Mrs Zigzag by Betty Chapman

Author:Betty Chapman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780752492766
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-03-01T21:00:00+00:00

7

A COLOURFUL BUNCH

OF VILLAINS

Picking up the pieces after the disaster of Ghana, Eddie returned to Tangier and bought – with money provided by Betty – a yacht called Flamingo. At that time Betty owned a share of Terence Young’s film The Red Beret,1 which she sold to the film producer Cubby Broccoli in order to raise the money.2 She takes up the story:

Terence Young was very flamboyant and extravagant – he liked to show off. Although he made lots of money off the Bond movies, it seemed he was always short of money. One day he came to me and said ‘Betty, I’m a little short of money. Would you like to buy my share in The Red Beret?’ So I said yes, and I bought his share. Eddie had decided by this time that he wanted to get a boat. Eddie always had all kinds of wild schemes because his whole family was sea-going. This boat was the famous Flamingo that he went to Africa with, which caused press coverage more or less worldwide. Cubby Broccoli came to do the deal for Terence Young on The Red Beret and I immediately sent the money down to Tangier to help Eddie pay for the boat.

Eddie crewed the boat with Bill Beamish as his skipper again, and a crew of old criminal associates, as well as the boxer George Walker. Eddie recalled:

I had done a deal with the fellow who ran Soho to buy half a yacht,3 an ex-admiralty boat. I had a look at it and liked it so bought a half share. I flew to Tangier with him and I met some friends of mine down there who said that they could give me one or two nice smuggling jobs. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll introduce you to the people running some of the smuggling, and there is a hell of a profit for cigarettes, whisky etc., and you can get plenty of money from this.’

Eddie said of his crew:

They were all villains, top villains, and not one of them had been to sea before. A lot of them had never been outside London before, but they took that boat 3,500 miles to Tangier. When the boat arrived in Tangier, they all got off, they looked around, and said, ‘What the hell are we going to do here?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about it, I am going to take you to meet a friend of mine’, and I took them to the best brothel in Tangier. The woman who ran it used to give me information from time to time. I introduced them all. They employed about thirty girls there. She had a menu printed, but as well as the food, was the price of all the girls.

They did genuine cargo work there, as well as the smuggling of guns, gold and cigarettes. Dealing in contraband in that area was so widespread it was almost respectable. Eddie tells the story: ‘We ended up smuggling about 2–3,000 cases of cigarettes which we bought at about 4 pence per pack.

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