Polish Mafia Book Coming in 2024

Twenty-four years ago Andrzej Gołota fought Michael Grant in Atlantic City. Donald Trump was in the audience (over Grant’s left shoulder) but look at the figure in the amateurishly inked blue box top right. That’s ‘Pershing’, Poland’s biggest gangster, and he’ll be dead in two weeks.

They shot him late afternoon in the car park of a Polish ski resort. The 45-year-old was standing by a silver Mercedes S500 when two men walked out of the December 1999 gloom with guns. Kolikowski aka ‘Pershing’ was the best known gangster in Poland and his death brought a bloody full stop to a decade of murder, drugs, corruption, and rape. The tentacles of his Pruszków Mafia, a crime family named after its hometown just outside the capital of Warsaw, stretched across the country, through Europe, and as far as South America.

Welcome to a world of Adidas, Kalashnikovs, and organised crime. After the fall of communism the most dangerous Mafia you’ve never heard of ran Poland as their own private playground and wallowed in all the luxury that Eastern Europe had to offer – until someone at the heart of the gang turned traitor and brought it all crashing down in a bloody round of murder and betrayal.

Read more about it when my book ‘The Polish Mafia’ comes out via History Press in late 2024.

The Strange Case of Ed Arthur and the Failed Invasion of Haiti, 1963

The office of the Sun-Sentinel in Deerfield Beach was full of cigarette smoke and chattering typewriters. At a desk near the door, a balding man with glasses and sharp features was smoking a cigarette as he pecked gloomily at his keyboard. A taller man with a family resemblance sat on the edge of the desk. Both looked up when the stranger who’d just walked into the office approached them.

‘Jim Buchanan?’ the man asked.

Buchanan was a fiercely right-wing newsman whose support for the Cuban counter-revolution stretched back to sheltering Frank Austin Young in a Havana hotel room during his brief 1959 jail break,. His brother Jerry was a familiar face with the International Anti-Communist Brigade when he wasn’t in prison for various petty crimes. Together they acted as gatekeepers to the world of Cuban exile groups in Miami. They looked warily at their visitor, who remained cheerful as they peppered him with questions and peered at his driving license as if the small print could tell them something.

Eventually the stranger lead them outside to where his car was cooking in the August sun and opened the trunk to reveal three old Mauser rifles, a Lee Enfield .303 with telescopic scope, and a cardboard box full of automatic pistols. When the man looked over his shoulder, both Buchanan brothers were grinning.

Havana Affair: The CIA Man Who Helped Catch Che Guevara

It was raining heavily on New Year’s Day 1959 when a schoolboy on holiday in Mexico City woke up to discover his homeland had a new government. The 17-year-old listened to the radio in shock as news bulletins talked about fleeing presidents, deserted streets, and marching rebels. His world had just turned upside down.

Felix Rodriguez Mendigutia grew up the only child of Cuban parents from the poorer branches of an influential family tree. Various uncles were architects and engineers with plenty of money to throw around but Felix’s father had a more modest life running a San DeSpiritas general store from a two-storey building in the town centre. Felix spent his childhood on the upper floor among heavy wood furniture and baroque chandeliers, waiting impatiently for the day he could start to live his own life.

He liked to sit on the balcony in the evening and watch the locals promenading around the octagonal bandstand outside. The men walked clockwise and women anticlockwise, casting lingering looks at each other. Adults were strange and confusing but he couldn’t wait to join them.

The Curse of Che Guevara

The Bolivian embassy in Paris was eight floors of Belle Époque architecture with good views of the Eiffel Tower. On 11 May 1976 a tanned figure with dark hair emerged from the front entrance and turned left along avenue du Président Kennedy.

The man striding purposefully through the 16^th arrondissement was 53-year-old Joaquin Zenteno Anaya. He had the straight back of a military veteran and a pale space on his upper lip where a moustache had recently been shaved to make him less obviously recognisable. Zenteno was concerned someone might be after him.

The Men from Miami Available in USA, November 2022

Good news for Americans, Cubans, and CIA agents everywhere: my book The Men from Miami is available in the USA from 10 November 2022. It’s a real-life Cold War thriller about the Americans who fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution – then switched sides to try to bring him down. This larger-than-life assortment of adventurers and misfits wreaked havoc across the Caribbean as they fought for and against Castro, then went on to be implicated in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a failed invasion of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s Haiti, and the downfall of President Nixon.

Back in 1957, Fidel Castro was a hero to many in the United States for his battle against Cuba’s dictatorial regime. Two dozen American adventurers joined his rebel band in the mountains, including fervent idealists, a trio of teens from Guantánamo Bay naval base, a sleazy ex-con who liked underage girls, and at least two future murderers. The rebels’ eventual victory delighted the USA – but then Castro ran up the red flag and some started wondering if they’d supported the wrong side.

Blog Index 4: From Yukio Mishima to Chinese Rocks

There are well over 100 posts on this blog covering everything from Chicago gangsters to Serbian lesbian snipers, mysteriously vanished leftist terrorists, and hostage-taking Yukio Mishima enthusiasts. To save you the keyboard wear of scrolling through all of them here are a few quick links to some of the most interesting pieces.

This time we’re breaking into 2017 and there’s a gangster flavour to the material with posts about a gunrunning trial involving the Almighty Gaylords, a look at Crazy Joe Gallo’s crew and their pet lion, and a long piece about how the Mkhedrioni mob took over Georgia for a few short years. Elsewhere you can find out about the link between The Beatles and General Franco, investigate a Norwegian kidnapped by Islamic State, and discover the true story of how Japanese writer Yukio Mishima reached out from beyond the grave. And, most important of all, get the answer to the burning question: who wrote Chinese Rocks?

The Men from Miami on the Radio

The Men from Miami has been out for a few weeks now and is starting to get some attention. On 3 June 2022 I was interviewed by former politician and current media personality Michael Portillo about the book for his programme on The Times internet radio station.

I was also asked to write a Top 5 books piece about the Cuban Revolution for the well-known street paper The Big Issue. Here’s a scan, although you can do some good by buying a copy – it’s the one with George Michael on the cover.

If you want to hear me talking with Michael Portillo about the Men from Miami and the Americans who fought in the Cuban revolution then changed sides to bring down Castro then skip to 1hr 33mins through this link for the start of the piece. It lasts about 15 minutes.

Who Killed Pershing? The Death of a Polish Gangster

It was late in the afternoon and starting to get dark when they shot Andrzej Kolikowski in the car park of a Polish ski resort. The 45-year-old was stowing skiing equipment into the boot of a silver Mercedes S500 when two men, one wearing a mask, walked out of the December gloom with guns.

The masked man fired a submachine gun burst into the air to frighten off other skiers then the second gunman shot Kolikowski twice in the chest with a pistol as the big man turned. He fell back onto the snow and the gunman put two more bullets through Kolikowski’s skull before both attackers walked briskly to a green Audi and drove away into the Zakopane twilight.

The Men from Miami Published 12/05/22

My new book The Men from Miami: American Rebels on Both Sides of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution is available in the UK from 12 May 2022. This real-life Cold War thriller about the Americans who fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution then switched sides to try to bring him down is available in hardback and ebook.

Back in 1957, Castro was a hero to many in the USA for taking up arms against Cuba’s dictatorial regime. Two dozen American adventurers joined his rebel band in the mountains but then he ran up the red flag and some started wondering if they’d supported the wrong side. A gang of disillusioned American volunteers changed allegiances and joined the Cuban exiles, CIA agents and soldiers of fortune who had washed up in Miami ready to fight Castro’s regime by any means necessary. These larger-than-life characters wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and went on to be implicated in President Kennedy’s assassination, a failed invasion of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s Haiti and the downfall of Richard Nixon. The Cold War had arrived in Miami, and things would never be the same again.

Recruiting British Mercenaries for Palestine, 1948

Avedis Boghos Derounian knew six words of English when he arrived in New York back in April 1921.

‘Yes.’ ‘No.’ ‘Hot dog.’ ‘Ice cream’.

He was a twelve-year-old Armenian from what the Ottoman Empire had called Dedeagach, an overgrown fishing village on the Thracian Sea with pretensions to being a town. By the time he made it to America the Ottomans had fallen and his old hometown been renamed Alexandroupoli in independent Greece. His parents had left the place years before, trying to stay one step ahead of Balkan Wars, Great Wars, and Turkish Genocides. They had bounced around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Derounian’s last home before the liner to America had been Sofia in Bulgaria.

A Cuban Volunteer Fighting for Haile Selassie

Alejandro Ramón Narciso del Valle y Suero had a round face, glossy dark hair, and the self-confidence of a man who can rebel as much as he likes and still inherit millions. He came from money. His father had interests in banking and export, his mother was an heiress. Their combined bank accounts built the Palacio de Valle in the sun-soaked bay city of Cienfuegos on Cuba’s southern coast.

The Palacio was an overscaled villa tinted turquoise and ivory. Its architect had gone for a mix of Gothic and Moorish, with a drop of Empire style and a pair of sphinxes to guard the front door. Critics called it kitsch but the Del Valles didn’t care.

Estate management and a family of eight turned out to be too much for Del Valle senior. In 1919 he dropped dead. Alejandro was twelve-years-old and the eldest son. Relatives sent him north to New York State’s Poughkeepsie Military Academy where he spent his teenage years learning discipline on the parade ground. He became friends with a Mexican classmate whose father was an exiled general dreaming of coups and revenge. When the general took his son out of school and headed for the border, Del Valle joined them.

Blog Index 3: From Crazy Joe to Communist Poland

There are well over 100 posts on this blog covering everything from Chicago gangsters to Serbian lesbian snipers, mysteriously vanished leftist terrorists, and hostage-taking Yukio Mishima enthusiasts. To save you the keyboard wear of scrolling through all of them here are a few quick links to some of the most interesting pieces.

We’re up to late 2016, where I was writing mostly about gangsters, mercenaries, and real-life crime. Find out more about the death of Crazy Joe Gallo, the early days of soldier of fortune Mike Hoare, more about French mercenary Dominique Borella, what the writer Raymond Chandler really thought of Ross Macdonald, a deep dive into foreign volunteers for the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, a pornographic Tintin cartoon caper, some notable black sheep of the British Empire, and a grim kidnapping in Communist Poland. Enjoy.

A Norwegian Volunteer in the Spanish Civil War

On 18 July 1936 General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde and his fellow Army officers attempted to overthrow Spain’s left-wing Popular Front government. The Nationalist insurgents believed the country was speeding towards anarchy, atheism, and communism under the Popular Front’s rule. The government and its supporters saw the rising as a fascist assault on democracy.

On the side of the insurgents were conservatives, monarchists, devout Catholics, and the far-right. The Popular Front could count on liberals, communists, socialists, and anarchists. Spain became an arena for opposing political ideologies to hack and slash at each other, with the rest of the world cheering on the gladiators. Soon thousands of foreign volunteers would join the war to fight for ideals, adventure, or money.

Among them was a Norwegian called Per Imerslund.

Blog Index 2 – From the Mau Mau to Charles de Gaulle

There are well over 100 posts on this blog covering everything from Chicago gangsters to Serbian lesbian snipers, mysteriously vanished leftist terrorists, and hostage-taking Yukio Mishima enthusiasts. To save you the keyboard wear of scrolling through all of them here are quick links to some of the most interesting pieces.

We’re looking at mid to late 2016 blog entries here, when I seemed mostly interested in France, lost causes, and half-alive books. Dive into posts about the OAS plotting to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, American students fighting  the Mau Mau in Kenya, the ghost of a Parker novel by Richard Stark, Dutch mercenaries plotting to take over Indonesia, and some Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd.

Blog Index 1 – From the Viet Cong to Brian Blessed

There are well over 100 posts on this blog covering everything from Chicago gangsters to Serbian lesbian snipers, mysteriously vanished leftist terrorists, and hostage-taking Yukio Mishima enthusiasts. To save you the keyboard wear of scrolling through all of them here are quick links to some of the most interesting pieces.

We’re starting with the early days of the blog from 2016 when I seemed to be mostly interested in war, crime, Ernest Hemingway, and the weirder shores of pop culture.  The pieces range from a few hundred words to a few thousand. Happy reading and feel free to buy one of my books – links at the end of the post. More indexes to come.

The Gehlen Organisation in Rome, 1948

The Collegium Germanicum et Hungaricum was a brick block in central Rome that turned German-speakers into priests. In the summer of 1948 the Collegium lay sleepy and deserted in the sun while its students spent their holidays at a butter-yellow villa in San Patore, thirty kilometres outside Rome. At the Collegium, a skeleton staff caught up with paperwork, shelved books, and prepared for a new intake of neophytes in the autumn.

The college librarian was a thirty-five-year-old Sudeten German called Frank Pax. He was smart and good at his job, although didn’t seem to be around much. The students liked him. Pax claimed to be a writer but no-one had ever seen anything he published. His switching of apartments every few months was tolerated as an eccentricity.

Pax lived with an unmarried Italian woman called Magda Bolsi and kept on good terms with a German ex-girlfriend who worked as translator at the Anglo-Italian Society. He had a wife called Lieselotte living in Switzerland. If the Jesuit seminary authorities knew about their librarian’s tangled love life, they forgave him. Everyone has vices.

The Best Books on Occupied France, 1940-44

On 10 May 1940 the German army poured over the border with France and occupied the entire country within forty-six days. The French spent the next four years with their collective neck under the Nazi jackboot, fighting a daily battle against hunger and fear until they were liberated by Anglo-American forces.

The occupation left a huge scar on the country’s psyche but the outside world has rarely regarded it as more than an opportunity for turning the heroes of the French Resistance into stock figures: the small town doctor whose professional detachment turns to grim determination when the right codeword is spoken; the serious young woman in beret and ankle socks with a pistol in the pocket of her mackintosh. Those on the other side of the political aisle who collaborated with the Germans receive even less attention. A few, like the gangster Henri Lafont, have become infamous but most remain blankly anonymous traitors operating from the murkiest of motives.

The reality of collaboration was  far more complex and disturbing than the wider world ever realised. Here are five books to help you better understand Occupied France and its collaborators.

New Book about Americans and Cuba, Coming 2022

The Covid lockdown has some advantages. Despite the masks and cruising police cars it’s given me more time to work on my next book. ‘The Men from Miami‘ is about the American misfits, gangsters, and anti-communists who fought for Fidel Castro’s rebels in Cuba … then changed their minds and tried to overthrow him when the revolution was successful.

Expect gunrunning, mysterious disappearances, Mafia plots, failed invasions, nuclear showdowns, the assassination of President Kennedy, and a little light burglary at the Watergate.

It should be out via Biteback around March 2022. If you’ve got information, photographs, or documents you think would be helpful then please get in touch via – othenc [at] gmail [dot] com. The late 50s/early ’60s was a murky time and the more light I can shed on it the better. Here’s more detail on the book:

King of Nazi Paris Paperback Out 11 February 2021

The paperback edition of The King of Nazi Paris will be available from 11 February 2021. It’s the story of a gang of crooks, corrupt cops, and fallen celebrities led by the orchid-loving thief Henri Lafont who worked for the Nazis in wartime Paris and lived like kings – until the Allies arrived and a price had to be paid.

The paperback has a new prologue that tells how I came to write the book and looks at other gangsters who worked with the Germans during the war. Other than that, the text is the same and so are the photographs. If you don’t fancy a paperback then it’s also available as an ebook. Your choice.

Here’s a look at the book:

Alain Delon and the Marković Affair

1ST OCTOBER 1968. They found the man’s body wrapped in a mattress cover on a rubbish tip near the outskirts of Paris. He had been battered around the head and neck with a blunt, heavy object. French police ran his fingerprints through the system and got a result.

The dead man was Stevan Marković, a 31-year-old Serb who had moved to France ten years earlier. In his home country he was minor underworld figure, known as a streetfighter but also believed to do occasional dirty work for the state secret police. Despite that, he’d been allowed to remain in France as a political refugee.

Marković had been in and out of French prisons over the last decade for violence and theft. Deportation was often threatened but somehow the Serb had acquired some important friends who managed to keep him in the country. Just how important became apparent when police looked up his last employer. Until very recently Marković had been bodyguard to Alain Delon, France’s most famous film star.

King of Nazi Paris Reviews

Forgive the relentless self-promotion but my new book The King of Nazi Paris has been getting some attention since it came out in July 2020. There have been reviews in national newspapers and a feature in the Daily Express.

This story of a French petty crook who became the most powerful man in Paris thanks to the Nazi occupation of France seems to have struck a cord with readers. A chance encounter in a prison camp led Henri Lafont to a life of luxury looting the city on behalf of the occupying Germans, who recognised his talent for treachery and deceit.

Lafont recruited ‘the French Gestapo’, a motley band of sadistic grotesques that included faded celebrities, ex-footballers, pimps, murderers, burglars and bank robbers. They wore the best clothes, ate at the best restaurants and did whatever they pleased.

Here’s a curated look at how it was received in the press.

King of Nazi Paris Available Now

The King of Nazi Paris is available from Amazon and all good bookshops from today. It’s the story of a gang of crooks, corrupt cops, and fallen celebrities led by the orchid-loving thief Henri Lafont who worked for the Nazis in wartime Paris and lived like kings – until the Allies arrived and a price had to be paid.

It’s published by Biteback and is available in hardback and ebook. Paperback and US versions are coming soon. If you have any questions, queries, or want to help me promote the book in any way then please get in touch.

There’s already a piece about the book up on the Biteback website and there should be more podcasts and reviews the closer we get to publication date. I’ll keep you up to date on it all.

Here’s a look at the book:

‘King of Nazi Paris’ Available 14 July 2020

My new book about French gangsters in Paris during WWII will be published by Biteback in a few weeks. Look for The King of Nazi Paris on 14 July 2020 through Amazon and all good bookshops.

It’s the first full account of the Carlingue, a gang of crooks, corrupt cops, and fallen celebrities led by the orchid-loving thief Henri Lafont. They worked for the Nazis and lived like kings – until the Allies arrived and a price had to be paid.

The book is available as hardback and ebook and they’ll be a paperback version coming along in the near future. If you have any questions, queries, or want to help me promote the book in any way then please get in touch.

There’s already a piece about the book up on the Biteback website and there should be more podcasts and reviews the closer we get to publication date. Here’s a look at the book:

Mine Were of Trouble – Peter Kemp

If you’ve read my book Franco’s International Brigades, about foreigners fighting for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, then you’ll know the name Peter Kemp. One of the few British volunteers to join the right-wing rebels, Kemp went on to an adventurous career in the SOE during WWII and as a post-war occasional journalist.

He’s a great source for anyone interested in Spain thanks to his memoir Mine Were of Trouble, published in the 1950s. It’s a vivid and honest account of his experiences, first with the Carlist militia and then the Spanish Foreign Legion.

It’s been out of print for decades and surviving copies are very expensive. Now it’s back on bookshelves, or at least in Amazon warehouses.

The Collaborator 3: Charles Delval

By summer 1944 the Allies were powering through occupied France. The military commander of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, had orders to destroy the city if the Allies got close. Dynamite was packed under every monument.

Locals suspected of contacts with the resistance disappeared daily. The concierge would force the door to find an empty apartment with two chairs close together in the hallway and German cigarette butts on the tiled floor. Family and friends could do nothing but queue daily at the Gestapo headquarters on avenue Foch to beg for information.

A woman with green eyes, high-cheek bones, and a bun of dark hair spent a lot of time standing in line that summer. Marguerite Donnadieu was a child-faced thirty-year-old born to French teachers working near Saigon. In early June 1944 her days were spent working as a Vichy civil servant, her evenings plotting with a hard-left resistance group led by fellow bureaucrat François Mitterrand. Any spare time went towards writing novels under the name Marguerite Duras.

Wanted for Genocide: The Escape of Walter Rauff

In August 1941 the men of Einsatzgruppe B put on a show for their boss in a field outside Minsk. Pits had been dug. It was 07:00 in the morning.

Scared-looking locals climbed out of lorries and lined up. Men in feldgrau uniforms stood around with carbines. Important men from Berlin peered into the pits and made jokes with each other.

The Einsatzgruppe were SS units that followed behind the front line and killed anyone the Nazi leadership regarded as subversive: Jews, Roma, Slavs, Communists, hostages of all kinds. Today SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had driven out to see his first mass execution. Einsatzgruppe B wanted to impress.

They stood the locals in the pits and shot them in batches. Carbines cracking, bodies falling, death coughs. Depending who told the story and in which court room, Himmler either came close to fainting or pointed out survivors to be shot again. Everyone agreed that when it was over the Reichsführer told the men of Einsatzgruppe B they were doing good and necessary work. He understood how psychologically difficult it was for them to murder unarmed people.

Belgrade Babylon: Pagan Resurrection

We’re in a funeral parlour in Belgrade and it’s July 2005. A bald man with a beard and glasses is signing a false name. He’s stealing a body.

The man is a film director, writer, paramilitary leader, and political figure. He’s a devout Orthodox Christian. The corpse he’s stealing was not.

The deceased is Dragoš Kalajić, a painter and full-time conspiracy theorist whose journey into Serbian nationalism turned him pagan. He was a familiar face in the media of both Serbia and Italy, a noticeable presence on art gallery walls. Cancer ate up his throat and put him in a pine box at the age of sixty-two.

He might appreciate this bit of grave robbery by a former political disciple. But probably not.

Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares: Gangster Edition

He’s a foul-mouthed, crevice-faced Scotsman and one of the best chefs in the world. Back in 2004 Gordon Ramsay had three Michelin stars and a fistful of accolades. It was time to move into television.

Ramsay had been on the box a few times before. Two fly-on-the-wall documentaries, a judging role on a show about catering students, and a bit of what passed for reality tv at the turn of the century. But it was Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares that made him a celebrity.

It was a simple formula. Ramsay goes to a failing restaurant, looks appalled, swears a lot, and helps the owner get the place back on its feet. There was some good advice and a few decent recipes but producers soon realised viewers mostly liked to watch Ramsay become foul-mouthingly furious at dirty kitchens, uncooked prawns, and chefs too obliviously incompetent to take his advice. A ratings hit.

In 2007 the programme went stateside as Kitchen Nightmares. American producers preferred sentimental stories of family heartbreak over business strategy discussions but the core of the show remained the same. Gordon Ramsay. Food. Swearing.

Turns out restaurant owners in America are a lot more interesting than their British counterparts. At least three had connections to some kind of organised crime.

The Collaborator 2: Gerald Percy Hewitt

It was 6 September 1944. A group of Maquis fighters was patrolling an area near the Swiss border, watchful and alert. The Allies were powering through France but this part of the country was still behind enemy lines.

A tall man with blue eyes and thin blond hair slicked into a combover came walking along the road that led back to Switzerland. He was carrying a suitcase and had clearly just crossed the border.

The Maquis stopped him, discovered he was English, and didn’t like the way he answered their questions. They took him for interrogation by a British SOE major called Johnston who had been parachuted in to help the fight against the Germans.

Faced with a fellow countryman, the man with the suitcase cracked. His name was Gerald Percy Hewitt and he’d been collaborating with the Nazis for the last two years.

The Collaborator: Violette Morris

The French resistance opened hunting season on collaborators in the spring. On 26 April 1944 they machine-gunned Violette Morris to death as she stepped out of her Citroën Traction Avant on a Normandy country road between Épaignes and Lieurey.

Morris was chauffeuring a local pork butcher called Bailleul, his wife, and their two young children. A carriage blocked the road. The Citroën stopped and Morris got out with a pistol in her hand.

Submachineguns opened fire from the treeline. Violette Morris and her four passengers died.

The attackers knew her as a cross-dressing traitor responsible for the deaths of their comrades. Morris’ friends remembered a bisexual race car driver, interwar celebrity, and champion weight-lifter who was friends with Jean Cocteau. It was complicated.

Blood on the Canvas: African-Americans, Haile Selassie, and Italian Fascism

It was a beautiful right cross, straight to the jaw. The big Italian folded up in the middle of the ring. He got up and fell to his knees and got up again but he was swaying.

Yankee Stadium was full of 64,000 people tonight. A scrum of men in suits and ties and hats plus a few women who didn’t mind getting blood on their mink wraps, all roaring down from their seats at a boxing ring the size of a postage stamp. The Italian-Americans were telling Primo Carnera to stay on his feet and keep his guard up, their black hair glossy in the lights. African-Americans shouted at Joe Louis to finish him, Joe, finish him and shadow-boxed with whatever fist wasn’t holding a cigarette.

Commentators ringside talked fast into their microphones for the folks at home. Photographers popped off another bulb in cameras big as a box of groceries. Louis stalked a glassy Carnera around the ring.

A Joy Division Bibliography: Part 1

When we take something apart, we understand it better but appreciate it less. Welcome to the world of books about the best post-punk band to come out of Manchester. Anyone who wants to keep their hero worship intact should look away.

Joy Division maintained their mystery for decades after the band imploded following the 1980 suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. The band rarely gave interviews and let the music speak for itself, an approach that continued when the surviving members became New Order.

Anyone who wanted to find out more about the band had to forensically analyse music press reports or buy the few, thin cash-in biographies that appeared in the aftermath of Curtis’ death. That all changed in 1995 when the singer’s wife published her account of their marriage. Then the floodgates opened as band members and associates wrote their own books that spilled the inside story.

Here’s a look at the best of them.

Links: October 2019

Welcome all. We’re stuck deep into an autumn of golden leaves and woollen scarfs. Summer is dead and Winter is rising. The best time of the year.

I’m coming to the end of my book on the Bonny-Lafont gang of crooks who terrorised wartime Paris. That sound you can hear is the bone protruding from my fingertips clacking on keyboard. It’s been a long ride.

To celebrate Autumn, Halloween, and all things in between, here’s some links to good things on the internet. Some of it’s spooky. Some of it’s just plain disturbing.

Drink your drinks, click your links, and remember to visit the graves of your ancestors on All Saints Day. Enjoy.

King of Greece Killed by Monkey in Palace Garden

A few years back I wrote about the death of Basil Murray during the Spanish Civil War. A weak-willed alcoholic, Murray is best remembered for providing a model for the character of Basil Seal in various books by Evelyn Waugh.

He died in a bizarre way, bitten to death by a Barbary Macaque while unconscious in a Valencia hotel room. Turns out Barbary apes are dangerous monkeys.

Very dangerous, in fact. One killed King Alexander of Greece in 1920 after a stroll in the royal gardens. The new King was twenty-seven-years-old and his country involved in a bitter war against the remnants of the Ottoman Empire.

Who was Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad? Part 2

I first wrote about the fate of Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad a few years ago. The Norwegian travelled to Syria in 2015 hoping to get involved in the war. He ended up an Islamic State hostage and dead. Someone who knew Grimsgaard-Ofstad well got in touch recently with a lot more information about this Quixotic right-winger. It’s quite a story.

Knut F. Thoresen is a Norwegian soldier and writer. His most recent book is out now. Nordmenn i krig: 1850-2019 (Norwegians at War) examines how his fellow countrymen have volunteered for every major war, and quite a few minor ones, since the mid-nineteenth century onward. Spain, Bosnia, Korea, WW1, WW2, Rhodesia. If you read Norwegian it’s an essential book and highly recommended.

Thoresen knew Grimsgaard-Ofstad well, first encountering him at school. He shared his memories of this unusual man by email.

A Cultural History of Russian Roulette in America

You are shown into a large room. You are nervous. Your heart races, your palms are sweating lightly. Your chair sits facing a long table. Behind the table a panel of faces look at you coldly. A man gets up and stands next to you.

‘We are going to play Russian Roulette,’ he says. Is he crazy? Do they expect you to risk your life for a job? You look at the panel. They are serious. You look at the speaker. He forms his fingers into the shape of a gun.

‘This,’ he says, ‘is a six chamber revolver.’ He puts it to your temple. ‘It has one bullet in it.’ He jerks his finger. ‘Click. No bullet in that chamber. I’m going to pull the trigger again. Before I do that, do you want me to spin the cylinder of the revolver? You have three seconds to answer.’

The panel are looking at you intensely, analysing your reaction. Welcome to the favourite situation of high powered job interviewers. Answering complex questions under pressure. Can you give the right answer?

Links: June 2019

The sun is my enemy. There’s a lot of burning heat, dried grass, and dehydration across Europe this summer. Not good news for anyone with the kind of aristocratic pallor that makes vampires look like George Hamilton.

I’m still working on my book about the Bonny-Lafont gang in Paris during the Second World War. The windows are open, the tower fan is humming, and ice is melting in a tall glass of orange juice and sparkling water. It’s hot as the day Satan banned beach umbrellas in Hell. If you know somewhere that snows all year round then let me know. I’ll move.

Let’s cool down with a deep dive into history, mystery, pop culture, and worse.

New Book ‘The French Gestapo’ Coming June 2020

Pop the champagne and spoon out the caviar. I just signed the contract for my next book. It’s about gangsters in Paris during WW2. Look out for it around June 2020 from publishers Biteback. The working title is ‘The French Gestapo‘, although that might change.

In wartime Paris a gang of crooks, corrupt cops, and fallen celebrities led by the orchid-loving thief Henri Lafont worked for the Nazis and lived like kings – until the Allies arrived and a price had to be paid.

Expect treason, debauchery, crime, and tragedy. It’s like Goodfellas meets Inglourious Basterds, or The Godfather meets Schindler’s List. And it’s all true. Find out more about my new book below.

Links: April 2019

Hope everyone had a good Easter, whether you were worshipping, ignoring, or munching eggs. I spent my time in one of the few cafes still open, reading about old school French gangsters while scribbling notes in a cheap exercise book and lingering over a hot chocolate so thick you could stand on it to change a light bulb.

Yes, there’s another book on the way. It’s about strange alliances in wartime Paris between the underworld and the occupiers. More details when things firm up with publishers. Stay tuned and feel free to get in touch if you know something on the subject that I probably don’t.

Until then, it’s time again for another round-up of interesting links on the kind of subjects that appal most normal folk. Click, read, recoil.

Who is Abhaz the Warlord?

The Gilet Jaunes protests continue in France. Victor Lenta and his gang of military veterans from Ukraine are rumoured to be involved. Behind them a shadowy warlord from a breakaway republic is threatening to send more veterans to the streets of Paris.

Unité Continentale is a controversial far-right political group whose members turned paramilitary and joined the separatists in East Ukraine, otherwise known as Novorossiya. The group is Paris-based but includes many expat Brazilians and Serbs. Since returning home they have become involved in the fight against Emmanuel Macron’s government. Our man in Serbia gave us the scoop but also dropped some hints about a warlord he believes is also involved.

I asked for more details. Here it is. His views, as always, are his own.

Unité Continentale in the Paris Riots

Everyone’s favourite far-right Franco-Serbian-Brazilian paramilitaries have transitioned from the battlefields of East Ukraine to the streets of Paris. Informed sources say Victor Lenta and friends are now street brawling alongside the Gilet Jaunes in France’s long running civil disturbances.

The Unité Continentale boys claim to be at the heart of the fight against Emmanuel Macron’s government. This has led to some alleging the Gilet Jaunes movement is far-right, but it seems unlikely. The movement has a broad reach and includes people from all points on the political spectrum, with a sizeable extreme left contingent and even more from the mainstream middle ground.

Lenta and the others are unlikely to turn the riots into a forum for fascism, or achieve the nationalist revolution they seem to want. But they’re getting a fair amount of publicity. Here’s our regular Serbian commentator with more details.

Links: January 2019

Happy January, ya filthy animals. Hope this year is treating you well. For me at least, 2018 was a weird one. I had a book published, got an agent, spent six months near the Parc du cinquantenaire, saw Paris, spent some time with the head of the Polish armaments industry, and got a whole new angle on the existential angst of lonely professional diplomats.

Looks like 2019 is going to be completely different, with a considerably deeper emphasis on staring moodily out the window of a city centre apartment while holding a glass of whisky and thinking deep thoughts.

So while that’s brewing here’s some links to interesting stuff around the internet. It’s a weird and wonderful world out there. Don’t kill yourself thirty seconds before the miracle.

Katanga 1960-63 Available in Paperback

t’s finally out. My book about the Katanga secession of the early 1960s is available in paperback for the first time on 6 December 2018. The hardback is sold out so this is the only option for those who don’t do ebooks.

For completists, the paperback is pretty much the same as the original text, with a few minor changes thrown in. Katanga 1960-63 tells, for the first time, the full story of the Congolese province that declared independence in 1960 and found itself at war with the world.

The Congo had no intention of allowing the renegade region to secede, and neither did the CIA, the KGB, or the United Nations.

Drug Dealing Lesbian Sniper Nuns in Novorossiya

The civil conflict in Ukraine saw foreign volunteers join both sides. Kiev loyalists like Right Sector and the Azov Battalion  attracted out-and-proud neo-Nazis from across Europe. The separatists in Novorossiya got enthusiasts for the Orthodox Church, Slavic brotherhood, and fringier parts of the far-right.

Our man in Belgrade has got in touch with some information about two volunteers for the separatists who’ve been all over the Serbian media recently. One is a a drug dealing lesbian sniper nun, and the other a Hungarian pagan ex-con merc from Brazil turned monk. Yes, you read that right.

The revelations about the pair have alienated friends and left their political cheerleaders baffled. Read on for some real-life chunks of strangeness that will either warm your heart or raise your blood pressure, depending on what political and spiritual sector you inhabit.

NOTE: as to whether Bagira really has been captured in Ukraine, late March 2022 – see here.

Unité Continentale Update 2

Some more information has come to light about the political and legal mess surrounding French and Serbian volunteers from the far-right Unité Continentale group. They fought for the Novorossiya separatists in East Ukraine a few years back and now the Serb authorities are taking action.

A Serb contact talked about the UC group’s actions in Ukraine and the legal fall out that followed. He’s got some more information to add that sheds light on the complex story of Paris-based far-righters, Serb monarchists, and a war still smouldering in the East of Ukraine.

It’s a world of back-stabbing, rival fascist leaders, and unnecessary cruelty to pets. Watch out.

Unité Continentale Update

A short while ago a Serb contact got in touch to talk about the adventures of Unité Continentale, a France-based far-right outfit which sent volunteers to fight for the separatists in Ukraine. The unit achieved little except bad publicity and was disbanded by the Novorossiya authorities not long after it arrived.

Recent months have brought problems for Unité Continentale over its volunteer recruitment, some of which took place in Serbia. The authorities took action and some people got arrested.

Here’s the view on the situation from our man in Serbia.

At the UFO Landing Site

Here’s a slice of fiction about a seductive stranger, a black forest, and a crew on an existential heist. If you get lost in the woods leave a breadcrumb trail.  It might save your life.

Written in pieces over a long time with some help from a vodka poster, a Russian documentary, and a mention of Eastern Bloc sci-fi in a magazine. Finished a few years back.

Rated MATURE for drug use and some disturbing imagery. Well, it disturbed me.

Normal non-fiction service resumed soon.

Soldiers of a Different God Now Available

After some wacky hi-jinks with the crew at Amazon, Soldiers of a Different God is available in the US. It’s the first book about the unlikely anti-Islamic alliance of gay activists, feminists, fascists, evangelical Christians, populist politicians, and surfing rabbis from California that fuelled the rise of the European hard right and gave us President Donald J Trump.

Follow the link to buy the book and find out all about the underground movement that has been spreading its tentacles through the Western World since 9/11, or read on for a deep dive into the counter-jihad.

A South African Volunteer for Franco, Maybe

In 1936 civil war erupted in Spain. Right-wing generals tried to overthrow a leftist government and the violence quickly turned into a symbolic battle between fascism and communism. The fighting dragged in foreigners from many different countries.

The left-wing volunteers who came from around the world to fight for the Spanish government are well known, but foreigners also joined the other side. I wrote a book about it.

More information about Franco’s foreigners is coming to light every day. The niece of a British volunteer got in touch about her uncle, who deserted the Royal Navy at Gibraltar to join the Foreign Legion. An aristocratic Belgian pilot is commemorated on a memorial in the centre of Brussels. Now a new book is out about South African Pieter Krueler, a far-right Boer embittered by the deaths of his family in the Anglo-Boer War. In June 1937, already in his fifties, he offered his services to Franco.

The experience disillusioned Krueler so badly that he joined the other side. Or so he claimed. He may never have existed at all.

Countdown to an Indonesian Coup

Sunday, 22 January 1950. Turk Westerling was the most casually dressed warlord the press men had ever met. Reuters and Australia’s The Herald had a man each at this exclusive interview with Indonesia’s public enemy number one. No guards, no guns, just an old-fashioned colonial bungalow somewhere outside sweaty Bandung and a tough, sun-tanned Dutchman crushing the life out of one cigarette and lighting another.

Westerling wore a white polo shirt and khaki trousers. One journalist noted the brown socks and street shoes. The other jotted shorthand about the expensive gold watch and the gold ring set with a black stone.

The Turk had spread himself all over the international press with his threats to the new United States of Indonesia government. The country was independent, the Dutch had gone home, and everything was supposed to be peace and liberty. Then Westerling (‘a mystery man‘ according to local politicians) came out of nowhere and tore the place apart. The news agencies wanted a closer look.

Soldiers of a Different God Out 15 August 2018

If you’re looking to make sense of Donald Trump’s election, Tommy Robinson’s arrests, and the rise of nationalism across Europe then my book on the counter-jihad movement will be available from Amberley on 15 August.

Soldiers of a Different God is the first book about how an unlikely anti-Islamic alliance of gay activists, feminists, fascists, evangelical Christians, populist politicians, and surfing rabbis from California fuelled the rise of the European hard right and gave us President Donald J Trump. You can reserve your copy on Amazon [and on Amazon.com] today.

Here’s a deep dive into what the book’s about:

Tourist Notes 1: Paris

Paris is the city of love, light, and literature. I went there prepared to hate it.

Historical Paris has an eternal place in my heart. I’ll talk your ear off about the absinthe glories of La Belle Epoc, Hemingway scribbling in the Closerie des Lilas, and Mesrine escaping La Sante prison in broad daylight.

But my image of modern Paris was an urban hell full of rude waiters and yapping poodles. I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong.

Who Was Roger Coudroy?

He had dark hair and eyebrows like thick slashes of marker pen and a grave somewhere in Palestine. Roger Coudroy died at 35-years-old and remains a minor martyr for people who lean so far to the right they’re practically horizontal.

The first European to die for the Palestinian cause, say the blog headlines. Not exactly. Germans and Bosnians and Britons are buried under Arabic pseudonyms out in the desert, volunteers for Muslim armies during the 1948 fighting that gave birth to Israel. Coudroy belongs to a later generation.

The Belgian engineer died the night of 3 June 1968, apparently when Israeli soldiers shot up a commando from the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. It was the opening days in the war of attrition that followed Arab defeat in the Six Day War. Palestinian guerrillas penetrated Israeli territory and launched terror attacks on civilians; Israeli planes bombed PLO camps in Jordan and took out Egyptian infrastructure.

The Palestinian cause had a lot of support from young leftists in Western Europe and regimes in the Eastern Bloc. But Coudroy didn’t appear to be a man of the left.

Haile Selassie’s Foreign Volunteers

Adwa was a scar on Italy’s heart. Back in 1896 this parched market town in the north of Ethiopia saw the Italian Army humbled by warriors with swords and spears. Politicians in Rome thought they could carve an empire out of the last independent nation in Africa. Ethiopian warriors killed 7,000 men in one day and ended that dream.

The Italians wanted revenge. In 1935 they got it. The land of Dante and Caravaggio was now a boisterously aggressive Fascist state under Benito Mussolini. Provocations at the border late the previous year led to war talk and demands for compensation. European powers tried to intervene but could not afford to alienate Mussolini, needed onside to counter-balance the growing threat of Nazi Germany. In October Italian Fascist legions kicked aside the half-hearted diplomacy and marched into Ethiopia. Bombs, bullets, and mustard gas started raining down.

Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie knew his country was poor and underdeveloped. He needed expert foreign help. Forty foreigners ignored League of Nations resolutions on non-intervention and came to Addis Ababa to fight. Another sixty joined medical units or found other roles. The international press corps gathered in Addis Ababa wrote them up as heroes.

A few mercenaries were honest. A few were competent. The rest was a crazy gang of playboys, Nazis, and black crusaders who could barely shoot straight. Here’s a selection from my book Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion [or amazon.com].

Unité Continentale in Novorossiya

In earlier posts we looked at foreign volunteers who found their way into the separatist militias of Eastern Ukraine. Most popular was a five-part interview with a well-informed Serbian contact who took us on a deep dive into the activities of his fellow countrymen.

He got back in touch recently with information about a extremist French organisation that supplied volunteers to the separatists for its own political ends. Some were hardened soldiers, others green recruits.

There’s a Serbian connection and a lot of infighting, so buckle up for backstabbing and paranoia in the ranks of Unité Continentale. As always, my interviewee’s opinions are his own. If you have any information about the situation in Novorossiya then please get in touch.

The Murders in the Rue Defacqz

The house at rue Defacqz 71 is thin as a bread stick and pretty as that girl you used to love. Planted four storeys high on a wide side street branching off Brussels’ prestigious avenue Louise, it has a red brick frontage and decorative graphic panels courtesy of Adolphe Crespin.

This tall drink of art nouveau was designed by famed Belgian architect Paul Hankar back in 1893 and served as his private home until he passed through the veil of death at the turn of the twentieth century. These days number 71 looks shabbier than in its prime, but is still a fine example of what a Belgian architect can do with money and imagination to spare.

In the morning of 1 September 1944 the locals found two Russian men dead on the pavement outside. They’d been shot with a submachine gun. We’re still not sure who killed them.

This Very Blog: A User’s Guide

I‘ve had a few requests for advice on which of the nearly 100 posts on this blog to read first. So here, in no particular order, are six stories which remain memorable for one reason or another.

Most Popular

The Almighty Gaylords of Chicago is by far the most popular piece I’ve written on the blog. This brief summary of a white Chicago street gang was prompted by running across its unusual name on some website and digging deeper. It’s subsequently garnered a whole lot of views and spawned two sequels. I don’t think many who come here to read it go on to buy my books or look at posts about Raymond Chandler, but I’m glad of their company.

Hard-Boiled Future

Neuromancer is the foundation stone of cyberpunk. William Gibson’s novel came out in 1984 before the genre even had a name, and won a lot of awards. The judges could tell this neo-noir about hackers in cyberspace was something special.

Gibson had been working in this direction for a while, finally perfecting the prototype with his 1982 story Burning Chrome. Contracted for a novel, he lashed his cyberpunk world to a heist plot. Neuromancer’s protagonist is the burnt out hacker Case, hustling through the nightlife of Japan in a suicidal spiral until a girl called Molly with mirror shades and blades in her fingers scoops him up for her ex-military boss.

They want him to take on some top level defences in cyberspace. The rest of the team is assembled, the heist set up, and then everything goes wrong when they all break into a rambling family mansion up in an orbital Las Vegas and the real mastermind behind it all is revealed.

Soldiers of a Different God at the Publishers

It’s done. The manuscript of Soldiers of a Different God[or amazon.com] went off to the publisher this weekend. Should be in print around autumn 2018. I’ll keep you posted.

This thing nearly killed me but I finally got it on the page. The untold story of how an unlikely anti-Islamic alliance of gay activists, feminists, fascists, evangelical Christians, populist politicians, and surfing rabbis from California fuelled the rise of the hard right across Europe and gave us President Donald J Trump.

Right now there’s champagne to be drunk and a 1,000 yard stare to shake off. While I work on that, here’s a deep dive into what the book’s about. Salut!

Who Was Adam Diment?

Groovy baby. The swinging sixties meant nothing to most people in Britain. They had jobs and mortgages and marriages and kids and gas bills. Only a select few got to hang out with dope smoking aristocrats in Chelsea or peacock around town in an outfit from Granny Takes a Trip. The class barriers may have come down for a few talented working-class photographers and musicians but they remained firmly in place for everyone else.

The closest the great British public got to joining the psychedelic generation was through the vicarious second-hand thrill of popular entertainment. The Beatles and Rolling Stones sold the sixties dream on vinyl, and movies like What’s New Pussycat? pushed the big screen version. In 1967 the written word got in on the act. Adverts were all over the Sunday supplements and double-decker buses for a new face in town. He had a blond Brian Jones-style cut and fashionable neo-Victorian clothes.

‘You Don’t Listen to Adam Diment,’ said the slogan. ‘You Read Him.’

He was the first psychedelic spy novelist. And he burnt out quick.

Who Was Rodolphe, Comte de Hemricourt de Grunne?

The Parc du Cinquantenaire is a large slab of green in the Etterbeek district of Brussels. It is home to some museums, a lot of statues, and a triumphal arch. Foreigners like the park and crowd it out on Belgium’s rare sunny weekends.

Buried in a corner behind hedges and an overshadowing building is a shiny grey stone wall and a statue of an arching pilot reaching for the sky. The wall records all the Belgian airmen who have died in military service since the first biplane wobbled into the sky over the country back in 1908. In the section for the dead of the Second World War is the name R. de Hemricourt de Grunne.

The neatly carved white letters hide a story not many know. Comte de Hemricourt de Grunne was a war hero and aristocrat, but he was also one of only fifty Belgians who fought for General Franco’s right-wing nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War. Short, dark, and bushy browed, the Belgian playboy abandoned a life of idle luxury to fight a personal crusade against a foreign government in a foreign land.

Foggy Notions

Some men live like heroes. James Horowitz did school at West Point, flew fighter jets in the Korean War, wrote screenplays for Hollywood, skied in Aspen, loved in Paris, and knew film stars as friends. He wrote novels as James Salter that ache with sex and loss. Burning the Days is his autobiography.

Americans who write about books for a living call Salter a great prose stylist, a literary giant, a master. Whether you agree depends on your tolerance for misty poetics and heartfelt vagueness. Here’s a slice of prose:

‘A woman, burnished by the sun, walks down the street in early morning carrying an eel. Many times I have written of this eel, smooth and dying, dark with the mystery of shadowy banks and, on that particular day, covered with bits of gravel. The eel is a saint to me, oblivious, already in another world.’

If that makes your heart throb then this is the book for you. Those already frowning should steer clear.

Love in a Gondola

In 1921 a young journalist from Illinois arrived in Paris with a loving wife and a suitcase of tyro manuscripts. Seven years soaking up the avant-garde teachings of Ezra Pound and James Joyce turned him into the best prose stylist of his generation. Ernest Hemingway returned to America with a fresh literary approach, a book contract, and a younger, richer wife.

Most readers still associate Ernest Hemingway with the French capital, an image cemented by his posthumous memoir A Moveable Feast. Guides do walking excursions round his old haunts for the tourists.

Richard Owen has other ideas. In a new book he makes the case that Italy, not France, was the place closest to Hemingway’s heart.

New Book on the Counter-Jihad Due 2018

I‘m working on my fourth book. Soldiers of a Different God [or amazon.com] should be out in late 2018. Crack open a bottle of champagne and alert the Nobel Prize committee.

Still a few months of keyboard-melting work to go but I can always use some help. Let me know if you’ve got any information or photographs that could help tell the untold story of how an unlikely anti-Islamic alliance of feminists, football ultras, evangelical Christians, gay activists, fascists, populist politicians, and surfing rabbis from California fuelled the rise of the nationalist right across Europe and gave us President Donald J Trump.

Raymond Chandler, Charles Bukowski, and the Dead Psychic

What’s the link between Raymond Chandler, poet laureate of noir detective fiction, and Charles Bukowski,  patron saint of low-life drunks? Two that I can think of: a dead gay psychic and a book.

That book was Bukowski’s Pulp. Published in 1994, it was the last he ever wrote. The bard of the bottle was on his way out when he wrote this skewed take on the LA detective thriller and few regard it as his best. But Bukowski’s homage to the works of Chandler and fellow noir master Dashiell Hammett is never less than interesting, even as he subverts their tropes and goes looking for more philosophical mean streets to stroll down. By the book’s end the text has escaped its noir roots to meanders off into autobiography and a creeping sense of mortality.

The dead gay psychic is something else.

WW2 Podcast & Lost Lions of Judah

Hi friends. I had a long chat with Angus of the WW2 podcast recently about Ethiopia, mercenaries, Haile Selassie, and my book Lost Lions of Judah. He trimmed it down and tidied it up and now you can hear us discussing the Italo-Ethiopian war in glorious stereo through iTunes, Facebook, as well as the WW2 website. It’ll probably turn up on Youtube some time soon.

Tune in and take a listen, then get your hands on the book itself [or amazon.com]. It’s about the crazy gang of adventurers who helped Ethiopia fight back against the Fascist Italian invasion of 1935.

It was a war between far-right modernity and patriarchal traditionalism. The Italians had airplanes, high explosive, and mustard gas. The Ethiopians preferred swords and spears. Emperor Haile Selassie needed expert foreign help. What he got was a bunch of mercenaries who could barely shoot straight and leaned further to the right than Mussolini.

Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion tells the whole colourful, blood-stained story.

America’s First Russian Roulette Victims

Texan winters are unpredictable. Rain turns the state into a soggy mess one day then blazing sun bakes it hard the next. This changeability is especially pronounced in the state capital of Austin.

‘If you don’t like the weather,’ say seasoned Austinites, ‘just wait five minutes.’

On Saturday 8 January 1938 they had their usual dose of fickle climate. The sun shone intermittently through the day but by late afternoon grey skies ruled and a chill wind chased commuters out of the downtown business district into the suburbs. In an upscale part of town a young man called Thomas H Markley jnr celebrated his twenty-first birthday with a gang of college friends outside his parents’ house.

He had a case of beer and a revolver to keep him warm.

The Bark Psychosis-Stanley Kubrick Connection

I was a teenage Indie kid. Dark blond hair cropped short at the sides and a fringe over one eye. Black jeans. Shirts the closest thing to psychedelic you could find in Ilford’s charity shops. Some army-surplus hooded jacket. Sneakers. You get the idea.

This was all back in the late 1980s when Margaret Thatcher ruled the land and indie music worshipped at the altars of The Pastels, The Jesus & Mary Chain, and the American noise scene. I smoked Rothmans, bought a lot of records, and sneaked into pubs that didn’t ask for ID.

My life was weeks of school sixth form interspersed with halcyon teenage weekends of cider and black; lumps of dope in matchboxes; flicking through the LPs in Oxford Street at HMV and the Virgin Megastore; watching gigs in The George Robey, the Astoria on Charing Cross Road, the Town and Country Club; sitting on the floor next to girls at parties; wandering round Camden Market and buying Velvet Underground posters and bootleg cassettes of indie gigs in photocopied covers on bright coloured paper. I had a metallic red guitar I couldn’t play very well.

My school friend Simon Ward taught me the chords to Revolution by Spacemen 3 and I daydreamed about being in a band.

An Introduction to Russian Roulette

You are shown into a large room. You’re nervous. Your heart races, your palms are sweating lightly. Your chair sits facing a long table. Behind the table a panel of faces look at you coldly. One gets up and stands next to you.

‘We are going to play Russian Roulette,’ he says.

Is he crazy? Do they expect you to risk your life for a job? You look at the panel. They are serious. You look at the speaker. He forms his fingers into the shape of a gun.

‘This,’ he says, ‘is a six chamber revolver.’

He puts his finger to your temple.

‘It has one bullet in it.’

He jerks his finger.

‘Click. No bullet in that chamber. I’m going to pull the trigger again. Before I do that, do you want me to spin the cylinder of the revolver? You have three seconds to answer.‘

The panel are looking at you intensely, analysing your reaction. Welcome to the favourite situation of high powered job interviewers. Answering complex questions under pressure. Can you give the right answer?

Our Man in Barcelona

Anarchist terror gangs stirring things up in 1960’s Spain. A mercenary whose service in the Congo conceals a dark past. A washed-up journalist in post-war Catalonia trying to solve a murder that powerful men would prefer left alone.

Antonio Padilla is a Barcelona native with two novels under his belt. La mano del muerto hit bookshops back in 2014 and Serás imbécil arrived in the summer of 2017. Both take a deep dive into the violent underbelly of recent Spanish history and come up missing a few teeth.

When he’s not writing crime thrillers, Padilla has translated everyone from Graham Greene to Jim Thompson. We had a conversation about his influences, the Catalan scene, and what keeps him hitting the keyboard every day.

Serb Volunteers in Novorossiya: Part 6

A few weeks back I wrote a post about a Serb mercenary who fought in Ukraine and died in Syria. Someone got in touch with more information. An interview came out of it.

My interviewee is a well-informed Serbian observer of the events in East Ukraine. He prefers to remain anonymous. His opinions are his own; feel free to comment or message me if your own views differ.

In the first part of the interview we talked about Bratislav Zivkovic’s activities in the Crimea and the media storm when he returned home. In parts two and three we looked at Serb sniper Dejan Beric who became a celebrity with his YouTube videos. Part four dealt with Zack Novak and other English-speakers working on Novorossiya’s propaganda campaign. Part five looked at the various motivations that drove Serbs to Novorossiya.

We’re coming to the last few sections of the interview. Here we talk about how media controversies, rumours of assassination plots, and mistreatment by separatist authorities led to many Serb volunteers returning home.

Serb Volunteers in Novorossiya: Part 5

The interview continues. Someone who knows a lot about Serb mercenaries got in touch to talk about the situation in East Ukraine.

In the first part of this interview we talked about Bratislav Zivkovic’s activities in the Crimea and the media storm when he returned home. In parts two and three we looked at Serb sniper Dejan Beric who became a celebrity with his YouTube videos. Part four dealt with Zack Novak and other English-speakers working on Novorossiya’s propaganda campaign.

In this part of the talk we discuss the motivation of Serb volunteers. My interviewee prefers to remain anonymous. His opinions are his own. If you have anything to add or correct then please get in touch.

Serb Volunteers in Novorossiya: Part 4

A well-informed Serbian observer of the events in East Ukraine got in touch to talk about this fellow countrymen’s involvement in the conflict. He prefers to remain anonymous.

In the first part of this interview we talked about Bratislav Zivkovic’s activities in the Crimea and the media storm when he returned home. In parts two and three we looked at Serb sniper Dejan Beric who became a celebrity with his YouTube videos.

Now the conversation has moved on to an American of Serb background who assisted the separatists in propaganda and humanitarian projects. Together with two other English speakers, Zack Novak was the public anglophone face of Novorossiya.

My interviewee’s opinions are his own. If you have corrections or elaborations then get in touch. The truth is not a monopoly business.

Serb Volunteers in Novorossiya: Part 3

Russia and Serbia have a historically close relationship. It was a Serb nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand pulled Russia into what became the First World War. At the other end of the 20th century Russian nationalists joined Serb forces in the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart.

Serbian volunteers returned the favour when the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine led to a Moscow-backed secession in the east. A well-informed observer of the situation got in touch to discuss his fellow countrymen who fought for Novorossiya. He prefers to remain anonymous. His opinions are his own.

In the first part of our conversation we discussed Bratislav Zivkovic’s activities in the Crimea and the media storm when he returned home. In part two we looked at the life of Serb sniper Dejan Beric who became a celebrity when his videos of life in the Novorossiya forces appeared on YouTube.

Here is part three.

Serb Volunteers in Novorossiya: Part 2

The separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine has pulled in foreign volunteers from many countries. Russians rub shoulders with Brazilians, French with Americans. Some come for money; some for politics; some for adventure.

A well-informed observer of the situation got in touch to talk about Serb volunteers who joined the secessionist east. He prefers to remain anonymous. His opinions are his own.

The first part of our conversation covered a small group led by Bratislav Zivkovic which served in the Crimea and returned with stories of battlefield glory. Unhappy ex-members later called the unit’s achievements into question. Despite this, Zivkovic made the separatist cause a major talking point in Serbia. Not long after the group’s return, Serbs became aware of another of their countrymen serving in the east.

Here is part two.

Serb Volunteers in Novorossiya: Part 1

The fighting in Ukraine continues. Many of the foreigners who joined the Novorossiyan separatists have gone home to face the media or the courts. Others remain.

The situation in Ukraine is complicated and deadly. Foreign volunteers who took part in the fighting were either tough combat veterans, shameless publicity seekers, or naive young men used by forces they didn’t understand. Like most wars.

Someone who knows a lot about the situation got in touch after reading my post on Sasha Karan, a Serb mercenary who died in Syria after previously serving in Eastern Ukraine. I asked some questions about Serbia and Novorossiya. He answered under condition of anonymity. His opinions are his own.

If you have any information that supports, contradicts, or expands what my interviewee says then get in touch. There are as many opinions about the Ukrainian situation as there are bullets flying over the battlefield.

Here is part one of our talk.

A British Volunteer For Franco

The Spanish Civil War was a vortex which sucked in foreign volunteers from Europe and beyond, and gave them a chance to fight their own battles on someone else’s soil.

In 1936 General Francisco Franco and his fellow Army officers attempted to overthrow Spain’s left-wing Popular Front government. The Nationalist insurgents believed the country was speeding towards anarchy, atheism, and communism. The government and its supporters saw the rising as a fascist assault on democracy. Foreigners from all sides flocked to join the fighting.

Italian Fascists and exiled Italians Communists came face to face in the grounds of a country house during the battle of Guadalajara. Frenchmen from either side of the political divide battled to the death around Madrid. Right-wing Cambridge man Peter Kemp fought against communist fellow countrymen in the 1938 offensive that divided the Republic and took Franco’s forces to the Mediterranean. After the war he asked a surviving opponent what would have happened if he’d been captured.

‘We’d have shot you,’ came the reply. ‘Sorry‘.

Kemp assured him he would have done the same if the positions had been reversed.

The Man Who Invented Russian Roulette

Scattered farm houses with roofs the colour of dark chocolate cling to sloping daffodil meadows at the foot of the Jura mountains. Cows amble through pastures with clanking brass bells around their necks.

Pure picture postcard to outsiders, this tranquil part of Switzerland is home to a town German-speakers know as Biel. Francophones prefer to call it Bienne. Georges Arthur Surdez was born here in 1900 to a French-speaking middle class family with its fair share of demons.

Surdez shared the family home with an elder brother and three elder sisters. An adult brother and sister were making new lives for themselves in America. They had been gone so long that the smart toys they sent Surdez at Christmas stirred no memories. His father Eugene was a watchmaker, and mother Marie happy to devote her life to her children. Like many outwardly respectable families, a maggot wriggled inside the apple.

Franco, Katanga, and Haile Selassie

Hi friends. This is a round up of stuff about my books and assorted matters i.e. a combination shill/boast. Let’s go.

An article I wrote for the Amberley website about Ethiopia and the Italian invasion is live. Check it out here. It’s a useful overview of the war and mercenary involvement. Also has a very nice photograph of Haile Selassie with book and Great Dane.

The BBC History website commissioned an article on my book, emphasising the role played by foreigners, both as soldiers and journalists. Article is done, checked, and lined up for publication. Should be live this month or the next. Keep an eye out or check back here – I’ll update when it appears. [Update: they’re taking their time. Hang in there].

Who Wrote Chinese Rocks?

Johnny Thunders used to say everyone in New York City claimed they wrote Chinese Rocks at one time or another. Then he took credit for writing it.

Dee Dee Ramone said the punk ode to heroin was all his own work. Richard Hell told people he was responsible for half of it. At different times Jerry Nolan, Sid Vicious, and all four members of The Ramones appeared in the songwriting credits.

Chinese Rock was the street term for heroin out of Vietnam, strong stuff that saturated New York during the punk era. The song named after it captures the sordid reality of scoring dope in the late 70s: the trip to Alphabet City, the dark hallways, money in one hand and a 007 knife in the other, a paper packet of heroin, scrambling home to lock the door and get out the works.

They’re still arguing over who wrote it.

Lost Lions Of Judah Ebook On Sale Now

The ebook version of Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion is now available. If you prefer pixels to ink then hit Amazon and download.

So far it’s available from Amazon.co.uk but the US edition will be out in October 2017. Here’s a taste of the introduction to give you the flavour of the book:

When the first bomb exploded, Vienna’s finest trauma surgeon was elbow deep inside a patient’s guts somewhere in northern Ethiopia. Dr Valentin Schuppler kept his scalpel steady as shock waves blew in half the hospital windows. The Red Cross on the roof was being used as a target by Italian airplanes.

Dessie hospital was an unhygienic pile of bricks in a backwater town whose best feature was its juniper trees. Any patient mobile enough had gone running for the hills when the first Fascist planes appeared. Schuppler stayed in the operating theatre and worked on a patient who was going nowhere without a mile of stitches and a dose of morphine.

A Death In Syria

In the summer of 2017 a young Serbian man died in Syria. He was the first Serb to lose his life fighting Islamic State. The international news didn’t notice. His fellow supporters of football team Vojvodina Novi Sad put up a tribute on Facebook.

Dimitrije Sasha Karan (Димитрије Саша Каран) was 24-years-old when he stepped on a landmine. He had a wife and a young son.

His path to the battlefield started in the terraces of Novi Sad. Born in the Bosnian town of Foča, Karan moved to Serbia as a child to avoid the civil war that wrecked Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He got involved in the Novi Sad football scene as a teenager.

The team had a fanatical fan group called the Firma (Фирма). Chanting, flares billowing smoke, drinking, expensive casual clothes, nationalism, the occasional fight. A Serb version of Italian ultras and British hooligans.

Karan loved the life. He became a Firma leader.

Here Are 6 Non-Fiction Books You Need To Read

I’ve been writing books, articles, and blog posts for a while now. My subjects are mercenaries and extremists, smugglers and peacekeepers, lost causes and short-lived countries, and the kind of writers who hammer out words on a busted typewriter with a 9mm in their belt and a bottle of vodka in the ice box.

Recently I wrote Lost Lions of Judah, the strange, untold story of the Nazis and adventurers who fought for Ethiopia against Mussolini’s invaders. And it’s all true.

That’s one of the revelations in non-fiction narratives. Almost everything that appears in a novels has already happened to someone real somewhere else. And it was weirder and wilder than you can imagine.

There are plenty of non-fiction writers out there with the talent to take all their research and interviews and summon up a living, breathing, technicolor world. Here’s six non-fiction books that do the job very well.

The Bloody Baron in Urga

In January 1921 hundreds of bonfires began burning in the hillsides around the Mongolian capital of Urga. The Bloody Baron had returned.

Baron Roman Feodorovitch von Ungern-Sternberg had first besieged Urga the previous October. Four attempts by his Asiatic Cavalry Division to take the town were beaten back by Chinese troops.

The Division retreated back into the steppes to regroup, recruit fresh troops, and make contact with Mongolian nationalists. Few locals liked the new Chinese overlords who had moved into the power vacuum left by the Russian Civil War. Rumours spread that a clique of lamas in Urga, close to the Living Buddha, were plotting to help the Baron’s men.

The Chinese tightened security; some Russians in the town were imprisoned, others were shot. In the hills, the Baron waited for his fortune tellers to tell him the best time to attack.

Lost Lions Of Judah Published 15 June 2017

My book about the foreign mercenaries, adventurers, and crusaders who fought for Ethiopia against the Italian Fascist invasion is out on Thursday 15 June. Here’s a taste of the introduction … .

When the first bomb exploded, Vienna’s finest trauma surgeon was elbow deep inside a patient’s guts somewhere in northern Ethiopia. Dr Valentin Schuppler kept his scalpel steady as shock waves blew in half the hospital windows. The Red Cross on the roof was being used as a target by Italian airplanes.

Dessie hospital was an unhygienic pile of bricks in a backwater town whose best feature was its juniper trees. Any patient mobile enough had gone running for the hills when the first Fascist planes appeared. Schuppler stayed in the operating theatre and worked on a patient who was going nowhere without a mile of stitches and a dose of morphine.

On The Trail Of The Bloody Baron

In 1936 Vladimir Pozner, a young immigrant writer with left-wing views, was trawling the underground of the Russian community in Paris for information on a dead Baron.

The people he talked with had been driven out of their homeland twenty years before by the Bolshevik revolution. Their Paris exile was a world of former colonels driving taxi-cabs; aristocrats in genteel poverty scratching for rent; Russian language newspapers on cheap paper predicting the fall of Communism any day now; and tea rooms in which the clock had stopped in 1917.

Pozner had no sympathy for these shards of old Russia embedded in the French capital. He was researching the biography of a general from the Civil War. The best place to find information was among the Russian exiles still mentally fighting the Bolsheviks.

“The taxi drivers and workers in the automobile factories made their way right across Paris to read the memoirs of their former leaders in the Russian Library,” he wrote. “They surrounded the page with exclamation marks and comments such as ‘Traitor!’ ‘Jew!’ ‘Coward!’ Everything that might be read between the lines of these books was shown up here, pencilled in, rubbed out, and scrawled in again by subordinates bursting with retrospective rage.”

Jihad Guerrillas In The Dutch East Indies

Darul Islam was on the run in late 1949. The jihadist army’s jungle camp was a hive of soldiers in short-sleeved shirts and Dutch army helmets. They slept in bivouacs under the palm trees and leaned their old rifles in tripods. The perimeter was strung with rattling tin cans strung on wire.

Down time was spent crouching around cooking fires watching cassava boil. On a good day the jihadists would get an extra pinch of sugar or salt but sometimes food was so scarce they ate leaves. A pack of Escort cigarettes was the kind of luxury that could make a man feel like a king.

The 15,000 strong Islamic army was trapped in a shrinking triangle of territory down in Pasundan’s south-east, a state in newly independent Indonesia. Some locals supported them. Others waited until the green Darul Islam flag with its crescent moon wrapped tight around a star had passed out sight, then contacted the authorities. If the soldiers of Darul Islam discovered the disloyalty they would return and exterminate the village, leaving houses in ruins and crops polluted by bodies and blood.

Lost Lions Of Judah At The Printers

My book about the crazy gang of foreign mercenaries who fought for Ethiopia in the 1930s went to the printers last week. It has a shiny new cover in gold and marble grey, and should be in the shops some time this summer.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in late 1935 outraged the world. Communists saw it as proof of Fascist barbarism, liberals were shocked by the display of outdated imperialism; even the empire builders in London and Paris were reluctant to welcome Mussolini into their club.

It was a war between far-right modernity and patriarchal traditionalism. The Italians had airplanes, high explosive, and mustard gas. The Ethiopians preferred swords and spears. Emperor Haile Selassie needed expert foreign help. What he got was a bunch of mercenaries who could barely shoot straight and leaned further to the right than Mussolini.

Lost Lions of Judah tells the whole colourful, blood-stained story.

Almighty Gaylords Update

The Almighty Gaylords are a Chicago street gang involved in guns and drugs. I wrote two posts on them: an overview and a look at some recent gunrunning arrests. A member of the Gaylords got in touch to bring me up to date about the gang’s fortunes.

He told me rumours of the gang’s demise are exaggerated. The Gaylords are alive and well and spreading across the US, with new chapters in places like Florida and Indiana.

It’s true that there’s no longer any central leadership, and individual areas in Chicago like Addison and Sayre Park run as separate gangs under the Gaylord banner. This fragmentation fooled outsiders into believing the Gaylords were on the skids. In reality it introduced enough flexibility to keep the gang alive after it was pushed out of its traditional Chicago inner city territory by demographic change. And it gave Gaylords who left the state the freedom to set up fresh chapters in their new homes.

The media paints the GLs as a gang of soft-bellied old racists mourning the loss of white Chicago. The truth is different.

The Day of the Mkhedrioni

When you hit the Georgian capital Tbilisi in 1992 you stayed at the Metechi Palace Hotel. Everyone did.

You got a taxi from the airport. It cost $5 and the driver spent more time negotiating bribes with the roadblocks manned by young men with AK-47s and leather jackets than he did at the wheel.

The city was a wreck, smoke-black from the recent fighting. Out the taxi window you saw the shops embracing free enterprise by selling Malaysian exercise books, Korean playing cards, fake Camel cigarettes, leather jackets from Turkey. The bookshops that sold only Soviet engineering texts and copies of the twelve century Georgian epic poem, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, that everyone in the country already owned. The Stalinist-style parliament building, half destroyed in the fighting, its supporting columns eaten away by RPG rounds. The street vendors selling orthodox icons, nesting dolls, glassware, ornamental daggers, the family silver.

Gunrunning Gaylords

The last time Chicago street gang the Almighty Gaylords hit in the media was back in August 2011. Early morning police raids scooped up nine gang members for illegal gun possession and sales. The tv news helicopters broadcast footage of stocky middle-aged men sitting around suburban gardens in their underwear while cops searched houses.

The days when the Gaylords were local boys defending a shrinking island of white inner city Chicago against multiculturalism were long gone. Now the gang was an amputated limb of its former self, a group of fortysomethings with prison records who’d made their peace with rival Hispanic and black gangs to sell drugs and guns in suburban places like Addison and Elmhurst and Villa Park.

The 2011 raid took out the Gaylord’s main faces, including James Grace aka Mega, the 40-year-old leader of the gang’s Addison faction. And he’d been turned in by one of his own.

Who Was Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad?

On 18 November 2015 Islamic State soldiers in Syria murdered a hostage. A 48-year-old Norwegian man in a prisoner’s yellow jumpsuit was casually shot dead.

Islamic State had been trying to get a ransom for Ole Johan Grimsgaard-Ofstad since it grabbed hold of him in March. His previous captors had given up trying to squeeze money out of the Norwegian government and passed him on to the Islamist fanatics.

Norway refused to pay kidnappers. It tried to persuade Islamic State to let Grimsgaard-Ofstad go free. All the Nordic negotiators got in return was videos showing the hostage suffering the after effects of sadistic torture.

The negotiations were top secret until September when Islamic State published photographs in its Dabiq online magazine showing a grim looking Grimsgaard-Ofstad, along with a 50-year-old Chinese hostage called Fan Jinghui.

The headline read: ‘For Sale‘.

The Lion, the Midget, the Warlord

Crazy Joe Gallo got a bullet in the head in April of 1972. I wrote a post about it here. He was celebrating his birthday in the early hours at Umberto’s Clam House when gunmen came in through the back door and started blasting.

Joe overturned the table and made it outside but died in the street. It was the end of the Gallo brother’s dream of forming their own Mafia family.

But back in the 1950s that dream was still alive. Joe, elder brother Larry (the brains of the outfit), and younger bother Albert (‘Kid Blast’) were up and coming foot soldiers in the Colombo crime family. They ran their own corner of Brooklyn for the family, collecting debts and protection money, and hustling any opportunities that came their way.

The three brothers were the Mafia warlords of their block. They had money, guns … and a real life lion in the basement. And a little person club-owning friend to walk him through the Brooklyn streets.

From General Franco to Sgt. Pepper

In Franco’s International Brigades I mentioned a mysterious Cuban called Miguel Ferreras who fought for both Franco and Hitler then married into the Guinness family and became stepfather to a man immortalised in The Beatles’ song A Day in the Life. Quite a ride.

Now  Paul Howard’s biography I Read the News Today, Oh Boy shines more light on Ferrera’s strange life and times through his relationship with stepson Tara Browne. Howard’s book is a great read that covers everything from swinging sixties London to Paris’ gay underworld. Definitely worth buying.

Ferrera’s stepson was a gilded youth born into money, privilege, and bohemia in Ireland. His mother was brewing heiress Oonagh Guinness. Browne was precociously advanced, quitting smoking at the age of eleven, and never getting more than a few year’s schooling. He got his own kind of education from his mother’s artistic friends.

In 1957 Oonagh married Cuban fashion designer Miguel Ferrera in New York. Oonagh had two ex-husbands and Ferrera quickly ditched his first wife (who’d given him an American passport and a few kids) when all that Guinness money walked into his showroom. Tara hated his new stepfather and so did most of Oonagh’s friends who considered Ferreras rude, provincial, and untalented as a designer. They didn’t know the half of it.

Welcome To Bayelsa

Here’s the second guest post from Chris Hennemeyer, an expert in contemporary Africa. He’s spent more years than he cares to remember working international aid and development across the subcontinent. His first post described dealing with rebels in Liberia; in this article he guides us through the corruption and danger of Nigeria’s oil region. 

In a scene right out of the old mercenary movie The Dogs of War the parting words from the immigration officials who had, in their phraseology, “intercepted” me on the highway and determined I was working illegally in Nigeria, are “Welcome to Bayelsa!”

After four sweaty hours of detention and interrogation, I am finally released, with fraternal claps on the back and proclamations of eternal friendship, to enjoy the splendours of the state capital, Yenagoa.

Sitting like a blood clot right in the economic heart of Africa’s most populous country and biggest economy, awash with the source of its massive petroleum wealth, one would think Bayelsa state would have something to distinguish it other than schizophrenic immigration personnel. And one would be right, but for all the wrong reasons.

The Revenge Of Yukio Mishima

On 3 March 1977 four men walked into an office block in the business district of central Tokyo and took hostages. They had a rifle, a pistol, and a Japanese ceremonial sword.

It all began at 16:30. The block was home to the headquarters of Keidanren (the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations), mouthpiece of Japan’s biggest corporations. The men arrived in the foyer and asked to see Toshiwo Doko, 80-year-old head of the Federation. They were politely told he was on a business trip in Osaka.

The men produced their weapons and fired three shots into the ceiling then headed up to a seventh floor office where they took twelve people hostage, including the Federation’s managing director.

As riot police sealed off the building, the leader of the hostage takers, 42-year-old Shūsuke Nomura, issued communiques attacking the corruption and business plutocracy he claimed ruled modern Japan. It all sounded left-wing until Nomura starting condemning the post-WW2 Yalta and Potsdam conferences. He accused America and other nations of having deliberately crippled Japan to prevent it reclaiming its former imperial glory.

The police realised they were dealing with right-wing terrorists.

A Kidnapping In Poland

If you get lost in the woods, leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Don’t stay out after dark. Don’t talk to strangers.

The schoolboy is walking along Warsaw’s ulica Naruszewicza with two friends. It is the afternoon of 22 January 1957. Snow is on the ground.

The three boys are on their way home from St Augustine High School for their dinners. St Augustine is a good private school, one of the very few in Communist Poland. Its students are the sons of important men.

The schoolboy is fifteen-years-old. His dark hair is combed back from his forehead in a pomaded shell. He carries his school books in a brown leather briefcase. He wears a herringbone overcoat and winter boots with white laces.

It is 13:50. At the intersection of Naruszewicza with ulica Wejnerta a tall man with a briefcase approaches the boys.

“Which one of you is Piasecki?”

The schoolboy steps forward. The man takes a piece of paper from his case and shows it to him. The schoolboy silently accompanies the man to a nearby taxi rank on Wejnerta. He does not look back at his friends.

Crossing The Cavally

Today we have a guest post from Chris Hennemeyer, a man who knows more about contemporary Africa than anyone else around. Chris has worked in international aid and development for the last few decades. He’s seen the beauty and the violence of the African subcontinent up close. Here is his account of  dealing with rebels in Liberia back in the 1990s. The follow up about Nigeria is here.

The Cavally was a thick, rich cafe au lait color and impressively wide for a river I’d never before heard of. I was on the Ivorian side of the border, my shoes deep in the crumbling sand of the river bank, squinting across the broad brown water at Liberia. On our side women chatted as they washed clothes in the shallows, and men sat nearby repairing fishing nets, but on the opposite shore there was no movement, only a dense wall of green, old-growth forest; soaring silk cotton trees, raffia palms, and elaborate weaves of liana vines. It was just past noon and my damp shirt clung to me like a second skin. I loosened my tie, a pointless effort in the oppressive humidity.

In 1991, Liberia was barely a quarter the way through its “first” civil war. Tens of thousands of people, nearly all civilians, had been killed by marauding bands of bizarrely costumed criminals, and many times that number had fled their homes, either for the bush or for neighboring countries. But things would get much worse before they briefly got better. In the meantime, though, they were bad enough.

In Search of Dominique Borella 2

My post about French mercenary Dominique Borella, who died in Lebanon during the civil war, stirred up some interesting responses. Fans, onlookers, and family members got in touch. Ultimately it all lead to Dominique’s son Gunther heading over to Beirut and meeting his father’s former comrades.

Gunther was 4-years-old when his father died but grew up knowing little about him. Dominique’s wife divorced her mercenary husband when he went to Lebanon to fight. She preferred her son not to know much about his adventurer of a father.

Later on, Gunther’s grandmother (Dominque’s mother) filled in the gaps.

“I remember that her house was like a museum dedicated to the memory of my father,” said Gunther. “Until the end of her life, she expected to see her son knock on the door and return home.”

Photographs and family legends kept Dominique’s memory alive until 2016 when Gunther went hunting on the internet for more information.

Frank Sinatra In Die Hard

The 1988 action picture Die Hard launched Bruce Willis into stardom and gave Alan Rickman his first foothold in the movie business. It’s an action-packed 2 hours and 11 minutes of gunplay and wisecracks as Willis takes on a gang of German terrorists holding an entire office block hostage. An incomparable modern classic according to some; a well-paced slice of 80’s bloodlust to others.

And it almost starred Frank Sinatra.

The producers asked the 73-year-old singer and actor to take the lead role that would go to Bruce Willis. They had no choice thanks to a decent bit of 60s neo-noir called The Detective.

The story began back in 1966 when a New Yorker who’d been a private eye and published a book that didn’t sell much decided to write a detective novel about a man on the verge of losing everything.

Enemy of Evelyn Waugh Killed By Monkey In Spanish Civil War

If you’ve ever read any Evelyn Waugh then you’ll know the name Basil Seal. He’s the roguish protagonist of Black Mischief (squeezing money out of an impoverished African nation), Put Out More Flags (squeezing money out of WW2), and Basil Seal Rides Again (squeezing money out … no wait, sabotaging his daughter’s wedding). He also makes a brief appearance in the amputated limb of Work Suspended.

Amoral, unclean, and charming, he’s a bit of a fantasy self-portrait for Waugh. But he began as a stinging caricature of Waugh’s real life enemy from Oxford University: Basil Murray.

A dissolute and rich Oxford graduate who found a cause in Liberal politics and anti-fascism, Murray is probably the only man to be murdered by a monkey during the Spanish Civil War.

Lost Lions of Judah, Due June 2017

I‘ve been off the radar for the last month trying to finish my third book . The writing is almost done and looks like it’ll be in the shops around June 2017.

My publishers have already got a provisional title and cover up on Amazon (or Amazon.com). So it’ll probably look a bit like this when it hits the bookshops … . But parts of the title may change and the cover too. Welcome to the wacky world of publishing.

Research for the book has turned up some strange characters among the foreigners who fought for Ethiopia against the Italian invasion: adventurers, drunks, Nazis, fascists, Pan-African visionaries, evangelical medical men, and racists of all races came together to defend an emperor against a dictator. And it also turned up a few surprises about Haile Selassie’s international friends.

Mind Games And Germs Burns

On 7 December 1980 Darby Crash, lead singer of Los Angeles punk band The Germs, pumped $400 worth of heroin into his arm. He nodded out in the arms of punk groupie Casey Cola, who thought she was part of a suicide pact.

Casey woke up the next morning in the embrace of a corpse. Darby had prepared both their hits and intended to go out alone. The singer wanted immortality. He wanted, he once said, fans to worship a statue of him after he died. Bad timing messed up that plan. A few hours after Darby was found by paramedics at Casey Cola’s mom’s house, ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot dead in New York City.

The movers and shakers of the LA punk scene paid tribute to the dead Germs vocalist; Rodney Bingenheimer’s Rodney On The Roq radio show alternated Beatles and Germs tracks all night long. Everyone else in America was mourning a much bigger star.

The last of Darby Crash’s plans to lead the people had failed.

Franco’s International Brigades FAQ

Crusading Catholics, foreign Fascists, and Muslims with a grudge. The Spanish Civil War set right against left when centuries of grievances erupted into a bloody settling of accounts in 1936. The left-wing volunteers who came from around the world to fight for the Spanish government are well known but foreigners also joined the other side. I wrote a book about it. Here’s a FAQ.

Q. What was the Spanish Civil War?

A. In July 1936 a cabal of right-wing generals tried to overthrow the Spanish government by force. The generals believed the recently elected hard-left government was speeding the country towards anarchy and Marxism. The government saw the generals as Fascists. The overthrow was meant to be a short, sharp coup d’etat, over in a few days. Instead the country was plunged into a bloody and divisive Civil War that lasted three years.

Raymond Chandler vs Ross Macdonald

In 1949 Raymond Chandler wrote to a friend who worked as a literary critic. Chandler was a lonely man who drank too much and the letter was long, rambling, and indiscreet. Among all the industry gossip and small talk were some strong opinions about a new kid on the block. The big man wasn’t a fan.

Chandler was the best known detective writer in the anglophone world. This British-American mongrel had set the template for the modern private eye in fiction: a cynical, bruised-heart romantic who uses the wrong methods to do the right thing in a futile battle against a world in which corruption grows like mould.

“Down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

The note perfect evocations of 1940’s Los Angeles in Chandler’s novels were the icing on the cake. He was such a towering presence in the genre that other writers had to try hard not to sound like him. Some didn’t bother. Earlier in 1949 Ross Macdonald (born Kenneth Millar in California but raised in Canada) published his first novel about detective Lew Archer. The Moving Target would be followed by another 17 books about Archer, each more popular than the last. Archer was clearly and unapologetically modelled on Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

Tintin in Abkhazia

Abkhazia is either a ruggedly independent state on the Black Sea or a renegade province of Georgia, depending on where you stand on Russian imperialism. It also issues Tintin stamps.

The country has been de facto independent since it split from Georgia in a bloody 1992 war. The Georgians treat Abkhazia (and fellow secessionists South Ossetia) as a bunch of misguided locals led astray by Moscow. Periodic attempts to bring Abkhazia back under Georgian control have resulted in bloodshed, war crimes, and finger wagging from the UN. Russia insists its troops are only there as peacekeepers. The Abkhaz insist they’re an independent state that needs all the friends it can get.

That may be why Tintin is on a set of Abkhazian stamps.

Black Sheep Of The British Empire

Sitting comfortably? Then put a new cigarette in its ivory holder and refresh your whisky and soda. Get the servants to stoke the fire because these old houses can get so cold at night. And make sure your service revolver in the desk drawer is loaded. Captain Grimes is coming round tonight to discuss the accounts.

The little matter of those post-dated cheques in the mess tin. You might be forced to take the gentleman’s way out. Or you might be forced to shoot Captain Grimes.

The wealthiest stratum of British society has always prided itself on loyalty and devotion to duty. But too many of the aristocrats, trust fund beneficiaries and members of the officer class who sit at the apex of Britain’s social triangle have a moral backbone like a bit of wet spaghetti. From Rupert Bellville to Simon Raven, the Earl of Erroll to John Aspinall, the most respectable part of the country has churned out black sheep on a production line scale.

So put away that portfolio of artistic French photographs and leave answering the love note from your brother’s wife until later. Let’s take a stroll through the last one hundred years of bankrupt aristocrats, corrupt golden youths, and frankly untrustworthy remittance men. Books and the odd flick will be our signposts.

We’ll start gently, with some flawed heroes. Let’s go back to the days when we still had an Empire … .

Girl With A Gun

Hundreds of foreign volunteers have joined Ukraine’s eastern separatists in the last few years. The Kiev government claims they are puppets of Putin, used to expand the Russian empire. The volunteers describe themselves as modern versions of the International Brigades from the Spanish Civil War.

Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Spaniards, Brazilians, and others can be found in the ranks of separatist militia units. Despite the guns and uniforms, few get to see the front lines. The separatists prefer to put them to work in ruined villages away from the fighting where they soak up Novorussia propaganda and take pictures of homeless refugees. They tell their compatriots back home about the horrors of a united Ukraine in internet chats and interviews.

The volunteers are men, mostly young and right-leaning despite the rhetoric about fighting fascism. Margarita Kaempfer-Seidler is a rare female volunteer. This blonde 45-year-old German former paramedic has been all over the internet condemning Kiev, fascism, NATO, the EU, and America.

Who is she and why does she support Ukrainian separatism?

The Tintin in Thailand Affair

In February 2001 two Belgian smugglers met their contacts in the town of Doornik. There was some small talk, a few jokes, then the smugglers showed off the merchandise. Copies of a comic book called Tintin in Thailand. The buyers flicked through a few pages and pulled out handcuffs. They were undercover police.

Shortly after, Antwerp police raided the home of the mastermind behind the operation: Baudouin de Duve, 50-year-old former expat and member of a prominent Belgian family. His uncle had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

Tintin is a comic book hero created in Belgium but globally famous. Hergé (aka Georges Prosper Remi) first drew the adventurous boy detective for the kids’ section of Brussels newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle in 1929. For the next 54 years the Belgian cartoonist sent his creation exploring a ligne claire world, from the African jungle to outer space. Most readers encounter Tintin in the elegantly slim hardback versions of the comic strips. Tintin in the Congo, Tintin in Tibet, Tintin and the Picaros, and 21 more.

But Hergé never wrote a book called Tintin in Thailand.

Mike Hoare in Katanga

Colonel ‘Mad’ Mike Hoare is the best known mercenary in the English-speaking world. He was all over the news in the 1960s as commander of the 5 Commando mercenary force in the Congo; in the 1970s he inspired and advised the blockbuster film The Wild Geese; in the 1980s he did prison time for trying to take over the Seychelles.

Now in his 90s, he’s still going strong in the South African sun.

Hoare got his start as a mercenary in Katanga, a short-lived secessionist state originally part of the Belgian Congo. The Colonel has never been publicity-shy, with several autobiographical books to his name, but he’s never discussed important details about his time in Katanga.

Missing Over Cuba, $25,000 Reward

On 24 September 1963 Alexander Irwin Rorke climbed into a twin-engine plane at Fort Lauderdale airport. He was never seen again.

The good-looking 37-year-old with black hair and blue eyes was a well known figure in the murky world of Florida anti-communism. He had been a free-lance photojournalist in Cuba covering Fidel Castro’s revolution until critical comments about the new regime’s leftward drift got him in trouble. Some jail time and a deportation order later, he was up to his neck in CIA agents, right-wing Cuban exiles, soldiers of fortune, and ultraconservative American patriotism.

In 1961 he scattered anti-Castro leaflets over Havana by plane. The next year was secret boat trips to Cuba for guerrilla warfare. Early in ’63 he was back in the air, bombing a Cuban oil refinery. FBI agents warned him off. Rorke ignored them.

Now he had another mission.

They Shot Crazy Joe On His Birthday

The gunmen came in through the rear door of Umberto’s Clam House at 4:30 in the morning. Mafia legend Crazy Joe Gallo had his back to them when they  started shooting.

Umberto’s was supposed to be neutral ground, a freshly opened corner restaurant in New York’s Little Italy district owned by Matty “the Horse” Ianniello. It was one of the few places Crazy Joe felt safe enough to sit with his back to a door.

Joe had been at the Copacabana club all night celebrating his 43rd birthday. Comic Don Rickles was on stage, insulting everyone. When the show was over Crazy Joe, his wife, her 10-year-old daughter, Joe’s bodyguard Pete the Greek, and Pete’s girl headed for Umberto’s for seafood.

When they walked in, a guy sitting at the bar gave them a long look, got up, and walked two blocks to see some friends. Crazy Joe didn’t even notice.

The Assassination of Stepan Bandera

When the ambulance crew got there they found Stepan Bandera dead on the block’s third floor landing outside his apartment. The crew guessed the fifty-year-old Ukranian had died from a fall. Bandera’s crying wife insisted he had been murdered. It was Thursday 15 October 1959.

It took until the following Tuesday for the coroner’s report to reach Munich police. The Ukrainian had traces of cyanide in his stomach. Now it looked like suicide.

‘We are completely in the dark as to the motive,’ a police spokesman told reporters.

The Black and Tans in Central America

Some time in the 1920s a Scot called James Alan Rennie went to a Central American country for a petrol company to guard oil wells.

Rennie was a prolific writer of the postwar period, turning out novels, plays, and history books at an industrial rate. In 1962 he wrote his autobiography Past Horizons. Rennie had lived a hell of a life: upbringing in Scotland, youthful service in WWI, art school, prospecting in Canada, travelling through America, nightclub bouncer, logger in the arctic circle. And briefly a mercenary for an oil company.

Rennie passes over the episode in a few pages, careful not to give too much away. He doesn’t tell us the name of the country, the company, or very much about what he did to protect oil wells from revolutionaries.

Mau Mau Manhunts

William Baldwin was 27-years-old when he arrived in Kenya looking for adventure. The University of Colorado-Boulder graduate had no money and his papers weren’t in order. He needed a job. The young American joined the Kenyan police.

The British colony was two years into an uprising by members of the Gĩkũyũ tribe. The authorities called them the Mau Mau and accused the rebels of dragging Kenya back into a violent past. The rebels called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) and demanded national independence.

The uprising had a taste of inter-tribal civil war: the number of Gĩkũyũ in the Mau Mau was matched by those who remained loyal to the British, fighting against the rebellion. Add the casual racism of white settlers and soldiers determined to hang on to their corner of the empire, and you had a recipe for bloody conflict.

The Plot To Kill Charles de Gaulle

Wednesday, 22 August 1962. Ten past eight in the evening.

It was just a yellow Estafette van parked in front of a hedge on the road to Villacoublay. The few pedestrians around didn’t pay it any attention.

If they had, they would have seen Serge Bernier sitting in the very back, a slim and blond Korean War veteran with startlingly blue eyes. A man called Lazlo Varga at the wheel. Three men in the back seat: Gérard Buisines, and the Hungarians known as Sari and Marton.

Observers might have wondered why Bernier was scanning the road with a pair of binoculars. The answer was simple: Charles De Gaulle’s limousine sometimes used this route. And the men in the van were trying to kill him.

Extraordinary Gentlemen of the First World War: The Great Omi

If you were in New York sometime in 1939 you might have visited the World’s Fair out in Flushing Meadows. You might have wandered around its 1,000 acres of pavilions, sideshows, bandstands, and cultural attractions.

And you might have stopped in at a stand called John Hix’s Odditorium. It showcased strange humans, like the Anatomical Wonder and Marvello the Fingerless Pianist. A freak show, entrance 40 cents.

One of the Odditorium’s attractions was a 57-year-old Englishman whose body was tattooed in crude zebra stripes. He had bones through his nose and earlobes,  and called himself The Great Omi.

Omi told visitors he had been kidnapped by natives out in New Guinea and forcibly tattooed. Off stage, he told journalists stories about being the scion of a wealthy family who had won medals for bravery out in Mesopotamia during the war and lost his inheritance in playboy living.

No-one knew which story to believe.

Sewer Rats in Nice

On the morning of Monday 19 July 1976 two employees of the Société Générale’s Nice branch trotted down the stairs to the steel door of the bank’s underground vault. The pair of keys required to open the vault door had to be turned simultaneously in locks too far apart to be operated by the same man. Société Générale prided itself on its security measures.

Each man inserted his key in the lock and turned it, expecting the door to swing open. Nothing happened. They tried again. Same result. It would be three and a half hours before anyone discovered the vault door had been sealed shut from the inside with a welding arc.

Child Heist by Richard Stark

When the guard came to open the cell door, Parker said to the big man named Krauss, “Come see me next week when you get out. I think I’ll have something on.” 

Richard Stark wrote 24 novels about a tough and remorseless American criminal called Parker. Child Heist isn’t one of them.

The first Parker novel hit the shelves in 1962 with our anti-hero striding angrily across the George Washington bridge into Manhattan. A double-crossing mob boss has taken his money and the veteran stick-up man wants it back. The character’s last appearance was 2008’s Dirty Money, set in Massachusetts, lady friend at his side, hunting down the cash from a botched robbery that nearly put him in jail.

In between are armoured car heists, double-crosses, bank jobs, casino robberies, payroll snatches, and an attempt to rob an entire town. They’re good reads if you don’t mind rooting for the bad guy.

The King of France Invades His Own Country, 1944

In early November 1944 French soldiers got into a firefight somewhere near Toulouse. They rounded up a gang of armed men. One of them, apparently the leader, had been hit in the shoulder. The French soldiers suspected the men had come over the border from Spain.

There was a lot of traffic through the mountains: Nazis on the run, escaping collaborators, smugglers, members of far-right Maquis Blanc bands trying to reconquer France for the Germans. The soldiers dragged their prisoners up to the nearest provisional government outpost and let the politicians sort it out.

The wounded man had slicked-back hair and a thin moustache. He spoke elegant French. The interrogators soon discovered he was Henri, Comte de Paris and heir presumptive to the throne. Royalists regarded him as the King of France.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Romances Mata Hari in London

Louis-Ferdinand Céline is one of France’s most controversial writers. He took both literature and politics to the extremes.

His novels are corrosively cynical, rage-fuelled attacks on modern life that portray humanity as selfish, violent, lustful beasts who commit horrible crimes for trivial reasons. Céline himself wasn’t much better.

‘When the grave lies open before us, let’s not try to be witty,” he said. “But on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of human viciousness we’ve seen without changing one word. When that’s done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit.’

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

In the autumn of 1967 Syd Barrett was falling apart. Too much LSD, a pre-existing mental illness, and the pressures of being in a chart-topping band had mashed up his psyche. He wrote unplayable songs, missed gigs, and stood there playing one chord all night when he did turn up. Even worse, from his band mates’ point of view, Syd didn’t seem to understand he was sick.

Pink Floyd were a big band. They had underground credibility from their druggy, voyaging live performances and mainstream popularity thanks to Barrett hit singles like Arnold Layne. Now all that was in danger of slipping away.

In December 1967 the band hired their guitarist friend Dave Gilmour for live performances. They had the idea that Barrett could stay home like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and compose.

Welcome to the Scriptatron 5000

Here’s the future. A programme which can write endless variations of any article in any possible style. Feed in the information. Click the button. A few seconds later you’ll have 300 variations of the same piece.

Need something about a terror attack in Ankara? Turn on Scriptatron 5000 and get a straight objective news piece, an angry opinion piece that blames American foreign policy, a snarky piece about how this will lead to holiday bargains, various conspiracy theory pieces, a straight news piece with a old school left twist, a straight news piece with a middle-class left twist, a straight news piece with a paleoconservative twist, a piece about someone’s reactions after reading one of the straight news pieces, a how-this-fits-into-history piece, a piece made up of photographs with a few lines of text, a wall of text with a few photographs. Etc. Et cetera.

All done by the Scriptatron 5000 in seconds.

Just the Worst Book Ever, Literally

Andre Marceau is an industrialist with a special hatred of midgets. He ends up strangled in the middle of an otherwise immaculate croquet lawn, a halo of baby-sized footprints around the body. He chokes out some last words.

“The Babe from Hell!”

And dies. Inspector X. Jones of Scotland Yard decides the killer must be a strangler baby with the ability to fly. Perhaps in some kind of experimental aircraft.

Welcome to Harry Stephen Keeler’s 1936 novel X. Jones of Scotland Yard. It’s terrible.

The majority opinion is that Keeler wrote some of the worst mystery thrillers ever. A stubborn minority insist his books are so-bad-they’re-good and occasionally cross into full blown art.

In Search of Dominique Borella

The soldier in the photograph was blond as a wheat field. He had a bandage wrapped around his face and an AK-47 in his hand.

“Dominique Borella, photographié sur la rive-est du Mékong au moment de l’offensive ‘rouge’ du 3 février 1975. Bléssé depuis plusieurs jours par éclats de grenades à la jambe gauche, il vient alors d’être touché au visage …”

Dominique Borella, photographed on the east bank of the Mekong during the 3 February 1975 ‘Red’ offensive. Injured in the left leg by grenade shrapnel a few days earlier, he has just been hit in the face … .

Staying Behind With Gladio

On 9 September 1952 a man walked into Frankfurt Police HQ and confessed he belonged to a top secret paramilitary group. In the event of a Soviet invasion he was to sabotage enemy installations, blow up bridges, and assassinate collaborators.

The whistle blower was disgruntled Waffen-SS veteran Hans Otto and the organisation Technischer Dienst (TD, Technical Service). It was 2,000 strong and funded by the United States government. Parallel groups existed across Europe. TD was staffed by ex-Third Reich soldiers, few of whom had changed their ideas since the fall of the Third Reich.

This bothered Otto, a rare Nazi with a conscience, particularly when his comrades drew up lists of untrustworthy public figures to be liquidated in the event of an invasion. The list included politicians whose only crime was to be socialists. Otto’s conscience itched even more when the American in charge of TD approved the measures.

Hubert Julian: The Black Eagle

Hubert Julian is all over my new book Lost Lions of Judah, about the mercenaries who fought for Ethiopia against the Italian fascist invasion. He was a hell of a character.

Julian’s home overlooked the Harlem River in New York. The Bronx town house was crowded with elephant tusks, vintage rifles, Ethiopian medals, photographs of Julian with Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie, souvenirs from Guatemala, books of newspaper clippings, a menagerie of parrots, and a pet monkey.

On Sundays his extended family turned up for inch thick steaks flown in from South America, with African fruits for dessert.

Julian obviously had money (“I’m richer now than a yacht full of Greeks,” he told reporters) although how much was the subject of conjecture among interested parties. An FBI report from the late 1950s claimed Julian “was subsidised by wealthy white women”. Julian insisted he earned his cash. Both may been true.

Foreign Fighters in Western Ukraine

I wrote a previous post about foreigners fighting for the separatists in East Ukraine. Here’s some information about their opposite numbers on the side of the government.

Most journalists tended to focus on the far-right volunteers who turned up in Kiev and demanded a gun (here’s an article from  George Soros’ Eurasianet.org about foreigners in the Azov Battalion) but around 100 Chechens, many Muslims from other nations, and several hundred Russian and Belarussians are also fighting for the Ukrainian government.

The fighting in Ukraine has attracted a lot of people with a ideologies some might think contradictory. They have one thing in common: hatred of Putin’s Russia.

Crocodile Crashes Plane Into House

Airplane crashes have replaced shipwrecks, fires, and acts of God as all-purpose symbols of existential catastrophe. A cross-section of society flying into a mountain is the world in miniature. Here’s a strange one.

On 25 August 2010 a twin-engine passenger jet carrying three crew and nineteen passengers crashed into a house near Bandundu airport in the west of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There were two survivors: a male passenger and a crocodile.

A Rhodesian Murder Mystery

On 17 September 1961 a plane known as the Albertina took off from an airport in the northern Congo. Six hours later it was a molten mess out in the Rhodesian bush. Sixteen people died in the crash. One was Dag Hammarskjöld, head of the United Nations.

The Albertina went down as it was approaching Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) just after midnight local time. It was a clear night hazed with mist from a local cobalt refinery. The Albertina’s Captain, Swede Per Hallonquist, made a last radio communication with the control tower a few minutes before the crash.

Foreign Fighters in Eastern Ukraine

Vice News is either the bleeding edge of contemporary journalism or a bunch of craven hipsters who’ve never been in a fight. Opinions differ. But they have the corporate investment to send reporting teams all round the world.

Here’s a short 2015 Vice video made in East Ukraine back when the Kremlin still allowed separatists to call it Novorossiya. The video contains brief interviews with Serb mercenaries (motivated by pan-Orthodox sympathy), Frenchmen (Front Nationale supporters), a Brazilian (anti-American), and a Spaniard (Communist). There’s also footage of rubble, bad roads, and spartan housing.

The Turk Westerling Affair

The Frenchman in the passenger seat pointed out the house. It was early evening in the Friesland village of Marshum and the house windows glowed warm and yellow through the falling snow. François Brigneau had been hunting Westerling for days.

Brigneau was a Paris-Presse journalist with a shelf full of awards and a murky past. His wheelman was a handsome journalist called Henri Gault. In a decade’s time Gault will invent the term nouvelle cuisine. Right now he is a cheerful Paris-Presse restaurant critic with enough time on his hands to drive Brigneau round Holland looking for a mysterious Dutch adventurer. Until yesterday they were not having much luck.

“Where is Westerling?” Brigneau asked his contacts.

“Who is Westerling?” said his contacts innocently.

Turk Westerling was the most notorious man in the Netherlands.

Fictional Painters of 1926

Ok, here’s some historical literary trivia for you. What do HP Lovecraft and Evelyn Waugh have in common apart from a deeply ingrained conservatism and a healthy dose of snobbery?

If you got the answer then pour yourself a drink. Both men created Francophone fictional painters active in 1926. Lovecraft came up with Monsieur Ardois-Bonnot, a French painter who ‘… hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926’, for his short story The Call of Cthulhu.

Ardois-Bonnot is an example of the worldwide psychic disturbances signifying the reappearance of the alien god. Cthulhu is obviously an art lover. Which salon he hung it in is another story, as there where at least three rival Paris art shows every spring.

Waugh’s contribution is Monsieur Jean de Brissac la Motte who appears in his novel Brideshead Revisited. De Brissac la Motte joins the narrator and friends in London at the time of the 1926 General Strike. He claims to have been in Budapest after WWI when Admiral Horthy rolled in and crushed the Bolsheviks; but ends up in hospital after an elderly widow drops a flower pot on his head from a top floor window.

‘We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.’

Most Futurists were painters, which seems to be what Waugh intended here, although some were writers or just liked causing trouble at the intersection of the politics and the art world. By 1926 Futurists had helped Fascism into power in Italy and were already a little disillusioned that Mussolini had no interest in bring their avant-garde dreams to life on the political stage.

Deceased, Well-Dressed Gangsters

I‘m a big fan of the Dead Guys in Suits blog. Pat Downey posts regular stuff about 1920s bootleggers, coppers, and gangsters meeting their various makers. The blog pretty much has a gangster death for every day of the year. It’s good stuff, macabre and chilling but ancient enough you don’t feel too sleazy about the rubbernecking.

Downey’s style is spiced with prohibition slang and a touch of cynical disrespect that nicely undercuts the glamour we tend to give men who standover for a living. He’s also written some full length books, like Bad Seeds in the Big Apple: Bandits, Killers & Chaos in New York 1920-1940 and Legs Diamond: Gangster. Anyone who likes the idea of blasting  tommy guns out the windows of a Model T Ford will get a good read.

Brian Blessed Punches Out Harold Pinter

Brian Blessed is a legendary British actor with a booming voice and charisma to spare. He’s been in everything from Shakespeare to Doctor Who, although most people remember him as the winged Prince Vultan in Flash Gordon. He also climbs mountains for fun and is the oldest man to have made it to the magnetic North Pole.

Harold Pinter is a now deceased playwright of doom, paranoia, and existential dread. Plays like The Birthday Party and The Caretaker have looping, pointless dialogues hinting at grim back stories and violent encounters. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005.

Now, thanks to Brian Blessed’s autobiography Absolute Pandemonium, we know that Prince Voltan once punched out the Nobel Prize winner. Here’s Blessed talking about the incident in the context of his friendship with Peter O’Toole.

A Short History of Russian Roulette in Australia

From above, the city of Melbourne looks like a bird of prey on the attack. Its wings stretch up into northern suburbs and its beak bears down to snatch a kill from Port Phillip Bay, the huge inland expanse of water on which the city sits. The bird’s beady eye is located in a grid of factories and Victorian houses known as Footscray.

Until the Second World War this area was the epitome of joyless working-class Australian suburbia. Pubs shut at six and restaurants risked a visit from the police if they served wine after eight. Except for a weekly trip to Oval Centre for the footy, Footscray’s inhabitants stayed home and minded their own business.

Those locals would not recognise Footscray today. The grey suburb has been transformed into a colourful district for young professionals attracted by cheap rents and a short commute to Melbourne’s centre. Coffee shops and art galleries thrive on the main streets. Restaurants and bars do good business.

The Almighty Gaylords of Chicago

They’re a street gang from Chicago’s North Side. A bunch of white boys with baseball bats and knives. They’ve been policing their blocks since 1954 and are still going today.  They have the strangest name of any street gang ever. Meet the Almighty Gaylords.

It started as a teen softball team back in the 1950s, when gay meant cheery and joyous. One of the boys got the name from a dictionary, although it might have helped there was an Italian-American singing trio called the Gaylords popular at the time.

The Vanishing of a Left-Wing Terrorist

The President of the United States gets a lot of unsolicited mail. Sack loads of begging letters, death threats, pleas for help, heartfelt congratulations, generalised hate mail, and closely worded arguments for the existence of alien life pour into the over-worked post room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Most of it is from correspondents unaware they are less important to the President than he is to them.

Charles Manson at Altamont, 1969

Ok, Charles Manson wasn’t at Altamont. He was already in police custody after an October 1969 raid on the Spahn Ranch for car theft. They booked him under the name “Manson, Charles M., aka Jesus Christ, God”.

One of the gang talked and soon the press knew Manson had ordered the murders of Sharon Tate, Gary Hinman, and too many others. The hippy dream was souring fast. Then a 6 December free festival at the Altamont speedway track in California ended with Hells Angels stabbing a man to death. It was a custom-made metaphor for the end of the love-and-peace era.

Hard Boiled Prose, Hemingway Style

Hard, cold, and carved. The minimalist prose style made famous by Ernest Hemingway shook up avant-garde Paris in the 1920s and made him a best-selling author. Within a few years any American tough guy writer with a glass of bourbon beside his typewriter wanted to sound like Hemingway.

“They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of the hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard.” [in our time, Ernest Hemingway, 1924]

Everyone from Raymond Carver to the interwar Pulp hacks tried to imitate the terse and telegraphic tone of the Hemingway narrator. Everyone wanted to sound like an intellectual barbarian who thought deep but parceled out insights as if long words were banned that year.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Ambrose Bierce

In 1913 the seventy-one-year-old Ambrose Bierce crossed the border from Texas into revolutionary Mexico. He never returned.

Bierce was a Civil War veteran, journalist, author, bohemian, and wit whose outlook on life was so darkly misanthropic that his army friends knew him as ‘Bitter’ Bierce. He’s remembered today as a writer of ghost stories (Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge still appears in anthologies) and the The Devil’s Dictionary, his definitive exercise in cynicism.

“Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.”

“Revolution, n. In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.”

Robbing Banks in South Africa with Police Captain Andre Stander

 

 

Johannesburg. Late 1983. A blue Cortina XR6 Interceptor cruises the Braamfontein business district in the dry heat of a South African afternoon. It pulls up near a policeman who stands with a shotgun over his shoulder. Two well dressed men exit the car. One has blond hair in tight curls and a thin horseshoe moustache. The other is dark with thick rimmed glasses. They walk past the policeman and head towards a bank.

The policeman ignores them and scans the traffic. Brigadier Manie van Rensburg, head of Robbery and Homicide, has ordered every policeman in Johannesburg to be on the look out for the Stander gang, a trio of escaped prisoners who have been robbing banks since August, sometimes four a day. The policeman with the shotgun knows what to look for. Screeching tires, slammed brakes, waving guns. He is ready for them.

Peter Kemp of the Spanish Foreign Legion

 

Take a look in the bibliography of any work about the Spanish Civil War and you’ll find a book by Peter Kemp. Mine Were of Trouble is one of the very few accounts of the war told by a foreign volunteer who fought for the Nationalists. There are whole library shelves full of autobiographies by the International Brigades but Kemp’s book has been out of print since the 1950s and goes for stupidly high prices these days.

Now it looks there’s a chance Mine Were of Trouble may come back into print. Adam Nettina is currently shepherding a new edition through an American publisher. Hopefully we’ll be seeing them on book shelves soon. More news when it gets here.

Cleon: Cover Artist to the Lost Generation

Ernest Hemingway hated the cover to A Farewell to Arms when it was published in 1929. A man, an angel, and a flowering tree in a circular design of gold and red against a blue background.

The cover was done by Cleon, the pen name of Cleonike Damianakes Wilkins. She did three Hemingway covers, a book each for F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and a couple for Conrad Aiken.

“The Cleon drawing,” Hemingway said, “has a lousy and completely unattractive decadence i.e. large misplaced breasts.”

André the Giant has an Existential Crisis

You’ll know André René Roussimoff one of three ways.

Wrestling fans know him as André the Giant from the WWF, a man mountain who took on everyone from Killer Khan to Hulk Hogan. Filmgoers remember him best from 1982’s The Princess Bride where he steals every scene he’s in as Fezzik, the sweet but dim henchman. Or, if you like graffiti, you might know him from Shepard Fairey‘s Posse and Obey artwork.

Woody Allen Fights a Kangaroo

We know Woody Allen as a neurotic Jewish-American comic who married his girlfriend’s adopted daughter and made many classic films along with some terrible ones. Everyone loves Annie Hall, a warm and funny comedy about relationships. Everyone hates Hollywood Ending, where the main character is blind and makes the audience wish they were too. And deaf. And watching something else.

But British audiences in 1966 knew him as the man who boxed a kangaroo at the Hippodrome. Sure, why not?

Pete Townshend Bombs the Viet Cong

Vietnam 1968. American troops are all over the Mekong Delta. The Viet Cong are sniping from the rice paddies. And up above, in the endless blue skies, American airplanes are dropping napalm into the jungle, trying to bomb the Communist enemy back to the stone age. And British guitarist Pete Townshend of The Who is helping them.

Karl Marx vs the Filipino Vampire Ghouls

The Aswang is a wandering Vampire Ghoul from Filipino folklore. It’s a daywalking shape-shifter that eats the livers out of children and makes a sinister ‘Tik Tik’ noise that gets quieter as it approaches. If you look into an Aswang’s eyes you’ll see your own reflection upside down. That’s how you tell.

Back in the late 1940s the Philippines was entangled in a peasant uprising against the government. The guerrilla Hukbalahap movement had fought the Japanese occupiers during the war and expected its reward when independence came. Instead the new government decided the Huks were trouble-making communists and arrested the movement’s leaders. The guerrillas went back into the jungle and started shooting.

New Book on Ethiopia Due in 2017

 

A few months back I signed the contract for my third book. Time to open the champagne. The book will probably being coming out some time  towards the end of 2017 with Amberley Publishing. It’s called ‘Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Foreign Legion of Nazis, Mercenaries, and Black Crusaders in the War against Fascism’.

A guaranteed best seller. People would have to be crazy not to buy it. Now I just have to write the thing. Here’s what it’s about:

Katanga 1960-63 – in Bookshops Now

 

My book is published. Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies, and the African Nation that Waged War on the World [or amazon.com] is available in hardback and ebook. Prices look reasonable. Hope you enjoy it and here’s what it’s about:

Katanga is now dirt beneath the fingernails of history but while it lived this secessionist state divided the world. Even now it divides the Congo from Europe. If you want to see an African diplomat rage, praise Katangese leader Moise Tshombe. Want to start a bar fight in Kinshasa? Wave a Katangese flag. The events of 1960 are the ground zero of CIA-sponsored African dictatorships, private military contractors, conflict diamonds, and global corporations picking clean the bones of Third World countries.

Remember: if you buy from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com you can leave a review letting the world know what you thought. It’ll really help.

If you want to show some love for this blog then buy my books in paperback, hardback, or ebook. It all helps.

The Men from Miami: American Rebels on Both Sides of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution [or amazon.com]

The King of Nazi Paris: Henri Lafont and the Gangsters of the French Gestapo [or amazon.com]

Soldiers of a Different God: How the Counter-Jihad Created Mayhem, Murder, and the Trump Presidency [or amazon.com]

Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion 1935-41  [or amazon.com]

Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World  [or amazon.com]

Franco’s International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War [or amazon.com]

Katanga 1960-63 eBook Available

For those who prefer pixels to ink, there is an ebook version of Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies, and the African Nation that Waged War on the World [or  amazon.com].

Here’s a taste from the introduction to whet your appetite:

Katanga 1960-63 in America

Good news for American readers – Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World will be distributed over there starting December 2015. It’ll be available through Amazon and all the usual suspects. It may even turn up in your local bookshop. It’s being distributed by the lovely people at IPG.

Katanga is available in hardback and ebook. Here’s a moment from the introduction about spending an evening in a dodgy Brussels bar:

Katanga Book Coming in September 2015

Looks like Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation That Waged War on the World [or amazon.com] will be released September 2015. Here’s the Katanga 1960-63 amazon.co.uk page. You can order the book in advance or wait impatiently until it hits the shops. Blood diamonds, CIA assassins, jungle fire fights, unsolved murders, and a man who once flew Haile Selassie’s private plane into a tree. Some good photographs too.

Katanga 1960-63 tells, for the first time, the full story of the Congolese province that declared independence in 1960 and found itself at war with the world. The Congo had no intention of allowing the renegade region to secede, and neither did the CIA, the KGB, or the United Nations.

Franco’s International Brigades Available as eBook

You can now read Franco’s International Brigades [or amazon.com]on your Kindle. The ebook version is available from Amazon as of today. It has a nice new cover and some light revision to the previous Hurst edition text.

Remember – if you’ve ever bought anything from Amazon you’ve got an account there. And that means you can review any book on the site. So if you feel like telling the world how much you enjoyed Franco’s International Brigades go right ahead. It will really help to raise the book’s profile.

For all those completists out there, this ebook edition has some additional material about Australian Catholic reactions to the Spanish Civil War and an updated total for Greek volunteers in Franco’s forces. The photograph selection is slightly different too.

Enjoy.

If you want to show some love for this blog then buy my books in paperback, hardback, or ebook. It all helps.

The Men from Miami: American Rebels on Both Sides of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution [or amazon.com]

The King of Nazi Paris: Henri Lafont and the Gangsters of the French Gestapo [or amazon.com]

Soldiers of a Different God: How the Counter-Jihad Created Mayhem, Murder, and the Trump Presidency [or amazon.com]

Lost Lions of Judah: Haile Selassie’s Mongrel Foreign Legion 1935-41  [or amazon.com]

Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World  [or amazon.com]

Franco’s International Brigades: Adventurers, Fascists, and Christian Crusaders in the Spanish Civil War [or amazon.com]