle 2 was murdered, having been shot repeatedly at 36 Little Newport Street, Soho, in January 1936. He's believed to be the leader of an international gang of white slave traffickers whose name is feared in all the underworlds of Europe, according to the newspaper.

Castle was king of Soho's Brigade of Iron, whose motley crew included Titi the Bigfooted, Marriott of the Big Eyes, Albert the Arab, Charlotte the Scarface, Coco the Animal, and BB the Bitter. We haven't had any decent gang names for a while. The blame for these crimes was laid upon, quote, foreigners, men who prey upon women of the streets. So you can see this thing growing already. And by the way, white slavery, there's a loaded term for you.

This is from the incredibly popular magazine at the time, The John Bull, quote,

Yikes. Oddly enough, despite Castle's prolific reputation, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Sharp, not the Sean Bean one, sadly, describes him as a, quote, very small-time ponce who lives on the earnings of one woman. This brigade of iron sounds fascinating. Is there a lot out there on them? I saw a couple of, like, really nerdy academic papers that I didn't want to get into or read at all. But, yeah, maybe I'll revisit it. Maybe we could do a bonus or something.

And by the way, the use of the word ponce, that is going to sound pretty funny. I'm surprised you didn't bring it up. Is it not a thing in America, that word at all? Not really, no.

Nah, it's going to sound really funny to British ears. I mean, these days it just means someone who nicks stuff or gets stuff without paying. Like you might call your pal who shirks around down the pub a ponce or you might ask someone to quote ponce a fag off them, which I don't think crosses the pond very well. It's a really good put down, not used enough these days, but basically it means pimp. And we're going to hear a lot of it in this show. So just a heads up.

Anyway, this whole situation of ponces and call girls and Soho bordellos and moral outrage, it creates this, it whips up this popular madness not too dissimilar to the satanic panic or QAnon today, where people believe there's a cabal of mostly foreign pimps and sex workers who are tainting London with evil practices.

The ire mostly falls on French women who've moved to London, as according to one academic, France, quote, was represented as a moral pit, a place of sexual adventure and infidelity, a place of refuge for the bankrupt and disgraced. Sounds like certain bars in Brooklyn that I go to. Hey, you can probably have another on the end of that as well. See, I mean,

These guys throw enough shit at the wall and eventually some of it sticks, so fair play to the British media for that one on the French. But Soho becomes a kind of Latin quarter around this time, and it welcomes French, Italian, Belgian, Greek and Yugoslavian migrants. I'm not sure how many of those are Latin, but it's the French who settle most, and for obvious geographical reasons, but also because London at the time is a far more liberal and welcoming city than Paris, despite the two cities' reputations.

French authorities at the time cracked down a lot harder on pimps and call girls. But some of these guys come over from Malta, such as Paul Samut, a gangster already known to authorities in Paris, Marseille, Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca, Rabat, before he settles down in the West End. But Samut, despite his large footprint, he's pretty small time. And Castle, the Latvian, well, he's on a mortuary slab.

London is ripe for a new underworld kingpin. Enter Giuseppe Messina, stage left, smuggling women from across the continent into the city to work in what he hopes will become Soho's dominant sex industry.

The Messinas also make a ton of money, and they begin snapping up property in the city's nearby Mayfair district, one of the fanciest in town, as anybody who's played Monopoly will know well. At one point, the family owns no fewer than 32 Mayfair homes.

As the quote from Chief Inspector Sharpe suggests, the police too have got a pretty loose grip on all of this at best, and at worst, a key hand in it. In 1928, there's a massive scandal involving Met Police bribes in the sex industry, which shows just how close the nexus is between pimps, bobbies and brothels, which definitely should be the name of the book about this, by the way. And there's this kind of comedy in the way that all this obvious crime and vice rubs up against British middle-class judicial prudishness.

There's an episode during an inquiry into the police misconduct, for example, when a female magistrate refuses to believe it's possible to have sex standing up. It is?

Yeah, it is apparently. I don't know. I'm learning. There's something they're known and still is known by in some British pubs, quote, knee tremblers. When one copper says he knows a couple that have been engaged in such an act, he replies, and I really can't think of this in any other than my granddad's voice, which is kind of like Parker from Thunderbirds. There was a smell of fornication in the air. This is a weird tangent to go off on and also even weirder that your mind goes to your granddad saying that.

Yeah, we had some frank discussions when I was a kid. But anyway, all of this goes to publicise London to Londoners and politicians that despite their Edwardian sensibilities, this stuff is going on a lot. And usefully for most xenophobes at the time, most of the ponces or pimps seem to be foreigners, many of whom they met deports in the years leading up to the Second World War.

The British Army's conscription into the war really puts a downer on the Messina's family's adopted British identities, and all five of Giuseppe's sons dodge the draft. During rationing, the family get their girls to be paid in petrol ration coupons so they can continue patrolling London streets at night.

The women, many of whom are in the UK via marriage as a convenience, so this isn't Giuseppe's daughters per se, but also the wives of the sons, they get out of service simply by listing their profession as, quote, prostitute.

A job the authorities are scared will contaminate the workforce with STDs. I don't know, maybe my manufacturing Columbia-tipped missiles or something, but it's pretty bold. Anyway, according to Aspects of History, quote, World War II was a boom time for British crime. Between 1939 and 1945, reported crime on the home front in England and Wales grew by nearly 60%. Kind of reminds me of like in Naples 44,

uh with the occupation of naples and how like the gangsters and black market just flourishes during the war yeah and all the yakuza in japan right they got loads of their power right in the middle of the war as well it's good time good time for crooks there's not only the chaos of war to contend with of course but the constant blackouts which extinguish all light at night during german bombing raids there's the black market in rations and other materials and that creates a thriving underworld

And then there's the cops themselves. They're overworked and often moonlighting or seconded as air raid wardens, soldiers or other vital tasks. And when it comes to vice, nothing gets folks horny like scores of deadly blitzkrieg attacks. Writes the Sunday Pictorial, quote, War has dimmed the bright lights of Piccadilly. Piccadilly's in Soho for non-Londoners.

The worst kind of war profiteers have turned a place that was once gay into a den of organised vice in which no one may walk with safety.

I can tell you, mate, Soho was and always will be pretty gay. Nothing new there. But with so many American GIs stopping over in London before D-Day and other operations, there's a whole new clientele for the Messina's women and, of course, business. And STIs, boom. Incidents of venereal disease are reportedly 25% higher in London than in the US. Shock. I love that quote.

One British admiral writes to the Met Police that Piccadilly is, and sorry for the language, but it's pretty telling, full of, quote, sluts and vicious debauchery. The Met leader calls the district a, quote, mecca of service personnel, but that, quote, the West End of London is not such a grim, sordid and sensational area as the newspapers would have the more unsophisticated of their readers believe. I mean, I don't think that's what Mecca is principally known for, but yeah, go off, mate.

Victory in Europe only serves up more victories for Soho's ponces. In 1945, there were just under 2,000 arrests in London for prostitution. By 1946, that figure has risen to almost 4,300. It's a huge rise. And the Messinas, they're responsible for a huge chunk of it.

And of course, the profits. Buying up gilded property like they're literally the monopoly man. I mean, in fact, they go so far down the route preferred today by Gulf states, princes, and Russian oligarchs that they create a real estate business and use that to launder their vice cash. Wasn't that like a saying from the first 10 episodes about how

Gangsters always end up in real estate and they should just skip it and go right to property development. Yeah, yeah. I reckon we should try and sell more of the Don't Instagram Your Crimes ones before we start getting on that. But yeah, underworldpod.com, guys. Anyway, so renowned are the Messinas that rival Maltese goons try to muscle in on Soho. But in a fight, Eugenio slices off three of a rival gang leader's name Carmelo Vassallo's fingers and he goes into hiding to ride out the possible ensuing gang war.

Later on, several of the Messina brothers are arrested over the fracas, and their reputation heads out into the air big time. Two months after his rivals are sent down over the violence, Eugenio's in the dock, but thanks to some nifty defence lawyers, he gets off on an unlawful wounding charge, despite only having locked off Vassallo's fingers because he was aiming for a kill shot to the gut. It's fair to say that Eugenio doesn't really know his place in Wandsworth Prison.

Most inmates don't appreciate ponces anyway, and a policeman gives him a beating when he reportedly tells the man, quote, take your hands off me, I buy and sell people like you in the West End. Not a great idea, mate. London hosts the Olympics in 48, bringing new Johns to the British capital. And Eugenio gets out of prison a year later, and pretty soon the Messinas have ramped up even their own big operations, running up to 30 brothels across the West End.

The book I mentioned even has a map of these places, which you can take a peek at if you're one of our Patreon subscribers, all the notes and reading lists up there. Anyway, in September 1950, the newspaper People runs an explosive headline. Arrest these four men. With a subhead quote, they are the emperors of a vice empire in the heart of London.

This story carries photos of four of the Messina brothers and others involved in the empire. But not only that, the writer gives their addresses too, which is pretty incredible. The brothers often get cops to frame rivals for crimes they never committed,

After the story publishes, Messina's allegedly hired trigger men from Corsica, which is at the time one of the world's biggest hotbeds of organized crime, to off its writer, Duncan Webb. And he is attacked in the street by guys claiming to be, quote, friends of the brothers. What is it with like the islands in that region that lends themselves to criminal organizations, right? Like Malta, Sicily, Corsica, all of these have...

I don't know. Like they've all birthed these like global criminal mastermind groups for like very small, small countries, small, I mean, essentially like small islands, things like that. It's pretty wild. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe it's just vitamin D and oily fish in your diet that sort of makes you into a crook. Maybe transport routes, trade, centers of trade. I don't know. Ships coming. Yeah, I mean, I guess- They're all like pier- Small islands, docks that can be easily bought, I guess, something like that. I don't know. Transhipment points, stuff like that, I guess, because it lends itself to drugs and whatnot. Yeah, drug transhipment points, oily fish, good sun, sunflowers.

sandcastles all of that yeah anyway this brings the brothers business to an attention of a young superintendent named guy man and it forces scotland yard to finally act decisively on what's going down in the west end revenues fall and expecting to be stung any moment eugenio drives his rolls royce south from london to dover then on to france which means he went through dartford which is kind of funny but anyway it seems to be crumbling to pieces for the messinas by this point

In 1950, four of the five Messina brothers are living in luxury on the continent. Alfredo, meanwhile, has spent the past decade or so as a, quote, diamond merchant living in Belgium and travelling all over Europe and North Africa. But in 1951, he's caught too while he's attending to a dodgy bank deposit box in London and all manner of dirt spills out in the preceding trial about his cooperation and friendship with London's cops.

Furthermore, during examination, Alfredo really doesn't seem to give two shits whether the jury believes him, claiming to have so many bank accounts because he, quote, likes to, and that he wants cash about because he can't bring cash into the UK, even though he's already in the UK, and that's false anyway.

Cross-examinations of working women under him don't go well, and pretty balls-ally Alfredo also claims that cops who had rolls of notes weren't bribed at all, but took notes from his safe and then fit them up on bribery charges.

He's found guilty, of course, of poncing and corrupting the police after a very, very short jury deliberation. He's handed a two and a half year prison term and a £500 fine, which in today's money is around $15,000. By the way, massive shout out to the Bank of England's inflation calculator.

which goes all the way back to 1209, which kind of makes me weirdly proud to be British for once. It means I can confidently say that a 15 pound pizza express in 2023 would have set you back just one P when the Magna Carte was sealed. Although I don't know, toppings, turnips and mud, pretty basic comedy.

Very good comedy. Little more is heard of Alfredo thereafter. He gets out of prison and he moves out to Brentford, which is in West London, probably best known today for its Premier League football team. And he's buried in 1961 with his mum and dad in Gunnersbury Cemetery, which is right opposite the stadium today. He's dead at that point, by the way, guys. After Alfredo is sent down, Atilio takes centre stage for the family.

But he has brush-ins with the law all the way up to 1959, and he too is arrested and charged with various crimes related to poncing or pimping. And later that year, he's found guilty with the judge saying, quote,

I mean, I'm putting this in mainly because of that quote. He then sentences Atilio to four years and recommends deportation. He's got 40 Mayfair properties with a sex worker operating out each one at this point. But in 1961, he gets out of prison early and he's put on a plane to Rome before he sets foot in San Remo. Foggy, smoggy London for the Ligurian coast. I mean, it's not a bad swap, I reckon. Anyway.

A similar fate awaits Carmelo, who's handed a six-month sentence and then is dumped out of Britain to Rome. He dies soon after, but in squalor. By the way, I checked out Hansard from this time, which is the British Parliament's official record of debates, and there's an interesting exchange from 1956 where MPs gripe about the brothels and the messinas.

But mostly because they're scared the locations are a hotbed of homosexuality, which is of course illegal at this point and will be until 1967. Britain of course is the country that chemically castrated one of its greatest heroes, Alan Turing, in 1952 and drove him to suicide just two years later. Stupid, stupid country. You know, the amount of work you put into these doesn't really correspond to the amount of money that we make on them. Have you seen rates for magazines at the moment? I'm not sure.

Anyway, for all this bluster, Parliament doesn't really do anything useful at all. In 1958, there were an estimated 5,000 sex workers on London's streets. The following year, authorities enact the Streets Offences Act, which aims to restrict loitering with the intent to sell sex, but that doesn't have much effect at all. And while the dominance of the Messinas is pretty much overbought in the early 1960s, it gives way to a rise of a new generation of ponces and underworld kingpins.

And these guys are Maltese too. Remember Tommy Smithson, the hapless goon from the introduction who told bystanders, good morning, I'm dying, and then, well, died. Philip Ellul and Vic Spampinato may have been his murderers, but the man who gave the order to kill, he was a guy named Frank Mifsud, Big Frank, an 18 stone monster and former traffic policeman.

Here's a Times of Malta report on the book, Passport to Vice by Matthew Vela. I'm trying to get Matthew on the show for a bonus episode because he's done some great work on this. Quote, Big Frank was at the head of this organised crime syndicate, which is believed to have worked with well-known gangsters such as the Kray brothers and infiltrated the top ranks of Scotland Yard to take control of Vice in a large chunk of the UK capital.

The one-time traffic policeman had left Malta in the 1960s to make a name for himself in the vice world of London's Soho. He's believed to have recruited the Maltese to the Soho gang that would become known as the Syndicate, a vast call girl empire built up in London over 20 years. Tommy Smithson, who if you recall is working for rival Maltese Hartman at the time of his death, is a key stepping stone in Mifsud's West End takeover.

In 1963, Mercer joins forces with Bernie Silver, a Jew from London's East End, and the pair form what will later be known as the Syndicate, taking over the Messina's one-time properties and strangling the city's vice industry.

It specializes in so-called clip joints, places familiar to anyone who's been strong-armed by mob-run strip clubs in, say, Vegas, where you go for a dance and then you're suddenly hit with a three- or four-figure bill enforced by a very large man speaking a language you don't understand. Not that that's ever happened to the respectable hosts of this here respectable podcast.

Not in Vegas. Beginning with a single club in Bow Street, Soho, by the late 1960s, Misterd and Silva control 19 of the district's 24 brothels. They're incredibly rich and powerful. Imagine a single gang controlling three quarters of Amsterdam's red light district, for example. Plus, these guys run bookies and gambling dens. It's big business. You know, I'd actually really like to do an episode or look into...

the groups that control the sex workers and drug markets in Amsterdam's current red light zone. A good one to go on assignment for, eh? Yeah. I mean, I just, I know everything's legal there, but you have to assume that these groups are still, there's still people out there getting paid on it.

Oh, for sure. I mean, it's like fully legal in Germany too, but there was a big raid on a place. It's like Europe's biggest brothel. It's on six floors. It's fucking disgusting. And they found that this guy who was a goalkeeper for Frankfurt in the, in the top football league was actually like in on the whole thing. And they were bringing women in from Ukraine. So like, it's hard to keep it all above board when it comes to this stuff. But, um,

Anyway, back to London. The Cray fans slash scholars, because they're the big guys, right? They play a big role in Big Frank's rise as well. In 1967, Mifsud sits down with the feared twins to broker a, quote, frightener on rival club owner George Caruana, also Maltese. There's a £1,000 price tag on Caruana's head and the Crays agree to off him.

Their first idea is to plant a bomb in Caruana's car, and they even dispatch a young guy named Paul Elvely to Glasgow to fetch the dynamite. But Elvey's arrested when cops find the four sticks in his luggage on the flight back to London. I mean, airport security really not a thing back then. Back at Elvey's home, they discover another weapon he's been given for the job. A crossbow, of course. London's chief inspector, Leonard Nipper-Reed, who's really famous back in the day,

He uses the failed hit to build a case against the Kray twins, which eventually brings them down. From that moment on, the Maltese syndicate reigns supreme in the British capital. You know, I really had no idea that the Maltese had this much of a presence in organized crime. Like, I wonder if it's just an English thing, because I don't know

you know, if there were us Maltese gangs out there, if we didn't have a big enough population of them, or if just the Sicilians, Jews and Irish just had such close control of this stuff that they ran them out. But it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. It's new to me. Yeah. It was kind of new to me. I guess it's because they're like technically at this point, British citizens and they can sort of hop between the countries pretty easily. Um, I know it's the only EU country now that has English as its main language, but, um,

It's totally fascinating, like you say, these island nations, they've got a history, man. Here is a Malta Today quote about the syndicate. At the height of its influence, most of the Metropolitan Police's obscene publication squad were in the syndicate's pay, including its head detective chief superintendent, Bill Moody.

But a 1969 Times expose of police framing small-time criminals and offering not to press charges in exchange for money or information started to slowly unravel the syndicate's network.

A series of other trials and exposés revealed a general picture of police-criminal links. Particularly favoured were Silver and Missard, with the discovery of a detailed ledger of the syndicate's police payoffs during a raid on the home of Silver associate Jimmy Humphreys. Don't ledger your crimes, guys. It led to hundreds of dismissals, false retirements and the corruption trials of 1976-77.

which results in 13 detectives, including two ex-commanders, the highest ranking British police officers ever to be convicted of corruption, being sentenced to a total of 90 years in prison. So this stuff was running all the way to the top. It's really sort of big time crime. Like you say, I didn't really know anything before I started researching this. Anyway, in 1973, that's a couple of years before the raids, Silver and Misford abscond on quote extended holidays.

Then the press and police collude in an extraordinary ruse to get the gangsters back to Blighty, claiming that charges have been dropped, warrants withdrawn, and Scotland Yard is no longer interested in them. Silver comes back from France and is arrested at dinner on December 30, 1973. So that's pretty wild. So the press knew they were printing a fake story, that the charges were being dropped just to get these guys to come back?

Yeah, this is like series five of The Wire, right? This is pretty crazy stuff. And Philip Ellul, right? He's the guy who killed Tommy Smithson. He's initially found guilty of Tommy's killing and sentenced to death. Brent's last execution was in 1964, by the way. But it's commuted to life in prison just 48 hours before the hanging date. And he winds up serving just 11 years behind bars. Now that is a reprieve.

Ellul serves his time and emigrates to the US, but in 1974 he's discovered destitute on a San Francisco park bench and he returns to London to testify in the trial against Bernie Silver.

Mifsud, meanwhile, hides out in Switzerland for the years before he's extradited, but he gets his sentence quashed on a pill and he lives out his years in Selema, a harbour suburb of the Maltese capital Valletta, until his death aged 92 in 2017. So, I guess crime pays. But that's not all. The Maltese connection in London continues even after Big Frank's exile. That is, of course, until the Albanians rock up.

Around the turn of the 21st century, Albanians and Albanian Kosovars, forced out by the Balkan Wars, push out the Maltese mobsters who run London Vice for decades. Writes Ben Judah in his excellent book, This is London, quote, they found workers bouncers at first. At the millennium, these running the brothels of Soho were Maltese, an old established mafia.

The Albanians disdain them as weak Soho bisexuals in pink bow ties and floral shirts, selling only ugly girls from Newcastle upon Tyne. Ouch. Barely warm in their leather jackets, smoking cigarettes at four in the morning outside the Maltese bruffles on Greek Street, they hatched a plan. They would conquer Soho. Holy fuck. I mean, that paragraph alone makes you want to buy the book.

I mean, that book is fantastic. Yeah, I'd fully recommend it. It's so good. Anyway, it carries on. Quote, the first Maltese to fall went down on his knees when the bouncers pointed a gun at his head. Quivering and pathetic in his purple jacket, he agreed to sell up. But now they needed girls, girls who were better and cheaper. One Albanian got in a truck and drove to Moldova.

They trundled around the peasant villages promising glittering careers in waitressing and modeling. Then they raped and trafficked them. Pretty awful, huh? Yeah, I mean, I've also noticed that the Albanians are popping up more and more in American TV and movies as like the bad guys. Like the new season of Justified, there's like a plot line with them. But, you know, Taken, I guess, came out years ago. It's really becoming like the new trend in like bad guys in action and police movies.

Is it justified? Is it good? Is it worth watching? Yo, I just watched the original and it's over the period of two months and it's incredible. The new season's alright, but the original is amazing. It takes a couple episodes to warm up, but it's fucking great. I need something new. I'll get on it.

But even as late as 2012, right, that's when London is hosting its second Olympic Games, Maltese organised crime is still influencing stuff in the West End. That year, cops raid the home of a Russian pimp or ponce in Charing Cross Road, an address made famous by Maltese Charlie, a pimp who specialised in controlling girls who charged premium rates because they were underage. Eek.

Writes the Evening Standard, it's self-owned by a controversial Russian oligarch, quote, his sordid business was estimated to earn him more than £500,000 a year.

When police officers finally arrested him, he had $3,200 in cash in his pockets, 58 grand in cash at his house, and in the refrigerator, tubs of margarine in which 20,000 pounds worth of gold jewelry was concealed. I mean, I keep my stuff there as well. That's not a big deal. Charlie, celebrated for his reputation for having a pair of eyes tattooed on his buttocks, that's a bit weird, isn't it? Was sentenced to nine months jail. That was four years ago.

Today is old horn in Charing Cross Road is still in business. I mean, I guess in jail, the eyes on the backside might come in handy. I don't know. So that's the story of Maltese Vice in London guys from the Messinas to Big Frank to Maltese, Charlie, Albanians, and my own stories of confused teenage poop shows and record stores. Hope you enjoyed it. Don't Instagram your crimes and we'll be back with another banger next week. Damn, that was a, that was thorough, man. That was a long one. Um,

Yeah, bonuses always. Patreon.com, Sesame World Podcast, iTunes, all that. And thank you for tuning in.