Lost At Sea Part 57

"How is Jonathan doing?" I ask.

"Great," says Andy. "He seems really cheerful. Talking ten to a dozen."

"Really?" I ask.

"He's wearing pink pajamas as a silent protest," Andy tells me. "He says it's aesthetically reminiscent of the way gays were treated under the n.a.z.is."

On November 20, things take a turn for the better for Jonathan. He is acquitted of b.u.g.g.e.ry and indecent a.s.sault in the second trial-the witness admits on the stand that he was sixteen and not fifteen. The Crown Prosecution Service announces that same day that it won't proceed with any more trials-this includes the allegations from boys who said Jonathan King had picked them up at the Walton Hop.

The next morning, Jonathan is sentenced to seven years. Judge Paget says that the case is a tragedy. This otherwise honorable man, he says, this successful celebrity, used and abused his fame and success to attract impressionable teenagers. But there was no violence, no threats used.

Jonathan smiles and nods as he is sentenced. One journalist says that he looks smug; another says that he looks pale and beaten. His name is placed indefinitely on the s.e.x offenders' list. The police say he may have abused hundreds of boys over the past thirty years.

POSTSCRIPT

Jonathan King wrote to me throughout his prison sentence, and sent me Christmas cards, etc. I wasn't the only one. The Observer's Lynn Barber published a brilliant article about their pen-pal friendship. Her husband, David Cardiff (who was my teacher at college), was dying, and Jonathan had proved to be a "wonderful confidant," she wrote. She visited him at Maidstone prison and reported that he was walking around wearing a T-shirt that read "I'm a celebrity-get me out of here!"

"The very qualities-the relentless cheeriness, b.u.mptiousness and optimism-which made him seem quite irritating on the outside seem absolutely heroic in prison," she wrote.

Just before Christmas 2001, a few weeks after the Guardian published my story about the case, I received a telephone call from the former Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning. Back in the seventies, Denning and Jonathan were best friends and business partners. Denning had, days earlier, been released from a three-year jail sentence in Prague for child-s.e.x offenses. The night before his deportation from the Czech Republic, I met him at a down-at-the-heels hotel off Wenceslas Square. He wouldn't say which country he was going to. (It turned out to be Austria.) He faced a number of similar offenses in Britain, and he told me he'd be arrested if he ever returned here.

He turned up with a boy. He introduced him as one of the boys he'd just been in prison for, and he said he brought him along to prove they were still friends. The boy had the flu, and throughout the interview he sat on the bed, sniffing, and looking bored and ill.

I asked Chris Denning if Jonathan King had learned how to pick up boys from him.

"That's possible," he said. "He did steal some of the things I did."

"Like what?" I asked.

"I would make funny remarks," he said. "I'd be walking down the street with a couple of my younger friends and I'd say something absolutely absurd to a pa.s.serby. I remember one joke I had. I'd say to a pa.s.serby, 'Excuse me, do you know where so-and-so street is?' And they'd say, 'No. I'm sorry, I don't.' And I'd say, 'Oh, I can help you! It's just down there on the left ... !' And for young people-for somebody like me to make a joke like that-it was hilarious."

Chris Denning-despite his various jail sentences and the fact that he'd been sleeping rough in a Prague cemetery for the past week, on and off-still had the looks and voice and demeanor of an old-style Radio 1 DJ.

"But Jonathan's humor always had a streak of cruelty," Denning added, "and I've always tried not to do that. I hate that kind of thing. Once, I was going along in his car to Brighton. He'd invited a couple of young people I knew. He'd said, 'Why don't you bring them along for the trip?' He had a chauffeur. He said, 'James! To Brighton!' I was sitting in the Rolls-Royce with my shoes half off and he grabbed them and chucked them out of the window. I said to the chauffeur, 'James. Can you please stop? I want to get my shoes.' Jonathan said to him, 'If you stop, you're fired. Drive on.'"

"What did the boys in the car think of it?" I asked.

"I don't think they liked it," he said. "It was funny, you see, but it was cruel."

Chris Denning asked me if I wanted to know the worst thing about being attracted to underage boys.

"Sadly," he said, "they grow up. They disappear. The person you were attracted to has gone. He doesn't exist anymore. You can never have a lasting relationship with them. It's very sad."

In August 2005, Chris Denning returned to London from Austria. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport and in February 2006 was convicted of child-s.e.x offenses dating back to the seventies and eighties. He was sentenced to four years in prison. That same week, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Jon,

I was abused by King's mate Chris Denning who, as you know, has just been banged up. I recently sent this e-mail to King. You may find it amusing.

Dear Jonathan, I see your old mate Chris Denning has been given another serve of porridge. Hardly seems fair that he only got four years and you got seven, but then again you are an extremely repulsive and smarmy c.u.n.t and one can't really blame the judge for wanting to shaft you.

You are no doubt aware that your ex employer the Sun has published a piece linking you to Denning as members of a "paedophile ring." May I make a suggestion Jonathan, this could be a blessing in disguise, an opportunity to restore your tattered reputation. Why don't you sue the Sun Jonathan? How dare they link you to that vile pervert Denning! After all you are a wronged man, a "victim" of your own celebrity. A modern day Oscar Wilde. And after all it's not your fault that twelve year old boys are so d.a.m.n s.e.xy, and of course they all wanted it, why wouldn't an adolescent boy want to be pawed and f.u.c.ked up the a.r.s.e by a slavering, fat, ugly pig like your good self. I expect they were beating down your door Jonathan, how unfair that you should be persecuted for providing these boys with a "service." Such a cruel world.

My dear sweet Jonathan I am not sure what lies beyond the great divide, I try to live a good life and I hope to die with honor. I am however sure of one thing. That is this. When you die you will be met by them and welcomed, the suicides, and the ones who chose to die slowly by bottle and by needle. And they shall take you in their arms dear Jonathan, and embrace you for all eternity.

Your friend,

Simon

PART FIVE

JUSTICE

"Look at your face. You look like a slave."

-From "Amber Waves of Green"

Amber Waves of Green

As I drive along the Pacific Coast Highway into Malibu, I catch glimpses of cliff-top mansions discreetly obscured from the road, which is littered with abandoned gas stations and run-down mini-marts. The office building I pull into is quite drab and utilitarian. There are no ornaments on the conference-room shelves-just a bottle of hand sanitizer. An elderly, broad-shouldered man greets me. He's wearing jogging pants. They don't look expensive. His name is B. Wayne Hughes.

You almost definitely won't have heard of him. He never gives interviews. He only agreed to this one because-as his people explained to me-income disparity is a hugely important topic for him. They didn't explain how it was important, so I a.s.sumed he thought it was bad.

I approached Wayne, as he's known, for wholly mathematical reasons. The same goes for everyone I meet for this story. I've worked out that there are six degrees of economic separation between a dishwasher making less than $8 an hour and a Forbes billionaire, if you multiply each person's income by five. So I decided to journey across America to meet one of each multiple, to try to understand their financial lives and the vast chasms that separate them. Everyone in this story, then, makes roughly five times more than the last person makes. There's a minimum-wage guy in Miami with an unbelievably stressful life, some nice middle-cla.s.s Iowans with quite terrible lives, me with a perfectly fine if frequently anxiety-inducing life, a millionaire with an annoyingly happy life, a multimillionaire with a stunningly amazing life, and then, finally, at the summit, this great American eagle, Wayne, who tells me he's "p.i.s.sed off" right now.

"I live my life paying my taxes and taking care of my responsibilities and I'm a little surprised to find out that I'm an enemy of the state at this time in my life," he says. He has a big, booming voice like an old-school billionaire, not one of those nerdy new billionaires.

"Has anyone said that to your face?" I ask him.

"n.o.body has to say it," says Wayne. "Just watch what they're doing."

"You mean the Occupy Wall Street crowd?"

"Those guys are a bunch of jerks," Wayne mutters, giving a dismissive wave that says, "They're just a sideshow." "Politically I'm on the enemy list. And I'm not so naive not to recognize it. I've lived my whole life doing what I thought was right and now I'm an enemy of the state."

Is he, though? It's true that income inequality is a big campaign issue. Obama in a recent speech: "What drags down our entire economy is when there's an ultra-wide chasm between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else." Whereas Romney called Obama's attacks on the super-rich, "the bitter politics of envy. I believe in a merit nation, an opportunity nation where people by virtue of their education, their hard work and risk taking and their dreams-maybe a little luck-could achieve great things."

The reality, though, is rarely are enemies of the state treated so incredibly well. Their tax rate is at a seventy-year low. In the 1950s and 1960s, the top tax bracket paid more than 80 percent. It was 70 percent when Reagan took office, 39 percent under Clinton, and now, under Obama, it's 35 percent. But the very, very rich don't pay even that. By utilizing a variety of loopholes, like awarding themselves dividends instead of income, the four hundred richest Americans pay, on average, 18 percent tax.

Wayne won't reveal exactly what he pays now that he's at the top, but he's happy to tell me he began at the bottom. "Have you read The Grapes of Wrath?" he says. "That was my family. My dad was a sharecropper in western Oklahoma. When the dust storms came and everything got wiped out, they came to California. The guys with the mattresses on the top of their cars in the movie? That was the way it was."