‍HE WAS Britain’s No.1 criminal. A violent mobster who had over 1,000 gangsters he could call on at any time and for any job.

‍Muscle men, burglars, safe crackers, forgers, fences, hijackers and thieves were brought together to suit the raid at hand.

‍On top of this, there were MPs and police on his payroll. He was king of organised crime in a way that had not been seen in London before.

‍His name was Jacob Comer, better known as Jack Spot, and under his leadership in the 1940s and 50s, younger gangsters such as the Kray Twins and Freddy Foreman were able to rise in London’s underworld. He was their mentor and his name made headlines for 30 years.

‍His favourite punishment to those who crossed him was to rip off the offender’s trousers and slice away at the victim’s buttocks with his cut-throat razor. The wounds were so deep they needed stitches and the unfortunate offender couldn’t sit down for weeks because of the pain as the stitches opened.

‍By the end of World War II, Spot topped London’s organised crime pyramid. He amassed significant wealth, dressed in bespoke suits, and was driven around in a Cadillac. He financed and oversaw major operations, including the 1948 £1.25 million heist on Heathrow Airport.

‍Feared by rivals and respected on the streets, Spot, known for a disfiguring mole on his cheek that became his trademark, controlled protection rackets, bookmakers, street markets, and entire neighbourhoods long before the Krays rose to power. But although he got rich, he never saved a penny.

‍Stabbings and beatings were regularly doled out by him to those who crossed him over three decades to the end of the 1950s. But his downfall was to come at the end of a razor that wasn’t his. And he died in poverty.

‍Jacob ‘Spot’ Comer grew up the son of Polish immigrants in London’s East End, on Whitechapel’s Myrtle Street, in an area of grinding poverty.

‍He joined his first gang at seven years old, which was made up of Jewish boys on Myrtle Street who fought their Irish Catholic rivals. He grew to be over six feet tall and was a good boxer, but an even better ‘nothing barred’ street fighter, especially with a razor.

‍At 15 he was hired for a bookie as a runner and a year later he started working the protection rackets in and around Petticoat Lane, gradually climbing the ranks of organised crime to become the self-styled ‘King of Aldgate.’

‍During the 1930s Comer was involved in many fights, slashings and other incidents of grievous bodily harm involving protection rackets and he portrayed himself as a protector of the Jewish people, a sort of “Robin Hood of the East End.”

‍By the time the 1950s arrived he was King of the East End. But he had enemies and not just the police, some of whom were in his pay. His main enemy became Billy Hill, once his right-hand man, just as dangerous and cruel as Spot. But cannier with money.

‍In 1954, Spot married Margaret Rita Molloy, and together the couple had two daughters. They lived in a luxury apartment in Hyde Park Mansions, Cabbell Street by Edgware Road station.

‍But already there were question marks over his empire and when Sunday People reporter Duncan Webb wrote a series of unflattering articles about him, accusing him of “going soft” Spot ‘did him over’ wearing a knuckle duster. He was convicted of grievous bodily harm and fined.

‍It was later claimed that journalist Webb was in the pay of up-and-coming gangland boss, Hill.

‍By now, Spot was getting tired but next came a knife fight with Hill’s bodyguard, Albert Dimas. The fight was outside a Soho nightclub called Bar Italia and the two fought tooth and nail, inflicting serious injuries on each other.

‍It was broken up after they crashed through a grocer’s shop and the plucky owner’s wife hit them both over their heads with a saucepan as they wrestled on the floor. The story made front page news.

‍There was more bad luck when in 1956, he and his wife, who was by now sick and tired of her way of life, were set upon by ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser, another bodyguard for Billy, wielding a butcher’s chopper, and half dozen other men as gang war broke out just 100 yards from his flat.

‍Spot was slashed with razors and stabbed multiple times leaving gruesome scars on his face. Rita went to the police and both Fraser and his associate Bobby Warren were given seven years in prison for the attack.

‍Fraser later told the Press he didn’t expect to be paid for slashing Spot believing such a high-profile target would earn him a priceless reputation. It did.

‍Spot was left with lifelong injuries and his days were numbered, He disappeared only to reappear some years later, having given up his life of crime and running first an antiques shop and then becoming a greengrocer. His wife and daughters had left him.

‍He died penniless in Isleworth, West London, in 1996, without them, aged 84. His ashes were spread in Israel. Hill went on to make a fortune and died from a heart condition at his home in Bayswater, London, in 1984, aged 72,

‍His death certificate said he worked in “demolition”

‍

‍OLD NEWS IN BRIEF

‍TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

‍A GENDARME who discovered the body of a man who committed suicide in a forest near the castle of Wildegg, Geneva, in September 1914, attempted to take the victim’s finger off the trigger of his revolver … it fired and he shot himself dead.

‍DRIPPING WITH KINDNESS

‍In March 1879, a 30-year-old Irish maid Kate Webster murdered her employer Julia Martha Thomas, 55. at her home in Richmond, London, the Daily Telegraph reported. After cutting up her mistress’s body, she boiled the fatty skin and flesh to make dripping and sold it to families to make sandwiches for their children.

‍SEABIRD VINDALOO

‍A bright orange, exotic seabird was rescued by concerned members of the public who found it waddling alongside the A41, near Haddenham, Bucks in 2019. They took it to Tiggywinkles, the renowned British wildlife hospital, who discovered it was a seagull that had fallen into a vat of curry, the BBC reported.

‍

‍A DAY WITH SPOOKY AUTHOR AND THE SATANIST’S CHAIR HE ADORED

‍BACK IN the late 1980s legendary Paparazzi photographer Richard Young and I drove through the Sussex countryside to the home of horror writer James Herbert.

‍Herbert who had a No.1 bestseller with his book The Rats, published in 1974, which sold out of its first 100,000 copies in three weeks, had embarked on a new horror story based on the newspaper paparazzi called Creed.

‍It followed the story of Joe Creed, a sleazy, cynical paparazzo who photographs an elderly man desecrating a grave. The man turns out to be a serial killer now a demon who wants to destroy the picture.

‍Herbert had been into the Express finding out about our newspaper world and what made photographer of the stars, Richard tick. Express Editor at the time, Sir Nick Lloyd had sent us down to find out what made Herbert tick. (Don’t ask).

‍It was a bright summer’s day when we arrived at the writer’s plush mansion on the Sussex Downs. His wife showed us into the house through a large square hallway with an extraordinarily high ceiling.

‍Pride of place in the entrance was a sinister-looking large, high-back black wooden chair with ornate carvings. There was something eerily menacing about it, although Richard and I didn’t mention it.

‍But we found out later over lunch with Herbert on his patio overlooking the Downs, that it was satanist Aleister Crowley’s chair.

‍The cult leader who was once described by the Press as the ‘Wickedest Man in the World’ would sit in it visualising his satanical rituals. Herbert had purchased two of the satanist’s chilling seats at auction. One was in the hallway.

‍As a boy Crowley killed the family’s pet cat … just to see if it had nine lives.

‍As a man, he staged drug-taking, orgies, ‘sex magic’ and even developed his own religion – ‘Thelema’, which was the inspiration for the Church of Scientology, so loved by Tom Cruise. He was always in the pages of the Press. Not the kind of bloke you might go for a pint with.

‍I suppose the only good thing about him was that Crowley was recruited by British Intelligence during the Second World War and he came up with the V-for-Victory sign, which became the signature wave of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

‍Herbert loved his Crowley chairs and the mystique of them and admitted that he was spellbound by the occult and all things supernatural. He asked me if I would like to sit on the one in the hall and see if I felt any vibes from the experience. I declined, having a deep respect for all things occult.

‍Then he told Richard and I of a chilling experience after he purchased the symbolic seats. One winter’s morning Herbert came down from his bedroom and entered the lounge. The door had been shut all night and the house locked.

‍Staring at him from the back of an armchair was a huge black crow and it wouldn’t budge. It just sat staring at him. His wife and he had a terrifying time waving it out of the house after opening all the doors. They never found out how it came to be there.

‍Herbert reminded me that a black crow in the occult is seen as a sacred guide between the spiritual world and us. They bear messages from gods and ancestors of spiritual rebirth. Herbert believed he was getting a message. What it was we shall never know.

‍Richard and I bade our farewells and left the house. As we did a huge black bird flew over us … and Richard couldn’t start his car for a very long time. We looked at each other and wondered about our strange world.

‍James Herbert died suddenly at his home on March 20, 2013, aged 69. No cause of death was given. Aleister Crowley died on December 1, 1947, following long-term heroin addiction. I have always wondered if Herbert finally discovered what the message from the crow was.

‍

‍WHAT IS THE MESSAGE FROM THE

‍WORLD’S MOST MYSTERIOUS BOOK?

‍A MYSTERY from the year 1404 remains unsolved to this day … The Voynich Manuscript, an illustrated book hand-written in an unknown script that has confounded scientists, academics and Governments.

‍Is it a message left on Earth by a master race? Some think so. Or a new language in a botany book by an anonymous master academic?

‍Produced in the early fifteenth century, and bearing an unreadable text with strange art, the manuscript has beaten every attempt to decipher it.

‍For over 600 years, researchers have tried to connect the manuscript with any conceivable language. They have attempted to link it with far-flung, exotic places and people.

‍Even connections with famous figures like Leonardo Da Vinci and English mathematician, astronomer, and occultist John Dee, who served as a trusted scientific astrological advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, were linked to it.

‍The manuscript has featured in the Fleet Street Press; TV shows, movies, and books. It has inspired music and its digital edition remains one of the most-viewed pages on the Yale University library internet, where it is held.

‍The 240 vellum pages is in unusual, unreadable script. Some of its characters seem familiar, particularly those resembling Arabic numerals like ‘4’ and ‘8’’ Others bear similarities to the letters ‘a’ and ‘c’, while another looks like two ‘Ps’ standing back-to-back, linked by a horizontal line.

‍The parchment is made from “at least 115 entire calfskins”.

‍For now, our only insight into the manuscript’s probable content comes from its many illustrations, which reveal apparently themed sections. The largest part, often referred to as the herbal section, is dedicated to drawings of puzzling plants with bizarre features,

‍Balloon-shaped human heads grow from some roots; others bear a resemblance to animals; and a tiny green dragon sits beside another plant, seemingly inhaling or exhaling its leaves.

‍Witten in by an unknown author, the world’s most famous mystery tome, was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The manuscript appears and disappears throughout history, from the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a secret sale of books in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome.

‍Its language has eluded decipherment, and its elaborate illustrations remain as baffling as they are beautiful. Illustrations of otherworldly plants, unfamiliar constellations, and naked women swimming through fantastical tubes and green baths.

‍There are drawings including astral charts with radiating circles, suns and moons, Zodiac symbols such as Pisces, Taurus, Sagittarius and miniature naked females emerging from pipes or chimneys, with swelled abdomens.

‍There are also pharmaceutical drawings of over 100 different species of medicinal herbs and roots portrayed with jars or vessels in red, blue, or green and continuous pages of recipes, with star-like flowers marking each entry.

‍The book has been travelled through centuries of theories over its meaning and who really wrote it. From secret codes to fake documents; from spreading the power of medicine to corruption and even a message from another world.

‍Or could it be just a medieval hoax — or a religious sect that believed women could give birth to the seeds of plants?

‍

‍TERRY MANNERS

‍15 June 2026