Oscar Owide
ONE OF the most colourful and ruthless owners of risqué night-clubs and ‘hostess’ bars in post-war Britain, Oscar Owide, has died in his 85th year. A former East End hairdresser, Owide could boast a string of criminal convictions to his name, including an 18-month ‘stretch’ for VAT fraud in 1989 and being struck off as a company director in 2000. Undaunted, Owide simply appointed ‘frontmen’ to run his business for him.
In 2004 he pleaded guilty at Blackfriars Crown Court to four offences under the Company Directors Disqualification Act, and was fined £200,000. Those who thought this would end his career were to be disappointed. Owide continued to control his sex empire until a few weeks before his death. Far from apologetic about its nature, he was proud to be once described as Britain’s biggest pimp.
Oscar Manuel Owide was born in Whitechapel in December 1931, the son of Isidor, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, and his wife May (née Gold), and was brought up in Finsbury Park. On leaving school Owide joined his father’s hairdressing enterprise.
In the 1950s Owide purchased his first night club, Il Grotto, in Ilford. With the profits he moved to London’s West End, acquiring a number of ramshackle buildings in Swallow Street, off Piccadilly, and turning them into restaurants and lap-dancing clubs. He bought homes for himself and his family in St John’s Wood and Marbella. Other purchases included a supermarket, beach bar and a helicopter company in Spain, a fleet of smart limousines, Bentley’s up-market restaurant in London, and the Windmill International, the oldest strip-club in Soho.
The whiff of scandal was never far from Owide and his questionable business ventures. Nicknamed “Shifty Oscar,” he even claimed to have been close to the Krays. Sporting a thin moustache and well-oiled hair, he took extraordinary care to mask his East End yiddisher accent. In 1956 he married Jeanette Costa. He is survived by her, their son Daniel and their daughter Juliette.