The Saga of Polish Peter

Like the overturning of a deeply embedded rock, the Profumo scandal caused a frantic scurrying of a great many odd human insects. One of the crawliest figures to emerge was that of Peter Rachman, who may, or may not, be dead. Last week press and Parliament were abuzz with his sordid story.

Rachman looked the part of an Ian Fleming villain. Short and fat, with grotesquely tiny hands and feet, he had no neck, a bald head shaped like a soccer ball, and sunken blue eyes always hidden behind dark glasses. He dressed flashily, wore elevator shoes of crocodile leather. It amused him to watch naked lady wrestlers, and he had a fetish about hygiene, insisting that all his silverware be sterilized and un touched by human hands. More than most men, Rachman loved money and women.

White Chief. In 1946, when he was 26, Polish-born Rachman had arrived in Britain virtually penniless and possessing a stateless person's passport. At first, he found postwar Britain a bleak place. His English was poor, and he labored as kitchen helper, insurance agent and black marketeer. He made his bid for fortune in the early 1950s by borrowing $2,500 to buy a lodging house near London's Harrow Road. The house cost so little because seven of its eight rooms were occupied by tenants protected by rent control and immune from eviction. Rachman rented the one empty room to a party of eight West Indian musicians who were encouraged to hold nightlong parties and raise hell; they did, to such good effect that the seven white tenants moved out within three months and were replaced by swarms of West Indians paying vastly inflated rents. Eighteen months later, Rachman sold the house for five times what he had paid for it, and moved on to further real estate triumphs in the rundown areas of Paddington, Bayswater and Netting Hill.

In his single-minded effort to get low-rent tenants out of his houses and high-rent tenants in, Rachman hired men to urinate in hallways, smash furniture, and once in Bayswater to remove the roof of a house and abandon the stubborn tenants to the mercy of wind and weather. In the underworld he got the name of "Polish Peter," and West Indians, who knew his power, called him "White Chief Rachman Man."

Bent Basement. The Rent Act of 1957 virtually lifted all controls and enabled Rachman to shoehorn tenants into his flats at whatever prices the traffic would bear. He also showed talent for "bending the basement," that is, converting cellar space into cribs for prostitutes or into nightclubs. The 1959 Street Offences Act, which drove prostitutes off London pavements, brought him another windfall, for the girls would pay more for rooms than even the desperate West Indians. In one house, seven prostitutes were charged $10 per day, payable every day at noon, or $25,000 annually, for a house valued at $4,200.

Rachman was never once found guilty of an illegal act, and never once paid a personal income tax. Police and Public Health officers nearly lost their minds trying to trace the true ownership of his 400 to 500 buildings. They would discover that in a single Rachman house different owners were listed for different floors; one company would have a lease to collect rents, another to make repairs, and a third would simply be holding the house "in trust" for one of Rachman's myriad firms.

By 1959, Rachman had enough money to start dealing in better-class apartments, hotels and office buildings. He married Audrey O'Donnell, a pretty Lancashire girl who had served as an officer in his multiple corporations, and moved into a mock-Georgian mansion just off Hampstead Heath's Millionaires' Row. The garage was large enough to house their six cars.

Numbers Fame. Always on the lookout for girls for his personal use, Rachman frequently visited the several night clubs he owned, and would sit in a corner like a satanic kewpie, a cigar in his mouth, diamonds on his pudgy fingers, a blonde juvenile obediently at his side, and a bodyguard in the background. Christine Keeler was one of his many mistresses, and in October 1960, he set up Mandy Rice-Davies, Christine's sometime roommate, in a West End apartment complete with a two-way bedroom mirror and a tape recorder beneath the bed. "In our two happy years," said Mandy later, "he gave me a mink coat, three mink jackets, a Persian lamb jacket, three diamond brooches, two pairs of diamond and ruby earrings, a big gold diamond and ruby watch, two diamond rings, and a Jaguar. For my 18th birthday, he gave me -L-1,000 in cash."

While gambling at a London casino one night last November, Rachman felt ill. He was rushed to Edgware General Hospital, and perhaps died of a heart attack. On his wrist was a gold bracelet whose inside, as a hospital attendant described it, was covered with a series of numbers that could be either safe combinations or account numbers in Swiss banks. Whatever Rachman did with his reputed fortune of $25 million, it was not found in his personal estate, which came to about $20,000.

Rachman's own fate is as mysterious as his missing money. The London underworld buzzes with rumors that there was a body switch at Edgware, and Rachman has reportedly been seen everywhere from Manhattan to Paris. The question was raised in Parliament, but last week Scotland Yard and investigating newsmen were satisfied that the real Rachman was dead and that his corpse lies buried in an unmarked grave in a Hertfordshire cemetery.

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