Lost at Sea (30 page)

I don’t see Jonathan in the canteen or the lobby on the day of the verdict, but I do see him in the dock as the jury files in. He smiles at me. Every male juror makes a point of looking at Jonathan as they take their seats. The women all look away. The clerk of the court asks the foreman for the verdict on the first count, and he says, “Guilty.”

Jonathan nods.

Then it is time for count two—the most serious charge. Buggery. This is the charge that relates to Chris Sealey. The foreman says, “Guilty.”

Jonathan nods.

There are six guilty verdicts in total. A clean sweep. Judge Paget says that, under these circumstances, bail must be revoked. Within seconds, Jonathan is led downstairs from the dock and straight to Belmarsh prison.

•   •   •

LITTLE KELLERSTAIN,
Tam Paton’s large, outlandish, rural bungalow near Edinburgh Airport, his home for twenty-seven years, give or take his twelve months in jail for child-sex offenses and the years traveling the world in Learjets and limousines with his young charges, the Bay City Rollers, is noisy today. You imagine it to have always been a noisy place. Indeed, the old neighbors, the now-dead rich couple who lived next door at the grand Kellerstain House, used to complain bitterly about their eccentric legendary pop-impresario neighbor, the packs of screaming Roller fans forever camped outside his electric gates, the parties, the teams of police officers searching his house for clues of pedophile activity, and then more screaming—the screams of the headlines: “Sordid Secrets of Twisted Tam,” “Tam’s Night in the Sauna with the Boys.”

Today, the place is noisy with dogs and boys. The dogs are Rottweilers. There are four of them, and they seem to hate one another. There are about half a dozen boys living with Tam. They live in spare rooms and in trailers in the garden. They are all around eighteen years old. Tam is sixty-three now. He is polite to a fault, almost humble. It is as if the years of being considered a pedophile have reduced him to a position of constant subservience around strangers. The Tam Paton of today is nothing like the fearsome Svengali you would see on television during the Roller years.

I have come to see Paton because of the similarities in his and Jonathan King’s crimes. They were friends and colleagues, and would visit the Hop together. The boys Paton “indecently assaulted” were not that young like Jonathan. The youngest was fifteen. I know it will take Jonathan years to settle into his new role in life as a convicted celebrity pedophile. Paton has had twenty years to do this. So I imagine that meeting him will be like meeting Jonathan in the future.

“I was jailed for six years for underage sex,” says Tam. “Underage sex. Under the age of twenty-one. This was 1981. I served a year. My victims were . . . one was fifteen. I never even touched him. There was nothing physical in that particular charge. The chap was deaf and he had a speech impediment. He came to my house and he saw a pornographic movie, a heterosexual pornographic movie.”

“What was it called?” I ask.

“Tina with the Big Tits,”
says Tam. “This happened right here in this very room. It was all to do with women’s boobs. Big boobs. All sizes of boobs. And he’d had two lagers. The charges that were raised against me was that I’d subjected a fifteen-year-old handicapped boy to pornographic movies and supplied him with stupefying alcohol with intent to pervert and corrupt. I got six months right there for that.”

Tam takes me to the scene of more of his crimes—his sauna room. It was built in the seventies, in what used to be his utility room. He turns on the Jacuzzi. It bubbles into life. “I got six months for putting my hand on a guy’s leg in the sauna,” says Tam. “And then I got another two years for a chap who willingly came up here. He was sixteen, educated, a nice guy. He came up in a taxi. I gave him a bottle of Lambrusco.”

Of course, the stigma of being imprisoned for underage-sex crimes remains with Tam. Just last week, one of his friends—who has a three-month-old baby—was visited by social services and warned that the baby should be kept away from Tam.

“A tiny little baby!” says Tam. “People look at me like I’m an animal. People who don’t know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: ‘There’s a pedophile!’ Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I’ll tell you, it outweighed anything I’d ever done.”

“What had she done?” I ask.

“Shoplifting,” says Tam.

There is a silence.

“People have their own little guilt trips,” says Tam. “They look around. ‘Who’s a beast? Who’s a pedo?’ Now it’s on my record for the rest of my life. If I want to go into business, I have to state that I was done for lewd and libidinous. Gross indecency. People think, ‘Oh my God! He must have been crawling about in a nursery.’”

“Can I ask about the boys who live here?” I say. “What do they do?”

“They clean up,” he replies, a little sharply. “They feed the dogs. They take them for walks. They help me with my property business. They are eighteen years of age, and I don’t have a relationship with them. You can interview them until the cows come home. Maybe I just like nice people floating about. We don’t have orgies. There’s no swinging from the chandeliers. Even if there was,” he adds, “it would be legal.”

Tam believes he was targeted because of his fame, because he was a celebrity Svengali. He blames his arrest, then, on the pop business. And now he is out of it. He has become a property millionaire, with forty flats in Edinburgh’s West End.

“I do get myself upset,” he says. “I’ve given away all the Roller albums to charity. I want to forget it all. I’ve had two heart attacks. And now the same thing is happening with Jonathan. A foxhunt. Everyone wants to see the death of the fox. They would never have gone after us if we were heterosexual. But if you’re a poof, my God.”

I change the subject.

“Do you think you have emotionally scarred any of the boys for life?” I ask.

“Oh my God,” he says. “I hope not.”

•   •   •

IN MID-OCTOBER 2001,
I have coffee with Jonathan King’s brothers Andy. He’s just visited Jonathan in Belmarsh for the first time.

“How is Jonathan doing?” I ask.

“Great,” says Andy. “He seems really cheerful. Talking ten to a dozen.”

“Really?” I ask.

“He’s wearing pink pajamas as a silent protest,” Andy tells me. “He says it’s aesthetically reminiscent of the way gays were treated under the Nazis.”

On November 20, things take a turn for the better for Jonathan. He is acquitted of buggery and indecent assault in the second trial—the witness admits on the stand that he was sixteen and not fifteen. The Crown Prosecution Service announces that same day that it won’t proceed with any more trials—this includes the allegations from boys who said Jonathan King had picked them up at the Walton Hop.

The next morning, Jonathan is sentenced to seven years. Judge Paget says that the case is a tragedy. This otherwise honorable man, he says, this successful celebrity, used and abused his fame and success to attract impressionable teenagers. But there was no violence, no threats used.

Jonathan smiles and nods as he is sentenced. One journalist says that he looks smug; another says that he looks pale and beaten. His name is placed indefinitely on the sex offenders’ list. The police say he may have abused hundreds of boys over the past thirty years.

POSTSCRIPT

Jonathan King wrote to me throughout his prison sentence, and sent me Christmas cards, etc. I wasn’t the only one. The
Observer
’s Lynn Barber published a brilliant article about their pen-pal friendship. Her husband, David Cardiff (who was my teacher at college), was dying, and Jonathan had proved to be a “wonderful confidant,” she wrote. She visited him at Maidstone prison and reported that he was walking around wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m a celebrity—get me out of here!”

“The very qualities—the relentless cheeriness, bumptiousness and optimism—which made him seem quite irritating on the outside seem absolutely heroic in prison,” she wrote.

Just before Christmas 2001, a few weeks after the
Guardian
published my story about the case, I received a telephone call from the former Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning. Back in the seventies, Denning and Jonathan were best friends and business partners. Denning had, days earlier, been released from a three-year jail sentence in Prague for child-sex offenses. The night before his deportation from the Czech Republic, I met him at a down-at-the-heels hotel off Wenceslas Square. He wouldn’t say which country he was going to. (It turned out to be Austria.) He faced a number of similar offenses in Britain, and he told me he’d be arrested if he ever returned here.

He turned up with a boy. He introduced him as one of the boys he’d just been in prison for, and he said he brought him along to prove they were still friends. The boy had the flu, and throughout the interview he sat on the bed, sniffing, and looking bored and ill.

I asked Chris Denning if Jonathan King had learned how to pick up boys from him.

“That’s possible,” he said. “He did steal some of the things I did.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I would make funny remarks,” he said. “I’d be walking down the street with a couple of my younger friends and I’d say something absolutely absurd to a passerby. I remember one joke I had. I’d say to a passerby, ‘Excuse me, do you know where so-and-so street is?’ And they’d say, ‘No. I’m sorry, I don’t.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, I can help you! It’s just down there on the left . . . !’ And for young people—for somebody like me to make a joke like that—it was hilarious.”

Chris Denning—despite his various jail sentences and the fact that he’d been sleeping rough in a Prague cemetery for the past week, on and off—still had the looks and voice and demeanor of an old-style Radio 1 DJ.

“But Jonathan’s humor always had a streak of cruelty,” Denning added, “and I’ve always tried not to do that. I hate that kind of thing. Once, I was going along in his car to Brighton. He’d invited a couple of young people I knew. He’d said, ‘Why don’t you bring them along for the trip?’ He had a chauffeur. He said, ‘James! To Brighton!’ I was sitting in the Rolls-Royce with my shoes half off and he grabbed them and chucked them out of the window. I said to the chauffeur, ‘James. Can you please stop? I want to get my shoes.’ Jonathan said to him, ‘If you stop, you’re fired. Drive on.’”

“What did the boys in the car think of it?” I asked.

“I don’t think they liked it,” he said. “It was funny, you see, but it was cruel.”

Chris Denning asked me if I wanted to know the worst thing about being attracted to underage boys.

“Sadly,” he said, “they grow up. They disappear. The person you were attracted to has gone. He doesn’t exist anymore. You can never have a lasting relationship with them. It’s very sad.”

In August 2005, Chris Denning returned to London from Austria. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport and in February 2006 was convicted of child-sex offenses dating back to the seventies and eighties. He was sentenced to four years in prison. That same week, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Jon,

I was abused by King’s mate Chris Denning who, as you know, has just been banged up. I recently sent this e-mail to King. You may find it amusing.

Dear Jonathan, I see your old mate Chris Denning has been given another serve of porridge. Hardly seems fair that he only got four years and you got seven, but then again you are an extremely repulsive and smarmy cunt and one can’t really blame the judge for wanting to shaft you.

You are no doubt aware that your ex employer the Sun has published a piece linking you to Denning as members of a “paedophile ring.” May I make a suggestion Jonathan, this could be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to restore your tattered reputation. Why don’t you sue the Sun Jonathan? How dare they link you to that vile pervert Denning! After all you are a wronged man, a “victim” of your own celebrity. A modern day Oscar Wilde. And after all it’s not your fault that twelve year old boys are so damn sexy, and of course they all wanted it, why wouldn’t an adolescent boy want to be pawed and fucked up the arse by a slavering, fat, ugly pig like your good self. I expect they were beating down your door Jonathan, how unfair that you should be persecuted for providing these boys with a “service.” Such a cruel world.

My dear sweet Jonathan I am not sure what lies beyond the great divide, I try to live a good life and I hope to die with honor. I am however sure of one thing. That is this. When you die you will be met by them and welcomed, the suicides, and the ones who chose to die slowly by bottle and by needle. And they shall take you in their arms dear Jonathan, and embrace you for all eternity.

Your friend,

Simon

PART FIVE

JUSTICE

“Look at your face. You look like a slave.”

—From “Amber Waves of Green”

Amber Waves of Green

A
s I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway into Malibu, I catch glimpses of cliff-top mansions discreetly obscured from the road, which is littered with abandoned gas stations and run-down mini-marts. The office building I pull into is quite drab and utilitarian. There are no ornaments on the conference-room shelves—just a bottle of hand sanitizer. An elderly, broad-shouldered man greets me. He’s wearing jogging pants. They don’t look expensive. His name is B. Wayne Hughes.

You almost definitely won’t have heard of him. He never gives interviews. He only agreed to this one because—as his people explained to me—income disparity is a hugely important topic for him. They didn’t explain how it was important, so I assumed he thought it was bad.

I approached Wayne, as he’s known, for wholly mathematical reasons. The same goes for everyone I meet for this story. I’ve worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a dishwasher making less than $8 an hour and a
Forbes
billionaire, if you multiply each person’s income by five. So I decided to journey across America to meet one of each multiple, to try to understand their financial lives and the vast chasms that separate them. Everyone in this story, then, makes roughly five times more than the last person makes. There’s a minimum-wage guy in Miami with an unbelievably stressful life, some nice middle-class Iowans with quite terrible lives, me with a perfectly fine if frequently anxiety-inducing life, a millionaire with an annoyingly happy life, a multimillionaire with a stunningly amazing life, and then, finally, at the summit, this great American eagle, Wayne, who tells me he’s “pissed off” right now.

“I live my life paying my taxes and taking care of my responsibilities and I’m a little surprised to find out that I’m an enemy of the state at this time in my life,” he says. He has a big, booming voice like an old-school billionaire, not one of those nerdy new billionaires.

“Has anyone said that to your face?” I ask him.

“Nobody has to say it,” says Wayne. “Just watch what they’re doing.”

“You mean the Occupy Wall Street crowd?”

“Those guys are a bunch of jerks,” Wayne mutters, giving a dismissive wave that says, “They’re just a sideshow.” “Politically I’m on the enemy list. And I’m not so naive not to recognize it. I’ve lived my whole life doing what I thought was right and now I’m an enemy of the state.”

Is he, though? It’s true that income inequality is a big campaign issue. Obama in a recent speech: “What drags down our entire economy is when there’s an ultra-wide chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.” Whereas Romney called Obama’s attacks on the super-rich, “the bitter politics of envy. I believe in a merit nation, an opportunity nation where people by virtue of their education, their hard work and risk taking and their dreams—maybe a little luck—could achieve great things.”

The reality, though, is rarely are enemies of the state treated so incredibly well. Their tax rate is at a seventy-year low. In the 1950s and 1960s, the top tax bracket paid more than 80 percent. It was 70 percent when Reagan took office, 39 percent under Clinton, and now, under Obama, it’s 35 percent. But the very, very rich don’t pay even that. By utilizing a variety of loopholes, like awarding themselves dividends instead of income, the four hundred richest Americans pay, on average, 18 percent tax.

Wayne won’t reveal exactly what he pays now that he’s at the top, but he’s happy to tell me he began at the bottom. “Have you read
The Grapes of Wrath
?” he says. “That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the top of their cars in the movie? That was the way it was.”

They had nothing. His father got a job winding coils that went into refrigeration units. Wayne grew up in East Los Angeles, went to college, joined the navy, drifted around. For a while he worked for unglamorous-sounding businesses with names like the Frieden Corporation, but nothing stuck. He got married, had two children, and wasn’t thriving. He had to do something.

And then he had an idea.

Maybe “idea” is the wrong word. He had a realization about a very no-frills aspect of American life: “You could rent a storage unit out for more than you could rent an apartment out, and with none of the overheads.”

“How come?” I ask.

“Supply and demand,” he replies, shrugging. “People needed them and were willing to pay for them.”

This was 1972. He put a down payment on a building in San Diego and divided it into two hundred units. “After that, it was just building the units up, one at a time. For years and years. That’s all. You don’t get money unless you have a lot of talent, which I don’t have, or you work hard, which is what I do. We don’t have any golden touch here.”

“How many buildings have you got now?” I ask.

“Maybe twenty-three hundred,” he says. “With five or six hundred units inside each.”

Wayne says he never once stopped to contemplate the amount of money he was making. “I was just looking at getting the best locations I could and getting the buildings opened and getting the tenants and getting the cash flow and on and on,” he says.

“You never once thought, ‘This money is cascading in. I am worth FOUR BILLION DOLLARS?’” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t spend any time at all thinking about my personal wealth. I suppose if I had nothing I might think, ‘I have nothing.’ But when we decided to go public and I saw how much money there was, I was very surprised.”

In 2006, Wayne was America’s 61st richest man, according to
Forbes
, with $4.1 billion. Then the recession hit and now he’s now the 242nd richest (and the 683rd richest in the world), with $1.9 billon. He’s among the least-famous people on the
Forbes
list. In fact, he once called the magazine and asked them to remove his name. “I said, ‘It’s an imposition.
Forbes
should not be doing that. It’s the wrong thing to do. It puts my children and my grandchildren at risk.’”

“And what did they say?” I ask.

“They said when Trump called up, he said the number next to his name was too small.”

When Wayne is in Malibu, he stays in his daughter’s spare room. His home is a three-bedroom farmhouse on a working stud farm in Lexington, Kentucky. “I have no fancy living at all,” he says. “Well. I have a house in Sun Valley. Five acres in the woods. I guess that’s fancy.”

I like Wayne very much. He’s avuncular and salt of the earth. I admire how far he has risen from the
Grapes of Wrath
circumstances into which he was born; he’s the very embodiment of the American Dream. I’ll return to Wayne—and the curious way he views the world—a bit later.

But first let’s plummet all the way down to the very, very bottom, as if we’re falling down a well, to a concrete slab of a house on a hot, dusty, potholed street in a downtrodden Miami neighborhood called Little Haiti.

•   •   •

THE AIR IS SO DRY
it hurts your teeth, unlike Wayne’s Malibu air, which is enlivening. As it happens, the view down the street includes not only used-car lots but also storage facilities—the idea that made Wayne his billions.

A young man peers into a crack of sunlight that emerges from behind one of the sheets that block out all his windows. His name is Maurose Frantz, but he goes by Frantz. He can’t afford air-conditioning, hence the sheets, so it’s very dark and stuffy in here with old air. Six people live here—Frantz and his parents, grandparents, and little brother—and it’s the size of my living room.

“Outside is dangerous,” Frantz says. “One time someone pulled up and said to me, ‘Do you need a gun?’ He showed me a
gun
! I said, ‘I can’t hear you, man.’ Another time my grandpa—they jumped him. They took his wallet. They slotted him. He cried, he cried, he cried.”

Frantz is Haitian. His accent is very strong. Throughout our time together, I’m constantly asking him to repeat what he said.

“They did what to your grandpa?” I say. “They slotted him? Slattered him? Sorry?”

“
Slapped
him,” Frantz replies.
“Slapped.”

Frantz washes dishes at Miami’s Capital Grille restaurant, a posh steakhouse right on the harbor in Miami’s financial district. He makes $180 to $200 for a twenty-seven-hour week. That means he makes in an hour what I make in 2.4 minutes, and what Wayne makes pretty much every time he breathes in and out.

At the end of the week, Frantz gets an ATM card with his pay already loaded onto it. He receives no health benefits or sick leave or anything like that. Sometimes when he clocks out at the end of the night, he finds he’s already been mysteriously clocked out by someone else. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), a restaurant workers’ advocacy group, say this practice has been reported in Capital Grilles across the country, so they’ve launched a class-action suit against Darden—the restaurant chain that owns Capital Grille—for such “wage improprieties.” Frantz says he’s repeatedly requested some kind of paper breakdown of how many hours he’s been paid for and how much tax has come off, but they never give it to him, so he’s stopped asking. He’s also stopped asking for a promotion to busboy. He says they told him they’d let him know, but they never did. According to ROC, the Capital Grille is notorious for denying promotions to dark-skinned people. It’s possible for a black worker to become a busboy, Frantz says, but he’s never seen a black server.

Last night, one of Frantz’s coworkers threw away his shoes.

“I checked everywhere,” he says. “I checked in the garbage but I couldn’t find them. I called the sous-chef and I told him, ‘I put down my shoes. Somebody threw them away.’ He said, ‘Frantz, you know me. I’m cool with you. I treat you like a man. I give you all the respect you need. I talk to you about your life.’ I said, ‘I know, Chef.’ He respects me, the sous-chef. He said, ‘I don’t know what happened to your shoes. I can’t tell you nothing.’”

Frantz talks a lot about respect and the opposite of respect—humiliation. Like the other day, he says, he was working so hard the busboy told him, “Look at your face. You look like a slave.” He says that insult really stung. It’s as if he’s lowered his ambitions to the level that he can take all sorts of awfulness as long as people talk to him with a little respect. It occurs to me that his life would be better if he spent less time worrying about feeling disrespected and more time actively working to improve his conditions, but then I realize he is doing all he can. Putting his head above the parapet to talk to me is a brave step. (ROC asked for volunteers on my behalf and he was the one to agree.) But I can’t see how his life will improve anytime soon. According to ROC, he receives no food stamps or government assistance of any kind. He’s so far down America’s financial ecosystem, he barely registers on it.

I ask Frantz to show me his neighborhood. He says there’s nothing really to see. He rarely goes out—only to work and church and to play soccer. Everywhere else is too dangerous. When we head outside, I scurry from his front door to the car. A smashed-up police cruiser lies abandoned on the corner. We take a drive past one place on earth he has some fun: the soccer field in the public park. Six miles later, we reach the Capital Grille. Usually he catches the bus, which takes an hour. When he works late and misses the 1:00 a.m. bus home, he has to stand there until the next one comes at 4:00 a.m.

“Do you ever wonder what the customers’ lives are like?” I ask.

“I don’t know nothing about the customers,” says Frantz. “I’ve never seen them.”

I look at him. “You’ve never seen a customer?” I ask.

“Never,” he says.

“Do you know how much the steaks cost?” I ask.

“I never saw a menu,” he says. “They’re in the restaurant, not the kitchen.”

His last words to me, before I leave to go and visit someone who makes five times what he does, are “If I get money, I’m going to leave.”

•   •   •

FIFTEEN HUNDRED MILES
away from Frantz’s neighborhood is a lovely, leafy, middle-class Des Moines suburb called Urbandale. There’s mist and dew and the lawns are so green they look painted. Any slapping that occurs in this neighborhood will be child-on-child slapping, quickly dealt with by the parents. It’s 7:00 a.m. and deserted and unseasonably cold—a tornado will pass through in a few hours—but I’m sure in warmer circumstances I’d see children running around, in and out of one another’s homes, and riding their bikes to school. Sometimes I dream of raising my family in a place like this. In poorer—and richer—neighborhoods, people isolate themselves. The $900-a-week family that lives here—Dennis and Rebecca Pallwitz and their two babies—has a ground-floor apartment on a nice block with a communal pool. Most of the properties here are detached family homes—theirs is an exception. I sit in their kitchen and tell them about Frantz.

“Oh,” gasps Rebecca sympathetically.

“I know,” I say. “Imagine living in Miami and earning a fifth of what you earn. The stress must be unbelievable.”

“It’s another world,” says Rebecca.

The Pallwitzes’ fifth anniversary is approaching. “We’d like to go to the east of the state where we had our honeymoon,” Dennis says. “But”—he glances at Rebecca—“that would cost gas and food and a bed-and-breakfast stay, so maybe we’ll stick around here, save the gas money, and get a hotel room for a couple of days.”

“You can’t afford to drive across the state?” I say in a startled screech. I sound like the Dowager Countess from
Downton Abbey
. In fact, last night in New York City, I got to see something Frantz has never seen: the inside of a Capital Grille restaurant. (I’m guessing Dennis and Rebecca have never been to one, either.) It was delicious and I didn’t even think about what it cost. There were stag heads and sculptures of horses and fine oil paintings of generic earls and lords and foxhunts. The milieu was very English country gentleman, although an English country gentleman would never put an “e” at the end of the word “grill.” Almost every waiter was light-skinned, but I did see one dark-skinned black man serving. So that was nice.