Is it all over for Mr Soho?

Of all the remarkable things about Oscar Owide, what most astonishes is the fact that he got away with it for so long. How did an ex-convict, barred from running a business, and once dubbed "Britain's biggest pimp", hold sway over a rich tract of Soho and, in his 70s, help create a nightspot patronised by the likes of Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie, George Michael and Chelsea Clinton?

As Owide is sentenced on company law charges, others will be pondering the same question. Some rather ruefully, perhaps.

Marco Pierre White, the restaurateur, was a partner in the glamorous nightclub venture. So, too, was the restaurant owner Piers Adam. They both lost money on the deal and came to regret they had ever met the man Soho knew as Mr Oscar.

It was the name the girls who plied their trade in his sleazy clubs were instructed to call him. It was meant to convey a kind of reverence and respectability, but Mr Oscar merited neither.

With his pencil moustache, slickedback hair and old-fashioned BBC announcer drawl, he may have seemed the perfect 1950s gentleman. But in reality he presided over a tacky empire where sex was a commodity.

For more than 30 years, Owide - now 72 - ran hostess bars where girls tricked gullible punters into paying vast sums for cheap drinks. If the customer could afford to keep paying the bar bills until 3am, he could take home a girl for sex, at a minimum £500 a time.

This was the trade in which Owide made his money, enough to buy a fine home in St John's Wood and a luxurious apartment in Marbella where refurbishment alone cost £100,000. He even bragged once that he could tell as soon as he met a prospective hostess whether she would be prepared to meet the most exacting demands of his clientele.

Marco Pierre White and Piers Adam did not know it, but their short-lived business partner was a pimp from way back.

When the law finally caught up with Owide, it was not for pimping but for arcane charges of illegally running companies. He admitted acting as a director while disqualified, a charge that could carry a penalty of two years in prison or an unlimited fine. That decision will be made by Judge John Samuels today.

Whatever the sentence, it surely must, at last, mark the end of the reign of Soho's king of the pimps. That it lasted so long is amazing.

Oscar Owide was born in Whitechapel in 1931 and brought up in Finsbury Park by his devoted parents, Isidore and Mary. His father was a prosperous hairdresser and Oscar went into the family firm, marrying Jeanette, the daughter of an East End market trader. In the 1950s, he bought his first nightclub, Il Grotto, in Ilford.

Owide soon moved to the West End where he targeted a number of run-down properties in Swallow Street, off Piccadilly. In the late 1970s his club, Chaplins, became known as a pick-up place for prostitutes. Its reputation was put to the test when an undercover reporter working for a Sunday newspaper applied for a job as a "hostess".

Owide told her: "I choose you appropriately for the customer. And at the end of the evening, he'll want to take your pants off." She would be "giving her body", he said, but she could draw comfort from the fact that she would be doing it for "a lot of money".

Owide benefited from a laissez-faire attitude towards prostitution and the police took no action. Soon, his clubs were attracting an affluent clientele. A visiting prince used to send a servant known as "The Doctor" to bring girls to his suite at the Dorchester. One was paid £8,000 for her services.

Then, in 1989, it looked as if the law was ready to close down the king of pimps. Customs and Excise investigators found Owide was running a VAT scam and he was charged with fraud. He was sentenced to 12 months, with nine months suspended. He served little more than a few weeks in jail, and paid a £4,000 fine.

Within days of coming out, he was back running his old firm. Chaplins made the news again, this time as a place where male and female prostitutes were to be had at a starting price of £500. Owide was in his 60s, and easily rich enough to retire. But something seemed to drive him on.

In 1994, he acquired a lease on the Windmill Theatre and tried to go into business with West End club-owner Peter Stringfellow, but Mr Stringfellow was not keen on a partnership.

He told the Standard as Owide faced sentencing: "He's a charming old fox. We were in negotiations with regards to the Windmill but that didn't go through. Old Oscar is just a soft old guy. We meet up for dinner or lunch and I thoroughly enjoy his company. He's a legendary name in the West End."

He added: "And what I like about him is he's older than me."

Owide was older than almost everyone, and as the sex industry began to change, with the influx of East European pimps, gangsters and prostitutes, it looked for a time as if he might be ready to quit while he was still ahead.

He bought a supermarket, beach bar, restaurant and helicopter business near his Marbella home. He began spending more time in Spain and his old contacts in Soho saw less of him.

Then, just as it seemed he was heading for a quiet retirement, he pushed his luck too far. He had turned the Windmill into a lap-dancing club and owned the Stork Club and Chaplins in Swallow Street. He also owned Bentley's restaurant, once one of London's favourites but in Owide's ownership, a rather shabby place. The description could equally apply to his business methods.

In 1996, Department of Trade and Industry investigators found the company running the restaurant had a £500,000 deficit, but no records to show what had happened to money loaned to another company of which Owide was the principal shareholder. Creditors simply could not find out where the money had gone.

Efforts to untangle Owide's business affairs went on for years. As the investigation continued, he was pursuing his old trade. At the Stork Club and Chaplins, girls were for sale. At the Stork, more than 40 could be found at the bar, skimpily dressed and available for "hostess" duties.

These, it emerged, involved talking to customers for a minimum £45 fee. A blonde called Lisa spelled out the other options to an undercover reporter.

"After the club closes we are allowed to leave with you," she said. "We do everything - lesbian sex, spanking, anything. It's a minimum of £500 for a couple of hours. And there are a few girls here who can sort out some coke (cocaine) so we can party all night."

According to the undercover team which called next door at Chaplin's, 30 women were available. One, who said she was called Faye, from Worcester, declined to do "full sex". But she said: "I do everything else - whipping, anything. I charge a minimum £300." Faye and her friend Lois negotiated a fee of £500 each to visit the reporters' hotel, which they did later.

When the story broke, it carried the added piquancy of revealing that among those to benefit from Owide's activities was the Crown Estate, which collected £50,000 a year ground rent from the premises occupied by his clubs.

The DTI investigators who had looked into the Bentley's restaurant affair put together a compelling new case. In February 2000, Owide was disqualified from holding any directorships for seven years. His business career was finally over - or so it seemed. Yes, he resigned his directorships and, yes, he appointed a general manager to run his affairs, but witness the testament of Claire Thompson, an employee at the Windmill Club in August, 2001.

MS THOMPSON was a lap-dancer. Unusually, she had been educated at Oxford and was doing striptease, she said, to raise money to publish her poetry. A highly attractive, 27-year-old redhead, she was much in demand at the Windmill and said she could often make £600 a night.

Of this, she said, she had to deduct £50 which was handed to her boss - a certain Mr Oscar.

The court at Blackfriars heard that despite resigning his directorships, Owide was still running his

companies. Mr James Pavry, prosecuting, said: "He continued to make important decisions relating to financial affairs. He entered into negotiations regarding their future."

And, Mr Pavry said, in his dealings with Marco Pierre White, Owide made it clear he alone was running things.

It might be asked why astute business figures such as Mr White and his partner Piers Adam went into a major deal with a man whose record showed he had made his money from vice and had been disqualified for business malpractice.

The answer, according to those who know the protagonists, is that Owide's scheme seemed to hold out the prospect of the next big thing in night-time London - a revival of the golden era of the 1950s, a time of heady glamour when stars and gangsters mingled at places like the Stork Club, where Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich could be seen, or perhaps Princess Margaret and Peter Sellers.

At first, it worked brilliantly. The stars came - Madonna and Guy Ritchie were among the first - and the reviews were fulsome.

But promises Owide made were not kept. The proposed expansion of the club came to nothing, not least because Owide did not have planning permission. When it became clear he was running his businesses while disqualified as a director and a court case loomed, the whole thing collapsed.

Now he stands convicted yet again. There is a view in Soho that this, finally, is the end for Owide. Among some there will be sadness that a character like him has ended his long run in the West End on such a sour note. Among others, there may be scepticism. After all, Mr Oscar has been prematurely written off before.

Additional reporting: Emine Saner and Paul Cheston.