Word: rachman
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White Chief. In 1946, when he was 26, Polish-born Rachman had arrived in Britain virtually penniless and possessing a stateless person's passport. At first, he found postwar Britain a bleak place. His English was poor, and he labored as kitchen helper, insurance agent and black marketeer. He made his bid for fortune in the early 1950s by borrowing $2,500 to buy a lodging house near London's Harrow Road. The house cost so little because seven of its eight rooms were occupied by tenants protected by rent control and immune from eviction. Rachman rented...
...single-minded effort to get low-rent tenants out of his houses and high-rent tenants in, Rachman hired men to urinate in hallways, smash furniture, and once in Bayswater to remove the roof of a house and abandon the stubborn tenants to the mercy of wind and weather. In the underworld he got the name of "Polish Peter," and West Indians, who knew his power, called him "White Chief Rachman...
Bent Basement. The Rent Act of 1957 virtually lifted all controls and enabled Rachman to shoehorn tenants into his flats at whatever prices the traffic would bear. He also showed talent for "bending the basement," that is, converting cellar space into cribs for prostitutes or into nightclubs. The 1959 Street Offences Act, which drove prostitutes off London pavements, brought him another windfall, for the girls would pay more for rooms than even the desperate West Indians. In one house, seven prostitutes were charged $10 per day, payable every day at noon, or $25,000 annually, for a house valued...
...Rachman was never once found guilty of an illegal act, and never once paid a personal income tax. Police and Public Health officers nearly lost their minds trying to trace the true ownership of his 400 to 500 buildings. They would discover that in a single Rachman house different owners were listed for different floors; one company would have a lease to collect rents, another to make repairs, and a third would simply be holding the house "in trust" for one of Rachman's myriad firms...
...Rachman had enough money to start dealing in better-class apartments, hotels and office buildings. He married Audrey O'Donnell, a pretty Lancashire girl who had served as an officer in his multiple corporations, and moved into a mock-Georgian mansion just off Hampstead Heath's Millionaires' Row. The garage was large enough to house their six cars...