Emmett Grogan interviewed in the Sunday Times (London) by Kenneth Allsop (1973)

The Sunday Times 4/2/73 The man from the neon jungle EMMETT GROGAN is alive, and was last seen padding foxiiy through London. What Grogan? Emmett who? Enimest Grogan Is the underground’s Howard Hughes. Both-the xillionaire skulking in hotel penthouse suites and the hipster outlaw melling into ghetto shadows- dwell in a dazzling glare of secrecy. At least, I still don’t know if Howard Hughes exists and, although the only reporter in Britain who hasn’t been shaking the shrubbery for him, come out equal on that one. But Entmett Grogan I have touched. My hand twice engaged with his lissom paw, upon meeting and parting, and we actually rapped, as they say, for a while. Emmett Grogan (not. almost needless to say. his real name) appeared in Britain about the same time as did his book, Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps, a fiction-form autobiography whleh runs from his promising beginning as a Brooklyn dead- end kid heroin addiet, aged 12. through Park Avenue jewelburglaries, jet-set cavortings he tween Paris and Rome. IRA bombings, and urban anarchist activities against what he sees as the military-industrial death culture of his hon:efand, where he started the San Francisco Digger movement of free hand- outs of hijacked food and cloth ing to the poor. On the telephone. his literary agent, John Walfers, although keen that we shouid meet, wasn’t confident that he could deliver his author into an interview situation, “He’s terribly paranoid about meeting people, especially the Press,” he said worriedly. Emmett Grogan arrived at 11 am. He looked greeny-pale at surfacing into the straight world at that hour: the gold ear ring in his left lobe had a fine tremor: he smoked Pali Malls without pause. His eyes tickered. automatically noting the nearest wall to get his hack to and which window could be dived out of. He was wearing two silver bracelets, suede bell-bottoms and wedge heeled Western boots. From his hair you couldn’t be positive where he fits in: hippyishly shoulder-length at the back, rocker-style sculpted sideboards, and full frontal baroque James Dean billows. He has a bony frozen face (you couidn’t get cooler) and a pipe cleaner-trim body which weaves-a mixture of ballet and boxing-into illustrations of his adventures. From the start I had to learn to survive on the streets. They’re familiar, my territory. I don’t trust anyone down there but I know how to get by. My philosophy has been assuming a freedom to do what needs to be done. I don’t mean just giving rein to my satisfactions. Way back, just as some people perfect yoga, I perfected badness, But 1 became a political animal. My attitudes didn’t change but my motives did. I was at war against property; I liberated and re- distributed it by community organisation. “I don’t advocate violence. Violence is stupid. Sometimes it happens by accident, something the guerrilla with no alternative has to resort to, but the only Violence I’ve committed has been against rat finks who deserved mayhem.” In Ringolevio (that’s a New York children’s game in which one team frees its members from the opposition’s “jail”) you get the idea he enjoys being a real terror. He moves bandit-like with gun or knife through the imminent danger of the slums, Catfooting through Greenwich Village, he whips an orange from a market stall, eats it, then from a fishstand farther along the block scoops up shaved ice to clean his sticky fingers. That’s the way Emmett Grogan sees elegantly choregraplied opportunism. He turned from acquisitive robbery to freelance social work in the neon Sherwood Forest. He decided to get the Lower EastSide cleared of abandoned cars and rotting garbage by enticing private enterprise firms to tackle the job which the private. enterprise sanitation authorities were receiving kick hack to stay clear of. What do you know-the private sanitation companies, which fixed the franchise and collected the fee but not the garbage, were run by the good old Maff. Grogan was received by the “gentlemen of respect” in the Cefalu Social Club and persuaded them that an onslaught on the stinking litter among the Puerto Rican tenements could earn themgood publicity. They listened, discussed the proposition in the dialect of their native Sicily, then said “It’s a good idea, but we don’ wanna throw no money away for nothin, unnersan? So, you make-a damn sure it counts front page. Okay, you a good kid. What you gettin’ outta all this?” Grogan’s explanation that he wanted everyone to live together in peace, harmony and hygiene seemed to balle the Malinso some. what. but they detailed their squatis for the great clean-up. Big deal. Except that some two-timing flower freak whom Grogan had crossed squealed to the mayor’s office, and the official trucks roared in to pick up the rubbish and the credit. When Grogan (a touch jittery) returned to apologise to the dons for the scheme going awry they listened stedaily, then shrugged and grunted:” You win some, you lose some. Maybe it works out better next time, okay But you gotta learn the people you dealin’ with over there on the East Sitte a little bit about silenciO, right”. Power to the People, and lift up the neglected, by forming the Diggers, named after the 17th- century English partist agrarian reformers who appropriated common land around Coblam. Officially the fond being dished out at free-for-all par kitchens was donated and second hand: coincidentally many the clothes meat trucks were being knocked warehouses looted and department stores raided. The enthusiasm of bearded Haight Ashbury liberal artists waned before the grinding monotony of dawn-to-dusk distribution. The brothers dispersed from the Human Be-In, just as did the Summer of Love evaporate autumnally in a haze of LSD, a tinkle of prayer bells and instant Karma. Meanwhile Grogan had run up against the problems of becoming a folk anti- hero. Experience from his criminal past had taught him to keep a low and modest profile, to stay camouflaged and fleet-footed. Grogan toid a Michigan revolutionary student congress that the Diggers were doing their job” not like the Salvation Army or romantic Robin Hoods but be cause they love the people, who need to see other people giving it all away so that they can dig the basic absurdity of this goddamn parasitical society. But you’ve got to remain invisible and anonymous, otherwise the fuzz will slam you away if your name’s written all over it. I you’re really serious should know what you look like.” To that. the counter-culture superstar, Abbie Hoffman jeered: Emmett, you’re in to get co-opted. They’re make an image out of you and steal your anonymity and put you on the cover of Time.”Not me.” snapped Grogan “I ain’t goin’ to put me on sale”. Well, here’s RingoleVio on sale. It’s a sprawling, often hammy Mailer-cum-Genet production, too monotoned to differentiate between hathos and pathos. Agreed Emmett Grogan’s life has been no joke, but nor, you suspect would he see one if it was hung out on banners. Yet it’s a powerful picture of an alienated character ranging suspiciously from underworld to underground, trying to conceal any growing softheartedness under cowboy tough-talk and a valuable documentary of aperiod in an American life which produced such phenomena as Stokey Carmichael and Spiro Agnew. However, look what happened. The mystery man has put his words on paper and his photograph in the hook, and he gives an interview to The Sunday Times, and the process of turning pariah into pin-up is inexorably in train. Squinting warily in the limelight. Emmett Grogan, on his way out and absent-mindedly flipping my mortice lock with flexible fingers, said defensively: “I’m no different now. But everybody on the streets really wants to get off them, and there are only two ways; into the nick or up out of it all. Writing it all down may have been a bridge for me.”Kenneth Allsop

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April 6, 2026 at 7:28 am

The Sunday Times 4/2/73 The man from the neon jungle EMMETT GROGAN is alive, and was last seen padding foxiiy through London. What Grogan? Emmett who? Enimest Grogan Is the underground’s Howard Hughes. Both-the xillionaire skulking in hotel penthouse suites and the hipster outlaw melling into ghetto shadows- dwell in a dazzling glare of secrecy. At least, I still don’t know if Howard Hughes exists and, although the only reporter in Britain who hasn’t been shaking the shrubbery for him, come out equal on that one. But Entmett Grogan I have touched. My hand twice engaged with his lissom paw, upon meeting and parting, and we actually rapped, as they say, for a while. Emmett Grogan (not. almost needless to say. his real name) appeared in Britain about the same time as did his book, Ringolevio: A Life Played For Keeps, a fiction-form autobiography whleh runs from his promising beginning as a Brooklyn dead- end kid heroin addiet, aged 12. through Park Avenue jewelburglaries, jet-set cavortings he tween Paris and Rome. IRA bombings, and urban anarchist activities against what he sees as the military-industrial death culture of his hon:efand, where he started the San Francisco Digger movement of free hand- outs of hijacked food and cloth ing to the poor. On the telephone. his literary agent, John Walfers, although keen that we shouid meet, wasn’t confident that he could deliver his author into an interview situation, “He’s terribly paranoid about meeting people, especially the Press,” he said worriedly. Emmett Grogan arrived at 11 am. He looked greeny-pale at surfacing into the straight world at that hour: the gold ear ring in his left lobe had a fine tremor: he smoked Pali Malls without pause. His eyes tickered. automatically noting the nearest wall to get his hack to and which window could be dived out of. He was wearing two silver bracelets, suede bell-bottoms and wedge heeled Western boots. From his hair you couldn’t be positive where he fits in: hippyishly shoulder-length at the back, rocker-style sculpted sideboards, and full frontal baroque James Dean billows. He has a bony frozen face (you couidn’t get cooler) and a pipe cleaner-trim body which weaves-a mixture of ballet and boxing-into illustrations of his adventures. From the start I had to learn to survive on the streets. They’re familiar, my territory. I don’t trust anyone down there but I know how to get by. My philosophy has been assuming a freedom to do what needs to be done. I don’t mean just giving rein to my satisfactions. Way back, just as some people perfect yoga, I perfected badness, But 1 became a political animal. My attitudes didn’t change but my motives did. I was at war against property; I liberated and re- distributed it by community organisation. “I don’t advocate violence. Violence is stupid. Sometimes it happens by accident, something the guerrilla with no alternative has to resort to, but the only Violence I’ve committed has been against rat finks who deserved mayhem.” In Ringolevio (that’s a New York children’s game in which one team frees its members from the opposition’s “jail”) you get the idea he enjoys being a real terror. He moves bandit-like with gun or knife through the imminent danger of the slums, Catfooting through Greenwich Village, he whips an orange from a market stall, eats it, then from a fishstand farther along the block scoops up shaved ice to clean his sticky fingers. That’s the way Emmett Grogan sees elegantly choregraplied opportunism. He turned from acquisitive robbery to freelance social work in the neon Sherwood Forest. He decided to get the Lower EastSide cleared of abandoned cars and rotting garbage by enticing private enterprise firms to tackle the job which the private. enterprise sanitation authorities were receiving kick hack to stay clear of. What do you know-the private sanitation companies, which fixed the franchise and collected the fee but not the garbage, were run by the good old Maff. Grogan was received by the “gentlemen of respect” in the Cefalu Social Club and persuaded them that an onslaught on the stinking litter among the Puerto Rican tenements could earn themgood publicity. They listened, discussed the proposition in the dialect of their native Sicily, then said “It’s a good idea, but we don’ wanna throw no money away for nothin, unnersan? So, you make-a damn sure it counts front page. Okay, you a good kid. What you gettin’ outta all this?” Grogan’s explanation that he wanted everyone to live together in peace, harmony and hygiene seemed to balle the Malinso some. what. but they detailed their squatis for the great clean-up. Big deal. Except that some two-timing flower freak whom Grogan had crossed squealed to the mayor’s office, and the official trucks roared in to pick up the rubbish and the credit. When Grogan (a touch jittery) returned to apologise to the dons for the scheme going awry they listened stedaily, then shrugged and grunted:” You win some, you lose some. Maybe it works out better next time, okay But you gotta learn the people you dealin’ with over there on the East Sitte a little bit about silenciO, right”. Power to the People, and lift up the neglected, by forming the Diggers, named after the 17th- century English partist agrarian reformers who appropriated common land around Coblam. Officially the fond being dished out at free-for-all par kitchens was donated and second hand: coincidentally many the clothes meat trucks were being knocked warehouses looted and department stores raided. The enthusiasm of bearded Haight Ashbury liberal artists waned before the grinding monotony of dawn-to-dusk distribution. The brothers dispersed from the Human Be-In, just as did the Summer of Love evaporate autumnally in a haze of LSD, a tinkle of prayer bells and instant Karma. Meanwhile Grogan had run up against the problems of becoming a folk anti- hero. Experience from his criminal past had taught him to keep a low and modest profile, to stay camouflaged and fleet-footed. Grogan toid a Michigan revolutionary student congress that the Diggers were doing their job” not like the Salvation Army or romantic Robin Hoods but be cause they love the people, who need to see other people giving it all away so that they can dig the basic absurdity of this goddamn parasitical society. But you’ve got to remain invisible and anonymous, otherwise the fuzz will slam you away if your name’s written all over it. I you’re really serious should know what you look like.” To that. the counter-culture superstar, Abbie Hoffman jeered: Emmett, you’re in to get co-opted. They’re make an image out of you and steal your anonymity and put you on the cover of Time.”Not me.” snapped Grogan “I ain’t goin’ to put me on sale”. Well, here’s RingoleVio on sale. It’s a sprawling, often hammy Mailer-cum-Genet production, too monotoned to differentiate between hathos and pathos. Agreed Emmett Grogan’s life has been no joke, but nor, you suspect would he see one if it was hung out on banners. Yet it’s a powerful picture of an alienated character ranging suspiciously from underworld to underground, trying to conceal any growing softheartedness under cowboy tough-talk and a valuable documentary of aperiod in an American life which produced such phenomena as Stokey Carmichael and Spiro Agnew. However, look what happened. The mystery man has put his words on paper and his photograph in the hook, and he gives an interview to The Sunday Times, and the process of turning pariah into pin-up is inexorably in train. Squinting warily in the limelight. Emmett Grogan, on his way out and absent-mindedly flipping my mortice lock with flexible fingers, said defensively: “I’m no different now. But everybody on the streets really wants to get off them, and there are only two ways; into the nick or up out of it all. Writing it all down may have been a bridge for me.”Kenneth Allsop

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Emmett Grogan interviewed in the Sunday Times (London) by Kenneth Allsop (1973)

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