I Am Max Lamm Read online

  Raphael Brous was born in Melbourne in 1982. He has studied law and neuroscience at Monash University. He currently plays music in the band Teenage Mothers and is a volunteer campaign director at the animal rights organisation Animal Liberation. He also appears on ABC Radio National with John Safran, debating matters of religion and animal rights. Currently based in Melbourne, Raphael has lived in London and Brooklyn. His recreation consists of skateboarding and obsessively reading.

  I Am Max Lamm

  Raphael Brous

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in Australia by University of Queensland Press, 2011

  First published in the UK by Corsair,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2013

  Copyright © Raphael Brous, 2011

  The right of Raphael Brous to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-597-4 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-613-1 (ebook)

  Typeset by TW Typesetting, Plymouth, Devon

  Printed and bound in the UK

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover photographs: ©Getty; Cover design: ©gray318

  To my grandmothers, Hilda Brous and Olga Brooke

  What shall I testify for you? What shall I compare to you,

  O daughter of Jerusalem . . . For your ruin is as vast as the sea!

  Who can heal you?

  The Book of Eichah

  (Lamentations)

  ONE

  Thursday 7 April, 2005

  Twenty-four hours after Malik Massawi collapsed beneath a bus shelter, his murderer remained unidentified. They said the culprit was a skinhead thug from an Aryan supremacist gang. Or an Islamic extremist, deliberately provoking the riots by attacking a Pakistani teenager who had strayed from the fundamentalist Wahhabi creed. Or most likely (but seldom printed for reasons of newspaper circulation), the murderer was a petty crim, another junkie prowling Camden for enough coins to buy a teaspoonful of crack wrapped in cooking foil. Despite its bipartisan condemnation in the House of Commons, the teenager’s murder was probably a bungled mugging, one of hundreds monthly in the capital.

  No matter the facts, London’s anger spread like a virus. Outrage breached the city’s borders of £14 entrees and Mercedes SUVs parked ten minutes’ walk from the drug dens of Dalston and Hackney’s Murder Mile. The riots broke the capital’s stoicism, cracking the resilience long hardened by the Blitz, the IRA’s bombings, the Brixton riots, Princess Di’s death and the 9/11 attacks.

  Can you believe it? Strangers asked each other on the Tube, the bus, at the hairdresser’s, in the queue at Tesco.

  See the smoke from the burning shops in the East End?

  See the boy’s poor mother crying on the news?

  It’s the skinheads from the BNP that started it . . . It’s the Pakis, they should go back to Currystan . . . It’s the liar Blair and his fucking war . . . It’s the bloody police. They attacked the protesters and made it worse! . . .

  It’s a shame the boy’s dead.

  They were frightened too. Much too dangerous on the night buses, they agreed in beauty salons, supermarket queues, doctors’ waiting rooms, laundrettes. Mothers phoned their teenagers: Where are you? Get home before the curfew! Thousands of wary parents prevented their teenage Mahmouds, Zhangs, Indras, Imrans and Yaakovs from walking the night-time streets where a racist slayer apparently lurked. The fear, the chronic collective nausea, cut especially deep because Max Lamm bludgeoned the Pakistani teenager four months before the Tube suicide bombings of July 2005, four months before a terrorist cell from Leeds finally disintegrated the assumption vital to a city’s calm – the assumption of safety during one’s daily routines – thereby testing London’s nerves just as terror had already shattered the vestige of sanctuary in Madrid, Manhattan, Tel Aviv or Baghdad. Nobody in a metropolis can be unimpeachably safe, yet until the Tube bombings many Londoners assumed otherwise.

  Malik Massawi died of his injuries, the news hit the airwaves and the Bethnal Green riots commenced, stunning the nation’s newspaper editors, pinstriped commentators and superannuated MPs, who had presumed that in the New Europe, this sort of messy, dangerous racial tension was restricted to the North African immigrant quarters of Marseilles or Amsterdam and hadn’t listened to the English working poor telling them otherwise. For months afterwards, at boardroom lunches in the city and dinner parties of Notting Hill, Malik Massawi’s bloody spectre was inescapable. These horrid riots, the diners concurred over their antipasto, revealed that a slimy arcadia of xenophobia, strongly resurgent across the Channel, had propagated like a bacteria at home despite London’s fondness for Brick Lane’s vindaloo.

  Max Lamm’s unintended crime would not be forgotten. Not when the BBC news bulletins commenced with Malik Massawi’s mother Priya, swathed in a black hijab, collapsing into her sister’s arms outside the Central London Morgue moments after identifying her son’s corpse. Not when, following the riot, armed constables patrolled Bethnal Green’s shopping centre to deter nocturnal looters, or when the PM’s press conference attracted nearly as many TV viewers as a World Cup qualifier. Not when hundreds of schoolchildren left half a tonne of flowers beneath the dead teenager’s locker at the South Camden Community School and at the Walthamstow football club where he played goalie for the under 16s. Not when that weekend, most of the priests, reverends, rabbis and imams in London sermonised against the inhuman bigotry that, they presumed, had given the killer a reason to kill and the mobs a reason to destroy. And not when the boy’s Leyton funeral, the Saturday morning thirty-six hours after his death, attracted a procession stretching two kilometres. Four thousand mourners, the newspapers reported, including, photogenically at the head of the throng alongside the victim’s family, the prime minister in a black suit, head bowed, shadowed by fifteen bodyguards.

  Unlike most crimes heinous enough for the front page, this one wouldn’t disappear to exclusively haunt its victims. All Britain, not just her Asian and Middle Eastern communities, mourned Malik Massawi, a son of Pakistani immigrants whom the Associated Press eulogized as a devoted older brother to his sisters Mufasa and Dila, as a passionate Tottenham Hotspur fan and talented goalkeeper who, his father admitted, mixed with a bad crowd on their council estate, smoked pot and often skipped school, but would surely have blossomed through adolescence. The night that he never woke up, Malik Massawi was fifteen years old; who could deny that this underachieving student might have outgrown his adolescent rebelliousness and ultimately made it to university or even the professional football pitch? The memorials to this wayward teenager with arresting hazel eyes, a mop of black curls and an easy gap-toothed smile occupied more newsprint than the obituaries for many distinguished statesmen, scientists and writers.

  But in the weeks following the riots, nobody writing the op-eds – not human rights lawyers hawking their positivist pluralism in the Guardian, nor thinktank wonks spruiking al-Qaedaphobia in the Daily Telegraph, nor even the mayor pleading for communal calm – nobody really knew what happened that fatal night in Camden.

  The statement of multifaith conciliation co-authored by the Archbish
op of Canterbury, the Chief Imam of Great Britain and the Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, published in the London papers the Sunday following the riot, was, of course, intriguing to the culprit. Flattering, the way John Hinckley Jr felt flattered after he shot President Reagan and Jodie Foster appeared on TV to discuss her nutcase stalker-assassin. But in their public statements, all the bishops, rabbis, imams, these lauded, learned, bearded men, were wrong! Wrong about the ‘deliberate racist attack against an innocent boy of Pakistani heritage’. Wrong, so damn wrong that Max Lamm, in his oily subterranean hideout, couldn’t help protesting aloud.

  ‘You presumptuous fuckers! It was an accident!’

  In a hole at 9.07 p.m., yelling at the newspaper, risking revealing himself to police if they were, at that moment, inspecting Hyde Park’s most neglected grove.

  For a day since accidentally killing the Pakistani teenager whose eulogies dominated the front pages of London’s tabloids and broadsheets alike, Lamm had been hiding hungrily, filthily, in the capital’s closest approximation to Dante’s inferno. His purgatory – smeared in sausage fat, charcoal dust, petrified kebab skewers – was the maintenance hole beneath a barbeque in Hyde Park. A gas barbeque set into a rectangular counter of limestone, built thirty years before a nearby McDonald’s reduced its use to once or twice a year. Underneath was the gap, long and deep enough for a vagrant to lie flat, between gas pipes and a sooty brick floor.

  Some homeless bum had already slept down there, leaving a legacy of mouldy napkins, six-month-old newspapers, soured milk cartons, a crack pipe fashioned from kitchen foil, three disintegrating socks and a condom creased with dried semen. Lamm removed the trash upon discovering the hideout at 5.23 a.m. (the time he sharply recalled, the way his luminous watch blurred in the Hyde Park fog).

  TWO

  A murder. Reported in the London newspapers as the unwitnessed bashing of a fifteen-year-old Pakistani boy, beneath a bus shelter at Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, at approximately 4.18 a.m. on Thursday 7 April, 2005. The victim, Malik Massawi of Chalk Farm Estate, was a ninth-form student at the South Camden Community School on Charrington Street, Camden. A secondary college, among North London’s most disadvantaged, where English is the second language learnt by almost eighty per cent of its students. Malik Massawi’s corpse hadn’t hit the autopsy slab before he made the BBC news bulletin at 10 a.m. Five hours later, the riots. In the Muslim quarter of Bethnal Green, about three hundred residents – Pakistani, Bangladeshi, a few dozen Afghanis – gathered outside their local MP’s office to condemn the apparently racist murder. The rally was hastily organized by five Pakistani teenagers, including three of the victim’s cousins. They carried spraypainted placards proclaiming in English, Urdu and Pashto: Stop Hate Crimes Now! or Justice for Malik Massawi! By the morning’s end, hundreds of thousands of British Muslims knew about the rally through text messages, emails or news reports, and from 2 p.m. until 6 the crowd swelled to almost eight hundred people.

  By three o’clock, the Metropolitan Police had cordoned off the pavement for TV crews. At four o’clock sharp, a contingent of forty-seven skinheads, many representing the British National Party; marched in to commence their counter-protest. Mostly they were pale twentysomething men wearing steel-capped boots, polo shirts buttoned to the neck, bomber jackets, crew-cuts. Their jackets bore the insignia of Combat 18, an openly neo-Nazi paramilitary organization founded as stewards for volatile BNP rallies. The outlines of iron bars were discernible beneath some of the men’s shirts.

  The skinheads unfurled banners advocating a moratorium on immigration, chanting in a baritone that would have prickled goosebumps at the Nuremberg rallies. ‘Asia for Asians, Britain for Brits’ these heavyset men bellowed unwaveringly. ‘Keep up the fight, keep Britain white!’ Amid the volley of rocks, bottles, drink cans and abuse in six subcontinental languages, thirty police separated the BNP gang from eight hundred furious Muslims and Hindus. The TV crews jostled for a clear view, however long the photogenic brawl would take to break out. Twenty minutes later, another chorus joined the cacophony: seventeen protestors from the Socialist Worker’s club at University College (their entire membership save for two who were tutoring in the philosophy department that afternoon). With some carrying bookbags, the students unfurled a faded, tattered banner proclaiming Nazi Punks Fuck Off painted above a swastika bisected by a red line.

  Had this rally occurred at night, the horde of flashing cameras would have outshone the streetlights. The photographers were especially fond of a nine-year-old Pakistani girl wearing a blue hijab, white stockings and a floral smock to her ankles. She stood at the police line, staring imploringly into a thug’s lantern-jawed face and screaming in high-pitched Urdu. Nearby, a few skinheads talked into mobile phones, telling their wives or bosses that they were ill and off the job this afternoon.

  Finally, the show commenced. Someone pitched two glass bottles at the police, striking a constable in the chest, and the violence erupted during a baton charge by officers who had never faced such a volatile throng outside a football pitch. The police line breached, a hundred Pakistani and Afghani men charged at their xenophobic provocateurs. A gang of local hoodlums joined in the fun, yelling numerous permutations of fucking Paki terrorists at the conspicuously devout protestors in beards or burqas.

  Within a minute, anything at hand was a weapon: placards, umbrellas, rocks, glass bottles, drink cans, rubbish bins, steel poles pilfered from the flimsy barricade. Dozens of windows smashed, three police cars pelted with stones, a BBC news van damaged beyond repair and two picket fences torn apart to yield makeshift batons, as sixty police, armed with truncheons, tasers and pepper spray, couldn’t contain the violence.

  Fifteen minutes later, five police vans were stuck at the intersection of Patriot Square, four blocks from the riot’s epicentre, as a thousand locals – chanting in Arabic, Urdu, Pashto, Farsi and English – took to the streets. At the head of the rally, the dead boy’s cousins led the thunderous chorus . . . Racist Murder! Racist Blair! Racist Murder! Racist Blair! The skinheads, and the local hoodlums who had tripled in number, replied with their fists, boots and palings broken from the picket fence. But amongst the many, many images of the riots headlining the news bulletins that night, the most talked-about footage worldwide – appearing on every major TV network from San Francisco to Sydney to Santiago – wasn’t the Bangladeshi children staring gape-mouthed at their fathers battering a police car with steel poles, nor an elderly Irish shopkeeper, his off-licence looted, defiantly scolding three white teenage thieves like the lone activist confronting a tank in Tiananmen Square. No, the most-broadcast footage of the 2005 East End riot featured an ITV reporter – wearing an absurdly nice Saville Row suit, wielding his microphone like a dapper Robert Capa at the D-Day landings – getting knocked out cold by a flying milk bottle as he solemnly intoned ‘Who would have thought this could happen in Londo—’

  At his press conference, the mayor condemned London’s worst race riot since the Brixton uprising of April 1981. Nine policemen and twenty-three protestors were hospitalized, including a Bangladeshi engineering student bashed into a coma and a British-Iranian teenager critically injured by a brick thrown at his head. A Scottish bystander suffered spinal injuries from being trampled beneath a barricade; her physicians suspected that paraplegia would result. Dozens of storefronts were smashed, with three electrical retailers, a Nike outlet, an off-licence and a mobile phone dealership looted amid the chaos.

  That night in Tower Hamlets, three Pakistani shops were firebombed by vigilantes who scrawled racist graffiti on the walls. A Bangladeshi social club was burnt down; on the front pages, its smoking ruins appeared like the charred exoskeleton of a monstrous alloy spider. Near Brick Lane, five turbaned Sikh teenagers were attacked by a mob of white youths. For the next forty-eight hours, police patrolled the East End from horseback and riot vans, enforcing the curfew from dusk. The damage bill exceeded £20 million and the glass-strewn streets, littered by torn cardboard packa
ging from looted stereos and TVs, attracted journalists in hordes unrivalled in London until the Tube bombings four months later.

  For the remainder of that week at the Finsbury Park mosque, afternoon prayers overflowed not only through piety, but because hundreds of young men (and a few undercover police and investigative journalists) crammed in for the sermon by Abu Hamza al-Masri, known in the tabloids as ‘The Hook’. Hamza the Egyptian-born imam who disfigured his face and lost both forearms in an explosion in Afghanistan, who delighted in looking monstrous with a milky shattered eye and two steel hooks for hands. At his pulpit, Hamza accused the prime minister of ordering the murder of a Muslim teenager in order to provoke the riot, demonize British-Muslims and win support for the unpopular alliance with Washington. Captivatingly employing the Arabic-English vernacular of the immigrant street, the handless preacher repeated his notorious sermon that was burnt onto CDs, sold at mosques from London to Leeds, and reprinted in the February 2008 issue of Vanity Fair.

  ‘My dear brothers, if you can go, then go! If you can’t go, sponsor! If you can’t sponsor, speak! If you can’t do all of this, do all of that! If you can send your children, send them! You must have a stand – with your heart, with your tongue, with your money, with your hand, with your sword, with your Kalashnikov! . . . Just do it! If it is killing, do it! If it is paying, pay! If it is ambushing, ambush! If it is poisoning, poison! You help your brothers. You help Islam any way you like, anywhere you like! They are all kuffar, and can all be killed! Killing a kuffar who is fighting you is okay! Killing a kuffar for any reason, you can say it is okay! Even if there is no reason for it!’

  And not just Abu Hamza’s infamous sermon, spoken to his audience of jobless, visaless, passportless young men who were fed at the Finsbury Park mosque, who slept at the mosque, who fled the scorched dirt of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan to discover that Britain wasn’t a bucolic pasture of full employment, but a cold concrete maze of CCTV cameras where, with a glance, the stranger in the street convicts you. No, the triggers were everywhere. The morning of the East End riot, the BBC broadcast the notorious surveillance footage that, like four white cops bashing Rodney King outside an LA truckstop, or OJ fleeing from the choppers in his Ford Bronco, or two thirteen-year-olds at a Liverpool supermarket coaxing the toddler Jamie Bulger to his death, came to encapsulate a famously reprehensible crime. The video showed a young white man, his face obscured beneath a woollen cap, fleeing through Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, while a block away the fifteen-year-old Pakistani boy bled to death beneath a bus shelter. This image was reproduced on the Sun’s front page, next to Malik Massawi’s most recent school portrait and a photograph of the riot in full bloody bloom. In huge red letters, the headline: