Dear Readers,
Welcome to the thirteenth iteration of our newsletter-slash-propaganda arm. We have got some very funny bits on Perry Anderson, a tribute to Carrie Bradshaw and a peculiar question for you all. But first, an investigation into the life and times of the most enigmatic figure in the London underworld.
Plotting Up on the Pavement
Decked out like a dandy in Missoni shirts, and loaded with a reverence for Charlie Parker, Jimmy Holmes was the peacock of the organised crime scene in London throughout the 1980s and 1990s. A former rent boy who was schooled in the vice game by Soho godfather, Bernie Silver, Holmes teamed up with the hardest man in Canning Town, David Hunt, to form a syndicate that became untouchable. So why haven’t you heard of him? Because they corrupted the Metropolitan Police so thoroughly that they became too big to take down. Now, thanks to investigative journalist Michael Gillard, Holmes’ story has been told in the book Legacy, which charts the astonishing story of the self-styled ‘avant-garde gangster’.
And you can see Jimmy in all his grim glory in this video here. If you reckon that he’s telling tall tales, then think again. As David McKelvey, the detective who spent a decade trying to bring down the Hunt crime group told us, ‘it’s the most important interview given by a major criminal on these shores.’
In 1996, Holmes got into a dispute with Hunt over money, so he started a campaign of revenge against his former friend. Hunt had bought an eight-bedroom mansion in the prim Hertfordshire countryside. Holmes covered the area with flyers, so to let the locals know there was an article about their neighbour:
‘Davey Hunt, the pimp. Read the truth. Buy it now and tell your friends. Also runs sex shops selling gay mags, lesbian mags, dildos, blow-up dolls, poppers. Free hard-core video with every purchase.’
That was only the beginning of Jimmy’s plotting. A talented writer, he penned a book, Judas Pig. While it was written under a pseudonym, Horace Silver, it was a thinly veiled portrayal of real-life events. It’s permeated with vantablack humour: the crew go and visit Ronnie Kray in Broadmoor, where the ageing twin holds court, smoking cigarettes ‘like Greta Garbo’, and asking for chocolates for his friend, Peter Sutcliffe.
By then, Holmes had fled to Miami, and according to Gillard, spent the next decade jetting between Florida, California, Ireland and Surrey, all the while fearing a bullet in the back of the head. As ‘Horace Silver’, he gave an interview to an online publication, and also started social media accounts to taunt Hunt.
Then in 2010, the Sunday Times published an article entitled ‘Underworld Kings Cash in on Taxpayer Land Fund’, which identified David Hunt as ‘head of a notorious crime syndicate’. So, Hunt then sued Times Newspapers for libel, a case which was dismissed in 2013 by Justice Simon, who said that he had little difficulty accepting that Hunt was head of an ‘organised crime network implicated in extreme violence and fraud’.
Now, with his enemy tagged with a Wikipedia page – but still walking free – where in the world is Jimmy Holmes? His social media accounts are inactive. David McKelvey reckons he’s dead, but Gillard has done some digging and found no proof that the dandy gangster has shuffled off into the eternal.
Whether he is six feet under or not, Jimmy’s book and interview are singular insights into the actuality of the London criminal world. Given the number of contemporary films and TV series that portray London’s criminals as a cheeky bunch of multicultural chancers (made, more often than not, by minor public schoolboys), there is a public misconception about the top tiers of organised crime in London. There are Albanians gangs, Eastern European gangs and so on, but it is still, to an under-reported extent, dominated by men from a white working-class background. And they’re very far from the Robin Hood figures the popular press make them out to be, as Holmes himself says:
'The public have a very strong image of what gangsters are like, and it's tied up with the likes of Lenny McLean or Dave Courtney, but that's a long way from the truth. I did an interview with a journalist from one of the lads' mags and he asked me if I had any funny stories. I didn't know what to say. To me, the time I put a nonce case in a coma was fucking hilarious. I fell about laughing afterwards. We used to laugh when we tortured people, too. I don't think he understood. I think he wanted a tale about the time we went out to rob a bank, pulled our guns out and our trousers fell down around our ankles.’
If you’d like to read more about Jimmy Holmes, then do buy Legacy: it’s one of the most important pieces of journalism published in recent years. And then see if you can work out who, within Hunt’s crew, is ‘the father of a well-known reality TV star.’
Dead Famous
The BBC have been punching out quite a few grandiose documentaries of late. In the summer, they broadcast Once Upon A Time in Iraq. It garnered breathless praise, even though at least two episodes were entirely based on the journalistic output of the American journalist, Dexter Filkins (not that the viewer would have been any the wiser).
Now, they are back with another portentous four-parter. Celebrity: a 21st Century Story, which looks at how the age of Simon Cowell and social media has transformed the nature of celebrity. It’s kind of watchable as a highlights reel of the last twenty years (there’s Nasty Nick! Gareth Gates hasn’t aged much! And so on).
But it makes a number of bold claims which are brazenly ahistorical. Greg Jenner, who is an expert in this field, points out that Kim Kardashian, Katie Price et al follow in the footsteps of Anna Held, Mae West and Giacomo Casanova.
And as a work of journalism, the series falls short. At the beginning of each episode, we are told that ‘agents, newspapers, magazine companies, broadcasters, record labels and TV companies have made vast amounts of money from celebrity’. But we are then given titbits with marketing execs who tell us, among other insights, that One Direction used ‘social media to expand their boy-brand’, which is not exactly new or interesting information.
In the interview with Jimmy Holmes, he very clearly tells the viewer how organised crime in London changed in the 1980s. Armed robbery was out; drug-dealing was in. We’re given facts and figures, and lots of colour about the individuals involved. It would have been fascinating to have had similar details about, say, how much money an influencer can make in a year, and how companies encourage them to maintain longevity. Everyone knows that ‘structured reality’ programmes like Made in Chelsea are scripted. But we get no access to this particular process.
There’s a surfeit of visual material available to TV producers, so it’s tempting to barrage an audience with so much razzle-dazzle that they forget to question whether a program succeeds as work of critical inquiry. Let’s call it the ‘Adam Curtis tendency’ and hope that the Beeb can step it up with their next outing.
Answers on a Postcard
Which prominent lockdown sceptic was once well-known on Fleet Street for making all their sexual partners rewrite You’re the Tops so that the lyrics were about them?
A Man of Wealth and Taste
Perry Anderson has completed his Lexiteer hattrick in the LRB, with an essay coming in hot at just over 11,000 words. Some salient facts within, no doubt, which we encourage you all to read. But we’re not interested in the Old Etonian doyenne of the New Left Review as a peerless critic of corporatist hegemony. We are here to celebrate Rory Francis Peregrine Anderson as an unlikely rock music fanatic.
According to Tariq Ali, Anderson was known in the sixties for his ‘frenetic dancing’, and under the thumb of ‘‘Richard Merton’, his pseudonym, produced two essays on The Rolling Stones. If you excuse the predilection for Continental theorists, they supply a remarkably perceptive analysis of why Jagger and Richards’ early output still speaks so strongly to a contemporary audience:
‘It is incorrect to say that the Stones are ‘not major innovators’. Perhaps a polarization Stones-Beatles such as Adorno constructed between Schoenberg and Stravinsky (evoked by Beckett) might actually be a fruitful exercise. Suffice it to say here that, for all their intelligence and refinement, the Beatles have never strayed much beyond the strict limits of romantic convention: central moments of their oeuvre are nostalgia and whimsy, both eminently consecrated traditions of middle-class England. Lukács’s pejorative category of the Angenehme – the ‘pleasant’ which dulls and pacifies – fits much of their work with deadly accuracy. By contrast, the Stones have refused the given orthodoxy of pop music; their work is a dark and veridical negation of it. It is an astonishing fact that there is virtually not one Jagger-Richards composition which is conventionally about a ‘happy’ or ‘unhappy’ personal relationship. Love, jealousy and lament – the substance of 85 per cent of traditional pop music – are missing. Sexual exploitation, mental disintegration and physical immersion are their substitutes.’
New Journalism, Baby
Amid the unremitting gloom, there have been a couple of mediaworld stories to savour. Jonathan Nunn has revitalised food writing with his newsletter Vittles, and Joshi Herrmann has launched Manchester Mill, a new local newspaper for the city, and he’s written a very interesting piece about his project which we recommend you read. Both publications were set up in the teeth of the pandemic, and both are flourishing. It just goes to show – people will pay for quality writing!
Sick Cribs
‘America is a madhouse!’ is a tedious cliché, one that has only gained currency among the idle commentariat since the events of the sixth of January. But what’s the maddest house in America? We’ve dug deep and reckon that we’ve found the most bonkers palazzo that’s ever been constructed in the United States. Situated on the wonderfully named ‘Attitude Adjustment Road’, if you want a tribute to the folly of wealth, then look no further than the Savannah Dhu and its boulder-hewn chimneys.
We’re Team Aidan
Sex and the City is back. The TV show was great for the first few series, when it was funny and cool and clever. But then the producers and the stars got greedy and dragged it on for two terrible films, the first of which received one of the brutal hatchet jobs of recent years: ‘I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hardline Marxist.’
At the Altar of Capital
Meanwhile, in lockdown Britain, the Government continues to be out-maneuvered by the careful heroism of the Manchester United footballer, Marcus Rashford. At the same time, the silent work that the Church of England (CofE) currently provides for society’s neediest remains unheralded.
The CofE was once known as the ‘Tory party at prayer’, yet the Church has long since been abandoned by the Conservative Party. Our staff writer, the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, provides a witty overview in this article, in which he explores the links between the foundation of the welfare state and the prevarications of the ruling class.
Regarding the Church, we are now just £900 pounds from our target for St Matthew’s, Burnley. Please, if you can, give something here to our appeal. Fr Alex Frost is stricken with a nasty bout of COVID. They need our help more than ever.
A Wavian Touch
A few newsletters back, we profiled the new chief of MI6, Richard Moore, who is perhaps the first ‘C’ to do a sideline in Twitter-lols. And now that Joe Biden has appointed William Burns to head up the CIA, it seems that the ‘special relationship’ is safe in the hands of two absolute banter merchants.
In 2006, as the US Ambassador to Russia, Burns attended a high society wedding in the Caucasus, which featured drunken jet-skiing and AK-47 toasts. Burns filed an elegantly funny cable which has since been published by Wikileaks: ‘To the uninitiated Westerner, the music sounds like an undifferentiated wall of sound. This was a signal for dancing: one by one, each of the dramatically paunchy men (there were no women present) would enter the arena and exhibit his personal lezginka for the limit of his duration, usually 30 seconds to a minute.’
Snitches Get Stitches
The UK has shut its borders as the death toll hits four figures a day, and so the nation’s influencers have decamped to Dubai. Archie Bland and Matthew Weaver have the story on the ‘hard graft’ currently being performed by those industrious Instagrammers.
Now, we are writers, not COVID-marshals; but we cannot help but wonder why it has taken the Prime Minister so long to enact a fairly obvious pandemic-proof measure. Maybe some enterprising hack might like to fire up their Insta, and look at which Tory donors were enjoying some winter sun a few weeks back?
Obrigado, Skepta
Last October, the dance music website Resident Advisor received £750,000 from the COVID-19 cultural relief grant. Cue outrage from slighted nightclubs like the Pickle Factory, Egg and Studio 338, who didn’t get a penny from the Government, and have no viable means of revenue for the foreseeable future.
It was knives out for Resident Advisor, because they run a highly profitable ticketing system for events. But they also operate a superb journalistic arm, that one particular youth media conglomerate has tried to imitate (and failed miserably).Their film series, Between the Beats, lifted the gilded rope of life as a touring DJ, to reveal the airport-centred mundanity of life on the road – and the crashing lows that come with it.
Now, in a long-read by Felipe Maia, they profile the rise of Brazilian grime music, and how a music form that originated in the council flats of Bow has made its way over to São Paulo. It’s a fascinating, unlikely portrait of cultural cross-pollination, between two countries that have, on paper, comparatively few similarities. A bit of joy amid the unremitting gloom!
*
On that hopeful note, that’s the lot for this week. Thank you especially to David McKelvey and Michael Gillard for speaking to us about Jimmy Holmes.
We’ll be back, ten days hence, with another batch of featurettes and deep dives. Plus, an interview with renowned critic-turned-novelist, Lauren Oyler, who talks to us about her social media addiction – a subject close to our hearts. As ever, you can get in touch with us by responding to this email.
All the best,
TF
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