Behind the Bastards - Part One: Lord Aspinall: The Gambling King of London

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Robert sits down with Ed Zitron to talk about Lord Aspinall and his gambling buddies, who ruled London high society with an iron fist and also did a murder.   (2 part series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My name is Matt Maroonovich and I've been obsessed by homes that are stigmatized forever by the brutal crimes that happen inside four walls. And in my new podcast, Murder Homes, we tell those stories of routine days that start like any other and turn into wrenching nightmares. All across the country, there are addresses I'll introduce you to that you'll never forget and the experts that know them best. Listen to murder homes on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past five years making my true crime podcast Helen Gone I've received hundreds of messages from people asking for help with an unsolved murder that's

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is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner, Rob called me, so would Edo Brein, and asked me what I knew about this crime. Well, ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president? Then we'll pull the curtain back on the cover-up. The American people need to know the truth. Listen to Who Killed JFK on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls of media. Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast

to behind the bastards, the only podcast around, uh, if you're listening to another podcast, I'm sorry, but you have lost your mind, uh, and are hallucinating, whatever crazy characters. There's no such thing as Joe Rogan, uh, not, not, not a one in the real world, uh, just me. And of course, Sophie, my producer, and our guest for today, Ed Zitron. Ed is a tech industry journalist and columnist with the newsletter, Where's Your Ed At? One of my favorite people to read on the internet. Ed, welcome to the show for the first time. What's up? Happy to be here. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Ed, have you ever hallucinated a podcast? I mean, I've recorded quite a few and forgotten them almost immediately. So that's just that's just called recording a podcast. That's broadcasting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's in San Asia in real time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have a, we'll have people come on our subreddit sometimes if you like, you should do this guy and I'll be like, oh, yeah That'd be a great topic and then someone will post like no, they covered in three years ago and I'll go. Oh, yeah I remember that for sure That's generous. Sometimes it's like hey remember that thing you said in the podcast that you recorded yesterday It's like absolutely not No, I will read my work back sometimes and laugh at my own jokes. That's one of my favorite tricks.

Just because I'm like, well, this guy's great. That's not that, yeah. Don't remember writing these words. So much funnier than me. Geez. I gotta get him on the show. Ed, elephant in the room. You live in Vegas, but you come from a little island across the sea that

you've been, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you feel about the British aristocracy? I feel terrible about them. I do not like them. I think we give them more than one pound, so that's too many. Yeah, I do not see what they do other than take up press and get away with dressing up like Nazis. Yeah. And also being related to them in some cases. And I find them a frustrating group and I find the lionization of the disgusting. Oh, well, you're going to be opinions.

Yeah. You're going to love this episode then. This is going to be a slow burn. The first episode is largely gonna be setting stuff up for our listeners, not gonna be as much faster during until we really hit episode two, in which case it's gonna come out hard and fast, but there's a lot you have to establish in this episode

because we're talking about, have you ever heard of a guy named Lord John Aspenal? I've not. Have you heard of his close friend, the lucky Lord Lucan? I have. Yeah. This was a big story, right? And like the 70s.

Well, my parents in their house, they have this weird space above their washing machine. And for years, we've referred to it as Lord Lucan's house because in England it's like, what a hell of a little Lucan got, it was probably the episode. Yeah. You're in the whole episode giving it away but yeah no that's a beautiful piece of dry humor. No, we can I mean we'll say up front right like Lord Luke and is a guy who committed a terrible murder. Yes. He's Lord obviously and then disappeared and we will be talking

about what happened and how it relates to our subject today, who is his buddy. And the guy who kind of robbed, like the generation of the British aristocracy who came of age in like the 40s, robbed them all blind because he was a casino maven. That's Lord Aspenal. And he also helped invent the modern zoo in a pretty irresponsible way, but still zoos. So this is gonna be a fun episode, but yeah, I feel like we can get started now. He's not a dude, I think most Americans will have heard of.

So a lot of what we'll be doing is kind of setting stuff up, which means we get to talk about the public school system in the UK, which will be fun. Yeah. Also, all these people are fascists, like straight up Hitler-loving Nazis. Is you alluded to it at the very start of this? Yeah, but most of England,

that's the thing that I think that people don't realize about, I say this is a British Jew. I think people don't realize around like, the horrors of the Holocaust and such. It wasn't like it was great being Jewish anywhere. Yeah, it's just it. And so it's like when you find out, oh, someone in British history was a fascist,

it's you need to go the other way around. Like who wasn't? It was like nine people. Yeah, who was on the right side of that. Certainly not John Victor Aspenal, who was born in Delhi, then part of the British Raj on June 11th, 1926. His mother was a lady named Mary Grace Horn.

She was the daughter of a highly regarded colonial official named Clement Horn, Clement built bridges in India, right? Like that was his job. So they're not aristocrats, right? But they are like upper middle class kind of verging on rich and within sort of the colonial system, they have a lot of cloud. Now that's not the same as sort of being somebody who's considered in like the ruling class

back home, right? But it's, you know, a pretty significant position over in India. Now Mary's father was the kind of dude who was pretty openly disappointed in her for being born a girl, not an uncommon situation in this time. And she grew up knowing that she was going to be basically a child in her father's control her whole life until she married. So as soon as she gets a chance, she jumps out of home

and she marries this guy, Robert Aspenall, who is a surgeon who joined the Foreign Service to see the world. So soon as she gets a chance, she jumps out of home and she marries this guy, Robert Aspenal, who is a surgeon who joined the Foreign Service to see the world. Their marriage wasn't great, they don't actually really like each other, but they have a kid together named Chip. And after having Chip,

Mary starts cheating on him straight away. She meets a young military officer, a lieutenant, and the two of them conceive their second child, our subject for today, John Aspenal, underneath the shade of a tamarind tree, which is kind of romantic. Yeah. Yeah, that's a romantic tree to have sex under.

I feel like a tamarind tree makes nice fruit. A romantic tree to do it on the outside. Yeah. I don't know, redwood is probably top of the tree. Yeah, redwood, I would say the smells are great. But no fruit. Anyway, no fruit. Yeah, John's a tamarind baby.

Now, I got two big sources for this series. One, both of them are biographies of John. One of them is this fauning 1988 book by Brian Masters. That's literally titled the Passion of John Aspenall. Um, what? It's like the A.T.s as well. So like very, very, history's already described this guy as a monster I'm guessing. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah, he's a monster in literally the only, he did two things. One of them was run a zoo that killed a shitload of people and the other of them was run a massive gambling hall. Like one thing I'll give the US, and I won't give us much. But when we have people who build casino empires, we're pretty open about like, yeah, it was just a gangster. Like yeah, that dude was a fucking gangster.

Yeah. Yeah, but also we lionize pieces of shit all the time. We just don't sure it is directly, we do back home. No, we lionize them. We lionize them. We just don't sure it is directly is we do back home. No, we lie and I enjoy yeah, we lie and I's them for being gangsters, you know, Alex Jones being like Trump is mobbed up and then you should definitely vote for him. Yeah. Yeah. God, I do think that England makes a special kind of bastard though. Yeah. You look at American history. We've got tons of monsters. There's this podcast is told and sure. But England makes a certain piece of shit. Yeah. We broom special. Yeah. It's not just enough to defraud people and kill people. It's, we

need to do so with a little bit of mustard on it. And what better way than a fucking zoo? Yeah, yeah, that is zoo. And that's who I've been wanting to talk about. There's an Adam Curtis documentary called The May Fair Set that covers a number of the people we'll be talking about. It's kind of going in some different directions because it's a lot broader in its purview. But there's a lot of these, because the guys who are like John Aspenhall's friends

who we'll talk about are like sponsoring coos in a bunch of different countries. And I want to be able to talk about more of them But like you have to get this grounding in sort of the social society that they come from before you can you can Explain much about like why they got to do the things that they got to do so Aspenal is kind of the center of all that and that's why we're starting with him this week the other biography I read about him is a 2007 book called The Gamblers by John Pearson.

And yeah, it's a lot better. Pearson wrote a biography of Ian Fleming. He's like as a professional journalist as well as a biographer. And he does a lot better job of being kind of critical to the subject. But yeah, Masters' book doesn't mention the fact that Mary had her son sort of out of wedlock because that wasn't really known at the time.

But by the time that Pearson writes his book, the evidence we have suggests that, you know, Dr. Aspen all learned pretty quickly that John is not his biological son. And to his credit, I guess he doesn't tell him or seem to have taken it out on him in any way, but that's not really a grand gesture because the Aspenal family follows this kind of fine upper-class tradition of not raising their kid, right? Like he doesn't disown his son for not being technically his son, but he also has nothing

to do with the raising of either of these kids because from their earliest days John and ship are raised by a local Indian nanny And they actually as kids Considered themselves Indian as their mother did their early contact with with the UK was was pretty much non-existent And just because they were raised in India. Yeah in India born in Delhi, you know raised in India. Yeah, in India, born in Delhi, yeah, yeah, yes, yes. And they're the their first language is Hindi, right? Like that's what they're speaking that before they really get fluent in English. So it's not like necessary. And

this is you read biographies of like British kids born in India in this time. And that's like a pretty common experience. So master says this about John as a young child, quote, he said whatever he came into his head, even as an infant, he was a grieble company, lively and affectionate and very attractive, with a shock of blonde hair. Their grew between Miss Aspenall and her son, a powerful bond, uncommonly close and confidential, which was never to be impaired. In any fraternal quarrel, no matter how mild, and irrespective of the justice of the case,

Mary always took John's side. And this is probably, I mean, it's theorized by some of the people writing about them. This is because she hated her husband, so she's gonna like prefer the kid that she didn't have with him. But yeah, she was something of a wild woman at her time, very independent.

She was also an inveterate gambler, so when John spent time with his mom, some of the first experiences that he would have had as his mom playing poker or other games of chance with her friends, wagering money on them. Childhood was also characterized by regular close contact with exotic animals. He's got a great uncle over there.

Like, you know, if you're part of the ruling colonial class in India, you get to spend a lot of time with elephants. And so he had an uncle who would hold these garden parties and just bring out his elephants. And the kids would like feed them sugar cane and get lifted into the air by them by their trunks. And one of John's first experiences would be being odd by what he called the power and gentleness of these elephants. What sounds pretty cool, right? Like that's a dope childhood experience to have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So compared to the average British childhood, yeah, time, we're just like being hit with a cane. Yeah. Being hit with a cane. And learning to be racist,

the British way. Yeah. Yeah. And don't forget dying in a coal mine. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a big one. Three. Yeah. Which was considered old. Yeah. So another with his moms, his mom has some boyfriends during this period of time. I don't like John knows that they're her boyfriends. They're just like friends of hers. But one of these guys who he comes to like idolize has two pet tigers, which is why John idolizes this guy, Scott Pet Tigers. So he gets to like play with these guys tigers.

Now this idyllic childhood doesn't last long because as I noted, parents don't raise their kids and when John was six and Chip was, I think like a year or so older. The Aspetals decide it's time for their kids to get out of India and go off to a boarding school. This was the fashion at the time. It was also a social necessity. Again, they're not aristocrats, but they're wealthy and they want to be in the aristocracy. And if you're going to do that, if you want to fit in with those people, you have to go to the same schools they do, which are public schools. But ideally, your child is put aside so that you can focus on being rich.

Yeah, you also don't want to deal with them. Yeah. You want to have a child, but you don't want to have a child at that time in history. Yeah. You want to know them when they're a cute baby and then when they're 18. And if graduates, just in time for you to hate them. Yeah. Yeah, for you to really grow to resent them. We are talking about like very fancy boarding schools here.

Like that is, that's like we're talking about Eaton, which is where the, basically the ruling class has sent their boys for forever, right? Yes. And I think he's gonna go to, John's gonna go to a school called Rugby, which is named that because that's where Rugby comes from. Like it's the, it was where, yeah, Rugby got sort of started off, I guess, which I,

I hadn't realized came from an institution initially, but yeah, there you go. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a country. I like Rugby, though. I don't know. I wouldn't play it, but I feel like it's more more honest than football. Like, let's get those pads on out of there.

What are you talking about? American football. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah. I was, I was a large boy in a British private school known for sports and drama. And let me tell you you that's the worst place in the world to be overweight. And I was pretty housed like 350 pounds. And at I grown up in America, I always think I would have made an offensive limo. A deeply offensive person, I'm very hard to move would have been great. But now I was in England where I was just called various insults around my size and the speed I moved at.

It wasn't enjoyable at all. Ah, nevertheless, I've learned absolutely nothing from that. So just other than a deep self-loathing, but that's what being British is. That's the core of it. I mean, yes, the British identity is hating oneself. Yeah, that's, I guess the American identity is loving oneself and then hating everybody who's similar to you. Yes, exactly. Or having no loyalty to anyone including yourself somehow. Yeah, yeah, deeply betraying your past self in the hope that it will benefit your future self. Something like that.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, there we go. So yeah, he goes to this fancy, this fancy boarding school, and this is the tradition for the ruling class. If you are part of why you go to a school like Eden is so that you can learn how to talk, there's accents that are associated with the very oldest of these schools and how to fit in with the people who are kind of

ruling the empire and Part of the way in which kids these children who go to these schools are molded into that tradition is by Basically a system of hazing, right? Like that's a huge, and how you make these kids. And this brings us to a difficult topic to discuss that's going, it's gonna sound like I'm using this slur here. I'm probably not, we'll deal with that because the kind of tradition that rules both the school that John Aspenall is gonna go to

and eaten all of these schools that like produce upper class ruling types is called fagging. Now, I have to, again, go and do explain where this comes from. And I'm gonna quote from the online etymology dictionary here. Hey, everyone, Robert here, I didn't make this clear. The definition I'm quoting from is the definition of the slur because that relates to what we're about to talk about. American English slang, probably from earlier contemptuous term for women, 1590s, especially an old and unpleasant one, and reference to

Faggot, a bundle of sticks as something awkward to be carried. Compare baggage, worthless women, 1590s. It may also be reinforced by yetish faggle, homosexual, literally little bird. It may also have roots in British public school slang, which is the term that we're talking about here, a junior who does certain duties for a senior. So the term fagging is to refer to this relationship in these public schools, where junior students are made to act as servants for senior students. And the actual word they use both comes from the fact

that because the original word means a bundle of sticks, part of the, especially like in the 1800s, part of what these younger kids are doing for older kids is like stoking the fires in their rooms and stuff. And it also comes from these kind of derogatory terms for women. And it may come from this Yiddish term for homosexual as well. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One of them is that there's not uncommonly sexual relationships, often with a lot of coercion

between seniors and juniors. So, you know, this is a messy tradition. Americans will be familiar with the bones of this if they've read the Harry Potter books because the system of like prefects and headboys and shit and like the magic school in that book series is a sanitized version of how culture works in these like boarding schools, right? Like that is like Rowling kind of adds girls to the mix and removes the hazing and the sex abuse, but she's writing about the same kind of system, which I, I, I, I had only started to realize like a year or so ago when I started reading about how some of these

schools worked. It's pretty wild. I don't think most people are kind of aware of how this stuff started out. Bullying is like a big part of school in England. And teachers do not, and I finished 2004. I wonder if, when I graduate secondary school, bullying has always been a big deal. Yeah. It's always fucking happened. And the teacher's like, well, you know, it's bad, but what do we meant to do about it? Stop the child?

No, no, absolutely not. Then you're like, and eventually just, there was a period of time where I was bullied so consistently, I just stopped showing up to school and they call my parents, my parents are just like, is he still being bullied? Well, and that actually stopped it for a little bit, but it's just, I genuinely think England,

two of its bones is just, they think abuse is good. I think England British school systems, like we have prefects so that we have miniature fucking police walking around the school. It's just an insane system. And thank God we actually have gun control in England because the anger and resentment in young kids in England is brewing constantly because teachers are fucking useless. And so if they create little monsters in England, that's why it's because it's

part of British blood. You must be subject to abuse from school. That is, I genuinely think that they believe that to this day. I mean, that is actually literally what I'm about to read from this. And this is from like a 1961 study, because like the system arises, part of the idea is that we are molding the minds who are going to run the empire, right? And if you're going to lead, you need to learn how to follow.

So that's why we set these kids underneath each other, right? So they can learn going to lead, you need to learn how to follow. So that's why we set these kids underneath each other, right? So they can learn how to exist within this hierarchy. There is this belief that putting them in this system will make them more compassionate because they'll have been sort of governed cruelly by kids who are old, which is insane. The idea that like, well, if we let kids abuse each other, it'll make them kind of adults. Why would you think that? But that is, I'm gonna read this quote. This is from a 1961 study by Paul Nash in History of Education Quarterly.

And he's writing about, again, it's hard to read this sometimes because the name of this system that I've described is called the prefect fagging system. There's like a little dash between the two of them, which I know guys, but like, this is what it's called, right? Quote, under the prefect fagging system, senior boys are given a major role in governing the school, wielding discipline and carrying out responsibility.

They are called variously prefects, monitors, or prey posters, chosen according to many criteria, including physical and intellectual prowess, the principal consideration in their selection, apart from seniority, has traditionally been character. Usually the prefects are members of the sixth form, and while in some schools, all members of the sixth are granted privileged status. The two bodies are not customarily identical. At the other end of the scale, new boys entering the school begin by serving as fags for senior boys. Their duties consist of almost anything the fag master cares to impose from cooking and

running errands to blacking shoes and kindling fires. And since public school kids, these are like the future ruling class, this is like you're training these kids to follow. And part of the goal here, there's this real system, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, there's this particular understanding that smaller boys are weaker and less valuable, right? And they need to get used to the idea that they should be subservient to larger and better bread boys, right?

And there's some, there's some flexif you're a small boy whose whose dad is a really highly placed member of the aristocracy, you can get some sort of like wiggle room there. But that is how it works a lot of the time. Quote, with teacher authority, unable or unwilling to protect the rights of the weaker, life for the small boy in the early 19th century public school was frequently one of servitude and fear. The Westminster review complained that the experience of starting off as a fag and graduating without any reference to merit to a point of having fags of his own encouraged the public schoolboy to see life in terms of tyrants and slaves. Fagmasters often treated their fags with great cruelty and imposed unreasonable tasks upon

them. When James Gaskell was a fag at Eden, he was sent by his fag master out of bounds on errands. If seen by a master, he was reported to Dr. Keat, the headmaster, and flogged. One sixth form boy at Eaton in cold ridges time ordered his fag to eat a tallow sandwich by way of acquiring an extra relish for his own cold mutton at the sixth form supper table. And what that means is that like they had mutton sandwiches. Right.

Yeah, he just pulled all the fat off of his, took the other boys' meat and gave him a sandwich that's just like stringy bits of fat in a, yeah, it's, this is hazing, this is abuse, right? It's disgraceful because there are people to this day who would hear this system and be like, other than the name, which is of course we can't say anymore. Yeah.

Which we stopped saying that in 2011. Yeah, it's going like being in a British private school. I'm not saying that you had like institutional abuse, but also you had a great deal of ignorance from a, a toward a even. And there was genuinely, I still believe to this day there is still this instinct within British schooling, private and public, especially private, that boys must be made to learn about the real world by giving them this very bizarre prison system that they will never participate in again. And but the other thing you say about like compassion, back when I was bullied in school,

that was kind of the, oh, it will make you a stronger person. And when we tell them, when we tell them you talk to the teacher, which I never wanted to happen, they will feel bad and be more better. No, they will be angry, they go in trouble and bully you more. It's just, the actual way to deal with it is just to kick the little fuckers out of school, by the way. You know, you don't go to school anymore, but this is back in the time when England did not care about this stuff. Yeah. This is back when England was like, this is just how we make a little army of fascists. Yeah.

And this is like, this is both, if you kind of are reading through the height of the empire and then sort of its dissolution and you come across these stories of some of these really crazy decisions people will make about what to do, had to crack down on things. Well, it's being made by kids who went to these schools and who were brought up in this system. This does explain a lot. Yes. And while this system was very much supported by the men who controlled the government at the time, the system we're talking about, this prefect fagging system is not...

It's certainly not nearly to the same extent. This has largely been dismantled, which doesn't mean there's not still abuse and bullying. It's just not set up in the exact way that it used to be, right? But you know, this is, while this is kind of supported by the people in power at the time, there are regular controversies by the time that John is going through it, right? It's 150 or so, something like that, years old by the time he is in school,

this kind of starts in the early 1800s. And there are some controversies because obviously not every kid is going to survive a system like this, right? And it's, there's also difficulty because since these prefects are being relied upon to manage large chunks of how these schools work, these kids who are made prefects actually have a lot of power and they often clash with the headmaster and with the school administration

because like you actually can't force them to do some things because you're reliant upon them to run the school. And because not just that the other dynamic is that the school. And because not just that, the other dynamic is that you may want to punish some of these kids, but if their dad is like the prime minister, you're going to have some trouble. Yeah, you can't do anything. Yeah. So obviously, as I noted, bullying and abuse is extreme in the system, and often sexual. Now, some of this, to be fair, is just boys who are close in age who are like engaging in consensual relationships. but that's not the only thing that happens. And because these boarding schools are also so locked down socially, boys are trained not to complain, not to respond to abuse with anything, but like, you know, going along with

it. It presents an opportunity for some of the adults in this system who are pedophiles. And pederasty is very common in this system. Suicides are not unknown in 1930, Charles Fairhurst, a 14-year-old boy killed himself during break because he decided he couldn't, and I think he's an etonian, he just couldn't return to the school. And his dad said that he had done it because of the fagging system, right? That 1961 article, I think, gives a pretty good overview. But it also avoids discussing some of the more prudent details, which is like the rampant

molestation of kids under this system. Masters and Pearson both avoid this topic while talking about Aspenall, but I found a good 2014 article by a survivor of abuse in these schools, Alex Rinton, who discusses his experience in the 60s and 70s. One of us new boys, I still don't know who, had complained about the regime in dormitory 5 to his parents. This was the cardinal sin.

What happened in school stayed in school. Billy punished us all. We didn't tell tales again. Some of the key locations have shrunk absurdly small, the brick chapel were Billy Grypt the Bible and Herangdas with the backing of his three trustiest prefects, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, and God. Just as tiny now as the assembly room where daily, 120 boys aged 7 to 13 were ranked on wooden benches.

Here the diatribe, the mass punishments and the public humiliations happened. This is where he would detail who would cry it under the cane the previous night. Jones and Smith took it like gentleman, but Rinton blubbed like a baby. Rinton recalled vividly how he used to look at the picture of the queen in their playroom, and beg in his mind for her to visit and save them all from this horrible system.

As per usual, the queen did nothing. Rinton would go on to experience as well sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher. And yeah, it's a pretty awful story. It's one of those things. You will encounter stories like this from some pretty famous people over in Britain. Richard Dawkins has talked, and it's often kind of odd. He's talked obliquely about the sexual abuse he encountered, calling it mild pedophilia, and saying, I am very conscious

that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours, which I think you can. In this case, riches, yeah. Yeah, the physical abuse is also something that some people will talk about. Eddie Isard specifically has talked about this quite a lot. Quick update, as of June of 2023, Eddie Isert has made it clear that she prefers to go by Susie, although she says you can't go wrong by still calling her Eddie or using other pronouns, but I'm still going to re-record this bit. Isert

has spoken about how she was sent to a boarding school at age seven, shortly after her mother's death. She cried relentlessly for about a year, quote, my housemaster would help me along with beatings when he could fit them in. And because John Aspenall is, I think, one of the people who grows up sort of taking a weird degree of pride and going through this system, he doesn't complain about this experience. And there's certainly not complaints baked in, like, his biographers don't talk about this as abusive,

but they do talk about the abuse that Aspenal suffers in this system. It's just sort of normalized. It's like, well, this is just part of what you go through here. This paragraph from the master's book is typical. John's first year was spent in Cotton House, where he shared rooms with John's straddling Thomas, later to be a Tory MP

and Knight in a government whip. Within days, he was almost constantly being whacked by head of house, Hardy, from minor but regular infringement of rules. Far from being abashed, John would show off the strokes he had received, throwing Hardy into a fury of indignation, eventually announcing that he would whack Aspenal no longer, Hardy sent him to the butler, Ellsworthy, who devised devilish schemes for punishment, such as moving hundred wakes of coke, cleaning the floor beneath it and moving the coke back again. Anyway, I guess we'll go to ads right now. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner, Rob called me, so let Addo Brein and ask me what I knew about this

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or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Yeah, and you'll hear a lot of the punishments are like weirdly collective. Like all of the kids have to paddle you. Like you run down a gauntlet or like down a staircase as they hit you and stuff. It's a, yeah, a lot of thought goes into how to hit kids. Deep sadism runs through a lot of what? A lot of British history, a lot of the world's evils come from England and a lot of what England taught was a form of

punishment driven success that you could own. It was very much a freedom through work. Yeah. I mean, eugenics comes from England. The eugenics club was formed in England. Yeah. England has, and to this day I'd argue, I realized my experience with the school system in England, it still has this, they can't physically abuse you anymore. They certainly can't sexually abuse you apparently, but they can certainly mentally abuse you. That is very fucking common.

And what inviurates me about this is hearing this stuff and this is horrifying and it's terrible, but terrible. But England has not advanced as far beyond this as they really would love to pretend. I am still scarred from my time in the British private school system. Yeah. Like I have friends who are still fucking mentally scarred from it. And it wasn't anything physical. It was the aiding in a betting of abuse by teachers. Teachers helped teachers would join in. And it's funny because they'll now claiming on this progressive nation and to an extent we are.

But then you really look at long and hard at what we do in our school system here. If spilling happens, but parents are the teachers, parents will do. Like there is genuinely a sense of all that you don't really want that smoke as a school. In England it's like oh boys will be boys. You have any, I don't know how many fucking times I've heard that. Pardon me for my sudden rant. No, no, no, no, no, no, that's the point of it, right? Like that's this is stuff I don't think as it's certainly not widely known over here about like the way that because there's I think part of it is because when most Americans encounter information about these schools it's through like fiction and I'm not just talking about

Rowling here but like her books are based on the fact that like for generations there have been a lot of like fictional stories about British boarding schools that have been very popular reading around the world, right? Like it's a genre. If Harry Potter was an accurate telling, Harry would have been a mass murderer. He was a viciously bullied kid at a boarding school, constantly bullied, and the institution did nothing. He'd have fucking killed someone. He had magic. Like, that's being manipulated by his professors. Yeah. His professor physically abused him. And it's magic, like, that's being manipulated by his professors. Yeah, he's, he's professor physically abused him. And it's like, like, many of them, like, and he told us.

And he loved it. And the user was this lovely kid. No, he would have been a violent, like, he would have been made violent by a violent system, like a lot of school boys in England. Yeah. And it's just, I remember reading it while I was in school and being like, this is fucking stupid. I don't even mean the magic.

I mean, the fact that he's just like, oh, I can shoot. I might want to shoot. We all have guns and we're not using them. Exactly. You know, not a single, truly violent child in there. Yeah. And no, it would have been horrifying. Yeah. It's just, it's so stupid because England could actually deal with this by having laws and regulations that stop this thing could have punishments for teachers to aid in a

bet and this. Instead, you get the occasional limp piece in the newspaper. It's another school does not stop bullying and nothing goddamn happens. So this sounds awful. They have improved the physical side and the pet arrest these side kind of. Yeah. Disgusting country. I'm so glad I left.

Now I live in an miracle in normal country And finally, yeah, good news about that. Yeah. So, you know, this is John's experience here. He's one of these kids. He has targeted a lot early on. His attitude, he's kind of this naturally rebellious person. And I will say to his credit, John is one of these kids who despite what he goes through

doesn't seem to be like mentally or physically aggressive to others. One of his classmates later said he was never cruel throughout his time there, and there are very few people about whom one can truthfully say that. So like most kids who go through this turn out worse than he did. So I'll give him credit for that. That takes something. That's something. credit for that. That takes something. And I, that's something. Yeah. That's for sure something. So John Aspen, all's mother is again, usually noted as sort of like favoring him. But if this is true, she still didn't prefer him to not having a kid around.

Because once he and Chip are off in these boarding schools, they don't really see their mom or their dad very much. During summer break, he doesn't live with his parents. He lives with this like family of farmers that his parents paid to take them in. Which is very common during that time. Like they just like ship the fucking kid off, ship him one way or the other way, right?

Yeah, he's done. You don't have a kid so you raise it. Yeah, anywhere but here. And this is good for John actually, because he loves animals. You don't have a kid so you raise it. Yeah, anywhere but here. And this is good for John actually, because he loves animals. So he spends a lot of time on this farm, getting to take care of and raise animals.

He kind of idolizes this farmer who helps to raise him because he's really good with animals. And this is just kind of John's passion from an early age. He also spends a lot of time with his grandparents who are pretty strict authoritarians. And yeah, he basically just does not see his parents. And he kind of grows up very independent and notably unwilling to take any shit from adults. Like that's a thing that people will notice about John from a pretty young age. He has his own ideas about the world

and he's not really willing to bend on them. As a teenager, he is a member of, it's like the cadet training program or something at his boarding school. It's basically an ROTC type thing. ROTC, but British, yeah. Yeah, although they do, I was in ROTC and we didn't do anything.

I like we marched around and shit, but apparently his ROTC and we didn't do anything. I like we marched around and shit, but apparently his ROTC equivalent, they do war games and stuff where they were like do fake attacks on houses and buildings and stuff. John recognized this as kind of like larping and refused to participate during these actions. He would go to sleep nearby.

He'd just be like napping with his other voice because he was like, this is pointless. I'm not going to do it. Which I, you have to respect. Like, yeah. Yeah. But also, was that not a time when that might actually have happened?

Conscripts was a real threat at those times. It's just very weird that like the one time, like he wasn't actually correct in that. No, you were right, because a lot of his, well, they're all a little old, because he's going to join the military like in 45 is when he's going to start his service. Oh, okay. Yeah, but they could have like they were very, very, very England loved wars.

We were going to have a few. We're always having one. Yeah. They've, he very well could have, but he doesn't. He was kind of indifferent in athletics. He was not particularly interested in dating. From what I can see, he probably would have been considered kind of a nerd for his day. Now there's not a lot of great outlets for that as there are today.

So the kind of nerd he is, he spends all of his time reading colonial adventure stories by guys like H. Rider Haggard. John's favorite book by Haggard was called Not a the Lily and it's this book about the Zulu King Shaka who was this like very good military commander who leads this kind of uprising war against commander who leads this kind of uprising war against the British Empire in Africa, kind of his winning for a while before, you know, tragically loses. And it's one of these things that happens a lot in the history of the Empire. Well, they'll have this local leader who fights against them, kind of comes close to winning and then gets massacred along with all of his people. And then it's turned to a hero, right?

Like afterwards, like people like within the empire will be like, Oh, what a noble man that we killed. That's a real shame that we had to wipe that dude out. I don't need to be born somewhere else. Yeah. Quote, Aspenal, and this is from a master's book, Aspenal continued this tradition and throughout his school days enthralled other boys so much with Zulu lore and accounts of battles and personalities that even those who can remember nothing else about him recalled the Zulu

obsession. He even went so far as to claim his mother was a Zulu princess and some of the younger boys, perhaps unaware that his blonde hair, blue eyes, and fair skin were inconvenient evidence believed him. So there we go. That's good. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kid stuff too, I guess,

lying about who your family is so that you sound cooler. It's this weird mix of like, But back then you could probably make up anything. Yeah, it's a lot easier. It wasn't really an internet for so much. Check, I just get to be a complete fancest. You'd have to go to the library to prove that this kid's life. Yeah, exactly.

And you've got the time for that. And I will not be doing that. No, I have hazing to see too. Yeah, I've got kids to hit. As they grew newer to adulthood, John started to show an aptitude for making money as well. He and his brothers started dealing guns while they are like teenagers. And it's easier back then, right? I don't think there's like laws really about it. So they're just like buying old, these are hunting weapons. They're buying old hunting weapons and like fixing them up and selling them for a profit. They're also

like doing hunting and stuff and kind of basically selling the game they get to rich people who don't want to be arsed to do it themselves, but want to have like a trophy. And kind of in the middle of doing all this, the two boys basically invent the entire modern industry of internet scams and analog form. And this is fascinating. I kind of, I think you're going to enjoy this. Chips was the more resourceful entrepreneur of the two at this stage. It was he who made the money, John who did his bidding. John was too dreamy and idealistic, too much throwmantic to grasp the practical steps towards profits. One of Chips' ruses was to advertise in the times, inviting interested parties to send in one pound,

in return for which they would receive enlightenment on the mysteries of how to make soap. Hundreds of letters arrived at prep school. They were answered with a page copied from the Encyclopedia Britannica. That's like, he's running like a kind of a chat GPT scam, right? They just copied directly from the Encyclopedia. Fuck you, no, no, no.

I approve all like British scams of that era because it was such a rotten country, such an inherently corrupt institution. It was such a rotten country, such an inherently corrupt institution. It was such a Britain was such a natural scammer, the things they did, the things the British Empire did in every other country was so disgusting. I, of course, we're going to have this happen. Of course, we invented that.

Yeah, it is, it is a weirdly modern scam, though. Yeah. Like, it's just like, this is, yeah, they would have, they could have gotten so much further with it if they'd had the internet, you know? Yeah. Chatchy PT would have really been a wonder to these kids. So early Crasen Steins.

Yeah, early Crasen Steins. So after graduation. So after graduation. Yeah, Crasenstein, yeah, Crasenstein. Yeah, that's probably right. Sure, Crasen's. Steen. Yeah. That's probably right. So after graduation. Steen Crasen's. That's what it is. Steen Crasen's. He joins the Royal Marines.

He's got to do his time in service, which I think is about three years. He gets really lucky. He comes in right at the end of World War II, and he doesn't have to do any of the war part, which is great. You would prefer to avoid that if it all possible. Not a great war to have to fight in. So he demobilizes in 48 and then applies to Jesus college Oxford and was accepted. And again, for Americans, Oxford, I think is like actually five universities when people refer to Oxford. A couple of different schools there. They're all nice, right? They're all like, I have prestigious. There's a lot of shit talks for God.

No, but Jesus is like sort of the least of the prestigious of them, at least at this time, I don't know where it stands today. Maybe at that time, but it's still everywhere is good now. Every word, yeah, these are all very good, right? And so he goes there, but he doesn't fall in love with it, right? He kind of is disillusioned very early on, part of it because he doesn't know what he wants to do at this point.

He thought he wanted to be a writer, and then he thought he wanted to be a journalist, but he doesn't actually like to write, and he's like, wow, this is a hard job, and it doesn't make much money. So he would be a perfect modern journalist there. Yeah, he'd be a perfect modern journalist there. So he drops that ambition pretty quick, and he just decides to dress like Oscar Wilde for a while and try to build a reputation as a poet.

Yeah, he's got this purple velvet suit he wears everywhere. Just a dandy now. Uh huh. Dandy Pilled. And he gets away with that for a while but he like doesn't actually like writing poems or making art in any way and you know you can only kind of keep up that lie so long before you get kind of bored of it. And while this is going on, well, he's kind of finding himself in Oxford, his mother was

off partying and eventually she hooks up with another army officer. His luck would have it. This guy, Colonel Osborne, like they marry, she becomes lady or she becomes, you know, Mrs. Osborne. And then he inherits a baronetcy, which is like, I believe that's kind of on the lower end of the aristocracy, like a baronet. It's an, it's not. Yeah, you get a few, but maybe the middle class of the aristocracy, I don't know. Any kind of aristocracy we have to explain why it's good is not great. No, no, no. But this works out great for John because he inherits a baronetcy. His mom is now the lady Osborne and this kind of lifts them all up, right? So this he gets to be on more than even footing with the other with the kids at Oxford who

are like members of the of the nobility. And this is why he's as an adult is going to be Lord Aspenal, right? Because he this baronet see goes to him eventually. That makes socialization at Oxford a lot easier. And he falls in with a crowd of wealthy young men who are real aristocrats with family fortunes that gave them basically endless trust funds. They are all his friends at school are all these rich boys. None of them have ever had to do anything on their own. And their whole youth, as we've talked about,

was this mix of like psycho private school bullying and these, you know, outside of that when they're with their families, these kind of interminable rituals that you have to carry out as members of the aristocracy. So these are rich kids. They are kids who have suffered some psychic damage as a result of their education,

and they are permanently bored, right? And so the only thing in their life that lends them excitement is gambling. That is the joy that these kids have is to gamble. Yeah. Beautiful. Mm-hmm. Yeah, great situation. And this is...

Yeah. So John learns to play poker with them, and he does not have, he's one of these kids, not the only one. This is a period where kind of the, the upper crust is opening up a little bit and there's some room for these kids who are born to just rich families to kind of move in and out of it. And John is one of these kids who is kind of welcome in these circles, even though he doesn't really have a family fortune, but the fact that he's not rich, you know, he's rich compared to like a

normal person, right? But he's not rich by the standards of these guys. He's certainly not rich enough to gamble like they do. Right. So he actually has to be before this is like the beginning of new money. Yeah, exactly. And he is one of the first new money people to really like a sinned, right? But he doesn't have that money at this point, which means he has to actually be good at gambling, right? He can't just waste money. I'm losing weeks. Yeah, exactly. And this is from Pearson's book, The Gamblers. Quote, he said later, from the first time I settled down to play, I felt at home as I never had before. The excitement invigorated him. the risk challenged him, and he relished the company of gamblers,

which came as a relief from those earnest Welshman back in college. Later, he used to claim that gamblers formed a superior race to passive tedious humanity, and he rather shocked the journalist Compton Miller by telling him, he regarded people who don't gamble as emotional cripples. To be able to count himself among the emotionally elect, must have been more satisfying than dressing up as Oscar Wilde or studying Beowulf or Chowcer, and nobody could doubt his dedication to his chosen field of studies. Soon, most of his waking hours were spent gambling in one way or another. The stakes rose. Some of his early partners, like John Lawrence, the future Lord

Oxy, became worried and dropped out. It was getting too hot for me to handle, and it was obvious that John was heading for the dangerous world of big time gambling. I just think it's marvelous you found another kind of British eugenics. Yeah, yeah. Gambling super. They found another way to be xenophobic. Yeah. Innovators. It is really innovative. And I mentioned that Adam Curtis documentary, The Mayfair set, which is about Aspen all in his friends. Curtis will draw a direct line with that between a lot of these guys who are sponsoring coos, right, who are doing shit, who are like behind a lot of like the military actions

in the Suez crisis. These guys who build private armies and use them to like change the nature of power and they're all gamblers. They all gamble with Aspenal. And he's like gambling is crucial to understanding why the people who are running a lot of foreign policy for the empire in the like latter half of the 20th century do the shit that they do, right? Because they're gamblers, like they're willing to kind of take these big wild risks of chance.

Yeah, they don't fear losing. Yeah. Or at least the idea of risk for them is a little more valuable. Yeah. They fear losing less than they fear not rolling the dice. Yes. I think is probably an accurate way to see it. So Aspenall is a pretty good gambler naturally, right? And when he does lose, you know, because these games are all between very rich people, there's like IOU systems, right? So you can kind of float for a while if you have a couple of bad nights by kind of

like rolling those IOUs forward until you win some. So he's able to kind of hang on. There's some like tight moments there, but he's able to hang on. But he realizes like, I don't want to just be gambling like this and potentially lose eventually the real way to like get ahead and to kind of build a place for myself in the society is to start hosting games, right? Yeah. So he starts to draw a network of close friends to him who he uses as almost like, this is almost like a corporate enterprise, except for it's just purely bonds of friendship here, right?

Friendship and sort of like mutual need. The first guy that he kind of attracts to him is this fellow Lord Maxwell Scott. And I say, Lord, he is the Lord Maxwell Scott. He's also like 18 at this point, right? These are all still kids. And Maxwell Scott is so addicted to gambling. He's one of these guys who

he's got he's got perfect noble credentials, right? So he's really good at making friends. He can make all of these connections to other members of the aristocracy. He's inherently welcome at every party, right? There's no event that's close to this guy because of how highly placed he is within the system. But he is a god awful gambler who is terribly addicted to it. Not only does he play games of chance, he said to gamble like, people will see like a crow flying in the air and he'll bet on them as to whether or not

it's gonna like land and which tree it's gonna land on. He'll put money on this shit. Or like which drop of rain is gonna make it to the bottom of a window first, like he's that kind. Like there's nothing going on in this man's soul other than the momentary thrill of play single wager. It's like a cartoon character. Yeah. It is really.

I love that. I love that there are guys like this that existed in history just completely insane dipshits. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's what I call living versions of the success memes that you find on Instagram posted exclusively from like India and the Philippines. Yeah, yeah. By the way, India gets a huge aversion of these like this boarding school system with like kind of carbon copied over to it. That's a whole British story. Disgusting. Yeah. So between the two of them, I mean, oh yeah, yeah. Hey, it's we all come from horrible countries here. You know, this is a this is a

safe place to work through it. I come from Oklahoma boy, like I can tell you some stories. from Oklahoma boy like I could tell you some stories. Speaking of Oklahoma, this show is sponsored by the state of Oklahoma. That makes a literally no sense. Oklahoma, we banned something else completely in a dine today. I don't know. I'm angry. That was one of your worst I gotta say. That was not a good one. Not a good one. Yeah, but you know what's illegal in Oklahoma right now Not much abortion. Yeah. Oh, well. Oh, no a lot of stuff is illegal. It's just not the kind of stuff that should be illegal Books yeah books. Yes. We have definitely been banning some books back in my old home state come to Oklahoma You can also leave yeah come to, a great place to exit. Anyway, here's some other ads.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history. That's Rob Breiner, Rob called me, so would Ed O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award-winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers. We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president. My dad, the 5JFK, screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the Cuban Missile Crisis. We'll reveal why Lee Harvey Oswald isn't who they said he was.

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much about for quite a few years. Listen to McCartney, a Life in lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, the second friend that he draws, that MassPenal draws to him, is this guy Dominic Elways. Elways is a mediocre gambler,

but he's incredibly handsome and charming with the ladies, right? So between Max, we'll Scott and L. Ways, Aspenall can get all of like the really rich kids to his parties, and he can get women to his parties, right? Which is sort of like the two ingredients in this social set for being able to have a good gambling party, right? I should also note as a fun aside, this is just like in Pearson's book, which is Pearson as a journalist is very much kind of close to this community. So while he's sort of critical about them, you get these lines from him where it's like, oh, you just come from a different world.

And as like a funnicide, Pearson's like, always his friends had a term for him, an SIT, which means not safe in taxis. And this is like portrayed as a funny anecdote. What that means is that like, you can't put L. Ways in a taxi with a young woman or he will just assault her, right? Like that's what that term means. That's what that term means.

Yeah, that's not just English. I'll give you that. But yeah, that is particularly this kind of guy. Like that's what it means to be a ladies man at this period of time. Yeah. So that's cool. John seems to have decided that the life of a gentleman

gambler was the life that he wanted to live. So he drops out of Oxford. He actually, on the day of his exams, like he's so close to graduating that it's like exam day, and instead of going to take them, he fakes an illness so he can gamble on horse races. Which I do respect to be honest. Like average British man.

That's commitment. Yeah. So the boy start. You'll learn more at the horse track. Go down the grand. Grant's boy doesn't understand. So the boy start renting rooms at the horse track. That's the new one. Go down the Grand Hats. Boy, it doesn't understand. So the boys start renting rooms at the Ritz Hotel and hosting poker parties. These are very popular parties, but they're also expensive

because like Aspenall, he gets a little bit of a cut from like each pot, but he's also, he has to pay for food and he has to pay for alcohol. And like, these are very rich people. So that's not cheap food in alcohol. You're not throwing together some ham sandwiches and beat it. People are appealing to the opacross you actually had to make an effort.

Yeah. So they have trouble breaking even. Aspen all is often reliant upon his rich friends in order to keep floating the games to the next week. And he's like, this is not going to I'm not gonna get rich doing this shit. Right. And so while he's kind of trying to puzzle this out, he comes upon a new game of chance

that is going to open the world up to him. And this game is called Shaman Defeire. Have you heard of Shaman Defeire? No. I learned about it from a Warren Zeevon song, but it's the heroine of games of chance. That's how it's described by some people who were both heroine addicts and gambling addicts, right?

And I would explain this because I don't think it's widely known anymore. But yeah, the way he finds out about Shemendefair is his friend, Elwiz, kind of wangles him in invitation to this regular game held by the Vickr. Who's this guy who who pretends to be a vicar, but is really just a degenerate gambler dressing like a religious figure in order to like make people trust him so he can take their money. And Aspen all has known this guy for a while, but he comes to his house to this shimand affair game and he's like, your house is much nicer than it should be. Where are you getting all this money?

And the vicar is like, well, there's this new game that's blowing up. And if you're the dude running the house that night, you make crazy money off it. And it's called Shaman Defeire. So as I noted earlier, the guys who are gambling in this, right? Are these rich kids, most of whom inherited huge fortunes from their parents who died during the war years? And in this period of time, this is like the early 50s, the English aristocracy, there are historic levels of cash on hand, what's called ready cash.

So you've got all these young people who have not really been seasoned by the world, who are very naive, and who have what seemed at them to be endless piles of liquid assets, right? And they have this kind of equally historic desire to throw this money away to feel alive for a second. And so the most popular games among the aristocracy are not things like poker where they're skill-involved, where you're actually you're competing, right? You can be good at poker and it matters, you know? Yeah, but you're not exactly. You're not losing because you were bad, you're losing because the role of the dice, whatever. And because that's more thrilling, right? You want to be your chance. Yeah. So the games that are like popular among these kind of self-destructive

rich kids are the ones that have the purest amount of chance in them. And Shemendefer, it's beloved and it's addictive because it's the most random game around and it's very fast. Now I'm not going to go through the rules of Shemend affair here because there's silly and also I don't really, I'm not a game of chance guy, but the point about how it works is that it's very fast and it's very random. Within these games, the standard bet is a thousand pounds, which is about $25,000 in modern money. These games are played every 30 seconds. These people are putting down 25 grand in modern money every 30 seconds or so.

They love this because it is the fastest way to light money on fire. That's why shaman DeFair is beloved. It's just another form of doing drugs. It is, it is. And in fact, one of the people that Pearson cites is like a member of the aristocracy who was a heroin addict who is like, describes it as the heroin of gambling.

And another guy says famously, you don't give up on shemi, which is kind of the nickname for this game. Shemi gives up on you, right? Like you never quit this game. You just run out of money because it's so addictive. So, Asmin, all the best thing about this from his perspective is that if you are the house, the house gets paid 20% of the pot in each game, right? That was just sort of the cultural sort of understanding about how this

was going to work. And the idea is this compensates the host for running the game. But because every member, everyone who's putting into a pot is putting the equivalent of 25 grand. And you make a fucking fortune running chimingame. So wait, is the, so does the person running the game get a, is they like a VIG? Yeah, that's the VIG, right? That's like you get 20% of the pot automatically goes

to the house. Oh boy. I gotta run one of these pot automatically goes to the house. Oh boy. I got one of these. Yeah, right. It's actually explicitly illegal in UK law to do this now. I think the most famous way is where it's extremely illegal to run any kind of gambling yourself. Yeah.

That's a shame. Thank God we can go to Caesar's palace. And anyway, I don't know, at least it's democratized, right? They're robbing everybody here. I don't know, I guess it's better the way that he's doing it because the only people in these games are rich, right? I will say Aspenal's version of running a casino is much more ethical than any other version.

Yeah, yeah. It's the only time where that's the case. We're like excluding people is fine Because the people you're excluding are poor and can't afford to gamble like this So I'll give them that so aspen all he brings in is you know They start making money with these games. He brings in his mom to curate the meals because she's you know Know some great cooks Maxwell Scott being this kind of impeccably mannered guy picks the wine and John sort of in order to dress this up, they're running it out of different houses each week,

but he has to like make it look nice so he needs some fine art. These pieces like originals by like guys like Penini and Cannelletto, and he's able to get fine art by sort of going to different art dealers and saying, I'm totally gonna buy this piece, but I need to take it home and try it out for a couple of days, right? And because he's a lord and, you know, in good with the aristocracy, all of these places are like,

well, of course. No, you need to try a piece of artwork at home. That's how that works. Yeah, take it for a spin. Jesus Christ. So his first few games are hits and he just starts making piles of money. Right. Now, none of this is strict. This is a legal gray area at the time, right?

England's gambling laws make it a crime to run a casino or gambling house. You can't do that legally, but private homes are allowed to host gambling games, right? You can't, I think it's if you do it more than two or three nights in a row, it becomes illegal. So basically every week, they switch locations, right? And that way they're not running a gambling hall, right? These are independent games. Well, this is this man's game this week. And but they're all run by Aspenal, right? And he's using kind of his buddy Maxwell Scott, who is this guy that any anybody who's rich and fancy knows Maxwell Scott. So he can just go to all these other people with mansions and be like, hey, you want a host of game this week, you know?

I think they're usually kicking them a little bit of the VIG too. But the money is create, they're making, Aspenal's generally making something like 30,000 pounds a night off of these games, which is at this period of time, an insane amount of money. Now his expenses are high too, but he's still making a lot of money. And in very short time, he is rich.

And the best thing about being rich is you can get totally devoted to insane hobbies that poor people cannot afford. In John's case, being this kind of lifelong animal lover, the insane hobby he chooses to get into is adopting exotic animals. Perfect. Perfect. Oh, it's going to be good.

Get so British. Yeah. And that is legal at this point. It's like not till 76 that the UK makes it illegal to just like buy lions or whatever. Like yeah. In part because of this guy, but I'm going to read another quote from the gamblers here. Aspedal never said what took him to Mr. Palmer's pet shop in North London in early 1957. Still less what made him buy a small capuchin monkey.

If you live in eaten place and want an unusual pet to amuse your guests, you could do worse than a cappuccine monkey. They're small and affectionate and have a zany sense of humor all their own. Livelyer than a pecanese and more affectionate than asyamies, they take their name from the monklike hood around their head. This particular monkey was a great success with gambling friends who visited the house. One of them christened him dead loss, thereafter he was always known as deadi. Deadi's popularity turned to aspenals' thoughts to other animals. Like many people with

childhood memories of teddy bears, he seems to have regarded bears as friendly creatures. And from Mr. Palmer bought a pair of young Himalayan bears. He called them Esau and Iyesha, took them home to eat in place, and for a while did his best to make them socialize among his guests. Legend has it that a short-sighted pier once mistook Esau for another member of the House of Lords, but Himalayan bears are not as sociable as they appear, and before long Aspenal reluctantly confined them to a cage that he constructed in the garden. This did nothing to deter him from trying to make friends with other wild animals, rather the reverse, and his problems with Esau and Aisha seemed to have convinced him

that if only he had bought the two bears young enough and brought them up to have no fear of him, this would have been quite possible. Yeah, that's the problem, mate. That's the problem. You didn't get those bears early enough, mate. Yeah, he tried to bring it back. No, I might, it's all due. You need to get early.

Yeah. That is his, his, his, the only thing he learns out of any time, like the reason why he has to cage them is that they attack people. And the only lesson he learns from this is like, these bears would be my friend if I'd gotten them younger. Right. Of course. That would, that is the, that's the lesson I've learned. Yeah. And he's from this. Pearson will kind of note that if you are running a gambling operation like this, if you're sort of the master of the casino It's kind of like being a cult leader, right? In part because people are really reliant upon you, especially the ones who are gambling too much and that sort of deranges

John like he's already grown up in this very rarefied strange world of high society He's become more deranged by being this kind of gambling maven. And something strange starts to happen to him as he starts taking on these exotic pets. He becomes so fascinated by them that he starts to grow irritated and enraged by the pedestrian pets that middle-class people have. It makes him angry to see someone with a dog or a cat, right? And he starts to hate people

who have less and extends this to their pets. He hates animals that aren't exotic, right? He thinks it's disgusting. Which is fascinating. Mentally, what's going on there is fascinating. I don't know how else to describe it. I love that. This is such a pretty story. We hate in a completely different way to the average person. Our brains are capable of loathing someone for the pettiest reasons. It is a major fabric cat. Yeah, fuck you. You blew pieces shit.

I have like a, I can't go to three rooms in my house due to the boomers. plural. Yeah, I get bitten by a bear every single day you coward. There are 18 timer and monkeys in my garden. I can account for 11. But I see seven evidence of another seven. One is pregnant. I don't know how they're all male. So because he's so angry at the idea of normal pets, in order to like both both Trump all of the cat and dog owners in the world He buys a tiger cup named Tara and he raises her like a kitten. She sleeps with him in his bed He'll take her on walks at night and one evening a family's dog attacks Tara or perhaps he says that the dog attacked Tara

We don't know that. We have no idea who attacked him. Trust him. Yeah. Perhaps Tara attacked him, but whatever the case is, his cat kills this dog with a single bite. Obviously, it's a tiger. Like, of course, this is how it gets.

Sure. Sure, man. Absolutely. So, Aspenal, I think this dog is like gotten out of someone's yard, right? Right. So Aspenal, it finds himself in the dead of night with his tiger and this like mold corpse of a family's dog.

And he just hurls it down the basement stairs of a stranger's house. That's like, that's how I'm gonna deal with this problem. It's where this shit goes. Yeah. We're all smugging a fucking butter. Yeah, it's quite an amazing guy. Trust me, I know how animals work. This is what you do. This is gonna fucking put it. Yeah, it's just quite an amazing guy. Trust me.

I know how animals work. This is where you put them. So in short order, it becomes obvious to him that like, I want more wild animals than I can. He's living in London, right? He already has. He has a tiger and two bears and several monkeys. That's too many animals for a house in the middle of London.

Yes. Fine. It's getting a bit crowded. So he buys this kind of decrepit country mansion on a bunch of acreage called Howlits. And he pays a lot of money. He has it like rebuilt and refurbished. And he starts setting up habitats for his bears

and for Tara. And soon more animals will join them. And we're going to tell that story and what happens next in part two. But before we kind of move on, I want to tell another story that kind of sets up and explains a bit what's happening with his gambling halls in this period of time. And to do that, we got to pull back a century or so to the early 1800s and discuss John

Aspenhall's predecessor, right, the gambling may have been who comes a generation before him and kind of sets up the board for him. So after kind of in the early 1800s after 1812, you've got this situation that's a lot like the UK after 1945 and that you've had this long series of wars. They've devastated the whole country, right? But the aristocracy, a lot of the sons of the aristocracy have died in this war. And suddenly there's this period of peace. And so you have this generation of aristocrats, Krat's come of age.

A lot of them have lost their parents in these conflicts, which means they have all of this money. And there's no war to fight, right? So they're all bored as fucking hell. And that creates this situation about a century before Aspenal's rise where gambling is going to flourish, right? Because there's all these rich kids with ready money looking for an adrenaline fix.

John is going to be the guy to take advantage of this in the late 40s and 50s, and a century earlier, his predecessor is this dude named William Crockford. One thing they have, they have a couple of things in common. One is that, you know, John is the son of a doctor and the daughter of a colonial officer. They're comfortable, they have money, but they're not the ruling class. Crockford is like a fishmonger by trade, which is a business owner, right? He comes from like he inherits this business, I think, from his dad, which means he's kind of solidly middle class, maybe upper middle class, right? So these are both guys who come from this position of like they have a degree of economic privilege, but they're not, they're not inherently like naturally going to ascend to the ruling class.

They have to work for that, right? And they both pick gambling as their way to get there. Like John, Croc for Discoverers is a teenager, he can calculate odds in his head, making him a good gambler. And he starts out just sort of gambling. But by the 1800s, he's made enough money that he buys this sort of facility in an upscale neighborhood. And he starts catering just to the rich. And he's kind of the first guy to do this. Prior

to Crockford, most gambling halls had been disreputable places where violence was common. Crockford locks, doesn't allow the poor in, doesn't even allow, you know, people who aren't aristocrats with money in other than himself generally, because he wants to create a safe place where the very rich can throw away their fortunes and splendor. And there's differences between the periods, the gamblers of Crockford's day like stuff like poker where there's an element of skill involved, right? Because, and he recognizes this is because, not because there's a big difference in odds, but they want the solution of control.

Which I guess shows a difference between these two generations of the ruling class that I think is kind of interesting. And Crockford kind of culminates in 1828, starting this place called Crockford, which is frequented Lord Wellington, the guy who defeats Napoleon is a regular there. Lord Byron is a regular there.

Like that's the kind of people who are sort of freaks. Yeah, very much so. And yeah, it's one of those things, a big part of White Crockford, he makes a decision early on, I don't want to host small businessmen or entrepreneurs, common people who have fortunes because they're smart, right?

I just want to host idiots who inherited all of their money because they will gamble it all away. And we don't know how much money Crockford ultimately fleeced out of the rulers of the British Empire, but it's generally agreed upon that he helped kind of clear out a generation of wealth, bankrupted a number of families,

and altered the map of British power, right? The aristocrats who like become wealthy and powerful after this point are sort of the people who weren't gambling it all away at Crockford power, right? The aristocrats who like become wealthy and powerful after this point are sort of the people who weren't gambling it all the way at Crocs Fritz, right? And that's going to be the case with Aspenal, right? He's kind of clearing the way for a new generation of people. And in the folks that kind of get rich and take the reins of power often don't come from the same sort of like ReraFied noble house backgrounds right before this is new money, right? That's what Aspenall is going to clear I think it's just interesting to talk about Crockford because this is apparently kind of a pattern right every 150 years or so

You'll have this gambling freeze that kills a chunk of the old aristocracy's wealth and kind of facilitates the transfer of that wealth to new mint, these business moguls and stuff. In the gamblers, Pearson writes, quote, more and more people were becoming vastly richer in that prosperous decade as city institutions like the Stock Exchange and Lloyds opened their boardrooms, previously reserved for members of the upper classes to the sharper offspring of the growing meritocracy. Takeover bids and property speculation offered others golden opportunities for acquiring a moderate amounts of wealth. A new class of money meant was now appearing, and the richer they became, the more of them attempted to assume the habits and pretensions of the vanishing ancient aristocracy. In the early 40s, George Orwell wrote that, no country under the sun is more obsessed by class than England. It still was. Class obsession had been in dimmick among the English for so long that it wouldn't

go away. And in the 60s, the very rich appeared if anything, to be more class obsessed than ever, as they infiltrated one by one, the former strongholds of the old nobility. And that's who John is going to be, right? He is a new money guy who is not just infiltrating, but going to shape kind of the next generation of power brokers, right? In part by like who his casino robs and who it transfers money to. He almost feels like it's just a chain of exploitation.

Mm-hmm. Like the British aristocracy exploited England, exploited overseas, and now someone found a way to exploit them. Yeah. Yeah. That is kind of beautiful. That's exactly what's happening. Yeah. It's England. It's a nice circle. So that's what we're going to end for today in part one. And in part two, we're going to have some more gambling and a whole lot more zoo stories and then kind of end on a murder. So that's all exciting.

That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Cool little cliffhanger there, Robert. Little cliffhanger there. Ed, you got any pluggables to plug here? Just read my newsletter at whereasyoured.app and if you need public relations services, easypr.com, please.

Excellent. Easypr.com and where's your ed at? Ed is one of my favorite people to read on the tech industry. And yeah, we will be back on Thursday. We'll have a little bit more. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

My name is Matt Maroonovich and I've been obsessed by homes that are stigmatized forever by the brittle crimes that happen inside four walls. And in my new podcast, Murder Homes, we tell those stories of routine days that start like any other and turn into wrenching nightmares. All across the country, there are addresses I'll introduce you to that you'll never forget and the experts that know them best. Listen to Murder Homes on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past five years, making my true crime podcast Helen Gone, I have received hundreds of messages from people asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. I'm Katherine Townsend.

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