Word: rachman
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Dates: during 1963-1963
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Like the overturning of a deeply embedded rock, the Profumo scandal caused a frantic scurrying of a great many odd human insects. One of the crawliest figures to emerge was that of Peter Rachman, who may, or may not, be dead. Last week press and Parliament were abuzz with his sordid story...
...Rachman looked the part of an Ian Fleming villain. Short and fat, with grotesquely tiny hands and feet, he had no neck, a bald head shaped like a soccer ball, and sunken blue eyes always hidden behind dark glasses. He dressed flashily, wore elevator shoes of crocodile leather. It amused him to watch naked lady wrestlers, and he had a fetish about hygiene, insisting that all his silverware be sterilized and un touched by human hands. More than most men, Rachman loved money and women...
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...