Most readers of this book, I suspect, will never have heard of Freddie Mills. He was a British boxer who punched above his weight. As a protagonist in this book, he also punches above his weight in the thickening plot. He is no lightweight among the cast of characters.
Britain wasn’t noted for its pugilists, a sport monopolised at the top by Americans. Although big-hearted, our fighters tended to be big losers, especially in the ring of the world stage. However, in 1948 Mills became the world light-heavyweight champion of the world, defeating Gus Lesnevich. So home-bred Freddie was a world-conquering hero just at a time when Britain desperately needed an infusion of sporting cheer in the wake of a debilitating world war that had left the country on its knees, not buckling or in genuflection, from exhaustion and an economic haemorrhage.
Freddie was a national treasure long before this eulogy had become a tired, meaningless cliché of a country running on tabloid hype. He had tousled, ruffled black hair, a craggy, trampled-over face, the crouched posture and freestyle action of a fairground prize fighter, and he was fearless to the point of recklessness.
‘Fearless Freddie’ dominated the back-page headlines during the days when he was mismatched by greedy promoters, who often upgraded him to the heavyweight division, having him brawl with opponents much heavier than he, by as much as four or five stones on some occasions. I say brawl consciously because Freddie was a brawler, a street fighter. He would dance from his corner, intent on attack and with contempt for defence; a charging warrior who would never retreat, even in the face of a machinegun-fire of punches. For Freddie, boxing was trench warfare: over the top and into the cannon’s mouth, whatever the cost. Consequently, he absorbed an abundance of punishment, especially to his head, but took it with the resolve of a masochist. Some weeks he was overdosing on painkillers, combined with neat whisky, which resulted in his even forgetting where he lived while out and about in London.
The year he was crowned world champion coincided with his marriage to Chrissie McCorkindale. Chrissie, a divorcee, had been married to another boxer, Don McCorkindale, so she was used to sleeping beside a bruised and battered husband. Freddie was twenty-nine and had enough sense still left in his head to accept that his career in the ring wouldn’t last much longer, if he wanted to retire while at the top and in command of most of his faculties; cauliflower ears couldn’t be avoided, but a brain of mashed potatoes, hopefully, could still be thwarted.
So he invested in a Chinese restaurant at 143 Charing Cross Road in London; it was only a basement place, but so what? Much of London was underground. He had partners: Andrew Chin Guan Ho, manager; George Riley, a pet food merchant; and Charles Luck, a civil engineer in Northamptonshire. Luck was the restaurant’s licensee.
Very few champion sports personalities – especially boxers – know when to hang up their gloves: correction, they know when they should walk away from it, but common sense has been knocked out of them. The heat of the spotlight, the clang of the bell, the popping of photographers’ flash-bulbs ringside, the sweat, the blood, the roar of the crowd, the referee holding up their arm in a victory salute, the exultation – it’s another drug, such a variety of them about, as this book unmasks. Purple hearts feeding a lot of black hearts.
So Freddie decided on just one more fight. It was always just one more, one for the road, the one that can turn a fun night into a fiasco. Even the astute and highly intellectual Muhammad Ali duped himself with that just one more delusional mantra.
Freddie’s biggest payday would be 24 January 1950; it would set him up for the rest of his life. He was to defend his world light-heavyweight crown at Earl’s Court against the Italian/American Joey Maxim, who had honed his skills on the streets of a ghetto in Cleveland, Ohio, a neighbourhood of poor immigrants, where his opponents often had knives and he was armed only with knuckles. Always the knuckles won. In many ways this was to be a clash of similar styles: both men were sluggers. Maxim was only a year younger than Freddie and was considered the underdog, but only by the partisan British press.
Joey Maxim was an off-the-shelf name, so much more American than Giuseppe Antonio Berardinelli. Maxim was the name of a prototype machine-gun and aptly reflected Joey’s speciality, a left jab that was unleashed with the repetitive speed of such a weapon. Nevertheless, the biased British predicted that ‘Fearless Freddie’ would be bathed in more glory; that’s what he was brainwashed into believing by not only the media but his manager, an avaricious promoter, his sycophantic pals and the blinkered public.
The result: he was murdered: perhaps murdered, in the context of this narrative, isn’t an appropriate description, but I’m sure it leaves the reader in no doubt of the nature of the contest. Freddie was floored, down and out, in the tenth round. At least he was alive and had a future, albeit a rollercoaster one and far from as planned, and with three of his teeth left embedded in one of Maxim’s gloves. Missing teeth seem to have become a feature of this book, one way or another.
Right from the launch, it was obvious that the restaurant was never going to be a money-spinner, but Mills was undaunted in those everything-to-play-for days. Although he’d retired from the ring, he was still a marketable sports star, a celebrity, who was constantly appearing on TV chat shows and other variety programmes, plus as a pundit for newspapers when there was a big fight coming up on the sporting calendar. He was the ideal B-list celeb to open fêtes, new sports arenas, carnivals and commercial enterprises.
‘Always friendly that Freddie,’ was typical of the compliments you’d hear wherever he’d undertaken a public engagement. ‘Always grinning. Always got a gag to tell.’ It was true too; even if he had a humdinger of a headache – and he was haunted by those – he would still manage to retain the cheerful chappie public persona that made him so popular. In fact, most people assumed he was a cockney, especially when he began hanging out with the disreputable Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, but nothing could have been further from the truth. He was born and raised in sedate and stuffy Bournemouth, an image that this south-coast resort shed years ago.
After a few years following sporting retirement, the name Freddie Mills ceased to be such a marketable brand and he wasn’t a natural entrepreneur. TV viewers began drawing producers’ attention to Freddie’s slur and mental sluggishness – not a result of over-indulging in alcohol, but punch-drunkenness. In that era, the damage that could be caused by incessant blows to the head that didn’t result in concussion or unconsciousness was still not fully appreciated, even by neurologists. In layman’s language, he’d been incrementally beaten batty.
The Kray family was collectively very fond of Freddie. In view of their record for sadism and thuggery, it’s hard to imagine fondness as having a place in the Krays’ makeup, but they were a boxing fraternity, it was in their blood. Although they respected – yes, respected – all boxers, Freddie was special to them. He was their kind of fighter. In other words, he was a bit ‘mad’. The more he was hurt, the more he attacked. The more he was hit, the more he slugged back. Pain was painless to him. That doesn’t make sense? Of course not, but it demonstrates the loveable side of his ‘madness’ and his affinity with the Krays.
So when the restaurant was floundering, the twins paid Freddie a visit, took him to one of the nearby snooker halls, and advised him to turn the basement premises into a nightclub. Now, advice from the Krays usually meant do it or you’re dead, but this really was an example of their being solicitous; protective without demanding money for it – a freebie from those villains really was something special. Freddie vacillated. He knew nothing about running a nightclub. Not ones for pulling punches, just like Freddie, they told him that it seemed as if he knew even less about running a restaurant. He saw another obstacle. Didn’t nightclubs become targets for the protection racket sharks?
‘Yeah and that’s us!’ Ronnie laughed, with Reggie slapping his twin’s back; what a breeze! ‘That’s the beauty of it for you, Freddie. You’ve nothing to fear from us. We’d never hurt you. And when others hear you have us for pals, then you’re armour-plated.’ This was an anecdote Freddie often repeated to friends, frequently the same ones, forgetting he’d already recounted it to them several times before. That head of his was leading him into trouble.
Freddie discussed the proposition in his south London home with wife Chrissie. She was diffident. The very nature of the business would mean that Freddie would inevitably be out all hours. Freddie countered that objection with the reasonable argument that he would be no more hands-on than with the management of the restaurant. He explained that he’d employ specialists at operating nightclubs in London’s West End and he’d just be The Name. He was still delusional, though encouraged by hangers-on and spongers such as the Krays, in believing that the name Freddie Mills remained a seller and that it would put bums on seats and hands in pockets.
In his defence, Freddie wasn’t a conceited man. On the contrary, he was practical, thankful for his good luck, and had invested in several properties in south London, faithful to the credo that bricks and mortar would always rise in value, but the downside was that he had no innate commercial acumen. As a boxer, he’d always been managed. Now he was a boss, he still needed managing. He was vulnerable and it was a role in which he was uneasy. In the ring, he never felt exposed, even when he dropped his guard. But to drop your guard in the predatory West End, especially in London’s nightclubs racket of the 1960s, was a death wish.
Of one thing Mills was aware: the worst enemy you could have was the Krays. The best friend you could have, for personal and business protection, was also the Krays. So ‘The Firm’, as the Kray brothers were known in their territory, which spanned London east to west, had the final vote, after also applying considerable verbal pressure on Andy Ho, one of the partners in Freddie’s restaurant.
On the opening night of the Freddie Mills Nite Spot, the Krays were at the centre of a photocall, smart-suited as ever, and later they circulated, glad-handing like slick politicians. Not on view were the girls. They would be wheeled out later for the paying customers, the bread and butter. No West End nightclub had a chance of survival without a stable of ‘hostesses’. As mentioned earlier, by tradition, they received no salary, so they were no liability to the club, but they demanded a fee from a customer for sitting with him, then haggled over bedroom rights. This was an issue between Freddie and his wife, who wasn’t a West End kindred spirit, although she was au fait with London’s nightlife.
Chrissie was also under no illusion about her rugged and no-frills husband. She loved him but not his foibles, of which there were many: the positive and negatives to his character were finely balanced. While working in TV, he’d had a number of affairs, most of them not much more than one-night trysts. Now, though, he was no longer a trophy. Any woman bragging that she’d had Freddie Mills, would be asked curiously, ‘Freddie who?’ He was yesterday’s mutton. And so he’d started paying for it, doing the club circuit, purchasing his sexual pleasure off the shelf, arriving home at dawn in summer and end of the night in winter, lying that he’d been carousing with pals, playing snooker or poker. But sex has its own aroma and its smell was not lost of Chrissie. All wives are finely tuned to another woman’s perfume.
Chrissie began checking up on him, in addition to her alternate Saturday nights, when she would meet Freddie at the club around eleven o’clock. At other times, she’d drive over Waterloo Bridge to the Nite Spot around midnight, but mostly he wasn’t there. Ho would cover for him, telling Chrissie that he was ‘down the road’ at an ‘all-male’ billiards and snooker saloon. Of course she wasn’t fooled. She might stay for a drink or two, hoping for Freddie to show up, but by one or two o’clock she’d slink off dejectedly, hearing the hostesses sniggering, and, perhaps paranoid, though with ample justification, suspect they were laughing at her, the wife who was futilely trying to rein-in her husband.
There were a plethora of rumours in orbit and Chrissie couldn’t have missed many of them: Freddie was bi-sexual (correct), he was Ronnie Kray’s lover (untrue), he had a homosexual affair with the crooner Michael Holliday, who had two number-one hit singles (true), he had sex numerous times with a girl young enough to be his daughter (correct), he was a mug punter, haemorrhaging money by the truck-load at cards, on the horses and dogs, two cockroaches scuttling across his club’s kitchen (true, encouraged by his Chinese associates), and his favourite party trick was to flash his penis and invite all women present to ‘wrap a big smile around that’ (apparently also true).
Mandy Rice-Davies, of Christine Keeler/John Profumo infamy, was heard to say, ‘It was huge enough to choke a woman!’ Very prophetic.
Mandy had been booked at Freddie’s Nite Spot as cabaret singer for a week. Unfortunately, the titillating event turned both farcical and sour when an advertisement in the London Evening News announced her as Mangy Rice-Davies. I interviewed Mandy for the Sunday Express, when this very right-wing newspaper was edited by the eccentric John Junor. The feature article was commissioned by a middle-ranking editorial executive for the ‘Meeting People’ regular column. Junor was extremely bigoted and wouldn’t have anyone featured in his columns if he disliked them, such as gays and socialists and social agitators, no matter how newsworthy or famous. Unknown to the commissioning editor, Junor despised Mandy Rice-Davies and didn’t want his readers corrupted by her free-spirited adventures, though he was perfectly content to give room and a warm handshake to ‘poor, victimised Profumo’, though he would have kicked Stephen Ward into the gutter.
Anyhow, I met Mandy in the clubby bar – soft leather armchairs and sofas – of the Waldorf Hotel in the Aldwych, where I’d booked a table for lunch. She drank a couple of whisky sours on the rocks and thereafter champagne, all of this before eating. Of course the interview wasn’t especially about Freddie Mills, but she mentioned him while gossiping about men in general who had made an impression with her.
‘There was definitely something sinister and even frightening about Freddie, in addition to his being a rather loveable rogue,’ she trilled mischievously during her second whisky sour. ‘In fact, I’d go further; he was dangerous and that appeals to women – well, me!’ Did she fall for him? ‘Depends what you mean by that. Did we have an affair? – No. Did we fuck? – No. Did we have sex? – Yes. Well, let’s say he did. It didn’t happen many times because he was so one-dimensional and gave me no satisfaction whatsoever. Same as Peter (Rachman), but he was much richer, of course, so he was worth tolerating.
‘I should have asked Freddie for payment, boredom money. He got off on oral sex, over and over. He didn’t want to give me anything in return; I mean physically. He was also pretty rough with it, too. I know it’s bad form to speak ill of the dead, but it’s better than speaking ill of the living, which is the cross I bear quite happily. Towards the end each time he got a wee bit too out of control, gripping my head with both hands, shuddering like he was having some kind of spasm, and not letting me go. I ended up gasping for air and the third occasion was enough for me, but he did have a certain animal magnetism, reminding me of Tarzan the Ape Man and I think I’d have enjoyed normal sex – whatever that is! – with him, but he must have reserved that just for his wife. I mean, he did have kids.
‘When I was pissed one night, I did mention to him the rumour of his liking for men and he told me to “shut my dirty bitch mouth”, so I said he could wank himself in future. I just have no control over my mouth; it runs on its own momentum and whims. I just listen in horror sometimes, so I was expecting a left jab to my big mouth, but he just burst out laughing, saying, “I might just do that as a cabaret act at the club if you promise to watch.” I’ll never just roll over and be an easy ride.’
Relevant to this book, though perhaps not readily apparent, was her opinion of the police, particularly as her father was a country copper. ‘I hate their rotten guts, especially those bent bastards Herbert (Detective Chief Inspector Samuel Herbert) and his batman Burrows (Detective Sergeant John Burrows). Scotland Yard is a mafia. They’re very different from provincial coppers; two different breeds. Scotland Yard detectives have fashioned themselves on New York cops.’ Bear in mind that this was more than forty years ago.
Mills was very friendly with comedian Bob Monkhouse. There is a very telling quote in James Morton’s book, Gangland Soho (Piatkus, 2008), in which Monkhouse, talking of Freddie, says to the author, ‘I heard he was less interested in penetration, more in a Clinton-Lewinsky type of activity,’ a reference, of course, to the US President Bill Clinton having oral sex in the White House with luscious-lipped Monica, an intern at the time.
There is a very convincing reason why Monkhouse’s insight into Freddie’s personality and habits should be taken very seriously, which I shall highlight shortly. He further told Morton, ‘Freddie had a very dark side. Freddie had male companions and he also consorted with a number of ladies on a casual basis. He’d try anything. With some people when they become famous they feel the right to have anything they want.
‘I didn’t see him do it, but the story was that Freddie Mills was quite capable of whipping it out and saying, “Wrap a big smile around that.” He’d expose himself in front of anybody. He didn’t bother to go to the gents.’
All this and events following 24 November 1964 took on a whole new dimension. So what did happen that 24 November? Well, at Freemason’s Hall in Great Queen Street, London, Freddie was initiated into the Chelsea Lodge (No. 3098). This was then – and still is today – a Freemasons’ Lodge for entertainers, meeting formally five times a year for ritual ceremonies.
Mills was proposed as an Initiate by Andy Ho and his nomination was seconded by the musician Judd Solo. Ho was entitled to be a member of this Lodge because, in addition to being a partner in Freddie’s club, he had also appeared in numerous movies, if only in walk-on parts and cameo roles. Monkhouse was there that evening and was one of the first to congratulate Freddie on becoming a ‘Brother’, owing allegiance to one another, in all undertakings legal. Singer Issy Bonn was Master of the Lodge. The Master asked Mills, ‘Do you seriously declare on your honour that, unbiased by the improper salutations of friends against your own inclination, and uninfluenced by mercenary and other unworthy motive, you freely and voluntarily offer yourself as a Candidate for the mysteries and privileges of Freemasonry?’
He replied, in front of all members in their regalia, ‘I do.’
Bonn told Mills that Freemasonry was ‘founded on the purest principles of piety and virtue,’ adding, ‘it possesses great and invaluable privileges, and in order to secure these privileges to worthy men, and we trust to worthy men alone, vows of fidelity are required…’ After taking the ‘solemn oath’, this celebrated lecher kissed the Bible, known in Freemasonry as the Sacred Law.
Months earlier, Mills had been interviewed by the Lodge’s management committee, a routine procedure when someone was seeking to join the fraternity. Before this meeting, rigorous inquiries would have been made to establish his character, taking every precaution to try to ensure that he wouldn’t be a disgrace to that particular Lodge and Freemasonry in general. Ho, as the proposer, attended that meeting and spoke highly of Mills’ ‘good name’, a man who was ‘adored’ by households all over the country. Ho expressed his opinion that it would be a ‘coup’ for the Chelsea Lodge to have Mills among its fold.
Mills was asked his reasons for seeking to become a Mason. Whatever he answered to that question, it wouldn’t have been for self-advancement in business or to ingratiate himself with senior police officers, or indeed for self-aggrandisement, otherwise his application would have come up against the buffers promptly. Ho would have primed him what to say and what to meticulously eschew. Certainly he would have had to pledge that he believed in God; that was an imperative. Today it would be sufficient to merely declare a belief in a superior being.
It is difficult to accept that at least a couple of members of the Lodge, all being involved in some form of entertainment and showbiz, hadn’t witnessed Mills’ extraordinary outré behaviour or at least heard the outrageous stories doing the rounds on the ever-current and updated grapevine about this incorrigible roué. Mills was worse than a rake; he was a dissolute dog, to put it bluntly. A dog with the purr of a cat when required and the instinct of a wolf, always. Certainly Ho knew enough about Mills to make him an undesirable for such an august and morality-based institution, with royalty at its helm. Indeed, at his initiation, Mills was informed that ‘to so high an eminence has its credit been advanced [Freemasonry] that in every age monarchs themselves have been promoters of the Craft, have not thought it derogatory to exchange the sceptre for the trowel…’
Writer Dea Langmead wrote a letter to author James Morton about a visit to Mills’ club, in part describing it like this: ‘I seem to remember some black ties and also suits – no hard and fast rules, apparently – I know I went with a “suit” – and there were tables and a small dance floor and a live band. There were girls sitting at the bar and cute waitresses and various brawny, muscular men, and a strange air of it not being quite a top-class venue. I think I felt a bit shivery and daring in being there at all, as if rubbing shoulders with the underworld, and if it had been a bit pricey I wouldn’t have been invited.’
Refocusing on the ‘Nudes’ murders, there are some critical alleged confessions in the public domain by singer Michael Holliday and pianist Russ Conway that give immense circumstantial credence to what I heard years earlier from a pivotal and inviolate source, ‘Jack’. Mills and Holliday would hire hostesses from one of the West End clubs for a ‘sex party’. These orgies would convene in Holliday’s luxury apartment or the flat of one of the prostitutes.
The girls, for a brokered fee, had to be prepared to participate in sado/masochistic games, allowing themselves to be spanked, belted and tied-up. When the two men tired of that sequence of the ‘party’, they would then have sex with each other, while the girls egged them on and indulged in lesbian tricks, sometimes using riding crops to spur on the proceedings. Now, consistent through every sexual anecdote about Mills’ proclivities has been his requisite for oral sex and this was an obligation for the girls who were rented; it was a clause in the verbal contract before any arrangement was finalised.
If a few girls couldn’t be rounded up from the nightclubs, Freddie would say to Michael, ‘Leave it to me. I know where I can collect a carload from the street. You get the bed warm and I’ll be back with a harem in half an hour.’ And he would be, with what he chuckling called a ‘chorus line-up’.
Now to the seminal issue: on one occasion, a prostitute, plucked from the streets, passed out while Mills was being over-vigorous while enlarged in her mouth; there is no means of sanitising this, unfortunately. The story goes that she gasped and her eyes shot up into her head, but Mills wouldn’t stop. Apparently, in Holliday’s version, ‘he was too far gone.’ Holliday claimed to have endeavoured to pull him off, but Mills was beyond the rubicon and the whore died. Panic time!
Holliday is reputed to have repeated this version of horrific events to two people: world-renowned pop pianist Russ Conway and singer Dorothy Squires, whose marriage to Roger Moore, later of James Bond fame, was in the process of being shipwrecked on the rocks of infidelity. Now this indecent anecdote is independent of Mandy Rice-Davies’s alarming experience and facts known to Bob Monkhouse.
When the two men realised that the woman was dead, Holliday, in frenetic, demented mode, wanted to call an ambulance and the police. Mills is said to have replied, ‘Don’t be such a fucking twat! If this gets out, we’re both finished for ever. Even though it was an accident, there’ll be no way back, for you just as much as for me. We’re in this together, up to our necks.’ If all accounts are correct, Mills assured Holliday that he could dispose of the body without it being ‘a problem’. Horrified, Holliday didn’t want any more to do with it and left Mills to see through his plan. Fortunately for them, there was no one else present; there was only one girl at this ‘death party’.
In part, this outrage is related in The Soho Don by Michael Connor (Mainstream Publishing, 2002) and Gangland Soho (2008), already mentioned, by James Morton. But neither of them had access to an officer who worked the ‘Nudes’ case, so were not familiar with the method of disposing of the body nor the connection with the ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders. The body of the prostitute who died in the company of Mills and Holliday went into the Thames, as a precursor, one might reasonably surmise.
Holliday, not surprisingly, was unnerved by the whole experience and Mills’ disregard, verging on contempt, for human life, and this was why he sought a camaraderie ‘confessional’ with his confidants Conway and Squires, who both resented being drawn into a conspiracy of silence over something of such magnitude. Placed in such an invidious quandary of betraying their long-standing friend, Holliday, or betraying him by doing their moral and public duty, they opted temporarily and reluctantly to remain staunchly true to their companion, but their moratorium was quickly overtaken by unforeseen events.
Conway strenuously advised Holliday to cut all ties with Mills, but this wasn’t easy to accomplish: there was still a strong emotional bond between the two men and Freddie could be both possessive and aggressive, so the cooling process had to be achieved by almost imperceptible increments.
Mills sensed Holliday’s affections for him were waning, so promised to tone down the ‘rough stuff’, but when he was in a ‘sexual fever’ – Jack’s phrase – he couldn’t restrain himself and yet a second woman died during a bedroom romp. She, too, was dropped up river into the Thames. Both deaths were written off as suicides without even a post-mortem: fingerprints identified them as prostitutes with a string of convictions for soliciting. Doubtlessly they were dismissed as just more of the capital’s flotsam. Holliday was so distressed that he decided he had only two alternatives: to go to the police or take his life. He chose the latter and overdosed.
For centuries the Thames in London has been an attraction for suicides, and bodies regularly fished from the river, in the murky past, were perfunctorily logged as ‘selfies’, unless there were external physical injuries to suggest foul play. In Victorian times, London’s Thames was known as ‘A Helping Hand for Prostitutes’. A poem, ‘Bridge of Sighs’ by Thomas Hood (1844), begins:
One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion’d so slenderly
Young, and so fair!
One has to understand the 1960s and keep Mills’ killings within context to appreciate how it was possible for him to continue so long undetected. Prostitutes drowning themselves was commonplace. To begin with, there would be no marks or wounds on the bodies to hint at violence. ‘Deep Throat’ murder – choked by a penis – was unheard of and almost impossible to detect; not something any pathologist of the time would have thought of looking for. The only marks on the first two prostitutes Mills killed were weals and bruises on their buttocks, consistent with the trade the women were running, in the eyes of the law. In this sense, one should not judge the police harshly. They were simply playing the percentages when bogged down with an insurmountable workload.
Although Mills was said to be devastated by Holliday’s death, there must also have been a veiled sense of relief and a feeling that he was now in the clear. The only eyewitness had removed himself, so the ambivalence for Mills would have been of grief and gratitude, a volatile tug of war. As for being in the clear, he hadn’t taken into account his own intrinsic propensity for dangerous sex by enforcement; that would never change because it was embedded in his dark side, to which Bob Monkhouse alluded. In that respect, Holliday’s death didn’t change a thing. The reality is that Mills was already on the treadmill to becoming a serial killer before the first body in the official tally came in with the morning tide.
Despite the demise of Holliday, there were still people around who guessed the harrowing truth about Mills, but to them he was of more value on the streets than behind bars. Blackmail could be very lucrative, especially if you were one of the ‘elite’ senior police officers with plenty of ‘covering fire’, or a much-feared gang master with London’s West End your fiefdom.