Part One: Peter Rachman: King of the Slumlords

Peter Rachman was a London landlord so bad, his last name became an internationally recognized synonym for "shitty slumlord". In these episodes, Robert explains how he went from fleeing the Nazis, to fleecing the British. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And before we start our episode today, I wanted to make a note of something. Those of you who have been watching on the Netflix since we started recording from the new room, which we're mainly doing because the old room, it's always like 15 degrees colder. And I just got tired of recording in those temperatures. But I've got some new wall art. And you can see this piece here was made by a very good friend of mine named Nova, who is four years old, going on five. And I just wanted to give a shout out to her and make sure that everybody on Netflix got to see her wonderful art. She's very talented.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Great job, Nova.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  You know, who else is talented? Our guest today, Kevin. Kevin, welcome to the show. How are you doing, man?

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Good. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate you calling me talented. That's very special.

• 0:55Robert Evans?

  You are. We've been working with you for the last couple of months now. You've been you've been doing or weeks, time, flat circle.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Months.

• 1:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Months.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's been more than two weeks. I know that. And those are the only two timeframes that exist in my life as more than two weeks and less than two weeks.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10Robert Evans?

  Like Sophie and I have been partners for well over two weeks.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14Robert Evans?

  So you've been helping us out on it could happen here. And you also have work of your own that you're doing that I think you should plug right now before we get into the story.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Plug your Substack and shit, man.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, my Substack is called Last Week in Hell, I guess, dot Substack dot com, if it matters to people. But it's got a cool logo of a gas mask. And I write about like politics and a bunch of activism things. And then I also freelance with different places. And I guess my pluggables is I'm at Kevin H. Foster on basically everything.

• 1:50Robert Evans?

  But yeah. Yeah. Now, Kevin, I'm gonna guess by the fact that you're a journalist, and you're a younger person, that you're a renter. Is that accurate?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, yes.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, nobody likes being the worst 30 years of my life. But if you if you take out the Oxford English Dictionary, which I know you keep on you at all times, Kevin, as do we all. I have I have the entire OED tattooed on. That's why I never wear short sleeves. It's nothing but words and very tiny font. It's unreadable.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  It's like the full Ben Affleck back tattoo, but it's your entire body.

• 2:28Robert Evans?

  It's my entire body. And it is on my back in the shape of a phoenix, like Ben's. But if you take to the OED to find synonyms for the phrase scummy landlord, you will encounter the real world word, "rockmanism," which stands for "the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords." Now, I'm gonna guess, at least half of our audience has experienced rockmanism in their lives. I have.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Why, yes.

• 2:54Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna guess everyone else has on this call. We've all had to endure some rockmanism. And as I'm sure you've concluded on your own, the term rockmanism has its origins in the name of a man whose last name was Rockman.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Sure, shit wasn't a woman.

• 3:11Robert Evans?

  No, it was. It was definitely not a woman. His name was Peter Rockman. And the most told version of his life story is that he was such a scummy landlord that after he died, and this is a he's a UK fella, or he didn't grow up in the UK, but that's where he was a landlord. He was such a scummy landlord that after he died, his very name became a byword for every other scummy landlord in the world.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 3:36Robert Evans?

  This is partly true. Peter Rockman was a real slumlord in real life London during a brief stretch of the post-war period. And he definitely counts as a bastard by any stretch of the imagination. But there's also bigger bastards in this episode, because the only reason his name became a watchword for scummy landlord, he was not the biggest or the scummiest landlord of his era. He was the one who happened to be a Jewish immigrant who died young. And so they kind of pushed all of the blame for being shitty landlords in England onto him.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, very classic, but all right.

• 4:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, not super surprising. He is more interesting than the bigger, scummier landlords. I will say that this guy has, I mean, he's got, he fought in World War II. He's got some fun stories that happened to him. But yeah, it's not entirely fair to put all of rockmanism on this one guy. But he also wasn't innovator. Like, one thing about him, while he wasn't the biggest of the scummy landlords, he was one of the more influential ones, because he was a really creative guy. You kind of have to be coming into England as a refugee from the Holocaust.

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• 4:51Robert Evans?

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• 7:29Robert Evans?

  So this is going to be a very British story. And like all great British stories, it begins far away in Lvov, which at this point in time, I think, is in Poland. I don't believe it's there now. I'll need to double check that, actually. I thought I had that in my script. But it was a part of Poland in 1919, when Peter was born, Perek Rockman, to a Jewish family in Lvov on August 16, 1919. Hey, everybody, Robert here. Lvov has actually been possessed by a bunch of different countries over the years. But it is currently part of Ukraine. It's also usually pronounced Lviv now, like L V I V instead of L V O V. Anyway, there you go.

• 8:13Robert Evans?

  Now, my sources for these episodes include two biographies, one written by Shirley Green in 1979 called Rockman, and another from like this year by Neil Root called Slumlord. And up until the release of Root's book, no one knew what Peter's parents' names had been, because he only ever gave one interview in his life to the press. And record keeping in Poland, right around the mid-century, was real poor for some inexplicable reason.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Not a lot of great birth certificates kept.

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  Anyway, Roots dogged research has revealed that Peter's parents were likely David and Golda Rockman, according to the application Peter later filed for British nationalization. He would claim to friends and colleagues that his dad had been a dentist, but Root could find no Rockman-registered dentist in that part of Poland at the time. David Rockman is listed in a 1935 to 1936 address book as a kupiak or merchant, although given the realities of life at the time, particularly for like Jewish people in communities in Poland, he might have been a dentist and they just like marked him down as a merchant because racism, like I don't actually know, like it's entirely possible he actually was a dentist and that's just not how he got listed in the phone book.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  How do you go from dentist to landlord? I guess we don't know, but.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  That's, that's the tale we're going to be telling the day. He does at least initially try to become a dentist. So Shirley Green's book claims that the Rockman children, Peter and his unnamed brother, who may not have existed. There's a lot of, this is a guy who, when he does talk about his life, he's lying a lot of the time, so I, we don't know if he really had a brother. Like there's no way, it's not like unlikely, but there's no document, there's no evidence at all that this guy ever existed. But Peter and his unnamed possible brother grew up and were expected to inherit and expand the dad, their father's dental office, right? Like that was the expectation in the 1920s and 30s when they were like becoming adolescents and turning into men, right? Like that's just kind of what she did at the time.

• 10:11Robert Evans?

  Their mother came from a wealthy glass making family who were in the vodka bottle business, which is a good business to be in in Poland. So they had some money, right? These are not poor people. Shirley writes of Peter's youth, "From all indications, Rockman went to an excellent school and took full advantage of the opportunities it offered. He was unusually intelligent with a quick mind and a retentive memory that made learning a pleasure rather than a chore. And unlikely as it may seem, he was also physically attractive. Although fat was to obliterate his features as an adult, basically his nose was straight and fine, his mouth small and well shaped, his eyes slightly slanting and intensely blue. She has a crush on him." This is one of those weird biographies where you can tell the biographer kind of wanted to fuck her subject. Cause she talks about him being hot a lot.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Oh God, I just like how you were like, it's unlikely as it may seem. And I'm like, you know, you're, I, I don't exactly know why, but that was definitely the vibe that I got from hearing about him for the past 10 minutes.

• 11:04Robert Evans?

  Because when this guy grows up, he will be compared to looking like a Bond villain by Ian Fleming's wife, right?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Oh wow.

• 11:11Robert Evans?

  Someone who's got some reason to say it. He's like, he's fat and balding as like a rich, older guy, right? So the fact that, and in, you know, in the seventies, he was a more famous figure. So I think she's writing for those people to be like, you won't believe this, knowing the pictures of him that you've seen, but he was a good looking guy as a young man.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Is that what landlord-ing does to you?

• 11:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, landlord-ing really wears you out. There are only four existing photos of Rockman, so basically, and basically no one who knew him in Poland seems to have survived the war. Everyone that this kid grows up with is annihilated in the Holocaust, right? So there's, there's no way to know what he looked like as a kid. That's the thing I find interesting about Shirley's book is that like, you can't know that. What is this based on? There's no pictures of him. You didn't talk to anyone who knew him back then, right? I think, I don't know. I don't know why she does this. We have vanishingly few details.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  I'm having flashbacks to learning about Henry Kissinger being just a hot shot. And I'm like, I don't, I don't want to know this.

• 12:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that he was a sexual icon for a period. No, that's not helpful to me. That doesn't improve my ability.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Feel good about, about the world in any way.

• 12:22Robert Evans?

  It, it makes me feel like better about every time I haven't, like attractiveness is based on so many things that have nothing to do with like anything but the weird mores of the time, right?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  That's a very good point.

• 12:39Robert Evans?

  Like it's, it's a bizarre, uh, social construct that we've created and you can really tell that by the fact that people used to want to fuck Henry Kissinger in large numbers.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  I don't like being reminded of that. Thank you.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. It just popped in.

• 12:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Speaking of popping in, uh, we have vanishingly few details about Rockman's childhood and pre-war life. Even Roots' book barely spends a couple paragraphs on that stuff. Green argues that, quote, "Few people could have had a better start in life, but that this early fortune gave Rockman little beyond a need to be liked and undeniable evidence of a good background," right? That basically because he winds up losing everything in the war, the fact that he starts off as wealthy doesn't really help him much, right? Like this is, this is a rich kid, but he doesn't benefit from being a rich kid because the Holocaust happens, right? So his only benefit is that he, he does grow up with like a cultured education that signposts him as someone of means, right?

• 13:37Robert Evans?

  Even though he's going to lose everything very shortly. Green describes Peter as growing up unapologetically Jewish, but also considering himself Polish more than anything. And as she describes it, "Pre-war Lvov was an unusually open-minded place." Quote, "In Lvov, a sophisticated city so famous for its theaters and cabarets that it was known as the Polish Vienna, there was a long-established tradition of tolerance and intellectual freedom. Over the generations, Jews had been allowed into the professional classes without prejudice until they had become thoroughly assimilated into society." There are elements of truth to that. You will find other people who write about Lvov somewhat like this, but that paragraph alone does not fairly depict the racial conflicts in that part of Poland or Poland as a brother.

• 14:20Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't say they were fully integrated because again, the Holocaust happens, right?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't know about that.

• 14:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That might be putting it a little too far, right? By the late 1930s, Lvov did host one of the largest Jewish communities in Poland, which suggests it was a lot safer than many other nearby cities for Jews, but that doesn't mean it was safe or had a long-established tradition of tolerance. I'm going to quote now from an article on Lvov for the Holocaust Historical Society. "Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, this would have been right around when Peter was born, and the Polish occupation of the area on 22th November, 1918, the Jews of Lvov were targeted in a pogrom in which hundreds of people were wounded and approximately 100 were murdered. In subsequent years, Jewish relief organizations worked prodigiously to rehabilitate the community." So right around the time he's born, there's a pogrom, right?

• 15:10Robert Evans?

  This is, this is a place that's a lot better to be a Jew than many in the area, but I wouldn't call it safe.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  That's bleak, man.

• 15:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  This is the good place.

• 15:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, this is genuinely one of the better places to be, right? Yeah. Eastern European history, first half of the 20th century is a nightmare. It doesn't get a lot better in the second half. I mean, it does get a lot better, but it's still not great.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:35Robert Evans?

  Um, I think a more accurate read about the situation in the city of Rockman's birth is that it did host a huge Jewish population and there were open-minded citizens who supported that community as well as bigots who wanted them wiped out. In his book, Root cites the global home for Jewish genealogy, who note in their write-up on the city, "Active antisemitism was widespread, one reason being that the Poles and Ukrainians each accused the Jews of helping each other," right? There's a nationalist struggle between people of Polish and Ukrainian descent and the Jews wind up not just in the middle, but blamed by both sides for like, well, you're secretly in line with the Ukrainians. No, you're secretly in line with the Poles, right? There's no winning.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Fascinating. This is funny because like my, my background is, part of my background is Polish, Ukrainian. So it's just a strange.

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  There's not really many groups you'd have wanted to be a part of in, in this part of Europe in this period of time, but like being a member of the Jewish community is certainly the toughest card to draw or, you know, Roma too, right? I would put them both in a similar, like it's just rough. It's just going to be rough for everybody. Green notes that by 1937, when Rockman is aged 18, he had grown into a good-looking, confident and popular young man, because she just really likes talking about how hot he is. He is noted as having loved the theater and also games of chance, which he played regularly. Her book continues, "He was a born organizer, unable to sit idle for any length of time or allow others to sit idle while he was around. All his interests were active rather than reflective, and his adolescence seems to

• 17:01Robert Evans?

  have passed by without any of the self-examination that might have stood him in good stead when faced with colossal reversals of fortune. Life was for enjoying, not analyzing, and he had no quarrel with the plans that his, that his parents had made for him, entering medical college to study dentistry, just as his brother had done before him. His future seemed assured, but like so many other promising futures, it was about to be shattered." So this is a kid where if, if the war hadn't happened, he probably would have grown up to be like a fairly affluent dentist, like his father. He and his brother would have both been dentists that would have been fine, right?

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Can I, can I ask, does games of chance mean that he has potentially a gambling?

• 17:35Robert Evans?

  He's got a gambling problem. He's got a gambling. I don't know if he has a problem because he's, he's, I think he probably has a problem. I think he probably has a problem.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  To be fair, I feel like, uh, there was like some report that has stuck in my mind that said that there's a very, very high rate of suicides in the, for dentists. So I don't know if he would have been fine.

• 17:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I don't know if that was true back then too, though, like, I don't know.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Fair enough, fair enough. But every time I hear somebody wants to become a dentist, I, that article pops in my head. I'm like, oh boy, are you sure?

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  Wow.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Teeth, teeth are kind of gross. I don't know. Mouth? No.

• 18:13Robert Evans?

  I don't know. I guess I've only ever had careers where there's like a high suicide percentage in them, so. I'm not a great judge on that sort of thing. Um, now unfortunately for Peter, 1937 was pretty close to the worst possible time to become an adult as a young Jewish person in Poland. In the years leading up to the war, Germany had slowly pieced its army back together and annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia with only token resistance at most from the rest of Europe. And one of Hitler's enablers in this period was Poland's Foreign Minister Joseph Beck. From 1935 to 1939, Beck backed Germany's play against Czechoslovakia by complaining about the mistreatment of Polish minorities there, which dovetailed to German claims about the same mistreatment for ethnic

• 18:57Robert Evans?

  Germans, right? This is a big part of why Germany needs to annex Czechoslovakia is there's so many Germans there and they're not being treated well. It should be part of, you know, that's, and Beck is backing Hitler's play because he thinks it'll keep Poland safe, right? That like, well, maybe if we feed Hitler some of these, some of these smaller countries.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Classically worked out.

• 19:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It doesn't work out that way, right? Beck supports Hitler during the Munich Agreement of 1938, which seemed to work out at first since Poland was allowed to invade and take Teshen, which was an industrial district in Czechoslovakia. People do forget about this part of the run-up to World War II, that when Germany takes Czechoslovakia, Poland gets a little bit of it, right? This is going to be kind of similar to what Hitler does with Stalin, where he's like, yeah, we'll split Poland with you. Of course, we'll never invade, buddy, guy, come on, right?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:48Robert Evans?

  Why would I do that? Um, so this is going to be, like I said, something of a mirror of what's going to happen next to the USSR. And this does happen like the next year, right? Germany and the USSR invade Poland and, you know, split it between themselves. Beck slightly redeems himself during the run-up to war. He refuses to make Poland into a German puppet state and hand over a bunch of territory to the Reich, but it was too little too late. When the Nazis invaded on September 1st, 1939, Peter Rockman was in Warsaw, where he'd recently enrolled as a medical student. So his country gets invaded right as he's starting medical school, right? Um, now even with Neil Roots, very welcome digging, there's a lot about Rockman's life in this period. We still don't know. I don't really know

• 20:32Robert Evans?

  exactly what he did next, but he leaves Warsaw and he flees eventually back to Lvov to be with his family. In 1949, after the war, he would claim that he and his brother had immediately started working as partisans, fighting alongside the Polish military, taking pictures and gathering information about troop movements and supplies. This may have been true, although Green proposes he invented his own part in this as a result of his bruised ego after the war. She says, his brother probably was working as a partisan because his brother is, Rockman claims his brother is caught by the Germans with a camera and arrested and shot as a spy during this period of time, right? Um, and Green seems to think this is probably true, but that Rockman lies about having helped his brother because

• 21:15Robert Evans?

  he feels bad about the fact that he didn't do anything, right?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 21:19Robert Evans?

  That seems kind of believable to me.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it definitely seems possible.

• 21:23Robert Evans?

  Seems very human to me, although it's also very possible he fought as a partisan, you know?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:28Robert Evans?

  Roots' extensive research has been unable to dig up any evidence that this, that his brother existed. However, again, we are talking about like a young Jewish guy in East Poland in 1939. The fact that there's not documentation of his life isn't weird. Um, his book cites research by the Jewish Historical Institute into the destruction of records pertaining to Lvov Jews during the war and notes that in the spring of 1949, uh, workers in the Morinaw district in Warsaw found Jewish death certificates from 1939 to 1941 from Lvov. The collection, uh, compromising roughly 10,000 items is shocking evidence of often partly burnt, sometimes illegible documents of extermination of the Jewish nation. So it's not weird that we don't have, if his brother is just, we don't have documentation of him because it was deliberately, they annihilated the evidence of a lot of people that they killed, right?

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Germans are not into archive.org.

• 22:16Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no. People talk a lot about like how much record keeping they did and that underestimates how much record keeping they destroyed, right? Which is also a big part of what the Nazis did. Um, so, uh, at other points, Peter would claim to have joined the Polish army as a volunteer and fought briefly against the Russians. I think this is untrue though. What is undeniably true is that Rockman's entire family is going to be interned in concentration camps and annihilated during the Holocaust. As far as we know, he loses everyone. There are none of his relatives left by the end of the war. Um, there's not, as far as we know, there's no one who knows him left alive from his childhood by the end of the war. I mean, may, I'm sure there were some, but like he never makes contact with anyone again.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Is this gonna be one of those complicated ones where we have to decide?

• 23:03Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  It's hard not to be on this guy's side and want things to go well for him with a start like this, right?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 23:14Robert Evans?

  Peter is the only Rockman to survive the camps and surely Green argues that he only survived because he was, quote, "too powerfully built for his strength to be wasted." In other words, he's put on a work detail and that allows him to survive, right? I think her wording here is a little weird and I chalk it up to the crush I think she had on him.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 23:33Robert Evans?

  Cause she, she follows this up by acknowledging he was five foot six with small hands and feet. So he's not, no one would call him pow, like you, obviously they're strong, short people, but you wouldn't call that a powerful build, right?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Did they say like his weight? Is he like stout or like, well, I guess small hands and feet.

• 23:48Robert Evans?

  Certainly later in life, he does have wide shoulders. Um, and, and she says a heavy build, but she also describes him as slender as a young man. I don't know that she knows what he looked like as a young man.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  This is weird, man.

• 24:00Robert Evans?

  It's, it's kind of weird. Um, he is conscripted into a road gang, uh, and Green writes that he only managed to escape the concentration camp because of this. And that is accurate, right? That because he gets put into a work gang, he doesn't wind up interned in a camp with his family. He would later claim that during this time, he would occasionally see a German, and he's building a road into Russia from Poland, right? As a part of this work gang. Um, he would, one of the roads, in fact, that the German invasion during Operation Barbarossa is going to go down. He would later claim that during this time, he would occasionally see a German officer visit the road gang in his big shiny staff car. Green writes, quote, "Instead of despising his captors as inferiors for dragging civilization back

• 24:41Robert Evans?

  to the Dark Ages, he is said to have sworn to himself that he would own a car even bigger and shinier one day." If that's true, that's a really weird reaction to seeing a Nazi when you've been put on a work gang.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  I like, I, I wanna like give him benefit of the doubt and chalk it up and be like, you're just, you're experiencing some really rough trauma right now, but also.

• 25:02Robert Evans?

  I can't judge you for almost anything you would do in this circumstance, but that is peculiar.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  That would be, that's crazy. That would be like if one of us was like covering a riot and we were like, wow, that ICE officer's Jeep. Wow, ICE officer's car. Look at that car that ICE officer just got in after work. Wow. I really wish I'd have that one. Like, no, it's fucking weird, dude.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Andrew Tate's balaclava that he wears.

• 25:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah. What a nice balaclava.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Only I had Andrew Tate's satin purple shirt and capris he wore when he got arrested in Florida.

• 25:36Robert Evans?

  I do feel like I could, I could pull off capris, Sophie.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I do too. You know what else you can pull off, Robert?

• 25:43Robert Evans?

  An ad break?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, buddy.

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  Possibly.

• 25:49Robert Evans?

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• 26:13Speaker 07

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• 26:55Robert Evans?

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• 28:24Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rosso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Duskalakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing, and why are they swabbing there? Finding a doctor who's not so judgy, and so much more.

• 29:09Robert Evans?

  It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term sponsor, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Your mental health doesn't know it's World Mental Health Day. Stress does not politely wait until October 10th. Burnout does not RSVP. And your brain definitely doesn't check the calendar before deciding to spiral at 11:47 PM. Mental health is just a part of

• 29:52Robert Evans?

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• 30:31Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, uh, Green describes how the Germans during the time when he's in this work gang also forced him to, quote, "undergo a sterilization operation." There's no evidence for that last part, especially because, and this is the weird part, Green talks about him, and he would sometimes talk about working on a work gang that the Germans were manning. But the region that he lived in during this period of time was taken over by the Soviet Union. And Root's book says that Rockman was conscripted to forced labor by the Soviet Union, not the Germans, which makes more sense, because the Russians are off, are occupying Lvov at this point. And he does claim that he fought the Russians. I don't know why Green makes it the Germans, and I think it's because Rockman would sometimes claim it was the Germans. He may have

• 31:14Robert Evans?

  just done this because like, oh, if I tell people I was like forced into a work gang by the Soviets, that'll confuse them because they don't really know that much about the war. Everyone knows Poland and Nazis.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  This is, so this is all during the war still, and we're, we don't know if

• 31:27Robert Evans?

  Just the very start. Yeah, we don't know what work gang he was on, really. Like, I think Root's probably right that it was a Russian work gang, because that was a thing that happened too. And because Lvov was occupied by the Soviet Union during this period of time.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Wait, does that mean that he, the Russians built the road into their own territory for?

• 31:45Robert Evans?

  I mean, the Russians were sending trains full of resources, fuel, and like raw materials to Germany. The last set of trains going from the Soviet Union to Germany carrying raw resources, like, arrived the day of Operation Barbarossa. The Germans waited to start until this last train came in, because they needed the shit. Like, it, there were some bad decisions made by the Soviet Union during this part of the war.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Also really uncomfortable with, quote, "undergo a sterilization operation," unquote. Nope.

• 32:18Robert Evans?

  I don't know what that, yeah, I mean, he never has kids, so people will write about, like, maybe he was sterilized during the Holocaust, or maybe like the, like, the privations he endured rendered him sterile. I think it's just likelier he either was sterile or just never wanted to have kids. Like,

• 32:32Speaker 01

  That, or, or some, some power at B was like, one scummy guy is enough.

• 32:38Robert Evans?

  One, one Rockman is enough.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  One Rockman's enough. We don't need to keep that gene pool going.

• 32:43Robert Evans?

  I don't know. That's, that's, that's unfortunately close to what the Nazis were saying, Sophie, so I'm not gonna go there.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  All right, all right, all right. Let's not compare Sophie to the Nazis in video and audio.

• 32:55Robert Evans?

  So Root writes that he escaped a stint doing forced labor for the Russians but was found and taken prisoner by Russian forces and transported to the notorious and deadly remote Siberia. Whereas, he wrote in his British naturalization application, he was made to do forestry work. And this is why I think Root was right, is we do know, one thing we know about him is that the Russians sent him east to Siberia, and he worked in like a gulag, right? We know that about him. And that makes it a lot likelier that he was working on a road gang that the Russians were operating. Because if he was working on a Nazi road gang, how would he have gotten transport? The, the Germans weren't sending people to Siberia.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:33Robert Evans?

  So this was not a nice experience. The gulags were not nice places, but being sent to one almost certainly saved his life, right? Because as awful as gulags were, and many people did die in Siberian camps like this, they weren't death camps. The USSR was not trying to murder every Polish Jew or even everyone they sent to these camps. And so while Peter's experience there was horrific, it was also survivable, right? It was way more survivable than staying home would have been, right? Because his, his family stays back home in Lvov, and they wind up in the camps, right? In the worst camps. I guess, for an idea of how bad his situation is, being sent to a gulag is like a break of really good luck for this guy. Forced labor in Siberia is a win.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Hey, you could be around the trees, maybe?

• 34:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, there's, yeah, at least there's trees.

• 34:26Robert Evans?

  He would go on to make some pretty horrific claims about his experiences, as Root's book outlines. Quote, "bitterly cold, and along with many others facing near starvation, Rockman would later account that he was forced to eat excrement to survive. He reportedly qualified that by saying to people he knew in London, 'I never ate German shit. At least no one can say I ever ate that.'"

• 34:46Speaker 02

  That's kind of badass, honestly. That's, that's a pretty, like, that statement. Damn.

• 34:52Robert Evans?

  I, I did look into this a little. I haven't run into any other stories. I've run into allegations of like cannibalism in the gulags, and even in like some of the camp, people who are starving will do almost anything. I have not ran into other stories about eating poop to survive. The research, I don't think that that would actually, it might fill your belly, though, so maybe if you were really that starving. It doesn't have much nutritional value, because it's, it's shit, right?

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, do you know, have you thought about this?

• 35:18Robert Evans?

  I, I mean, I've read a lot of concentration camp and other like narratives of people who have wound up in horrible starvation situations. And I have read a lot about like people literally eating dirt or leaves that had no nutritional value, just to like fill their stomachs, or ice, or, and like snow, just to like fill their stomachs. So stuff like this does happen, right? It's not gonna sustain. Don't take this as a survivalist tip, kids. But yeah, stuff like that definitely does occur. I don't know, maybe he made that up because it was a really good anecdote to tell. I don't know. Yeah, this is first reported in Shirley Green's book, and she is repeating a story Rockman told to a bunch of his friends and girlfriends while alive. That

• 35:59Robert Evans?

  said, I don't know why he'd lie about this, right? It, like, it's a good anecdote, but it's also not like, it's not like a cool thing to brag about.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Or something. Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I'd really want to be like, kind of human set up eating myself a little bit.

• 36:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know that I'd lie about that if it hadn't happened.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'd tell, talk about if it did happen, but you know.

• 36:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know that I would talk about it if it did happen, but Rockman clearly does. Root notes that Rockman's girlfriend later in life claims he told her many stories about his frenzied efforts to maintain some sort of hygiene when he was interned by the Russians. He's a very hygienic guy after the war, and part of it's because he's, he kind of goes a little crazy at how like filthy everything is when you're in a fucking gulag. His girlfriend relating the stories he told her said, "He used to de-lice himself and throw in the insects on the fire, listening to them pop as they exploded in the flames. He made clothes and shoes out of newspapers." So, this is a win again. This is lucky, but it's really bad.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  I feel like I keep hearing these things, and I'm, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I don't know if I would have told this story, but you know, fair enough.

• 37:14Robert Evans?

  For this to be the only reason you survived, like, that really shows what a nightmare it was to be a fucking Jew in Poland this period of time. Just like, yeah, this was like a really lucky break. Green notes that he claims to have been beaten regularly by guards and by other prisoners, and he would argue that's what made him sterile. One Pole that she interviewed, who knew him during this period of time, claimed, "By the time they'd finished with him, he was practically a eunuch." So maybe that's it. Maybe he was just like beaten badly enough that like, he was not able to have kids. However,

• 37:46Speaker 01

  That's dark.

• 37:48Robert Evans?

  I don't know, like, whatever damage he suffered to his, you know, reproductive organs during this period of time, he is going to have a lot of sex later in life. So it doesn't do that kind

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Good for, good for Rockman. That's, it's a good name for.

• 38:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Getting his, yeah, I'm not gonna make that joke.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, Sophie.

• 38:07Robert Evans?

  So on June 30th, 1941, German forces collaborating with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists took Lvov from the Soviet Army, who fled alongside roughly 10,000 of the city's Jewish population. Within days, German and Ukrainian forces spread lies that Ukrainian political prisoners had been murdered by Jews in the NKVD's dungeons in Lvov. This was used to justify a pogrom which, between June 30th and July 3rd, 1941, cost 4,000 Lvov Jews their lives. Rockman's parents and family may have died then, surely some of them did. They also may have been sent to the Genovsk concentration camp, where 35,000 to 40,000 Jews would be murdered later in the war. It's also possible they were sent to Belzec

• 38:48Robert Evans?

  and murdered there. They may have even died in March of 1942, when German forces executed 5,000 Jews who were too old or sick to labor. We don't know, and Rockman would never learn of his family's fate. This is something that haunts him the rest of his life.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 39:01Robert Evans?

  That he can't find out what happened to his mom in particular. And obviously, like, that would haunt you.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  In July of 1941, Peter's internment ended. General Sikorski, the leader of Poland's government in exile, made a deal with Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maysky. The Sikorski-Maysky Agreement saw 250,000 Polish prisoners of war released from Russian custody so that they could fight against the German invasion. Things are so bad, in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, that Stalin is like, "Yeah, man, get them out of the Gulags and put a gun in their hands. We have no other options. Things are very bad."

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Do they even have guns for all of them? Like?

• 39:40Robert Evans?

  Probably not, because I think they're gonna get armed largely by the Brits. I'm not 100% sure where their weapons come from during this period of time. I know that once he's mobilized with a bunch of other Polish former POWs, he travels to Teshkent, where he joins the Polish Army in exile under the command of General Wadyslaw Anders. This force left the USSR, passed through Iran and Palestine, and while it was in Palestine, which again is part of the British mandate, right? The British are governing Palestine at this point in time. It's integrated into the British Army, right? So even though this had been, this had been part of like the Russian resistance, for whatever reason, it's decided these forces would be better off fighting as part of like the integrated

• 40:21Robert Evans?

  British military forces. So they're integrated into the British Army and renamed the Polish Second Corps. I don't fully know the reason why these guys are sent to Palestine to fight under the Brits rather than the Russian front, but also Peter wouldn't have known, right? Nobody's explaining this to these guys, right? They're just going where they're sent.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  Were the Soviets just like, "We don't want to deal with this right now"?

• 40:41Robert Evans?

  Or like? It may have been that they didn't trust these guys enough to want them in like a crucial part of their front, but also 250,000 guys is 250,000 guys. If we give them to the British, it'll put pressure on the Germans somewhere else, and that will still help us, right? It may have just been that.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I suppose if you had people in the Gulag, you're like, "I don't know if we should really put these next to our, like..."

• 41:02Robert Evans?

  "I don't know if we want these guys in Stalingrad."

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:05Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 41:09Robert Evans?

  Green writes that Rockman was elated to have escaped Russia and have a chance to fight for the Poland he still loved. However, his patriotism, and he seems to have been a very patriotic guy at this point, is very quickly quashed by the antisemitism of his comrades, which has not been reduced at all by the fact that they're fighting the Nazis.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 41:27Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Although most Poles deny it, there seems little doubt that the regular officers of the Polish Army regarded all Jews as cowards and incapable of fighting. They constantly disparaged them in front of the other men, and so successful were they in belittling their abilities that when the Second Corps passed through Palestine, about 80% of them melted away into the local population," right? That like, they're just like, "I don't want to be in this situation. This isn't that much better," right?

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:51Robert Evans?

  Rockman stays, though, which says something about him, right? Although all this abuse saps his morale, and Green writes that he withdrew into himself, inwardly seething with anger and bitterness. She describes how his horizons narrowed to sheer self-interest, and that "the effect of this rejection may have influenced his behavior far more than any physical hardships." He did receive the Polish War Medal for his service, which was issued to anyone who served for a set length of time, but Peter did not end the war with any cool stories or any vengeance. You know, we talked about Robert Maxwell's youth, right? Gyllenhaal Maxwell's dad, which, like, there was a period of time where he's basically living in glorious bastards. He's committing war crimes against the Nazis. Peter doesn't

• 42:33Robert Evans?

  get that kind of, to the extent that that provides any catharsis, he doesn't really get it, right?

• 42:38Speaker 02

  All he got was the eating shit thing? That's, damn, that sucks.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  You would have hoped he'd gotten to kill at least one of them, right?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, goddamn.

• 42:48Robert Evans?

  I mean, he may have, he fights in Italy for a while, and he gets promoted to cadet officer in 1945. But Green, and I think his, the thing he was useful at was not his fighting, right? Green writes that what he managed to do well, and he managed to prove himself indispensable to his comrades, by using his powers of organization to gather luxury supplies like chocolate and soap and coffee, and provide them to his comrades, right? In other words, he was really good at logistics, and like the shady kind of logistics, where you're gathering and requisitioning stuff from the civilian population, maybe you're handing them some guns, maybe you're just taking it, right? It's probably not, not sketchy, what he's doing to get this stuff.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  He will become a landlord later.

• 43:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, we're seeing the landlord breaking through, yeah. He makes himself so useful, providing luxuries to his comrades, that he gets a private room while most of his unit is still camped out in tents, right? Like a room in an actual, like, building.

• 43:48Robert Evans?

  As Green describes it, "By the end of the war, Rockman had made a place of acceptance for himself in a unit that had initially been very bigoted against him." Quote, "He was genuinely popular, provided he kept his place. Everything about him was regarded with friendly condescension. When he dished out the canteen rations, if any of the Russian soldiers in the unit complained, his voice would squeak with emotion as he would shout, 'Go back to your German friends then. If you think you'll get better from Hitler, go back and get it from him.'" This hatred provided something of a stock entertainment. So did his Jewishness, which brought him in for nonstop teasing, apparently taken in good part. "If that sounds cruel," it was explained, "you must remember that it was the Jews themselves who created the atmosphere. They never thought of themselves as Polish, and they always thought that we Poles despise them." This is a quote from one of his comrades.

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  So I don't know if we should take that literally, right? This is somebody after the war trying to explain why he was such a racist to the Jews in his unit.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, that's like, this sounds like a, definitely an antisemitism. You know, it's actually still the Jews' father.

• 44:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I don't know if they brought it on themselves. I think you guys were just assholes. I think you guys were huge dicks to these people.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  For no real reason.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, just racism, you know?

• 44:54Robert Evans?

  Just racism, yeah. "By the end of the war, he'd had no contact with any of his family, and for obvious reasons, Rockman is not eager to return to post-war Poland." Who can blame him? I wouldn't want to go back either. And unfortunately, this is like,

• 45:11Robert Evans?

  another, I guess you could call it like, one of the Nazi successes in this war is that even among the Polish Jews who survive, a lot never want to return, right? Because they saw all of their neighbors turn against them and murder a lot of their family members, right? Why would you go back, right? Since he'd served in the British Army, he was stationed in Britain after the end of the war, and in November of 1946, he transfers to a unit in the British military that's called the Polish Resettlement Corps, right? This is a special British military unit made up of Polish forces who wanted to resettle in the United Kingdom after the war. There was an understanding that like, "A lot of you aren't

• 45:51Robert Evans?

  gonna want to go back for obvious reasons, and you did fight for the British Empire, so we should probably make a place for you here," right? Technically a stateless refugee, Rockman received an alien registration certificate, and after this point, he becomes, in essence, a permanent legal resident of Britain, but he's never a citizen, right? Like, he has, he's not even naturalized, like, he's a, he's got like a permanent visa, right?

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Permanent resident, yeah.

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, something like that, yeah. Alien resident visa or something like that, I guess you'd call it. During this next period of his life, he bounces around a few normal jobs. He works as a trainee toolmaker, and then he's a laborer at an aircraft production factory. And this is what takes him to East London for the first time. He's gonna be in East London for a while before he winds up on the West Side. Peter Rockman was ultimately discharged from the Resettlement Corps in February of 1948. So his service to the military does last a few years after the war, and it's here that I should zoom out and talk a little bit about how post-war Great Britain looked. Because as Americans, we have a tendency, when we think about the post-World War II period, it's a time of like affluence and hope. It was a real boom period for us. And that's because the US ended World War II

• 47:03Robert Evans?

  with literally half of all of the wealth on Earth, right? Like, just in our country. Like, that's like, I didn't pull that out of my ass, that the actual statistic is about half of all of the wealth on the planet was in the United States at the end of the war. England is not doing so well, right?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:19Robert Evans?

  The country is devastated by the wars, and not just because she'd had to spend a catastrophic amount fighting the war, but because her greatest cities had still been heavily damaged by years of German bombing and rocket attacks. Bomb sites were still being cleared, and bombs removed well into the 1950s. Many thousands of Britons lost their home during the fighting, and to make matters worse, after the war, they experienced a baby boom, just like the US did. So Great Britain has the baby boom without any of the money, and without any of the massive construction of housing. Initially, they're going to have to do that, but like, this causes a huge issue in the country. There's just not enough housing for everybody, right? Like, Peter Rockman is spending a lot of this in like, these group homes.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Well, that feels familiar.

• 48:06Robert Evans?

  Right, yeah, yeah, exactly. The end result of all of this is that Peter Rockman enters a Britain in which huge numbers of people are homeless. The government estimated at least 750,000 new homes would need to be built to address the crisis. After the war, Parliament passed the New Towns Act in 1946, which led to the construction of a ton of precast reinforced concrete homes. These were much faster to build than traditional dwellings, but even that was not enough to alleviate the crisis. Many Britons moved into caravans, which are basically RVs or trailers, right? And again, Rockman's living in like group homes and dormitories for a big chunk of this. The UK Science and Media Museum also notes that, quote, "Neglected or cheap and disused vehicles, such as railway carriages

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  or trolley buses, were used as homes. They were weatherproof and comfortable, and much cheaper than running a conventional built home." So people are like...

• 48:58Robert Evans?

  Desperate enough that they had to get creative. They're living in like decommissioned trolleys and trains because there's just no housing, right?

• 49:05Speaker 02

  God.

• 49:05Robert Evans?

  That's, you're seeing how the situation is being created in which a landlord could do very well.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  I just keep, I just keep having these feelings of like, look how far we haven't come from.

• 49:16Robert Evans?

  Oh, at the very end, we're, we're gonna have a stat dump that really makes that point.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Oh, man, Robert, don't tell us that.

• 49:25Robert Evans?

  It's okay. This is mainly bad for our friends over in the UK. So obviously it doesn't affect us at all.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:30Robert Evans?

  Because the world's not interconnected.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  You know what is interconnected though, Robert?

• 49:34Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of our podcasts. Yes.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:37Robert Evans?

  Yes. They're deeply connected to everything in the story, especially the Third Reich, you know? Which is why I'm a big fan of Mercedes. You know, Mercedes, if you need engines built for a bunch of tanks and armored vehicles that you're going to use to invade Russia. I mean, it didn't work the last time and it probably won't work when you do it, but I don't know, use Mercedes anyway.

• 50:02Robert Evans?

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• 51:01Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

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• 52:39Robert Evans?

  You love the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast, but you've got questions. Don't worry, everybody does. To answer them, hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson-Rasso just dropped a new bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor. For all your burning questions, the guys turn to the experts, including Dr. Dimitri Daskolakis, an infectious disease doctor, public health honcho, and big time advocate in LGBTQ+ health, HIV prevention, and health equity. Think of it as the after show to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, where the crew dives deep into topics and stories from that week's Tuesday episode. Episodes cover topics including testing and why are they swabbing there, finding

• 53:21Robert Evans?

  a doctor who's not so judgy, and so much more. It's all about busting sexual health myths and helping listeners better understand the topics they may want to explore with their own doctors. Listen to this special bonus series, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions: Bedside Manor, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get podcasts. Sponsored by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences.

• 53:42Speaker 06

  I'm Donald Faison and I'm in a new movie called Christmas at the Kringle's. At first, it looks like a fun Christmas comedy, but then it gets weird, really weird. Imagine moving next door to a family that celebrates Christmas 365 days a year. Then imagine finding out they may not have the best intentions. The movie mixes comedy, action, suspense, and holiday chaos. We've got a great cast, including Ron Livingston, Rachel Bilson, Rob Riggle, Thomas Lennon, and more. If you like holiday movies and a totally unexpected twist, this one's for you. Christmas at the Kringle's opens exclusively in theaters October 30th. Rated R. Grab some friends and go see it on the big screen. Check out the trailer and get your tickets now.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Uh, so, Rockman couldn't help but notice the fact that there was not nearly enough housing to go around and that it was easily the most valuable commodity in the country after the war. Next to like, well, fresh meat was also a pretty valuable commodity, right? The fact that there was not enough housing would have been obvious during his own struggles to find a home, but it would also have been a constant topic in the news. In 1950, Clement Atlee's Labour Government committed to build 200,000 new homes. Churchill's Conservatives chose to up that to 300,000, and by 1953, that many new homes were being constructed per year. The housing boom in Great Britain would last more than a decade, but even so, it is not keeping up with the growing population. These

• 55:06Robert Evans?

  are huge numbers of houses to be constructed and they're still behind, right? They're still behind the eight ball every step of the way. Green describes Rockman's living situation at the end of the 1940s. Working as a, at a veneer factory and living in, quote, "Dakinsian rooms that were still lit by gas and destitute of any floor coverings." Their bedsitters had no facilities for washing or cooking, and beyond empty grates, no facilities for heating. He and his roommate would steal cast-off cuts of veneer from the factory and burn them for warmth. So they're like burning, which is like this, like fucking paints type, like, it can't have been good for you to just be burning this stuff and inhaling these fumes? But that's how poor they are, right? Is that they're like burning veneer for warmth?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  God, you get, you get out of the Gulag.

• 55:52Robert Evans?

  It's rough.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  You go to war and then all of a sudden you're, Jesus, this guy just can't catch a break.

• 55:58Robert Evans?

  No, not yet.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  Not yet.

• 56:00Robert Evans?

  Um, he leaves this last job after eight months and leaves the East End for the West End, where London historian Gary Powell writes that he, quote, "became involved in Soho's crime and prostitution rackets." And there's some missing here. We don't yet get him explaining it. I think what happens here is he's like, you know what? A sucker's game is working for money. That's bullshit. I'm gonna get into gambling and pimping.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Game's a chance.

• 56:24Robert Evans?

  Games a chance and pimping. Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:29Robert Evans?

  And it was, Gary Powell alleges, this illicit money that first allowed Rockman to start purchasing properties, which he funded by working as a pimp. This matter is up for some debate. Neil Root describes him as taking a more acceptable route, taking a job at a property management office in the late night, in late 1950, and working his way up to a management position by 1952, when he saves up enough money that he's able to buy, he's buying what we would call today distressed properties, right? And it's definitely true that he works in this place. It's also almost certainly true that some of the money he's making to buy these houses comes from money he's making illicitly, right? Both of these things are accurate. Root makes it clear that Rockman was heavily involved in

• 57:11Robert Evans?

  the underworld too, although in a somewhat different way than Powell describes it. Quote, "It's around this time that Rockman became close to Gloria, a tall, redheaded prostitute, as detailed by Shirley Green in her biography. A police officer, now deceased, who was working in Notting Hill during Rockman's time, compiled a report of what he had learned about him, and this was supplied as research for this book by the writer and journalist Mark Olden. The policeman thought that Gloria's surname was Davenport, but this could not be verified, and Gloria may well not have been her real name. In any event, Rockman seems to have been associating with prostitutes, but there was no evidence that he worked as a pimp. As the report states, 'It was at the time, that time that he started to befriend prostitutes, not only availing himself of their services, but also trading with them and even lending them money. He was well-liked by the frail sisterhood, who report that this man, that

• 57:55Robert Evans?

  his main catchphrase was, 'Don't worry,' when they were late with rent or repaying loans. There was never any evidence that he took earnings of prostitution from any prostitute as a ponce. A ponce is an old-timey Britishism for pimp, right, in this period of time." So at least from that era, it's less that he was, he was definitely making some money gambling, but he wasn't a pimp so much as he was just like, his entire social circle was prostitutes?

• 58:17Speaker 02

  That's, that's.

• 58:18Robert Evans?

  Which is a cooler guy.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  That's kinda like, not so bad, you know?

• 58:21Robert Evans?

  That's not so bad.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Pro-sex work maybe, hopefully helps out with the hope, maybe?

• 58:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, you get mixed reports about whether or not he was really helping with the rent, so to speak. Gloria's pimp was a West Indian guy, right? And he fell in love with her and suggested, and she suggested, at least the story he would tell is that he falls in love with this, this prostitute. And she's like, you should start like buying and renting out homes, right? Because you're a white respectable looking guy who can buy a property and you could sublet it to all of my friends who are also sex workers and have trouble finding like a landlord who's not an asshole, right? Like that, that's one version of the Rockman story. We don't actually know what's true here, right? It is entirely possible that he's basically working as a pimp for these people. But, you

• 59:11Robert Evans?

  know, at least Root's research suggests it's something a little more nuanced. In an article for the New York Review of Books, Carol Phillips gives an account that sides somewhere between these two versions of what happens. She writes, "Rockman's first tenants in this enterprise were prostitutes with whom he freely consorted as a friend and client," she writes, and proposes that "his wartime experiences had also taught him not to be too judgmental, either about people themselves or the means by which they made a living. So he moved easily into the world of prostitution," right? And British law at this time considered two girls doing business out of the same flat to be a brothel, right? So they would crack down if there was more than one girl working out of the same apartment. But one girl working out of one flat could pass without incident if her neighbors didn't complain.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  That's incredible, Robert.

• 59:58Robert Evans?

  It's British, British laws are crazy. Recent changes to policy had led London police to aggressively arrest and crack down on both brothels and street walking, right? For the first, but not the last time, Peter Rockman took a look at these laws and found a place for himself to make a fortune. Quote, Rockman's, and this is Carol Phillips, Rockman's girls paid him their official rent and then handed over additional cash in payment for this consideration, which allowed them to work more safely off the streets. Although Rockman certainly had sex with some of his girls, though, according to his biographer Shirley Green, never against their will nor in lieu of rent, he was unsentimental about it. Mandy Rice Davis, his ex, his girlfriend or his ex-girlfriend claimed sex was not a passion with him, but something functional, like drinking a glass of water.

• 1:00:43Robert Evans?

  Now, I think that kind of neatly explains the discrepancy between was he a pimp or was he just a friend? He's not directly a pimp, but he's the landlord to basically an apartment building where everyone there is a prostitute and they're paying him out of their cut of their earnings. So it's kind of pimping with like an extra step.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  This, this feels like a, like an abusive, like love bomb type thing where he's, he's like, oh yeah, don't worry, it will be good. This isn't really sexual to me, but then also, uh, yeah, I own this building where you're, yeah, yeah, just sounds bad.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  And, and again, that doesn't mean, he may also have been, cause he was, seems to have been very popular with a lot of people who lived in kind of the underclass of London in this period of time. So it may have been that he was still a better option than they had from anyone else. Like that's, that can be true. And it can also have still been a, not a great situation ethically.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  The lesser of two evils, the harm reduction pimp.

• 1:01:40Robert Evans?

  He's their version of getting sent to the Gulag instead of a death camp where it's like, well, this is better.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 1:01:48Robert Evans?

  Um, now, again, when you read kind of some of the versions of this, where he's just like hanging out with all of these prostitutes and like helping them out, he can seem like dangerously close to being a cool guy. In an article for Unseen Histories, Neil Root makes it clear that this was not the case. Rooms were also rented to sex workers and these women were charged the highest rents, which they sometimes would have to pay, pay to have an inside space to do business, but they were also sometimes intimidated and victimized. So Root will also note that like, he wasn't directly a pimp, but he's also like, not always nice to his tenants, right? Like he could be harsh when he needed to, and he was also charging them the high end of the scale because they were working from home, so to speak, right?

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Robert Evans?

  So I wouldn't, I wouldn't call this a great moral situation, even if it is like a better deal than they were getting from anyone else, right?

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Robert Evans?

  Now, London in this period also had very strong rent control laws, and these made it basically impossible to raise rents or evict tenants, right? If you live there and have been living there, you pay the same rate that you've been paying and you can't be evicted. And this is great for the people, right? But it makes rental properties a terrible investment unless you can find a way to force your tenants to move. Then you can charge the new folks whatever the fuck you want, right? And so as he's buying these distressed properties that he's going to fill with sex workers, they're all filled with other people who have a rent control situation, right? So he's got to force other people out of these buildings before he can fill them with his quote unquote friends. Andy Edwards summarized in an article, Rockman's first home purchase this way and how he cleared

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  out the former tenants. Seven of the eight rooms were already occupied by rent paying tenants who were protected by the current rent controls and therefore immune from eviction. Rockman is alleged to have rented out the one unoccupied room to a party of eight West Indian musicians who were encouraged to party. This led to the white tenants quickly terminating their tendencies and being replaced by West Indian immigrants who were charged higher rents, right? In other words, and when we say West Indian, we're talking about like a lot of people from like Jamaica, right? The Caribbean, and these are generally black people, right? And so what he realizes is that if I move a bunch of black people into the only spare space or one of the spare spaces in this building, and I tell them, sometimes he would like, he's alleged to have like paid them or given them a break on rent to party late

• 1:04:05Robert Evans?

  at night, it'll make everyone else want to leave, right? And, you know, he's kind of just taking advantage of the racism of these white tenants. That is a big part of what's happening. Although it's also fair to say, you might just want to leave in if you're not a racist, if someone's paying like a band to play music at all hours of the day inside of your apartment building. So I'm not going to say only racism leads to these people leaving, but a lot of it is racism. Um, and it's interesting because I, I think probably what Green says is accurate, that this is a guy who, because of his life experiences, is not at all judgmental about people. He doesn't really think that, he doesn't have a moral issue with prostitution and he's not a bigot, right? He, he's not like a racist against these black people or any of the non-white people

• 1:04:50Robert Evans?

  that he's moving into these spaces, but he understands racism and he's very willing to take advantage of it to profit, right? And this is going to contribute, as we'll talk about in part two, to this kind of like boiling undercurrent of racial resentment from white people against West Indian refu, like immigrants, right? Because he's deliberately putting them in a situation to have conflict with these, with these white people, right?

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Robert Evans?

  Um, and we'll talk about that and what happens later in part two, but we're done with part one.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Part two.

• 1:05:21Robert Evans?

  How are you feeling, Kevin?

• 1:05:22Speaker 02

  Good, good. I'm doing, doing what I can to, to keep up. I, I'm like so immersed in this piece of shittery that is also has such a like.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Crazy origin.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  It's always tough when the, the origin is literally the worst possible thing you could have happened to you.

• 1:05:42Robert Evans?

  Like you want this guy to succeed and do well, and then it's like, ah, but not like that.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  Like, he, he's like a, a step, like a few, okay, not a, he's a few steps away from being on cool people who did cool stuff for being like a pro sex work awesome dude that was helping people out after going through hell, but he's, seems like a piece of shit.

• 1:06:04Robert Evans?

  And it's tough because there are, but you will get a lot of quotes from like West Indian immigrants too, who are like, Rockman was like the only guy who would rent to us because all of the other landlords were so fucking racist, right? Um, and so there are a lot of people that like legitimately got by and were able to make a life for themselves because Rockman offered them a place, but he wasn't doing it out of the goodness of his heart and he was deliberately stoking racial tensions in order to make more money for himself in a way that's going to cost some of these people quite dearly later on.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Robert Evans?

  Um, so we'll talk about all that. Uh, you got any pluggables to plug before we roll out here?

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Check me out on Substack at Last Week in Hell and Kevin H Foster on all the social things.

• 1:06:49Robert Evans?

  Excellent. All right. Well, we will be back in, on Thursday, uh, except for everyone in this call will be back in like five minutes because that's how we actually record these things.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Figured.

• 1:06:59Robert Evans?

  But yeah, pretend it's otherwise, you know, uh, and, and wait for us. We'll be there.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

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• 1:08:11Speaker 06

  Hey everybody, it's Donald Faison and I wanted to tell you about a movie I'm in called Christmas at the Kringle's. What starts off as a family moving next door to some very enthusiastic Christmas lovers quickly turns into something way crazier than you expect. It's funny, it's action packed, it's got some twists, and trust me, you've never seen a holiday movie quite like this. The cast is incredible and we had a blast making it. Christmas at the Kringle's opens exclusively in theaters October 30th, rated R, so grab your friends, get your tickets, and I'll see you at the movies.

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• 1:09:13Speaker 07

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• 1:09:16Speaker 05

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• 1:09:17Speaker 07

  Everyone's just been blown away by all the new products.

• 1:09:21Speaker 05

  Wow, is that?

• 1:09:22Speaker 07

  Yep, the Rascall card in the new red brown color.

• 1:09:25Speaker 05

  The price is amazing. And is that the Billy bookcase?

• 1:09:29Speaker 07

  A classic, and it comes in a new beautiful blue.

• 1:09:32Speaker 05

  Is my hair okay?

• 1:09:33Speaker 07

  Ah. Explore hundreds of new products this season when you shop in-store or online at ikea.us/discovernew. IKEA, dream the possibilities. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories.

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• 1:10:49Speaker 03

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