The Underworld Podcast - The Maltese Mobsters who Ruled London's Empire of Vice

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

The Messina family came from Sicily, then Malta and North Africa, before settling in 1930s London—whose underworld was about to be supercharged by wartime blackouts and love-lorn American G.I.s. They would soon control an empire of brothels and gambling dens in the British capital, conning, bribing and killing their way to gangland dominance. And while the Messinas' flame died in the early 60s, their mantle would be taken up by a new generation of Maltese mobsters, whose legacy lasted until the 21st century arrival of another viceland behemoth: the Albanians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Tommy Smithson's nickname in post-war gangland, London, is Scarface. A more accurate name, if one that require a fluency in ancient Greek legend rare on the streets of Stepney, Shoreditch, or Soho, might have been or Ophous, because Tommy, raw bone, drawn-faced and slick-haired, has stared death right in its ugly sanguine face,

bungeyed down into the underworld and come rebounding right back. Only Tommy's done it in 1954, and this wasn't Hades, but somewhere, if not similar than at least grimy, in the snug alleys that snake around the back of a hulking, Camden Town cigarette factory. By this time, Tommy's already a fixture in the vice scene of Soho, and the British capital's neon-soaked West End, where cool girls and exotic dance halls

rubbed shoulders with upscale, mayfair townhouses and the city's fame theatre land. Tommy doesn't even come from London. He's a northerner, a scouser, to be precise, born just off the Liverpool Docks in 1920, several decades before the Beatles ever stepped foot in the Cavern Club. But in the post-war United Kingdom, despite its battering at the hands of German doodle bugs, V-2s and Heinrichs,

London is where the money's at, and the gangs. By 1950, a glut of them controlled brothels and boudoirs, whose scenes years previous had almost burst figuratively, of course, from wave upon wave of lovelorn American GIs, with time and cash to kill. Among them, the most powerful is a family of Maltese migrants called the Messinas, but over the years, modern migrants they claim to be, they've given themselves strange English names.

Not that you call them strange to their faces, of course, as one hoodlum tells a local paper, quote, people were paid a pound a stitch, so if you put 20 stitches in a man, you've got a score. You used to look in the papers next day to see how much you'd earned. The score is a 20-pound note, by the way, still is now. Although the value of a score in 1954 is a monkey these days, which is around 500 quid.

Tommy moves to London's crime-ridan these stand as a child, a longtime seven siblings, and he gets thrown into a reform school for theft, where, of course, he learns not to mend his ways, but to break people's faces. Boxing, self-defense, street smarts. During the war, he ships out to Australia but returns to Shortwich, where the East End meets the ancient financial heart of the city in 1950. Cops ring him up on a robbery, and he spends 18 months in prison. That's when he gets in with London's black market movers and shakers,

including a young pair of twins named Roddy and Reggie Cray. But it's the Maltese Tommy targets, and he sets up a rival bookmaker before getting in a spat that ends with a Maltese associate being slashed across the face. Soon after, Tommy's told, there's a piece offering, and he heads to the back of the Carreras Black Cat Factory, a monstrous art deco masterpiece just a block away from Mornington Crescent Tube Station. But it's a trap.

rival mobsters cut Tommy across the face, arms, legs and body, and leave him to bleed to death in the street. But Tommy, Orpheus Scarface, survives. And in a gangland twist, the Maltese give him £500, a princely sum at the time, for refusing to rack them out to London's notoriously corrupt metropolitan police. Not only that, but Tommy joins his former foes as an enforcer, scaring the crown jewels out of would-be assailants, with the bright pink, fleshy slugs scrawled all over his skin from before. But fall Tommy once, shame on you. Fool him twice.

Well, less than two years later, on July 25, 1956, Tommy is waiting in the Soho room of one of his bosses' sex workers when three rival Maltese goons. Philip Ellul, Bix Bampanato and Joe Zammett stroll in. Elel pulls a revolver and shoots Tommy in the arm and neck, before the gun jams. Tommy makes it out into the street but collapses in the gutter. As a crowd of people gathers around him,

Tommy looks up and utters his final words. Good morning, he says, I'm dying. This is the underworld podcast. And welcome to another episode of the show that goes where other true crime podcast never will. So it's good stories and fact-checking, basically. I'm your host in OTHIRO in New Zealand, Sean Williams. I'm now well-versed in screaming children and nappies full of crap.

And I'm joined today by a reporter and documentarian Danny Gold in New York City. It's summer there, but it's winter here. Isn't the world a crazy place. Oh, what about those damn Yankees, eh? Couldn't buy them. Yeah, I mean, they're not doing so good. That intro, too, that was the most British thing I've ever heard in my entire life. I understood maybe, like, half of it, maybe two thirds and less than one third of the references,

but I'm sure it made the guys who like your cricket jokes and all that pretty happy. So, yeah, I don't know. which we know the majority of listeners. Yeah. I feel like I'm going to have to do footnotes for that intro, but if you sign up on the Patreon, then you'll see them. But anyway, we're under new management. We're happy and we're producing a ton of bonuses,

and we've got really good ones too. I've been speaking to experts on Ecuadorian assassinations, trade for corruption. I read it at Dale even did this brilliant bonus show on what's going on with fentanyl and homeless encampments in the Pacific Northwest, which is, of course, insane and pretty harrowing. Anything I'm missing?

Yeah, I mean, patreon.com, slash in the world podcast or iTunes you can sign up for it too. We just have a bunch of bonuses. I did want an update on the situation in Trinidad ad with the gangs and all that. But I think we got a lot more coming. It's almost like one a week for the next few months. So plenty on there. And here, well, Tommy Smithson, Scarface,

owner of some of the best and most British final words I've ever come across, of course. But you may have already figured out because you literally have to search for this show before we download it. today's episode isn't really about him, but the folks who killed him and the ones he worked for, because strangely, the vice of London's West End, this is your Piccadilly Circus, Lester Square, Chinatown, but of course in post-war blitzed out Britain, so smoggy, smouldering and jam-packed with crime. This is all dominated by gangsters from a Thailand island nation in the Mediterranean. And like I mentioned a few minutes ago, of these interloping pimps, one family rises way, way above them all.

that is the Messina. Yeah, I don't actually know too much about Malta. All I know is my brother took his family on vacation there this summer and he loved it. So a little different from this subject matter. But yeah, I got nothing, man. I'm excited to learn about it. Yeah, it's cool. It's really, really fascinating.

Somo has always been by this, by the way. There's plenty of that going on today. I mean, when I was about 13, I used to bunk off to school and head into Soho, see the sex shops, pay a quid for the peep shows on Compton Street, rifle through reckless records on Berwick Street. There's another CD store on Kingley Street down the road. But if anyone can remember the name of that place,

I'd love to know you could just sit there and listen to anything on your headphones and there was a seller with really random old vinyl from a million years ago. You listen to Red Bus Memories, by the way, guys, the new series on Radio 4. Jesus, settle down. It's like the British wonder years over here right now.

Yeah, it really is. Now, before we dive into the history of the Messinas and their legacy in London, which, by the way, is still going strong now over 70 years after they showed up. Let's do a bit of Maltese trivia, because I know how much Danny loves pub quizzes. Constantly pinging me on WhatsApp about another one of his hood.

I mean, it's getting a bit older, you know, mate. I'm anti-pub quiz. I do not. I'm not looking at gain knowledge when I drink. Drinking is for forgetting things, not learning new things. Ah, here. Yeah, anyway, Malta,

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

who else the British, have occupied it at some point in time. It's also historically, totally fascinating from megalithic temples, the oldest in the world, among the oldest in the world, to the order of St. John, aka the Knights of Spitalia, which, well, we don't have time to get into, but I'm sure the BBC have done a 28-partar on them, so I guess you could head elsewhere for your Crusades pub trivia. I actually might. I kind of want to know more right now. Yeah, it's like super interesting stuff. Maybe we could do a show on the Templars and all that.

I don't know. Are they gang? Kind of. Today, Malta is a big time holiday destination for Europeans. But in terms of crime, I mean, it's basically Europe's mecca, from online gambling to mob money laundering and a completely corrupt political and judicial class. It's been a long dramatically for Italian and Russian organized crime for decades. And of course, it is a deadly place to be a journalist. In 2017, the writer Daphne Caruana Galizio was murdered in a car bomb, and the killing has caused all kinds of muck to come bubbling up in Maltese society. It took until last year for main suspect George de Giorgio. Isn't that George of George? Anyway, to admit killing Caruana Galizia telling a Reuters podcast that if he'd known who she was, quote, I'd have gone for 10 million euros, not 150 grand. For me, it was just business.

Yeah. Business as usual. Of course. I feel sorry. Wait, what? That happened on a podcast? That's way better than our podcast. Was he locked up already? Or was that just like a random interviewer got? Like found him, I don't know, in hiding or something. I guess he's locked up. I don't know. Maybe they were just like smoking blunts or something. But yeah, it's a pretty good. That's a good. That's way about anything we've done. Come on, man. Here's local website to shift news from January this year. Quote,

The EU's smallest member state, Malta, has become the Mafia's El Dorado, or Mecca, guys. This was the shocking conclusion of a study commissioned by the European Parliament's Martin, oh God, Sheardovan. The report shows how Italian Mafia clans looted billions of euros through online gaming platforms in Malta between 2015 and 22. That's four billion euros of assets that were confiscated through investigations into online gaming related to Malta. and the study found that criminals, including those from Calabria's Andrangeta and Sicily's Koso Nostra have become part of the Maltese gaming sector through companies they set up in which they used to launder huge sums and money.

Actually, just a little hat tip to a story that I've got coming out in a couple weeks, which is on a similar sort of thing than that. Anyway, that is another show altogether. But, yeah, I'm not really sure we can add about Caruana Galizia on Underworld. Yeah, I mean, we did do some Andrangetta episodes, not about, Maltese stuff, obviously, but I think that I've got something coming up on the Camor just to round out the sort of Italian organized crime trio. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this is all related to like the online gaming there, which is obviously corrupt as hell. But there is another side to Maltese gangs. And it's focused on a different set of islands, colder ones, with better sport, but worse coffee. Yeah, it's Britain. And we're going to come back to our pal Tommy Smithson from the cold opening a wee bit. But first of all, we've got to find out.

where the Messina's actually came from because it's a fascinating tale and like I said one of its influence runs all the way up to well the time when I'm rifling through records sorry you guys don't want to go there again anyway through a guy named big Frank Mifshud and even our best friends the Albanians pop up but

the story of the Messina family actually doesn't begin in London at all or Britain but in Sicily calls it Sicily that's where in 1878 or 1879 Giuseppe Messina is born into a peasant family in the village of Lincoln or Glossa. His name weirdly

means tongue tongue in both Latin and Greek. But that's kind of apps because the Messina's lie about everything. Sounds like my ex-wife. Oh, wow. Is that too corny even for us? No, no, no, no, keep it, keep it. Is it? It might be too corny. Dale, if it's too corny, delete it.

If it's corny but it works, add in like a b-dumpch, like simple drum thing afterwards, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And first up, I'm going to use a lot of info from a book called the Mayfair Mafia, the lives in crimes of the Messina brothers here by Dick Kirby. And he goes pretty hard on this concept of the Messina's being born liars.

And fair enough, too, when we get deeper into this episode, you're going to find out. Kirby writes, quote, the Messinas lied about everything. Their names, their dates and places of birth, their addresses and their occupations. Others were drawn into their net. Their legal representatives lied for them. And the prostitutes, they rang, not only lied for them, but they went into courts of law and perjure themselves as well. I mean, I guess you don't need to listen further on

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

He sets up shop not in the capital Valletta, whose narrow straight street, aka the gut, It's a thin vein of bars, brothels and flop houses, bin Hamren, a sleepy suburb a couple miles inland, that not uncoincidentally is heavily populated by Sicilians. But of course, they're brothels here too. And Giuseppe gets to work on one of them as an assistant, marrying a local girl and having a son named Salvatore in 1898.

Then, in 2001, another son, Alfredo. The 1814 Treaty of Paris, signed by Napoleon after defeat in a series of conference, conflicts, including, most notably the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, which is my chance to shout out the Fulkechlax Sting, Madder, it's probably the maddest monument I've ever seen in my life. It ends up handing control of Malta to the British Empire, which means, among other things, that Giuseppe and his growing family can now get British citizenship. But Giuseppe has other plans. In 1904, he has to Alexandria, Egypt, which is at this point under the colonial administration

of, well, you know who, that year the British. racial authorities reverse anti-prostitution law set out by the Ottoman ruler, and by the way, something I didn't know, Albanian, Mohammed Ali Pasha, allowing brothels to apply for permits and subject to weekly health inspections. You know, when you scratch the surface under a lot of things, it's all run by Albanians, every country. Yeah. Is Pharaoh Albanian?

Is Martin Luther King Albanian? I don't know. Maybe. This is manner from heaven, of course, for Giuseppe. and he gets to work building a string of Egyptian bordellos servicing, among others, British troops despise for their drunkenness and poncho on for girls, some of them young. Giuseppe's family balloons alongside his business concerns, and he has three more sons, Eugenio, Atilio and Carmelo, and a daughter, Margarita.

But since citizenship of Egypt is only granted if a child's father has been born there, their time seems to be at a premium. Now, Giuseppe is no benevolent magnate. He's a pretty low-down pimp, or, to put it in the Arab vernacular, a sahbat, someone who manipulates, assaults and even rapes women into the trade. You thought this was your run club era. Turns out, it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start.

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No help is coming. Send help, rated R. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. But something even more violent is about to break out, the First World War. And that is when Giuseppe's chain of brothels becomes an empire, spreading from Alexandria into Cairo, Suez, and Port Saeed, and outside Egypt to Morocco. By the late 20s, the Messina sons are getting in on their father's act, and they hold bank accounts across North Africa and Europe.

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

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

make their way across the region. Salvatore visits Madrid, then Marrakesh in Casablanca, and he marries a Frenchwoman. Others head back to Malta, but eventually they all wind up in London, which at the time is the most popular city on earth, with almost 8 million people, that's just ahead of New York and Berlin. London also vitally has a big, fat underworld. vacuum. And to understand this, let's take a step back and examine the city between the wars. Now, it goes without saying that there are racial and fascist panics kicking off all over the continent, not least, of course, in Germany. And London has its own moral scares. Here's an excerpt from a 2013 essay called Pimps, Police and Fiederjoy. Quote, in April 1936, the news of the world

asked, is there a Jack the Strangler at large? The panic ensued as a result of two murders in Soho on 4th of November 1935 and the 16th of March 1936. Both victims were women of quote unquote uncertain virtue. A reign of terror was believed to hold sway over the West End following the murder of Dutch Lear, an English prostitute from East Ham and the 8th of 9th of May also in 1936. Her body was found in a flat in Old Compton Street, Soho.

Allegedly her tongue had been deliberately mutilated. The press inferred, darkly that she knew too much. Indeed, it was believed that all three of the victims knew too much. However, it was not the murders themselves that fueled such salacious stories. It was the alleged connection of these women believed to be prostitutes with a certain Max Castle, a Latvian pimp. A castle too was murdered, having been shot repeatedly at 36 Little Newport Street, Soho, in January 1936. He's believed to be an leader of an international gang of white, slave traffickers, whose name was feared in all the underworlds of Europe, according to the

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

Soho has a worst record for blood or violence and for darker forms of vice than any other in Great Britain. Decent, hardworking, clean living foreigners, as good citizens as any Britain, living cheek by jail with the scum of continental gutters, and now the mixture is getting too strong for anybody's taste. Yikes. Oddly enough, but. Despite Castle's prolific reputation, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Sharp, not the Sean Bean one, sadly, describes him as a quote,

very small-time ponds who lives on the earnings of one woman. This brigade of iron sounds fascinating. Is there a lot out there on them? I saw a couple of like really nerdy academic papers that I didn't want to get into or read at all. But yeah, maybe I'll revisit it.

Maybe we could do a bonus or something. And by the way, the use of the word ponds, that is going to sound pretty fun. I'm surprised you didn't bring it up. Is it not a thing in America that word at all? Not really, no. Nah, it's going to sound really funny to British ears.

I mean, these days it just means someone who nicks stuff or get stuff without pain. Like, you might call your power who shirks around down the pub, a ponds, or you might ask someone need to quote, ponds a fag off them, which I don't think crosses the pond very well. It's a really good put down, not used enough these days, but basically it means pimp. And we're going to hear a lot of it in this show, so just a heads up. Anyway, this whole situation of Ponziers and cool girls and Soho Bordellos and moral outrage,

it creates this, like whips up this popular madness not too dissimilar to the satanic panic or QAnon today, where people believe there's a cabal of mostly foreign pimps and sex workers who are tainting London with evil practices. The ire mostly falls on French women who've moved to London, as according to one academic France, quote, was represented as a moral pit, a place of sexual adventure and infidelity. a place of refuge for the bankrupt and disgraced. Sounds like certain bars in Brooklyn that I go to.

Hey, you can probably have another but on the end of that as well. See, I mean, these guys throw enough shit at the war and eventually some of it sticks, so fair play to the British media for that one on the French. But Soho becomes a kind of Latin quarter around this time, and it welcomes French, Italian, Belgian, Greek,

and Yugoslavia and migrants. I'm not sure how many of those are Latin, but it's the French who settle most. And for obvious geographical reasons, but also because London at the time is a far more liberal and welcoming city than Paris, despite the two cities' reputations. And French authorities of the time crack down a lot harder on pimps and call girls. But some of these guys come over from Malta, such as Paul Samut,

the gangst are already known to authorities in Paris, Marseille, Tunis, Algiers, Casablanca, Rabat, before he settles down in the West End. But Samut, despite his large footprint, he's pretty small time. And Castle, the Latvian? Well, he's on a mortuary slab. London is ripe for a new underworld kingpin. Enter Giuseppe Messina, stage left,

smuggling women from across the continent into the city to work in what he hopes will become Soho's dominant sex industry. The Messinas also make a ton of money, and they begin snapping up property in the city's nearby Mayfair district, one of the fanciest in town, as anybody who's played Monopoly will know well. At one point, the family owns no fewer than 32 Mayfair homes. As the quote from Chief Inspector Sharp suggests, the police too have got a pretty loose grip on all of this at best,

and at worst, a key hand in it. In 1928, there's a massive scandal involving Met Police bribes in the sex industry, which shows just how close the nexus is between pimps, bobbies and bruffles, which definitely should be the name of the book about this, by the way. And there's this kind of comedy in the way that all this obvious crime and vice rubs up against British middle class judicial prudishness. There's an episode during an inquiry into the police misconduct, for example, when a female magistrate refuses to believe it's possible to have sex standing up. It is? Yeah, it is apparently.

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

But anyway, all of this goes to publicize London to Londoners and politicians that despite their Edwardian sensibilities, this stuff is going on, a lot. And usefully, for most xenophobes at the time, most of the Ponces or pimps seem to be foreigners, many of whom the Met deports in the years leading up to the Second World War. The British Army's conscription into the war really puts a downer on the Messina's families, adopted British identities, and all five of Giuseppe's sons dodged the draft. During rationing, the family get their girls to be paid in petrol rationing. coupons so they can continue patrolling London streets at night.

The women, many of whom are in the UK via marriage is convenient, so this isn't Giuseppe's daughters per se, but also the wives of the sons. They get out of service simply by listing their profession as, quote, prostitute. A job the authorities are scared will contaminate the workforce with STDs. I don't know, maybe my manufacturing chlamydia-tip missiles or something, but it's pretty bold. Anyway, according to aspects of history, quote, World War II, was a boom time for British crime. Between 1939 and 1945, reported crime on the home front

in England and Wales grew by nearly 60%. Kind of reminds me of like in Naples 44, what the occupation of Naples and how like the gangsters and black market just flourishes during the war. Yeah, and all the Yakuza in Japan, right? They got loads of their power right in the middle of the war as well. It's good time, good time for crooks. There's not only the chaos of war to contend with, of course, but the constant blackouts, which extinguish all the light at night during German bombing raids. There's the black market in rations

and other materials and that creates a thriving underworld. And then there's the cops themselves. They're overworked and often moonlighting or seconded as air raid wardens, soldiers or other vital tasks. And when it comes to vice, nothing gets folks horny like scores

of deadly blitzkrieg attacks. Writes the Sunday pictorial quote, War has dimmed the bright lights of Piccadilly. Piscillis in Soho for non-Londoners. The worst kind of war profiteers have turned a place that was once gay into a den of organized vice, in which no one may walk with safety. I can tell you, mate, Soho was an always-will-be pretty gay, nothing new there.

But with so many American GIs stopping over in London before D-Day and other operations, there's a whole new clientele for the Messina's women and, of course, business. And STIs, boom. Incidents of venereal disease are reportedly 25% higher in London than in the US. I love that quote. One British Admiral writes to the Met Police that Piccadilly is, sorry for the language, but it's pretty telling,

full of, quote, sluts and vicious debauchery. The Met leader calls the district a quote, Mecca of service personnel, but that, quote, The West End of London is not such a grim, sordid and sensational area as the newspapers would have the more unsophisticated

of their readers believe. I mean, I don't think that's what Mecca is principally known for, but yeah, go off, mate. Victory in Europe only serves up more victories for Soho's Ponces. In 1945, there were just under 2,000 arrests in London for prostitution. By 1946, that figure has risen to almost 4,300. It's a huge rise.

And the Messinas, they're responsible for a huge chunk of it. And of course, the profits. Buying up gilded property like they're literally the Monopoly Man. I mean, in fact, they go so far down the route preferred today by Gulf States, princes and Russian oligarchs that they create a real estate business and use that to launder their vice cash. Wasn't that like a saying from the first like 10 episodes about how gangsters always end up in real estate

and they should just skip it and go right to a property of element? Yeah, yeah. I reckon we should try and sell more of the don't Instagram the crimes ones before we start getting on that. Underworldpod.com, guys. Anyway, so renowned are the messinas that rival Maltese goons try to muscle in on Soho. But in a fight,

Eugenio slices off three of a rival gang leaders named Carmelo Vassallo's fingers, and he goes into hiding to ride out the possible ensuing gang war. Later on, several of the Messina brothers are arrested over the fraccar, and their reputation heads out into the air big time. Two months after his rivals are sent down over the violence, Eugenio's in the dock. But thanks to some nifty defence lawyers, he gets off on an unlawful wounding charge, despite only having locked off Vassalo's fingers because he was aiming for a

kill shot to the gut. It's fair to say that Eugenio doesn't really know his place in ones with prison. Most inmates don't appreciate Ponces anyway, and a policeman gives him a beating when he reportedly tells the man, quote, take your hands off me, I buy and sell people like you in the West End. Not a great idea, mate. London hosts the Olympics in 48, bringing New Johns to the British capital. And Eugenio gets out of prison a year later, and pretty soon the Messinas have ramped up even their own big operations, running up to 30 brothels across the West End. The book I mentioned even has a map of these places, which you can take a peek out if you want of our Patreon subscribers, all the notes and read a list up there.

Anyway, in September 1950, the newspaper People runs an explosive headline, arrest these four men, with a subhead quote, they are the emperors of a vice empire in the heart of London. This story carries photos of four of the Messina brothers and others involved in the empire. And not only that, the writer gives their addresses too, which is pretty incredible. The brothers often get cops to frame rivals for crimes they never committed. After the story publishes, Messina's allegedly hired Triggermen from Corsica, which is, at the time, one of the world's biggest hotbeds of organized crime,

to off its writer, Duncan Webb, and he is attacked in the street by guys claiming to be, quote, Friends of the Brothers. What is it with like the islands in that region that lends themselves to criminal organizations, right? Like Malta, Sicily, Corsica, all of these have, I don't know, like they've all birthed these like global criminal mastermind groups for like very small, small countries, small, I mean, Sicily, like small islands, things like that, it's pretty wild. Yeah, maybe it's just vitamin D and oily fish in your diet. This sort of makes you into a crook. Maybe like transport routes, like centers of trade. I don't know.

Ships coming. I mean, I guess, small islands, docks that can be easily bought, I guess, something like that. I don't know. Ship-transhipment points,

stuff like that, I guess, because it lends itself to drugs and whatnot. Yeah, drug transshipment points, oily fish, good sun, sandcastles, all of that, yeah.

Anyway, this brings the brother's business to an attention of a young superintendent named Guy Mann, and it forces Scotland Yard to finally act decisively on what's going down in the West End.

revenues fall and expecting to be stung any moment. Eugenio drives his Rolls Royce south from London to Dover, then on to France, which means he went through Dartford, which is kind of funny. But anyway, it seems to be crumbling to pieces for the Messinas by this point. In 1950, four of the five Messina brothers are living in luxury on the continent. Alfredo, meanwhile, has spent the past decade or so as a, quote, diamond merchant living in Belgium and traveling all over Europe and North Africa.

but in 1951 he's caught too while he's attending to a dodgy bank deposit box in London and all manner of dirt spills out in the preceding trial about his cooperation and friendship with London's cops. Furthermore, during examination Alfredo really doesn't seem to give two shits whether the jury believes him, claiming to have so many bank accounts because he, quote, likes to, and that he wants cash about because he can't bring cash into the UK, even though he's already in the UK, and that's false anyway. cross-examinations of working women under him don't go well, and pretty balsily Alfredo also claims that cops who had rolls of notes

weren't bribed at all, but took notes from his safe and then fit him up on bribery charges. He's found guilty, of course, of pouncing and corrupting the police after a very, very short jury deliberation. He's handed a two-and-a-half-year prison term and a £500 fine, which in today's money is around $15,000. By the way, massive shout out to the Bank of England's inflation cab. which goes all the way back to 1209, which kind of makes me weirdly proud to be British for once. It means I can confidently say that a £15 pizza express in 2023 would have set you back just one P when the Magna Carte was sealed, although, I don't know, toppings, turnips and mud, pretty basic. Comedy. Very good comedy.

Littlemore is heard of Alfredo thereafter. He gets out of prison and he moves out to Brentford, which is in West London, probably best known today for its' primary. Premier League football team, and he's buried in 1961 with his mum and dad in Gunnersbury Cemetery, which is right opposite the stadium today. He's dead at that point, by the way, guys. After Alfredo is sent down, Atilio takes centre stage for the family. But he has brushings with the law all the way up to 1959, and he too is arrested and charged with various crimes related to Poncing or pimping. And later that year, he's found guilty with the judge saying, quote, while many men make an honourable living in the merchandise of goods,

you apparently for 10 years have made a sumptuous, but a revolting type of living from the suffering bodies of women you trapped or seduced and reduced to a form of slavery. I mean, I'm putting this in mainly because of that quote. He then sentences Atiliota four years and recommends deportation. He's got 40 Mayfair properties with a sex worker operating out of each one at this point, but in 1961, he gets out of prison early and he's put on a plane. to Rome before he sets foot in San Remo. Foggy Smoggy London for the Librean Coast. I mean, it's not a bad swap, I reckon. A similar fate awaits Carmelo, whose hand is a six-month

sentence and then it's dumped out of Britain to Rome. He dies soon after, but in squalor. By the way, I checked out Hansard from this time, which is the British Parliament's official record of debates, and there's an interesting exchange from 1956 where MPs gripe about the brothels and the messinas, but mostly because they're scared the locations, are a hotbed of homosexuality, which is of course illegal at this point, and will be until 1967. Britain, of course, is the country that chemically castrated one of its greatest heroes, Alan Turing in 1952, and drove into suicide just two years later.

Stupid, stupid, stupid country. You know, the amount of work you put into these, it doesn't really correspond to the amount of money that we make on them. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue.

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It's a way to design, our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks for presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Have you seen rates for magazines at the moment? I'm not sure. Anyway, for all this bluster, Parliament doesn't really do anything useful at all. In 1958, there are an estimated 5,000 sex workers on London streets. The following year, authorities enact the streets Offenses Act,

which aims to restrict loitering with the intent to sell sex, but that doesn't have much effect at all. And while the dominance of the Messinas is pretty much over by the early 1960s, it gives way to a rise of a new generation of ponces and underworld kingpins. And these guys are Maltese too. Remember Tommy Smithson, the hapless goon from the introduction who told bystanders, good morning, I'm dying, and then, well, died. Philip Ellul and Vic Spampinato may have been his murderers,

but the man who gave the order to kill, he was a guy named Frank Mifsard, Big Frank, an 18 stone monster and former traffic policeman. Here's the Times of Mortar report on the book, Passport to Vice by Matthew Vela. I'm trying to get Matthew on the show for a bonus episode because he's done some great work on this. Quote,

Big Frank was at the head of this organised crime, syndicate, which is believed to have worked with well-known gangsters such as the Cray brothers and infiltrated the top ranks of Scotland Yard to take control of vice in a large chunk of the UK capital. The one-time traffic policeman had left Mortar in the 1960s to make a name for himself in the vice world of London's Soho. He's believed to have recruited the Maltese to the Soho gang that would become known as the syndicate, a vast Coral Empire built up in London over 20 years. Tommy Smithson, who if you recall is working for rival Maltese Hardman at the time of his death,

is a key stepping stone in Mithsard's West End takeover. In 1963, Mistsod joins forces with Bernie Silver, a Jew from London's East End, and a pair of form what will later be known as the syndicate, taking over the Messina's one-time properties and strangling the city's vice industry. It specialises in so-called clip joints, places familiar to anyone who's been strong-armed by mobbed, run strip clubs in, say, Vegas, where you go for a dance and then you're suddenly hit with a three or four-figure bill enforced by a very large man, speaking of language you don't understand. Not that that's ever happened to the respectable hosts of this here respectable podcast.

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

in Amsterdam's the current Red Light Zone. A good one to go on assignment for, eh? Yeah, I mean, I just, I know everything's legal there, but you have to assume that these groups are still, there's still people out there getting paid on it. Oh, for sure. I mean, it's like fully legal in Germany, too. but there was a big raid on a place.

It's like Europe's biggest brothel. It's on six floors. It's fucking disgusting. And they found that this guy who was a goalkeeper for Frankfurt in the top football league was actually like in on the whole thing. And they were bringing women in from Ukraine. So like, it's hard to keep it all above board when it comes to this stuff. But anyway, back to London.

For Kray fans slash scholars, because they're the big guys, right? They play a big role in Big Franks rise as well. In 1967, Mifsted sits down with the feared twins to broker a, quote, Frightner on rival club owner George Caruana, also Maltese. There's a £1,000 price tag on Caruana's head, and the craze agreed to off him. Their first idea is to plant a bombing Caruana's car, and they even dispatch a young guy named Paul Elvley to Glasgow to fetch the dynamite.

But Elvies arrested when cops find the four sticks in his luggage on the flight back to London. I mean, airport security really not a thing back then. Back at Elvys home, they discover another weapon he's been given for the job. A crossbow, of course. London's chief inspector, Leonard Nipper Reed, is really famous back in the day. He used this the failed hit to build a case against the Craig Twins, which eventually brings them down.

From that moment on, the Maltese syndicate reigns supreme in the British capital. You know, I really had no idea that the Maltese had this much of a presence an organized crime. I wonder if it's just an English thing, because I don't know, you know, if there were U.S. Maltese gangs out there

if we didn't have a big enough population of them or if just the Sicilians, Jews, and Irish just had such close control of the stuff that they ran them out. But it's, yeah, it's interesting. It's new to me. Yeah, it was kind of new to me. I guess it's because they're, like, technically,

at this point, British citizens and they can sort of hop between the countries pretty easily. I know it's the only EU country now that has English as its main, language, but it's totally fascinating, like you say, these island nations, like they got a history, man. Here is a Malta today quote about the syndicate. At the height of its influence, most of the Metropolitan Police's obscene publication squad were in the syndicates pay, including its head

detective chief superintendent Bill Moody. But a 1969 times expose of police framing small-time criminals and offering not to press charges in exchange for money or information, cite to slowly unravel the syndicates network. A series of other trials and exposés revealed a general picture of police criminal links. Particularly favoured were silver and misstud, with the discovery of a detailed ledger of the syndicates police payoffs during a raid on the home of Silver Associate Jimmy Humphreys. Don't led to hundreds of dismissals, false retirements and the corruption trials of 1976-77, which results in 13 detectives, including two ex-commanders, the highest ranking British police officers ever to be convicted of corruption,

being sentenced to a total of 90 years in prison. So this stuff was running all the way to the top. It's really sort of big-time crime. Like you say, I didn't really know anything before I started researching this. Anyway, in 1973, that's a couple years before the raids. Silver and Mr. Ombuds are abscond on, quote, extended holidays. Then the press and police collude in an extraordinary ruse to get the gangsters back to Blighty, claiming that charges have been dropped, warrants withdrawn, and Scotland Yard is no longer interested in them.

Silver comes back from France, and he's arrested at dinner on December 30, 1973. So that's pretty wild. So the press knew they were printing a fake story that the charges were being dropped just to get these guys to come back? Yeah, this is like Series 5 of the wire, right? This is pretty crazy stuff. And Philip Ellul, right? He's the guy who killed Tommy Smithson. he's initially found guilty of Tommy's killing and sentenced to death.

Britain's last execution was in 1964, by the way, but it's commuted to life in prison just 48 hours before the hanging date, and he winds up serving just 11 years behind bars. Now, that is a reprieve. Elol serves his time and emigrates to the US. But in 1974, he's discovered destitute on a San Francisco park bench, and he returns to London to testify in the trial against Bernie Silver. Mithson, meanwhile, hides out in Switzerland for the years before he's extradited,

but he gets his sentence quashed on the pill and he lives out his years in Silema, a harbour suburb of the Maltese capital Valletta, until his death, aged 92 in 2017. So, I guess, crime pays. But that's not all. The Maltese connection in London continues even after Big Frank's exile. That is, of course, until the Albanians rock up. Around the turn of the 21st century, Albanians and Albanian Kosovars, forced out by the Balkan wars, push out the Maltese mobsters, who've run London Vice for decades,

writes Ben Judah in his excellent book, This is London, quote, They found work as bouncers at first. At the millennium, these running the brothels of Soho were Maltese, an old established mafia. The Albanians disdain them as weak Soho bisexuals in pink bow ties and floral shirts, setting only ugly girls from Newcastle upon time. Ouch. Barely warm in their leather jackets,

smoking cigarettes at 4 in the morning outside the Maltese bruffles on Greek Street. They hatched a plan. They would conquer Soho. Holy fuck. I mean, that paragraph alone makes you want to buy the book. I mean, that book is fantastic. Yeah, I'd fully recommend it. It's so good.

Anyway, it carries on. Quote, the first Maltese to fall went down on his knees when the bouncer pointed the gun at his head. quivering and pathetic in his purple jacket, he agreed to sell up. But now they needed girls. Girls who were better and cheaper. One Albanian got in a truck and drove to Moldova. They trundled around the peasant villages, promising glittering careers in waitressing and modeling.

Then they raped and trafficked them. Pretty awful, huh? Yeah, I mean, I've also noticed that the Albanians are popping up more and more in American TV and movies as like the bad guys. like the new season of Justified, there's like a plot line with them, but you know, taken, I guess came out years ago. It's really becoming like the new trend in like bad guys in action and police movies. Is justified, is it good? Is it worth watching?

Yo, I just watched the original and it's like over the period of like two months and it's incredible. The new season's all right, but the original is amazing. It takes a couple episodes to warm up, but it's fucking great. Right, I need something new. I'll get on it. But even as late as 2012, right, that's when London is hosting its second Olympic Games. Maltese organized crime is still influencing stuff in the West End. That year, cops raid the home of a Russian pimp or ponds in Charing Cross Road,

an address made famous by Maltese Charlie, a pimp who specialised in controlling girls who charge premium rates because they were underage. Wight's the evening standard, it's cell phone by a controversial Russian oligarch, quote, his sordid business was estimated to earn him more than 500,000 pounds a year. When police officers finally arrested him, he had $3,200 in cash in his pockets, $58,000 in cash at his house, and in the refrigerator, tubs of margarine in which 20,000 pounds worth of gold jewelry was concealed. I mean, I keep my stuff there as well. That's not a big deal.

Charlie celebrated for his reputation for having a pair of eyes tattooed on his buttocks. That's a bit weird, isn't it? was sentenced to nine months jail. That was four years ago. Today his old horn in Charing Cross Road is still in business. I mean, I guess in jail, the eyes on the backside might come in handy. I don't know. So that's the story of Maltese Vice.

In London, guys, from the Messinas to Big Frank to Maltese, Charlie, Albanians, and my own stories are confused teenage peep shows and record stores. Hope you enjoyed it. Don't Instagram any crimes. And we'll be back with another banger next week. Damn, that was thorough, man. that was a long one. Yeah, bonuses always, patreon.com,

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