Clarkenwell, London. A Tuesday afternoon, July 2017. St. Peter’s Italian church on Clarkenwell Road. The same street where the Italian community of London has buried its dead for 150 years. Mourners filing in, most of them elderly, men in their 70s and 80s, who move carefully and dress well and do not look directly at the journalists and photographers positioned outside the gate. Then the music starts.
Not a hymn, not the Ave Maria, the Godfather. The theme from the film playing inside St. Peter’s Italian church in Clarkenwell as the coffin arrives. Then at the end, as the mourers file out into the July afternoon, Once Upon a Time in America, two films, two allergies for men who built criminal empires and never fully left them.
playing for one man, Roberto Alberto Rossi, known as Bert, known as battles, known as bananas for the size of his fingers, known to the world he actually inhabited for eight decades as the general of Clark andwell. He had died 5 days earlier. He was 94 years old. Now, here is what that man, the one in the coffin while the Godfather played in a London church, had done in the 94 years before he died quietly in a North London hospital after falling and breaking two ribs at his home. He had
driven for the Sabini brothers, the most powerful criminal family in Interwar Britain. He had jailed alongside Frankie Fraser for the razor attack on Jackspot that ended the most powerful Jewish gangster in London’s history. He had met Ronny Cray in prison, decided he was mad as a hatter, and mentored him anyway.
He had become the London representative of Angelo Bruno, boss of the Philadelphia mafia, confidant of Maya Lansky, the man the commission called the dosile dawn. He had helped Mayer Lansky open casinos in London. He had stood trial for murder in 1975. He had been acquitted. He had retired.
He had spent 40 years on Colbrook Row, Islington, wearing three-piece suits, attending the Italian procession, playing cards. And every man who had operated alongside him, every figure from the Sabinis to the Craze to the American mob to the Msina era to the Adams family, was either dead, imprisoned, or destroyed.
Bert Rossy died in his own bed at 94 with the Godfather at his funeral. The most successful criminal, he always said, is the one who keeps out of the limelight. He kept out of it for 94 years. This is his story. Clarkenwell, London, November 1st, 1922. Saffron Hill sits in the crease between Clarkenwell and Hullburn, a street that Charles Dickens had named as Fagan’s territory in Oliver Twist 80 years before Roberto Alberto Rossi was born there because it was the specific geography of London where the poorest
immigrant communities had always landed. Italian families by 1922 there were thousands of them in the streets around Clarkenwell. the children and grandchildren of men who had come to London from Calabria and Campia and Sicily in the decades after Italian unification, who had found work as ice cream vendors and organ grinders and street entertainers, and who built in the tight streets around Saffron Hill and Warner Street and Street Hill.
A community so dense and so self-contained that it had its own name, Little Italy. Not a tourist designation, a fact. Italian spoken on every corner. Italian food from every kitchen. St. Peter’s Italian church, the same church where Bert Rossy’s coffin would arrive 94 years later to the Godfather theme at the center of it.
His parents were immigrants. His father worked. His mother stood at the window and shouted, “Berto.” When she called him in from the street where he was playing football, she called his name the Italian way. Berto. Her accent made the B hard. The syllables clipped. The English boys on the street heard something else.
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They heard battles. The name stuck. It would follow him for 94 years. Battles. Rossy. He left school as early as the law permitted. He was already fighting by then. Not organized fighting, street fighting. The specific currency of a boy from Little Italy who had grown up understanding that the boundary between the Italian community and every other community around it was a boundary that required maintenance.
He was good at it more than good. He had what the men he would later work alongside. Men who had seen every variety of physical confrontation that the criminal world produced would describe with the specific respect of professionals recognizing a peer. He was naturally violent in the way that useful men are naturally violent.
Not hotheaded, not impulsive, cold. London, late 1930s into the 1940s. Charles Darby Sabini had built the most powerful criminal organization in Britain during the interwar years. We have covered the Sabini story on this channel, the racecourse protection. the pitches at Epsom and Brighton and Ascot.
The Jewish and Italian alliance that controlled London’s criminal economy for two decades. The interament during the war that broke the family’s power. By the time Bert Rossy was old enough to be useful, the Sabinis were contracting. But they were still the Sabinis. He went to work as a driver for Harry Boy Sabini, one of the family’s key operators.
The man who ran the day-to-day enforcement that kept the protection operation functioning. A driver, not a soldier, not an enforcer in his own right. Yet, a driver who watched, who listened, who learned the specific geography of London’s criminal economy from inside one of the cars that moved through it, he became close to Bert Marsh.
Bert Marsh, born Pascalino Papa, a name he had changed for the same reasons every man in this community changed their name to move through English institutions with less friction, was one of the most respected Italian criminals of his generation. The two Berts, Rossy and Marsh in the Clarkenwell that shaped both of them.
That pairing was the beginning of a reputation that would grow for 60 years. During the Blitz, the German bombing campaign that leveled large sections of London between 1940 and 1941, Rossy got work as a demolition contractor. The specific, practical, unglamorous work of clearing bombed buildings. He was good at that, too.
And the bombed landscape of London in the early 1940s was the same landscape that Billy Hill was working. the black market, the salvage operations, the specific economy of a city that had been partially destroyed and that was rebuilding itself with money that moved outside every official channel. Rossy found his way to Hill and through Hill to the world that would define him, London, late 1940s into the 1950s.
Billy Hill was the man who called himself the boss of Britain’s underworld. He said this in a published memoir in 1955 in court and on numerous other occasions. He was not contradicted. Albert Dimes, Italian Al, the man from Clark andwell, whose story we have already covered on this channel, was his enforcer.
The man who stood between Hills operation and everything that threatened it. Bert Rossy ran alongside Dimes, not under him, alongside him. They were both from Clark andwell, both Italian. Both men who had grown up in the same streets, attended the same church, absorbed the same specific understanding of what the Clark andwell Italian community was and how it needed to be protected.
Rossi dealt cocaine through the clubs he ran in Soho, not heroin. He never touched heroin. This was a line he maintained for his entire career. the specific moral distinction that men of his generation and his background drew between a drug that made people feel good and a drug that destroyed them.
The clubs ran, the gambling halls ran, the snooker halls ran. Protection money moved through Clark andwell at the rates that Hill’s operation had established. And in 1951, Rossy demonstrated what he was capable of when the boundaries needed enforcing. Tony Meler, a rival gangster, was dragged from a flat near Old Street.
Rossi and associates, razors and fists. The cuts were severe enough to require extensive medical intervention. The scars lasted a lifetime. Meer survived. The message was received. London 1956. The attack on Jack Spot coma in August 1956. We have covered this story from two angles on this channel.
From spotside from Albert Dimes’s side. Rossy was in the crew that carried it out. Frankie Fraser, eight men with razors and cautious. The ambush outside Spot’s Paddington flat. The three minutes that ended Jack Spot’s criminal career and his power in London. Spot and Rita bleeding on the pavement. Rossy was arrested alongside Frankie Fraser.
He went to prison. And in prison, he met someone, a young man from Bethnyl Green. Intense eyes, a paranoid quality that experienced men in the criminal world recognized immediately as either a liability or an asset depending on how it was managed. Ronny Cray. Rossy looked at Ronny Cray and formed an assessment that every person who ever knew Ronny Cray would eventually reach.
Made as a Hatter, his words. Mad as a Hatter. But Rossy was a man who saw utility in everything. A man who had spent his life in an environment where the specific kind of madness that Ronny Cray possessed. The complete absence of the fear that regulates most men’s behavior was the most dangerous and therefore the most valuable quality available.
He chose to mentor him. He taught Ronny Cray what he knew about running clubs, about protection, about the architecture of a criminal organization, about the specific discipline that separates an operation that survives from one that destroys itself. Ronnie listened. Whether Ronnie absorbed the discipline is a matter of historical record.
He did not. But the relationship, the Clark andwell Italian teaching the Bethyl Green twins about the business they were building was real. Rossy would later say without particular emotion that he had tried to teach the craze that business should not be mixed with pleasure. They disagreed. The 30-year sentences that followed were the consequence.
London, early 1960s. When the British government legalized casino gambling in 1960, the reaction in the United States was immediate and specific. Maya Lansky, the financial architect of American organized crime, the man who had built the gambling infrastructure of Las Vegas and Havana, and who understood better than anyone alive how money moved through a casino and what it was worth, looked at the London Gaming Act and saw an opportunity.
Lansky came to London. With him, Angelo Bruno, the boss of the Philadelphia crime family, 60 years old, slight, soft-spoken, the man the commission called the doile dawn, not because he was weak, but because he had understood something that the more theatrical figures of American organized crime never fully grasped.
The most powerful demonstration of power is not violence. It is longevity. Bruno had been running Philadelphia since 1959. >> >> He would run it until 1980 when an assassination ended him. He was the most respected figure in American organized crime of his era, connected to every major family sitting on the commission. And he came to London.
He needed a man, not an American, not someone who would be immediately identified by Scotland Yard as what they were. Someone British, someone who knew London, who knew the clubs and the casinos and the specific geography of the city’s criminal economy, someone the London underworld would deal with. Angelo Bruno came to Bert Rossy.
The Colony Sports Casino on Berkeley Square in Mayfair, fronted by the Hollywood actor George Raft, managed by Lansky’s man Dino Chelini, financed by Bruno and Lansky, opened in the early 1960s. Bert Rossy was their man in London, their representative, their contact, the man through whom the most powerful criminal organization in the world interfaced with the British underworld.
He traveled to the United States. He worked with Bruno, with Lansky, with Little Nikki Scaro, Bruno’s nephew, the man who would eventually take over the Philadelphia family and turn it into something Bruno would not have recognized. An Italian from Clark andwell in the rooms where the American mafia made its decisions.
Trusted, valued, called back to London when Scotland Yard closed the Colony Casino, deporting the American operators, barring George Raft from re-entering the country and given the specific task of managing what remained. He managed it. He survived it. Every American the mafia sent to London was eventually deported or identified and expelled.
Bert Rossy stayed. Old Bailey 1975. Beatatrice Biddy Gold ran a clothing business in Clarkenwell. In her basement in 1975, she was murdered. The investigation led to Bert Rossy. He was tried at the Old Bailey for murder. He denied having anything to do with it. His barristister was Jeremy Hutchinson QC, one of the most eminent criminal barristers in Britain.
the man who had defended the publishers of Lady Chattalie’s Lover, who had represented the great train robber Charlie Wilson, who moved through the most significant criminal cases in British legal history with the calm authority of a man who had never been in a room that made him uncomfortable. The prosecution’s case rested on a suspicious package that Rossy had handled.
He said it contained jewelry. The evidence was insufficient. The jury acquitted him. He was 52 years old. He walked out of the old Bailey and retired. 40 years of quiet. Colbrook Row, Islington, 1975 to 2017. He lived on Colbrook Row, a Georgian terrace in Islington’s Angel Area. Wide pavements, the kind of street that in 1975 was workingass and Italian, and that by 2017 had become one of the most sought-a addresses in North London.
a street of architects and journalists and tech workers who had no idea that the man in the three-piece suit at number whatever had once been the London representative of the Philadelphia mafia. He wore the suits until the end. Dapper, always dapper. He attended the Italian procession, the annual religious festival through Clark andwell Street, the procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel that the Italian community had been running since 1883 and sat with his grandson Frankie near Denny Mancini’s stall.
Denny Mancini, the legendary boxing cornerman, another Clark andwell Italian, another old man who had seen things. They sat together, old men in suits, watching the community process pass them. He played cards. He gambled. He kept his close friendship with Terry Adams, the North London crime boss, the head of the Adams family that had become one of the most powerful criminal organizations in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, and that we have covered on this channel. Terry Adams, his neighbor, his
friend. Adams did not attend the funeral. The press were outside. He sent a wreath. Bert Rossy had done consultancy work occasionally in retirement. Nothing specific was ever documented. St. Peter’s Italian Church, Clarkenwell. July 2017. The mourers filed in, most of them elderly.
The journalists outside the gate photographed the faces they recognized and noted the ones they didn’t. Inside, Father Jeppe led the service. Then the Godfather. Then once upon a time in America, Bert Rossy’s grandson Frankie said his grandfather had taught him morals. To be respectful, never to be a bully. He loved gambling.
He loved cards. He loved boxing. He was, the Islington Tribune reported, one of us. Here is the full accounting of Bert Rossy’s criminal career. He had worked for the Sabinis, the most powerful criminal organization in Britain before the war. He had worked for Billy Hill, the man who called himself boss of Britain’s underworld.
He had worked alongside Albert Dimes, the man who kept the craze out of Soho for a decade and brokered meetings between the New York mafia and the Corsac underworld. He had helped break Jack spot, the king of Oldgate, the Jewish gangster who had run London’s racecourses through the war. He had mentored Ronny Cray.
He had been the London man for Angelo Bruno, My Lansky, and Little Nikki Scaro. He had been tried for murder. He had been acquitted. He had lived quietly on Colbrook Row for 40 years. He had worn three-piece suits until he could not. He had died at 94. A journalist had once told him they thought he’d killed as many as 11 people in Britain and the United States.
His response, reported in his memoir, was characteristically economical. Bastard. He did not dispute the number. The most successful criminal is the one who keeps out of the limelight. 94 years, three-piece suits, the Godfather at his funeral, the general of Clarkenwell, the last of his kind.
