Part Two: Lord Aspinall: The Gambling King of London

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Fol Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where
we talk about the worst people in all of history.
And today's part two on our series on John aspinall
the gambling King of London in the fifties and sixties.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
I'm not gonna lie. That made him sound much cooler
than he actually is.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Ah. He is fun. He is fun. Today we're going
to get a lot of stories about zoo animals maiming people.
So I hope everybody's ready for that, and I hope
our guest Ed Zitron is ready for that. Ed welcome back.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm ready. I'm ready to hear about some violent zoo animals.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Excellent, All right, well here is the fucking story. So
John aspinall you know, it is kind of the the
fifties are starting to come to a close. Is in
a great He's pretty happy, right, He's running these rotating
games of chants that are in this legal gray area.
He's making a lot of money doing. It's starting to collect,
you know, wild animals, starting to build his private zoo.

(01:06):
But things are going to like kind of have a
sudden shift for him, and it's caused by his mom. Right,
she is sort of you know, one of the people
who's kind of renting houses for their parties. She's a
kind of a key aspect of all this. And the
lady Osborne makes a mistake one week in nineteen fifty
eight and she rents the wrong house for a shimmy

(01:27):
party because it's it's outside of their usual range and
it's under the jurisdiction of the Paddington Police, who are
not chill with what John Aspinall is doing for reasons
that I've never really been made clear to me. But
this is not a friendly police station. I don't know why,
but yeah, so there's and part of what seems to
have happened is I think they pissed off one of

(01:48):
these rich people who loses a bunch of money at
their games because it looks like he kind of drops
a dime on them to the Paddington cops. And so
for the very first time, the police carry out a
raid on one of these games he's playing. And because
this is the kind of game that it is, they
arrest a bunch of like lords and ladies along with
Aspenall in his friends. It's this like big moment in

(02:09):
high society because like there's footage like pictures of the
cops leading out all of these very, very highly born
people and taking them into custody. Very This kind of
gives you an idea of sort of the tinor of
that night when when the police enter the house, Lady
Osborne demands a list of the charges against them, and
the police inspector says that they're being charged with keeping

(02:31):
a common gambling house, and her response is, young man,
there was nothing common in this house until you entered.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
It got him. Yeah, I'm sure he love that bit.
I'm sure was like, oh, perfectly, Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Sorry, sorry, I'm faddy of a comment.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, it really is so perfect.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
That's classic England.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Now, that said, if you are an above room temperature person,
you're probably not surprised to hear that nothing happens as
a result of this legal case. Right, not only does
aspinall have money, but like they have arrested all of
the people who are running the country, so it doesn't
go anywhere. He's a little bit yeah, yeah, not only
are their charges dismissed, but the arrest of all these

(03:17):
people kind of radicalizes a number of influential Britons and
in nineteen sixty Parliament passes what became known as Aspinall's Law,
the Gaming Act, which legalizes us you never want to
law named after No. It's always a bad thing, like
Maxg's disease.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Also a bad one, like.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, also a bad one. But this makes it legal
for people to run casinos in London, which is what
this is why London becomes the gambling capital of Europe
for a while. Right, it's because of Aspinall's Law. So
the downside of this is that, like, now he has competition.
Right back when it was this gray area, he'd kind
of figured out a sweet spot. There was nobody else

(03:56):
really running these chimney games on the same scale that
he is. Now anyone can run a chimney game. So
Aspinall has to kind of think bigger. And on November twelfth,
nineteen sixty two, he opens his ultimate gaming hall, the Claremont.
Now this is in like a neighborhood in London called Mayfair,
which is like super rich neighborhood. Right, this is like

(04:17):
a very central Yeah, it's like a nice place to
do this kind of shit. And he, you know, he
has this. If you look at videos from this gaming hall,
it's like very high ceilings, huge chandeliers, like it's a
place for the wealthy and the well born to feel comfortable.
Like Crockford, he limits his business to a pretty select clientele.

(04:39):
Kind of as time goes on he opens it up
more to like new money, but certainly at the start
it's really focused on the ancestrally wealthy, and there's this
kind of two tiered membership structure that's also how the
club is run. The people who are kind of technically
his employees, although he's not open about this, are called
the blues, and these are mostly Some of them are

(05:01):
like high born people who don't have a lot of
money but are good gamblers. Some of them are like
people of more common stock who are just really good gamblers,
but they are his house gamblers, and their goal is
not to win in order to get money. Sometimes they
do that, but it's largely if you're really good, you
can kind of influence games to keep them running, right,
to keep them going longer, because the longer different games

(05:24):
go on, the longer a hand goes on, the more
money gets put in. Right, and since the house is
taking a cut out of every pot, that works out
better for you. Right, you don't need your house guys
to win, but you need them to keep the game going.
So the pot is bigger and you get a bigger cut, right.
And so these guys, the Blues, they get free membership
in the club and they receive a basic salary for

(05:45):
their work. The Reds are the marks, and these are
the sons of power and prestige who he's going to
rob blind right now. A couple of years after the
Claremont opens, in nineteen sixty eight, John Aspinall opens his
zoo doors to I say, the public. It's most It
is a private zoo, so you have to pay to
get in. But it becomes like this is the zoo
you go to if you're rich, right, You're not going

(06:07):
to like the London zoo, right, that's where common people
go to look at at endangered animals. You're gonna go
to Aspenall Zoo. Right now. The fact that he's opened
his home zoo to the public is against the express
advice of like expert zoo keepers he had consulted, who
didn't think that he had like the temperament to safely

(06:28):
run a zoo, which turns out to be a wise concern.
But he also has this very unique view on the
care of animals, right. He thinks that they should be
offered different food regularly so that they have like a
varied diet and so that their diet is more exciting.
He thinks it bores them, which he's kind of right about.
And he also thinks that they need constant stimuli, which

(06:48):
is true.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
I'm also sorry, but I never really considered one's temperament
a feature of a zoo, just because generally a zoo
is not controlled by one person.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah, his is. So he gets to it's good. Yeah,
it's great, it's good, and it's bad. The animals in
his zoo, some people are you, seem to have been
happier than like most other zoos at the time because
he's feeding them. Sometimes he'll bring them like like he'll
bring his gorillas gourmet food from the Claremont and shit,
and he has. He and his zoo keepers spend a

(07:21):
lot of time playing physically with the animals, which, as
we'll talk about, is dangerous. But the animals seem to
be happier, and the best evidence for this is John's
peculiar history with gorillas. He meets his first gorilla at
the London Zoo. This old silverback named Guy, and because
he's he's got money, he's able to basically like convince

(07:44):
the zoo keepers to let him try to hang out
with Guy. You know, he'll feed the animal and stuff.
But like, Guy is an adult silver back, so he's
not super like into being buds. But meeting this animal
that like won't be his friend makes John obsessed with
the idea that one day I will make an adult
male gorilla be my best friend. To befriend a gorilla,

(08:05):
I am going to befriend a gorilla. Yeah, that is
my life goal.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
I now I've successfully defrauded a bunch of rich people.
Now I move on to defrauding a gorilla. Yeah, I'm
going to convince a gorilla that one become the gorilla's friend.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah. What a what a wild life goal. So he's
he's gonna make this gorilla his best friend. So after
he moves into Howlitz, you know, he gets the zoo started,
he uses some of his infinite gambling money to buy
a gorilla. And the first gorilla he gets again, anyone
can have any animal at this point in time if

(08:40):
they have enough money. So he finds a gorilla some
other rich guy had owned named KEI.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Was gonna say, how does one purchase a gorilla?

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yes, it's it's through a gorilla dealer. You know you've
got a guy.

Speaker 3 (08:51):
Oh my gorilla guy. Yeah, yeah, I get a gorilla guy.
Stay you going to gorillas this week?

Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (08:58):
I got some fun cut silver yea, A lovely one
coming in next week. You love it. He'll be your friend.

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Unfortunately for John, and more unfortunately for this gorilla named Kievu.
Kivu is his is bit of abuse victim. This gorilla
has PTSD. It's deeply traumatized. Now, to his credit, John
recognizes this is a traumatized animal and he uses human
logic to try to comfort it. And he's like, you

(09:27):
know what makes a sad man happy is a woman.
So he gets a human woman, his mother in law,
to like sleep in bed with this gorilla to try
to soothe it. That's his that's his strategy.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
My.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
Now, gorilla's not aggressive animals to people, and so this
doesn't go badly. His mother in law doesn't get like
hurt or anything.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
Let's just start there.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
Kivu does not seem to like well, I think John
may have disliked that woman and Kivu that's my point.
Does not respond positively to this, Like, again, gorillas are
quite peaceful. He doesn't like attack her, but he dies
of depression a couple of months into this man, that
woman was very sad.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
Women are evil, as we've established, and that one.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
Sophie, I don't know. That's the lesson. He died in
the same way that potme died in st He does,
he does. He doesn't badme.

Speaker 1 (10:24):
She made that gorilla have depression.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
I mean the gorilla was already depressed, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
You made it worse.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yeah, with her like horrible woman.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
Well I did not see this this turn from you, Sophie.
Man the subredd it's gonna have a field day with
this one.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
No, they're finally going to be on my side.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
So wow. You know, John is very sad for a while.
But I think this is a commonly known thing. When
you lose a gorilla, the only thing to do is
double down and get two.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yeah, you need more gorilla, You need more gorillas, right,
The problem was not gorillas.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
So the market I imagine is quite liquid at this time,
so like a gorilla is floating around.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
So he buys two more gorillas, a breeding pair, and
he sets about making them happy enough to breed. Now
this had been done at there, that people had bred gorillas.
At this point, it is kind of considered one of
the one of like the brass rings of the zoo
world is getting gorillas to breed in captivity. It's not easy,
right like, they are hard to make comfortable enough to

(11:33):
be willing to make a gorilla horny. It's tough to
make a gorilla horny. So John works on these gorillas.
He spends a lot of time intimately with them. He
wrestles with them, right, He'll like play games with them physically,
He'll cuddle with them at night, and they they do
seem to come to view him as a friend, and
it gets comfortable enough that they they start to breed.

(11:54):
Right like, he does succeed in making them happy enough
that they are willing to make more gorillas. So I
guess that it's a win for him. He also grows
closer with his bears during this period of time, which
is an uneven process. Right one day, What a.

Speaker 3 (12:08):
Great other thing to happen in this story, of course,
see as he romances the gorillas, he successfully improves his
friendship with the It's like fucking like an RPG.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Unevenly, I should say, because one day he like enters
the bear inclosure without sort of like you know you would.
There's a there's a certain way you want to enter
your bear enclosure to not spook them. He doesn't do this,
and they they maul him. They nearly kill him, right like.
He gets horribly injured by these bears, and his mother
around the same time is nearly murdered. A wolf that

(12:42):
he's trying to treat like a dog almost rips her
throat out of course he's got a wolf. Of course
he's got a wolf. Yeah, you're gonna have a wolf.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Gonna have a gorilla with that wolf. Gon'na have a
really without bath like.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
So his his family narrowly escapes anything fatal. But this
mix of complete dissociation from reality because he's this wealthy,
gambling maven, combined with spending all of his free time
cuddling with wild animals, leads John to kind of believe
that he's gone feral himself, right swee. He would later say,

(13:15):
sometimes when I'm pleased to meet a friend, I find
myself purring like a tiger. When I make love, I
even grunt like a gorilla. That's just how British people sound.
One like fuck, yeah, so that's good. That's good. He
was so convinced that he has gained some secret insight
into the lives of the gorillas that he's willing to

(13:37):
bet his life on it. At one point on safari
in Africa, a friend has to rescue him when a
male lion starts roaring at the party. And John, you
know there's a lion outside of your camp that's being aggressive.
You want to stay inside the camp, you know where
there's lights and men with guns. John charges out into
the night, and he claims later I wanted to reason

(13:59):
with it, like yeah, yeah, that don't work on a lion.

Speaker 3 (14:04):
That's fine. Come on, might have a word with it.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
Yeah, they love being recent.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Let me know how it goes. I will be inside
the car.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah. One of his friends basically has to like tackle
him to stop him from getting murdered by this.

Speaker 3 (14:18):
Let him, let him cook, let's see what happens.

Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, so as his collection might don't Yeah, yeah that
one made who saves you from getting eaten by a lion?

Speaker 3 (14:29):
No, I mean one might go strong reason with the
lion who tries to talk it out with a pines
doAnd the local he's all fucking yelling at the lions,
trying a reason, we're Steve come.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Then, so his collection expands and how it's becomes again
it's this kind of the private zoo of the ultra rich.
And by the late nineteen six again there's a degree
to he's very irresponsible in a lot of ways, but
there is a degree to which he's good at this
because by the end of the sixties, Aspinall has the
largest captive bread gorilla call in the world, which is

(15:02):
an achievement, you know, dubiously moral achievement, but that is
a thing to have done, right, So.

Speaker 3 (15:08):
I genuinely have to say this. Yeah, one through line
with this is that this boy was raised kind of cruelly. Yeah,
like he went through the school system. But weirdly enough,
I have to wonder if a lot of these people
gems the wokest thing. I'll say, genuinely, if a lot
of these people didn't actually have good hearts but were

(15:28):
just torn up by this hellish system that Britain had
created called Britain. And just this is the result of
this horrifying school system, this horrifying culture, is that you
just have this fucking nutter who is only able to
really be nice to gorillas to make them fuck. Yeah,
but he's so utterly broken that he does not know

(15:49):
how to communicate with animals or humans alike. He only
knows how to exploit them. Yeah, depressing, oways, nothing about
this is depressing.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, it's it is like fascinating. But if he had
grown up like in an environment that was like both
more nurturing and also where there was some degree of
like rigor placed on, like, you know, maybe he could
have become like a normal wildlife expert, you know. His Yeah,
he seems to actually have a talent. He has some

(16:18):
degree of a gift here. It's just married to this
inability to not be crazy about it, right, Yes, Yeah,
because he's he's like effectively like a miniature deity, like
at this point in time.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
Right, he thinks he's craven Hanta.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Yeah, it's it's something else. So while he again there's
this undeniable element of skill in what he is, his
irresponsibility also gets people horribly, horribly injured and worse in
the future. And the first example of this in nineteen
seventy He's got this friend Annabel Burley. Annabel is a
social lighte. She is an aristocratic lady. She's married at

(16:56):
that point to a businessman named Mark Burley, and she
comes to visit Howlitz with her young son Robin and
her daughter. She's close with the Aspinall family. You know
their kids are going to hang out together, and obviously,
being children, you take a bunch of children to a
place like Hawlitz, they want to see the animals. Of course,
that's what kids are going to want to do. So
Lord Aspinall only too happy to oblige them. Quote and

(17:19):
this is from Pearson's book The Gamblers. After seeing the gorillas,
Aspinall was anxious to take them all to see one
of his young female tigers called Zora. Annabel was not
so keen on this and wouldn't let her daughter India
Jane into the cage with the other children, like Damien
and Amanda. Rupert was used to the animals, but Robin
was nervous. Though Aspinall persuaded him to approach the tiger

(17:40):
and stroke her, Aspinall turned his back for just one moment.
In that split second, the tiger, sensing Robin's fear, rose
on her hind legs, put her front paws on his
shoulders and pushed him to the ground. Snarling, she shook
the boy's head in her mouth. Seeing what was happening,
Aspinall leapt towards the tiger, and with the show of strength,
somehow prized her jaws apart. By doing this, he undoubtedly

(18:01):
saved Robin's life. Min Aspinall that's his wife, meanwhile, was
tugging at the tiger's tail, trying to prevent its rear
claws tearing at the boy's body. Somehow, between the two
of them, they made the tiger drop her prey. Rigid
with fear at the nightmare taking place before her eyes,
Annabel watched as James Osborne rushed forward and picked up
her son, who was still conscious. Rupert and Nindia Jane

(18:21):
were terrified and screaming. As James carried Robin out of
the cage to safety, Annabel could see that the lower
left hand side of his face was crushed past recognition,
his mouth had disappeared, and part of his jaw was
hanging by a thread. So maybe don't let children in
a cage. Good tiger, he lives, he will make a recovery.
They like he has to go immediately into surgery. He

(18:43):
has like.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
Scars, a recovery of sorts.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Yeah, they described that probably some trauma one would is
alive PTSD from getting your sixty. Yeah yeah, it's uh yeah,
very arist.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
Sounds like a story from like the eighteen hundreds, but
this is alarmingly recent.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yes, this is like this is like Star Trek is
on the air right closed to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's it's it's pretty insane. So despite this, like everyone
is horrified by this kind of butt Aspenall, he's like, well,
this tiger had a bad reaction to this kid. Yeah, yeah,

(19:26):
it's the tiger. I'm going to keep having my tiger
Tara sleep in bed with me and my wife.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Right, that's the good tiger.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
And you know, most of his friends are generally loath
to question his judgment because they're all in debt to him, right,
they're all gambling at the Claremont.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
And he has a bunch of violent animals.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah, he has dangerous animals. Now kind of by this point,
the Claremont set has filled out. Aspinall has made two
additional friends to kind of complete his his inner circle,
and one of these guys is the seventh Earl of Lucan,
nicknamed Lucky Lucan after a particularly great gambling hall earlier
in his life. Now, Lucan, his grandfather is the dude

(20:06):
who did the charge of the Light Brigade. Right, that
is the family that this guy comes from. And as
you might guess from the whole Charge of the Light
Brigade thing, his family is kind of a reputation for eccentricity. Now,
this is not always bad. Lucan's father, who's the sixth
Earl of Lucan, becomes like a massively influential Labor Party
leader in the House of Lords and is like a
very famous progressive in this period. But his son, the

(20:30):
seventh Earl of Lucan, does not get along with his dad.
He actually hates his father. And part of what this
means is that he goes far right right. Now, this
makes him fit in very well because all of the
old money said at the Claremont are right wing guys.
But he isn't just like conservative. He develops a specific
fascination with the Nazis, and in fact, after bad night's gambling,

(20:52):
he would calm himself down by reading mind komp like
that's his like, that's his safe place. That's his putting
on like Frasier at night to go to sleep.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
His reason I play like Slay the Spy or MLB
to the show. Yeah, like just like something to chill
out with, except he chose that book.

Speaker 2 (21:09):
Yeah, a little bit of Hitler to calm yourself down
after a hard day.

Speaker 3 (21:13):
That's his Housewives.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
That that's his Desperate Housewives.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
It's nothing first sight for him is Hitler.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, that's his chill out.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
That's exactly what it is.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Married, yeah, wild. So the other friend who joins their
circle is this fellow James Goldsmith. Now he's the son
of a luxury hotel magnate. He's not he's not royalty right.
In fact, he's a He's a Jewish guy. His family
has to flee Germany ahead of the Nazis, right, he's

(21:46):
going to be one of these new money people who
kind of remakes the ruling class. You know. He's one
of these sort of like guys who sort of he
comes in during this period and becomes one of the
most powerful people in the entire country. He's this he's
an Etonian, but he drops out for graduating because he's
already is like a kid, a successful entrepreneur, and he
basically tells everyone, I'm too rich for this high society

(22:08):
cloud game. Bullshit, Right, I've made my money. I don't
need your approval now. Now you have to get my
approval because you're all going broke gambling and I have
the fucking cash, right, And he's got He's a fascinating dude.
Actually get Goldsmith. In his older adult life, Goldsmith is
like this corporate raider dude. He's stripping assets and like
destroy He's one of the men who will destroy industry

(22:30):
in Britain, right because he's stripping all the and like
strips assets from all these companies. He's this big offshoring
guy he's going to like play a major role in
killing along with his other dude, a friend of his,
Slater killing like industry in the UK. But earlier in
his life, he has this like wildly romantic and sympathetic backstory.

(22:51):
So as a young man, he falls in love with
this woman, Maria Borbon, and Maria is her father. Is
this indigenous Bolivian man, right who like as he's kind,
he's a minor basically, and he kind of lucks into
buying this incredibly rich tin Vein, which makes him an
incredibly wealthy man. And he then moves to the to

(23:12):
Europe because he knows that, like the political situation Bolivia
is unstable, and he buys himself a Spanish noble title. Right,
so he is a he comes from a very common
you know, he's literally an indigenous man from South America,
but he makes himself into a European noble and he
does not want his daughter Maria to marry this Jewish man, right,

(23:33):
and in fact tells him when James tries to come
to him for his approval to get married, He's like,
we are not in the habit of marrying Jews. Now
James is a piece of shit too, and his response is, well,
I'm not in the habit of marrying red Indians. So oh,
you know, two racists negotiating a marriage. Racist Uno, Yeah,

(23:55):
racist Uno. Now Maria's dad is insanely rich. When they
try to get married anyway, he has his daughter kidnapped
and put under house arrest. She yeah, it's one of these,
and she like, there's this time where he keeps searching,
He's traveling around the world looking for her, Like she's
being kind of locked away, she gets free and they

(24:16):
run to Scotland together, right, and they they start they
hide out in Scotland because the way the laws are
at the time, if you've been in Scotland for two weeks,
you can get married there. Don't ask me why that's
the rule, but that's the rule. So they're like and like.
At the same time, her dad, who like has mercenaries,
travels to Edinburgh and so he's got like his mercenaries

(24:36):
in private searching for them for two weeks as they're
like hiding in the underground so that they can get married.
And it's one of those things. James being a pretty
savvy guy, he starts sending letters to a journalist right
telling them what they're doing, telling him about the fact
that they're and this journalist starts publishing articles while they're
hiding and while like their dad is putting out bounties
for them, and it becomes like the biggest story in

(24:58):
the country, right, everyone it's this incredibly romantic tale. This
couple has eloped and they're being chased by this evil
plutocrat and like they're hiding out in the Edinburgh underground.
Like everyone is obsessed with this story. Couldn't be much
more romantic, right, it is a pretty cool so you
could make a movie out of this. Yeah, it's thought
you really very cool. I would watch a movie about that.
It is a dope story. So and they succeed, right,

(25:20):
They're able to kind of wait out long enough that
they elope they have this like secret wedding and then
you know there's nothing that Maria's dad can do about it,
so they're able to move back to London where they are.
They're not just popular with the rich because they're like
the like everyone loves them, right, this is such a celebrities. Yeah,
this is Yeah, it's such a romantic story. And then
almost as soon as they get back, you know, she

(25:42):
gets pregnant and dies horribly in childbirth. So it is
this guy. Yeah, it's this really tragic, like hi dramas story.
It is like the most sympathetic backstory a dude would have.
And the rest of James's life is going to be
killing all of this sympathy by becoming like the evilest

(26:02):
corporate overlord of his day. Right, yeah, it's it's something else, ok. Fine, Yeah,
and some people will argue because he like his marriages
are purely transactional. After this point, you know he's got
this these mistresses, but he never like loves again like
this seems to have. Basically, some people will argue this
kind of kills his ability to care about people. I

(26:23):
don't know if that's the case. Maybe he always would
have turned out to be a piece of shit, but I.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Think that it's hard to tell what's inside of man's
especially when he's British. Yeah, but it's definitely didn't help.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah, it doesn't help, and he's gonna again. He destroys kind,
He helps to destroy the cot like industry in the UK.
He makes a lot of his money in tobacco. He's
a big tobacco guy. He makes a lot of his
money in Indonesian nickel miinds, which are not nice places.
He's buying and selling forests around the world, including in
the US for timber, and he kind of he's one

(26:55):
of the dudes who will pioneer the modern concept of
setting up shell companies and shadow appet so that he
can basically secretly buy up controlling interests in companies without
people realizing until it's too late that he's taken them over.
Like he helps to kind of pioneer. How you do
that in the modern era? That is that is this
other buddy of Johnson.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
Is so good at developing people at this Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
A very British story, right, And Lucan and Goldsmith are
going to form the nexus of a far right poll
in aspenall social world and I say that everyone's pretty
right wing. These are all rich people from like families
that have always been rich. But England that at that
time was pretty right wing anyway, England is very right
wing at this time and Goldsmith, but Goldsmith and Luken

(27:40):
are like fascists, right. And in fact, in nineteen ninety four,
like one of Goldsmith's first things, he's like the first
Brexitter before the EU is even a thing. He's like
fighting like hell to stop the creation of the EU
and to stop England from being a part of it.
That doesn't work, and he gets He's as kind of
a response to failing to stop the EU, he writes

(28:02):
this book in nineteen ninety four called The Trap, And
basically the argument is in the Trap is that like
US style attitudes of free trade which bring with them
mass migration, right, which open borders that people can travel
between borders is a trap because it will lead to
non white people taking over, right, that's the Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
This is like a great replacement guy.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yeah, he's like, this is like the BC version of
the great replacement theory, right, Like it's a little bit
underdeveloped when he starts it, but you can see the
bones of it in the book that he writes. Yeah, yeah,
so that's cool. Anyway, you know who doesn't support the
great replacement as a narrative, the podcast or the sponsors

(28:47):
of our podcast. Oh okay, yeah, they don't do that,
so buy them. Uh we are back. We're having a
good time over here. So James Goldsmith is a mercantilist, right,

(29:09):
he feels basically that wealthy and this is kind of
the attitude of the Claremont set. Wealthy business owners should
hold all political power and the government should primarily be
used to stop poor people from entering Europe through force. Right.
That is the belief that this guy has not an
uncommon one today. You see the descendants of Jimmy Goldsmith

(29:29):
all over the place. But this is weird because he's
he and aspinall are the two independently wealthy, like actually wealthy,
not just inherited money and squandered it members of the
Claremont set. So he is the only guy in this
social circle who's willing to tell John, hey, your zoo
experiments are insane, like like you're you're a lunatic. And

(29:52):
in fact, on the day is your tiger of ripped
someone's face? Yeah, he actually bad. He tries to Warren
Annabel the day her son gets maimed. He's like, Oh,
I would never get in the cages with these animals.
They're wild animals. If they get frightened, you never know
what they're going to do, right, Like, you can't you
can't trust them with your safety, just doing the jock test,

(30:12):
ignoring it. No, no, throw the kid in there right
ooh yeah, tells fucking prick it's wild. So at the
end of the sixties, Jimmy opens his school to again
the public, provided that they can pay, and he has
expanded by this point to a host a wide variety
of animals. He starts to get less interested in the
Claremont at this point. Right gambling has kind of gotten

(30:34):
boring and nothing compares throwing down money, which he has
plenty of on a game, is not nearly as exciting
as like cuddling with a tiger. Right, So, at the
start of the seventies he sells the Claremont outright. I
think he sells it to Hugh Heffner. May be wrong
about that, but he sells it so he can focus
on his new passion. Now, Aspenall, he's been dying every day,

(30:55):
nearly nearly dying every day to animals, to wild animals.
May now in sort of the period as he's gotten
experienced with this zoo and kind of gotten bored of gambling.
Aspenall has also begun to develop a peculiar set of
theories about the world, basically not just yes. Some of
them are based on Goldsmith and his buddy Luke and

(31:16):
their outright Nazism has an impact on Aspenall, but Aspinall
is also heavily influenced by his close contact with wild animals.
His idea, the idea that he comes to believe, is this,
in the ancient past, human beings and animals had been equal,
but then mankind had betrayed them, creating a world in
which animals were little more than beasts of burden. Aspinall

(31:38):
saw himself as the appointed defender of the animal world
from man, and in his eyes, the oppression of animals
was not caused by rich men like him who keep
them in zeus, or who like buy and sell forests,
like his buddy James Goldsmith. But it's caused by poor people,
mostly non white people right right where, Yeah, who are

(31:59):
cluttering up the world with their filth, and.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
That somehow controls the animals. Right.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
I'm gonna quote from an article in the Telegraph that's
kind of writing about him. He castigated the human race
as a species of vermin and positively welcomed natural disasters
as a means of reducing the plague of Homo sapiens.
He would gladly end his own life, he declared, if
he could take another two hundred and fifty million with him,
there was something to be said. He felt for Hitler's
ideas about eugenics. Broadly speaking, he said the high income

(32:29):
groups tend to have a better genetic inheritance. And like
he meets, he becomes buddies with Richard Nixon at one point. Obviously,
of course, of course he and Nixon are friends, and
you know, they're hanging out one day and the Claremont
Nixon's like, you know, we have some of their nuclear weapons.
We've got to kill two million people if they hit

(32:49):
the right place. And fucking Aspinall's response is like, well,
that's not nearly enough. We're gonna have to We're gonna
have to up those numbers if we're gonna get rid
of enough.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
Beatle's again, let's get the work. Americans have gotten cocky.
Eurotrocities are nothing compared to the British Empire.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah, it is good.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
The conversation that must have been fixed. Ditch. One of
the tigers nearly killed someone when I sleep with the gorilla.
Now you doesn't like Americans?

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah, I do not think a gorilla would have a
good reaction to dignate Johnson. Sorry, yeah, this gorilla actually
loved escalation in Vietnam, couldn't get enough of it. So
it was not only the poor that that Aspinall's animal
friends taught him to reject pearson Rights quote. Having identified

(33:41):
fed so closely with his gorillas, he started to imitate
their habits and showed a marked preference for the rules
governing the world of animals to that of human beings.
From watching how the dominant old silverback gorilla ruled the
females in his entourage. He concluded that the idea of
women's rights and women's liberation was not only ridiculous, but
also contrary to nature. He'd also decided that an authoritarian,

(34:01):
paternalistic setup was the natural model for a human family.
He's a he's a literal gorilla mindset, dude.

Speaker 3 (34:08):
He is quite literally a gorilla mindset.

Speaker 2 (34:12):
That's so funny. The gorillas have taught me how human
relationships outill work.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
Mike is going to listen to this and be like, oh, well, to.

Speaker 2 (34:24):
Be clear, I'm not saying he's right about how gorilla
I don't know. I don't know much about gorillas.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
This guy is a disgraceful piece of share and I
wope burns in hell. But also he does kind of
live his dream. It's not like he's saying I have
the gorilla mindset. Yeah, and doesn't. He owns these gorillas
and indeed interacts with them, cuddles. Is what I think
he believes is a peer.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, you have to you have to give him credit.
He's not a dilettante, right, he is committed to living
like an animal, So I'll give him that. I'm not
saying that's a good thing. I'm just don't got to
hand it to him. But you don't get to hand
it to him, he'd be he's not a casual. Yeah,
there are if you read interviews with him. I have

(35:06):
read two separate interviews with him that he gives at
his zoo with a journalist, two separate interviews where he
is mauled by an elephant while giving the interview. That
happens twice. Yeah, it's something else. So to continue that quote.

(35:29):
From studying how the animal kingdom operated in the wild,
he reached some even more alarming propositions. The first of
these was that just as the survival of the fittest
seems to work in nature, we should willingly accept the
position of the powerful and successful as natural leaders of
modern day society. He also believed as firmly in selective
breeding for humans as he did for animals, and proclaimed
that since animals had as much right to exploit the

(35:50):
planet as a human beings, the time had come to
call something like a billion humans from what he called
the urban biomass if the world as we know it
was going to survive. So that's great, that's great, that's good. Yeah, Now,
his evolving gorilla.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Min Elon Musk. Dealing with any of these people, they
would kill him. Yes, actually yeah the gorilla. The gorilla
looks pretty epic to me.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, he would try to cuddle with a lion and
get his head crushed. She immediately die, which might have
been the best thing. Honestly, this could save us all
a lot of problems. Yeah, so his evolving gorilla mindset,
this is why he like leaves his like. So, he
and his first wife split up. She cheats on him,
and he decides to keep her. He like locks her

(36:33):
away from their kids, right like, she has no contact
with the children. So he marries this next woman, who
is like a wonderful partner. She loves his animal. She's
like in every way, a perfect match. But she delivers
a daughter with a heart defect who dies after birth.
So John dumps her because like, well, humans should only
mate to breed, because that's what gorillas do and obviously

(36:54):
we can't breed, so goodbye. Yeah, okay gross his third wife,
who he marries because she has a famous ancestor and
he wants that those jeens and his children like Merlin, No, no, no,
I wish it's a us shit, I've forgotten I had

(37:14):
it written down somewhere here. But yeah, she has a
famous ancestor that he admires. And when they have their
first kid, John waits until it's six months old, and
then he takes it into his gorilla enclosure and hands
it to the dominant mother father pair in the gerrillarium. Right. Uh,
and I'm gonna I'm going to quote from Pearson here.

(37:35):
The gorilla appeared inside its nappy to see what sex
it was, with the baby tucked under her arm, swung
up into the trees, and showed him to the other
females in the community. When all the female gorillas had
thoroughly examined the baby, Bassa, his gorilla mother brought him
down to earth and returned him safely to his human parents.

Speaker 3 (37:53):
That was not how I thought that one was gone.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
No, it works out fine, So that's great.

Speaker 3 (37:59):
That's kind of strange.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, that's a wild experience, baby.

Speaker 3 (38:04):
Yeah, it's a wild experience to participate in, even as
an observer.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah, and it's wild.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
We would just send the baby off to the gorillas.

Speaker 2 (38:13):
Sally marries him after this anyway, She's like, yeah, fine,
why not the baby?

Speaker 3 (38:19):
It was fine, nothing to complain about.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Jesus, it works out fine. So the early nineteen seventies
are a bad time for the Aspinalls, and they're rich friends,
but for reasons divorced from getting mauled by wild animals.
The economy tanks at this point, right Aspinall, not just
in the UK, but like Aspinall has, he's gotten over
gambling on gambling and is gambling on the US stock

(38:40):
market and he loses his fucking shirt when the US
stock market takes a tumble in the early A new.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
Kind of exploit or exploited him.

Speaker 2 (38:47):
Yeah, exactly life.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
Yeah, and really it is just human beings will create
new systems to exploit other human beings. He created one
and then another, and then someone created one to exploit him.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
It's kind of beautiful, it is. It is, it's it's
it's batical way, yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:02):
Quote George Lucas.

Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah, he's able to. He doesn't lose everything just because
his friend Goldsmith, right, is still rich and Goldsmith basically
floats him so he can keep paying for his exotic animals.
During this period, the other members of the Claremont Set
do not fare as well. The new membership of the
club won't give them IOUs right so these guys are
all still horribly addicted to gambling because they never started

(39:26):
businesses or zoos they have Like Lord Lucan has nothing
in his life but gambling, and he's bad at it,
so he can't afford to gamble without aspinall running the Claremont.
Now luc Is this starts to kind of drive him crazy.
The fact that he is actually poor now, Like he
still has his fancy manor house, he's still a lord,
but he has no money. That drives him crazy. And

(39:49):
then in nineteen seventy four a labor government takes over
in the UK, and that drives these guys, these Claremont members,
into a sense of mania because to them, aspenall the way,
Aspenall views this is this labor government. These are communists.
Communists have taken over and they are in the process
of uprooting the natural order of society. This is a
conspiracy against the rightful ruling class based on my gorilla studies.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, but the ruling class that got there through gambling
on an insane game.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah yeah, it's.

Speaker 3 (40:21):
Something else so that they're not they're not good rich
people like us where we got money through gambling. That
bad rich people who got it through some other method
that I don't really understand.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
They did something shady for it. Now no one's no
one's mind has degraded more by this point than the
formerly lucky Lord Lucan. His luck had turned sour years ago,
and again he is broke. Now he's increasingly obsessed with fascism.
And this is all related to the fact that his
marriage has collapsed, right, and it's become clear like his

(40:53):
wife is going to take the kids, right, So he
just is losing his mind increasing And anytime he'll meet
with his Claremont buddies with Aspinall, because they're all still
hanging out, Aspinall will cite these theories based on gorillas
of how inferior women are. So Lucan takes from that
he tries to force his wife into a mental institution

(41:14):
so he can take the kids. He does this several times.
This would have worked. I think Aspinall. Probably Aspinall had
wanted to like force a wife into a mental institution,
he had the juice to do it. Luken isn't good
at anything, so he can't he can't even work this
kind of evil scheme, right, He's just he's not even able,
even with his like social position, to make this happen thankfully. Right,

(41:38):
that's good.

Speaker 3 (41:38):
And also his rationale is based on gorillas.

Speaker 2 (41:41):
Yeah, he's based on his friend's gorillas. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
So who told you the gorilla for our right?

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Okay?

Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yeah, so Lord Lucan his mind is a mix of
his buddies gorilla theories, and he buys this nineteen thirties
translation of mindkomp which which he reads feverishly and is.

Speaker 3 (41:59):
Also his off the World War two as well well
after World War Two. It's the Losing Guy's Handbook to racism.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
Yeah, yeah, he does. He has one other idol. Unfortunately,
that idol is Mustapha Kamal of Turkey, who is you know,
a dictator and one of the Armenian genocide guys. Yeah,
and the book is called Gray Wolf, right, which is
today the name of a fascist organization in Turkey.

Speaker 3 (42:23):
So that's good, not good. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
So these are his two buds, right, Hitler.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
And Hitler and gorilla and dictator.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah yeah, that's his his like his like in his head,
the fucking like. Yeah. His idols are.

Speaker 3 (42:38):
Hysteric, including a gorilla.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Uh so yeah, and you know this says something about
his wife too. She claims in interviews later she didn't
realize that he'd taken a turn for the extreme right.
Although this is the exact quote from her, I'm not
sure I believe her here quote. He did have very
right wing views, some might describe them as fascist. I
didn't know he was indulging in extremist reading matter in

(43:06):
nineteen seventy two, although I knew he listened to recordings
of Hitler's speeches at Nuremberg rallies.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Well, was that not a warning science?

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (43:16):
Where'd you think he golt the ideas? Did he just
like walking down the street it's someone talking about it?
Or was it his weird gorilla friend.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Yeah? I also just like I didn't know the gorilla man. Again,
I didn't know he was reading fascist books. I just
knew he listened to Nuremberg a lot. Wild So, this
increasingly conspiratory obsession with race theory, communism and communism and
the only possible solution to a labor government infected the
whole Claremont set. And I'm going to quote from a

(43:45):
really interesting, interesting two thousand and nine article in the Guardian.
Here there is no suggestion that Luken was in any
way anti Semitic or supported the final solution, but he
and his associates, who included casino owner and party host
John Aspinall and the tycoon sur James Goldsmith, were increasingly
convinced Britain had fallen victim to a socialist conspiracy. Daily

(44:05):
Express journalist Charles Benson, one of Luken's friends, said he
was very right wing and never watered it down in
front of liberals. He would talk about hanging and flogging
and use the inWORD in order to get a reaction.
One biographer, Patrick Marnham said, seen from the Claremont Club,
the country was starting to resemble the less stable years
of the Weimar Republic. Sir James Goldsmith began to develop

(44:26):
his theory of the communist infiltration of the Western media.
Over the smoked salmon and lamb cutlets. The talk turned
to the pros and cons of a British military coup
and that is what these guys are going to come
to support now. So when he was just.

Speaker 3 (44:38):
The guy who claimed he wasn't right wing, who walked
around saying the N word to get a reaction around
a bunch of people who are kind of embarrassed to
be around him, just like podcaster.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
Yeah, he's a podcaster. Yeah, he would have been a
great boy.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
Like he would have been a he would have been
on was it a Lex Friedman's podcast?

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Oh? Yeah, huge Friedman?

Speaker 3 (44:58):
So what is that do you think?

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (44:59):
The girl guy? Huh? Actually, no, a guy you seriously,
A guy who's just like, Yeah, I learned everything I
learned about woman from watching Mike Gorillas. That guy would
be an insanely popular YouTube.

Speaker 2 (45:10):
Oh yeah, he would be huge. Now. It's also it's
worth noting one of their good friends here when I
talk about them supporting a military cupe. A member of
the Claremont set who's tight with all these guys is
this dude Sterling who creates the SAS. And Sterling is
going to make a private army in the UK with
the goal of like using them as this sort of
right wing counter availing force. It doesn't work out for

(45:32):
a variety of reasons, but like, these are their social set,
and by late nineteen seventy four things have gotten to
a pretty toxic level. And we're going to talk about
what Lucan does next in this mind state, but first
there's some ads. We're back so late nineteen seventy four,

(45:56):
The Lucky Lord Lucan has grown obsessed with his need
to rescue his children destroy his wife, all of which
fits in with his Nazi gorilla beliefs about power and masculinity.
So he starts telling Aspital. He tells his friends he's
open about, Like They're like hanging out playing cards, and
he's like, gonna kill my wife. Decided it gonna murder her.
And they're all like, yeah, sounds like a good plan. Man, Like, Yeah,
that sounds like a great idea.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
There is some debate as to like whether they thought
he was bullshitting or not. And to be fair, I
do think it's not uncommon for these guys to joke
about murdering their wives. Yeah, that's the kind of culture
it is, right, Like, but.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
Also the culture is one where a guy owns multiple
gorillas and leads them anything could be happening. I believe it.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
Yeah, I'm just saying I think I'm bringing this up
not to like defend them, but more to say a
lot of them talk about murdering women. He's not the
only one, right, and there is evidence.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
Doesn't surprise me. There are a bunch of fucking ethno
fascist freaks like that.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
We'll never know precisely, but Hearson's book makes a very
strong case that like, not only is he joking about this,
but they provide him with resources to carry out a murder. Right,
and again, some of this is up. Obviously, these guys
are not stupid enough to be completely open about what
they're doing. But one of his friends loans him a

(47:18):
car that he's going to like use as like his
getaway vehicle to dump his wife's body after he murders her.
One of them like he's broke, and he figures he
needs ten thousand pounds sterling to bribe a guy with
a boat to dispose of the corpse. Right, there's a
couple of bribes and he'd be made right and Goldsmith, interestingly,
James Goldsmith, being the smartest of them, doesn't want to

(47:40):
get involved in this. He doesn't want to be directly
tied to this murder. So he's like, I will give
you ten thousand pounds to commit this murder, which means
that he doesn't have to give the money to him
because as a noble in the aristocracy, you can't take
a gift, right, Luken can't be given ten thousand dollars.
He has to be loaned it, so his their friends
loan him the money. Right. This is actually Goldsmith's clever

(48:03):
way to not get tied to this is by offering
it as a gift, because then Lucan won't take it.
I don't know, wild culture, but a tax dodge, what
the yeah? So Luken gets a loan from other friends
of his and he gets this car. There's some other
tools he probably gets, and the plan he cooks up
is like, I Am going to kill my wife, like
bash her head in, throw her in like a sack,

(48:26):
drive her to this boat, and then the boat will
like weigh down the sack and toss her in the
fucking ocean, right Like, that's that's the idea. Pearson describes
this not as just his plot, but as a conspiracy
involving other members of the Claremont Club. There's this anonymous
financier who he calls mister X. I think because he's
scared to bring this guy's name in that works as

(48:47):
both a high end lege breaker for gamblers and is
like involved an organized crime. This may have been ad
non Koshogi. I think it's possible who is like this
arms dealer, But it's that's not the only guy. It
could have been a lot of other guys, right, There
are a lot of guys involved in organized crime. Because
Aspinall's a gambling maybn, right, obviously he knows dudes who

(49:09):
are dangerous.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
For some randomly violent fellows.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
Yeah. So the basic idea is that Luken's going to
murder his wife. She's just going to disappear. No one's
going to know there was a murder because the body.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
Will go the people he's discussed it with while gompling.

Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah, right, other than his gambling buddies. And then he'll
live happily ever after with his children. Right, this is
his plan to save type plan. Yeah. Perfect. Now, the
only hole in this perfect plan is that Lord Lucan
is a useless, rich kid who has never developed a
skill in his life other than losing all of his
money gambling.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
So he.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Heads into his London home with this metal pipe wrapped
in surgical tape, and he swings it at the first small,
dark haired woman to come down the stairs. Unfortunately, well
I'm not going to say unfortunately. This is all.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
Unfortunate, horrifying thing to do, just like even not. But
then the slap, the weird like slap showed nature of him.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
He kills he killed some other lady, didn't he.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
He kills his maid, who people would say, yeah, yeah,
it's one of those like she kind of had a
casual resemblance to his wife. Right, so he doesn't even look.
He swings, he shatters her skull and he kills her instantly, right,
this very brutal, horrible, horrible thing. God. Now the lady
Lucan is right behind her maid, and she comes down

(50:30):
the stairs next, and this is from Pearson's book. When
he heard Veronica, that's the Lady Lucan coming down the
stairs from the sitting room to find out what was
going on. He started attacking her as well, hitting her
around the head as he had Sandra Rivet. Somehow she
managed to slide down between his legs and grab his balls.
The agonizing pain made him stop, and suddenly he seemed
to come to his senses and realize too late what

(50:52):
he was doing. This was not a gamble or a
lethal fantasy. He had just battered to death his children's
nanny and was now doing his best to do the
same to their mother.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
That is so cool.

Speaker 4 (51:02):
It is pretty dope. And murr you got to give
that woman is hardcore. Yeah, yeah, that is thinking on
your face. This bitch good for you? Good for you?

Speaker 3 (51:13):
Honestly, also complete head on a swivel AWESO.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
She grabbed them so tightly that he was like, WHOA,
maybe I shouldn't murder plants.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
Yeah. This was the point at which Lucan did something
that seems so incredible in the middle of a bloody
murder that it actually becomes credible. He apologized to his
intended victim. He did more. He sat in the back
of down and found himself telling her that they must
talk to try to work things out. Then, noticing blood
was pouring down her face, he went to the bathroom
to fetch a towel to help clean her up. This

(51:44):
gave her the chance she needed to make a quick escape.
Stumbling down the stairs, she got out onto the street
and ran to the local pub, the Plumber's Arms, where
she burst into the saloon bar screaming, help me, help me.
Somebody's just murdered my nanny. Now Lucan escapes after.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
Somebody peers, you're defending that man.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
I'll get She has suffered a head injury. At this point,
I don't know what was clear to her, like maybe
it may have been a thing where like because she
gets hit in the head, she's not immediately aware. She
has to put it together. I'm gonna I'll give a
lot of grace to someone who's just been hitting the
head with the pipe and had to fight their way free, right,
who knows what's going on.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Well, so it's very funny that he was like, yo,
one minute, let me get twet, me get a towel.
It's this she kind of wait right here, I will
not kill you.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
She grabs his balls and it resets him back to
like politeness.

Speaker 3 (52:35):
The little getting like a pin reset device.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
It's wild. Yeah, Luken goes missing. He is still missing
to this day. Right, he's been declared dead at this point. Obviously,
nobody totally knows what happens to him, Right, it is
generally agreed that he committed suicide. The kind of most
common story is he takes a boat out to see
and he drowns himself, because that's like the most romantic,

(53:02):
aristocratic way of killing yourself, right, is to like throw
yourself into the ocean. But we don't know that that's
what happened. And Lord Aspinall's mother. She gets I think
it's his mother or his wife. She's interviewed later and
she kind of insinuates that like his friends got rid
of him, that he was murdered by his friends because
he might expose them. There's some suggestion that maybe he
was fed to Aspinall's tigers. That might not boss.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
I would absolutely believe that, Yeah, I would definitely believe
that he was just like, yeah, go with the tiger.
I trained this tiger to protect from wives.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yeah. And it's it's unclear he could have killed himself.
Pearson's attitude is that, like this was he was too
much of like a weirdo narcissist to kill himself. I
don't know if I think that's credible, but he does
know more about Luken than I do. His his suggestion
is that like Lucan, using these kind of like mister
X and these other sort of overseas connections, Aspinall has

(53:57):
Lucan gets spirited away to Switzerland, but because he's the
most famous murderer in Europe, he can't. He has to
be stuck in a house for the rest of his life, right,
you can't let this guy out ever, And Lucan can't
handle that. He still wants to get his kids back
and like return to high society. He kind of convinces
himself someone else killed his wife. And so Pearson's theory

(54:17):
is that, like, well, once these guys who are hiding
him realize that he's a danger to them, he's going
to expose himself somehow, they murder him, right because they're like, well,
this guy, we can't we have It's the only thing
to do, you know. That's also perfectly possible.

Speaker 3 (54:30):
I My theory is he probably died in some sort
of stupid way. It's not like it quite like a
mystic being death.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
But friends, I hope was the tiger.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Yeah, maybe he's more likely he pissed off one of
the multiple rich and violent and crazy gambling people and
was like, ah my, I'm lucky lucun and then got
killed by a guy in the street.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Totally possible.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
He strikes me as the kind of guy who dies
in a very boring and funny way. Yeah, like in
a bar in Switzerland.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
Yeah. Yeah, he just gets drunk with the wrong people now, I.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
Mean, but think about it. If he's this rich, racist,
horrifying bigger who hates woman. The people he's going to
associate himself with wherever he ends up are going to
be equally shitty and unreliable. And also, yeah, someone probably
fucking looked in the paper and went, hey, aren't you
that famous murderer? Yeah who got like.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
A gay sacks.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Yeah, fucking idiot. Because also, but also I would also
fully believe that they all had him done in.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Yeah, totally possible.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
Because his Lucan's whole thing. Even I'm thirty seven years old,
so obviously the whole Lucan thing happened a lot longer
before I was born. But it's it's interesting his legend
is still around even though most people myself included until
this podcast, did not know anything about how this happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(56:02):
which is not a great story for him. Yeah, yep, big,
big no no on most of this stuff. Yep, the
gorilla stuff sounds interesting though.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Yeah, the gorilla stuff's fine. So yeah. For his part,
Lord Aspinall would never condemn his friend for murder. He
talks to journals about that. He's like, I get why
he did it. I think he was I think he
was within his rights. You know, he did it for
the good of his children. Aspiral's attitude is he was
only trying to save his children from the worst fate
imaginable being raised by a woman.

Speaker 1 (56:34):
Right wise, we established earlier in the pod women being people.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
Yeah now and the other so Lucan because he or
Aspinall because he kind of goes broke in seventy four.
In seventy six, he starts another gambling hall right which
he makes another fortune in, and he sets up in
the hallway these like busts of like famous gamblers from history,
and one of them is a bust of his friend,
the murderer, Lord Lucan, and like the initial inscription on

(57:00):
it basically says he did it for his kids something
else this guy. So after his friend's disappearance, Aspinall continues
to devote most of his time to his zoo. He
makes a couple more fortunes when we're talking millions, tens
of millions each time, but then he loses them, often
by like pampering his animals because it's just it's expensive

(57:22):
to run zoos like this, they never make money. He
does open a second zoo like a few years later,
so he has two zoos that he's operating, and these
become increasingly large and influential. Through the eighties and nineties,
he grows obsessed with the idea that his zoo keepers
like him can only do their job properly if they're

(57:43):
getting if they're willing to get dangerously close to the animals,
and this is a bad idea. In nineteen eighty he
has two Siberian tigrises and they viciously maul and kill
two zoo keepers in the same year, forcing him the
only thing that's his attitude angry that he has to
shoot these tigers to death because these zookeepers got murdered

(58:04):
by them, which, to be fair, not the tiger's fault,
but it is your fault, dude, Like you had them
cuddling with them.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
I mean you also had tigers. Yeah, quote people in for.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
I just yeah, that's not the end of it. In
nineteen eighty four, one of his zoo keepers is crushed
to death by an Indian bowl elephant. In nineteen ninety four,
the head zookeeper at Howlitz is massacred by yet another
Siberian Tigersking guy.

Speaker 3 (58:30):
Went into the nineties with this shit.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Right afterwards, another keeper, Damian Cockrell,
is crushed to death by the elephant La Petite in
its enclosure. So he is running through these guys very quickly.
This is a deadly zoo. I'm going to quote from
The Guardian again. In nineteen ninety six, Aspinall won a
High court case to maintain the controversial practice of Keepler's

(58:54):
keepers mingling with lions, even though in May of that
year a boy was awarded one hundred and thirty two
thousand pounds because his arm was ripped off by a chimpanzee.
In nineteen eighty nine, this is again at one of
Aspinall's facilities, and as irresponsible as all that is, he's
still in some ways good at what he's doing because

(59:14):
his second zoo, like his second zoo opens and yeah,
both Howletts and his second zoo, port Lymphany, are renowned
breeding centers. He produces seventy three captive bread gorillas and
six black rhinos.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
People die, but the animals fuck.

Speaker 2 (59:29):
The animals fuck. Yeah, it's it's wild and like by
the time, like kind of in the eighties, zoo professionals
who had sort of who had rightfully been like this
guy is a maniac started learning like taking his lessons,
some of his lessons on raising animals, because he's got
by this point eighty breeding species and he is hit.

(59:49):
One of his projects in the Congo is the first
to successfully introduce captive bread gorillas back into the wild.
So it's this mix of like wild incompetent that gets
people killed and also like this is the first program
to get captive bread gorillas back into the wild. So
I don't know what lesson you want to take from that.
It's just a thing that happened. Yeah, yeah, there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
I think the lesson I'm taking from this is we
need to learn a little bit about gorillas from this guy. Yeah,
this guy to throw more people in front of gorillas
just to see what happens.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
It's kind of a bummer. He doesn't die from like
being eaten.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
Now, I thought that was where this was going. I
thought he was going to get killed by like a
domestic cat.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
It's it's it could it's literally the opposite of that.
Because he does die of cancer in late June of
two thousand. But his final regret in life is that
cancer has made him too sick to like cuddle with
his dangerous wild animals anyway. That's yeah, aspers, as his

(01:01:01):
friends called him. Yeah, there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):
How are you feeling, I'm feeling great.

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:08):
I love the fact that Britain. I feel like Britain's
freaks are just very different to America, and.

Speaker 2 (01:01:15):
This is a unique kind of freak.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
Yeah, but it's only something that could be created by
the horrors of the colonial empire. Not just like the obvious,
repeated atrocities that to this day are visited upon the
world as a result of the British Empire. It's also
just the insane, repressive, violent nature of Britain in that

(01:01:41):
hundred year period. I don't even think it's truly stopped,
but we've just tamped down how violent and horrifying we are.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
And what's insane is nothing happened to this guy now,
nakedly corrupt, guy who led to the deaths of several
people and by proxy one made Yeah, and he's fine.
He died of cancer and his last thing was like, oh, yeah,
I didn't get the cuddle with my animals as much

(01:02:09):
as I wanted.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
I never got maimed one last time by a tiger.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't say I'm not going to
let God kill me. My gorillas will do it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
Yeah, I'll make my gorilla.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
You're really right there, like I refuse to let go
like this, this giant silverback gorilla I've been breeding specifically
to kill me when I get cancer.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
Yeah, I mean I will say. I'll say this for
gorillas because I think it's important to push back on
this myth sometimes.

Speaker 3 (01:02:37):
Yeah, voice, the gorillas are going to fucking light us
up in the comments.

Speaker 2 (01:02:42):
They are not the animals that kill people, right, because
it's actually like a silver like gorillas, it's kind.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
Of hard to get human beings do.

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
Yeah, I'm a be established to get take your mother
in law. Yeah, and she'll depress the gorilla and that's it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:55):
Yeah. Yeah, So I guess that's the lesson here. Everyone
go get a silver backrilla. It's completely safe.

Speaker 3 (01:03:02):
It's totally fine. You will be fine. Yeah, by one today.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
Yeah, do you have any pluggables for us?

Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
Said, just to find me at where's your head? Don't
if you want to read some excellent tech journalism and
if you want to hire a PR from easypr dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
Yes, most excellent easypr dot com. Check out where's your
ad at? And uh yeah, that's going to be it
for us at Behind the Bastards This week. You can
subscribe ad free to our shows at what is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:30):
It called Sophie Cooler Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Yeah, do that all right, We're done bye.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part Two: Lord Aspinall: The Gambling King of London