"Venturing into the urban underbelly of post-war Britain, and especially of London, Villains' Paradise explores the shadowy ganglands where armed robbery, prostitution, drugs, and protection flourished. It charts the paths of crooks and thugs who stole, collected, peddled, pimped, and killed by their sobriquets: the Velvet Kid, Johnny the Gent, the Monkey, the Professor, the Ferret, the Hat, Big Albert, Jack Spot. It discovers the cops that gangland bosses bent." "In a riveting narrative, this absorbing social history of Britain's underworld reopens the files on criminal cases both notorious and nefarious to reveal the darker side of an era in which vice was as shocking as it was commonplace."--Jacket.
|
