Part Two: Peter Rachman: King of the Slumlords

0:05 Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week we are talking about Peter Rockman, who is the namesake of the term Rockmanism, which is a recognized real word for a shitty landlord. Here to talk about this shitty landlord is a Kevin Foster. I didn't know what a comparison to make there. I guess you're a renter? I assume you're not a shitty renter. I don't see holes in your wall.

0:35 Yeah, I'm with the prostitutes from the first episode. That's right.

0:42 Prostitute solidarity.

0:43 Very pro-sex worker on this podcast.

0:47 And West Indian immigrants. And also poor demobilized Polish soldiers trying to get by up to a point.

0:55 Does this... I've been wondering this the whole time. Who is Dennis Rockman, and does he have anything to do with this?

1:02 No.

1:03 I don't know who Dennis.

1:04 That's good. Is that not a... That's not a famous person?

1:07 Are you talking about Dennis Rodman? The basketball guy? Oh, shit.

1:10 Yeah, no.

1:11 That's a very different guy.

1:12 I failed.

1:13 That's a very different guy.

1:15 I've never been more disappointed in you.

1:18 I'm sorry.

1:18 Dennis Rodman was like the bad boy of basketball in like the 90s. Yeah. Gotcha.

1:23 Like, See, that's pre-me.

1:26 Yeah.

1:27 Okay.

1:27 Don't tell me that. Don't tell me that, Kevin.

1:30 Fuck off, Kevin.

1:30 With your youth. Yeah.

1:32 I'm sorry.

1:33 Your knees don't hurt.

1:34 Your back doesn't hurt. You still know how to feel joy.

1:37 Well, I don't know about that.

1:39 He is a renter, Sophie.

1:41 Yeah. I am a renter. I am about to lose my health.

1:46 There you go.

1:48 Here's the question. Robert, is he.

1:52 Uh, has he seen enough that you would let me play Landslide for him in the car?

1:57 No, no, no.

1:58 Would you let Kevin listen to Landslide is my question.

2:02 I'm not going to stop anyone from listening to Landslide, but I don't know that you need it in your life at that age.

2:07 What is Landslide? Wait, the book?

2:10 Fleetwood Mac song. No, it's a Fleetwood Mac song about how getting older sucks.

2:17 I have listened to the book, Lancelot.

2:19 Most Fleetwood Mac songs are either about how awesome cocaine or cheating is, but this one is about how the passage of time is a brutal and cruel demon.

2:28 Anyways, Kevin, what's your sub stack for those who are.

2:32 My sub stack is called Last Week in Hell.

2:35 Where I feel I am right now.

2:37 Yeah, yeah.

2:38 Terrible.

2:40 But sort of in the name, I guess I do Portland politics and also national stuff. Sometimes I talk about all the horrible things happening, and then sometimes I talk about people doing cool things. And yeah, I enjoy it.

2:55 I do feel like a deeper understanding of Fleetwood Mac will be useful for understanding Portland politics, because Fleetwood Mac was essentially one large dysfunctional polycule, and Portland is essentially several large dysfunctional polycules.

3:08 Gotcha.

3:09 I have.

3:10 I've listened to Elliot Smith. I know that person.

3:13 I think he did nearly as much cocaine as Fleetwood Mac, but no one did.

3:17 No one did.

3:17 No one did.

3:18 Yeah.

3:19 No one did. Scarface didn't.

3:21 Not even Stephen King.

3:22 Robert, go to the script while I, you know.

3:25 You know who's not as cool as cocaine or Fleetwood Mac? Well, maybe as cool as cocaine. Peter Rockman. That's more or less a good entry way back into this story.

3:36 Hell yeah.

3:44 So on June 22nd, 1948, right around the same time that Peter Rockman was demobilized and became a civilian, a boat named the HMT Empire Windrush brought the first large group of Caribbean immigrants to England's shores. This had been precipitated by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which quite reasonably made the people who lived in the empire's remaining colonies British citizens. This spurred a shitload of people from the West Indies to move to the UK looking for a better life. Unfortunately, the UK is not an easy place to live. It's not like moving to the US in the late 40s, right? Like you're going to encounter racism in either place, but at least there's money in the States.

4:25 Yeah.

4:25 Britain's still rationing. You still can't buy more than a certain amount of like meat or whatever at one time. Like you get ration tickets and stuff up and through like the 50s. Right.

4:35 Yeah.

4:37 Things are rough there. And so when these people get off the boat to the UK, they are not going to have a I mean, no, not that immigrants in the US had an easy time of it, but it's going to be even harder. Right. Because it's just harder in England at this point in time. These immigrants from what's called the West Indies, right, the Caribbean, become known as the Windrush Generation. And these are the people who are going to make Peter Rockman a rich man. So it's relevant that like the year he demobilizes is when the Windrush docks and the first chunk of these immigrants who are going to become known as the Windrush Generation kind of make their way into British shores.

5:13 Why is it called the Windrush?

5:15 Because that's the name of the boat that the first of them come on is the HMS Empire Windrush, right? So they call everyone after that the Windrush generation, even though I presume it's other boats who are bringing most of the other people. And these people are going to make Peter Rockman a very rich man. Now, the British government, in all of its wisdom, had finally agreed to do the right thing by letting these subjects of the crown be citizens. but they follow that up by failing to plan at all for their arrival in the country. So parliament does the good thing of like, well, yeah, we got to let these people be British if they want to be British, but they don't like take any actions to prepare for their arrival. They don't do anything to

5:53 make sure there's like places for these people to live. They make no effort whatsoever to give a shit about the consequences of this decision.

6:00 This is like Reagan's amnesty in the 80s and just being like, oh yeah, we just, It's actually about capitalism, but it's still very divorced from where we are now anyways.

6:12 We want a lot of cheap workers, and we absolutely are not going to think about any other aspect of their lives or needs. And again, as I said, the UK is still living with wartime rationing for a big chunk of this period. Food rationing continues in England in some form until 1954, right? So again, this would have started 39 or 40. I forget exactly when they start rationing.

6:35 And it doesn't fully end until the mid-50s for an idea of how different the post-war is in England to the United States. And as I established last episode, there's no fucking housing, right? So you add tens of thousands of new non-white immigrants to a country where nobody has enough housing and people are poor and don't have enough food.

6:58 It's not hard to predict how a lot of white Britons were going to respond with racism, xenophobia, and eventually violence. In the immediate aftermath of the Windrush docking, 11 labor MPs signed a letter asking the prime minister to stop the arrival of colored people. This is labor doing this, by the way. Not that the conservatives are any better, but like for an idea of where the vibes are at.

7:22 This is just way too close to like some of the stuff happening today.

7:27 Time's a flat circle. So nothing is, the prime minister doesn't do anything to stop these people, which is good, but again, also doesn't do anything to help them. By the mid-1960s, the situation had gotten so bad that conservative parliamentary candidate Peter Griffiths used the slogan, if you want an N-word for a neighbor, vote labor, as his campaign slogan.

7:47 This is like, yeah, things are bad. Jesus Christ, man. He doesn't use the term N-word.

7:54 Even for that time period.

7:57 Yeah, it's pretty bad.

7:58 That's pretty rough, bro.

8:00 Damn. Jesus, sir. Yeah, I mean, I guess how... Like compared to the U.S., where were they at on the, I mean, he didn't use the.

8:09 The U.K.? I mean, he did use, he did use.

8:12 Yeah.

8:12 Yeah.

8:13 Hard R is my understanding.

8:15 Very bad.

8:16 I don't know that it's. The U.K. The racism levels seem like they're pretty similar, but there is more to go around in the U.S. And there's more space, right? Yeah. which again, I don't want to like minimize the difficulties non-white immigrants face in the United States. It's just, you have to add on to the difficulties that they would have faced here. The fact that in England, there's not enough food or housing for it.

8:37 Yeah. They didn't have, like you said, half the money in the world.

8:40 Right.

8:40 Exactly.

8:41 So just even worse.

8:42 Right.

8:44 You can get an idea of how difficult it was for non-white Britons to find accommodations by looking at this 1950 selection of housing ads that from the Kensington News and West London Times, curated by Neil Root for his book, Slumlord. And I'll just read a couple of them. The Netflix people can see that it just looks like newspaper text, but double and single rooms, well-furnished and newly decorated, cooking facilities in all rooms, use of bath and telephone, double from three pounds, seven shillings, single from two pounds, 10 shillings weekly, inclusive light linen service, Europeans only. What do you think that means? Europeans only. Another ad just reads, no color. Another ad reads, English business people only. Another

9:29 ad says, professional people preferred, no colored. And then the last ad says, professional people preferred, no colored. Right? So this is just like the norm. You would also see no Irish in this time, too, in quite a few room listing ads in London. But less common, as this shows, than just no colored.

9:45 Yeah, if you were wondering before.

9:48 Professional people preferred.

9:49 Where the UK stood at this time. I think we got our answer.

9:53 It's not great. It's not great.

9:55 Boy, howdy. Yeah.

9:57 As I said last episode, Peter Rockman was definitively not a racist. At least he's not motivated by racism against other people. But he has no problem using racism as a weapon against them if it makes him money, right? And he doesn't really care what his use of racism against these white people to make more money is. does to the attitudes that white people have towards these non-white immigrants, right?

10:22 And the fact that that's only going to make the conflict worse, right? And through the rest of the 1950s, it is going to make the conflict worse. After he successfully pushed his former tenants to leave his first property by moving in non-white tenants, Peter realized that London was full to bursting with homes that he could buy for absolutely nothing. Because they're filled with rent-protected tenants and investors feel like there's no real chance to profit off them.

10:45 So the people who own them are looking to offload these houses and apartment buildings or whatever from whatever the fuck they can. And Rockman realizes that like, well, one thing that consistently pushes white people to break their leases is having black neighbors, right? So he starts to realize this is a reproducible business strategy that I can use to make a shitload of money. Historian Gary Powell writes that by 1956, Rockman had acquired some 30 properties in the Notting Hill area of West London. Quote, many of them run down or derelict. Powell adds, Rockman saw an opportunity, devising a plan that he ruthlessly implemented. If he could force out the existing tenants, he could move in Afro-Caribbean immigrants,

11:25 who at the time were having great difficulty in finding accommodation in the London area at much higher rents. Rockman, whilst portraying a solicitous nature to the media, a man who was an immigrant himself providing rental accommodation to those in need, was using severe tactics to remove existing tenants.

11:40 These tactics included the moving of prostitutes into adjacent overcrowded flats, hiring local thugs such as Michael DeFritas, a.k.a. Michael X, to harass the tenants with violence and threats of violence, the playing of loud music, and even the killing of domestic pets. The war of attrition continued with the cutting off of electricity supplies and making the bedsits insecure by removing door locks. We're not going to talk a lot about him, but one of his main enforcers is this guy, Michael DeFritas, Michael X, who is.

12:06 Like- I want to talk about him. That sounds very interesting.

12:09 He's like the British Malcolm X in some ways, but a lot uglier. He's going to get executed for murder when he gets returned to Jamaica because he definitely kills some people. Jesus. He's a he's a complicated guy.

12:23 That that was just I just need to feel like I need to pause for a second. That was just a row of horrible.

12:30 Yeah.

12:30 Yeah. Like executing people's pets.

12:34 Yeah. Sometimes they're killing pets. Sometimes it's like threats of violence. You're moving in these guys that either look like or just straight up are basically criminals in order to, like, scare these people into leaving there so that you can fill it. And you're charging– by the way, as he's moving in these Afro-Caribbean immigrants, he's charging them higher rents than the white people had been paying. So again, while they are grateful, he's also fleecing them, right? Like this is not at all a kindness of his heart sort of thing.

13:03 Doesn't this make you feel like the AI price-fixing people are just like– they're not– they're really like uncreative people? By Rockman's standards.

13:11 So, so much lazier, right? At least this is, he's putting in elbow grease, right?

13:17 I'm grateful for that.

13:17 He's got to kill people's pets. He's got to meet all of these like sketchy, like musicians that he can move into apartments to like scare people. He's got, you know, he's got to put in work. He's got to build like a crew of toughs who are willing to beat the shit out of people for him. That takes effort.

13:33 It's a lot more respectable than the AI price fixing stuff.

13:36 I think. How big is his empire getting at this point?

13:40 He's got like 30-something properties in Notting Hill at this point.

13:43 In time, right?

13:44 Gotcha.

13:46 And I don't know. All of these stories may not be true, right? And there's some room to like, well, is he moving in prostitutes as a tactic? Or does he just really love prostitutes and like finding houses for them?

13:58 Yeah.

13:59 There's some interpretation there. After Rockman's death, some of his former muscle wound up in court and discussed what they had done for their boss. One man, Rondell, talked in detail about how large Alsatian dogs owned by another Rockman employee were commonly used to terrify tenants. Quote, As well as Rockman, a man called Raymond Nash was concerned in the properties. Nash used to run brothels in the Earl's Court area and was connected with various clubs.

14:38 This could be like a Guy Ritchie movie.

14:41 Yeah, these guys are kind of Guy Ritchie characters. He makes a friend who has a bunch of huge dogs so he can scare the shit out of people with them. He's hiring these former heavyweight boxers because they're scary, right? You can intimidate people into leaving. This guy can punch you to death. I should also note that an article in the UK Mirror described Fred Rondell as a, quote, mentally unstable man who had a penchant for biting off people's ears. This is another one of his stuff. Like he's he's got he's bitten off so many ears that decades later, the news is like this guy loved biting off ears. Couldn't get enough of it.

15:19 Wow.

15:20 Real Mike Tyson type. Yeah.

15:22 Wow.

15:23 Yeah.

15:25 It's great. I mean, these are just some great characters. Another quote from that Mirror article, Rondell once sued his defense barrister, his defense lawyer, for negligence and took umbrage at claims that he had used a knife to inflict injuries. He insisted he had actually used his hands and teeth, clearly a point of professional pride for him. I don't need a knife! It was more Australian, but you get what I'm saying.

15:48 What the fuck was that?

15:49 That's wild.

15:51 Usually your accents aren't that bad, Robert.

15:53 I don't know if that's true, Sophie. But I do love the idea of a guy who's like, wait a second, you think I stabbed those people? I bit them. Excuse me, I'm the ear biter. I don't use a knife.

16:05 All I can think of is like the ratatouille guy with the thumb.

16:10 I thought of Iron Mike Tyson.

16:12 Yeah, fair enough. That's honestly very respectable to be like, look, I know that I'm admitting to a crime in court, but I will not let this slander stand. I bit those people. I did not stab them.

16:24 Well, maybe you could get his... Can you get your charges?

16:29 If I'm the judge, I would have let him off entirely at that. I'd be a terrible judge. I am a judge, but I'm a bad one.

16:36 You're a judge?

16:37 Yeah, yeah, technically in New Mexico.

16:40 Cool.

16:41 That exact scenario reminds me of Cardi B when she was in court in August 22-5. They were trying to get her to say that she had called somebody fat. And she was like, I didn't call the security guard fat. I called her a bitch. And that's the exact thing that popped into my mind.

17:01 Yeah, yeah.

17:02 Fair enough.

17:03 I didn't do that. I bit the guy. I'm like, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

17:07 Put some respect on my name.

17:09 It's like a drug dude being like, I wasn't selling fentanyl. I test my shit. Excuse me.

17:13 Excuse me.

17:13 This is pure Yale.

17:15 How dare you?

17:17 Yeah.

17:19 So today, Rockman's Defenders, and he does have some, will point out that he was very popular with a lot of black and brown Britons, in large part because he's one of the only people who was willing to rent them homes. As Carol Phillips wrote for that New York Review of Books article, this so-called slumlord was regarded by many in the newly arrived immigrant community as something of a godsend. Speaking about Rockman a few years after his death, a West Indian social worker whose job during the 1950s had been to meet West Indians off the boat train was clear in his assessment of him. To the West Indian, he was a savior and people still have a lot of respect for him, right? And this does seem to

17:52 be true. You can find a lot of positive quotes, although you can also find he evicted West Indian people for not payment. He would threaten them too. He's not– again, I don't think he's actually a good guy, but you can see how people's attitude of him would be like, this guy's our savior, right?

18:06 Yeah.

18:07 Because they just have no one in their corner at all, right? The fact that this scummy landlord is at least willing to do business with them is better– the best deal they're getting. Yeah. And, you know, it is worth knowing that while he was not a bigot, Rockman only saw these people as a source of money. And when they couldn't pay, he had no issue with being brutal. A little earlier, I read you a quote that listed Peter Rahn, a former heavyweight wrestling champion, as one of Rockman's thugs.

18:34 In 1963, Rahn spoke to the press. I was introduced to Rockman about six years ago through one of his rent collectors. The original deal he had in mind fell through, but Rockman asked if I would be his bodyguard. Then he asked me to recruit a squad of men who would throw out any of his tenants whom he wanted to get rid of. Perhaps they were not paying their rents promptly. I got together this squad, and the first job we did was to throw out all of the occupants of a house on Westburn Park Road. There were about 15 people in this house, all colored. Six of us got there at about 10 a.m. and stormed the house.

19:02 We rushed in like a band of thugs. We went through every room, removing all the tenants and every bit of their furniture. We had to jostle them on a bit. All their cases and furniture we piled up on the pavement and we left them there. My squad were used to throwing people out of five or six houses. Jesus.

19:17 So he's not a friend to these people, right?

19:22 Are there like a lot of these stories? Like, do you feel like there's certain things where he's.

19:26 Again, Ron's saying it wasn't weird for them to do five or six houses sometimes in a day, you know?

19:32 Jesus Christ. Yeah.

19:34 Ron also noted how differently he treated white people that he wanted to evict. For instance, at one point, Rockman decided to push an elderly white couple out of their rent-controlled home, which he'd purchased. Rather than send in thugs, he sent in a painter who only worked nights. Quote, trampling on their bed, keeping the light on, and sloshing paint all over the place. This went on until, in desperation, the old couple moved out, right? And that's not nice either, but you can see he's treating the white people differently.

20:00 Because he knows, if I send thugs to these elderly white people and they go to the news, that might bring some shit down on me, right?

20:06 Yeah.

20:07 If I have my thugs beat up or threaten or force out like a black family, no one's going to give a shit, right? So he's using different tactics. Again, because he recognized– and I don't think he's more brutal to the non-white tenants because he's racist. I think he's more brutal because he knows he can get away with it, right?

20:24 It's all about money to him, right?

20:25 He's a very conniving bastard.

20:28 Yeah. He's a guy who– I think, you know, you could maybe assume part of this is just the things he had to learn to do in order to survive maybe made him willing to be harsher to people than he otherwise would have been.

20:43 Right.

20:43 Like you have to think that after an upbringing and young adulthood like he had. something like having a squad of goons force a family out of their home does not seem near. Well, I'm not killing them.

20:54 Right.

20:54 I'm not starving them.

20:56 Right.

20:56 I had worse shit done to me. I can imagine that being part of his like justification for this.

21:01 Right.

21:01 Especially after coming from, it seems like he grew up in like a relatively safe affluent ish, like going to be a dentist going to, and then it's just having everything like that completely taken away from you. And you, and then you end up being the, the drug and, slinger for the british.

21:20 Army right right yeah coffee slinger yeah yeah um so there is another ron story worth telling uh that i'll quote from here quote another couple complained that their windows did not fit properly rockman sent someone to take out the windows but they didn't fit new windows in their place this was in the middle of winter and not surprisingly the old couple couldn't stand the cold and they were moved out by relatives That's not a nice thing to do either, right? Freezing elderly people in the dead of a British winter, London winter, out of their home.

21:52 Not nice. But you know who would never do that? I can't actually say that. Blue Apron certainly would. But I don't know, maybe not the other sponsors. And we're back. Throughout the course of the late 50s and early 60s, Peter Rockman gave a masterclass on the truth that you can be a gigantic piece of shit without being much of a bigot. Rand described his boss's oft-expressed ideology this way.

22:26 His philosophy in life amounted to this. Everybody can be bought for a price. He boasted that he could always buy off anyone who might create difficulties. Police, council officials, as he attempted with the local politician Donald Chesworth. Property surveyors. He claimed that he had all the protection he needed in high places, but he had a great fear of being exposed by a newspaper or in parliament, right? And that's why he's being kind of like more cautious with some of these older white couples is he really doesn't want to wind up in the paper, right? And so he's playing on like the racism of the British media.

22:57 We're like, well, nobody's going to do a story on these West Indian immigrants who are unhappy with me, right? Like that's not going to happen. And if it does, I have more who are happy with me, right, that I can put in front of a newspaper man or something like that, right? He's very cautious, and he doesn't attract a lot of media attention during his life, so he's very good at this. Like, he knows how far he can and can't go, it seems, as a rule. Yeah.

23:24 Root writes that Peter only ever gave one interview to the media in 1958. This is after the Empire News and Sunday Chronicle published an investigation to immigration in London. Rockman gave an answer in this interview that did indeed make him sound like a decent, even enlightened man. The Rockman in this interview sounds like a much nicer man than he was in real life. I find colored people good tenants. Of course they have no references, so I go on what I think of them. I work on the principle that the first man who calls for a flat gets it, whether he is white or colored. Some people say I work a color bar in reverse, that I prefer West Indians, but it isn't true. I take people as they come. Mind you, some white people do

24:02 object to the colored people when they move in. They don't like the way they play jazz records up to 1 a.m. and always play loudly. So when they come to me and say they are unhappy, I help them find another home. That's how he frames what he's doing.

24:15 He feels like a subprime lone dude. Yeah.

24:21 And again, you can also see he's perfectly willing to stoke some of those racial divisions. He knows that these people aren't naturally always up playing jazz at 1 a.m. He's asking them to, to force these other tenants out. He's telling them, I'll give you a break on rent if you play your music super late at night to make these other assholes leave. Like, he is the one doing that. And he's like, oh, it's just how these people are, you know? And sometimes when people don't like it, I help them find a new place, you know?

24:48 It's like, if I can, you know, maybe I can accept some level of like bad things happening in the world. But I'm like, you know, like, why can't we have people who are like, I'll kick them out and then I'll give like a good rent to the immigrants. It's always like, no, no, no, I have to, yeah.

25:05 Off i just i don't think there's a lot of altruism in the slum lording business there's not a lot of it could use some altruism that would be helpful but there's not a lot of it.

25:17 Um it's like if i stoke a bunch of racism right now maybe it'll save a million people in 200.

25:23 Years no it's more if i stoke a bunch of racism i can make an extra couple hundred pounds this month yeah so uh Some people did recall him as a kind and generous man, but even his defenders have to acknowledge that he primarily rented to non-white people because he could charge them higher rents. Per Carol Phillips, quote, an unfurnished room that might be rented at one pound a week to a rent-controlled tenant could then, in racially intolerant Britain, be rented at six pounds a week to a West Indian newcomer as furnished accommodation. This is a massive profit differential, right? That's why he's doing this. Now, one of Rockman's peers was the famous Lord Michael Heseltine, who was an even larger slumlord than Peter during the

26:05 same period, and also, I think, cribbed some of Rockman's tactics. In his 2000 biography, The Former Conservative MP, because Heseltine, after being a slumlord, becomes a member of parliament, he shared his recollections about Rockman during this period of time. One of his managers had come to view the hotel.

26:22 He was selling Rockman a hotel. It so happened that, having shown him the premises, I was standing outside talking to him when a Rolls Royce parked alongside us. The manager turned to the man behind the wheel, saying, a little child was killed this morning, Mr. Rockman. She fell off the balcony of one of our properties. Rockman's reply was brief. Are we insured? Yes. And off he drove.

26:42 So that tells you. Although, Heseltine's also a scumbag and is one of the guys who's really lying on really relies on stoking Rockman's reputation for being a slumlord to kind of ignore the fact that he was an even bigger slumlord.

26:59 Yeah. It's like the... Maybe that's true. You don't want to be the top of the pyramid in the shithole Olympics.

27:05 You don't want to be the most visible person in the pyramid, right?

27:09 Yeah. Did other... Wait, so did other people like make it into the press more or was it like....

27:15 This isn't really covered all– this is covered somewhat like the immigration thing is, like the fact that all of these West Indian immigrants are moving. That is covered a lot, and the housing crisis is a big deal. Slumlords are not getting nearly as much coverage, and Rockman is going to be kind of the first one who gets a lot, and we'll explain why later. But no, this is not– it's just not making the news because, again, most of what he's doing is– not super obvious right the people who like live in his buildings aren't aware rockman is paying these people to like be obnoxious or sending you know maybe they're the white people he's not sending goons after so much as he's doing other shady stuff right

27:54 so i think it's just kind of hard for people to put together and there is a lot of positive talk around him too because there's all these people who only have a home because of rockman's properties right yeah um now The reality is that Peter Rockman was mostly notorious during this period of time among the slumlord community, not because he was a particularly large slumlord. In London, he was like a medium-sized fish, but he's not one of the biggest, right? But he is super innovative, and the vast majority of his renters are Black. An investigation by Empire News after his death declared him probably London's largest individual landlord for the colored people. He doesn't advertise vacant rooms or flats. The colored people tell each other,

28:36 go see Rockman Man. I think that was supposed to be kind of a play on the Jamaican stereotypical accent. Didn't like that. I can't really tell.

28:44 Didn't like that.

28:46 I don't know how accurate that is, but that's what the papers are writing at the time. Like many of his peer slumlords, once Rockman cleared out a building, he would subdivide it into multiple cramped rooms. So he's not just clearing people out. He's like, ah, this isn't one apartment. This is three. Let's put in some more walls. You know, we'll stick a table and a couple of chairs in there.

29:05 Bada bing, it's furnished. You know, we're good to go.

29:08 Right?

29:08 He's the king of this shit.

29:10 I'm just glad this guy wasn't around for packaging securities.

29:15 I'm assuming he's also doing the landlord paint job on everything. Oh, yeah. You've just got like load bearing layers of paint holding the walls up at a certain point.

29:25 A little sinks.

29:27 Yeah.

29:27 Yeah. Oh, God. By August of 1958, Peter Rockman was a force in West London real estate. He'd done as much as anyone to move large numbers of non-white people into the area. And while that doesn't make what happened next his forte, fault by any stretch of the imagination, one must assume that his habit of pitting black tenants against white ones contributed to the simmering racial unrest in Notting Hill. And there's some evidence of that. There's some reporting that kind of jibes with that. I want to quote now from an article titled White Riot by Mark Olden and the Independent. Quote, Back in August 1958, Notting Hill had been seething with violence all summer. Then the West London neighborhood was a place of grimy streets and decrepit,

30:07 overcrowded tenements, a far cry from the chi-chi neighborhood it is today. The Saturday before the area finally exploded, nine white youths had embarked on what one of them called an inward hunting expedition around Notting Hill. They were armed with iron bars, blocks of wood, an air pistol, and a knife. By the time they'd finished, five black men were in the hospital, three in grave condition. Now, bleak as that is, that's just the start of the Notting Hill riot. The next week on Friday, August 29th, a domestic dispute between an interracial couple attracted white passersby, right?

30:41 Majbrit Morrison, a Swedish woman, is married to a black man named Raymond who's from Jamaica. And he had had his window smashed in a previous outburst of racial violence. And the two of them are arguing on the street when this crowd of whites descend to defend Majbrit. And she's like, I don't want you. Like, I'm dealing with my husband. I don't want you guys here. Like, get the fuck out. Like, you are not wanted in this.

31:01 But they just start fighting, right? Raymond's friends show up and it turns into a brawl and that kind of just things escalate from there. Nothing calms down past that point. Per an article in The Independent, by the following evening, a 200 strong mob were rampaging through the streets of Notting Hill armed with weapons, including sticks and butcher's knives, shouting down with the inwards and go home, you black bastards.

31:23 Three days of rioting followed. And although 108 people were arrested, no one thankfully was killed. The violence, however, would leave a last, and they destroy a lot of people's property, right? This is businesses and homes. They are beating people. This is a very ugly riot, right? And it's massively influential.

31:43 This is one of the things that really influences Joe Strummer of The Clash, right? He sings about this white riot in one of his songs, right?

31:50 Gotcha.

31:52 So this is a very influential moment in the history of racial conflict in Great Britain. In an analysis of the violence, Emily Cousins noted that one major cause was, quote, competition for housing between poor black and white families and tensions that were exploited by ruthless landlords. And again, Rockman's not the only one. He's not really the largest one, but he's one of the larger ones. And he's probably the guy who has innovated the most of the tactics that are contributing to this. So he does have a role in this riot, right? Um, In Slumlord, Neil Root lays out how the racial tensions that Rockman and his fellow landlords stoked for money helped to feed the growth of the British far right as well. That's another thing

32:34 that's happening in this time. Oswald Mosley is back after the war. He's free again. He's founded the Union Movement, which is the sequel to his old British Union of Fascists. Per Root's book, quote, In an interview with David Frost on the Frost Program on 15th November 1967, almost a decade after the Notting Hill riots, Mosley said that the disaffection in Notting Hill and the appeal of his union movement to summon the area was due to unemployment and vile housing. There was undoubtedly some truth in this, as previously mentioned, and Rockman and his likes certainly exploited the very poor housing conditions, but Mosley and his organization were also instrumental in consciously and ruthlessly inflaming racial tensions in

33:12 and around Notting Hill for their own ends, which culminated in the riots. So again, I want to be accurate about Rockman's contributions to the problem without blaming what happened on one shady landlord, right? Mosley's crew and other fascist organizations like the BNP recruited by complaining about slumlords flooding London with non-white people, right? And that doesn't mean it was bad to offer homes to those people, but it does mean that Rockman's tactics gleefully exploited and in some ways incited further race hatred, right?

33:41 Yeah.

33:42 He's making money off of contributing to this problem, right? And Mosley and his fellow fascists see these landlords as like, oh, well, this is a great thing to campaign on, right?

33:55 Yeah.

33:56 Is these guys who are changing the character of the neighborhoods, right?

34:00 Yeah.

34:01 Rockman built doing this into a science, one that was followed by many larger landlords in London. One of these guys was Nicholas von Hoogstraten, who laughingly described Peter in an interview as more or less small potatoes, right? He was like, well, he wasn't a very big landlord compared to me or some of my friends. But we definitely took some ideas from him. And one of the ideas he took was what he called destating with de-Schwarzers. And this is a term he took from Rockman, right? Schwarz is a Yiddish term for black. And Rockman popularized using it that way, right? The Schwarzers are the black people.

34:35 and de-stating. Stats are legal renters with rent protection. So de-stating with de-schwarzers is forcing out legal renters with rent protection by moving in Black people, right? Like, that's what Rockman meant when he would say that. And the fact that this other, like, larger landlord, von Hoogstraten, used the same term that Rockman popularized is evidence of the influence that his tactics had among, like, the slumlord community in London. Yeah.

35:02 I feel like these guys all have, like, Evil names.

35:06 Oh, God, Van Hoogstraten's a real bad one.

35:09 Rockman is like, could kind of go either way. But then there was like, what, Hellstein or something?

35:14 Oh, Heseltine. Yeah, that's a fucked up name. Yeah. Yeah, Van Hoogstraten. Even though he derided Rockman as being a minor landlord, Hoogstraten admitted, That might have been one of the tricks I picked up from him, actually. It would have probably been accidental to start with, but once you started getting complaints about the black people from your white tenants, you'd turn it to your advantage. I used to bring in the tenants from hell.

35:36 Right?

35:36 So they're all doing this, you know?

35:39 I mean, I know they're not like... I mean, I'm sure some of them are like really bigoted racists, but like... Oh, yeah.

35:47 I'm not going to go to bat for any of them.

35:48 Yeah, I like... Does it really matter? They still suck so much.

35:55 And I think that there's I don't know if I'd say it's worse, but it's certainly a different equivalent kind of evil to not personally be bigoted yourself, but to be very happy to use bigotry for your own profit.

36:08 Yeah, it's not like necessarily nihilistic, but like it's it's there's just being so profit oriented and the I don't know. Makes me sad.

36:20 To that end, too, again, and this is why I actually do have a lot more sympathy and consider him not as bad a person as these other larger slumlords who are sometimes cribbing off of him because there is some excuse in his backstory to be a nihilist about things.

36:35 Yeah.

36:36 Right?

36:37 Like, this is a, it's hard not to be a, like, completely fucked up and broken person after.

36:42 You can imagine complaining to this guy about his tactics not being, like, fair or ethical. He'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?

36:47 Yeah.

36:48 Like, do you know what I've been through?

36:50 He'd be like, look around.

36:52 Like, the world's built by monsters, man. I don't know what you want from me.

36:55 Yeah.

36:56 Um. By the start of the swingin' 60s, Peter Rockman was wealthy. He owned six luxury cars and had a string of mistresses, several of whom wound up famous. Two of his mistresses were Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, who would gain notoriety for their dalliances with other prominent Britons in politics. He started dating Mandy when he was around 40 and she was 16, which is incredibly gross.

37:19 This was legal! Don't care. But it is pretty gross. It's not great. That's a bad age gap.

37:27 He couldn't have stopped at the, like, I got my Nazi cars. I got seven of them.

37:31 No, no.

37:32 Of course, he's going to date a teenager as soon as he gets money. God. It's from Mandy that we get some of our most sympathetic accounts of Peter. She described him as being, like, just having constant nightmares. Regularly, he would wake up with night terrors, screaming for his mother in his sleep. She also described him bathing multiple times a day and slathering himself with huge amounts of cologne, which is, again, a holdover from his time in the camp.

37:58 He was terrified of having bad hygiene. I think because it had been out of his control for such a long period of time. She describes their time together as two happy years in which he gave me a mink coat, three mink jackets, a Persian lamb jacket, three diamond brooches, two pairs of diamond and ruby earrings, a big gold diamond and ruby watch, two diamond rings, and a jaguar.

38:20 For my 18th birthday, he gave me a thousand pounds in cash. My 18th birthday.

38:28 Was there anything else or was it just the gifts?

38:31 I think it was just the gifts. That's a lot of gifts for two years. I'll be honest.

38:36 That's true. That's fair.

38:37 You can see where the money he's fleecing from these immigrants is going.

38:41 Did he ever say anything nice?

38:44 He must have. She spoke very highly of him for decades or years at least after his death, right? Although, that said, I wouldn't want that to be the only picture of their relationship I give. A 1963 Time article profile on Rockman also noted, in October of 1960, he set up Mandy Rice Davies in a West End apartment complete with a two-way bedroom mirror and tape recorder beneath the bed. Cool. He told her the two-way mirror had been there when he bought the place. I don't think any slums had two-way mirrors in them when you bought... Like, that is an install. You had that put in, Peter.

39:26 That's disgusting, my guy.

39:28 Who's running into a two-way mirror in a residential apartment ever right pervert i'm sure someone has but.

39:36 It's weird he's lost definitely lost the last of my sympathies that pedophile child porn.

39:44 Yeah that's pretty upsetting Rockman was also married in 1959 he's cheating on his wife with this girl to a woman named Audrey O'Donnell who does not seem to have been shocked by his constant infidelity she may have been this may have been an arrangement they had like where she gets you know stuff and he's just gonna fuck around I don't know yeah how progressive things were going well for Peter until November of 1962 and I'll talk about what happens next but first how about some ads And we're back. So in November 1962, Peter goes out gambling at a London casino. He was a regular attendee of the Mayfair Casino. I've talked about the Mayfair set and its founder on previous episodes here. So he's kind

40:37 of part of that clique, or at least he shows up at some of those same events and parties. And he's out gambling at a casino when he starts to feel sick and he decides to drive home. And I'll let Carol Phillips describe what happened next. The bald, corpulent man pulled off to the side of the road and, sweating heavily, spent some time doubled over the steering wheel.

40:56 After a short while, Rockman felt well enough to complete his journey. Once he reached his mock Georgian mansion on fashionable Winnington Road, he took to his bed. At 9.45 the next morning, after a fitful, uncomfortable night, Rockman suffered a heart attack and his wife, Audrey, called for an ambulance.

41:11 Rockman was admitted to the Edgeware General Hospital at 4.45 p.m. He suffered a second, this time fatal, heart attack. He was 43 years old. So he's dead now! But this is kind of when the Rockman story gets started in public. He had no public profile in the news, in higher society. Outside of the slums, no one really knew who Peter Rockman was. Outside of the slums and the slumlord community, right?

41:36 The slumlord community. Yeah, the slumlord community. Peter's death is actually what makes him famous. And again- His shadiest tactics were pretty well known by people on the street by this point. And I assume a lot of journalists knew about them too. I want to say journalists aren't not reporting on him just because his victims are mostly non-white.

41:58 They're also not reporting on him because Britain has very strong libel laws. And you really don't want to report about the shady behavior of a living rich man if you can avoid it because you can get in a lot of trouble over there, right?

42:11 But he's dead.

42:12 But he's dead now, so you can write about him. Who's going to fucking sue you, right? And also, this is key, all of these tactics that he's doing, as I've talked about, his shadier and even wealthier landlord peers are doing, often on a larger scale. But those guys are rich and in many cases like members of the nobility.

42:30 And not dead.

42:30 So you can't write about them.

42:32 And not dead.

42:32 They're going to sue the fuck out of you. This guy's dead now. So we can write about the problems in like the rental market in London and these shady slumlord tactics and blame it all on this guy. Even though he was like maybe 15 to 20% of the problem, maybe a little more, right? We can pin it all on him.

42:50 Let's blame it all on the Jewish guy.

42:51 Let's blame it all on the dead Jewish refugee, right?

42:54 Yeah.

42:55 Yeah, that's what the London press is going to do.

42:58 The bald, what did they describe him as? The bald?

43:01 Bald and corpulent.

43:03 Corpulent.

43:04 Corpulent.

43:05 Jesus Christ.

43:06 Great word.

43:06 Great word, yeah, but.

43:08 So now that Rockman's dead, he can't sue anybody. And this presents an opportunity for the press to report on his tactics safely. On July 14th, 1963, a magazine called the Sunday People published an expose on Rockman. The New York Times view of books describes it this way. The paper identified Rockman as a central figure in an empire based on vice, drugs, violence, and blackmail, extortion, and slum landlordism, the likes of which this country has never seen and let us hope it never will again. With no fear of a libel suit from a dead man, other newspapers followed and targeted Rockman, although there were plenty of examples of unscrupulous landlords at work in London. The day after the Sunday People Splash, the BBC broadcast an episode of

43:48 its flagship investigative program, Panorama, that depicted Rockman as a degenerate racketeer in tinted glasses. with a cigar in his mouth and a roll of banknotes in his pocket.

43:58 They're making him look cool now, too?

44:00 Yeah, they're making him look kind of cool. This is one of the things that's happening in this story, and Roots Book does a good job of talking about this. This is also kind of the birth of investigative journalism in the UK. That had been considered kind of gross. Journalists weren't supposed to do that sort of work, right?

44:18 That's not respectable journalism. And that's changing. And Rockman is like one of, some would say the first really big story. that investigative journalists start sinking their teeth into. This and something that happens around this that we're about to get to. So this is actually a really important story in the history of British journalism as a profession, right? British journalism and American journalism have very different histories in a lot of ways because they don't have the First Amendment, right?

44:44 They have strong libel laws. You can say a lot of shit in the United States and not get sued. Both of our jobs rely on that.

44:51 Yeah, thank God.

44:53 Thank God. So the BBC reported that in order to extract maximum profit from his houses, Rockman would not hesitate to put in the Schwartzers as those in the real estate world commonly termed the practice of letting their properties to black people so that rent-controlled white tenants would feel they had little choice but to leave. Panorama reported that if this didn't work, Rockman would pay Caribbean tenants to play deafening music at all times of the day and night.

45:16 The BBC also reported claims that Rockman hired black hoodlums to intimidate white tenants or conversely, white hoodlums to harass black tenants. And if these tactics failed... Rackman would employ thugs with Alsatian dogs to wrench doors off their hinges, remove roof tiles, and rip up floorboards in order to terrify those who he wished to evict. A lot of that's true, as we've discussed. Some of it's also lies, because people are just saying shit, right, too, when they, you know, you're going around and, like, talking to people who are, like, living in the slums, including people who had worked as, like, toughs for Rackman. They're not necessarily telling you the whole truth, right? Yeah. In part because

45:49 they're often criminals, right? Yeah.

45:51 It's an Alsatian. What is an Alsatian?

45:53 Big old dog. Big fucking dog.

45:55 Is that like Alsace Lorraine?

45:57 I believe that's where they came from originally. You wouldn't want an Alsatian to be pissed at you. They're pretty big animals.

46:06 Yeah.

46:08 So Rockman becomes a boogeyman in the media after this, and he remains a top story for days until the bigger one breaks on July 22nd. And he's going to be very much tied up in this one, the Profumo affair. And this is one of the other like big stories that is kind of like they're at the birth of British investigative journalism. This is the gist of the Profumo affair.

46:29 The war minister at the time is a guy named John Profumo. He had slept with Christine Keeler, who had also dated Rockman, right? He is married to someone else, right? You're not supposed to do this, especially in the 60s, right? The fact that he had had an affair was a scandal for the Macmillan government on its own. And it actually helps the Profumo affair. It's such a, this tells you how different politics were. The fact that the fucking war minister is having an affair with some like socialite is such a big deal that it helps lead to the conservative prime minister's resignation later that year. It helps bring down the government.

47:04 Wow.

47:04 That's how big a deal, like one dude in the administration sleeping around could be.

47:09 Okay. We got a, Of all the things that feel very similar to today, that is a big divergence.

47:17 That's a real big difference. We're in a different place. We just blast past that shit these days.

47:22 Yeah.

47:23 They're like, oh God, that's like a, that's a not even front page anymore.

47:28 No, could you imagine? Like, I don't even know if you'd get a Times reporter on that story these days. What, Pete Hegg says having an affair? Who gives a shit? I'm sure they report on it, but it wouldn't change anything, right? Yeah.

47:38 You can't even talk about the global conflicts.

47:40 No, no. Now, because this was a huge story and one the press could report on without being sued, they dove into it with as much fervor as they dug into Rockman. They started finding more, like that a Soviet naval attache and spy named Yevgeny Ivanov had also slept with Keillor. This lady had a fascinating life. She was really, if you were anyone in London, you spent some time dating this lady.

48:03 Oh, yeah.

48:05 So because... Keillor had slept with this Soviet spy and she'd also met and slept with Profumo. And she had it comes out that she she'd met both Profumo and Ivanov through an osteopath named Stephen Ward. This guy, Stephen Ward, gets accused of basically being a pimp to the powerful. Right. That's not really fair.

48:23 This was a big story with Prince Philip.

48:28 Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is one of the first times old Philly gets on the map.

48:33 They even covered this on the Netflix The Crown. It's a big deal.

48:38 This is a huge deal. And Rockman is not really deeply tied. He just happened to sleep with one of the same women who sleeps with Profumo, right? But because his name is involved, this winds up giving extra. And it also, the people in power who are endangered by this are like, we really want to draw as much attention to the Rockman parts of the story and to Stephen Ward as possible. And again, I don't think Ward is really a pimp to the powerful, right? But his name gets drug through the mud so much that he commits suicide over all of this. And the press finds out that Ward had lived in a home owned by Peter Rockman.

49:19 So.

49:20 that's going to bring Rockman back into the news. Per that New York Review of Books article, quote, that Rockman's portfolio also included a good many slum properties in the Notting Hill area of West London, flats that were often rented out to white prostitutes and recently arrived West Indians further piqued the press's interest. And it soon became apparent that Rockman was involved in other ways. He, too, had slept with Keillor, introduced by Ward, and Rice Davies had been Rockman's mistress for a time, installed at one of his properties. Unable to defend himself from beyond the grave, Rockman was depicted as a sleazy foreigner and a sexual opportunist, a ruthless man whose only interest lay in turning a

49:54 profit and whose eagerness to rent to blacks and prostitutes had undermined the lives of decent white people. To cap it all, he was a stateless Jew who had been denied British citizenship.

50:03 Oh, my God.

50:03 And pieces of that are true. He is pretty ruthless, you know? But also, he's not undermining the lives of decent white people as much as he is, like, fucking over everybody.

50:12 A stateless Jew. It's like, um... You had to go there. You had to go there.

50:18 Oh, God, yeah. Of course they did. It's the 60s.

50:22 They're like, oh, what if we just sprinkle some anti-Semitism on top?

50:26 You have to assume of like the over 40 population who are in politics and journalism. A not insignificant number of them would have gone Nazi if things had been a little different in that war.

50:36 Yeah, 100%.

50:36 But it's like, this guy's- This would have been the same here.

50:38 This guy sucks so bad. Why you gotta sprinkle the anti-Semitism on top?

50:43 You don't need to be racist.

50:44 There's so many other things.

50:46 Well, he was a dick. He was a piece of shit.

50:49 Don't be anti-Semitic.

50:50 But that's the thing that like pisses me off. Cause I, you know, he is a bastard and I'm, but he's not the main bastard of these episodes. Like the British power structure is the main bastard of these episodes.

51:01 I'm listening to this and I'm like rolling my eyes at their, at their like pinning this on him. And I'm like, but I can't feel like, I don't want to feel bad for this guy. Like he sucks ass. Yeah.

51:13 And he's dead. It's complicated. And he's dead, so of course they're going to blame everything on him.

51:17 He totally also... It seems like he also built this world. He totally would do the same thing if somebody else had kicked it first. He'd be like, oh, well, I get to stay out of the press by blaming it all on this person.

51:34 Yeah, he would have been happy to throw the blame on someone else if he'd had the opportunity. I don't know that he would have, because as much as he is a part of the state of affairs and London housing... and also like the racial conflict that existed in London. He has a big impact on all those things. He's not part of the upper crust. He is not, he might, he might get to like gamble and party with some high society guys when they're slumming it, but he is not a respectable man at any point in his life.

52:01 Right.

52:01 Because it's a stateless Jew, right? Like that, like that, that that's the reality of the situation, you know?

52:06 Yeah.

52:07 Um, So Keillor and Rice Davis talk to the press. I mean, how could they not? It's the biggest story in the country for a shocking amount of time. They wind up providing anecdotes about Rockman that fuel an expanding series of articles. And these articles report both true stories of Rockman's behavior and absolute fantasies. And because I think there are some journalists who want to and try to report on some of the other sleazy landlords, but it's really dangerous to do that, right? But it's very safe to keep churning out Rockman content. Rockman was turned from a relatively middling, if influential, slumlord to the demon responsible for all of London's housing and race-related woes. Carol Phillips

52:46 provides a great example of this in a quote Ian Fleming's wife Anne gave the Evening Standard in July of 1963. This is after the story breaks about him. I was reminded that I had seen him driving a Rolls Bentley, and he'd slowed down to greet a friend. I shouted, it's one of Ian's villains, straight out of Bond. It was certainly one of the most evil faces I have ever seen. I don't know that I think she's telling the truth. I think Ian Fleming's wife might have just been a liar. But here's a picture of him. I mean, he just kind of looks like a bald kind of heavyset dude.

53:17 He's a guy.

53:18 He's a guy. There are definitely some Bond villains who are bald heavyset dudes, I guess.

53:25 He looks like he could be like a. Indie film director He looks.

53:30 Like he could also be an indie film director He could be a sleazy producer Definitely not a Bond villain Not a Bond villain That's.

53:38 A I don't know if it's more anti-semitism creeping in Or something.

53:44 He just kind of looks like a businessman Right? He's just like a bald white dude in a suit He just looks like a business guy.

53:51 He looks like Steve Higgins I don't.

53:54 Know who that is Sophie Me neither He's.

53:56 The announcer from The Tonight Show.

53:59 Okay. I feel like he looks like My Dinner with Andre.

54:02 He does look a little like, yeah, My Dinner with Andre.

54:04 I forget his name. It's Andre, right?

54:05 He looks a little like roughly a third of the doctors I've ever had. He just looks like Steve Higgins. Yeah, kind of an overweight, middle-aged, balding guy.

54:12 He just looks like a normal guy.

54:13 Like Steve Higgins. He doesn't actually look that much like a Bond villain, really.

54:19 But he was a sexual icon. Yeah.

54:21 But he was a sexual Tyrannosaurus, according to one of his biographers, who we should probably look into a little more.

54:27 And he was bald and corpulent. Wait, wait, is that a quote?

54:31 No, no, no, no, no. I stole that from the movie Predator. I steal a lot from the movie Predator. I've seen that a lot. When stories from former tenants and people claiming to be tenants ran out, as Neil Root writes, quote, reporters very briefly rented rooms in a former Rockman property so they could write the headline, I lived in a slum. Many contemporary articles used language to describe Peter that made him sound, yes, like a Bond villain, but also subtly anti-Semitic. Here's a segment from a Contemporary Time article. Always on the lookout for girls for his personal use, Rockman frequently visited the several nightclubs he owned and would sit in a corner like a satanic Kewpie, cigar in his mouth, diamonds on his pudgy fingers, a

55:11 blonde juvenile obediently at his side, and a bodyguard in the background.

55:16 Why do they gotta body shame his fingers?

55:19 Can I? Yeah.

55:20 That seems unnecessary. Yeah, they really, every one of these articles will talk about him being fat.

55:26 Every article is like, by the way, this guy, he didn't have the makings of a varsity athlete. Sorry, not this guy.

55:33 Except in the gulag.

55:34 Are you going to tell me the ruling class of England isn't also a bunch of balding, overweight guys with diamonds hanging out with teenage girls in nightclubs?

55:43 Please. Really? Really.

55:45 Yeah.

55:46 Wait, wait.

55:48 What is it? Okay. What is a satanic Kewpie?

55:51 I think it's a, I mean, it's kind of a doll. Like a Kewpie doll is a type of doll.

55:56 Yeah. Is it like the mayonnaise?

55:59 No. I mean, yeah. Kewpie mayonnaise. It may, it may have a similar name, but yeah. Kewpie is like a doll.

56:04 It's like a little cartoon.

56:05 Baby Cupid.

56:06 Yeah.

56:06 A little, like she's saying he looks like a creepy demonic cherub. Right.

56:13 Jesus Christ.

56:14 They're calling him Jimbo from Boss Baby. He's Jimbo from Boss Baby.

56:21 Yeah. Like you could write a very similar description about Winston Churchill.

56:26 Right, right. Bold and corpulent and definitely satanic.

56:32 Yeah, definitely satanic.

56:34 Definitely satanic and very, very, very, very racist.

56:38 Much drunker. I will say I have never heard any allegations that Rockman was as hard a drinker as Churchill. No one was.

56:44 Yeah.

56:44 Yeah.

56:46 It's often suggested credibly that part of why Rockman stories went so viral is that the rich and powerful, other people who might have been implicated in like the expanding Profumo scandal and similar scandals, Much preferred to see reporters clustering around a dead foreign landlord, right? That was to the benefit of a lot of people in power. One of the political figures who took advantage of the situation was labor politician Harold Wilson, who in Root's words was desperate to further wound McMillan's conservative government, right? That he sees, oh, this is going to bring down this government. And if I really keep hammering on this landlord in my speeches to parliament— This can bring my party into power, right?

57:27 Like I can make a lot of hay out of this. In a 1964 parliamentary debate on housing, he coined the term Rockmanism. That's where it comes from. It's from a speech that Harold Wilson gives in parliament. And he describes Rockmanism as a disease infecting British society. Wilson's goal was to win the 1964 general election, and his party did.

57:47 This had a number of positive outcomes, including the Rent Act of 1965, which did give tenants more protection, and the Race Relations Act of 1965, which made it illegal to discriminate racially in housing. That might actually count as a positive legacy for Rockman, although he surely intended none of it. But it isn't his only legacy. In my research, I came across an article on rogue landlords for the BNPs, the British National Party's modern website. And this is the British fascist party today too, right? They're still around. And they have an article in their modern website about rogue landlords.

58:23 I'm going to read a quote from it. Rogue landlords have existed in London for a long time. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Peter Rockman was notorious for his brutal treatment of tenants. However, later in that article, it becomes clear why Rockman is really on the BNP's mind. They list as two of their suggestions for destroying rogue landlords, deport illegal immigrants and no amnesty for illegal immigrants, which makes it clear what they saw as Rockman's actual crime, right?

58:51 That he was giving non-white people a place to live in London, you know?

58:55 Yeah.

58:56 I found an article by Jules Birch, a PhD from the University of Bristol, who was an expert on housing. And he notes this about the long-term impact of the changes to British renter policy pushed in the wake of Rockman's post-mortem brush with fame, right? This is him talking about what actually, on paper, the Rent Act and the Race Relations Act were supposed to remove racism from housing decisions and protect renters. It doesn't quite work that well.

59:24 And here's Birch, quote, Only harassment and illegal eviction were made criminal offenses, and those convicted of them were mainly resident and often immigrant landlords. Rockmanism in the sense of financial exploitation by large commercial landlords continued untouched. The new system of rent regulation was seen as a response to the perceived failures of both rent control and decontrol. Fair rents were meant to be what they said and were often much higher than the controlled rents of the past, right?

59:51 So these restrictions don't like, It's another one of these cases in which there's a hole left in these laws wide enough to drive a truck through. And the end result is that, yeah, some non-white immigrant landlords get punished for sleazy behavior, but the big corporate landlords, including the guys we've heard from earlier who definitely took some of their influence from Rockman, they don't get up in any trouble.

1:00:19 And in fact, they're able to charge higher rents because controlled rents go away, right? So it doesn't, necessarily fix things. I'm going to continue with that quote from Birch's article. The restrictions that did apply proved all too easy to avoid for landlords clued into evasion techniques and with access to professional advice. Where that did not work, landlords could simply exploit the power imbalance with tenants by persuading them to sign up for tenancies exempt from the legislation. A rickety table and chairs became a furnished tenancy in the 1960s, and a clause in the lease offering breakfast turned a furnished tenancy into a holiday let in the 1970s. By the early 1970s, a conservative MP was complaining about legal rockmanism,

1:00:58 a technique used by commercial landlords to raise rent levels and therefore the mortgageable value of entire blocks of flats. Rent officers determined fair rents by deducting scarcity value from the market rent for the accommodation, but the system was open to manipulation. For example, a landlord and tenant could apply jointly for a new rent to be registered. If no tenant willing to pay a higher rent could be found, then a landlord might make it a condition of offering a tenancy in the first place. Once the higher rent was established for one property, it could be used as the norm for all of the others in the block, right?

1:01:29 Nothing deals with the central problem, which is that sleazy landlords are fucking over the poor, right? That does not get fixed at all as a result of the blow up over Rockmanism, because it's not in anyone powerful's interest to do that.

1:01:42 Yeah, there's just like levels of financial engineering going into it. It's just Disgusting.

1:01:49 And you're kind of making it so that in order to really be a rockmanist landlord, I guess, you have to be a big company now, right? Because it's harder for the small guys to be sleazy, but easier for the big ones to be sleazy, which contributes to the consolidation of these big rental empires, right? And this brings us at least some of the way to the situation our British friends enjoy today. Remember how I noted that after World War II, England had a shortage of roughly 750,000 homes? That's pretty bad, right? You want to guess how many homes the UK is short today?

1:02:22 I don't know if I do.

1:02:26 Housing charity Shelter estimates the United Kingdom is short a whopping 1 million homes right now. And while this is in some ways a worse crisis than the post-war.

1:02:37 One, right?

1:02:38 Look how far we've come.

1:02:40 Look how far we've come. And as bad as this is, Britain today is also, per The Independent, quote, building fewer homes than at any time since the First World War. We were told by a number of housing officers that local authorities dare not inspect many establishments for fear that they will have to rehouse those inside. They have nowhere to rehouse anyone. We asked every council in the UK how many landlords they had prosecuted. The answer was, on average, fewer than two landlords in three years. Far from showing that standards are rising, it reveals an unregulated market in which bad landlords operate as they wish. The government's own figures reveal that 40% of all housing in the private rental sector is in poor condition. And, yeah.

1:03:19 This just, like, makes me so mad.

1:03:21 It's really, really frustrating.

1:03:23 I've done stories about, like, low-income housing tax credits and stuff in the U.S., and it's just like, God, this is everywhere. Yeah. And you just create systems that funnel the poorest people to the shittiest fucking places and then you stick them there forever.

1:03:38 Because no one making any of these decisions about what rental law should look like gives a single solitary fuck about these people. They're not donating to your campaign. They may not be voting, right? Why do you give a fuck, right? And if they are voting, you can just pass some law and be like, look, we helped the problem and not do a goddamn thing.

1:03:56 Yeah, there's a million different things they could do to just make it– Yeah. It's like a window dressing for the war. Yeah. Just the worst thing for people's livelihood, you know?

1:04:05 Yeah.

1:04:06 Yeah.

1:04:06 It's, it's pretty infuriating. Um, and yeah, I don't know. That's, uh, that's, that's the Rockman stories, right? You know, it, it, it's, it's the thing where he's, he's a bastard, but he's not the main bastard. Everything he did bad and good was the result of holes in the law or outright carelessness by British lawmakers. who after generations of imperial violence welcomed hundreds of thousands of non-white people into the country without making sure they had a place to host them.

1:04:33 Many of those same lawmakers and their successors then used the racial animus this all caused to build their own political power, and they're still doing it today. Rockman's main role in all of this was both as an innovative slumlord and, more than anything, as a dead scapegoat, a foreign Jew who could be blamed for all of England's housing problems while the guilty parties floated away in a river of money, which they're still doing today. Anyway, cool.

1:04:57 That's the story.

1:05:00 Oh, my God.

1:05:01 Yeah.

1:05:03 There's so many fascinating elements from just, I'm still stuck on this idea of, like, how people were taken down in politics and how much slower the news moved.

1:05:15 Oh, yeah.

1:05:15 But then also.

1:05:17 And that investigative journalists were considered bad.

1:05:20 Yeah, like that's nasty.

1:05:21 Well, he was considered kind of like, kind of trashy.

1:05:24 It kind of feels like the way that we think of like paparazzi these days.

1:05:29 Yeah, it took some time. I mean, and again, Britain, Great Britain has produced some of the best and great investigative journalists in the world. But like, this is the period of time in which.

1:05:37 That's becoming a thing. Jake Hanrahan, I'm wearing a popular front shirt right now.

1:05:41 Hell yeah.

1:05:42 Um... But yeah, it's not necessarily the most auspicious initial outing for some of that stuff.

1:05:49 Jesus Christ. I don't know. I feel like my sympathies really fell off after the pedophile part.

1:05:58 That'll do it. I don't know. For me, it was after he knocked out the windows of that elderly couple in the dead of winter.

1:06:06 Don't get me wrong. He was losing me a lot before that.

1:06:09 He was losing me a lot before that.

1:06:11 Yeah.

1:06:12 Yeah.

1:06:12 That was just like the, like, all right, we're.

1:06:15 That was the fight.

1:06:15 That was the, that was the.

1:06:17 Oh, okay.

1:06:17 Yeah.

1:06:18 All right.

1:06:19 It was, yeah, for me, it was just one of those, like, as I'm reading this, I'm like, okay, well, there's gotta be a teenage girl somewhere in this story. You're talking about like a sleazy landlord who owns nightclubs in the sixties. There's gotta be a 16 year old somewhere in here.

1:06:32 I'm like, oh, he's, he's sleeping with all the, his prostitute clients. I'm like, oh, we're.

1:06:39 Yep.

1:06:39 Yeah, this is not going to end well. It's not.

1:06:44 It hasn't. It's still pretty bad over there. But you know where it's not bad is in your pluggables. You want to plug them at the end of this episode?

1:06:54 Yeah, lastweekinhell.substack.com Go read about I talk about other Slumlord-like people sometimes and other bad things and then all the news happenings in Portland and beyond. And then I am at Kevin H. Foster on socials.

1:07:15 Excellent. All right, everybody find Kevin, uh, on socials and check out his writing and check out his work on. It could happen here. Um, and check out us.

1:07:26 And our newest cool zone media show.

1:07:30 Oh, yeah. Oh, right.

1:07:31 We do have a new show. That's right, Sophie. It's also an old show.

1:07:35 Yeah.

1:07:36 Knowledge Fight Country, hosted by the great Dan Friesen. We're just kind of iterating on his great show, Knowledge Fight, widening the spectrum of topics a little bit from just Alex Jones to some other figures in the far-right fever swamps. But it's the same great research from Dan that you're used to, and we'll have a host of new guests in there. But very excited for me to get a chance to check that out. I know Dan's excited.

1:08:03 A rotating group of guests. In the first month, the guest is the great Molly Conker from Weird Little Guys.

1:08:09 That's right. Two great tastes that taste great together.

1:08:12 And the theme song is a banger from DJ Anarchy. I just got it.

1:08:15 Danarchy. Danarchy, Sophie.

1:08:17 Sorry. Sorry. I'm not good at things.

1:08:19 How does it compare to the Tariff song?

1:08:24 Oh, nothing compares to the Tariff song.

1:08:26 Yeah.

1:08:27 Oh, that was alarming that we did that in sync.

1:08:30 Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:33 You got to talk about the clash knockoff song during the British landlord episode. I mean, we can't, we can't not.

1:08:40 Yeah. Yeah.

1:08:41 Anyways.

1:08:43 All right.

1:08:43 Well, that's, that's gotta be, that's gotta be it for us here today. Behind the bastards. Until next time. I don't know. Don't, Be a slumlord?

1:08:53 Don't be a slumlord. Touch grass.

1:08:55 I don't know what else to tell you.

1:08:57 Unless you're allergic.

1:08:58 Just try not to be a slumlord.

1:08:59 Wear sunscreen.

1:09:01 Sunscreen. Good, good tip.

1:09:02 Yeah, wear sunscreen. Don't be a slumlord. Eat a lot of fiber.

1:09:09 Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.