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Ah. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast where we talk about the worst people in all of history. And today is part two on our series on John Aspinal, the gambling king of London in the I'm not going.

To lie, that made him sound much cooler than he actually is.

He is fun. He is fun. Today we're going to get a lot of stories about zoo animals maiming people. So I hope everybody's ready for that, and I hope our guest Ed Zitron is ready for that. Ed, welcome back.

I'm ready. I'm ready to hear about some violent zoo animals.

Excellent. All right, well, here is the fucking story. So John Aspinall is kind of the 50s are starting to come to a close. He's pretty happy, right? He's running these rotating games of chance that are in this legal gray area. He's making a lot of money doing it. He's starting to collect wild animals, starting to build his private zoo. But things are going to kind of have a sudden shift for him, and it's caused by his mom, right? She is sort of one of the people who's kind of renting houses for their parties. She's kind of a key aspect of all this. And the Lady Osborne makes a mistake one week in 1958, and she rents the wrong house for a shimmy party because it's outside of their usual range and it's under the jurisdiction of the Paddington Police who are not chill with what John Aspinall is doing for reasons that have never really been made clear to me. But this is not a friendly police station. I don't know there's and part of what seems to have happened is I think they pissed off one of these rich people who loses a bunch of money at their games because it looks like he kind of drops a dime on them to the Paddington cops.

And so for the very first time, the police carry out a raid on one of these games he's playing. And because this is the kind of game that it is, they arrest a bunch of lords and ladies along with Aspinal and his friends. It's this big moment in high society because there's pictures of the cops leading out all of these very, very highly born people and taking them into custody. This kind of gives you an idea of sort of the tinner of that night. When the police enter the house, lady Osborne demands a list of the charges against them and the police inspector says that they're being charged with keeping a common gambling house. And her response is, young man, there was nothing common in this house until you entered it.

Got his ass.

Got him. Yeah.

I'm sure you love that bit. I'm sure copper was like, oh, I understand perfectly. That makes sense.

Sorry, what a baddie of a comment.

Yeah, it really is perfect.

That's classic England.

Now that said, if you are an above room temperature person, you're probably not surprised to hear that nothing happens as a result of this legal case, right? Not only does Aspinal have money, but like they have arrested all of the people who are running the country, so it doesn't go anywhere.

He's a little bit, yeah.

Not only are their charges dismissed, but the arrest of all these people kind of radicalizes a number of influential Britons. And in 1960, Parliament passes what became known as Aspinal's Law, the Gaming Act, which legalizes you never want a law named after it's always a bad thing.

It makes disease also a bad one.

Yeah, also a bad it, uh, this makes it legal for people to run casinos in London, which is what, this is why London becomes the gambling capital of Europe for a while. Right. It's because of Aspinal's law. So the downside of this is that now he has competition, right? Back when it was this gray area, he'd kind of figured out a sweet spot. There was nobody else really running these chimney games on the same scale that he is now. Anyone can run a chimney game, so Aspinal has to kind of think bigger. And on November twelveTH, 1962, he opens his ultimate gaming hall, the Claremont. Now this is in like a neighborhood in London called Mayfair, which is like super rich neighborhood, right? This is like a very central yeah, it's like a nice place to do this kind of has this if you look at videos from this gaming hall, it's like very high ceilings, huge. Like it's a place for the wealthy and the well born to feel comfortable, like crockford. He limits his business to a pretty select clientele. Kind of as time goes on, he opens it up more to new money.

But certainly at the start, it's really focused on the ancestrally wealthy and there's this kind of two tiered membership structure that's also how the club is run. The people who are kind of technically his employees, although he's not open about this, are called the Blues. And these are mostly some of them are like highborn people who don't have a lot of money but are good gamblers. Some of them are like people of more common stock who are just really good gamblers. But they are his house gamblers and their goal is not to win in order to get money. Sometimes they do that, but it's largely if you're really good, you can kind of influence games to keep them running, right? To keep them going longer. Because the longer different games go on, the longer a hand goes on, the more money gets put in, right? And since the house is taking a cut out of every pot, that works out better for you, right? You don't need your house guys to win, but you need them to keep the game going so the pot is bigger and you get a bigger cut, right? And so these guys, the Blues, they get free membership in the club and they receive a basic salary for their work.

The Reds are the marks and these are the sons of power and prestige. Who he's going to rob blind right now, a couple of years after the Claremont opens in 1968, john Aspinall opens his zoo doors to, I say, the public. It is a private zoo, so you have to pay to get in. But it becomes like this is the zoo you go to if you're rich, right? You're not going to like the London Zoo, right? That's where common people go to look at endangered animals. You're going to go to Aspinal zoo. Right? Now, the fact that he's opened his home zoo to the public is against the express advice of expert zookeepers he had consulted who didn't think that he had the temperament to safely run a zoo, which turns out to be a wise concern. But he also has this very unique view on the care of animals, right? He thinks that they should be offered different food regularly so that they have like a varied diet and so that their diet is more exciting. He thinks it bores them, which he's kind of right about. And he also thinks that they need constant stimuli, which is true.

I'm also sorry, but I never really considered one's temperament a feature of a zoo just because generally a zoo is not controlled by one person.

Yeah, his is. So he gets to good. Yeah, it's great. It's good and it's bad. The animals in his zoo, some people argue, seem to have been happier than most other zoos at the time because he's feeding them. Sometimes he'll bring them. He'll bring his gorillas gourmet food from the Claremont and shit. And he and his zookeepers spend a lot of time playing physically with the animals, which, as we'll talk about, is dangerous. But the animals seem to be happier. And the best evidence for this is John's peculiar history with gorillas. He meets his first gorilla at the London Zoo, this old silverback named Guy. And because he's got money, he's able to basically convince the zookeepers to let him try to hang out with Guy. He'll feed the animal and stuff, but Guy is an adult silverback, so he's not super into being buds. But meeting this animal that won't be his friend makes John obsessed with the idea that one day I will make an adult male gorilla be my best friend.

I'm going to befriend a gorilla.

I am going to befriend a gorilla. Yeah. That is my life.

Now. I've successfully defrauded a bunch of rich people. Now I move on to defrauding a gorilla.

Yeah, I'm going to convince a gorilla.

Step one, become the gorilla's friend.

Yeah. What a wildlife goal. So he's going to make this gorilla his best friend. So after he moves into Howlets, he gets this zoo started. He uses some of his infinite gambling money to buy a gorilla. And the first gorilla he gets again, anyone can have any animal at this point in time if they have enough money. So he finds a gorilla some other rich guy had owned named Keith.

Okay, I was going to say, how does one purchase a gorilla?

Yeah, it's through a gorilla dealer. You've got a guy?

Oh, my gorilla. Him.

I got a gorilla guy.

You got any steve? You got any gorillas? This?

Yeah. Oh, I got some uncut silver, baby.

I got a lovely one coming in next week. You love it. He'll be your friend.

Unfortunately for John, and more unfortunately for this gorilla named Kivu, kivu is an abuse victim. This gorilla has PTSD. It's deeply traumatized. Now, to his credit, John recognizes this is a traumatized animal, and he uses human logic to try to comfort it. And he's like, you know, what makes a sad man happy is a woman. So he gets a human woman, his mother in law, to sleep in bed with this gorilla to try to soothe it. That's his strategy. Now, gorillas not aggressive animals to people, and so this doesn't go badly. His mother in law doesn't get, like, hurt or anything.

He hates that woman. Let's just start there.

Kivu does not seem to like, well, I think John may have disliked that woman. And Kivu, that's my point does not respond positively to, like again, gorillas are quite peaceful. He doesn't attack her, but he dies of depression a couple of months into this.

Man that woman was it's very sad. Women are evil, as we've established. And that woman wow.

Sophie. I don't know that that's the lesson.

He died in the same way that Padme died in Star Wars.

He does. He does. He does. A Padme.

She made that gorilla have depression.

I mean, the gorilla was already depressed.

Sophie and you made it worse.

Yeah, with her. Horrible woman.

I did not see this turn from you, Sophie. Man subreddit's going to have a field day with this one.

No, they're finally going to be on.

My you know, John is very sad for a while, but I think this is a commonly known thing. When you lose a gorilla, the only thing to do is double down and get two gorillas.

You need more gorillas.

You need more gorillas. Right. The problem was not enough gorillas.

The market, I imagine, is quite liquid at this time.

A lot of gorillas floating around. So he buys two more gorillas, a breeding pair, and he sets about making them happy enough to breed. Now, this had been done that people had bred gorillas. At this point, it is kind of considered one of the brass rings of the zoo world, is getting gorillas to breed in captivity. It's not easy, right. Like, they are hard to make comfortable enough to be willing to make a gorilla horny. It's tough to make a gorilla horny. So John works on these gorillas. He spends a lot of time intimately with them. He wrestles with them. Right. He'll play games with them physically. He'll cuddle with them at night. And they do seem to come to view him as a friend. And it gets comfortable enough that they start to breed. Right. Like, he does succeed in making them happy enough that they are willing to make more gorillas. So I guess that's a win for him. He also grows closer with his bears during this period of time, which is an uneven process. Right.

What a great other thing to happen in this story. Of course, as he romances the gorillas, he successfully improves his friendship with the it's like fucking like an RPG.

Unevenly, I should say, because one day he enters the bear enclosure without sort of like there's a certain way you want to enter your bear enclosure to not spook them. He doesn't do this, and they maul him. They nearly kill him. Right. Like, he gets horribly injured by these bears, and his mother, around the same time, is nearly murdered a wolf that he's trying to treat like a dog, almost rips her throat out.

Of course he's got a wolf.

Of course he's got a wolf. Yeah. You're going to have a wolf.

Go and have a gorilla without a wolf. Go and have a gorilla without a.

Jesus his family narrowly escapes anything fatal. But this mix of complete dissociation from reality because he's this wealthy gambling maven, combined with spending all of his free time cuddling with wild animals, leads John to kind of believe that he's gone feral himself. Right.

Sweet.

He would later say, sometimes when I'm pleased to meet a friend, I find myself purring like a tiger when I make love. I even grunt like a gorilla.

That's just how British people sound when they fuck.

Yeah, so that's good. He was so convinced that he has gained some secret insight into the lives of the gorillas that he's willing to bet his life on it. At one point, on safari in Africa, a friend has to rescue him when a male lion starts roaring at the party. And John, you know there's a lion outside of your camp that's being aggressive. You want to stay inside the camp where there's lights and men with guns. John charges out into the night and he claims later, I wanted to reason with yeah, yeah, that'll work on a lion.

That's fine. Come on, mate, have a word with it.

Yeah, they love being reset.

Let me know how it goes. I will be inside the car.

Yeah. One of his friends basically has to tackle him to stop him from getting.

Murdered by this lion.

Let him cook.

Let's see what happens.

Yeah.

Don'T they?

Yeah. That one mate who saves you from getting eaten by a lion.

No, I mean your one mate who goes to try and reason with the lion oh.

Who tries to talk it out with.

A couple of pints down the local he's all fucking yelling at the lions, trying to reason. Steve, come down.

So his collection expands and howletz, becomes again, it's this kind of the private zoo of the ultra rich. And by the late 1960s, again, there's a degree to he's very irresponsible in a lot of ways, but there is a degree to which he's good at this, because by the end of the 60s, aspinal has the largest captive bred gorilla colony in the world, which is an achievement, dubiously moral achievement, but that is a thing to have done. Right.

I genuinely have to say this.

Yeah.

One through line with this, is that this boy was raised kind of cruelly. He went through the school system. But weirdly enough, I have to wonder if a lot of these people it's the wokest thing, I'll say genuinely, if a lot of these people didn't actually have good hearts but were just torn up by this hellish system that Britain had created, called Britain. And just the result of this horrifying school system and this horrifying culture is that you just have this fucking nutter who is only able to really be nice to gorillas to make them fuck. But he's so utterly broken that he does not know how to communicate with animals or humans alike. He only knows how to exploit them depressing. Otherwise, nothing about this is depressing.

Yeah, it is fascinating. If he had grown up in an environment that was both more nurturing and also where there was some degree of rigor placed on, maybe he could have become like a normal wildlife expert.

Yeah, he seems to actually have a talent.

He has some degree of a gift here. It's just married to this inability to not be crazy about it. Right, yes. Because he's effectively like a miniature deity at this point in time.

He's craving the hunter.

Yeah. It's something else. So while he again, there's this undeniable element of skill in what he does, his irresponsibility also gets people horribly, horribly injured and worse in the future. And the first example of this, in 1970, he's got this friend, Annabelle Burley. Annabelle is a socialite, she is an aristocratic lady. She's married at that point to a businessman named Mark Burley and she comes to visit Howlett's with her young son Robin and her daughter. She's close with the you know, their kids are going to hang out together. And obviously, being children, you take a bunch of children to a place like Howlett's, they want to see the animals. Of course, that's what kids are going to want to do. So Lord Aspinal only too happy to oblige them. Quote. And this is from Pearson's book, the Gamblers. After seeing the gorillas, aspinal was anxious to take them all to see one of his young female tigers called Zora. Annabelle was not so keen on this and wouldn't let her daughter, India Jane enter the cage with the other children. Like Damien and Amanda, rupert was used to the animals. But Robin was nervous, though Aspinal persuaded him to approach the tiger and stroke her.

Aspinal turned his back for just one moment. In that split second, the tiger, sensing Robin's fear, rose on her hind legs, put her front paws on his shoulders and pushed him to the ground. Snarling, she shook the boy's head in her mouth. Seeing what was happening, Aspinal leapt towards the tiger and with a show of strength, somehow prized her jaws apart. By doing this, he undoubtedly saved Robin's life, min Aspinal that's his wife, meanwhile, was tugging at the tiger's tail, trying to prevent its rear claws tearing at the boy's body. Somehow, between the two of them, they made the tiger drop her prey. Rigid with fear at the nightmare taking place before her eyes, annabelle watched as James Osborne rushed forward and picked up her son, who was still conscious. Rupert and India Jane were terrified and screaming as James carried Robin out of the cage to safety. Annabelle could see that the lower left hand side of his face was crushed past recognition. His mouth had disappeared and part of his jaw was hanging by a thread. So maybe don't let children in a cage. Good tiger, he lives. He will make a like he has to go immediately into surgery.

He has, like, scars, a recovery of sorts. I think the way we describe that, probably some trauma. One would have PTSD from getting your medicine. Yeah. Very irresponsible.

Sounds like a story from, like, the 18 hundreds. But this is alarmingly recent.

Yes. This is like Star Trek is on the air, right? Yeah. It's pretty insane. So despite this, everyone is horrified by this kind of butt ASP and all. He's like, well, this tiger had a bad reaction to this kid. It's the tiger. I'm going to keep having my tiger Tara sleep in bed with me and my wife. Right. That's the good you know, most of his friends are generally loath to question his judgment because they're all in debt to him. Right. They're all gambling at the Claremont.

And he has a bunch of violent animals.

He has dangerous animals. Now, kind of by this point, the Claremont set has filled out, aspinal has made two additional friends to kind of complete his inner circle. And one of these guys is the 7th Earl of Lucan, nicknamed Lucky Lucan, after a particularly great gambling hall earlier in his life. Now, Lucan, his, like, grandfather, is the dude who did the Charge of the Light Brigade. Right. That is the family that this guy comes from. And as you might guess from the whole Charge of the Light Brigade thing, his family is kind of a reputation for eccentricity. Now, this is not always bad. Lucan's father, who's the 6th Earl of Lucan, becomes like, a massively influential Labor Party leader in the House of Lords and is like, a very famous progressive in this period. But his son, the 7th Earl of Lucan, does not get along with his dad. He actually hates his father. And part of what this means is that he goes far. Right. Now, this makes him fit in very well because all of the old money set at the Claremont are right wing guys. But he isn't just, like, conservative, he develops a specific fascination with the Nazis.

And in fact, after bad nights gambling, he would calm himself down by reading. Like, that's his safe place. That's his putting on, like, Frazier at night to go to sleep is reading.

When I play, like, Slay the Spire or MLB the show.

Yeah.

Like, just like something to chill out with, except he chose that book.

Yeah. Little bit of Hitler to calm yourself down after a hard day.

That's his housewives.

That is in. Yeah, that's his desperate housewives. It's nothing.

Married at first sight for him is Hitler.

Yeah, that's his chill out.

That's exactly what it is.

It's his married at first sight. Yeah. Wild. So the other friend who joins their circle is this fellow, James Goldsmith. Now, he's the son of a luxury hotel magnate. He's not royalty. Right. In fact, he's a Jewish guy. His family has to flee Germany ahead of the Nazis. Right. He's going to be one of these new money people who kind of remakes the ruling class. He's one of these sort of like, guys who sort of he comes in during this period and becomes one of the most powerful people in the entire country. He's an Etonian, but he drops out before graduating because he's already as like a kid, a successful entrepreneur. And he basically tells everyone, I'm too rich for this high society clout game bullshit, right? I've made my money. I don't need your approval now. Now you have to get my approval because you're all going broke gambling, and I have the fucking cash, right? And he's a fascinating dude, actually, Goldsmith. In his older adult life, Goldsmith is like this corporate raider dude. He's stripping assets. And he's one of the men who will destroy industry in Britain, right? Because he's stripping all the and strips assets from all these companies.

He's this big offshoring guy. He's going to play a major role in killing along with this other dude, a friend of his, Slater, killing industry in the UK. But earlier in his life, he has this wildly romantic and sympathetic backstory. So as a young man, he falls in love with this woman, Maria Borbon. And Maria is her father is this indigenous Bolivian man, right, who like, as he's a miner, basically. And he kind of lucks into buying this incredibly rich tin vein, which makes him an incredibly wealthy man. And he then moves to Europe because he knows that the political situation, Bolivia is unstable. And he buys himself a Spanish noble title, right? So he comes from a very common he's literally an indigenous man from South America, but he makes himself into a European noble. And he does not want his daughter Maria to marry this Jewish man, right? And in fact, tells him when James tries to come to him for his approval to get married, he's like, we are not in the habit of marrying Jews. Now, James is a piece of shit, too. And his response is, well, I'm not in the habit of marrying red know, two racists negotiating a marriage.

Racist uno.

Yeah, racist uno. Now, Maria's dad is insanely rich. So when they try to get married anyway, he has his daughter kidnapped and put under house arrest. Yeah, it's one of these and there's this time where he keeps searching. He's traveling around the world looking for her. Like she's being kind of locked away. She gets free. And they run to Scotland together, right? And they hide out in Scotland because the way the laws are at the time, if you've been in Scotland for two weeks, you can get married there. Don't ask me why. That's the rule. But that's the and like, at the same time, her dad, who has mercenaries, travels to Edinburgh. And so he's got his mercenaries in private searching for them for two weeks as they're, like, hiding in the underground so that they can get married. And it's one of those things. James being a pretty savvy guy. He starts sending letters to a journalist, right. Telling them what they're doing, telling him about the fact that they're and this journalist starts publishing articles while they're hiding and while their dad is putting out bounties for them. And it becomes like the biggest story in the country.

Right. It's this incredibly romantic tale. This couple has eloped and they're being chased by this evil plutocrat and they're hiding out in the Edinburgh Underground. Like everyone is obsessed with this story. Couldn't be much more romantic. Right? It is a pretty cool so you could make a movie out of this.

Yeah, it's actually really very cool. I would watch a movie about this.

It is a dope. So and they succeed. Right. They're able to kind of wait out long enough that they elope, they have this secret wedding, and then there's nothing that Maria's dad can do about it. So they're able to move back to London, where they're not just popular with the rich because everyone loves them. Right.

They're such a celebrities.

Yeah. It's such a romantic story. And then almost as soon as they get back, she gets pregnant and dies horribly in childbirth. So it is this guy. Yeah. It's this really tragic high drama story. It is like the most sympathetic backstory a dude would have. And the rest of James's life is going to be killing all of the sympathy by becoming, like, the evilest corporate overlord of his day. Right? Yeah. It's something else.

Joker Fide.

Yeah. And some people will argue, because his marriages are purely transactional after this point. He's got these mistresses, but he never loves. Again. This seems to have basically some people will argue this kind of kills his ability to care about people. I don't know if that's the case. Maybe he always would have turned out to be a piece of shit.

But I think that it's hard to tell what's inside a man's heart, especially when he's British. But it definitely didn't help.

Yeah, it doesn't help. And again, he helps to destroy the industry in the UK. He makes a lot of his money in tobacco. He's a big tobacco guy. He makes a lot of his money in Indonesian nickel mines, which are not nice places. He's buying and selling forests around the world, including in the US for timber. And he's one of the dudes who will pioneer the modern concept of setting up shell companies and shadow assets so that he can basically secretly buy up controlling interests in companies without people realizing until it's too late that he's taken them over. He helps to kind of pioneer how you do that in the modern era. That is this other budy of John.

Britain is so good at developing people like this.

Yeah, it is a very British story. Right. And Luken and Goldsmith are going to form the nexus of a far right pole in Aspen. All social.

World.

And I say that everyone's pretty right wing. These are all rich people from, like, families that have always been rich.

It's also England at that time was pretty right wing.

Anyway, England is very right wing at this time. But Goldsmith and Lucan are like, fascists, right? And in fact, in 1994, one of Goldsmith's first things, he is like the first Brexiter before the EU is even a thing. He's, like, fighting like hell to stop the creation of the EU and to stop England from being a part of it. That doesn't work. And as kind of a response to failing to stop the EU. He writes this book in 1994 called The Trap. And basically the argument in the Trap is that US style attitudes of free trade, which bring with them mass migration right? Which open borders so that people can travel between borders, is a trap because it will lead to non white people taking over. Right? Yeah.

This is a great replacement guy.

Yeah, this is like the BC version of the great replacement theory, right? Like, it's a little bit underdeveloped when he starts it, but you can see the bones of it in the book that he writes. Yeah, so that's cool. Anyway, you know who doesn't support the great replacement as a narrative? Or the sponsors of our podcast.

Oh, okay.

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Ah.

We are back. We're having a good time over here. So James Goldsmith is a Mercantilist, right? He feels basically that wealthy. And this is kind of the attitude of the Claremont set. Wealthy business owners should hold all political power and the government should primarily be used to stop poor people from entering Europe through force. Right. That is the belief that this guy has not an uncommon one today. You see the descendants of Jimmy Goldsmith all over the place. But this is weird because he and Aspinal are the two independently wealthy, like actually wealthy, not just inherited money and squandered, it members of the Claremont set. So he is the only guy in this social circle who's willing to tell John, hey, your zoo experiments are insane. You're a lunatic. And in fact, you notice your tiger.

Ripped someone's face off.

Yeah, he actually bad. He tries to warn Annabelle the day her son gets maimed. He's like, oh, I would never get in the cages with these animals. They're wild animals. If they get frightened, you never know what they're going to do. Right? Like, you can't trust them with your safety.

She's just doing the jackoff gesture the whole time, ignoring it.

No. Throw the kid in there. Yeah.

All right, mate. Tiger is fucking pricked.

It's wild. So at the end of the 60s, jimmy opens his school to again. The public, provided that they can pay, and he has expanded by this point to a host, a wide variety of animals. He starts to get less interested in the Claremont at this point. Right. Gambling has kind of gotten boring and nothing compares. Throwing down money, which he has plenty of, on a game, is not nearly as exciting as, like, cuddling with a tiger. Right. So at the start of the 70s, he sells the Claremont outright, I think he sells it to Hugh Hefner. I may be wrong about that. But he sells it so he can focus on his new passion. Now aspinoly dying every day. Nearly, nearly dying every day to animals. To wild animals. Maiming him now, in sort of a period as he's gotten experienced with this zoo and kind of gotten bored of gambling, aspinal has also begun to develop a peculiar set of theories about the world. Some of them are based on Goldsmith and his buddy Lucan. Their outright Nazism has an impact on Aspinal. But Aspinal is also heavily influenced by his close contact with wild animals.

The idea that he comes to believe is this in the ancient past, human beings and animals had been equal, but then mankind had betrayed them, creating a world in which animals were little more than beasts of burden. Aspinal saw himself as the appointed defender of the animal world from man. And in his eyes, the oppression of animals was not caused by rich men like him who keep them in Zeus, or who, like, buy and sell forests like his budy James Goldsmith. But it's caused by poor people, mostly non white people, right? Yeah. Who are cluttering up the world with.

Their filth and that somehow controls the animals.

Right? I'm going to quote from an article in the Telegraph that's kind of writing about him. He castigated the human race as a species of vermin and positively welcomed natural disasters as a means of reducing the plague of Homo sapiens. He would gladly end his own life, he declared, if he could take another 250,000,000 with him. There was something to be said. He felt for Hitler's ideas about eugenics. Broadly speaking, he said, the high income groups tend to have a better genetic inheritance. And, like, he meets he becomes buddies with Richard Nixon at one point, obviously, of course, he and Nixon are friends and they're hanging out one day in the Claremont. And Nixon's, like, some of their nuclear weapons we've got, could kill 2 million people if they hit the right place. And fucking Aspinal's response is like, well, that's not nearly enough. We're going to have to up those numbers if we're going to get rid of enough people. Let's get to work.

You Americans have gotten cocky. Your atrocities are nothing compared to the British Empire.

Yeah, it is good to know the.

Conversation that must have been which one of the tigers nearly killed someone and I sleep with the gorilla.

No.

He doesn't like Americans.

Yeah. I do not think a gorilla would have a good reaction to Johnson.

Sorry.

Yeah. This gorilla actually loved Escalation in Vietnam. Couldn't get enough of.

Man.

It was not only the poor that Aspinal's animal friends taught him to reject. Pearson writes, quote, having identified so closely with his gorillas, he started to imitate their habits and showed a marked preference for the rules governing the world of animals to that of human beings. From watching how the dominant old silverback gorilla ruled the females in his entourage, he concluded that the idea of women's rights and women's liberation was not only ridiculous, but also contrary to nature. He'd also decided that an authoritarian, paternalistic setup was the natural model for a human. A he's a literal guerrilla mindset. Dude.

He is quite literally a gorilla mindset.

Dude, that's so funny. The gorillas have taught me how human relationships ought to work.

Mike Zodovich is going to listen to this and be like, oh, wow.

To be clear here, I'm not saying he's right about how gorillas I don't know much about gorillas.

This guy is a disgraceful piece of shit and I hope he burns in hell. But also he does kind of live his dream. It's not like he's saying I have the gorilla mindset and doesn't. He owns these gorillas and indeed interacts with them cuddles as what I think he believes is a peer.

Yeah, you have to give him credit. He's not a diletente. Right. He is committed to living like an animal. So yeah, I'll give him that. I'm not saying that's a good thing.

I'm just don't got to hand it to him.

You don't got to hand it to him. He's not a casual yeah, if you read interviews with him I have read two separate interviews with him that he gives at his zoo with a journalist. Two separate interviews where he is mauled by an elephant while giving the interview. That happens twice.

Maul me once, shame on you.

Yeah, it's something else. So to continue that quote from studying how the animal kingdom operated in the wild, he reached some even more alarming propositions. The first of these was that just as the survival of the fittest seems to work in nature, we should willingly accept the position of the powerful and successful as natural leaders of modern day society. He also believed as firmly in selective breeding for humans as he did for animals, and proclaimed that since animals had as much right to exploit the planet Earth as human beings, the time had come to coal something like a billion humans from what he called the urban biomass. If the world as we know it was going to survive, so that's great, that's great.

That's good.

Yeah. Now, his evolving gorilla imagine like Elon.

Musk dealing with any of these people, they would kill him. The gorilla looks pretty epic to me.

Yeah. He would try to cuddle with a lion and get his head crushed, just immediately die, which might have been the best thing. Honestly. This could save us all a lot of problems.

Yeah.

So his evolving guerrilla mindset, this is why. So he and his first wife split up, she cheats on him and he decides to keep her. He locks her away from their kids, right? Like, she has no contact with the children. So he marries this next woman, who is like a wonderful partner. She loves his animal, she's like, in every way a perfect match, but she delivers a daughter with a heart defect who dies after birth. So John dumps her because, like, well, humans should only mate to breed because that's what gorillas do and obviously we can't breed, so goodbye. Yeah.

Okay.

Gross. His third wife, who he marries because she has a famous ancestor and he wants those genes in his children.

Was it like Merlin?

No, I wish. It's shit, I've forgotten I had it written down somewhere here. But yeah, she has a famous ancestor that he admires, and when they have their first kid, John waits until it's six months old and then he takes it into his gorilla enclosure and hands it to the dominant mother father pair in the to. I'm going to quote from Pearson here. The gorilla peered inside its nappy to see what sex it was with the baby tucked under her arm, swung up into the trees, and showed him to the other females in the community. When all the female gorillas had thoroughly examined the baby, basa his gorilla mother, brought him down to Earth and returned him safely to his human parents.

That was not how I thought that one was going.

No, it works out fine.

That's actually kind of strange.

Yeah. That's a wild experience to have as a baby. Yeah.

It's a wild experience to part participate in, even as an observer.

Yeah. And it's wild.

Let me just hand the baby off to the gorillas.

Sally marries him after this anyway. She's like, yeah, fine, why not?

The baby is fine, nothing to complain about.

Jesus, it works out fine. So the early 1970s are a bad time for the Aspinals, and they're rich friends, but for reasons divorced from getting mauled by wild animals, the economy tanks at this point, right? Aspinal not just in the UK, but like, Aspinal, he's gotten over gambling on gambling and is gambling on the US stock market, and he loses his fucking shirt when the US stock market takes a tumble in the early seventy s.

A new kind of exploiter exploited him.

Yeah, exactly.

Circle of life.

Yeah.

No, really, it is just human beings will create new systems to exploit other human beings. He created one and then another, and then someone created one to exploit him.

It's kind of is. It's like a magical quote.

Lucas.

Able to he doesn't lose everything just because his friend Goldsmith right. Is still rich. And Goldsmith basically floats him so he can keep paying for his exotic animals. During this period, the other members of the Claremont set do not fare as well. The new membership of the club won't give them IOUs. Right. So these guys are all still horribly addicted to gambling because they never started businesses or have like lord Lucan has nothing in his life but gambling, and he's bad at it, so he can't afford to gamble without Aspinal running the Claremont. Now, Lucan is this starts to kind of drive him crazy. The fact that he is actually poor now, like, he still has his fancy manor house, he's still a lord, but he has no money. That drives him crazy. And then in 1974, a labor government takes over in the UK. And that drives these guys, these Claremont members, into a sense of mania, because to them, aspinal the way Aspinal views this is this labor government. These are communists. Communists have taken over, and they are in the process of uprooting the natural order of society. This is a conspiracy against the rightful ruling class based on my guerrilla studies.

Yeah, but the ruling class that got there through gambling on an insane game.

Yeah, it's something else.

They're not good rich people like us where we money through gambling. They're bad rich people who got it through some other method that I don't really understand.

They did something shady for it. Now, no one's mind has degraded more by this point than the formerly lucky Lord Lucan. His luck had turned sour years ago, and again, he is broke now. He's increasingly obsessed with fascism. And this is all related to the fact that his marriage has collapsed. Right. And it's become clear, like, his wife is going to take the kids. Right. So he just is losing his mind increasingly. And anytime he'll meet with his Claremont buddies with Aspinal, because they're all still hanging out, aspinal will cite these theories based on gorillas, of how inferior women are. So Lucan takes from that. He tries to force his wife into a mental institution so he can take the kids. He does this several times. This would have worked, I think, aspinal if Aspinal had wanted to force a wife into the mental institution, he had the juice to do it. Lucan isn't good at anything, so he can't even work this kind of evil scheme. Right. He's not even able, even with his social position, to make this happen, thankfully. Right. That's good.

And also his rationale is based on gorillas.

Yeah, he's based on his friends gorillas. Yeah.

So who told you? The gorilla friend.

All right. Okay. Yeah. So Lord Lucan, his mind is a mix of his buddy's gorilla Theories, and he buys this 1930s translation of Mine. Comp, which he reads feverishly, and is.

Also after World War II as well.

Well, after World War II.

Like the losing Guy's handbook to racism.

Yeah. He has one other idol. Unfortunately, that idol is Mustafa Kamal of Turkey, who know a dictator and one of the Armenian genocide guys.

Yeah.

And the book is called Gray Wolf. Right. Which is today the name of a fascist organization in Turkey. So that's good.

Not good.

Yeah. So these are his two buds, right? Hitler and attiturk.

Hitler and gorilla. And.

Like, his like, in his head, the fucking his idols are Hitler gorillas and attitude, including a gorilla.

So yeah.

And this says something about his wife, too. She claims in interviews later she didn't realize that he'd taken a turn for the extreme right. Although this is the exact quote from her, I'm not sure I believe her here. Quote, he did have very right wing views. Some might describe them as fascist. I didn't know he was indulging in extremist reading matter in 1972, although I knew he listened to recordings of Hitler's speeches at Nuremberg rallies. Well, was that not a warning idea? Where do you think he got the ideas?

Did he just like walking down the street? He had someone talking about it? Or was it his weird gorilla friend? Yeah, I also just the gorilla man.

Again, I didn't know he was reading fascist books. I just knew he listened to Nuremberg a lot. Wild so this increasingly conspiratorial obsession with race theory, communism and communism and the only possible solution to a labor government infected the whole Claremont set. And I'm going to quote from a really interesting 2009 article in the Guardian here. There is no suggestion that Lucan was in any way antisemitic or supported the Final solution. But he and his associates, who included casino owner and party host John Aspinall and the tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, were increasingly convinced Britain had fallen victim to a socialist conspiracy. Daily Express journalist Charles Benson, one of Lucan's friends, said he was very right wing and never watered it down in front of liberals. He would talk about hanging and flogging and use the N word in order to get a reaction. One biographer, Patrick Marnham, said, seen from the Claremont Club, the country was starting to resemble the less stable years of the Weimar Republic. Sir James Goldsmith began to develop his theory of the communist infiltration of the Western media over the smoked salmon and lamb cutlets. The talk turned to the pros and cons of a British military coup.

And that is what these guys are going to come to support. Now, he was just the guy who.

Claimed he wasn't right wing, who walked around saying the N word to get a reaction around a bunch of people who were kind of embarrassed to be around him. Just a podcaster.

Yeah, he's a podcaster. Yeah. He would have been a great podcast.

He would have been on was it Lex Friedman's podcast?

Oh, yeah. Huge Friedman.

Yeah. So what is that, do you think? Oh, the gorilla guy? Actually, no, a guy, seriously? A guy who's just like, yeah, I learned everything I learned about woman from watching my gorillas. That guy would be a insanely popular YouTuber.

Yeah, he would be. It's also, it's worth noting, one of their good friends here when I talk about them supporting a military coup, a member of the Claremont set who's tight with all these guys is this dude Sterling, who creates the SAS. And Sterling is going to make a private army in the UK with the goal of using them as this sort of right wing countervailing force. It doesn't work out for a variety of reasons, but these are their social set. And by late 1974, things have gotten to a pretty toxic level and we're going to talk about what Lucan does next in this mind state. But first, here's some ads. Hi.

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We're back. So late 1974, the lucky Lord Lucan has grown obsessed with his need to rescue his children and destroy his wife. All of which fits in with his Nazi guerrilla beliefs about power and masculinity. So he starts telling aspinal he tells his friends, he's open about, like they're like hanging out, playing cards, and he's like, gonna kill my wife. Decided it gonna murder her. And they're all like, yeah, sounds like a good man. Like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

I bet that'll work. Yeah.

There is some debate as to whether they thought he was bullshitting or not. And to be fair, I do think it's not uncommon for these guys to joke about murdering their wives. Yeah, that's the kind of culture it is. Right?

But also the culture is one where a guy owns multiple gorillas and breeds them. Anything could be happening. I would believe it.

Yeah. I think I'm bringing this up not to defend them, but more to say a lot of them talk about murdering women. He's not the only one. Right. And there is evidence.

I mean, that doesn't surprise me. There are a bunch of fucking Ethno fascist freaks.

We'll never know. Precisely. But Pearson's book makes a very strong case that not only is he joking about this, but they provide him with resources to carry out a murder. Right. And again, some of this is up. Obviously, these guys are not stupid enough to be completely open about what they're doing, but one of his friends loans him a car that he's going to use as his getaway vehicle to dump his wife's body after he murders her. One of them, he's broke, and he figures he needs 10,000 pounds sterling to bribe a guy with a boat to dispose of the corpse. Right. There's a couple of bribes that need to be made, right? And Goldsmith, interestingly, James Goldsmith, being the smartest of them, doesn't want to get involved in this. He doesn't want to be directly tied to this murder. So he's like, I will give you 10,000 pounds to commit this murder. Which means that he doesn't have to give the money to him because as a noble in the aristocracy, you can't take a gift. Right? Lukin can't be given $10,000. He has to be loaned it so his other friends loan him the money.

Right. This is actually Goldsmith's clever way to not get tied to this is by offering it as a gift, because then Lucan won't take it. I don't know. Wild culture murder, tax dodge. What the yeah. So Lucan gets a loan from other friends of his and he gets this car. There's some other tools he probably gets. And the plan he cooks up is like, I am going to kill my wife. Like, bash her head in, throw her in a sack, drive her to this boat, and then the boat will weigh down the sack and toss her in the fucking like that's. That's the idea. Pearson describes this not as just his plot, but as a conspiracy involving other members of the Claremont Club. There's this anonymous financier who he calls Mr. X, I think, because he's scared to bring this guy's name in that works as both a high end leg breaker for gamblers and is, like, involved in organized crime. This may have been Adnan Khashoggi, I think it's possible. Who is like, this arms dealer, but that's not the only guy. It could have been a lot of other guys. Right? There are a lot of guys involved in organized crime because Aspinal's a gambling maven, right, obviously he knows dudes who are dangerous.

Some randomly violent fellows.

Yeah. So the basic idea is that Lucan's going to murder his wife. She's just going to disappear. No one's going to know there was a murder because the body will go.

Other than the people he's discussed it with while gambling.

Right, other than his gambling buddies. And then he'll live happily ever after with his children. Right. This is his plan to save airtight.

Plan, yeah.

Perfect. Now, the only hole in this perfect plan is that Lord Lucan is a useless rich kid who has never developed a skill in his life other than losing all of his money gambling.

So, average conservative male.

Yeah. He heads into his London home with this metal pipe wrapped in surgical tape, and he swings it at the first small dark haired woman to come down the stairs. Unfortunately well, I'm not going to say unfortunately.

This is all unfortunate fucking horrifying thing to do. Just like not even premeditated act. But then the weird, like, slap shot nature of him.

He killed some other lady, didn't he?

He kills his maid, who people would say, come on.

Man. Now your house is dirty.

Yeah, it's one of those, like she kind of had a casual resemblance to his wife, right? So he doesn't even look. He swings, he shatters her skull, and he kills her instantly. Right. It's very brutal. Horrible, horrible thing.

God.

Now, the lady Lucan is right behind her maid, and she comes down the stairs next. And this is from Pearson's book when he heard Veronica that's the Lady Lucan coming down the stairs from the sitting room to find out what was going on, he started attacking her as well, hitting her around the head as he had Sandra Rivet. Somehow she managed to slide down between his legs and grab his balls. The agonizing pain made him stop, and suddenly he seemed to come to his senses and realize too late what he was doing. This was not a gamble or a lethal fantasy. He had just battered to death his children's nanny and was now doing his best to do the same to their mother.

That is so cool.

It is pretty dope of her. You got to give.

That woman is hardcore.

Yeah. That is thinking on your face. Good for you. Good for you.

Honestly, also, complete head on a swivel.

Also, she grabbed them so tightly that he was like, whoa, maybe I shouldn't commit murder plants.

Yeah. This was the point at which Lucan did something that seems so incredible in the middle of a bloody murder that it actually becomes credible. He apologized to his intended victim. He did more. He sat Veronica down and found himself telling her that they must talk to try to work things out. Then, noticing blood was pouring down her face, he went to the bathroom to fetch a towel to help clean her up. This gave her the chance she needed to make a quick escape. Stumbling down the stairs, she got out onto the street and ran to the local pub, the Plumber's Arms, where she burst into the saloon bar screaming, help me. Help me. Somebody's just murdered my nanny. Now Lucan escapes after somebody.

You're defending that man?

She has suffered a head injury. At this point, I don't know what was clear to her. It may have been a thing where, because she gets hit in the head, she's not immediately aware she has to put it together. I'll give a lot of grace to someone who's just been hit in the head with pipe and had to fight their way free, right? Who knows what's going on.

Also, it's very funny that he was like, yo, 1 minute. Let me get a towel.

Yeah, let me get a towel. Right. You wait right here.

I will not kill you.

She grabs his balls and it resets him back to polite getting like a.

Pin to reset a device.

It's wild. Yeah, good to know. Lucan goes missing. He is still missing to this day. Right. He's been declared dead at this point, obviously, nobody totally knows what happens to him. Right? It is generally agreed that he committed suicide. The kind of most common story is he takes a boat out to sea and he drowns himself. Because that's like the most romantic, aristocratic way of killing yourself, right, is to throw yourself into the ocean. But we don't know that that's what happened. And Lord Aspinal's mother, she gets I think it's his mother or his wife. She's interviewed later, and she kind of insinuates that his friends got rid of him, that he was murdered by his friends because he might expose them. There's some suggestion that maybe he was fed to Aspinal's tigers. That might have not impossible.

I would absolutely believe that.

Yeah.

I would definitely believe that. He was just like, yeah, go with the tiger. I trained this tiger to protect from wives.

Yeah. And it's unclear he could have killed himself. Pearson's attitude is that he was too much of a weirdo narcissist to kill himself. I don't know if I think that's credible, but he does know more about Luken than I do. His suggestion is that Lucan using these kind of, like Mr. X and these other sort of overseas connections aspinal has. Lucan gets spearded away to Switzerland, but because he's the most famous murderer in Europe, he has to be stuck in a house for the rest of his life. Right? You can't let this guy out ever. And Lucan can't handle that. He still wants to get his kids back and return to high society. He kind of convinces himself someone else killed his wife. And so Pearson's theory is that, like, well, once these guys who are hiding him realize that he's a danger to them, he's going to expose himself somehow they murder him. Right. Because they're like, well, this guy it's the only thing to know. That's also perfectly possible.

My theory is he probably died in some sort of stupid way, like a Mr. Bean death.

But friends, I hope it was the tiger.

Yeah, maybe.

It's more likely he pissed off one of the multiple rich and violent and crazy gambling people and was my I am lucky Lucan and then got killed by a guy in the street.

Totally possible.

He strikes me as the kind of guy who dies in a very boring and funny in in a bar in Switzerland.

Yeah. He just gets drunk with the wrong people.

But think about it. If he's this rich, racist, horrifying bigot who hates women, the people he's going to associate himself with wherever he ends up are going to be equally shitty and unreliable. And also yeah, someone probably fucking looked in the paper and went, hey, aren't you that famous murderer who got a guy who sucks? Fucking idiot. But also, I would also fully believe that they all had him done in.

Yeah, totally possible.

Because Lucan's whole thing, even I'm 37 years old, so obviously the whole Lucan thing happened a lot longer before I was born. But it's interesting his legend is still around, even though most people, myself included, until this podcast, did not know anything about how this happened. Yeah, which is not a great story for Big. Big no, no on most of this stuff.

Yep.

Gorilla stuff sounds interesting, though.

Yeah, the gorilla stuff's fine. So, yeah. For his part, Lord Aspinal would never condemn his friend for murder. He talks to journalists about that. He's like, I get why he did it. I think he was within his know, he did it for the good of his children. Aspinal's attitude is he was only trying to save his children from the worst fate imaginable, being raised by a woman. Right.

Well, as we established earlier in the Pod, women be evil.

Yeah. So Lucan Aspinal, because he kind of goes broke in 74. In 76, he starts another gambling hall right. Which he makes another fortune in. And he sets up in the hallway these busts of famous gamblers from history. And one of them is a bust of his friend, the murderer, Lord Lucan. And the initial inscription on it basically says he did it for his kids. Something else, this guy. So, after his friend's disappearance, aspinal continues to devote most of his time to his zoo. He makes a couple more fortunes. We're talking millions, tens of millions each time. But then he loses them, often by pampering his animals. Because it's expensive to run zoos like this. They never make money. He does open a second zoo, like, a few years later. So he has two zoos that he's operating, and these become increasingly large and influential through the he grows obsessed with the idea that his zookeepers, like him, can only do their job properly if they're willing to get dangerously close to the animals. And this is a bad idea. In 1980, he has two Siberian tigresses, and they viciously maul and kill two zookeepers in the same year, forcing him the only thing yeah, that's his attitude.

He's angry that he has to shoot these tigers to death because these zookeepers got murdered by them. Which, to be fair, not the tiger's fault, but it is your fault, dude. You had them cuddling with them.

I mean, you also had tigers and put people in front.

Yeah, that's not the end of it. In 1984, one of his zookeepers is crushed to death by an Indian bull elephant. In 1994, the head zookeeper at Howlettz is massacred by yet another Siberian tiger. Fucking guy went into the shit right afterwards, another keeper, Damien Cockerel, is crushed to death by the elephant La Petite in its enclosure. So he is running through these guys very quickly. This is a deadly zoo. I'm going to quote from The Guardian again. In 1996, Aspinal won a high court case to maintain the controversial practice of keepers mingling with lions, even though in May of that year, a boy was awarded 132,000 pounds because his arm was ripped off by a chimpanzee in 1989. This is again, at one of Aspinal's facilities. And as irresponsible as all that is, he's still in some ways good at what he's doing. Because his second zoo his second zoo opens in yeah. Both Howlettz and his second zoo, Port lymphney, are renowned breeding centers. He produces 73 captive bred gorillas and six black rhinos.

People die, but the animals fuck.

The animals fuck. Yeah. It's wild. And by the time kind of in the 80s, zoo professionals who had rightfully been like, this guy is a maniac, started learning, like, taking his lessons, some of his lessons on raising animals, because he's got, by this point, 80 breeding species. And one of his projects in the Congo is the first to successfully introduce captive bred gorillas back into the wild. So it's this mix of wild incompetence that gets people killed. And also, like, this is the first program to get captive bred gorillas back into the wild. So I don't know what lesson you want to take from that. It's just a thing that happened. Yeah. There you go.

I think the lesson I'm taking from this is we need to learn a little bit about gorillas from this guy.

Yeah.

This guy has throw more people in front of gorillas just to see what happens.

It's kind of a bummer he doesn't die from being eaten.

I thought that was where this was going. I thought he was going to get killed by a domestic cat.

It's literally the opposite of that because he does die of cancer in late June of 2000. But his final regret in life is that cancer has made him too sick to cuddle with his dangerous wild animals. Anyway, John Aspidall Aspers as his friends called him. Yeah, there you go. How you feeling?

I'm feeling great.

Yeah.

I love the fact that Britain I feel like Britain's freaks are just very different to America.

This is a unique kind of freak. Yeah.

But it's only something that could be created by the horrors of the colonial empire. Not just like the obvious repeated atrocities that to this day are visited upon the world as a result of the British Empire. It's also just the insane, repressive, violent nature of Britain in that hundred year period that I don't even think has truly stopped. But we've just tamped down how violent and horrifying we are. And what's insane is nothing happened to this guy.

No.

Nakedly, corrupt guy who led to the deaths of several people and by proxy, one maid. And he's fine. He died of cancer. And his last thing was like, oh, yeah, I didn't get to cuddle with my animals as much as I wanted to.

I never got maimed one last time by a tiger.

Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't say, I'm not going to let God kill me. My gorillas will do it.

Yeah, I'll make my gorilla.

You're really right there.

I refuse to let go this giant silverback gorilla I've been breeding specifically to kill me when I get cancer.

Yeah, I will say I'll say this for gorillas because I think it's important to push back on this myth sometimes.

The gorillas are going to fucking light us up in the comments.

They are not the animals that kill people. Right. Because it's actually like a silver like, gorillas. It's kind of hard to get human.

Beings do human beings establish just take your mother in law and she'll depress the gorilla and that's it.

Yeah. So I guess that's the lesson here. Everyone go get a silverback gorilla. It's completely safe.

It's totally fine. You will be fine. Buy one today.

Yeah.

Do you have any pluggables for us, Ed?

Just find me at where'syoured at if you want to read some excellent tech journalism and if you want to hire a PR firm. Easypr.com.

Yes, most excellent easypr.com. Check out where's your Ed at. And yeah, that's going to be it for us at behind the Bastards this week. You can subscribe add free to our shows at what is it called, Sophie?

Cooler zone media.

Yeah, do that. All right, we're done.

Bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Coolzone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever.

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