Burke John - The hustlers: gambling, greed and the perfect con

Douglas Thompson is the bestselling author of more than twenty books. A biographer, broadcaster and international journalist, he is a regular contributor to major newspapers and magazines worldwide. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.

For Lesley and Dandy
a winning double

Under the influence of uncontrollable ecstasy,
the players gamble their wives, their children
and ultimately themselves into captivity.

TACITUS, GERMANIA

Doc Holliday said, or was said to have said, that a friendly game of cards was a misnomer: Play to win, or dont bother. Check friendship at the door. If what you want is camaraderie, there is the bar. If it is companionship you seek, there are any number of likely whores.

I learned to play cards, three-card brag, usually blind bets, in the bagpipe room of an Edinburgh higher education establishment. I was often lucky.

The luck stayed with me when I met John Burke and Bobby McKew. Doc was wrong: you can have a friendly game. I thank them both for their grand help, their inspiration, and, most of all, for their stories. Id also like to thank Mark Sykes, Mark Birley, David Pritchett, Michael Caborn-Waterfield, Bobby Buchanan-Michaelson, Caroline Gray, Theresa Follet, Cathy Maxwell-Scott, Raymond Nash, Claus Von Blow, Nancy Gillespie, Charlie Richardson, Frankie Fraser and Diane Guinan-Browne for their help and time.

As always, Ingrid Connell at Pan Macmillan was patient, polite and a superb help at all times, as was my agent Sheila Crowley. Thanks are also due to Bruno Vincent at Pan Macmillan for his inspired help with the manuscript and photographs.

Life is six-to-five against? It depends who youre playing with.

A big, winning hand for them all.

Trust everybody, but always cut the cards.

MR DOOLEY, 1950S DUBLIN PUB PHILOSOPHER

Picturing a teenaged Bobby McKew digging up turf board to fuel the fires of his home city of Dublin, its difficult to imagine hed later be known as the Chelsea Scallywag: dapper, with perfect manners, clever, quick-witted, a man whose sociability and tact would allow him to be Billy Hills lieutenant, the son-in-law of South African millionaire industrialist Lucky Jack Gerber and the close friend of movie stars and aristocrats. Yet hes always been a man of single-minded enterprise. Whatever has been thrown at him he has dealt with in a no-nonsense, practical way. He has accepted the knocks and there have been a few, mostly self-inflicted and ridden them out.

His father was in the movies. Robert McKew Senior worked for Rank and was in charge of the distribution of films to Irish cinemas. The powerful film executive thought his son might follow him into show business, which, in some ways, he eventually did. He lived with his father and his mother, Iris, and his two older sisters, Joy and Paddy, in the highly respectable Dublin suburb of Blackrock. The adored only boy in this comfortable, successful family went to Mountjoy College, a prominent Protestant school, but says his father got fed up with paying for him to do little but play sport and told him: Im not sending you to Trinity College to play bloody rugby.

The solid-thinking businessman hoped his son would join him at Rank, but instead Robert Junior got a job as a labourer, taking what work came around, but especially digging turf board, which kept him fit and put money in his pocket. When not working, hed meet up with friends in the pubs around town, usually Davy Byrnes just off Grafton Street. Bobby often encountered John Burke, as they moved in a similar set. They were both restless young men, keen for company and intrigued with the world. Bobby McKew wasnt sure what he wanted, other than more excitement than he was getting in Dublin. John Burke simply wanted to play cards, to socialize, but also yearned for a bigger playing board. Among the friends theyd meet most evenings was John Ryan, the brother of the actress Kathleen Ryan.

Kathleen was renowned as a great beauty of her time. Her prominent Tipperary family had opened a shop on Dublins Parnell Street in the 1920s, the first of a chain known as the Monument Creamery. She was a prize in every way. In her decade-long career she appeared in several films, including her 1947 debut opposite James Mason in Carol Reeds eloquent classic, Odd Man Out.

One of her admirers was the gifted safe-cracker and Second World War double agent Eddie Chapman, who was more colourful than a rainbow and a dab hand with gelignite and the ladies. He treated them both delicately and to good effect. The safe-cracker came to Ireland to pursue Kathleen Ryan and one evening in Davy Byrnes her brother introduced Chapman to his 19-year-old friend Bobby McKew.

Eddie always wanted the best, said McKew. She was an utterly gorgeous, long-red-haired girl and Eddie was friendly with her. She lived with her mother Agnes Veronica and Eddie had to be careful with his courtship. But he didnt mind. He was a handsome man and had great charm and birds used to throw themselves at him.

The young Dubliner was fascinated by Chapman and his incredible, seductive stories of events which were still fresh in everybodys minds. This was contemporary excitement, lavish true-life adventure. Eddie Chapman, the only Englishman to have been awarded the Iron Cross, directly from Hitler, had much to teach. Hed worked for Winston Churchill stealing Nazi secrets, and MI5 regularly had to decline his offers to assassinate Hitler. In 1997, his MI5 wartime files were released by the UK Public Records Office. Christopher Plummer had played Chapman in the rather wooden 1966 film, Triple Cross. The British Intelligence file on the agent codenamed ZigZag is much more entertaining:

The story of many a spy is commonplace and drab; the story of Chapman is different. In fiction it would be rejected as improbable. The subject is a crook, but as a crook he is by no means a failure and in his own estimation is something of a prince of the underworld. He plays for high stakes and would have the world know it. Of fear he knows nothing. Adventure to Chapman is the breath of life. Given adventure, he has the courage to achieve the unbelievable.

Chapman, who was born in a village near Newcastle, had deserted from the Coldstream Guards in the 1930s and metamorphosed from a professional soldier into a highly successful professional crook, leader of Londons infamous Gelignite Gang, whose trademark was to use the newly popular American chewing gum to attach the explosives. His MI5 personal file disclosed new details of his life before he became a spy. He had served a series of prison sentences, mostly for robberies, although one came after he behaved in Hyde Park in a manner likely to offend the virtuous public and was caught in flagrante delicto.

He was arrested in Scotland after blowing the half-ton Chubb safe of the headquarters of the Edinburgh Cooperative Society. After endless scrapes and scraps he fled to Jersey, where he was eventually jailed for cracking the safe of a large dance hall. In prison he used his burglary knack to make keys that allowed him to move freely at night between the mens and the womens prisons and pursue the only thing he enjoyed more than blowing up safes.

After the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, he saw an opportunity for some form of freedom and offered his services to the Germans as a spy. He was convincing enough for the German authorities to move him from Jersey to France, where he was trained in the dark arts of espionage. As a subterfuge, the Nazis pretended to have executed him. In reality, he was sent back into Britain with orders to blow up the De Havilland aircraft factory in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. He handed himself over to MI5, who decided to play him back against the Germans, using him to provide false information as part of the Double Cross system. They staged a fake explosion at the aircraft factory and Chapman returned to Germany a hero. He was then sent back to England as an agent for the second time and fed his German handlers false information about the effects of the V-1 and V-2 rockets blitzing Britain. He is credited with saving the lives of many, many Londoners.