Anna Smith with Strippers, Prostitutes, JESUS but no Zombies in Vancouver

I asked Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, how she had been getting on during the coronavirus pandemic. She lives in Vancouver.

She replied:

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COVID-19 has me off work for now, sadly.

No, I’ve not had the coronavirus, unless asymptomatically. I probably should get tested though… I worked until the end of March and then four different doctors told me not to go to work cause I’m too high risk and I was doing stuff like cleaning vomit from the sink and consoling suicide attempters with hugs etc.

I’m fine, more or less. Just a bit annoyed at having involuntarily appeared on  YouTube in something called Strippers, Prostitutes and JESUS. 

My entire life I’ve tried so hard to avoid being in porn and now, all of a sudden, with no warning at all, I’m in Strippers, Prostitutes and JESUS! 

All I was doing was trying to catch a bus at Main and Hastings!

Why is it every time I go to a bus stop these things happen?

You can see me crossing the street, at 5’17” in, just as the preacher is shouting about Trials and Tribulations. How appropriate.

I even have a speaking part… 

All I say is, “Oh, hi,” to a lady I know… and now ten thousand people all over the world have liked the video and are saying “God Bless” and worse…

Can’t they see I am holding my hand over my ear to protect myself from the Gospel? 

Because the preacher had a powerful amplifier, it was really disturbing the peace and he was shouting about all kinds of drugs and his mother and prostitution.

Eventually, he was arrested – a few days later at English Bay, near the Davie Street gay village – for causing a disturbance by insulting lesbians.

I find it a bit odd that a man who seems to have such hatred for homosexuals (and Muslims and trans people) has chosen a theme song which starts with the lyrics “Falling in Lo-o-o-ve with Jesus…”

I am thinking of making a sequel called Strippers, Prostitutes and Zombies. Or maybe Strippers, Zombies and JESUS. We have already found a dog at our marina to play Jesus. I could be the stripper and almost anyone here could easily pass as a zombie.

… CONTINUED HERE …

Comedian Chris Dangerfield on his new Edinburgh show and starting up a sex business without the Chinese Triads.

(This was also published by Indian news site WSN)

Chris Dangerfield looking over his shoulder yesterday

SERIOUSLY… A SEVERE WARNING… REALLY:
This blog contains very sexually explicit material and should not be read if you find that sort of material offensive.

* * *

I met Chris Dangerfield for tea in London’s Soho yesterday.

When I arrived in Chinatown and phoned him, as arranged, at 5.00pm, he said “Hello, John,” and then put someone else on the line.

“Hello, John,” a female Chinese voice said.

“I’ll be five minutes,” said Chris.

When he arrived, he told me he had had eight hours sleep in the previous three days.

“You know Pam died?” he asked.

“Pam?” I asked.

“Pam. Beggar. Been round here twenty years. Stood as tall as your knee. Green hands from moving 2p coins in them. Gambling addict. She died. Died just before Christmas. Probably cancer. She had it. Was treated. And I only found out yesterday that she died. So that was a bit of a shock.”

“She was a tramp?” I asked.

“She lived in sheltered housing,” said Chris, “but she was a gambling addict. It’s all about addiction. Last time we spoke, I was on the way to rehab for my hideously re-occurring heroin addiction…”

“…for a weekend,” I added.

“Yeah,” said Chris, “well, it went on a bit longer than a weekend.”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah, I’m clean. Yeah. But I got a girlfriend and she’s been hit by a car and she’s in hospital. That’s why I’m kind of… I left her on Sunday and I found out this morning (Thursday) that’s she’s in hospital.”

“What happened?” I asked. “A broken leg?”

“I don’t know,” said Chris, “because I’m trying not to get too… I just don’t know, John. It’s all  very… new. So that’s why I’m a little bit… more confused than usual… I’m also trying to buy 50 kilos of silver off of someone… That’s another complication… I’m all up-in-the-air.”

“All a great source for comedy,” I suggested.

“I had an interesting phone call,” said Chris. “The Comedy Cafe phoned me and said If you can fill our venue, you can have 100% of the door. An interesting business model. I said What’s the capacity? They said A hundred people. So I’ll do an hour’s show there. I’ll get £800. I can fill it. I am very good at marketing these things.”

Coming soon – the last ever performance of this 2012 show

“When is this?” I asked.

“25th of April,” said Chris.

“You’ll manage that,” I said. “Are you doing last year’s Edinburgh Fringe show?”

“Yes. And it’ll be the last performance of it. The last time I ever perform Sex Tourist. So that’s also a selling point for it.”

“So things are going well?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve been asked back to Swansea,” said Chris.

“Whaaaat???” I reacted.

“I know,” said Chris. “It was a nightmare, a living nightmare last time. You blogged about it. I’ve been asked back by Richard Griffiths, the same person who booked me last time. He said I’m in demand down there. He rang me up and said £400 plus travel expenses.”

“Perhaps news of your nightmare has spread,” I suggested. “Did Richard Griffiths explain why he has had this mental aberration?”

“I don’t care,” said Chris. “£400 plus travel expenses to go down to Swansea and do a gig is OK by me. He’s got a different venue. I said I’ll do it. I want the money in advance. I’m not going all the way down to what is essentially a… a… well, I don’t even need to describe it. Everyone knows what Swansea’s like. I’m going to go down there and preview my new show, which is now called Enter The Dragon.”

“Because?” I asked.

“It’s about how I spent £150,000 – I’m done the maths now and it wasn’t £200,000 like I told you, it was only £150,000 – So it’s now called Enter The Dragon: How I Spent £150,000 on Chinese Prostitutes… sub-titled Looking For Love in All The Wong Places.”

“Aha,” I said.

“Now,” Chris continued, “when you rung me up, I was in a Chinese brothel, as you know, because I put one of the girls on the phone. I am going to set up my own massage parlour…

“I am trying to get Will Self – who I know – to let me do a gig to just him. I want to preview my Edinburgh show just to Will, because I want him to write a review because he’s excellent with language and I grew up reading Will Self stuff. That sounds like it might be on the cards, but I also told him about setting-up this massage parlour because you know I had a meeting with the Triads?”

“Errrr…. No,” I said. “Which Triad?”

“They’re actually the Xxxxx Family,” said Chris. “Hong Kong organised crime, essentially. They wanted an Englishman to front a massage parlour for them in London. I had a meeting with them and all these Chinese women came in first – all beautiful – and I thought they were laying them on. I thought it was like a little sweetener. It was 11 o’clock in the morning in a hotel in North Soho and I thought, Jesus Christ, man, this is it. Game on! but then the boys come in and discussed terms with me.

“I was with all these Triads and these women and the meeting went on for about three hours and halfway though – and I say this embarrassed – I was squinting my eyes and my accent had changed slightly – Ah. This ah sounds like-ha good ideeah in a Chinese accent – because it all seemed just so seductive to be part of their world. The weird thing is I’ve never felt I belonged anywhere. The only place I’ve ever belonged is rehab. When I’m in rehab, I think Yes, I should be here.

“I’ve got a terrible history with organised crime. I’ve had people put guns in my mouth. I’ve been chased round the country. I’m still paying someone off for some very very naughty business I used to be involved in.

Chris Dangerfield in Chinatown yesterday

“So I said to the Xxxxx Family, You have a terrible reputation for cutting people’s hands off. And we all laughed. Hahahahaha we went and they said, Yeah, but we just wanna make money.

“Anyway, I turned that business model down. I decided not to do it. But the woman you spoke to on the phone today – me and her are going to set up a massage parlour. And that’s part of my new Edinburgh Fringe show. That meeting with the Triads and what happened before and after. I’m not saying I have a particularly bizarre life, but I wouldn’t put it in my show unless it went worse than just a meeting with some crooked businessmen.

“This year’s Fringe show opens with a true story about having sex with an Alsatian called Emma.”

“This is a woman from Alsace, not a dog?” I checked.

“No, it’s a dog not a woman,” Chris corrected me.

(I have changed the dog’s name to preserve its privacy)

“The thing is,” said Chris, “you know they say You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink? In much the same way, you can lead a dog to penis but you can’t make it fuck. I did not rape the animal. I did insert my penis into an animal, but it took to it like a… duck to… water. It truly did.

“I didn’t fuck it… I’ll tell you why I call it ‘it’ in a minute. Weirdly… You know some people name their pets with human names like a gerbil called Scott? Well, this Alsatian was called Emma. It really did not help to have my penis inside a dog called Emma. I was quite high and remember stroking its back and thinking Emma’s got amazingly soft hair.

“My point is that, although the dog was called Emma, I couldn’t tell if it was a male or a female. My question to you, John, is Has anyone ever seen a dog’s vagina?”

“Another dog, I presume?” I managed to suggest.

“Have you yourself ever seen a dog’s vagina?” Chris asked me.

“Errr… Not that I remember.”

“If you were going to have to put your finger in a dog’s orifice, starting under the tail… Weird, isn’t it?”

“It seems that way to me,” I agreed.

“Fill yourself full or heroin and tuinal,” Chris continued. “Look… I had a penis; the dog was happy to reverse onto it. In Germany, they’ve got animal brothels. They’re trying to get them closed down, but I’ve seen men fucking horses and you can’t make… I’ve seen a horse fucking a man on a video… and you can’t make a horse do that. The horse either wants to do it or not. I’ve seen a man – not on video, live – put his penis in the massive chasm that is a horse’s rear end. It wasn’t pleasant.”

“I think this conversation is getting out of hand for my blog,” I said.

“Well,” said Chris, “you’ve got the Triads, you’ve got the bestiality, you’ve got the mother-and-daughter prostitutes who, whilst wanking me off…”

“I must have missed that one,” I said. “My attention must have wandered. Run that past me again..”

“The mother-and-daughter prostitutes who, whilst wanking me off,” repeated Chris, “had an argument that ended up with them hitting each other, whilst they’re still wanking me. They did not stop. You’ve got to admire that…”

I shrugged casually.

“So this new Edinburgh show is going to be excellent,” Chris told me.

“I’m going to regret using this phrase,” I said, “but you’re not sucking up to me with made-up stories just to get publicity in my blog, are you?”

“You know me by now.” said Chris. “It’s all true. I can take you to meet the people. This is my Edinburgh show. Every single thing is true. You know me by now, John. You know that I don’t actually have an imagination. I can’t write jokes. I’ve never written any comedy down. I buy books. Every year, I think: It’s time to grow a bit as an act. I buy a book. I open the book up, I do a pencil drawing of a goose with human legs and it gets put in the bin. It’s all true.

“Another bit of news is… When is this blog being published?…”

“Probably tomorrow,” I said.

“OK, then I can’t tell you this next bit. It’s a PR stunt. I’ll ring you and you will be the first to know. But I can tell you I’m doing a UK tour – me, Trevor Lock and Lee Kern of the TV show Celebrity Bedlam… The three of us are doing a UK tour with a very, very, very odd, different… I’m not going to tell you any more, but it is not just a comedy tour.”

“Does it involve any woodland creatures?” I asked.

“There’s no animals,” said Chris, “unless anyone brings one along to the show. But there will be no reversing them onto me.”

“At my age,” I said. “I am thankful for small mercies.”

The death of a UK boxer linked to the sadistic murders of prostitutes by serial killer ‘Jack the Stripper’

I missed the 2008 movie The Bank Job when it was released in cinemas, but saw it on TV last night. It is about the 1971 robbery of the safety deposit vault at Lloyds Bank in Baker Street, London, and is allegedly based on a true story that one of the safety deposit boxes contained sex pictures of Princess Margaret (who is oddly never named in the film). Whether it is true or not I have no idea.

But the combination of seeing The Bank Job last night and the sad death of boxer Sir Henry Cooper yesterday reminds me of the story about British boxer Freddie Mills which I have heard for the last fifteen years from unconnected people in both the boxing and crime worlds.

The story is that Freddie Mills, a former World Light Heavyweight boxing champion who appeared in two Carry On films and many TV entertainment shows – he was the Frank Bruno of his day – was also a serial killer nicknamed Jack The Stripper who murdered six or possibly eight prostitutes between 1959 and 1965.

A 1969 novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square was loosely based on the case and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 movie Frenzy was loosely adapted from the book.

On 24 July 1965 Freddie Mills was found shot through the right eye in his Citroen car, parked in a cul-de-sac behind his nightclub The Nite Spot in Charing Cross Road, London. He was said to have shot himself inside the car with a .22 fairground rifle borrowed from a friend who ran a shooting gallery. The Coroner’s Court brought in a verdict of suicide. His family never accepted the verdict.

In 1991, Tony Van Den Bergh published Who Killed Freddie Mills? which brought up the Jack the Stripper story.

In 2001, former London crime figure Jimmy Tippett Jnr was reportedly writing a book which claimed Freddie Mills was Jack the Stripper and killed himself because the police were likely to arrest him.

In his 2004 book Fighters, James Morton concluded that Freddie Mills had killed himself because he was depressed and was convinced the Kray Twins were about to kill him.

In 2006, David Seabrook published Jack of Jumps which deduced that Freddie Mills was not Jack the Stripper.

The story I heard in the mid-1990s and over the years from multiple separate sources was that Freddie Mills was Jack the Stripper and – because the worlds of crime and boxing are inextricably intermingled in the UK and there is a crossover between crime and showbiz in Soho – he was known by crime figures to be the killer. It was said that, at the point of sexual climax, he was known to lose control of his violent inner self.

The police did not have enough evidence to arrest him, so those crime figures killed Freddie Mills. The police knew or suspected this was the case but, because of the Jack the Stripper background, did not pursue any investigation; they figured justice had been done. As the Coroner’s Court had decided the death was suicide, there was no need to investigate.

In 1999, I had a chat with Brian J Ford, first British President of the European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations, specifically to ask him about the Freddie Mills ’suicide’ story. Shortly after Freddie Mills’ death in 1965, he had written an article for the Sunday Mirror, pointing out the complete lack of any psychological profile for a suicide.

In a 1965 interview with ITN, boxing promoter Jack Solomons said of Freddie Mills: “He would never accept defeat… I would assume that he had no enemies in the boxing game – what he did outside of that in his after boxing life, that I couldn’t say.”

One very unusual detail in this alleged ‘suicide’ was that Mills had his right eye open when the bullet hit it. Usually, people close their eyes as the trigger is pulled.

Professor David Wingate, resident medical officer at Middlesex Hospital the night Mills’s corpse was brought in, carried out an examination on the body and was convinced that someone had taken the gun off Mills and shot him with it. He was not called to give evidence at the Coroner’s inquest.

Brian J Ford told me he had also looked in detail at the alleged ‘suicide’ weapon and concluded that it was physically impossible for Freddie Mills to shoot himself seated in the back of that type of Citroen in the way that he was shot with a gun which was too long to manipulate through 180 degrees. There were also signs of a violent struggle before the alleged ‘suicide’ took place in the back seat. Brian did not go for the Jack The Stripper angle and just believed Mills, as a boxer, was involved with criminal types who shot him for unknown reasons.

But the story refuses to go away.

I heard it again last year.

It may be an urban myth.

It may be the truth.

That’s the ironic thing about the real world. You can never be absolutely certain what’s true and what’s not.

There is a BBC TV documentary about Freddie Mills here on YouTube in which Scotland Yard’s ‘Nipper’ Read, who investigated the case, says he believes Freddie Mills killed himself, but Mills’ family still dispute the ’suicide’ verdict; towards the end, there is also a reconstruction of how not to shoot yourself in the head with a fairground rifle in the back seat of a Citroen.

The Prime Minister, sex, sleaze, prostitutes and Boris Johnson

A friend of mine – an Englishman in Italy – used to work for a large international conglomerate and, in the 1990s, once had to take a briefcase stuffed with cash to Rome Airport and hand it over to a civil servant. Everyone accepted that was how the wheels were greased. That was how the Italian state worked.

I also used to know someone involved with an Italian TV show which had to employ a girlfriend of now-deceased Prime Minister Bettino Craxi on their series. In fact, that underestimates her role: she actually arranged orgies for Prime Minister Craxi. My chum thought, “Ooh, now there’s a big secret I know about!” But then he discovered everyone knew about the supposed ‘scandal’ and it was almost routinely printed in Italian newspapers and magazines; everyone just accepted it. That was how the Italian state worked.

So I am a tad surprised as well as being in moral confusion about the current Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s problems.

He is immensely entertaining, which is always a bonus in my eyes. A bit like London’s current mayor Boris Johnson but with dyed hair. My heart takes flight when I hear any news item about either Boris or Silvio. I just know it’s going to be knockabout laugh-a-minute stuff.

But now Silvio is accused of having sex with an under-aged prostitute. This is not good. He faces a court case and a potential 15 years in prison. This is definitely not good.

The age of consent in Italy is generally 14, though 13-year-olds can legally have sex with partners who are less than three years older. This seems much too low to me but, if that is the law in Italy, then that is what good Italians Catholics have decided is morally acceptable. As I understand it, the girl involved in the Berlusconi case was 17 when the alleged sex took place and, while prostitution is legal in Italy – just as it is in the UK – it is illegal in Italy for a man to have sex with a prostitute under 18.

So the girl involved was three years over the general age of consent but one year under the legal age for sexual consent as a prostitute. This seems a very complicated moral quagmire within Italy, though I can see why sex with a prostitute under 18 is proscribed.

However, both Silvio and the girl totally deny sex took place. If they both deny it, then quite how evidence can be presented that it did take place I don’t know. There was a payment of £6,000 but apparently well after the alleged sex allegedly happened and Silvio and the girl both claim the payment was connected to something totally different. He also got her released from police custody in a separate incident, but that is more abuse of power than directly relevant the sex charges. It’s all a bit murky but sounds too circumstantial for a prosecution.

They could be lying through their teeth, of course, though I’m not sure why a young prostitute would not admit sex took place if she is going to become rich on selling the whole story to the media.

There is also the question in my mind of why on earth Silvio Berlsconi would have to pay for sex with a girl. Call me cynical, but the man is a billionaire, he owns a string of high-profile populist TV stations so he can get anyone he wants onto TV and he is the most powerful politician in the country! Any one of those three facts, in my experience, would mean lithe young nymphettes would be throwing themselves at him for free every day! The casting couch stretches beyond the movie business.

Heavens! Nymphettes throw themselves at impoverished comedians in dodgy basement clubs on a nightly basis let alone powerful billionaires who can get them on several national television series.

BBC News reported that Silvio Berlusconi reckons he has been in court over 2,500 times during various cases over the years. He has been accused of tax fraud, corruption, infidelity, Mafia involvement, you name it. I’m surprised he hasn’t been accused of illegally importing birds’ eggs. At least once he was accused of paying bribes on behalf of his companies at a time when no large company in Italy could operate without paying bribes. It struck me as a purely politically-motivated prosecution. That was/is how the Italian state worked/works.

Last year he was accused of being a member of an alleged secret organisation allegedly called P3 – a revival, it was said, of the infamous Masonic lodge P2 – Propaganda Due which existed from 1946 to at least 1981 and of which Silvio really was a member.

I have no idea if he is guilty or innocent of the current charges. He is certainly not an innocent man in general. And Italy – run by P2 and the Mafia from the end of the Second World War to perhaps the mid-70s – is most certainly not an innocent country.

P2 comprised prominent politicians, industrialists, bankers, journalists and military leaders, the heads of all three Italian intelligence services and even the pretender to the Italian throne. In 1977, P2 took over the influential Corriere della Sera newspaper; it was rumoured to be involved in the 1982 killing of ‘God’s banker’ Roberto Calvi, who was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London, and it even had rumoured links to the 1980 bombing of Bologna railway station and the 1978 killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the heavily-infiltrated Red Brigades (allegedly because he had started to talk about NATO’s secret Gladio network).

It feels to me that Silvio is being stitched-up at the moment. He may very well be a reprehensible, ageing sleazeball, but this is a case where every fact seems to swirl in very muddied waters indeed.

It is not as if Silvio Berlusconi was running a prostitution racket, is it…

Is it?