Mastermind

He ran the racecourses of southern England for a decade and never held a title, an office, or a stake in anything a court could name. That was the design. Every bookmaker at every meeting needed a pitch, chalk, a bucket of water, a stool, and a printed list — and Sabini's men supplied all of it, at a price, and the price was not negotiable. Refuse and your pitch was unusable. Pay and nothing happened to you. It was protection sold as a service, and it was so complete that at its height his organisation took a levy from virtually every bookmaker working the tracks from Epsom to Brighton. He controlled it without ever once being convicted of running it.

The war for it was open and violent. Rival firms came down from Birmingham and up from the East End, and the fighting was done with razors sewn into cap peaks, hammers, and iron bars, at Epsom, at Alexandra Park, at Lewes, in station yards and on the trains carrying men home from a meeting. He held it because he was better organised than the opposition: he brought in Sicilian and Italian muscle from Clerkenwell, he had a working relationship with a good many racecourse police, and he kept a stable of lawyers who turned up before the charges did. And he ran it on a principle that made him rare in that trade — he kept his word. Men who dealt with Sabini were paid what they had been promised, on time, and he did not promise the same thing to two men. In a business where everyone lies as a matter of routine, being reliable was itself a form of power.

He came out of Saffron Hill, the Italian quarter of Clerkenwell, one of six brothers, with an Italian father who died young and an English mother who raised them poor. He boxed as a young man and was good enough to be noticed and not good enough to matter. What put him in business was ordinary: he took work as a strong-arm for a club owner, discovered he had a head for organisation that nobody around him had, and understood before anyone else did that the money at a racecourse is not in the horses. It is in the fact that hundreds of men must stand in a field with cash in their hands and no protection whatsoever.

The end was bureaucratic. He was interned in 1940 as an enemy alien despite being born in London — a detail that finished his standing — and his son was killed serving in the RAF. He was convicted of receiving stolen goods after the war, served his sentence, and died in Hove in 1950, at a boarding house, broke.

Forget the racecourses and the razors and the decade at the top. Remember only this: he built the whole thing on being a man whose word could be relied upon absolutely — which meant that when somebody finally decided to use him, he never thought to check.