Roskov book 8, p.20
Roskov, Book 8, page 20
‘When I found out about it … I met with the judge and confronted him, but he didn’t care and he ended up getting fired, the local black man released, and we fought for compensation for him.
‘We have another case now where the legal team thinks that a white British police officer murdered his pregnant wife and stitched up a black man, and my team is looking hard at it.
‘So far we’ve spent more than a million dollars of taxpayers’ money, money sent to my charity, and the charity fund has about ten million dollars available for legal work.’
‘Are the police in Britain racist?’
‘Yes, institutionally racist. I think they’re better than some of the police here, but they’re still racist to some degree, and we find many cases of injustice against black men and youth.
‘But they’re also sexist and against gay rights, in a big way. I’ll give you an example: gay rape. In Britain there’s no such thing as gay rape, same here I believe.
‘So if a big strong gay man knocks down a skinny young gay man and has his way … the police in Britain don’t care and won’t investigate.
‘If a big strong lesbian woman beat a skinny teenage girl and penetrated her with an object or finger … the police don’t care – that would not result in someone going to prison.’
‘It’s a serious crime,’ she insisted. ‘But the dumb cops here wouldn’t care either.’
‘In Sweden they took my advice and created a gay rape law, but what’s needed is a revision of the rape law, to say that Citizen A penetrates Citizen B against their will in a sexual way. Just that.
‘And then a gay man could be prosecuted, a lesbian could be prosecuted, and I hope that … someday … we have a view that all citizens are the same, judged above the chin as I keep saying, and not judged on sex or race or age.’
They applauded loudly.
‘Judged above the chin,’ she repeated. ‘I like it, but the dumb cops and courts in this country still think it’s 1850.’
‘In Britain as well, and up until the 1970s the British police rarely prosecuted rape cases, it was public pressure that caused the change.
‘The law of rape has not changed in two hundred years, here or in any country, just that our police can’t be bothered to do what’s written down as law set by our Parliament.
‘We don’t really need a new law or a change to the law, we just need a few police officers that can actually read. But the lack of interpretation is diverse, and it helps women in Britain.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘If I walk up to a girl in a bar and grope her, I go to prison and get placed on the Sex Offenders Register. If a girl walks up to a man and grabs his pecker, no law is broken – simply because she’s a woman.
‘In Britain, women are often sentenced to a third of the time in prison that a man would receive, so a woman that stabs a man gets a year in prison, a man that stabs a woman probably gets five years.
‘So it’s skewed based on public opinion and how the police react to public opinion, and what’s written down in black and white is clear yet open to interpretation by the police.
‘But if a woman groped an off duty police officer or a judge … she would be prosecuted as the law states. One rule for them, a different rule for ordinary people.
‘And I have a hard time wanting to work with women’s right groups in Britain, because they say that they want equal rights but they don’t. They enjoy more rights from the police because they’re seen as the weaker sex, but equal means equal, in all things.
‘Ask a woman in Britain if a lady should be prosecuted for groping a man and the answer is always no. Ask them if a man should be prosecuted and the answer is always yes.
‘As long as that attitude prevails … there’s no real equality, and no woman in Britain is going to stand up in court and say: please, your honour, sentence me as you would a man, five years not one year in prison.
‘I have upset many of the women’s rights groups in Britain because I want equality, pure equality, no exceptions, yet the women’s rights groups there want more than just equal rights, they want to keep the prison sentencing practises.’
‘Well how can they call that equal?’ she challenged. ‘If I get punched by a woman I want her prosecuted.’
‘In Britain the police would rarely bother to prosecute a woman, and then it would just be a fine,’ I told her.
‘I had a woman break into my home and come at me with a knife, and I wanted the bitch to get ten years.’
‘Here maybe, but not in Britain, she’d get a ten week suspended sentence and some community service – sweeping the streets. A man attacking you with a knife in your own home … he’d get six years or more in prison, simply because he has a dick.
‘But how the hell do we move forwards into a modern society if the sentencing rules are based on having a dick or not?’
‘Gay rape should be the same as regular rape,’ she suggested. ‘I had a big butch girl force me down when I was fifteen and finger me, and that’s rape, just that the local cops laughed and asked for the video.’
‘In Britain that’s not even a crime. I mean, it is as far as the law written down goes, just that it’s not a crime in the eyes of the police. And the problem is that laws are influenced by TV, public pressure, campaigns, and not set by the government, and they should all be set by the government.’
‘Hell yes, and here in the States we have all the right-wing kooks wanting to ban abortion, mostly men, yet they walk on by a homeless person dying in the streets.
‘They claim to value life, which is just horse shit, they don’t care about drug addicts or the homeless here dying in the streets.’
The audience applauded.
I began, ‘Phoney Christianity is common here, the man that sings loud in church and hates blacks and poor people at the same time. That always confuses me, a hateful Christian – it’s a contradiction in terms.’
‘We have a shit load of hateful Christians here, trust me. The hang ‘em high judges and lynch mob are all devout Christians, so they claim. You’re not religious?’
‘No, not at all, and I see all people as people, not black or white or gay or straight, they’re all citizens and taxpayers – judged above the chin.’
The audience applauded.
‘So the plane crash didn’t turn you to God?’
‘No, nor the miracle baby. I had helped my fellow man as a kid, and I’ll do the same as an adult, nothing to do with religion.’
‘What was going through your mind during the escape from the burning plane?’
‘I wanted to get people off the plane, I was desperate to get them off, and … in my dreams I’m frustrated, beaten back by the flames.
‘And finding the baby was a bonus, and she was sat right under the nose of the plane. If that plane had skidded ten yards more the baby would have been killed, and I found her a matter of seconds before the smoke would have choked her, the fire ten seconds behind.
‘But saving her was what got me back on track and feeling OK about myself, she was something to feel good about when I couldn’t get more passengers off.’
‘And she would only quieten down for you?’
‘At first, yes, but she had been mistreated at home, she just needed to warm up to people. When she was crying I held her and she stopped crying -’
‘So would I.’
The audience laughed.
‘- and she slept when I placed her on my bare chest.’
‘So would I,’ she repeated, the audience laughing.
‘Tell me something, from a woman’s point of view. When I complain that the twins come in drunk and fall asleep – so that I have to undress them and put them to bed, they say that they were not flopping on the bed because they were drunk, but because they were tired.’
The audience laughed.
‘Sounds fair,’ she agreed. ‘If we drink we get tired, but that doesn’t mean that we’re drunk.’
‘But … it’s the excess alcohol that makes a woman tired.’
‘Cause and effect. A lady is tired, not drunk,’ she insisted, the audience laughing. ‘She’s drunk if she’s up on the table naked.’
‘Ah, so that’s the definition,’ I mocked.
‘Do you get drunk?’
‘No, just tired.’
They laughed.
‘Are you still in pain?’
‘A few twinges now and then, and I avoid the gym at the moment, but I swim and walk, and that helps.’
‘It helps to have your own luxury hotel, yeah,’ she quipped, the audience laughing.
‘Will you visit?’ I asked her.
‘Can I afford it?’ she challenged.
‘We’ll offer you a great rate next spring, you can ride a horse naked.’
‘That I would do, yes. And you’re building another hotel?’
‘Next door, a valley full of luxury villas, apartments at the bottom of the valley, a lido, promenade, a good quality restaurant. The existing hotel is fully booked, so I wanted more rooms and villas, not to turn people away.
‘But we have a winter crowd lined up, writers and scientists, people that want a month locked away with a typewriter in mild weather.
‘And soon we’ll start on a giant nursing home in Corsica, each room with a sea view, the first nursing home just started in my home town, the first of many I hope.
‘The investors are involved to make money, but I want to show to the British Government the cost savings, so that they then make these nursing homes for poor people.
‘We do have a great many nursing homes, but they’re dreary places. I’d rather be dead than in a nursing home,’ I told her.
‘God, yes, awful places, even the good ones here. Florida is better, swimming and sunshine.’
‘I aim to prove the cost savings and then build many nursing homes, which I’d sell to the government afterwards, not hang onto them.
‘But I read an odd fact about New York … in a magazine at an airport a year ago, in that the average person living in an apartment block for three years … on average makes no new friends in the block.’
‘That I can believe, yeah, we don’t talk to each other but we sometimes bang on the wall. In my building I met a man that works at a studio, so we had a common interest, but apart from that I just know the supervisor.’
‘My parents used to talk to all their neighbours in the street, borrow food, look after each other when sick. Looks like our modern lifestyle is making us unsociable compared to small town life.’
‘Hell yes, we’re the grumpy generation, doing our own thing. And if you’re gay or lesbian you move away quickly and get an apartment away from people you know, so that doesn’t help with the socialising.
‘What did I read about your soft prison?’
I began, ‘I’m out to help people, and that includes the law abiding citizens, and in Britain we have a situation where we have a lot more criminals than we have prison places.
‘The judges are under orders not to send the minor-crime repeat offenders to prison, so you may have a drug addict breaking into a hundred homes before he faces some jail time, and the cost to society is huge – a great many homes trashed.
‘I’m building a soft prison, and the British Prime Minister has agreed to look at more of them, especially privately run soft prisons, for short stay offenders.
‘So if someone is caught breaking into a house and he’s trashed it, he might get seven days or thirty days in a cell - he would get some time behind bars at least, because at the moment he would get a suspended sentence and some community service picking up litter.’
‘So Britain is soft on criminals?’
‘We closed a few prisons that were falling down and … we failed to spend money on more of them, so cells that were designed for just the one prisoner often now have two or three men in them.
‘And our judges are told not to send people to prison. If you were visiting Britain, and a man walked up and broke your nose, he’s not going to prison.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘Shit, I’d want him hung, or shot.’
‘Don’t visit Britain, the prisons are full, the criminals walking free. And now we see rapists sentenced to seven years released after two.’
‘Two years for rape,’ she sighed out, shaking her head. ‘What a joke.’
‘It’s something that the women of Britain have to suffer at the moment. But when I’ve built more soft prisons it will take pressure off the existing prisons; a prisoner about to be released can stay in a soft prison.
‘But I’m also interested in rehab, and I’m creating a menial labour factory, for the repeat offenders and drug addicts to earn some money, free meals. It will get them off the streets.’
‘Why do you have to do that … and not the fricking government!’
‘I’m leading by example, showing what can be done and what it costs, then – hopefully – the government can copy me after some public shaming.’
She shook her head. ‘You’re doing the work that the damn politicians and the government should be doing, and people like me campaign about things all the time, so just what the hell are our elected officials doing all day!’
The audience applauded.
I told her, ‘They’re enjoying good salaries and great pensions – at our expense. But I am changing things in a good way, leading by example.’
‘And now involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland…’
‘Yes, and persuading companies that I know to invest there, and some of the re-development projects could make a good profit, a waterfront development in Londonderry for example.
‘My experts tell me that a condo built there could double in value in five years, so the people investing are not afraid to spend the money.
‘And if there’s peace in Northern Ireland … then the new Belfast Docks apartments would appreciate in value nicely for an investor because at the moment land and buildings are cheap, so they start from a low base.’
‘And the chances of peace?’
‘It comes down to jobs, and I’m doing a good job of attracting interest there, shipping repair companies and shipping lines all interested. At the moment the British Government and the European Union offer subsidies, so a company moving there can’t go wrong.’
‘Ricky Roskov, thanks for coming on.’
The female audience applauded me loudly.
I stood. ‘I’ll go wash my hands, eh,’ I said as we shook.
My host laughed, the audience laughing.
An empire to run
Back at the hotel I found the girls out, as expected, Bill and Ted with them, so it gave me time to sit and think. And after five minutes I called Ross Daniels.
He arrived with three men in smart suits half an hour later, tables moved together, a trolley of goodies from the hotel ordered, lunch ordered, jackets taken off.
I signed a document to say that I was deferring inheritance for a year, a second document to accept legal assistance and advice, a third to accept stock market investment advice on the estate’s investments.
Tea sipped, and Ross began, ‘Our team in Londonderry were surprised, in that the area has great potential. Apparently it’s very picturesque and has a modest tourist trade, people from the south as well as from Belfast.
‘There’s an ornate old building, was a docks authority building, and I suggest that we buy it under license – it’s a listed building - and renovate the inside, the outside façade left as it is, a tourist shop, a coffee shop, and offices upstairs for rent by local companies.’
‘Sounds great, do it,’ I commended.
‘There’s also an old hotel in need of work, and we could renovate it for the summer tourist trade, twenty rooms at most. Perhaps to decorate them in a dated Irish style.’
‘Yes, keep it authentic.’
‘There’s also the planned development of the sailing industry, tourism from sailboats docking, and that would mean a few pontoons strong enough to survive a winter storm, electric cables for boats, a yacht support centre.’
‘Yes, all good ideas. What about a pier or pontoon?’
‘The council is considering that, if they have the money, a floating pontoon that rises with the tide.’
‘How much to build it?’
‘Less than half a million dollars.’
‘Do it, yes, grant them the money. I’ll get sailors interested.’
He glanced at his notes. ‘There are some falling down properties immediately behind the planned development area…’
‘Could they be bought and fixed?’ I asked.
‘Yes, and made to look authentic, many are like cottages – with low doors and ceilings.’
‘When renovated, old people will love them, so do as you see fit there, we don’t want an eyesore seen from the new apartments.’
‘And in Belfast?’
I heaved a sigh and glanced out the window. ‘I’m not sure that a squeeze on house prices helps them, not now, and … those renovated houses may sit empty for years.
‘Apartments can be used by young people, young couples starting out, a house needs a family … and those families all have houses at the moment – the population is shrinking not growing.’
A new guy began, ‘What if house prices in the Protestant areas were squeezed, money made, families moving to the mainland.’
I smiled at him. ‘Sneaky shit. I like you.’ They laughed. ‘And yes, if some of the Protestants fucked off … a good thing yet … less money spent by the high earners. We need an analysis done.’
Ross cut in, ‘We’ll get one done, on the effects of price increases in Protestant areas. But it would give them a feel-good factor in the short term whilst peace talks take place…’
I considered that. ‘Buy a few properties that need work, renovate them, observe the effect on local prices and – most of all - local attitudes to outside ownership.’
Ross added, ‘We can go ahead and open a paint factory in Derry, it’s in progress.’
