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A dark history of crime in Soho
North Soho 999. By Paul Willetts
AUTHOR Paul Willetts’ biography of the Soho novelist and raconteur Julian Maclaren-Ross was many literary critics’ book of the year in 2005.
Fear And Loathing In Fitzrovia told the story of the novelist’s life of debauchery, debt and alcoholism in the post-war milieu.
Willetts’ follow-up, North Soho 999, marks the 60th anniversary of a cold-blooded murder in Charlotte Street in the same era.
Alec de Antiquis was shot dead in Charlotte Street on April 29 1947 after challenging the leaders of a smash-and-grab gang targeting jewellers in the West End.
An agency photographer snapped the 31-year-old’s body slumped against the kerb seconds after the brutal killing (pictured).
The image, beamed around the world at the time, revealed the human cost of teenage gun crime in bomb-scarred 1940s London.
Willetts trawled through Old Bailey transcripts and scores of newspapers cuttings.
He says: “People will tell you that teenage gun crime is a modern phenomenon – a fashion blamed on black people or rap culture. But the statistics surrounding this story paint a different picture. In London alone, 10,300 people between the ages of 14 and 20 were, by 1947, convicted members of criminal gangs. It was a wave of gun crime and gangsterism threatening to overwhelm post war London.”
Charles Jenkins gunned down Antiquis, an Italian-born mechanic and father of six, following a botched raid on Jay’s jewellers in Tottenham Street.
The getaway driver, a 17-year-old ‘novice’, failed to find the reverse gear and the masked robbers were forced to flee on foot.
Superintendent Robert Fabian, nicknamed ‘Fabian of the Yard’, solved the murder after a mystery mackintosh holding forensic clues led detectives on a nationwide manhunt stretching from the South London to North Yorkshire.
Jenkins and his accomplice Christopher Geraghty, 21, from Islington, were eventually found, sentenced to death after an Old Bailey trial and hanged in Pentonville.
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