RedHanded - Michael X - Part One: British Black Power | #445

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

Malcolm X was a true revolutionary, Michael X was an imposter.This con man realised that politics was a lot easier than poetry and rose to the top of the British Civil Rights Movement. All the while violently exploiting the Windrush generation he claimed to be fighting for.John Lennon and Leonard Cohen were his biggest fans. They donated thousands to Michael X's projects that never actually happened. The press hung on his every word, quoting him as the most powerful black man in Europe.By the time Michael X's ego unravelled, it was too late for socialite Gale Benson to escape from his web. They would both pay the ultimate price for his lies.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

I'm Suruti. And welcome to Red-Handed. And because I've wanted to do this one for 10 years, I've done the old intro. I've been waiting. That was my moment. This is my time. Even if this episode hasn't come out yet,

it is a Red-Hounded classic in our minds. And in Hannah's heart and soul. In my heart and soul, for sure. I've sat on this one the longest. And now I have written it. I know why. Let's do it. I'm pumped.

I've got zero. clues about what's going on. Many moons ago, in the time before, we, Surruti Bala and I, team red-handed, used to take meetings with documentary producers, a lot of them. Every time they went very badly. So badly that we said, we're not doing this anymore. Please don't make us do this anymore. Because it would be the same. Every time the dance was this. initial meeting where everyone's nice and excited.

And then we would go away and do loads of work, come up with entire series arcs, find all of these cases. And then the production company would say, you're great, we just don't know really what to do with you. Yeah, you're making a lot of jokes while you're talking about murder. And we don't know how that's going to go. And we're like, you don't know how that's going to go. We've got a lot of widows listening to the show. But yes, you just carry on making snapped and I got murdered. on the beach and my, my, my, my, in ice cold blood with ice tea.

Exactly. All of the, all of the above. Sure. My hair strangled me. I don't know. Whatever the fuck is out there. I don't know what's out there. And it just became so like, oh, well, you're the TV guy.

You tell me what's going to work on TV, Justin. Yeah. And also like, you heard the show before you called us down here. You knew we were going to make fucking weird jokes. Why are you wasting my time? I could be behind a mic making more weird fucking jokes. about things that are inappropriate. And that's what we did.

It was too hard. We were too hard. It was burned. So we just scuttled off to our dark rooms. And we just got some cameras. So if you're not watching this on YouTube, you really should be because we are now recording this and lots of our episodes in 4K, no less,

as I have been told. And I'm very worried that I didn't put a single bit of makeup on my face this morning. They've seen it all before. And worse. However, all of those things I said were true. But I think I do have to take a little bit of responsibility because every single time I would pitch this case. And they would be like...

Yeah, but what? What? So let's prove them wrong, Hannah. Exactly. The only reason we haven't already done this as an episode of Red-Hounded or as it will be two episodes of Red-Handed. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes.

Tell the people. So it is a two-parter. But we're releasing part one on a Thursday, and then you have to wait but 24 hours for part two because it will be released tomorrow. We're doing a Thursday and Friday drop just to see what happens. Who the hell do we think we are? Not documentary producers, that's for sure.

Damn straight. But the only reason we haven't done this is because I secretly, in my stupid little heart, thought that maybe one day we would make a documentary about it or a limited series. I just want to go to Trinidad. We can go. I know. Anyway, the dream is dead. It's done.

So I'm going to give you this story that has been in my heart and in my soul for 10 years, the only way I know how. What do John Lennon, Louis Theroux's dad, the Black Panthers, and James. Jason Statham all have in common. They all have podcasts about true crime. Am I right? I wish. But no. What they have in common is this very true story.

And we're going to start off with the British black power movement, which has essentially been lost to the ages. so much so that almost every, not almost, every book connected to this case is there's no e-books, there's no audio books, they are physical form books that are out of print or hundreds of pounds. And I know that for a fact because I bought two books related to this case in 2019 and I kept them all this time and now you can't get them anywhere. So good luck, anyone trying to do this. I'll know you cop evening. Anyway, believe it or not, we, on the British Isles, did have a Black Power movement,

all of our very own, and the suspiciously named Michael X was forgotten entirely on purpose. At the Roundhouse in Camden, in July, 1967, a conference promoting a book called Black Power, the Politics of Liberation, was held. All sorts of activists took to the stage to discuss the key social issues of the coming decade. American Stokely Carmichael was by far the most controversial speaker that night.

A figurehead of the pan-African movement, Stokely Carmichael told the audience that they could not ignore their blackness. They needed to demand equality on their own terms. Across the pond, the Black Power movement was growing ferociously in strength and support. Self-determination and Black is Beautiful was, at its center. The civil rights soldiers had realized that working through state apparatus was never going to work. The United States system had been built to fail the black population of the Americas and working with it would never lead to liberation. White liberal policies had failed,

therefore the accommodation of white liberal demands on black people had to be ignored and replaced with black terms for black people. Stokely Carmichael spent a lot of his time on stage highlighting the struggle facing developing nations being a direct result of the colonising west, which meant that British people of colour, the so-called New Commonwealth citizens, were invited to the Black Power Party too. And by framing the Black Power movement as an anti-colonial struggle, British Caribbean and Asians and Irish people, more on that later, were no longer an isolated minority facing discrimination in a country that they were citizens of. They were part of a global militant majority, or at least that's how it felt at the roundhouse that night.

Anytime the white man touched the people of the third world, Carmichael exclaimed, he's going to war with all of us. That night was the beginning of the British black power movement. And we even had our own Black Panthers in under a year. And in every photograph of Stokely Carmichael's rabble-rousing speech, there is a man sat behind him looking at the floor. That man is Michael X, right there on stage at this history-defining moment. But good luck finding anyone who wants to spend any time on his story. Except me. The post-colonial framing of the black struggle may have united minorities,

but we do have to point out the very striking differences between the laws of the lands. Racial discrimination in the United States was enshrined in law and enforced with state-sponsored brutality. The United Kingdom does not share the same story. Now, look, that isn't to say societal discrimination didn't exist, doesn't exist on the basis of race, but it is an entirely different kettle of fish. It's like how now you see some protests happening and people will be like, hands up, don't shoot in the UK.

And I'm like, our police don't carry guns. It's like an imported, like racial history, which just isn't the same. in the UK. Like the people, non-white people in this country were never brought here to be slaves in the UK. And like I said, we didn't have Jim Crow era laws and things like that.

We didn't have the civil rights movement. It's just a totally different, totally different thing, as you say. But Michael X was not a member of the American Civil Rights Movement come to Britain. He was Trinidadian, a country with a black administration

and a black majority. And according to some, Michael X wasn't even black. He was, like Bob Marley, half white. Michael X was even white passing when it suited him, even pretending to be Jewish on occasion to evade arrest. But he managed to become the leader of the British Black Power Movement anyway. I didn't know Bob Marley was half white.

That's interesting. Yeah, man. Dad's a British soldier. I didn't know that. Well, there you go. There are plenty of places in the world where mixed race is an offensive term. it is not accepted global parlance, I think we should point that out. Yeah, it's hard to know what's accurate. Not accurate, that's not the right word.

Everybody knows what you're talking about. What's inoffensive to say. Because when we did that episode, I think it was on Liberia. I can't remember why we were talking about it. Why were we talking about Liberia? I can't remember, but it was in that and how there's like words used there like mulatto, which means of mixed ethnic descent. that's like highly offensive in a different country, but that is like the preferred term there.

So, you know, we could easily piss anybody off. This is why wouldn't put us on TV. In countries where mixed race is the politically correct phraseology and mixed race people are considered black, that is because of this premise, which is that any drop of blackness in a person means that that person will be a victim, of racism and therefore all mixed race of people come under the black umbrella

right? There are so many reasons why that's not the case in other countries which is what I'm trying to explain. And political blackness will come back to hauntiness next week but for now we're going to tell you the story of the man in the photograph that nobody cares

to remember. I am not saying there are no virtues to the British black power movement. Let's get that out of the way. He is not one of them and the reason he has been forgotten is because everyone's so embarrassed that he pulled it off. Sure. His Barbadian mother, Iona, gave birth to Michael in 1933 in Port of Spain.

The only thing Michael X's Portuguese father gave him was the surname De Freitas and a lightness of skin, which in Trinidad had him branded red. Not black, not white. Michael was in between. And it is worth noting that before Windrush, the black population of the UK was almost entirely Trinidadians and Guyanese because their former colonies.

Trinidad became a British colony in 1797 and slavery was abolished in 1837 which gives Trinidad a markedly different history to Jamaica, for example, where slavery went on for much, much longer and therefore the scars of the transatlantic slave trade are a lot less visible on Trinidad than they are in other corners of the Caribbean. Trinidad also has lots of oil and has shaped its identity with Carnival and it has been considered a destination of worth. for longer than other Caribbean islands have been for those reasons. Have you ever been to the Caribbean? Only Cuba. Oh yeah, we went to Cuba. As I said it, I remembered we'd been to Cuba. No, I've never been anywhere else, though.

No. And we were going to go to the Bahamas, but... Oh, yeah. Alas. On that crime cruise. Crime wave, whatever it was called. Which we would totally do again. It's not our fault.

We didn't pull out. It got cancelled. Yeah. Michael's father went to prison not long after his son was born. And when he was eventually released, he just fucked off to sink hits to seek his fortune. Michael was left behind with a drunk mum and a Catholic understanding of blackness

being the antithesis of holiness. And that is true. There's a lot of Christian literature that's like black as sin, white is pure and holy, like it is very entrenched and he is very exposed to that. I can completely understand and imagine that that's the case.

I think it's also something I enjoy pointing out every now and then. that it's like you go to other countries and that same narrative of like blackness versus whiteness of like pureness versus like, you know, lowliness is also deeply, deeply entrenched speaking as somebody of Indian heritage. That is not lost on me in terms of like skin color. I hate the word colorism because it almost feels like

it's one of those things that can just be like I rolled out, but it is genuinely true. It's genuinely like baked into society at every level. And even people who are like in this country who are educated, like lived in this country, they'll still say shit like that. And I'm like, whoa. But then they'll be all like, you know, our black rights. And I'm like, but you don't feel the same way about people of your own race who happen to be darker than you.

Like it's such a weird mentality that I think that people outside of that community are maybe not always aware of. So I can totally understand why it would be in the Catholic Church also. Now that same year, Windrush delivered 492 Jamies. Macon's to Britain. Michael went to St Kitts to find his father. The whole thing was a disaster though, and Michael got a job with a Norwegian shipping company and set sail to see the world instead of building a life with good old daddy. Nobody told his dad he was coming. He just shows up to St Kitt's at like 15 years old and he's like, hi, dad. And it obviously goes to ship quite quickly afterwards. Michael the Freitas went all over the world from Canada to the Ivory Coast. He's been a significant

stint in and around Africa and was thoroughly underwhelmed, saying for the rest of his life, there was no beauty in Africa for me. Which is an odd sentiment for the future leader of the Pan-African movement. Being raised in the Imperial Caribbean, young Michael was taught that England was the best place on earth. He played British sports, he was taught British ideals, and when he got to Liverpool, he was thoroughly disappointed, just like he had been with Africa. Very underwhelmingly, the two places he was supposed to belong were just not what they were cracked up to be. The land of hope and glory was full of snow and germs that landed teenage Michael in a Siemens hospital in Cardiff with a horrible flu.

Once he recovered, Michael spent a few years bopping between the Caribbean and Cardiff. Every time he went back, his mum was more drunk and his dad was more dead. So he stopped going back and decided to make Wales his permanent base. Like ports all over the world, Cardiff's Tiger Bay was full of all types of people and cultures. But much more importantly to young Michael, where there are sailors, there is sex work. When he was on land long enough, Michael started pimping. He only ever had white girls work for him. Make of that power dynamic what you will.

In Trinidad, Michael's mother had always insisted that whiteness was superior to blackness. Michael was not allowed to associate with black children or do black things like speak patwa. Now, Iona was no saint. She ran brothels on and off for years. She was loud. She threw boiling water on her husband as he lay asleep in bed, and she drank like a fish. Michael once wrote to his mother, saying,

I'm not ashamed of being a negro, but of you. They'd have to be a psychoanalyst to notice that Michael's later embrace of blackness might have had a lot more to do with his mummy issues than racial liberation. That transition began when Michael decided to leave Cardiff behind. According to Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Nypole, it was after Michael left Cardiff and headed to London that Michael DeFratis, quote, became a Negro. V.S. Nypole wrote a house for Mr. Biswa.

He's an Indian Trinidadian author. And he is also where Louis Theroux's dad comes into this. because Louis Theroux's dad worked with V.S. Ippel so much, and he was so horrible to him that he wrote his biography as revenge. In 1957, Michael settled about a mile north of Notting Hill. He was all alone in the big city, bang in the middle of our no Irish, no blacks, no dogs era. Michael tried all of his usual tricks to get his feet under the table and make a name for himself like he had done in Cardiff. He tried pimping but he couldn't break into the scene. He tried to open a couple of gambling dens, but that didn't work either. He did eventually find some success stealing suitcases from Heathrow.

And he also met his long-suffering wife, Desiree, at a street party in the eye of the Caribbean migrant slum storm, Notting Hill. Back then, Julia Roberts wouldn't have gone anywhere near it. And by 1958, the slum was ready to blow. Caribbean people were shut out of council housing and most of the private rental market, leading to unbearable overcrowding, squalor, disease and sky-high friction in places like Notting Hill. And then the Tories made it worse with a rental act. The new law meant that when a rent-controlled tenant ended their lease, that tenancy became decontrolled,

which is obviously what the landlords want to happen because they can make more money. So to make sure that happened quicker than it may have done, slum landlords would rent flats to large groups of Caribbean men and encourage them to cook pungent food, throw wild parties and loiter menacingly on landings, meaning that the elderly white tenants would move out of the surrounding flats and then the landlord could hike everything up. This technique became known as Rachmanism,

after the infamous Peter Rachman, who bought up Notting Hill, brick by brick. Rackman would charge black tenants more because they had nowhere else to go, which meant that people had to share accommodation to survive. The pressure was building, and when Oswald Mosley reared his fascist little head once more, there was a predictable explosion. At the end of that summer, violence wrecked Notting Hill,

hundreds of young white men attacked houses inhabited by Caribbean migrants every night for two weeks. 140 people were arrested, 108 people were charged with things like GBAH, a fray riot, possessing offensive weapons, etc. 72 of them were white, 36 were black. None of them were Michael. He pretended to be Jewish, so he wasn't arrested.

After what would become known as the Notting Hill riots, celebrities, mainly jazz musicians, decided that they could fix Britain's race problem by throwing a televised interracial children's party called Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship. It was pretty toned out for a bunch of musicians and it only ever happened once. After the instigators of the riots

were given hefty sentences, the celebrities' interests in racially uniting Notting Hill quickly evaporated. And all this left Michael with an idea. He realised that rich white people seemed very ready to part with their money if they thought they were fixing Britain's race problem and elevating some of that pescule.

white guilt. So when rich white people came sniffing around the slums, Michael was always there to give them a guided squalor and tell them how to fix it. The solution was always, always, give Michael your money. The point being, bad people are everywhere. And Michael DeFratis didn't need the riots to learn about Rachmanism because he was Peter Rachman's right-hand man. While we're on Peter Reckman really needs a short handle all of his own. He's a fascinating person. But here's what I can't stop myself from telling you right now. The Polish-born Kingpin's parents were exterminated by the Nazis

and he was sterilized and sent to work on a road gang. And his biographer says that he never admitted that he had been sterilized, but he did have a really high voice. And it was very common for that to be done at the time into Polish Jewish children. so it is assumed that he was sterilized as a kid. And then he sent on this road gang, he manages to escape into the Russian wilderness for like almost a year, but then ended up in a gulag and was only saved

from the jaws of death by Stalin's liberation of the death camps. And then he made it to London via the British forces and quickly got to exploiting because he had seen the horrors of humanity and he really believed that morals were merely the luxury of the affluent who could afford them. he knew better than anyone how quickly men can become monsters once their good fortune was swept away. And I thought that was a really interesting point.

He's an awful man who did horrible things, but I'd never quite heard that explained in that way of him just being like, none of you are better than me. If you were in any circumstance, we're all the same. Well, yeah, I mean, we've seen it before. I mean, you've got psychopaths that are, this is obviously massively dumbing it down, but, you know, psychopaths that are born, it feels like he's maybe a bit of a sociopath who was created through his adversity. Anyway, game-recognised game

and Michael X found his feet in London as Peter Rackman's enforcer and he loved it, which is another clue that the actual well-being of Caribbean migrants, whatever their colour, was not ever the reason Michael DeFratus did anything.

As I said, very few people write, speak, make things about Michael X because it's all a bit embarrassing that he got away with so much. And that's even before we get to the murders. But quite a lot of the things out there on him are very sympathetic to him.

Oh, yeah. Because he is a migrant to this country. And I just think it's so patronising. Of course it is. Of course it is. It's because he's not white, but what he's doing is horrific. And he's exploiting the people that he says he cares about. And he's using white guilt to exploit

another group of people that he doesn't care about to a grand ice himself. And I'm sorry, like, this is maybe going to be semi-controversial, but I'm going to say it because it's fucking true. Go look it up. Like we're not in 2020 anymore. Like this really reminds me of like the organized wing of BLM. They were like, oh, we need to raise all this money. We need to help all these people. And that's what's going to happen. And then they raised all that money and they stole all that money. And then they committed massive amounts of fraud, bought themselves ginormous mansions. and now nobody talks about them. If it had been any other group of people,

they would have been roundly and rightly, absolutely scorched as they should have been, but they didn't. And this isn't me making any statement about the sentiment, right, of Black Lives Matter. I'm talking about the organized wing of it and how they conned everybody, stole all that money, committed massive fraud,

and just made a load of money for themselves, using the exploitation of people that they claim to care about and exploiting people's feelings of white guilt. So these things don't go away, they just repeat. No, no, and there are many things that we will come onto in this episode and the next, where you're just like, okay, it literally was ever lost. We're just doing the same shit over and over again. So about four years after the riots, Michael was arrested for stealing paint from a ship.

He considered this to be a victimless discretion. But he was handed a three-month custodial sentence nonetheless. He didn't mind being inside too much, even remarking that, it was cleaner than Brixton. But Desiree, his wife, couldn't stand it. She left him and London, and their two children were put into care. I will say that if nothing else is wrong in your relationship

and it only takes three months for you to run, I don't believe you. I don't think being married to Michael, that could be the only thing that was wrong. It's like she's like, oh, thank God, I can escape. At this point, Michael was 30, and when he was released from prison, he was all out of options. No shipping company would employ him, and Peter Rackman had been toppled by a tabloid scandal. So Michael went back to Notting Hill and straight back to the hustle to come up with something else.

He got a job at a scrapyard and turned his rented room into a she-bin. A she-bin. She-been's a really cool word. It means like... Sheebin. I just thought he was way through your she-wees. No. It's like a bed-sit bar. And Shabin is an Irish word.

It's one of those things that's like another illustration of the connection between the Irish and Caribbean populations of London. Shabin means like cheap ale in Irish. And so you would have Shabine queens like these ladies who would run secret bars out of their bed sits. And he did that for a while. And for once, at Ashley, went quite smoothly. Michael made a tidy amount of money pretty quickly and even befriended the Eaton types who had replaced Peter Rachman. He wiggled his way into dope. soaked parties with actual Ronnie Scott, full of rich white people with do-good money burning

holes in their fancy pockets. One idiot wrote Michael a $4,000-quid check to fund a fashion business. In the 60s. On the spot. Did Michael start a fashion business? No, he did not. He bought himself a red thunderbird instead. Loving his new lifestyle, Michael got himself a fancy Canadian journalist girlfriend called Nancy,

who, due to her lifelong friendship with Leonard Cohen, was very well connected. Nancy truly took Michael to the next level and introduced him to the breathlessly chic socialites and to the world of black writers and beatnik poets. The white negro by Norman Mailer left a profound impact on Michael, and it's not perfect, but it informed his quote-unquote politics for the rest of his life. I say politics and inverted comments because he just stole the idea.

If you haven't read the white negro, this is the general gist, it's that all the beatnik movement was, was rich white people modelling themselves on black culture in a desperate attempt to look interesting, cool and subversive, which this is what I mean, it was ever the. But Michael really did do the 60s properly.

I can't take that away from him. He made best buddies with the Times Central pillar, Alexander Trocky. The heroin drenched master of existential dread, and Leonard Cohen's contemporary Christ lived with Michael for a while and founded what he called Sigma

which he defined as an internationally alternative and autonomous community Andrew Chrocky loved saying stuff like I am outside of your world and I am no longer governed by your Lord I don't I can't

so is this meant to be like a philosophical idea or a physical place great question both. Oh, it sounds dirty. I don't want to love that. I don't think they've got regular bin pickups. They sure don't.

But Michael convinces Andrew, he's like, I can fund this for you. And so involved in this beatnik scene was Michael that he was there when Alan Ginsberg banged out Howl for the first time at the Royal Albert Hall. He gets himself into these rooms and he just magics it. It's completely morally bankrupt and ethically awful. But it's really impressive. He just is so good at getting up to the next person, next person, next person, next person.

I mean, he's common. Yes. And there's a biography that is out of print now. If you want to read it, you can buy it off me for £700 because that's what it's on the fucking internet for. Whoa. Yeah, it's called Michael X, A Life in Black and White. It's a good title. It is a good title.

And the author, John L. Williams, he sort of makes the point. He was like, any Trinidadian in London who met him was like, there he goes. Because as we said at the top of show, Trinidad, black administration, majority black population. It's very, very mixed in a way that the UK and the US just aren't. So there's loads of quotes from Trinidadians who were in London and they were like, I see you, man. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so good at hanging out with poets was Michael that he was invited. to represent Trinidad at the Commonwealth Poetry Festival in his old stomping ground, Cardiff.

And that festival was absolute carnage. The Welsh hated the Ottsbredlock, the African Methodists, hated the Communists, and sordid affairs were uncovered by cross-telephone wires, and a dead pig was left in the lift of a hotel. Rock and roll. Yes, yes. And Michael DeFratis looked at this mess and realized that he was surrounded by idiots

and he could convince them of anything. Again, this just makes me think of all of the race grifters who are out there today. They're literally looking at me and I can con these people. Don't fall for it. Don't fucking fall for it. The point is that Michael was right. He was surrounded by idiots.

And he could absolutely convince them of anything. Michael convinced the poetry lovers that they should all write a letter to Chairman Mao and tell him to keep his beak out of the India-Pakistan conflict. Not only did the chairman reply, he did stay out of it. How is he getting replies from Chairman Mao? I don't know. He honestly, I think...

Did he write the reply? No, it was literally from Chairman Mao. Oh my God. In this point in his life, I think he can't believe his luck. And then I think he falls into Tyra Banks' megalomania in the second half of his life. Sure, sure, sure. But I think at this point he's just like, no way. And then it keeps happening, so he keeps pushing.

Sure. And yeah, Michael had seen at the light. Poetry was too hard. Politics was much easier. And less rhyming. Yeah, poetry is hard. It's very hard to make things rhyme. Politics, by which he means just riling people up and stealing their money, is much

easier. And 60s Britain had more than enough politics to go around. By the time, migrants had been steadily trickling into the UK for about a decade, and they were battling through waves of discrimination. Black children were routinely pathologised because of their accents, fluency, or just on account of having spent time in a different schooling system. So they were labelled as educationally subnormal and sent to ESN schools, where they received inferior education. And just like had been taught in Trinidad. The British education system reinforced black inferiority by ignoring the existence of black people altogether

or by representing them as savages. Read an Enid Blighton book if you're perhaps not convinced. Parents wanted better for their children. Unrest was building in migrant communities all around the country and the evils of the white man were frequently espoused a speaker's corner. It was clear that revolution was in the air, but the movement had no clear leader. By 1965, JFK had been shot

and the American Civil Rights Movement was all over the headlines. And in February that year, Malcolm X had come to the United Kingdom on a speaking tour. Michael DeFratis pulled every single string he had to get in the same room as Malcolm X, and he managed it, as usual. There are two stories of how Michael DeFratis managed to become a child of the house of X.

Here's the first one. The two men were at a hotel in Birmingham because Malcolm X is staying there because he's speaking. Michael X is there because Malcolm X is there. And they're checking in, and Malcolm X says to the hotel clerk, oh, and a room for my brother, Michael. The second version of the story is that Michael DeFratus

just started calling himself Michael X, and the press believed him. Because Malcolm X was shot dead by the FBI three weeks later, So the very tiny, tiny amount of time that Michael DeFratus spent in his presence was vastly blown up by the British press. And Malcolm X wasn't exactly around to give his version of events. So the British press only had Michael to go to. And he became a lot more important than he ever would have done otherwise. Up until this point in history, no British papers had been writing about black nationalism,

but now Malcolm X had been shot, they had to, and Michael X, with his shiny new surname, was right there to give as many interviews as they wanted. None of them bothered to fact-check him. So when New Spangley Michael X told the times that there were 60,000 angry black people planning a violent revolution, they printed it. They print everything he says.

No one checks because they're all too embarrassed to say they know nothing about it because they're rich white people. Fact check, everyone, except us. Author of England half English, Colin McKinness, was the only journalist who could have caused Michael X a problem. And that's because Colin knew Notting Hill inside out. So Michael was very worried about him being called out on his bullshit.

So Michael got to Colin first and made him the only white member of his organisation. R-A-A-A-S. Say it. RAS. RAS stood for the Racial Adjustment Action Society. Not only did it never really exist, it's a joke. He pulls a big Hitler on it and claims like 45,000 people were members. Sure.

No, no, they went. Yeah, and just in case this went over your head in Jamaica, not Trinidad, Rass is slang for arse. Michael X collected techniques he saw work for other people. He made himself a caricature of an American civil rights activist for a British Caribbean audience. And it worked most of the time. Colin McInnes wrote that those around Michael X either thought he was entirely unscrupulous or a rough diamond, a powerful political animal.

I will put in here, this is unsubstantiated, but there are lots of, large rumours that another way that Michael X sweetened up Colin McKinness was finding young boys for him to sleep with. I thought you were going to say something like that. Everyone's a paedophile. Exactly. However he did it, finally Michael X had found a system in which he could succeed. By positioning himself as the leader of the British Black Power movement, everything was the white man's fault. Which again, history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does fucking rhyme.

Don't get caught. Everything was especially the fault of whites like Gail and Benson. Hooray! We finally get to Gail Benson. The name I've been hearing from Hannah's lips for the past nearly 10 years. I'm pumped, honestly. Who is she? Good fucking question.

Gail was the daughter of Conservative MP Leonard Plug, and she inhabited a very different London indeed. Lord Plug, her dad, was. instrumental in pirate radio in this country, which is a very punk element of our history that is often overlooked unless you're Bill Nye or Richard Curtis. Could you say it's the precursor to podcasting? Pirate radio?

No, because we have to pay tax like idiots. Fuck. In yesteryear, a loophole in maritime law meant that vessels just three miles off the coast of the UK were in international waters and therefore did not have to comply to the BBC's fascist regime. Let's get a boat.

Sure. Why not? Let's take this. Fucking offland. Let's sail to Trinidad in a boat. I do get quite seaset. You would be actually, yeah, you'd be terrible. Just plug me up to an IV and like a horse trough that I can be sicken to.

But keep me hydrated. Radio Caroline and Radio London, also called Big El, were the first pirate stations, and they were commercial enterprises broadcasting current pop music with no license on a frequency that they had no right to be on. And they didn't pay a penny of tax. And legally, nobody could touch them. And I have heard tell that Gail Benson's dad is the man behind the verb to plug, as in to plug something you're selling on the radio. That's a good legacy. It's great, isn't it? That's a good legacy, yeah. The Oxford English Dictionary disagrees, but honestly, what have they done to make you feel good recently? Fuck you. Take my story and tell them to fuck on.

Don't fact check off. I've done my time. I've been fact check enough. So, Scorpio's both, Gail and her twin brother called Gravill, were born in 1944, and she lived a pretty uneventful, rich white girl life. She married Jonathan Benson in 1964, an actor, an all-round media type, who was the assistant director on Charity of Fire. So therefore, had a lot of access to very glamorous people.

Colin Redgrave, a ventral star of four weddings and a funeral, was the best man at their wedding, and they had a very star-spangled social circle, which would lead Gail down a very different path. Via Atonement Star Vanessa Redgrave, Gail Benson was introduced to the Black Power Movement. Gail's Wikipedia page will tell you that it was via Vanessa Redgrave's desperate need to do good, that Gail Benson was introduced to Michael X. And as much as that would make this story sleeker, not true. Oh. Her Wikipedia page is very disappointing.

But as I will go on to discuss, I think there is a very good reason we don't know anything about Gail Benson. Her Wikipedia page says, she goes to this party, she meets Michael X, she falls desperately in love with him, and he doesn't want her. Nah, it would make this story a lot neater, but that's not what happens. She did fall desperately in love with a non-examplead.

another man whose name is Hakeem Jamal, an actual bona fide Black Panther. But there are a lot of rumours about Gail. The most interesting one, by far, being that Lord Plug wasn't actually her dad at all, but she was actually the love child of JFK's father, a product of his stint living here as the ambassador to the United Kingdom. Wow. Big rich people stuff, though. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Only about 25 people in the country at this time, it would seem, because they're all knocking about together. Yeah, none of this like, A, the Postman's kid, a you JFK's dad's secret kid. There's some real rich people share. Now, other less interesting opinions held about Gail by the upper cross was that she was neurotic, a liar, a bitch, a sleeper around her, and the greatest sin of all, a big fat fatty.

I just Google pictures of her. She's not a big fat fight. That's after she meets Hakeem Jemal. Oh, I see. Now, Gail never really fit in, and that was the first thing that Hakeem Jamal noticed about her. He had been in England for a while and found high society incredibly boring.

Hakeem Jamal, just like Malcolm X, was a true hustler made on the mean streets of Boston. He got so sick of everyone at these parties that the enemy of his enemies became his girlfriend. After three weeks of wall-to-wall shagging, Gail had lost three stone, which about 19.5 kilograms or 42 pounds. And she also converted to Islam, and like everyone else, changed her name to Hail Kigma,

an anagram of her previous name and Hakeems. For the sake of clarity, we are going to keep calling her Gail, and like many a trust of Ferry and after her, Gail forsake her white British values and everything African soon took over her paradigm. She got her hair, got as tanned as she possibly could, learned Arabic, and served her husband, Hakim, in the most Muslim way she could. Gail Benson walked so Constance Martin could run into a burning car.

I know. If you haven't listened to our episode on Constance Martin, please go do that immediately. It's pretty fucking bonkers. Gail and John Benson got divorced in 1970, but Gail and Hakeem never tied the knot Islamically or otherwise. Because Hakeem Jemar was very married to someone else. His wife, Dorothy, lived in L.A. with their six children. And Dorothy would periodically try and track Hakeem down for money, but he ignored her, and him and Gail ran off to Morocco, where they lived happily for a few years selling handmade Dashikis on street corners. Really, Gail.

Really? Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Eventually, the odd couple, very surprisingly, outstayed their welcome in North Africa. And they decided to go back to England to get some money off someone. And that someone was the doyen of publishing Diana Ant Hill. Diana edited Hikim's 1971 autobiography, which is called From the Dead Level.

And Hakeem Jamal thanked her by Shagin the Shitting the Shit out of her. She writes a book about their affair which is called Make Believe and it's so weird I really wish it was. She's a very strange woman. I should clarify the reason Hakeem Jamar is in England

in the first place is he's trying to raise money for a Montessori school Okay him and everyone else and the Malcolm X Foundation so the Malcolm X Foundation attempted to start this Montessori school in Los Angeles

but it burnt down. So that's the reason he's in the UK with Vanessa Redgrave because she's like, oh darling, would you like some money from my rich friends come and meet them? And that's why he's there. And then he writes this book with Diana Anhill. Well, there you go. He looks, I just googled a picture of him.

He looks like a man in disguise. Not a man who's going to run a Montessori. No. I do believe he's like very, very charismatic. and he's also very, very good at finding the most insecure woman in the room and making her feel like she's a princess. And he does that again and again and again. Come, man. Yeah.

So when Hakeem first meets Diana Ant Hill via Vanessa Redgrave because of this Montessori school for Malcolm X, he took an interest in Diana Ant Hill immediately, if her book Make Believe is to be believed. And Hakeem Jemal actually made a bit of a habit of flirting with me. middle-aged women because it made him feel kind. 14 years his senior, Diana Ant Hill, was a very receptive target to his charity work. The book she writes, okay, everyone in this story is mad. Everybody.

There is not a single shred of sanity anywhere. Diana Ant Hill is so delusional. She's just like, oh, well, of course, I never, I never wanted to sleep with him. I had no intention of ever letting him in my house. How ridiculous. And then he lived with me for two years. Like, she, the way she writes is like so obviously cooked. Brilliant.

Brilliant. And the thing is, people like this, they can just sniff out that kind of crazy. Exactly. Hakeem wrote to Diana, asking for £200 so he could go back to America and support his family. He insisted he could only accept the cash if Diana let him come and stay with her in London for a weekend and shack the shit out of her. No, he's not. You're not freeloader. He's like I'll fuck you for the money.

Yep. Yes, exactly. He even wrote, If somehow you begin to see yourself as being treated by me, like an old woman who is reduced to buying sex, that, my darling, is your problem. You wrestle with it. I'm not a moral person.

I like what makes me happy, and you happy decide. It's not surprising he needed quite a lot of help with his autobiography, is it? He's not a brilliant writer. No, no. Now Diana's book about this affair, like Hannah said, is pretty fucking bonkers, but it is also a succinct window into how absolutely mental Hakeem Jamal was and the effect that he had on women,

or rather how good he was at exploiting female insecurity to get what he wanted. Diana agreed to this weekend Shagathon, and Hakeem told her he was on his way, stopping off in Paris to visit Jean Seaburg. another one of his celebrity conquests who was right in the middle of a mental breakdown and he also shagged her Gene Sieberg is extraordinarily famous at this point in history

she's not just like minor celebrity she's a movie star and the FBI like hounded her because of her involvement in the black power movement Hakeem had never mentioned Gail in his letters to Diana but she had brought a bunch of stuff to cook them dinner with so you know that's cool Gail didn't even seem to have a problem with Hakeem regaling gale with tales of how many women he'd fucked out of psychosis,

like some sort of penile Dr. Doolittle. That's exactly what he thinks he is. He tells this story of him going to see Gene Seabberg and her being in a complete state of mental collapse, which she was because the FBI drove her to it. But he's just like, well, I just shagged her lozen and then she was fine. So now I'm here, your turn. He, I should say this now, genuinely does believe himself to be God.

Sure. That helps. Hmm. So yeah, while Hakeem is saying all these things to Diana, Gail just cooked away in the kitchen and when it was bedtime, she didn't even kick up a fuss when Hakeem announced that he would be, you know, shagging Diana in another room. Diana was certain that this was all a ploy

to try and shake Gail loose so that Hakem could return to the USA solo. But it was Diana who was getting played. As per the letter that had been sent ahead, she had set aside 200 quid in cash, and she'd put it in a drawer. Long story short, Gail stole that money. And then Hakeem Jemar convinced Diana to give them another 200 quid in cash,

so Gail and Hakeem went on their merry way to America with 400 great British pounds from the Middle Age lust-filled editor. It was you they were playing, Diana. But before they run off, Gail and Hakeem stayed up all night in this very weird cyclical argument where Hakeem would insist that Gail couldn't come with him to America and she would say that she had to

and then he would just shrug and then they would go around again. And then the next morning Hakeem told Diana that she had possessed Gail's body to have sex with him the night before and that's why Gail was crying. It's madness. Have you seen the show behind her eyes I think that's what it's called.

Spoilers, but that's like basically the plot line of that. Yeah, well, good. I'm glad someone else can make sense of it because I only included it. It's so difficult to follow but I only included it because it shows just like the level of absolute

insanity that everyone in this story is involved in at all times which makes it easier to understand how and when things go south. There are already quite south. Anyway, Gail and Hakeem leave Diana Ant Hill behind with 400 quid and an American dream. And funnily enough, it was Diana Ant Hill who introduced Hikim Jamal to Michael X at

Jamar's request. Perhaps he was searching for an essence of the other ex who had been taken out by the FBI in 1965. But Diana did assure Hakeem Jammal that Michael X was nothing like Malcolm. They had crossed paths during the commission of Michael's own book, which was called from Michael DeFratus to Michael X, and Diana couldn't stand him. When Michael was asked to make edits to avoid legal action,

which is an editor's job to point those things out, he threatened to burn down the publisher's office and went off on a lengthy rant about secret concentration camps being built in Wales to exterminate black people. And Diana Anhill openly admits that she thought, I wish they were. Yikes, Diana. Nobody in this story is normal.

But in this story, there is only one person more mad than Michael X. He is genuinely mad. Yeah. Whereas I think Michael started bad and then went mad. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, like Hannah said, he, Hakeem Jamal genuinely believes that he is God. And here is how he got to that level of thinking. He started drinking at the age of just 10 years old and started chasing the dragon just four years after that.

As a young teen, Hakeem Jamal discovered that his mother had been living just a few streets over from him the whole time. And he describes in his book that he fell in love with her and ended up marrying a woman with the same name. I'm not going to say GSA, but I also am. Like, in his book from the dead level, the way he talks about his mum and how they are reunited and, like, genuinely the, like, very sexual attraction he had towards her, happened, but like, not normal. Not normal. Because she's just living a couple of streets over the whole time, and he just happens to be outside her house. And then this other guy on the street is like, oh, you're looking for your mum, she's inside. And then they have this weird reunion,

and then she becomes part of his life again. It's just, it's going to do things to you. Yeah. So with no real idea of where he could go, Hakeem Jamal joined the army. But his addiction got him kicked out, and he ended up in prison shortly afterwards for kidnapping a taxi driver. But he claimed he was just, too drunk to remember what had happened. Hakeem Jemar was sentenced to 40 years in prison for this crime, but he was paroled after just four.

How? I don't know, but it is just one of the many points of speculation that breed conspiracy around this whole saga. Sure. Now, within a year, he was back inside, however, for trying to cut a man's throat with a shard of car window glass. Once again,

he claimed to have absolutely no recollection of the attack, but he was sent to a psychiatric facility. He did like this a lot more than being in prison. The staff there assured him that he wasn't insane. He just had a lot of emotional problems, a lot more than the average person, and they had just never learned how to deal with them.

Yep, that's what that is. But this refreshingly accurate treatment program was short-lived. Hakeem Jamal's time on the psych ward was cut short when his doctor burned alive, and they just turned him loose. Sorry, what? Why would that mean that you get out of a psychiatric facility? Also, is anyone checking that he didn't do it? I don't know.

I feel like we should do a short hand on. What's it when, like, people just go on fire for no reason. Spontaneous combustion. Is that what they're saying happened to this person? I don't know. Oh my God, your doctor spontaneously combusted. We can't possibly deal with you. You've got so many emotional problems.

You should just leave. What is happening? I genuinely think that a product of so many of the sources on this story being out of print is that a lot of the details like this are just like, and then this ridiculously unbelievable thing happened anyway. Yeah, it's kind of like we're trying to tell the story that like the police officers in the McStay family case had to investigate. There's so many bits missing that we just can't possibly know what's going on.

Which is why nobody wants my documentary. But you will listen to this. You will listen to this. So, at 26 years old, Hakeem is out on the streets and he found Islam and Malcolm X. He actually met Malcolm X once when he was a child when he was like a street hustler and a heroin addict. And then he finds him again when Malcolm X has converted Islam, got sober and become a preacher. Hikkim sees a lot of himself in Malcolm. They're from the same part of Bokston and both become devout Muslims with addiction demons.

And funnily enough, Malcolm X was a very distant cousin of Hakeem's wife, Dorothy, which is possibly one of the only reasons he kept her around. He even dedicates his book to Dorothy. But it's someone else and then Dorothy, and it says, for lighting the dark and for making Malcolm my cousin, or something like that. It's a very weird thing to say. And Hakeem Jammal would go on to found the organisation that created Kwanza and was instrumental in the Malcolm X Montessori school.

That was the reason Vanessa Redgrave flew him over to London, and that's how he met Gail Benson. This is fascinating. And it was Gail that put together the timeline of Hikim's life, because although he was incredibly charismatic and an enthralling speaker, he was so bad at reading he had to spell words out like a child, which is just like shocking juxtaposition. You can listen to him speak. There's loads of recordings of him, and he really is captivating. and he described himself on BBC radio as excruciatingly handsome, tantalisingly brown and fiercely articulate. I'm going to change my Instagram bio to that.

You absolutely should. And then you can start a Kwanza Foundation and teach children at a Steiner school or something. Yeah, a Kwanza Montessori. Now another well-to-do white itching to change the world at Vanessa Redgraves parties was Herbert G. Herbert, a fan. fabulously well-bred German dropout who hated capitalism and loved weed.

Herbert and Hakeem joined forces and decided they simply had to start a commune together. Fucking, stop, stop it. They can't. Stop it. Back then, the Guyanese government were handing out grants to any foreign nationals who wanted to clear some jungle and farm the land. And we all know another racial equality activist who snatched up that offer, don't we? Spoilers, he had a monkey and a shit let a punch.

And Angela Davis made calls to Jonestown, look it up. Hakeem and Herbert decided that Guyana was the future, and in order to build their jungle utopia, all they needed was some airfare. So they popped off to Germany to ask Herbert's daddy for it. They make this plan, right, where Hakim Jamar was like, oh, I'll just build printing presses in the Guyanese jungle, and then we'll just print these leaflets, and then somehow that will sustain our uter.

program. This is why you need capitalism. These people are full of terrible ideas. Back in Britain. Michael X was keeping himself at the centre of beatnik blackness via something called the London Free School. It started as a community action project aiming for a more integrated society.

It offered, and this is a quote from one of their flyers, a free education through lectures and discussion groups in subjects essential to our daily life and work. The London Free School is not political, racial, not intellectual, not religion, and not a club. It is open to all. And it was, but that's not because Michael had anything to do with it. He claims that he taught English to West Indian and Irish migrants for about 18 months at the London Free School. I call fucking bullshit. I don't think he did at all. I don't believe that a man like Michael X had the time, energy, inclinational

patients to do anything for 18 months other than common people. Quite. He did manage to provide an old Rachman basement for the London Free School to be held in just up the road from Portobella Market, but he only did that because it was too squalid to rent even by his standards, not because he'd transformed into a good person or grown a conscience or actually cared about education. But he pulls it off again because on the 15th of May, 1966, Muhammad Ali visited the London Free School

and of course the press went wild, all because just as he had done with Malcolm. X, Michael had tracked him down. And when Mohamed Ali fought Henry Cooper at Highbury, Michael X lost big money. He tells Mohamed Ali about it. So as a consolation prize, Muhammad Ali gave Michael X. Henry Cooper's shorts with blood on them. And he says, here's the blood of an Englishman.

So naturally, Michael continues to ride the waves of his publicity sumps. And he gave interviews to anybody who asked. and in those interviews he took full credit for the London Free School and threw in Ross into the bargain as well. And that didn't sit particularly well with the actual founders of the London Free School who were genuinely trying to do good and it earned the committee a visit from Special Branch.

If you don't know, Special Branch is Old English for Anti-Terrorism Unit. But Michael X managed to hold on to W-11's next big idea, Notting Hill Carnival. The president of the London Free School Ruan Lassett told timeout that Carnival was born out of the urge to take to the streets in song and dance to eliminate the pent-up frustrations born out of the slum conditions and to unite the West Indians, Africans and Irish that occupied the same squashed space.

As usual, Michael X was right there at the inception. Whenever Ruehain or anyone else applied for funding for Carnivore, they were told, no, not until they got rid of Michael X. This was fantastic for Michael's ego, but did nothing for his wallet. So Michael X got back to working white liberal guilt to his advantage. As CND turned to LSD, Michael X did a good job of organizing benefits concerts, featuring massive names like Pink Floyd. He managed to maintain the image of a militant black nationalist and a hippie somehow simultaneously.

It didn't matter who you were. Michael X was cool. to basically everyone. He was so influential that when the Beatles started Apple Music, Michael X managed to get an audience with John Lennon, which he spent berating the songster for co-opting black music for his own financial gain.

And Michael X left that meeting with 10 grand cash in a paper bag from Yoko Ono to write a book about the Black experience which he didn't do, by the way, shocker. And Michael's performative anger, whether he really felt it or not, was validated at the Roundhouse by Stokely Carl Michael. So Michael X booked Stokely to speak at a Rouse meeting at Redding's Rainbow Center.

But the real revolutionary cancelled at the last minute, leaving the stage wide open. This was Michael's moment to truly become the most. important black man in Europe. A quote he shouted at any passing journalist or person, by the way. It really is a lesson in if you say it over and over again, a journalist somewhere will print it, and then people will cite it and it will become the truth. On stage in Reading, Michael X started with the typical white devil chat that you could kind of get away with at Speaker's Corner. Here's some quotes for you. The most savage human being in the world is the white man. He robbed you of your heritage, your culture, he took away everything from you,

and he imposed his everything on you. This is what the white man did to you, this violence, this rape. And then he gestures to the reporters in the room, and he said, don't worry about these white monkeys. They can't do anything. If you ever see a white laying his hands on a black woman, kill him immediately.

Unfortunately for him, the white monkeys ran the transcripts, and Michael X was charged with inciting racial hatred a few days later, which for the first time gave him legitimate radicals. credentials, and the Times called him the leader of the British Black Power movement. So that is what he became. And the subsequent trial for inciting racial hatred was milked for all it was worth. It's a win-win for him. Oh yeah. Michael X employed poet Andrew Trokey and Naked Lunch writer William Burroughs as translators

at the trial because he claimed that he couldn't possibly be expected to speak the same language as the white establishment. Sorry, what? Oh my God. As soon as the fiasco began, Michael requested to be addressed as Michael Abdul Malik. And like Gail, we're just not going to do that. Not for any sort of anti-Islamic reason. It's just confusing enough as it is.

He's already had like three other names. Yeah. Any attempt to confuse the magistrate failed. And Michael X got a one-year custodial sentence for inciting racial hatred. Good. And the magistrate is like very straightforward. He's like, this act. exists to prevent the like rousing of friction between white people and people who are not white.

That is why it exists and you knew exactly what you were doing. So here is your sentence. Michael supporters, however, were of course outraged. One told the press, we're not just going to appeal. We've tried to communicate with white justice and white society. That has failed. Now we are going to destroy it. Others who face the same charge were just handed fine. So it was obvious that the severity of sentence was a result of the reputation Michael X had so carefully built. It's a strong sentence, definitely, but it is this sort of copy and paste of the American black power movement into Britain where it just doesn't quite make sense. No. Now Michael X, he didn't serve that one year.

He only served eight months this time, but the world was a very different place on the other side of this stretch. MLK had been assassinated and with him the non-violence of a black power movement had also died. So Michael X dumped White Nancy and moved back in with Desiree and their kids in Islington. Ross had been taken over

and Michael was a bit lost. But he knew how to deal with that problem. He just needed another idea. A new project, but he was done working with other people. He didn't want to be a collaborator or a co-founder. Michael Xx. wanted to be judge, jury, an executioner. He called his new kingdom the Black House,

an idea that lived and died in a derelict property on the Holloway Road. Like the London Free School, the Black House was meant to be a centre of learning and safety for the vulnerable and also a supermarket slash living space slash music studio for disadvantaged youth. Unlike the London Free School, it was for black people only unless you happen to be John Lennon. For funding, Michael X kept up with his guilty white benefactors and even planned a half-assed Trinidadian revolution with one of them.

According to Leonard Cohen, yes, that Leonard Cohen, the one who wrote Hallelujah, he told the New York Times that once Michael X had taken over Trinidad, he wanted Leonard Cohen to be the, quote, permanent advisor to the Ministry of Tourism. What? Why are they printing this stuff? That's the real question. Nobody's interrogating any of this. They're just like, oh, really, Leonard, how interesting.

Mohamed Ali and Sammy Davis Jr. donated about $20,000. That's what Michael says. We don't know if that's true. But John Lennon and Yoko, oh no, would not be outdone. They made several visits to the Black House to smoke weed and be photographed looking breathlessly cool. Once the World Peace Campaigners showed up at the Black House, with shaved heads, and they swapped bags of their own hair for the bloody boxing shorts.

I don't know. I don't know. Okay. Let's move on. Other than that, the glitter artsy stayed well away. The black house was bristling with the hard men that had always been the real backbone of Michael X's operation. And he finally had the physical base that he'd never had before. He was in charge of every inch of it, and the rules were simple. No alcohol, no white people. Even sleeping with white women off the property would be doggedly policed by Michael X himself.

It's a cult. Oh, you bitcher. Also, drugs fine. Just no booze because Muslim shop. And of course, very little education actually happened inside the Black House. And none of the youths put on plays about Africa like the Black House investment brochure boasted. Yeah, famously, if you have a cult, you don't really want too much education. But in early April, the bad news bears came a knocking.

A black house frequenter had done some odd jobs for a cleaning agency and felt that he had been shortchanged. Michael X gathered his scariest hangers-on and marched down to the company's office and demanded that 25-year-old Marvin Brown hand over the three-quit he owed. Terrified Marvin didn't have the money to hand, so Michael X stole one of his folders and told him that he could collect it from the black house

in exchange for the money later that day. Now it must have been a very important folder because Marvin Brown agreed. He very sensibly took a police escort with him to the Black House where he handed over the money and was told that he had to come back without the police in order to get his folder back. Inexplicably, he did this.

And this is where shit gets very dark. Like Lord of the Flies dark. Which is why it has to be included. Yeah. Because of what happens next. I understand that currently it doesn't sound that important. Marvin Brown was jostled into Michael X's office where about 30 people were waiting for him and told him that he was about to stand at trial. What for? Well, a long list of

injustices suffered by black people that Michael X had prepared earlier. Marvin insisted that as a Jew, he was also a member of a persecuted race, which did him absolutely no favours. One of the only actual historical artifacts that the Black House had in its possession was a genuine slave collar. So it's like a metal ring with spikes on the inside designed to ensure the wearer can't do anything you don't want them to do, right? And Marvin Brown was forced onto his hands and knees as the collar was fastened around his neck and then he was paraded around the room like a dog. After some protest from the women present, Marvin was released from the collar and handed his folder back. But it still wasn't over.

Michael X ruled that Marvin should pay a fine for bringing the police to the black house. So Marvin put the £13 he had in his pockets on the table. Michael X gave him $8 quid back and a copy of his autobiography for good luck. He sold signed copies off his book to guilty liberals for five. And while this bizarre slave circus went on, the police were waiting outside. They just wait. They sent him back in there on his own and they just wait outside. Anyway, a week after this, 50 officers raided the Black House and arrested the lot of them.

And the case was jumped up to the old Bailey. There was no way that Michael X was going back inside. And there was no political future for him in England. And he was a shit poet. So he decided to go back. to his roots. He had a few friends from his check had passed already waiting for him, and her Kim Jamal had been keeping up with Michael X's exploits

and had become convinced that white elites were conspiring to keep them apart. On February 2, 1971, Michael X flew to Trinidad, never to return. And that is where we will meet both of them. Tomorrow! Where it only gets with. weirder, I'm afraid. Yeah. And murdery?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Real murdery. Yeah. So join us then for part two. Goodbye.