Pity the under-siege Conservative Cabinet minister who fails to spot stories of a party donor’s brushes with the Gambino crime family – that is the unhappy lot of Housing Secretary Robert “Honest Bob” Jenrick.
Ask Jenrick about his due diligence on the ex-porn baron and his possible connections to a crooked lawyer working for Team Kremlin oligarchs and you find, in the words of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a great ox has stepped on his tongue.
The boy-faced wunderkind, the youngest member of Johnson’s Cabinet, is in trouble because he overruled Tower Hamlets Council and approved a £1 billion 1,500-home property development promoted by ex-porn baron Richard Desmond on his old Daily Express printing works at Westferry in London’s docklands.
Jenrick timed his decision so that it took place a day before the council could hit the developer with a £40 million local levy. He also lifted an affordable homes clause, saving the developer a further £106 million. This is the only time Jenrick has overruled a council in this way.
When Tower Hamlets appealed, the minister changed his mind because he now realised his decision was “unlawful” due to “apparent bias”. The buck has now been passed to another minister, but the way Jenrick reversed his call had an interesting effect – preventing the court from examining the Government’s decision-making chain.
The Gambino Family Affair
Some weeks before Jenrick made his “unlawful” planning decision, he had sat next to Desmond at a fundraising beano at The Savoy in November. Desmond, it turned out, had given the Conservatives £12,000. At the bash, he showed the Housing Secretary a four-minute film about his billion-quid development on his phone. This latest intelligence comes from Desmond himself via The Sunday Times, raising the possibility that the entrepreneur is getting his own back.
But the Conservatives and Jenrick should have treated Desmond with a long spoon. In 2001, I reported for BBC Radio Five Live on the then porn baron’s brush with the Gambino crime family a decade before. Desmond had cut a deal with American entrepreneurs over phone sex lines but the parties soon fell out. The Americans wanted a million pounds back, and a million on top – for the insult. Desmond denied this.
In late 1992, Desmond’s then managing director, Philip Bailey, went to New York. Bailey subsequently told Andrew Cameron, former managing director of Express Newspapers, what happened next: “They took him into the back of a car, a stretch limo perhaps, a vehicle of some sort, stripped him, applied a cattle prod to his testicles, put a gun to his head, drove him down along that road near the Hudson, said to him ‘you go back and tell your boss it’s a short hop across the pond’, and threw him out on the sidewalk.” Bailey said he had been cattle-prodded, pistol-whipped and knife-slashed.
Officer Thomas Ramos of the NYPD’s 19th precinct wrote up an extremely detailed report on the case on 24 October 1992. The NYPD was not able to complete an investigation because Bailey returned to England.
Desmond pooh-poohed the story but that wasn’t the end of it. In December 1987, James Brown was sentenced by an Old Bailey judge for perverting the course of justice to seven years. Brown had shoved a sawn-off shotgun against the head of a man who was a potential witness in a court case, telling him that nothing would happen to him if he didn’t give evidence but if did: “I’ll blow your f***ing head off.”
While Brown was still serving his sentence, Desmond appointed him to be company secretary of his porn empire. After Desmond and Brown fell out, a source close to Brown said that the threat to Desmond’s life was real and that it came from the Gambino family: “It was £2