T Stokes, London
The Beatle’s John Lennon was born on Oct 9 1940 and murdered forty years later on Dec 8 1980. His killer, Mark Chapman was caught, tried and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison – a sentence that he is still serving. So much is history but it might not be the whole story.
At a big London railway station in the spring of 1970, a plastic carrier bag was found in the regular search for bombs before the station closed for the night. The contents were an odd assortment of letters and photos, which seemed to have been taken at kinky party attended by some well-known figures in entertainment. One in particular showed a pop singer who masquerades under a Christian persona; dressed in women’s underwear he was pictured with young boys.
Brian Epstein
The bag was duly taken to the station office and as a senior rail worker wrote out a report for the lost property office, two MI5 men and a special branch officer arrived and demanded the photos. They claimed that the pop singer was being blackmailed over them: the object being to coerce him into promoting socialism and homosexuality in Britain for the Soviet KGB.
The pop singer in question had even threatened to commit suicide if the photos were released.
However MI5 passed one particular letter from the bag to the tax authorities, because it seemed to indicate that the three brothers who had a virtual monopoly over Britain’s entertainment industry were short-changing the taxman.
The brothers – Bernard Delfont, Lew Grade, and Leslie Grade (Winogradsky) – had a stranglehold over stage and screen appearances in Britain and gave preference to Jewish stars and promoters. Such were the amounts involved that fellow Jews the Kray twins were asked to launder much of the money in clubs and fixed boxing matches, gambling and other dubious enterprises.
Meanwhile the Krays themselves had high-level protection from inside the police, which bought them immunity for a while with bribery and funny handshakes.
Another ‘entertainer’ connected to the underworld was comedian Bud Flanagan of the Crazy Gang. He was not actually an Irishman at all, but a Polish Jew named Reuben Weintrop, codenamed ‘Whisky’ who had told
the authorities all about London’s East End criminal networks before World War II. This information had been filed in the ‘take no action’ category but suddenly reappeared and made jaws drop with its accuracy.
Mail surveillance of music promoters Brian Epstein and Joe Meeks revealed that the company Epstein had set up with Nat Weiss to promote the Beatles in the States – marketing everything from Beatles chewing gum and comics to bathroom mats, towels and wallpaper – was taking a phenomenal 90% of the profits while the Beatles took just 10%.
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