What the taxi driver told me about the prostitutes and the criminal families

It was exactly fourteen years ago today.

It was in the very early hours of Bloomsday – the 16th of June.

I had flown back from Rome to Stansted on Ryanair.

Delays on the flight back to London had escalated to the point that I only narrow managed to get the delayed last train out of Stansted to Liverpool Street station… but, by the time I arrived there, I had missed the last tube train to Kings Cross.

This is what happened, as I wrote it in my diary when I got home:

______________

A few of us followed the signs for the taxi rank at Liverpool Street station – temporarily by Platform 15 – arriving just as a taxi picked someone up. No other taxi appeared. After about ten minutes a British Rail man, who must have seen us on the security cameras, came and told us taxis would not be coming to the rank because it was after the last train. But, if we went and stood outside the Broadgate office development they stopped there.

“Don’t go to the ones on the left,” he told us. “They just hang around to rip people off. I know the bloke who runs the scam. Turn right where there’s a real rank.”

Sure enough, outside to the left there were about six black cabs with men hanging around looking hopeful. We went to the right and waited while taxis circled: some passed, some stopped and took the first person in the queue, some asked for people going in specific directions.

When I got to the front of the queue, a cab drew up and the driver asked if I was going north; I said yes – either to Kings Cross Thameslink for the next train (in about 2 hours) or, I asked: “How much would you charge to take me to Borehamwood?”

“How much are you offering?” he replied.

“Thirty quid?” I suggested. (I knew it was about £25 on the meter from Heathrow.)

He paused, then said, “Alright,” almost with a shrug, as if he didn’t care.

The cab driver was short but broad and had hooded eyes which he blinked slowly in the mirror, as if he was aware of controlling them. He said he didn’t specialise in stations or in any particular area and he’d always worked nights because it was more interesting. Like many a cab driver, he fancied himself as a bit of a philosopher.

“People have two faces they wear,” he said to me through the glass, “and the one they put on in the wee small hours of the morning – in the dark in the night in a cab – is their real one. No-one ever puts on their real face at work, do they? I mean, I do, because I don’t care – people can take me or leave me. But people show the real person they are when they’re in a cab and it’s night and they’re talking to the back of your head.”

He told me he had been looking for anyone going north because he had someone to pick up near Camden in 90 minutes.

He eventually told me that he was involved with two ‘escort girls’…

“I’m not their pimp or anything,” he said, “I don’t get involved in that side at all. I just drive them to places and I’m around if they have any trouble. I don’t wait around while they do whatever they do, but I stay fifteen minutes after I drop them off and I’m there fifteen minutes before they’re going to finish.”

The girls, he told me, charged £300 per hour for a minimum four hours. If they were only wanted for an hour, they would still get four hours pay. Some other girls charge £1,000 per hour with a minimum four hours.

“I didn’t even ask what they did the first two or three months. I mean, I knew – I’m not stupid. But it’s just business. I do it for the money. They pay me a decent amount – if they paid me less, I wouldn’t do it – and they give me a bonus if I sort out any trouble for them. I’m not tied to them. It’s not like they keep me or anything.”

The two girls he knows are not just on ‘call-out’; they often arrange parties with other girls for what he called old age pensioners – old men – mostly Jewish and Asian old men, he said, many retired, he said, who can afford it.

“They specialise in…” the taxi driver told me, “…what they specialise in.”

“After a couple of months,” he said, “one of the girls asked me if I could sort out any problems that came up for them. I said I preferred to sort things out by just talking to people but, if I had to do any more, I was OK on that.”

I mentioned there used to be a brothel in the countryside just outside Radlett (next to a Little Chef restaurant which has since been demolished). It had occasionally been mentioned in the local paper. They even reported when it finally closed down: the madam had decided to retire.

“It seemed a strange place to run a brothel,” I said.

The cabbie told me there still was one in Radlett. But, he said, I’d be surprised how much use is made of big country houses at weekends.

“Lots of parties,” he said.

I mentioned I had heard Xxxxxxx Xxxxx and his friends had had a big party at a hotel near Tower Bridge when they were planning the alleged £800 million ATM robbery and they’d brought in British Airways stewardesses for the party. The driver said he’d heard it was Virgin stewardesses.

We agreed Xxxxx was a clever man.

“I mean,” said the cabbie. “He doesn’t need to do any of that for the money or anything.”

The cabbie said he had heard Xxxxxxx Xxxxx had been involved in some made-to-order insurance robberies. The owners of the houses agreed with Xxxxx that burglaries would take place and specific very valuable insured items would be taken. After the robberies, the owners would be given back the main items; the burglars would keep some relatively unimportant minor items; and Xxxxx would split the insurance money with the owners. There was never any problem getting the insurance pay-out because there really had been a robbery.

I said I had read that one of the five youths allegedly involved in the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence was related to a well-known South London criminal family but I did not know which one.

“Oh,” the cabbie told me, “One’s a member of the Cxxxxx family who are related to the Lxxxs – they’re gypsies. The gypsy families are very violent.” He said all five of the Lawrence ‘suspects’ were ‘well-connected’. When I got home, I looked the names up in a couple of very thoroughly indexed books: the Cxxxxxs go way back to the days of Jack Spot in Soho, but there was no reference to the Lxxxs. None of the Lawrence defendants have the surname Cxxxxx, though they could still be part of the family.

Perhaps the cabbie was making it up. Perhaps he was repeating a new urban myth. Or perhaps it was true.

He told me he lived in Hastings with his wife, but was only there at weekends. During the week, working in his cab, he stayed at a flat he had in Potters Bar, just off the M25.

He said he got regular work out of ferrying the two girls around and it filled in the gaps picking up fares in whatever area he took them to. This explained why, unlike other cabbies, he did not specialise in any particular area of London.

When I got home there was an e-mail from Tara TV asking me if I could go to Dublin to do some work for them. I thought about how much the world had changed since James Joyce wrote Ulysses about Bloomsday in 1904.

But then I thought Maybe it has not changed at all.

In defence of racial jokes, Bernard Manning and Jimmy Carr but not this British Asian bloke I saw

(This blog later appeared on Chortle, the UK comedy industry website)

I once put on a show at the Hackney Empire theatre in London where a top-name comic refused to introduce or be on stage with comedian Jimmy Carr because, in the preceding week, Jimmy had been much criticised in the press for jokes about gypsies. Especially one gag:

“The male gypsy moth can smell the female gypsy moth up to seven miles away – and that fact also works if you remove the word ‘moth’.”

I had no problem with Jimmy Carr nor with the joke. Told in his particular dead-pan persona, it is a beautifully-crafted joke. From some other comic, it could have been very ethnically offensive. From the Jimmy Carr on-stage character, it did not seem to me to be offensive. It is/was a joke.

In a Guardian interview in 2006, Jimmy said, “If you’re doing wordplay, there is no real place to take offence. It’s like taking offence at a crossword puzzle… People don’t come and see my show and go, ‘That’s what he thinks’.”

I think if the late Bernard Manning’s live act – much attacked by knee-jerk PC supporters who never saw it – were performed today, word-for-word, by Jimmy Carr or Jerry Sadowitz, then trendy journalists would give it a four or five star review. Because they don’t believe (despite the gypsy jokes) that Jimmy Carr or Jerry Sadowitz are actually themselves bigoted.

But people do believe in retrospect and without having seen and heard him deliver jokes live on stage, that Bernard Manning’s live act was racist. Because they’ve read or heard other people say it’s a fact.

I did see Bernard Manning perform live three times. He was very funny. I also once had lunch with him. It seemed to me he had a bit of a superiority complex – he thought he was a bit better than the other Northern Comics of the time – but then he probably was. And he was very funny in a hard-edged, cynical way not un-reminiscent of the current Jimmy Carr on-stage persona.

The first time I saw Bernard perform live, at his own Embassy Club in Manchester, was probably in the early 1980s. It was one of the slickest professional shows I have ever seen in my life, performed in tacky, glittery decor like a cheap Hong Kong Christmas party that Butlins had staged for holiday campers in the mid 1950s.

The room was filled with ordinary down-market punters who clearly seldom went out and were be-suited and dolled-up for their Big Night Out. The only comparable thing I’ve seen was a Sunday night show at a Masonic hall in Easterhouse, Glasgow, which felt like it was set in South Vietnam circa 1968. The exterior (the walls were topped with barbed wire & broken glass) and location of the venue (a lone building in the middle of what felt like and very possibly was a free-fire zone) looked like something out of Escape From New York and the punters were middle-aged blue-rinsed women in over-tight sparkly dresses and dark-suited men looking uncomfortable wearing tightly-collared shirts and seldom-used ties.

What struck me about Bernard Manning’s act at the Embassy Club in Manchester for his very mainstream, very middle-of-the-road, probably Labour-voting but very conservative early-1980s audience was that, for the first third of the act, he used the word “cunt” very liberally. It was all over the place. This was at a time when the word was unacceptable in alternative comedy shows (which were only barely starting) and never heard on feature films, let alone in straight middle-of-the-road live punter shows. The use of the word “cunt” tailed-off after the first third of the act and had disappeared entirely by the final third.

It only struck me the next day that this was part of Bernard’s professionalism.

The show had been due to start at 8.00pm.

At 30 seconds before 8.00pm, Bernard appeared on stage and briefly introduced the first act. There then followed competent singers, competent comics. Nothing hyper-special. But satisfying. There were two breaks. In one, there was a charity raffle. In the other, chicken-in-a-basket. Throughout the show (as was the way with Northern clubs) you could order drinks at your table and there was a constant flow of staff bringing drinks from the bar to tables. It was a visible money-making machine and the paying punters got value -for-money. They got what they paid for.

At the climax of the show, they got Bernard Manning doing his stand-up act – he was the one they had come to see – and they expected his act to be rude and shocking. That was why they had come. He delivered. It was cunt-this and cunt-that and cunt-the-other at the start. After he had established the act was rude and shocking, he just got on with good, solid gags and had no need to say “cunt”. He had delivered what they expected and, next day, those punters would be able to tell their friends and workmates: “Ooh, our Bernard, he were so rude. It were proper dirty.”

Even there, I am perpetuating a stereotype.

The second time I saw Bernard perform live, there was a young honeymoon couple in the very front row who foolishly admitted the fact to him. He, of course, went for sexual jokes throughout. They loved it. At the same show, there was a black couple in the audience. He went for them as well. They loved it. Afterwards, they were laughing and joking with him.

I also saw him make anti-Semitic jokes.

He was part-Jewish.

I have seen the brilliant Jerry Sadowitz make what most people would consider anti-Semitic jokes.

He is Jewish.

The London-based New York comic Lewis Schaffer tells the best Holocaust joke I have ever heard.

He is Jewish.

Recently, I saw a new-ish comic, a British Asian, make an anti-Indian joke.

It should have felt OK – like a Jew telling a Jewish joke against Jews – but, to me, it felt racist.

It is relevant that he is a new-ish comic.

It’s the way they tell ’em.

A joke is a joke is a joke.

It’s the way it’s told that makes it funny. Or racist.

There is a difference between racial and racist jokes.

The sign of a non-racist society is that anyone can be the butt of a good joke.