235. The British Criminal Underworld in The Second World War.
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Hello and welcome to Battleground 45 with me, Patrick Bishop. We've rebranded, as you have noticed, for the new year. Today we're going to turn to the home front in Britain and look at a little-examined aspect of wartime life. Not everyone felt moved by the spirit of sacrifice that Winston Churchill, in his speeches, and the government propaganda machine in all its forms, sought to awaken in the citizenry.

For the country's criminal fraternity, the war was not an opportunity to show their patriotism. Far from it. Instead, wartime conditions offered a golden chance to enrich themselves. At one level, there was simple opportunism with villains taking advantage of the cloak of darkness provided by the blackout and the chaos caused by the blitz to nick whatever they could find. But this was low-level stuff.

The shortages caused by rationing and the plenty provided by war industry and the arrival of the Americans created a thriving black market. And of course, the vice trade was bound to flourish in the febrile atmosphere of war.

Our guide today to this fascinating subject is Mark Ellis. Mark was a barrister and a businessman before he turned to writing. He's the author of five books, wartime novels featuring a London detective, Chief Inspector Frank Merlin. I'll just read the titles to you to give you some idea of the world that he takes us into. There's the first one, The Embassy Murders, then In the Shadow of the Blitz, The French Spy, A Death in Mayfair,

and Dead in the Water. Who could resist with titles like that? They're a cracking read, rich in drama, but also totally authentic. The detail on the London underworld is the result of Mark's deep research. It's great to have him on the podcast and to offer listeners a diversion from our regular fare of shot and shell. So, Mark, welcome to Battleground.

Thank you very much for having me, Patrick. So first question, did the criminal classes feel any sense of obligation to the old country when war was declared? No. I think that there's a general belief that everyone mucked in in the war, including the criminals, but that was far from the case. There was a crime boom during the war. Between 1939 and 1945, crime grew by around 60%.

And this was partly because of increased number of crimes that came with the war, because all of a sudden we had blackout rules to comply with and various other rules. But fundamentally, the criminals could see the vast opportunities that they were given by the introduction of the blackout, by the introduction of rationing, which led to the black market. And so they went for it, and they really had a good time. So much so that Mad Frankie Fraser was a rather famous individual who

A few years back, he was a hardened criminal who lived through the war in the subsequent period. And his memoirs were ghosted. And he went on all the talk shows. And he castigated Hitler for being a coward, for giving in so easily, because it was a golden age for criminals.

But were the criminals people who were born into crime families or did the ranks actually swell as a result of the war? And another question, actually, how did they actually evade the National Service? I mean, by 1942, every able-bodied man was either in uniform or down the mines working as a bevan boy helping war survivors.

industry? How did they manage to get away with it? Well, of course, some of them who were the more successful gangsters bribed their way out of things. Other people just skipped and went on the run. The main gangsters of the period during the war, I believe that only one of them I know of actually served in the army, and that was a chap called Jack Spott.

All of the others, actually, some of them escaped being in the army because they were in prison at the time. Some of the big hitters like Billy Hill spent a few years in the army.

prison during the war and so on. An interesting sort of side point is that women's conscription was introduced in, I think, 1941-42. And I'll be talking a little bit later about the vice business in wartime London. But if you were a prostitute and you were called up, you could put damn prostitute on your papers and they wouldn't follow it up.

So there were various ways in which people escaped. And another way, of course, was going to the doctor, a crooked doctor, and getting a doctor to give you a piece of paper which said you weren't fit for service. This was quite a thriving trade, in fact. Yeah, well, let's start...

at the beginning, really, with the Blitz, because as you say, the blackout and the Blitz create these opportunities, obvious opportunities, don't they? And it does sit very much at odds with our view of the Blitz. The myth of the Blitz, as a famous book called it, about it, bigger time, is of national solidarity. Yet on the margins, you've got people who are in extremists being preyed on by these jackals who come into the

into the chaos and steal whatever they can lay their hands on. Tell us a bit about the scale of that and how it actually happened, how it operated. Yes, when you mentioned jackals, it wasn't just what we might call criminal jackals who profited from looting. Pretty much all sorts of people, all categories of people got involved in looting. But yes, again, people who take the rosy view of the war can hardly believe that looting took place, but it was a major activity, particularly

particularly in the Blitz, but also later on in 1944 when the doodlebugs were around. First of all, there were policemen, emergency officers, fire people, all sorts of people got involved in the looting. The figures in the run-up to Christmas after the bombing started in 1940, there were almost 5,000 cases of looting heard in the Old Bailey in that period, which shows you how prevalent it was.

And looting could be quite straightforward. A house was bombed and then people's property would be easily accessible. But there are also other occasions which are quite shocking. In the spring of 1941, a fancy nightclub called the Café de Paris got a direct hit and a lot of people were killed.

And when the emergency workers arrived, they found scores, if not hundreds of people, clambering over the dead bodies, pulling necklaces or whatever other jewelry the dead bodies might have away, and then squabbling and fighting over the dead bodies. And that's always struck me as the sort of height of the bad looting scenario. Yeah.

Who were these people? Who was actually doing the looting? Well, there were some people who survived the bombing who were in the Café de Paris. So there were just customers who saw their opportunity. There were people walking, coming from the outside. There were criminals, obviously, who were waiting for their chance. But as I say, people who were prosecuted in those cases I mentioned up until the Old Bailey included anyone. You know, there were children, there were old people, there were

As I say, people in uniform, it was everyone participating, all categories participating.

Not everyone in terms of everyone in London, but all categories of people were prosecuted for looting. And it didn't just happen in the cities, of course. It happened in the countryside. I came across a case the other day of a farm in Lancashire, which took a big hit. And the farmer himself survived, but he lost some members of his family. And when he came back from the hospital, he found that the farm had been entirely looted, including some of his animals had been taken away.

And this particular chap was definitely born unlucky because he survived into old age. And when he was in his old age, the doctor he called in to attend to him when he was suffering was Harold Shipman. And he did not last very long. For those who don't know the name Harold Shipman or overseas names,

This was a notorious doctor who, under the guise of being a benign local GP, actually murdered at least scores of people, and it may indeed have been over 100. And it was brutal.

purely for gain, wasn't it? Again, it's in the spirit of the wartime opportunist. Here he is in the position of trustee exploiter. I'm not quite sure what Shipman got up to in the war, but I'm sure it was no good. And what were the penalties? I imagine that the authorities would want to come down very, very hard. Yes, people would. Generally speaking, people would go to jail for a couple of months, but if not, there were very heavy fines.

And as I said, it was a perennial problem. It wasn't so great in 1944. I found a parliamentary exchange with the Home Secretary where he was saying it's not as much of a problem, but it is still a problem and people had to pay attention to it.

Yeah. Well, presumably because, you know, the blitz conditions were by no means prevalent in 1944. You did get the doodle bugs, as you say, the V1s and V2s, but it wasn't on the scale of the bombing. No, no. But again, you could still have situations like, which this happened in the blitz and later, where a shot might be bombed and people would go in and if the shot keeper had been killed or injured. Again, there are cases where people pulled a

jewellery off them or took the money out of their pockets and what

whatever. It was from small scale to large scale. What about other kinds of crimes? Presumably there was opportunities for robbery, for example, given the fact that you're operating in pretty much table darkness, particularly winter. Yeah, robbery and murder. As I said, as you mentioned, the blackout, and again, for people who don't know exactly what the blackout was, it was simply all streets were lights were off.

and everyone had to have heavy curtains so that there was no light available to guide the German bombers to their targets. But in the blackout, there were murders, there were robberies. Perhaps it was more straightforwardly helpful to murderers and individual robberies rather than gang robberies, which there were plenty of during the war. There was one case in 1941-42 where

where an RAF airman murdered and mutilated four women over a period of time. His name was Gordon Cummins, and he was known by the papers as the blackout ripper. He got caught and he got hanged. But there were other instances like that. The blackout itself, of course, gave rise to crime in the sense that if you didn't do what you were meant to do in blackout terms,

you could be prosecuted again or even imprisoned in some cases. Now, let's talk about the black market. As you say, scarcity brought about by rationing obviously creates a business opportunity. How organized was the black market and who dominated it? It was very organized as the war developed. Various gangsters took part in it and indeed tried to control it. The most well-known gangster who called himself the king of the black market,

was a gentleman called Billy Hill. Billy Hill had been a small-time criminal before the war, gradually gaining in power, but he probably was the most significant gangster during the war. He was born in Seven Dials of Irish parents, and he built up connections throughout the 30s.

a lot of the gangsters made their way on the race courses. There was a lot of race course crime. What I mean by that is particularly protection rackets in which the bookies had to pay money to have their position. And Hill and a number of others made a fortune out of that

And then they would return their money into investment in nightclubs and spielers and bars and prostitution and so on. And what's actually for sale on the black market? What are the commodities that are being traded or the goods that are being traded? Well, the things that were subject to rationing were food, petrol, clothing, principally. And the black marketeers would either steal them or acquire them somehow or other cheaply.

And of course, they'd sell them for a huge markup. There was also a great opportunity, given the existence of these coupons and ration books, to steal ration books or forge them. There was a case in 1944 in which 14,000 ration books were stolen. It wasn't by Billy Hill or one of the other major gangs. It was up north.

And those 14,000 ration books were sold for £70,000 at the time. At the time, that would have been worth about £3 million. So it was really big business. And Hill led the way in that, but there were others who were in the game. At the beginning of the war, there was a gang called the Sabinis.

and they were edged out by hill and there was a chap called Jack Spot who came into the picture. But obviously there were lots of smaller scale gangs who made hay while the sun shined,

with the black market. Now, wartime famously is a time when sexual mores tend to become looser, shall we say. How did that impact on the vice business? Because you would have thought actually it wouldn't be a particularly good time if you're a working girl in London because there are lots of amateurs, if we can put it like that, who you're now competing with. Was that the case or am I barking up the wrong tree there? No, no, the vice business was a huge business during the war.

And there were, again, individual smaller operators or there were big operators. The biggest operator in the vice business was a gang called the Messinas. And they were of Italian Maltese origin. There were seven Sabinis and five Messinas.

The father came from Sicily, married someone from Malta, went to Egypt where he set up brothels. Then they came to England in the mid-30s, and they found that there was a bit of a gap in the market. Many of the big figures in the market before that were in jail or were dead. So they moved in, and just before the war, the main area for prostitution was Tottenham Court Road. And they thought this was a bit too down market, so they moved into Mayfair.

buying up lots of flats from which their girls could operate. And it's from then that the most popular area was Sheppard Market, and it remained so for a long time after the war. So working girls were either, generally speaking, they were pressurized to become part of a bigger organization like the Messinas,

They got protection for that to a certain extent. As I mentioned before, Gordon Cummins killed four women. A couple of them were prostitutes. The Messinas made sure that their girls were safe, but they exacted a price. They were very ruthless, brutal people. But they ran a business. So their business was the girls had to live up to certain strict rules.

If they had a client, they were not allowed more than 10 minutes with him. They were not allowed to dress up too fancily because the Messinas didn't want them to attract the attention of the police. And again, they operated mostly out of expensive flats in Mayfair. Obviously, there were other girls who were just operating on their own or with smaller scale pimps.

There were nicknames given to prostitutes in London. There were the Hyde Park Rangers and the Piccadilly – I forgot what the name is – Hyde Park Rangers. And there were a lot of amateurs on the game. In terms of the clientele, a big boost to the vice business obviously was the arrival of the Americans in 1942.

When he got to 1944, there were one and a half million Americans over here and three million British Allied forces under arms. All of those people at the weekend would be looking for a good time. And if they were near London, London was the place to come. It was massive. The Messinas made an absolute fortune along with various other people. There were also, of course, clip joints, clubs everywhere.

which are gangling, stroke, prostitution, stroke drinking clubs, and scale of things was absolutely massive. What about the police in all this? I mean, did they make any serious attempt to try and control it or to close it down? I mean, traditionally, the British attitude towards prostitution and brothels and the rest of it

has been to sort of more or less deny its existence and treat it just as a criminal activity, unlike in France, for example, where it's sort of semi-legalized. You had brothels which were kind of more or less approved of and controlled and regulated by the state, but we've never had that attitude before.

Did they just sort of throw up their hands, decide that there was nothing much they could do about it given all the other priorities they had? Or did they try? Pretty much. Pretty much. I mean, remember that the police had an awful lot on their plate during the war. In addition to what you might call their normal criminal responsibilities, all of a sudden they had to police the looting, they had to police smuggling.

the blackout, they had to, there's deserted and so on to cope with. So the answer to your question is that they pretty much turned a blind eye. Some of this, of course, they would be remunerated for because there was definitely corruption in the police at this time.

Things only really changed after the war. It was about the mid-50s when various crime-raking reporters started investigating and exposing what was going on. And the Messinas in particular got targeted by the People newspaper, which I'm hard to believe now had a readership of over five or six million in the 50s. And it eventually brought their downfall. But of course, their removal didn't mean anything other than other people moved in on their patches.

It's an interesting point in terms of looking at the gangs of London during the war, that most of the other big gangs, by which I meant the Sabinis, Billy Hill, Jack Spot, didn't really get involved in prostitution. They left it to the Messinas. And interesting enough, most of the other people involved in the game on a big scale were also of Maltese origin. I don't really understand why that was, but...

It's a fact. And the others were just focused on, for example, as we just discussed, the black market and the various other activities which we can cover. Robbery was a very big thing and millions and millions of pounds were stolen during the war. But I digress. In terms of vice, it was a big business and you were lucky to be in it. If you were a criminal, that is.

Well, that was really absorbing, wasn't it? Join us after the break when Mark will be telling us what happened when the Americans arrived on the scene. Tell us more about the Americans. Did they bring their own criminals? There must have been criminals inside America.

the American Armed Forces? Was there any friction between the arriving Americans and the native homegrown crims? There was. I mean, when I'm researching my books, I always discover something new. And when I was doing my last book, when I was doing my initial research, something I never knew about, which you may have known about, but in the summer of 1942, there was a legislation introduced under which authority over crimes alleged against Americans was

was assumed or was transferred to the American military authorities. So the London Bobbies and my character, Frank Merlin, would have nothing to do, could have nothing to do with any crime alleged against an American. Generally speaking, of course, there were plenty of criminals amongst the Americans.

And indeed, a lot of people deserted. A lot of American deserters got involved in major crimes. A thing about deserters, which slightly differentiated them from most of the ordinary criminals, is most of them carried guns. So that added a dimension to the things that they got involved in. There is a famous case of a deserter murdering people. And it was actually turned into a film called Chicago Joe and the Showgirl.

There was an American soldier called Carl Hulton. This is towards the end of 1944, who hooked up with a Welsh good time girl called Elizabeth Jones. He had a car and they went on a crime spree for six days. And then all this culminated in them robbing a taxi driver near Ealing and Hulton shot him.

Eventually, they were caught. And this is one case in which the Americans did not enforce their jurisdiction. They were so horrified by it, they handed it, they allowed the British police to deal with it. Halton was in due course hanged. Elizabeth Jones was sentenced to death, but it was commuted. And she spent a pretty long time in jail.

So the film, if anyone's interested in watching, is called Chicago Joe and the Showgirl, and the American character is played by Kiefer Sutherland. And this came out when? Oh, this is about 20 years ago. It's somewhere out there on video. I watched it. I watched it a while ago. Yeah, it might be on Amazon. They've got a kind of rich trove of old movies, I find. I mean, you're asking about the Americans in general. There were other problems with the Americans apart from the simple crime. Of course, there was a huge amount of prejudice.

There were black soldiers and American soldiers. If an American soldier saw a black soldier dancing with an English girl in a nightclub in London, it would often provoke fighting. And the situation resolved itself over time into that within London and outside, there was almost a form of apartheid. There were pubs which black soldiers could go to and pubs which white soldiers could go to.

And again, the prejudice against the black soldiers or military people was evidenced in the American judicial system. There's a case in which a black soldier was accused of rape. The evidence was extremely flimsy, but he was going to be hanged very quickly. And the people of Bath, good people of Bath, where this alleged crime had taken place, put up a

petition of 30,000 people claiming basically supporting him and in due course Eisenhower was obliged to release him and let him back into the forces but the crime ratio in terms of black soldiers who were convicted these are the white soldiers within their own jurisdictional system

There was a massive difference. Obviously, there were many more black people who were convicted and sentenced to death or jail than white soldiers. Yeah, and we touched on this actually in an earlier podcast. It's a fascinating subject and one actually in which

We, the Brits, come out pretty well, I think. You know, you talked about that case in Bath. I think there have been various literary references to that instance and others like it. So, yeah, I think we could give ourselves a bit of a pat on the back about that. I think the British people generally were appalled by what they saw. You know, they had no idea of just how dreadful the racial segregation was.

wars in America and how it played out in wartime when you have men in uniform doing their bit for their country and still being treated as not even second-class citizens, but almost subhumans. Yeah, and that's a fascinating aspect of it. Now, come the end of the war,

Were the gains, the position they'd carved out for themselves by these gang leaders, were they able to maintain that into peacetime? And of course, their relationship with the police, you mentioned that earlier, there were bent coppers

inside the Metropolitan Police. Did that lead into an increased sort of, what I'm trying to say is the landscape you're talking about, did it remain unchanged after the war? It did pretty much for a while. Obviously, rationing continued. The blackout ended, but rationing continued.

So there was plenty of scope still to make money in the black market. And indeed, the sort of heavy scale robbing that went on during the war continued. There were lots of major heists, as we may call them. The most prominent person involved in that was still Billy Hill. And we're talking about robbing banks, robbing jewelry shops, and so on. Billy Hill had a big gang, and he actually thrived all the way through

And he ended up, he had been in jail. In fact, he was in jail when the war ended for a post office robbery that had gone wrong. But he managed to survive and succeed all the way through to, I can't say a happy retirement, but he was safe. But he continued to dominate the black market.

He did lots of robberies. He had a safe house outside London, which made life a bit easier. And instead of blowing safes in banks and so on or houses, they would take the safes there and blow them up in his safe house or in a barn in his safe house. He fell out with the other guy I mentioned briefly called Jack Spot, who had been in particular very, very successful in terms of running gambling clubs during the war.

But they fell out and violence was done, including a bad Frankie Fraser, who I mentioned earlier. But Jack Spot, having had his face carved up very nastily, was allowed to live and went on to have a quiet retirement in southwest London. The Messinas, as I mentioned, they were still successful. The vice business carried on very successfully. Well,

Vice business goes on wherever it goes on, doesn't it? But what happened, as I mentioned, I think there was a journalist called Duncan Webb, who the Time magazine called the most successful crime reporter of all time, who exposed them. And then they had to leave the country. They carried on running the business from Belgium or France. But in the end, they all fell away. And other people, as I mentioned earlier, I think, took over. There were, of course, new people came along, most famously the Krays.

And Billy Hill was something of a mentor to the Krays. And they looked up to him, although there came a time when they really wanted to be the top dogs. And I think Billy Hill got the message and withdrew somewhat, although he still managed to perpetrate some scans at Aspinall's Casino, where he took up card shopping for a while. Yeah, good to know that he's flexible in his criminal activities.

Now, did you actually look at what was going on elsewhere during the war, European capitals? I'm thinking actually Berlin. Was there a thriving criminal scene there during the war? Well, yes, although I have to admit that my knowledge of it is more related to reading the books of the Bernie Gunter books of Philip Kerr than any deep historical research. Yeah.

And France, of course, France in Paris, the Germans themselves got heavily involved in crime. And there were gangs, but there were gangs who were in the hands of the Germans and gangs who weren't. And those who weren't tended to not survive.

Yeah, I mean, there's the famous Bonny Lafont gang, which was actually a coalition between a former police chief in the Paris police and a leading criminal. So it was kind of perfect. I have another author friend, I'll give him a plug now, called Christopher Lloyd, who writes a series about a French detective in World War II Paris. They're very good. Yeah, I've got a friend also who writes about a French detective in World War II Paris called Pirate.

Irwin, also very much worth checking out. Okay, well, look, that was really terrific. A change from, as I say, the usual fare. And it did shine a light on something that I think will come as a surprise to quite a lot of people. So thank you very much for coming on. Get out and read those books. They're a terrific read. I'm just in the middle of the first one, and I'm very much looking forward to getting through it. It's so nice when you pick up a book and you realize there's

a series down the line waiting for you. That's very kind. May I just say one thing? I've now remembered the name of the other nickname for the prostitutes in London, which was the Piccadilly Commandos. Piccadilly Commandos. There you are. Anyway, thank you very much for having me on. Great, everyone. Mark, thank you. Bye-bye. Cheers. Bye. Well, I thoroughly enjoyed that. I hope you did too. Join us on Friday for all the latest from Ukraine and, of course, the following Wednesday for another absorbing episode of Battleground 45.