THE NAME OF SHAME ...FOREVER

PETER “Perec” Rachman arrived in Britain as a penniless refugee at the end of the Second World War, after escaping the Nazi holocaust in Poland.

- By Tom Pettifor

It may sound like an inspiring story, but he went on to build a property empire based on prostitution, gambling, extortion and threats of violence.Now a new book, Slumlord: Peter Rachman and the Postwar London Underworld, charts the rags-to-riches story of a man whose name became synonymous with rogue landlords.

Author Neil Root follows Rachman from the labour camps of Siberia to the streets of Notting Hill, West London, where he used gangsters and Establishment figures to simultaneously harass tenants while buying up and renting out cheap housing.

Neil writes: “The Rachman scandal will soon fade from living memory.

“But his name will remain permanently seared in history and on the periphery of British consciousness, especially as the term ‘Rachmanism’ it generated is still in the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Rachman operated on the fringes of the London underworld and associated with members of it, some of whom went on to much more serious criminal activity.

“He operated and acted close to how a gangster would in his sphere of property, stopping short of serious violence, but using threats and intimidation and the smokescreen of his network of nominees and henchmen to keep his enterprise running.

“He was also allied to some outwardly respectable property wheeler-dealers who, like him, were expert in finding loopholes in the law to avoid both civil and criminal prosecution.”

Born into a Jewish family on August 16, 1919, in Lviv - now in Ukraine but then part of Poland - Rachman had a comfortable childhood. He was a medical student in Warsaw when the Soviet Union invaded his hometown three weeks after Hitler entered Poland in September 1939.

The 22-year-old enlisted in the Polish army but was captured and sent to Siberia.