Soho Crime Boss
In the grey post-war world, Soho was the most exciting and
dangerous place in Britain.
Crime, sex, foreign food, and jazz, all lived side by side in this melting pot
of approximately one square mile in the centre of London
that is Soho.
There were no flowers near to where Jack Comer was born; as a Jew from the east
end of London, his earliest memory of a vibrant colour was the scarlet red
blood that gushed from the gaping wound left by a cut-throat razor, during a
street fight between two rival illegal bookmakers.
With such childhood memories it was no wonder that Comer wandered into a life
of crime. A life that took him from his humble east-end beginnings, to the top
of his chosen profession, as the boss of the London Underworld.
Wage snatches and gold bullion heists featured heavily in Comer’s line of work,
as did protection rackets, gambling, and taking over west-end nightclubs. None
of this however, could be achieved without a high level of violence, some of
which ended in death, gang warfare, bent coppers, and double dealings from all
sides.
There were however, two sides to Jack Comer; the side that everyone saw was
Jack Comer the vicious gangster, but the other side of the coin was Jack Comer,
the family man, who would have laid his life on the line for his wife and
daughter.
Jack Comer made many enemies along the way, from the early racecourse gangs
during the 1930s, to the 1940s wartime racketeers, and through to the first
organised sex trade gangs who were threatening the well-being of his clubs and
spielers in the west end.
As the 1950s was coming to an end, the old guard were also in decline and new
faces in the guise of a pair of twins from London’s
East End, were starting to make their presence felt around Soho.
Comer was starting to feel the heat, but being the man he was, he was not about
to take this new threat lightly.
