Warwick Spinks

Warwick Spinks, a Londoner who had run a mail-order pornography business from Brighton, managed the Gay Palace at 44 Spuistraat in Amsterdam in the late 1980s, across the road from Boys Club 21, run by the Welsh paedophile Alan Williams. Both clubs offered adult male prostitutes legally. Spinks also trafficked boys as young as ten into the city's sex industry, first homeless boys from London and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, boys from East Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, whom he used himself, sold to brothels and escort agencies, and filmed.¹² In his flat police later found lists headed "Klantenlyst" and "Jongenlyst," clients and boys.¹

The Blue Boy Case

On the night of August 2, 1993, a fourteen-year-old boy from the north east of England, called "Gary" in the press, climbed out of a toilet window of the Blue Boy club on Spuistraat and found a policeman; the British Embassy repatriated him the next day and alerted Scotland Yard. He said that Spinks had earlier taken him and a friend to his flat in Hastings, given them LSD and, at knifepoint, photographed and raped them, and that at the end of July Spinks had drugged him again, taken him by Jetfoil from Dover to Ostend on a false identity card in the name of Michael Samuels, and sold him to the Blue Boy. The Paedophilia Unit found the photographs and the mugshot used for the false card in Spinks's flat in George Street, Hastings. Spinks was sentenced at Lewes Crown Court in 1995 to seven years for abduction and buggery, cut on appeal to five.¹² He absconded from a London probation hostel before completing the sentence, defrauded several credit card companies on a spending spree in the boy bars of Fuggerstrasse in Berlin, and settled in Prague.²

Operation Framework

In 1990 informants told the Obscene Publications Squad that videos of boys aged eleven to fourteen being raped by masked men were being shown at the Gay Palace; one said he had seen Spinks selling a video of an eight- or nine-year-old boy being tortured for 4,000 pounds. A drug dealer called "Frank" told Scotland Yard in 1993 that Spinks had shown him, in a bar in the Canary Islands, a video in which a boy of about twelve was attacked with needles, castrated and cut open in what looked like a Dutch barn. Scotland Yard and the Dutch police then set up Operation Framework, in which an undercover officer befriended Spinks in England.² Told that friends had been offered a snuff film for 6,000 pounds, Spinks said: "They're not six grand. I know, well I knew some people who were involved in making snuff movies and how they did it was, they only sold them in limited editions, made ten copies or something, ten very rich customers in America, who paid $5,000 each or something like that." He went on: "I know the person who made the film. I felt sorry for this boy, it was a German boy." Asked how old, he replied: "About 13, 15. He thought he was going to make 200 guilders and ended up being dead."¹ He produced no film, and the operation ended with his arrest on the Blue Boy charges.²

A Birmingham man called "Edward" told Dutch and British police that he had seen five videos made by Spinks and Frank's circle in which boys were abused and killed, one on a boat, and took them to a house in Hoofddorp and to a lake where he said bodies had been dumped; Dutch police confirmed that Spinks had lived at one of the houses he identified, and said they found no evidence to support the claims.¹² A later informant for the Avon and Somerset police described a similar video shot in a flat.²

Manuel Schadwald and the Elm Guest House

Robbie Van Der Plancken, who had worked in the Rotterdam brothels of Lothar Glandorf, claimed in an unbroadcast part of a Dutch television interview that the missing Berlin boy Manuel Schadwald had been sold to Spinks in Amsterdam; a bar owner told the journalist Nick Davies he thought he had once seen the boy with Spinks, then said he could easily have been mistaken. A joint Dutch and Berlin police inquiry found no sign of the boy, and Frank said Spinks had hinted that a German boy named Manny had been murdered.²³

On December 6, 2014, The Sun reported, from confidential sources, that the Metropolitan Police had been told by two informants that a boy had died while being abused in the Blue Boy with a Member of Parliament present, that Spinks had arranged the MP's trip, and that police were re-examining his files amid claims that he had visited the Elm Guest House. Spinks complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that he had never run the Blue Boy, never given an MP tours of Amsterdam, was not a suspect and had never visited the guest house. The complaint was not upheld; the newspaper offered to add his denial.⁴