The day of the notorious Middle Street Massacre dawned like many another in those happy, far-off days. In fact, any Brighton visitor hypothetically strolling seawards down Middle Street early on that June Saturday would have thought, ‘How normal for the seaside!’: the sparkling sea beyond, herring gulls wheeling and calling overhead, the comforting sound of a horse-drawn milk cart trundling along the seafront, the heady whiff of seaweed mixing intriguingly with warm sugar and peppermint from the humbug shop on the corner.
And then, having tripped over the freshly butchered corpse of an Italian gang member murdered outside the Hippodrome overnight, this hypothetical person would have chuckled, ‘Ah, Brighton!’, and continued his perambulations. Because it was all of a piece somehow, in those heady mid-century years; all part of the sheer breezy romance of the place: chips and vinegar wrapped in newspaper, larger-than-life Knickerbocker Glories, bloody torsos left in suitcases at the railway station.
Ask people in 1951 what they knew of Brighton and they would confidently list: crime, gangs; cockles and mussels in vinegar, shiny shingle, sunburned shoulders; more crime, more gangs; reprehensible Max Miller jokes, saucy postcards; then more crime, and more gangs. Clearly, the popular appeal of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (and the film featuring the young Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown) had a very great deal to answer for.
Where were the police in all this? Well, if those same respondents had been required to think of a policeman in the context of Brighton in those benighted times, 85 per cent would have pointed either to the ineffectual constable in the Punch & Judy show (beaten violently to the ground with a big stick), or to that excellent fairground attraction, the Laughing Policeman, a paunchy animated doll in a glass-sided box that stood less for maintaining law and order, more for shrieking, ‘AAAHHH-ha-ha-ha, Ha-ha-ha-hah-haah!’
All this was about to change, however. That famous Saturday in June saw a new star appear in the Constellation of the Helmet. His name was Inspector Steine.
From now on, anyone asked about the Brighton Constabulary would picture something new: not a puppet begging for its life while receiving blows to the side of its head; nor a sinister dummy roaring dementedly at a private joke; but a real man – a tall, slender, dignified grey-haired man, in fact, with blue eyes and a strikingly thoughtful far-away expression. A man about whom a middling British black-and-white film would be released in 1953, and several slapdash biographies would later be written.
In the years following, this man would come to represent the Brighton Police in a new way – in a way that said, ‘Come to this town by all means, have fun, enjoy yourselves; get drunk, throw up; copulate under our stately piers like beasts of the field, if you must; but don’t commit crime, matey, not on my patch.’
He was no Laughing Policeman, this paragon. In fact, it was a foolish person who dared even to mention the Laughing Policeman in his stern, unsmiling presence. All of the biographies of Inspector Steine (pronounced Steen, incidentally) detailed how one of his first acts on arrival in Brighton in April 1951 was to have all the Laughing Policemen in the penny arcades confiscated in early-morning raids, surgically dismantled and destroyed in bonfires behind the police station.
This act of authorised vandalism naturally caused ructions with the arcade owners, but Steine was above such concerns. If there was one thing about post-war Britain he abominated, it was the systematic inculcation of disrespect for the appointed guardians of the public.
Yes, Inspector Steine, formerly of the City of London constabulary, had arrived in Brighton with a mission. Of police corruption there would be no more. Of violent gangs with flick-knives there would be no more. Of mispronouncing his name there would be no more. And of Laughing Policemen – well, within days there was nothing remaining of that ghoulish Marionette Division beyond piles of ash and melted plastic with blackened springs and levers sticking out.
A little film was made by Pathé News: ‘The Bonfire of the Effigies’. This rare and disturbing newsreel is honestly worth watching. It substantiates the legend that when the last (and greatest) Brighton Laughing Policeman was put to the flame, its body thrashed, it stopped laughing, and when it fell forward, the flames literally wiped the smile from off its face.
Now, to return to the events of Middle Street: while it truly was commonplace for people to trip over lifeless villains in Brighton at this time, the corpse discovered on 9 June 1951 was special for two reasons. First, the dead man had not been sliced, stabbed, skewered, mutilated or otherwise dispatched with a blade. He had been shot, twice, from behind. Second, he was no expendable journeyman gangster; he was ‘Frankie G’, a junior member of the Giovedi family, and therefore ranked as underworld aristocracy.
The Giovedis owned various legitimate restaurants in the town while also running very lucrative extortion and gambling rackets, and the teenaged ‘Frankie G’ was the apple of their collective eye. An ambitious, illiterate and cocky boy, he performed his hoodlum work with a passion – especially when it came to threatening people or roughing them up. Frankie’s doting parents regarded him as a trainee criminal psychopath of pleasing potential, and his death at such a tender age (sixteen) was devastating. For his next birthday, they had planned to give him Worthing.
‘Oh, Frankie G! My Frankie G!’ each of them wailed, when they were brought the news in their modest flat upstairs from their Old Neapolitan restaurant in Preston Street. They were so upset that they briefly stopped counting the heaps of notes, coins and IOUs that had been delivered by henchmen to their drop-box overnight.
‘Mama!’ wailed Papa.
‘Papa!’ wailed Mama.
Young Frankie had been a model son. He had loved his mama’s cooking! He had loved his hokey-pokey ice cream! He had loved cutting people’s thumbs off! He had seen Brighton Rock five times at an impressionable age!
Naturally, the Giovedi family’s thoughts turned swiftly to revenge – but who had murdered Frankie G? The fact of his being shot contained no clue. Whereas six months before, guns had been a rarity in the town (casino owner Fat Victor being the only hood to flash one around), now they were everywhere; everyone was ‘packing’. When Frankie G’s body was discovered in Middle Street, his own gun was clamped in his cold, dead hand – apparently unfired.
The suspect pool was limited, however, because only three gangs operated in town: the Giovedi Family (based on the seafront); Fat Victor’s crew (based at the Casino); and the more nebulous satellite gang of a London outfit supposedly led by the legendarily unstable and sadistic Terence Chambers (not so easy to pinpoint a base for this particular gang, on account of the nebulousness).
Mama and Papa Giovedi wasted no time jumping to the obvious conclusion.
‘Those Casino Boys done this to my Frankie!’ wailed Mama Giovedi.
‘They pay for this, Mama,’ said Papa, grimly.
But was it the case that Fat Victor had thrown down this suicidal gauntlet to the Giovedis? In the few short hours it took for the bloody Middle Street Massacre to be organised and take place on that fateful Saturday, it now appears (with hindsight) that none of the participants stood back from events sufficiently to ask the right questions. No one asked, for example, just who would benefit from the Italians and the Casino Boys eliminating each other in a hail of bullets. Was some nebulous third party possibly behind it? Had some nebulous third party also been behind the sudden proliferation of firearms in the first place?
When the film of The Middle Street Massacre came to be made, the lovely John Gregson was cast in the lead role. The inspector was portrayed as a plain-clothes man, which in fact he never was – but there was no way you could dress Gregson in police uniform and peaked cap, he’d look ridiculous; so he wore the usual loose suit, trilby and mackintosh-over-the-arm ensemble, which added to his air of cool capability. The Middle Street Massacre struck lucky being released just after the hugely successful Genevieve; Gregson was red-hot box office at the time.
‘What’s all this about the gangs, Sergeant?’ he asked in an early scene, handsomely entering his office, hanging his hat on a peg and tossing a folded newspaper onto a desk.
His sergeant was played by a very young (and unknown) Stratford Johns. ‘It’s Middle Street, sir. Bit of trouble brewing, so they say.’
Steine/Gregson perched on the corner of the desk, looking debonair. ‘Middle Street where the Hippodrome is?’ he enquired.
‘That’s right, sir. Where young Marty S was found murdered early this morning.’ (The names had been changed slightly.)
‘Marty S has been murdered?’ Steine/Gregson jumped up and reached for his hat. ‘The Sabatos won’t take that lying down.’
‘They’ve already retaliated, sir. Gunned down one of Fat Trevor’s boys as he came out of the barber’s. In my opinion, it looks set for all-out gang warfare, sir.’
‘Get all the men together, Brunswood.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Brunswood’s face showed a mixture of emotions, in close-up. Steine/Gregson put a hand on his shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, Sergeant. You were going to see that girl of yours today, weren’t you?’
‘She can wait, sir.’
‘Good man. That’s the spirit. Keep them keen, eh?’
Brunswood coughed, politely. ‘The villains will all be armed, sir.’
‘Will they, indeed?’ said Gregson/Steine. He narrowed his eyes, as if hatching a plan, then put on his hat and opened the door. ‘I want you to clear the area, Brunswood. Then I’ll meet you at Garibaldi’s on the seafront at half-past two.’
Criminal historians have had a difficult time accounting for the sheer stupidity of everyone involved in the Middle Street Massacre. Why did two entire gangs turn up that afternoon? Who started the shooting? Why didn’t it stop? And out of forty-five participants, why did no one whatsoever survive?
Again, hindsight allows us to guess at a nebulous third-party influence, but the 100 per cent mortality rate meant there could be no eyewitness accounts of (say) guns fired from upstairs windows into the crowded narrow roadway below, blocked at both ends by police cordons. Many men, it seems, were shot in the back. All accounts agree that by the time Steine and his officers arrived, the street contained two heaps of bodies (in the telltale shape of cresting waves), a number of loose hats (lost in the rush) and an overpowering smell of cordite.
Conspicuously absent from the dead was Fat Victor; his serious fatness prevented him from taking part in face-to-face confrontations; he disappeared from Brighton that very afternoon, to be apprehended in a Littlehampton love nest in 1954. But every senior member of the Giovedi family ignominiously bit the dust – and Inspector Steine’s clear-sighted decision to delay his men by buying them ice creams at Luigi’s on the seafront (again, the name was changed for the film) was seen as a stroke of tactical brilliance. The Middle Street Massacre made his reputation, in every way.
Inspector Steine was given his own celluloid copy of The Middle Street Massacre, and over the next few years he often rigged up a projector at home and watched it. Having at first quibbled over the swap from uniform to plain clothes, the swap from grey-haired, middle-aged inspector to young, dark-haired inspector (not to mention the outlandish idea that his maudlin sergeant would ever have a ‘girl’ to go out with on a Saturday afternoon), he gradually came to believe its version of events. The film cuts back and forth between the villains in Middle Street squaring up to each other and the scene at Luigi’s/Garibaldi’s where Stratford Johns looks serious and tense, holding his truncheon in a deathly grip.
‘The villains, sir,’ he pleads. ‘We must arrest those villains!’ After which he memorably explodes, ‘Eating flaming ice cream at a time like this!’
But Steine/Gregson is firm, and buys everyone an Ovaltine by way of a digestif. He adopts a striking faraway expression, quite similar to Inspector Steine’s own. The camera looks down vertically on Ovaltine, swirling round in the inspector’s cup, and expressionistically cuts back to the bloodbath taking place just a couple of streets away. Since then, Inspector Steine has never had a cup of Ovaltine that didn’t make him beam with pleasure at this associated memory.
What worries Sergeant Brunswick (real name) sometimes these days is that when Steine reminisces about the Middle Street Massacre, he refers to the ‘Sabato family’ when he means the Giovedis – to ‘Marty S’ when he means Frankie G. That’s how far the fiction has supplanted, in Inspector Steine’s mind, the actual events. Steine even thinks he remembers saying the words (written for the film), ‘I have no blood on my hands this day, just a smidgen of raspberry sauce.’
Because there is something about Inspector Steine that needs to be disclosed, which has probably not been quite apparent up to now. Despite his great success as a policeman, despite his fame, despite his popularity as a regular broadcaster on the BBC’s Home Service and despite the look of profound seriousness that sometimes settles on his face, Inspector Steine is not as clever as he thinks he is.