| |
 Antiquis lies dead on the pavement after being shot in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia in 1947 |
Image of evil killing that went around the world
Author bases book on robbery gone wrong that ended in murder
THE picture on the left, taken 60 years ago in Fitzrovia, became one of the most famous crime shots in British history.
Alec de Antiquis, 31, was shot dead in Charlotte Street on April 29 1947 after challenging the ringleaders of a smash-and-grab gang targeting jewellers in the West End.
An agency snapper photographed his body slumped against the kerb seconds after the cold-blooded killing.
The image, beamed around the world at the time, revealed the human cost of teenage gun-crime in bomb-scarred 1940s’ Westminster.
Author Paul Willetts, whose biography of Soho legend Julian Maclaren-Ross, Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, which was many national newspapers’ book of the year in 2002, has trawled through Old Bailey transcripts and hundreds of newspaper cuttings for his latest ‘faction’ North Soho 999.
He said: “People will tell you that teenage gun crime is a modern phenomenon – a fashion blamed on black people or rap culture. But the statistics surrounding this story paint a different picture. There were 12,300 convicted members of criminal gangs in 1947. It was a wave of gun crime and gangsterism threatening to overwhelm post-war London.”
Charles Jenkins gunned down Antiquis, an Italian-born mechanic and father of six, following a botched raid on Jay’s jewellers in Tottenham Street.
The getaway driver, a 17-year-old ‘novice’, failed to find the reverse gear and the masked robbers were forced to flee on foot. Antiquis tried to tackle them but was ‘executed’ in Charlotte Street.
Superintendent Robert Fabian, nicknamed ‘Fabian of the Yard’, solved the murder after a mystery mackintosh holding forensic clues led detectives on a nationwide manhunt stretching from the south of London to north Yorkshire.
Jenkins and his accomplice Christopher Geraghty, 21, were eventually found guilty and sentenced to death at the Old Bailey trial and hanged in Pentonville.
In a bizarre twist, hangman Albert Pierrepoint, whose life was recently documented in the British film Pierrepoint, witnessed the attack from the Fitzroy Tavern.
It was Pierrepoint, the last executioner until capital punishment ended in 1965, who hanged Jenkins and Geraghty. |
 |
|
| |
| |
