I had one thing in common with Freddie Forsyth — doing business with financier with a rat-like face
CREEP: Roger Levitt with his wife
I have something in common with author, spy and Daily Express columnist Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86.
Alas, it is not a string of best-selling thrillers, such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War, all of which became hugely successful movies, making Forsyth a very wealthy man.
No, it is something more mundane. We both did business with a creep called Roger Levitt.
When I came to London in 1976 I rented a flat while I spent days off looking for a suitable one to buy. I finally found it in Notting Hill, just off the Portobello Road and next door to George Melly’s place.
But buying it was not as simple as I imagined it would be. I went to my building society, the Anglia, with whom I had savings and history, to borrow the necessary cash – and they said No.
I had not set my sights too high; I could afford the modest one-bedroom apartment in a bohemian, slightly down-at-heel area of West London. But the Anglia was adamant it would not lend money for a converted flat in a once-grand old townhouse.
I called the seller, who was to become a close friend, fishing companion and drinking buddy, to ask if he would give me some time to approach other societies.
“Sure,” said Mike, himself an estate agent. “But first go and see this guy and tell him I sent you.” He gave me the details of a mortgage broker he sometimes dealt with.
A few days later, I was sitting in an office in, I think, Holborn, talking to a man whose features reminded me of a rat. Like the taxi driver I wrote about last week, I didn’t trust him as far as I could caber-toss him.
But he made some motormouth calls (his sales patter earned him the moniker Roger Rabbit) and when the last one was finished, he turned to me and said: “That’s it, Richard! The money is irrevocably yours.” I remember he pronounced the word with the stress on the letter O.
Despite my reservations about the probity of Roger Levitt, I got the money and the flat, where I was very happy, and it was years before I heard of Levitt again.
Levitt was a man of rampant ambition and limited scruples, as Freddie Forsyth was to discover. He, along with film-maker Michael Winner, singer Adam Faith and four-time Olympic champion Seb Coe, put money into the Levitt Group financial services empire.
It collapsed in 1990, owing £34 million to creditors. Forsyth lost £2.2 million. Levitt, whom he counted as a friend, was charged with fraud and theft but reached a controversial plea bargain with the Serious Fraud Office whereby he admitted using false documents and dodged a jail sentence for the bad stuff.
Cigar-smoking Levitt, who died aged 70, was sentenced to just 180 hours’ community service, though he was later banned from financial services in Britain, a first for the industry.
He moved to New York to try his hand at promoting boxing matches. In 1999, Levitt tried to put two former heavyweight champions, George Foreman and Larry Holmes, in the ring together but the deal went sour and he could not come up with the $14 million purse. He personally lost $1.4 million.
It was around this time, with rumours swirling of Levitt’s shady dealing in the United States, that I asked Sunday Express picture editor Terry Evans to try to track him down.
Evans had a top American photographer camped outside his Park Avenue office, opposite Grand Central Station, for three days. Just as Evans was fearing for his budget, Levitt emerged, spotted him and ran for it. The snapper hosed him down and sent over some very amusing pictures.
Meanwhile, Forsyth was still writing and we were still reading his work, which was just as well as he had a divorce to pay for, a crippling demand from the taxman – and he was never going to get his money back from Levitt.
He signed a £9 million deal with Bantam for two books, a record at the time. The Fist of God and Icon were not in the same class as The Day of the Jackal but they sold well.
After that he went back to journalism, “horrified” says his obituary in The Times, to discover that newspapers were now full of “limp-wristed graduates”.
Forsyth wrote: “The news floor is like a cathedral – calm, cloistered, reverent, the sepulchral hush broken only by the whisper of computer keys. Stunning birds walk up and down in skin-tight leggings and no one takes a blind bit of notice. The fellas all have degrees, of course.”
He called his column in the Express “an old codger sounding off from his pulpit”.
Forsyth was a shameless self-publicist and a bombastic Right-wing demagogue. But his whole life was one long, exciting adventure.
Even he couldn’t make it up.
*****
What to make of the revelations in Sarah Vine’s book How Not To Be a Political Wife, and the superb piece by Janice Turner in the Sunday Times magazine?
My first thought was to pity Vine and her then husband Michael Gove for their slavish hero-worship of David and Samantha Cameron and George Osborne and his then wife Frances. It must be awful to realise these moneyed toffs were stringing you along and secretly despised you.
The second was: A pox on Eton and Oxford for producing Cameron and Boris Johnson – one a liberal chancer who spotted his opportunity to pose as a Conservative and gain the high office he craved; the other a louche liar with a faulty moral compass.
The third was: Doesn’t Vine write well. And Turner even more so.
*****
The King yesterday tapped his sword lightly on the shoulder of London’s Mayor – the man who has done more to destroy my city than anyone since Hitler – to signify that he is now officially Sir Sadiq Khan.
Pah! Next, they’ll be telling us that David Beckham deserves a knighthood… Oh, hang on.
RICHARD DISMORE
11 June 2025
