It was a dull weekday evening at the end of 2003, and Michael Lafferty was slumped on his sofa in Hampton Wick half-watching London Tonight. Amid the usual local news stories – an accident in the Blackwall Tunnel; a Tottenham teen’s inspirational weight-loss journey; a Newham Hospital baby blunder delivered with stony condemnation by Alastair Stewart – something caught his eye. ‘I was sitting in our living room around dinnertime, when I noticed a live reporter doing a piece literally outside the front of our house,’ Lafferty says. He lived next door to Stryker’s Railway, a traditional locals’ boozer that directly faced Hampton Wick train station. According to the news report, the pub’s landlord, a genial American by the name of Stryker, had been arrested that day. Some heavy words were being thrown around, words like ‘mafia’ and ‘gangster’. It seemed that John Stryker was not who he claimed he was. ‘We quickly went next door for a pint and the Aussie barman filled us in,’ Lafferty says. ‘That’s how I found out about our friend Nofio.’
In 1991, Nofio Pecoraro Junior, the son of a high-ranking caporegime in the New Orleans mafia, was indicted on 41 counts of money laundering and insurance fraud after Certified Lloyd’s, the company he had run since 1987 with his mother, Frances, had allegedly defrauded customers out of $7.2 million. Frances was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a federal prison (she died in 2003), but Pecoraro – worried that a 1984 drug-dealing and bribery conviction would exacerbate his punishment – fled to England, changed his name to John Stryker (seemingly after John Wayne’s character in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima) and for 13 years lived a life on the lam as the landlord of Stryker’s Railway. In December of 2003, he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police while attempting to obtain a passport and a shotgun licence under a false name. Pecoraro spent some time in both Wandsworth and the floating prison ship HMP Weare, before being extradited back to the US. Until now, Pecoraro had never discussed his life in Hampton Wick. This is the first time his story has been told.
The case of Nofio Pecoraro Junior and Stryker’s Railway had been on my mind for a while. I was only 12 in 2003, but having grown up in nearby Kingston, the pub – by then known as The Railway – did play a very minor supporting role in my own personal suburban Bildungsroman. In 2006, I got into a fight with the then-landlord’s son, who had taken umbrage with my penchant for winklepickers and coloured drainpipes. In 2008, I spent a few illicit underage evenings there, back in the days when a tenner would keep you in refreshment for an entire raucous night. And I vaguely remember acknowledging its closure in 2010 with nothing more than a passing shrug; too young and in-the-moment to care about such humdrum things as pub preservation, or the loss of a community asset.
Ten years later, I found myself revisiting The Railway as part of my London Dead Pubs project. It’s a fascinating and barely believable story: the mafioso’s son turned suburban publican. There was a flurry of press at the time – some British papers took to referring to Pecoraro as ‘The Grogfather’ – but, 20 years later, it’s a story that’s been largely forgotten. I wanted to hear Pecoraro’s side of things. How had he ended up in sleepy Hampton Wick, the south-west London locale best known as the setting for George and Mildred? How did someone from Louisiana get on running an unruly English pub? And now he was back in America, did he miss any of it? On a whim, I looked up Pecoraro on Facebook. I found a profile with some mutual friends of mutual friends. So, I sent a request and in November 2022, received a reply.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t believe I know you,’ it read. ‘Was I a friend of your parents possibly?’ His photos showed no sign of either criminality or pubs, with just a handful of images of a handsome olive-skinned man playing polo, each proudly stamped with an ‘I Got My COVID-19 Vaccine’ sticker. It was the Facebook page of a man living his best life, all tagged inspirational quotes and check-ins at steak houses. Had I got the right Pecoraro? I typed up my response, explaining that I’d love to have a chat about The Railway, pressed send, and waited. And waited. It wasn’t until the following year that I eventually got a response.
‘I don’t know what questions you may have, my story was pretty publicised in the UK; but if you wish, contact me on my email.’ I had an in.
Although Pecoraro, now 73, was reluctant to divulge too much information about his time pre-Railway (‘If you’re trying to get background history on my family, I am not interested’) he did tell me that on arriving in England in the early 90s, he lived first in Maida Vale, and then Barnes – before moving to Lower Teddington Road in Hampton Wick and getting a job as an estate agent with Carringtons.
‘I fell in love with it – Bushy Park and Hampton Court Palace.’ For him, it was about the beauty and the convenience, ‘to just walk into Kingston, or jump on the train and go to London, Wimbledon, Guildford – all over the south of England.’ One night, some friends of his dragged him to The Railway for a pint and a game of pool. He loved it, and slowly began spending more and more time in the pub.
