Gamblers, gangsters and glamorous women are the backdrop to Doped – the gripping and fast moving true story of Bill Roper, bookmarker and gambler, and Micheline Lugeon, his beautiful Swiss mistress. Micheline came to London in 1955 to work as an au pair at Bill’s marital home. She dreamed of becoming a beautician like Helena Rubinstein. Roper, whose nickname was ‘Mr Racing’ and who laid bets to all the high rollers, became her lover. He set her up in business with a shop in Beuchamp Place in Knightsbridge, bought her a sealskin fur coat and took her to the best restaurants and nightclubs. Bill, trying to juggle family life with a luxurious Kensington apartment, had to finance his lifestyle by doping racehorses, including a Derby favourite, and betting against them on the track. His supplier Edward Teddy Smith, alias ‘The Witch Doctor’, boasted that he had enough drugs in his Surbiton flat to stop a thousand horses.
Over a three year period Roper’s gang, who had their London headquarters in Rachman’s Notting Hill, made several million pounds in modern money but assorted racketeers and strong arm men began demanding a share of the spoils. Fearful for his own and Micheline’s safety Bill started doping steeplechasers instead, employing his lover as a spy. When the gang breached Fairlawne, the stable of the Queen Mother’s trainer Major Peter Cazalet, the Jockey Club, racing’s aristocratic rulers, finally woke up to the scale of the threat and called in Scotland Yard. The Flying Squad embarked on a hunt for ‘the biggest doping gang in history’ and with both the police and the gangsters on their trail, Roper and Lugeon had to resort to ever more desperate measures to survive.
Hardback.