At the same time, as a Muslim, “a worker and producer,” a builder of a mosque, a converter of the infidel and a trainer of the young (“we are able to train in excess of 500 directly and an unresearched multiple indirectly”), he was making an assault on the treasury of the Emir of Kuwait. He wrote to the Kuwait Student Union and asked to be invited to Kuwait: “As an articulator for our people I am invited to speak by all of our major universities in England.” He sent an autographed copy of his ghosted autobiography to the Kuwait embassy and, no doubt for reasons of drama, asked for it to be packaged in the presence of an embassy official and sent by diplomatic carrier to the Emir, together with a letter. He wrote two letters to the Kuwait ambassador. One asked for an “audience even if it is only for five minutes,” and drew attention to the second letter, which had been put in an envelope marked “X.” X marked the spot: “As you know, the biggest property owners in this country are Jews. Our landlords are Jews. We must get them off our backs . . . We ask you to deal with this our request of direct financial aid as an urgent and top priority matter. In terms of money the figure of £100,000 (one hundred thousand pounds) is a very realistic and immediate need. . . . Yours in Islam, Michael Abdul Malik.”
It was as another kind of Muslim, Harlem and very devout, that he wrote to his Black Muslim contacts in the United States. He reported success (“an urban village . . . a beautiful place to live in”); he confessed his fears about the Jews. But he reversed the Kuwaiti approach. The hard request came first; the flannel followed. “We need most desperately, a large injection of capital. . . . Sometimes I feel very much abandoned and alone when I preach the word of the Messanger [sic]. Sometimes, when our need is very great and there seems no way to turn a Brother who has never spoken to the Holy Aposle [sic] would say to me ‘Why dont you bare your heart to him, surely he will help.’ But somewhere in my head and maybe this is because I had the honour to sit with him and look in his eyes, I feel that it is my duty to go out and search for our needs in the wilderness of Babylon.”
Later, in a statement at his trial, Malik summed up this period. “I returned to the United Kingdom and started winding up my business, liquidizing certain of the assets that my family had acquired for the many years we spent in Europe.”
He encouraged some of the people around him to believe that he was successfully liquidizing: money or the show of money would win him those “recruits” he was looking for. But he went too far. Like a man touched by the fantasies of his own begging letters, he began to speak of fantastic sums; and he trapped himself. He said he had got £250,000 from Nigel Samuel for the Black House; and there were people who believed him. (In the Sunday Times of March 12, 1972, the “Insight” reporters gave an outside figure of £15,000.) But the Black House had little to show for £250,000; in February 1970 a check for £237 to the London Electricity Board had bounced; and it began to occur to some people, during this fund-raising year, that Malik might be preparing to get away to Trinidad with the equivalent of a million Trinidad dollars.
“. . . Within found out that threats become Real—like being shot at—Problems with Black and Whites on organisation.” The notes for Requiem for an Illusion are cryptic. But, as in the autobiography, Malik distorts one story by fragmenting it into many scattered stories; and the notes themselves later provide the key. “Relation with outside—myth of immense wealth—How did this come about.” Malik was beginning to feel that in London he was close to danger. And even later, in Trinidad, he was never to lose the fear—perhaps some threat had been made—that his children might be kidnapped.
And there was trouble with the law again. Earlier in the year Malik and seven of his followers had been charged with demanding money with menaces from a London businessman—“a local Jewish businessman,” Malik had written to a Black Muslim in the United States. It was a complicated story about an employment agency, a black American, a job, a ring pledged in lieu of a fee. The sum involved was small, five pounds. But the businessman had been led about the Black House in a dog collar, and the case had attracted attention. Malik, for some reason, had written to the New China News Agency asking them to take an interest in the case; but what had appeared “farcical” became less so when in November Malik and five of his men were committed for trial at the Old Bailey.
Flight to Trinidad was now urgent. But Black Power had provided Malik with a complete system; even at this stage he made it fit. He gave interviews; he went on television; and he spoke now like a Black Panther. He was giving up Black Power, he said; henceforth he was going to devote himself to constructive work. He handed over the management of the Black House to Stanley Abbott, a fellow Trinidadian to whom—in the absence of Steve Yeates in Trinidad—Malik had grown especially close during the past year: Abbott of the pale complexion and the dreamy, bruised eyes, five feet six, neat and powerful, with a straight back and immensely muscular arms. Abbott was now thirty-three, fifteen years away from home, with a life already in ruins, with fresh convictions during the two previous years for possessing marijuana, for theft and for assault. Abbott believed that Nigel Samuel had given £250,000; Abbott believed that Malik was rich, and Abbott was loyal.
All was now set for Malik’s flight to Trinidad. Steve Yeates was there, waiting, a bodyguard. But then Malik, remembering the Black Power revolution that had failed in Trinidad, remembering the Stokely Carmichael tapes he had played and the strikers he had marched with, became anxious about how he might be received. One day, playing records to “mood” him, “for this city is full of ——— and viciousness and I want to feel clean and talk the truth,” he began to write to Eric Williams, the Trinidad Prime Minister. The letter quickly became hysterical, marijuana-hazy, and spread through a long postscript to seventeen pages.
He wrote, as he had so often written, to explain himself. The bewilderment of his early life had turned, with success, to awe at himself; he could put so many patterns on his disordered experience. And now, once again, he spoke of the poverty of his boyhood; of his name de Freitas (“there was so much dirt with him”); of his Notting Hill success (“I ran the most successful string of Gaming house and Whore houses that any Black person ever did in England”); of his great fame (“I know my name is a household word”: the Patricia East PR proposals “to promote the name of Michael X as a household word” had clearly made an impression on him).
As he wrote, his awe at himself grew. He saw himself “living in danger on the real front line,” and from this military metaphor he developed a fantasy about his life in England:
Up here we are walking a tightrope, at the moment its like a suicide mission, you cannot come to our aid Militarily but here we can aid you they cannot Bomb London, Birmingham Liverpool etc. to get us, it must be man to man, we are ready. There are 52,000 English troops in Germany the Reserves are low, the Irish conflict contained enough explosive Power to draw 9,000 out of Germany, and they were ill equipped, I don’t know how much longer we can hold out, A few weeks ago they were talking of Gas Ovens in the English Parliament but our morale is high.
So many personalities during this last year in England, so many voices: the real man had long ago been lost. Yet, promoting himself as a Negro, he everywhere “passed.”
The Black House, after three weeks under Stanley Abbott, ended in chaos, in a general looting. And with that, Malik’s London career was over. Abbott saw Malik the night before Malik left. From a pile of five-pound notes Malik gave Abbott two hundred pounds. “Liquidized” assets: a glimpse of real money. When later, from Trinidad, Malik sent Abbott a letter with the one word “Come,” Abbott would take the next plane out.
3
AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS his London career had ended in flight, and it might have been thought that he was finished. But Malik flourished in Trinidad as a free man for one year.
Trinidad in 1971 was his perfect setting. Trinidad, with its oil economy, was rich, with a standard of living equaled in South America only by Venezuela and Argentina. Every consumer
comfort was at hand, and Malik was soon pleasantly settled in the country town of Arima, in a newish house with a large garden. But Trinidad was far away. In London, Chicago and Toronto, fund-raising centers, Trinidad could pass as an impoverished island where a black leader, fleeing persecution, and also reacting against “the industrialised complex,” might settle down, in a “commune,” to constructive work with despairing blacks, who needed only this leadership, and little gifts of money, to get started in black agriculture, black fruit-growing. And, later, even a little black fishing: a trawler (obtainable through “contractural relationships with . . . Schichting-Werft shipyard, Travemuende”) would cost £18,000, but “initial feasibility studies indicate that the profits . . . would exceed £30,000 a month.” Remote Trinidad held this kind of possibility for its enthralled blacks; all that was needed was the leadership.
And in Trinidad Malik presented himself as a London success. Shortly after he came he sought out Raoul Pantin of the Trinidad Express. “He wanted me to do this interview. I was to prepare both the questions and the answers, and I was to make it sound good. He was hiring a skill. His comment when I resisted this was: ‘How do you think I became famous if I couldn’t find people in England to do this for me?’” Some people were also shown a letter purporting to come from an English lawyer, in which the writer said that Malik couldn’t expect a fair trial in England. Malik was also a friend of the famous. The names weren’t always known in Trinidad and could be mangled—Feliks Topolski becoming Saponski or Topalowski, painter of the Queen, Alex Trocchi becoming Trotsky—and there were people who thought that Malik might only be a name-dropper. But the well-publicized visit in April 1971 of John Lennon as Malik’s houseguest stilled all doubts.
He was successful; he had money; he had style. Rawle Maximin was a partner in the car-hire firm Malik now patronized. Maximin is a big, handsome man, half Indian, half Venezuelan, with no racial anxieties and no interest in the subject. But his business success, perhaps greater than he expected, now makes Maximin wish he were better educated; and he remembers Malik as someone who never made him feel less than a man.
Michael impress me a lot when he come back. He always move in a big way. If they are selling orange juice in that bar there for a dollar a glass and they are selling the same orange juice in that other bar for two dollars, he want the two-dollars one. If you go to the supermarket with him he fulling up two trolleys, one with meat only. You only hearing these slabs of meat dropping in the basket like iron—you know how they freeze and hard. He don’t want all he buy and you know some of it will go rotten. But he want people around to see. Another thing. He never argue your price. And as friendly as we were he would never say, “Lend me that car.” He would say, “How much for that car?” He had his own car but he would hire mine, for the show. He want this crowd around him. “I am the leader.” I liked him very much. He never made me feel less than a man. And he always give. I still have a pair of black socks of his.
Style, and money, were also noted by a black woman, a teacher, who went up to the Malik house in Arima at a time when there was some talk that she might teach the Malik children, who, because of the fear of kidnapping, couldn’t be sent to school.
If you ran out of cigarettes you weren’t offered a pack. You were offered a carton. Soft drinks by the case. Michael talked about the prices he had paid for this and that, and talked about the dogs he was bringing down from London. I was impressed by the decor of the house. You could see money oozing out of everything. You walked into a room, you saw taste. The house was very clean, everything well chosen and put away.
The local Belmont boy, with the common black mother who wore washerwoman’s clothes, had made good. And with his success there had come a change in his manner. Patrick Chokolingo, editor of The Bomb, had met Malik in London in 1965, at the beginning of his fame. “He told me that the white man was a devil. I said to him, ‘But you are living in a white man’s country and you are part white.’ He said, That may be so. But my heart is black. They made it black.’ He did capture me; he did excite me.” Shortly after Malik’s return to Trinidad in January 1971, Chokolingo went to see him at the Chagacabana Hotel.
He was occupying one of the cabanas, and with him was Steve Yeates. I found he was trying to impress me—which I didn’t think that time in London. He was selling me Michael, and his entire demeanor had changed. In the Marble Arch flat in London he had looked a little bit wild, a little bit fanatical, excitable, moving about in fits and jerks. In Trinidad he sat cross-legged in a reclining chair and his voice had changed. It had become very soft and persuasive. This was the first thing that struck me—that I was talking to a completely different person.
The new light voice, the relaxed manner: other people noticed the change as well. Malik was made by words, his and other people’s. He needed a model always, and a clue to his new manner may be provided by the ghosted autobiography of 1968. Malik doesn’t say much about Rachman, the London property racketeer for whom he worked as a strong-arm man. But what he says is oddly admiring. Rachman, in his book, is cool and stylish, almost a Hollywood character, “a good-looking man with a strong face.” He is introduced, Hollywood-fashion, sitting at a desk, surrounded by his Alsatians, and with two bodyguards, one just sitting, one reading a newspaper. “He was very well dressed and groomed and spoke in a quiet voice which I never heard him raise. In short, he exuded quiet charm.” Rachman, in Notting Hill, was in his “manor.” It might be that Malik, in Trinidad, fancied that he was in his.
Chokolingo asked Malik to write for The Bomb, and found that he was “pushing at an open door.” Malik began a series on brothels. “He would not be satisfied, he said, until he had wiped brothels off the face of Trinidad. He did not see how Chinese men could come here and destroy the little girls of Trinidad. He was particularly aiming his barbs at the Korean Chinese who were running brothels in Port of Spain. Two were prosecuted. One hanged himself in his cell.” But then the police came to Chokolingo and told him it was a shakedown: Malik had raised 10,000 Trinidad dollars, £2000, from two brothel operators. Rich Trinidad, demoralized by years of racial politics, and tense after the Black Power upheaval of 1970, offered this kind of possibility. Later, when he had settled in, Malik thought of a £50,000 “foundation,” to be named after his wife; and he prepared a list of local people who might be asked to contribute.
And he didn’t neglect the “agricultural” side. Chokolingo says:
Sometime in ’71 he went up to Toronto and Chicago, and one day I got a call from Michael in Toronto. He said, “Do you remember that worm that was destroying the cabbages of the dirt-farmers on the Highway?” Worm? Cabbages? And then I realized that he had an audience at the other end, and I said, “Oh yes. Yes.” And he said, “Well I’ve got the people at the University of”—I can’t remember—”who are prepared to investigate this, and I would like you to put some of those worms in a bottle and mail it to me at this address.” The next time it was from Chicago. That time I was a little wiser. “That project we were discussing about those farmers and their arid lands on the east coast—I’ve got some people who are prepared to move the silt from the Orinoco basin and deposit it in this area. So you can pass the message on to the farmers.” Shortly after he came back he started to splurge. He bought a Humber Super Snipe and a jeep.
And in Trinidad the “commune” grew. No agricultural commune grew so fast; on no kibbutz did fruit trees mature so swiftly. Within months, from his suburban garden, Malik was reporting to a correspondent in the United States on the expanding commune’s need for “more moving equipment—another tractor, a bulldozer,” claiming at the same time “a [sic] impressive surplus of coconuts, limes, oranges, grapefruit, mangoes, milk, Anthorium [sic] lilies, cow and horse manure.”
He had an option to buy the Arima house at the end of the year—the £1000 he had paid was in effect a year’s rent—but people believed the house was his. One day he told a visitor—the black woman teacher—that he had also
bought the large French-style house at the back and was going to have it redecorated. Ringo Starr was the next Beatle coming down, and that was where he would stay. He looked over a £4000 piece of land in Guanapo, in the hills to the north; he didn’t buy, but he later “incorporated” it into his commune as “extra land acquisition . . . able to absorb from the U.S. initially 60 young men and women on a construction redevelopment program.”
In Carenage, a seaside slum settlement west of Port of Spain, he rented a £35-a-month house from Oswald Chesterfield McDavidson, the black Guyanese entrepreneur involved with things like beauty competitions who was the husband of a Trinidad government minister. This house was “The People’s Store.” Its “trustees” were Steve Yeates and Stanley Abbott and it handled the “produce” of the commune. Letterheads had been printed and copy prepared for a brochure. According to this, the profits of the store were to be handed over each month to a different black cause.
In Arima itself there was a racing stud farm, owned by a Portuguese who was another Belmont boyhood friend, and with whom Malik now struck up a relationship. That was also “incorporated” into the commune: it was the source of the milk and the manure that formed part of the commune’s “impressive surplus.”
The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad Page 5