International mafioso Meyer Lansky.
A few days ago I received my copy of Andrew Loog Oldham’s first autobiography, Stoned, so I’m now in a position to reveal who his mother’s long-term boyfriend was: Alec Morris. Morris was married throughout his relationship with Loog Oldham’s mother Celia; he funded her lifestyle in London.
As a recap, Andrew Loog Oldham was an early manager for The Rolling Stones. Oldham left the band after their 1967 staged drug bust, which you can read about in Rolling Through the Intelligence Community.
Alec Morris is important because it was probably his connections that hooked the teenaged Andrew Loog Oldham up with a series of high-profile jobs which culminated in Andrew managing The Rolling Stones in his early twenties. These glamorous jobs included: personal assistant to fashion designer Mary Quant; protegé to Beatles magician Brian Epstein; and protegé to music-biz-murderer Phil Spector. As I mentioned in Rolling Through the Intelligence Community, Oldham was an angry young man and prior to the Stones, he didn’t stay with any of these positions for very long.
So who was Alec Morris? To hear Andrew Loog Oldham tell it, Morris was a well-to-do furniture maker from ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ who switched to producing munitions boxes during WWII and ended up driving a Rolls Royce. (You can read Oldham’s take on Alec Morris’ personal background here, it’s the usual schlock about hard-scrabble street smarts.) After the war, Morris’s well-capitalized family furniture business, ‘Made by Morris’, branched out into investment banking: ‘Alec Morris Investments Ltd’. The new investment company was incorporated on May 4th in 1954 and registered at Devonshire House, near Regent’s Park in London. That’s a swanky address.
Morris’s fantastic business success happened at a time when most of Britain was malnourished and struggling to say warm. How’d Alec do it?
Andrew Loog Oldham offers one oblique clue: in 1915 Alec Morris “smuggled himself aboard” a troop transport ship destined for New York City, where for a few years Morris taught dance classes alongside George Raft, the mafia figure. What Andrew Loog Oldham fails to mention is that George Raft wasn’t just any up-and-coming mafioso– Raft was a friend of Bugsy Siegel and Hollywood heavyweight Johnny Rosselli; Raft became a partner in the Mafia-run Las Vegas casino The Sands; and then a front man (perhaps even a bit more) for OSS mobster Meyer Lansky’s gambling operations in Cuba and London. In the 1910s Alec Morris’s twinkle-toed buddy Raft was ‘on the make’.
How’d Morris get plugged into Raft and his ilk? It’s common knowledge that furniture-making is excellent training for success in the performing arts. Therefore, it’s only natural that a stowaway like Alec Morris should find himself giving dance lessons next to George Raft, who was earning quite a name for himself on Broadway, according to his TMC.com profile:
Raft worked as a “paid dancer” (a male escort for female patrons) in several clubs, including the Roseland Ballroom, where his dancing shoes were on display at the time of his death in 1980. He was the partner of Elsie Pilcer on the Keith and Orpheum vaudeville circuits, and was on the bill with the famous nightclub hostess Texas Guinan at her club, the El Fey speakeasy, where Fred Astaire and George Gershwin would come to watch him dance. Astaire recalled going there “several times to see George dance. He was a sensation in those days…the main attraction…George did the fastest and most exciting Charleston I ever saw. I thought he was an extraordinary dancer.”
Of course, I’m kidding. It’s far more likely that Alec Morris’s family had mafia connections which young Alec was able to exploit by ingratiating himself with New York mob figures over several years– just like George Raft had done. Who might these mob figures be?
In Gus Russo’s book the The Outfit, he writes this about George Raft and his long-time friend Bugsy Siegel:
By 1936, the thirty-year-old [Bugsy] Siegel himself became a marked man…Instead of boarding the New York to Chicago underground railroad like [Al] Capone, Siegel was ordered to Los Angeles by his superiors, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky… Soon after his arrival, Siegel hooked up with another transplanted Brooklyn pal who had already scored in Hollywood, actor George Raft… With the well-placed Raft and di Frasso as his connections, a starstruck Siegel soon met celebrities like Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper and many others. Through Johnny Rosselli [another of Raft’s friends– a.nolen] Siegel met studio barons like Harry Cohn and Louis Mayer, and the thug Willie Bioff.
George Raft’s, and by extension Alec Morris’s, connections in the post-WWII American mob and intelligence community really couldn’t get any better: Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Johnny Rosselli… this post is shaping up like a Francis Ford Coppola movie! Sadly, Andrew Loog Oldham’s story is real life. I’m going to look at Morris’s contacts through the lens of Raft’s career, because the Mafia works on a basis of ‘who you know’.
After Raft had made his contacts dancing in NYC, he found himself well-placed for a Hollywood career: mobsters from New York like Harry Cohn and mobsters from Chicago like Johnny Rosselli had Hollywood under their thumb, as Gus Russo writes:
Johnny Rosselli became the movie honchos’ bookmaker and personal adviser… As bookie to the studio heads, Johnny would glean information vital to the Outfit’s [Chicago mob’s] movieland aspirations. By either threatening to expose hidden skeletons or to call their vigorish, Rosselli was able to acquire silent partnerships for the Outfit in many Hollywood careers. It is believed that in this way the hoods “sponsored” actors such as George Raft, Chico Marx, Jimmy Durante, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe.
Readers will remember that Marilyn Monroe was one of the few actors we know of who had a secret contract with the movie studio at Lookout Mountain Air Force Station, in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon neighborhood.
Johnny Rosselli was also a CIA collaborator, as Russo writes:
It seems that some senior CIA officers who had met Johnny Rosselli at a Maheu clambake the previous spring and were so taken with the Outfit’s emissary that, when word come to the Agency that Castro was to be removed, the officers immediately thought of “Uncle Johnny.” It is not known if Rosselli had spoken to the CIA boys at the clambake as he had to actor George Raft a year earlier in a Los Angeles bar. When Raft had mentioned that he had just returned from Cuba, where Castro was threatening to take over, Rosselli had bragged, “You give me a couple of guys with machine guns, we could go down there and take over the who island.”
Later, Rosselli gave details of the CIA’s attempt on the life of Fidel Castro to Jack Anderson, a Mormon journalist and a veteran war correspondent who served with US forces during WWII. (Jack Anderson was also the protegé of Drew Pearson, a journalist who worked for Ernest Cuneo and the British Security Coordination, William Stephenson’s British spy ring and a close ally of the OSS. [1]) According to Colby’s self-serving 1974 ‘Family Jewels’ leaks, the CIA spied on Anderson after he published Rosselli’s information about the planned Castro assassination– i.e. Colby made Anderson look good.
After WWII, when Raft’s Hollywood career as a mafioso character actor dried up, he went into business with the real Mafia in Las Vegas by investing in The Sands casino with Meyer Lansky, Fred Astaire and Frank Costello.
Popular entertainers outside George Raft’s Las Vegas casino, The Sands.
Somehow, Raft lost his ownership stake in The Sands (Russo says Raft had a gambling addiction), but Raft continued to work as a front man for Lansky’s business in Cuba. When Castro shut down the Cuban casino, Raft became the front man for Meyer Lansky’s and Angelo Bruno’s ‘Colony Sports Club’, a gambling den in London, where Raft befriended local underworld figures the Kray brothers. (The Krays were contemporaries of Albert Dimes, the British mafioso of Italian extraction who patronized ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez, the Rolling Stones groupie/Robert Frasier’s underworld fixer.)
Dino Cellini outside George Raft and Meyer Lansky’s London gambling den, The Colony Sports Club. The Colony’s rise and fall had a strange synchronicity with Andrew Loog Oldham’s career.
At this point I’d like to draw a parallel between the careers of George Raft and Andrew Loog Oldham. In 1959, Castro pulled Lansky’s (and Raft’s!) Cuban gambling ticket, prompting the mobster to look for somewhere else to set up casinos. Lansky chose London– Raft’s old friend Alec Morris’s haunt– and set up shop there in the early 1960s with The Colony Sports Club, amongst other establishments. Andrew Loog Oldham began his string of fantastic, high-profile jobs in the early 1960s too– the most fabulous of which was managing the Stones, which started in 1963.
In 1967– sometime before March 2nd– the lucrative London gambling scene fell apart for Lansky and Raft: in a deft move by British authorities, Raft was denied reentry into the U.K. due to his unsavory business connections. When British authorities pulled Raft’s immigration ticket, the Colony Sports Club shut down, i.e. it didn’t just get a new front man. (For more information on this, see Colin Fry’s The Krays.) It seems that U.K. authorities knew just how to pull the rug out from under the American mobsters.
February 1967 was also the end of Andrew Loog Oldham’s career in Britain, and the end of the golden period of his career overall. In early February a strange American with multiple passports visited the Rolling Stones while the band partied at their rural Redlands mansion, according to Rolling with the Stones by Bill Wyman. This American dropped off some new drugs from California, then disappeared just before local police raided the Stones and made them media martyrs. According to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Andrew Loog Oldham fled Britain, just like the mysterious American, in order to avoid police charges in relation to the drugs:
Oldham’s empire collapsed nearly as quickly as it developed. In early 1967, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones were all busted on drug charges. Afraid of being arrested himself, Oldham decamped to California, where he helped Lou Adler and John Phillips with Monterey Pop, suggesting they book Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who. Meanwhile, the Stones felt abandoned by Oldham, while Allen Klein found them lawyers and stood by their side in court. By September 1967, Oldham was no longer managing the group.
Andrew Loog Oldham’s phenomenal teenage success in London’s music scene, and his inexplicable pull with magazines like Vogue, dried up at the same time as the money stream from George Raft’s gambling business. I believe it’s *more than likely* Andrew Loog Oldham’s initial success, and his “father-figure” Alec Morris’s success, is rooted in the same muck as George Raft’s career.
A painfully young Andrew Loog Oldham sits between Keith Richards and Brian Jones. Thank you, dailymail.co.uk/ Getty Images.
Why would the Stones’ handlers lose a cute trick like Andrew? Well, according to Bill Wyman, Andrew’s management skills were not of the caliber needed by the band, whose success was ever-increasing. I think that there is probably another angle here: The Rolling Stones were formed in 1962– the same year that the MI6/CIA ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was ‘outed’ by Soviet-backed press. By 1967 it was probably clear that the Stones were shaping up to be a valuable mouthpiece in the ‘cultural Cold War’– they were useful promoting non-Communist left politics. Perhaps the time was right to drop no-longer-necessary liabilities, like low-rent mafia connections. Intel pros might have been fine with mobsters financing a seedling operation with a 1-in-100 chance of success, but the Stones were beyond that in 1967. Perhaps the Redlands drug bust was useful for more than just its media fallout, perhaps it helped the Stones’ handlers protect their investment and ‘clean house’.
I’ve written a lot about George Raft’s mafia connections so far, but I haven’t said much about the intelligence angle surrounding Raft. In The Outfit, Gus Russo describes how Raft was a close friend of Bugsy Siegel, who in turn reported to Meyer Lansky and Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Lansky and Luciano worked for the OSS during WWII:
[Mario] Brod had been a liaison between the Central Intelligence Agency and the New York crime bosses since World War II, when the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had kicked off the U.S. government’s long, mutually beneficial relationship with the underworld. The partnership had its known origins in 1942, when the OSS enlisted Meyer Lansky and the imprisoned Charles “Lucky” Luciano in its effort to deter wartime sabotage in the New York harbor. The government also utilized Luciano’s Italian contacts to gain intelligence in anticipation of the invasion of Sicily. For his efforts, detailed in Rodney Campbell’s book The Luciano Project, Lucky Luciano was allowed to leave prison in exchange for permanent exile in Italy. At the time, Brod was an OSS captain in Italy under future CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton.
James Angleton used Luciano’s mob connections to help OSS’ers wrest control of Italy. (A bit like how Robert Fraser used ‘Spanish Tony’ Sanchez in London.) To better explain this OSS/Mafia partnership, we need to look at what, exactly, James Angleton was doing for FDR/Churchill’s spying outfit in Italy.
The British trained Angleton for his OSS counterintelligence work in Italy. Angleton trained in London– and there befriended Soviet double agent Kim Philby– prior to being transferred to Rome 1944. While in Rome, Angleton participated in the Italian equivalent of ‘de-nazification’, where anyone who supported Mussolini or criticized American involvement in WWII was purged from positions of influence. (See Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior). At the same time, Angleton made connections with people who would eventually form Israel’s Mossad. In Richard Bennett’s 2013 book Espionage: Spies and Secrets, Bennett writes this about Angleton:
Angleton began his career in espionage in the wartime OSS. During his time in Italy both before and after the end of the war, Angleton developed a deep relationship with the leaders of the Jewish underground, who later became senior officers in Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Because of these ties, he entered the CIA with the clear understanding that he would head the Israeli desk.
In 1951, the year Celia Oldham introduced her boyfriend Morris to her son Andrew, Angleton was given control of the Israeli Desk, the CIA’s formal information-sharing arrangement with the new Middle Eastern state.
‘Jimmy Jesus’ Angleton, the disgraced, mocked CIA counterintelligence chief, who was ignored by his superiors and ‘went crazy’ some time during the twenty years he ran his department, was given the Israeli desk soon after he was hired. Angleton doesn’t appear to have fought with other power-brokers for this gem– it was simply created then handed to Angleton, who had been groomed by the British for this position via Italian contacts. This is how Tom Mangold describes Angleton’s prize:
In early 1951, Angleton received a new important assignment: the so-called Israeli Account. He was the first head of the CIA’s newly created Israeli Desk, or Special Operations Group, as it was then officially known. Angleton served as the CIA’s exclusive liaison with Israeli intelligence. One might have expected his unit to be part of the Middle East division. But it stayed under Angleton’s tight, zealous command for the next twenty years– to the utter fury of the division’s separate Arab desks.
Angleton’s ties with the Israelis gave him considerable prestige within the CIA and later added significantly to his expanding counterintelligence empire.
Owning the Israeli desk was odd for a counterintelligence pro, because regional intelligence gathering at the CIA was usually done by a separate division, e.g. ‘The Soviet Division’. Could there have been a special counterintelligence angle to the CIA’s relationship with Mossad? Israeli overtures to lure one-time Communist sympathiser, Crowley devotee and jet propulsion scientist Jack Parson to the Promised Land had just been scuppered when the CIA set up the Israeli desk for Angleton.
I’ve established in previous posts (Who was Winston Churchill?, Haunted Wood, Did Colby Help the KGB?) that CIA leadership wasn’t adverse to communism ideologically, nor were they adverse working with the Soviets under the right circumstances. Was there something special about the Mossad connections– connections which provided an alternative source of information on the USSR from that provided by the CIA’s in-house Soviet Division– which led *somebody* to want counterintelligence stooge Angleton to have first crack at the information the Israelis provided? Angleton may have been the first line of defense between the intelligence community’s Anglo-American ‘pink’ fifth column (old OSS’ers, Abe Lincoln Brigade, ‘milk of FDR’ types etc.) and the Russian Soviets. Was Jimmy Jesus’s exclusive Israeli information pipeline designed as a way for old OSS’ers to protect themselves from now uncontrollable Russian agents who might try to cannibalize FDR networks? Might they have found it safer to use foreign intelligence to do unpopular things, like taking down ‘fellow-travellers’ by having Mossad feed Angleton information? If the WMD fiasco has taught us anything, it is that the ‘intelligence community’ likes to blame foreigners when something blows up in their collective face.
What we know for certain is that Angleton’s Italian/Israeli connections were set up under the watchful eyes of the British. This makes Alec Morris’ furniture/investment banking all the more interesting, because Andrew Loog Oldham tells us that Morris made at least one business trip to Italy in 1948– the year Angleton was officially hired by the CIA as the top aide to the director of the Office of Special Operations.
Pat Clayton [Alec Morris’ biological child]: My dad was flying back from a buying trip in Italy in 1948, when he nearly died and became a hero in the national newspapers: he rescued an air-hostess by jumping with her from the plane, forty feet off the ground, just before it crashed. They were the only survivors. [from Stoned, by Andrew Loog Oldham]
Pat Clayton doesn’t say who hit the ground first, but that Morris would be forever haunted by the screams of the dying on board that plane– the plane only he, and the woman he grabbed saved next to him, had time to jump out of.
Out of all of the countries across the globe, our British furniture-and-investment-banking magnate Alec Morris, with his Angleton-associated mob connections, toddled off to Italy, Angleton’s Mossad feeder-pool, where he jumped from a crashing plane… how quaint.
**UPDATE** Here’s a little more information on what James Angleton was doing in Italy after the war: according to Hugh Wilford in his book The Mighty Wurlitzer, in 1948– the year Alec Morris jumped from that Italian plane– Angleton was heading up black propaganda in Italy for the CIA. The propaganda was anti-communist and took the form of placing newspaper articles and other literature, which were reproduced in the compliant Italian press. This is somewhat similar to what Paul Cushing Child, Julia Child’s weird husband, did in Germany and France after the war.
At the end of the day, what Andrew Loog Oldham hints at about Alec Morris’ Mafia connections tells us something veteran intelligence observers knew already: after 1939 Anglo-American spooks got deeply into bed with organized crime. What is interesting about Andrew Loog Oldham’s case is that it’s a British example of international organized crime’s ties to the music industry and the Anglo-American ‘intelligence community’ at quite a high level.
It wouldn’t be right to end this post without recognizing that, to some extent, Andrew Loog Oldham is also a victim. His mother was an extremely selfish woman to whom money was everything: during the war she’d shacked up with a doctor who’d got rich doing illegal abortions, but when his business dried up she switched to Morris. (It’s unclear to me where her brief relationship with Loog Oldham’s father fit into all this.) One of Andrew’s childhood friends, who otherwise liked Celia, described her as having “a private agenda, which Andy didn’t even know about”. Much like Ken Anger, Celia Oldham broke off contact with every member of her family after each one had displeased her in some way; she was threatening towards Andrew when he asked about his relatives. Worst of all, Celia would only show approval of her son if her sugar-daddy Morris approved of him, as Loog Oldham writes:
The year 1963 was a very good one, and a very fast one. Late 62 through April 63 had me busy, secure and content with my lot . I hoped my mother had noticed, and told Alec as much. Alec’s approval was just as important to me, since if he thought I was doing okay, my mother would go along with him.
Celia’s behavior towards her son shows how narcissistic people are very easy to control: they’ll put their desire for approval from ‘authority figures’ ahead of everything else, even their own children. See Great Users of People and The Cult of Intelligence.
Celia was emotionally abusive towards Andrew; Andrew’s youthful anger was justified. It’s hard to grow up around selfish users and not learn to mimic their poisonous behavior. If I’m right about Alec Morris’s mafia/intel involvement, then Morris was just as bad as his squeeze: he put Andrew in harm’s way when he involved the teenager with his ‘work buddies’– particularly the psychotic Phil Spector. I can’t find any evidence that Alec Morris treated his biological children with such callous indifference. (Though that doesn’t mean he didn’t.) Either way, Morris’ ‘guidance’ didn’t do much for Andrew Loog Oldham in the long run, because now he’s camped out in Bogotá, reliving the glory days through multiple autobiographies.
I’ll wind this up with a final question: Why does Andrew Loog Oldham talk about Morris’s mafia connections at all? I suspect Loog Oldham knows as much or more than I do about the mob world Morris inhabited. Andrew Loog Oldham probably considers Morris’s connection with George Raft to be glamorous, which would tally perfectly with how he says Celia brought him up. It’s hard to be ethical when you don’t know what ethical looks like.
[1] Jack Anderson inherited Drew Pearson’s ‘Washington Merry Go Round’ column, from WashingtonMerryGoRound.com:
Founded by Drew Pearson, “Washington Merry-Go-Round” began as a syndicated column in 1932. The provocative and often controversial column broke the story of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton and the soldier he slapped in 1943. Pearson later brought about the downfall of Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal, an ideological foe, and he denounced the witch-hunt agenda of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc.
The slapping story was false. Regular readers know what I suspect about Jack Anderson: managed opposition in the vein of Sy Hersh, probably working for the old, pink, OSS’ers at the CIA like William Colby.
