How I wrote ‘Passport To Vice’, the first true crime history of Maltese vice in London’s Soho
My book ‘Passport To Vice’ is the first Maltese crime history of Maltese vice in London’s Soho - it was my first book and it took me three years to finish
Ever think of that kernel of an idea that started off a project that now controls your life right up until you take it to fruition?
In my case, it was an idea that had been locked away in my memory palace for nearly 20 years that had suddenly found a way out of its deep recess. And, as a journalist committed mainly to practical and realisable goals, it was a cursory research for an obituary of Soho boss Frank Mifsud that kick-started everything in late 2019. Almost two decades earlier, I had fantasised about charting the real story of Maltese pimps and gangsters in London’s Soho by piecing together the nuggets of the past from interviews with survivors from the scene. Now, as I looked up old British newspapers for me to write up the Mifsud obit, I realised that… only the past century and a half of newspapers had been entirely digitised and rendered text-searchable.
That was hardly a possible endeavour in 2003 when I was just starting out in the trade, and when the Internet had yet to manifest the kind of power that allows such historical research to be carried out so efficiently. Back then I had interviewed Soho club and restaurant entrepreneur Jean Agius, whose biography back then never saw the light of the day. Now I had before me a full 80 years of newspapers to scour, and start understanding the history of Maltese migration to port cities in London and Wales, and how a criminal underclass took root in places like Cardiff, the East End, and Soho.
Where does one start? Type “maltese” and see where that… goes?
Maltese lace, Maltesers, single malt, the national football team suffering humiliating defeats in the European championships, the British forces parading in the Maltese colony, aristocrats at a ball in London as reported by Tatler… searching with narrow terms and precise names is a skill acquired fast.
There were the court cases, facilitated for me by a kind acquaintance and lawyer (or is it a barrister?) in London, Ylenia Rosso, who carried out searches for Maltese surnames; a big mass of police statements from the members of the Maltese Syndicate to ‘Old Grey Fox’ Bert Wickstead of the London Met’s Serious Crimes Office was physically delivered by the great true crime writer James Morton, to my friend David Darmanin (also in London), for him to photocopy and then despatch over to me. I forgot to mention… this was now early 2020 and COVID had prevented me from doing this kind of legwork!
I had the bones for this mammoth in hand: there were the names, the property interests in London connecting them to the Soho clubs, the police statements that recounted present stories from the 1970s went all the way back to the 1950s, and I was slowly, thanks to a newspaper research of well over 1,000 editions, carving out the milestones of this criminal fraternity.
It seemed endless, almost exasperating at certain points. When the research starts with little to go by with, you can stand in the dark feeling your way around, gingerly, almost comforted by the small steps of fact-finding. When the sheer amount of evidence, facts and stories are suddenly before your eyes, it feels like a blinding light is being shone into your face. As I read through or contemplated the never-ending newspaper stories and court cases and the detail from the police statements, I felt an exhilaration that comes every time a lucky scoop is in the works: as I looked at the reams of A4 copies chock-full of names, tell-all confessions and details never before published, I could feel my knees trembling.
“Now, how do I write all this down?” I asked myself. But I didn’t. I just read and read, and throughout 2021 almost wrote only infrequently because I just had too much information before me… punch-drunk by the excitement of leafing through these primary sources. I know that sharing useless details of the exploits of men in the world of prostitution might have been bothersome to those kind enough to hear me out (“more Soho? When does this guy get off…?”) but the trepidation from having this kind of documentary evidence had by now become an unshakeable feeling. These details commanded my almost every single thought the more I got closer to sketching out my historical timelines. And as I fished out more primary sources for my stories from the Maltese and British national archives, all I could think of every time I leafed a new page with rich detail was… maybe I can punch the air or let out a tiny scream of happiness?
“Hey, did I tell you I am writing a history about the Maltese in Soho?” I must have reminded a few dozen friends, relatives and acquaintances of my impending oeuvre… maybe I was sprinkling a couple of breadcrumbs around just to make sure I don’t back out of actually writing the book.
By 2022, a draft had finally come into shape: my research had practically worked its way down from the 1970s bust of the Maltese Syndicate, through to the 1960s, the ‘gangster’ heyday in the 1950s, and also the origins of this underclass as dockers and seamen in Cardiff. I zipped back and forth constantly: the development of Cardiff’s multicultural working class, the moral panics about white slave traffic in the 1932 Music Hall Affair in Malta, the crime fixation of the British press in the 1950s, the social unrest in the East End from heightened Maltese criminal activity… it never stopped.
I interviewed all the survivors of the era I could get in touch with - not everyone was willing to talk; but the most honest of interviews served to confirm much of the primary documentation in hand, giving better context, the necessary human element to interpret the stories of toxic male culture from a different era, one in which war and poverty had scarred a particular generation, with joblessness and migration after WWII, austerity and the search of fortune in post-war London, all leading up to a changing landscape of sexual morality and the promise of liberty in the great metropolis.
My biggest struggle was how to give this book its voice. I shied away from treating it as a “history” because I lacked the deeper research to explain so many factors beyond simple crime - poverty, austerity, social unrest, colonialism - so I stuck to my forte as a journalist. I simply told the story of the facts, tied the narrative up with a string of beads, attempting to move from one period to the other, story by story…
I drafted and redrafted. Teodor Reljić gave me a much-needed pep talk on… owning the voice (or even owning up to it…) - “you’ve done the research, talk about it as you are seeing it and telling it, you are committing pen to paper and you take ownership of it.” Yeah, I had been concerned about how to narrate this history/story as a person whose trade is journalism, fluctuating between the dry delivery of facts on court cases and criminal trials, or taking the reader by the hand and transport them back in time, unfurl the story of post-war austerity and the migration of women from the north to London where they would be picked up by Maltese pimps, just like I would when I tell a story to my children. I think I tried to strike a balance with the two… though in Passport the author’s voice is that of his day-job, unmistakably. So be it.
With my brother Mark, we finalised proof-reading and editing. Paul Cocks helped me design the book in double-time. The people at Horizons took Passport to print, and in my mind at least, I had no doubt that this book would resonate with the Maltese reading public.
Many of the stories about the Maltese in Soho, and there are so many more to be said, have lived on a bit in anecdote and legend, passed down as a recollection or story from old-timers to their relatives and friends in Malta. But Passport To Vice eschewed that kind of undependable story-telling: if anything, the raw taste of the court report, the police memorandum, the letters from the Maltese High Commissioner in the UK to the prime minister’s aides, is what sifts the wheat from the chaff on the “aesthetic” of crime. The ‘canon’ of London gangland books seems to fluctuate wildly from the authoritative and very readable tomes by James Morton, to a large collection of copy-paste jobs from amateur historians or gangster biographies.
Morton chronicled the story of the Maltese Syndicate, Frank Mifsud and Bernie Silver in a chapter or two in his books. But I was lucky enough to have embarked on a book whose audience was, in many ways, strictly Maltese - Morton might have not required the intensive detail about the Maltese that I was looking for. So he was gracious enough to share his research with me just before he gave it over to one of the London borough archives.
Passport To Vice turned out, in a certain sense, better than I expected when I set about to write it. I had covered almost a half-century with various, momentous developments in what was Maltese-led sexual exploitation, from Malta, to Egypt with the Messinas and then London, the seafaring community in Cardiff and other port towns, the East End cafés, the Thomas Smithson murder, the rise of ‘Big Frank’ Mifsud - name-dropped by none other than British crime overlord Billy Hill in his autobiography - the role of minor characters like fascist sympathiser Joseph Grech Marguerat, Philip Ellul and Victor Spampinato, the Soho firebombs, ‘one-eyed’ Tony Cauchi, George Caruana and the Krays assassination attempt on him, Charlie Grech ‘il-Likk’, and Jean Agius…
I’d love to get back to the book and improving upon it, but I have a dozen Freedom of Information requests that have been refused by the National Archives in London… so until a few more decades pass, it seems that a lot of the information about Maltese gangs in London will be under lock-and-key.
Passport To Vice is available from Mallia D’Amato, BDL, Agenda and Solo Vinyl & Books
Have you read Passport To Vice? I’d love to hear your thoughts… as well as your rating at Goodreads!
Hi Matthew, I would love to read this book. My Nannu and his brothers had a club in Soho and I am also a Vella. Is there anywhere in the UK I can buy it please? Thanks, Laura.