Alec de Antiquis lying dead in Charlotte Street.

Anatomy of a gun-law culture

A murder on the streets of post-war London 60 years ago came to symbolise the lawlessness of the times. Tom Foot reports

North Soho 999: A True Story of Gangs and Gun-Crime in 1940's London by Paul Willetts Order This book

AUTHOR Paul Willetts’ biography of the Soho legend Julian Mclaren Ross was many national newspapers’ book of the year in 2002.
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 ringleaders of a smash-and-grab gang targeting jewellers in the West End.
An agency snapper photographed the 31-year-old’s body slumped against the kerb seconds after the brutal killing.
The image, beamed around the world at the time, revealed the human cost of teenage gun crime in bomb-scarred 1940s 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. Antiquis tried to tackle them but was “executed” in Charlotte Street.
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.
The breakthrough came when a taxi driver called round to the investigation headquarters at Tottenham Court Road police station.
The cabbie talked about seeing two men at Brook House, a nearby office block where another man was waiting by the entrance.
The two of them had then disappeared into the office block, located on the corner where Torrington Place met Tottenham Court Road.
Fabian searched the building and found a raincoat stuffed behind a dusty counter in an upstairs storeroom.
Fabian tore open the seams and found a cloth label, leading them to a factory in Leeds where the coat had been manufactured.
They found the coat had been delivered to Montagu Burton’s, a men’s clothing chain in Deptford.
The shop, under rationing laws, had kept a record of each buyer.
Jenkins and his accomplice Christopher Geraghty, 21, from Islington, were eventually found, sentenced to death after an Old Bailey trial and hanged in Pentonville.
In a bizarre twist, the hangman Albert Pierrepoint, whose life was recently documented in the British movie Pierrepoint, witnessed the attack from the Fitzroy Tavern.
Pierrepoint was the last executioner before capital punishment ended in 1965.
Willetts said the stranger-than-fiction aspects of the story appealed to him.
He says: “I was keen to do something in the area – geographically I know it.
“But I wanted to shift across into fiction.
“I researched a lot of crime statistics, novels and police propaganda and I came across the story of Antiquis.
“It was a celebrated case that was largely forgotten because of the name of the deceased – it just didn’t really have a ring to it like the Black Dahlia about Beth Short who was shot in the same year.
“The killing led to questions being asked in Parliament by the Home Secretary and led to a campaign about teenage gun crime in the Daily Mail.
“The story faded from the public consciousness. I started writing fiction but I found that nothing was as interesting as this.
“Real-life crime stories have a resonance I don’t think you can achieve writing fiction.”