His final resting place can be found under an overhanging tree in a cemetery 7,000 miles from his old stomping ground at the House of Lords, where he once pledged allegiance to the Crown. Located in one of the most densely populated, noisiest and polluted cities in the world, the Court of Everlasting Peace in Manila’s Memorial Park is an oasis of calm – you can even hear birds singing as you crouch to read his gravestone.
It is 33 years since the 3rd Baron Moynihan of Leeds died from an aneurysm at 55 and, either because of theft or just the passage of time, several of the letters on his inscription have disappeared.
But there can be no mistaking this is where the ashes of the man also known as ‘Lord Supergrass’, ‘Baron Scoundrel’ and the ‘Ermine Pimpernel’ are interred.
It was just a few miles from his unkempt grave in the Philippines capital that ‘the Right Honourable’ Antony Patrick Andrew Cairne Berkeley Moynihan ran a vast criminal empire while in self-imposed exile from his beloved England.
The ex-Coldstream Guard fled to Manila, via Spain, in 1971 to escape charges in London where he was described in court, in his absence, as the ‘evil genius’ behind frauds. But those offences were nothing to his activities in the Far East.
Court documents unearthed by the Mail in the US refer to him in the late ’80s as ‘a suspect of several law enforcement agencies around the world for crimes including first degree murder, money laundering, fraud, heroin trafficking and the exportation of 25,000 prostitutes’.
Add to that the fact he ran a string of massage parlours (brothels might be more appropriate) across Manila and Bangkok, was a five-times married bigamist and serial playboy, and you get a clearer picture.
Now another of his unlawful sidelines can be revealed: the supply of fake passports to his criminal associates.
They included, it is sensationally alleged, a fellow fugitive peer from London: Lord Lucan, who vanished in November 1974 after allegedly murdering nanny Sandra Rivett at the family’s Belgravia home.
According to Baron Scoundrel’s fourth wife Editha, Lady Moynihan, Lucan visited them in Manila in around 1984 to collect a travel document which was produced through the ‘Day Of The Jackal’ ploy of stealing the identity of a dead child.
She says the pair greeted other with hugs and her husband referred to their ‘charming’ visitor as a ‘very special’ old friend from London. Her account, which the Mail has spent months investigating, reads like something out of a Netflix crime drama.
Some will be sceptical – for 50 years the Lucan case has been mired in false sightings and far-fetched theories – but our inquiries have uncovered a series of tantalising connections between her late husband and Lucan, and compelling circumstantial evidence to support her story.
The suggestion that two fugitive peers – born a year apart and who mixed in the same ‘Chelsea Set’ circles in the 1960s before going on the run – should stay in contact should come as no surprise.
They were signed up to the masonic-style bond, which linked that breed whose ‘stud book’ lines lead back to the same stables – privileged schools and the Household Brigade. The honour code bound their silence on each other’s affairs, however despicable.
Lucan went to Eton, while Moynihan was educated at Stowe, and both were members of the Lords. Lucan inherited his title in 1964 and Moynihan the following year.
Both did their National Service in the Coldstream Guards. Moynihan served from January 1955 to July 1956 and Lucan from February 1953 to May 1955. Both were posted to Germany, both left as second lieutenants but both remained on the reserve list.
Both were connected to illegal gambling in London. Criminal associates of Moynihan held card schools in private homes, in particular baccarat and chemin de fer. Lucan attended similar parties and chemin de fer was his favoured game.
Moynihan asked questions in the Lords for the gambling lobby, which included Lucan’s close friend, zoo owner John Aspinall.
Moynihan was a criminal associate (through a mutual friend) of Mark Sykes, a now dead Old Etonian who organised such gambling parties and claimed to be a house player involved in using rigged cards at Aspinall’s Clermont Club, where Lucan played, to fleece wealthy players.
Their characters were remarkably similar. Both were cads, playboys, poor with money and heavy drinkers. They were part of the Establishment but in a sense anti it, despite being obsessed with their children getting their titles. And both were fugitives who frustrated Scotland Yard’s finest.
Millions of words have been written about Lucan but what about Moynihan, the ‘Lord that Roared’ who turned supergrass to help the US’s Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA) bring down the elusive British drugs baron Howard Marks in the late 1980s?
Moynihan was born in 1936, the elder son of Patrick Moynihan, a barrister and stockbroker who succeeded to the Barony of Moynihan later that year. Patrick’s father Sir Berkeley Moynihan, an eminent surgeon who introduced surgical rubber gloves to Britain from America, had been created a baronet during Lloyd George’s final administration and then a peer in 1929.
Patrick died in 1965, financially embarrassed and facing charges of homosexual importuning. If there was a key principle to Baron Scoundrel’s life, it was to be found on the wall of his office in Manila, where a brass plaque bore the legend, ‘Of the 36 ways of avoiding disaster, running away is the best’. Moynihan learnt the importance of this at an early stage.
He first legged it in 1956, to Australia, to escape his father’s fury over a liaison with a Soho nightclub waitress and to flee his first wife, an actress and sometime nude model whom he had married secretly the previous year and who had now taken out a summons for assault.
The idea was to work on his uncle’s sheep farm but after five days he ran away to Sydney, where he made his debut as a banjo player and met a ‘ravishing’ Malayan fire-eater’s assistant with the stage name Princess Amina who was to be his second wife.
Soon after they wed, he made his first court appearance, accused of stealing two bedsheets. He was found not guilty but as he walked from court he was given another summons, this one over a lease. It was time to run away again.
Moynihan set off with his wife on a belly-dancing tour of Europe and the Far East. In Tokyo he challenged an American journalist, who criticised his wife’s performance, to a duel. Photos show them attacking each other with their buttocks: Moynihan, the king of publicity, triumphed.
After he succeeded his father in the peerage in 1965 Moynihan took the Liberal Whip in the Lords, where he was mainly concerned in arguing that Gibraltar be given to Spain. The maverick’s stance did not endear him to the House.
Meanwhile, his complex business activities and personal finances had brought him to the attention of police. By 1970 he faced 57 charges, among them fraudulent trading, false pretences, fraud against a gaming casino and the purchase of a Rolls-Royce with a worthless cheque.
His extradition was sought from Spain, where he was living, but he disappeared, only to resurface the next year in the Philippines, a haven for British fugitives.
In 1968 he married for a third time – another belly-dancer, this one a Filipina – and the new Lady Moynihan’s family had a chain of massage parlours in Manila, where the peer remained for much of the rest of his life.
At the Old Bailey fraud hearing in 1971, the judge who branded him in his absence ‘the evil genius’ remarked: ‘It’s a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The prince behind all these offences is Lord Moynihan.’
As the 1970s wore on Moynihan found employment in the international drugs trade, as well as in fraud and prostitution. The first hint of this came in 1980 when he was named by an Australian Royal Commission as an associate of Sydney’s ‘Double Bay Mob’, engaged in the importing of heroin from Manila.
No charges were brought and Moynihan continued his life as a pimp under the patronage of President Ferdinand Marcos, ‘my drinking chum’, as he called him.
Marcos reportedly shielded him from prosecution over the murder of a nightclub owner (who married one of Moynihan’s ex-wives).
He ran a brothel within 100 yards of the British Ambassador’s residence and owned a hotel called MacArthur in a seedy part of Manila, which is where Lucan is said to have gone after initially arriving in the city in the mid-80s.
One of his best friends and drinking partners was the Manila- based 6th Marquess of Headfort, Michael Taylour, who according to Editha also met Lucan.
After the coup against Marcos in 1986, Moynihan’s position became uncertain – although his 50th birthday party that year was legendary, with the best beef and wine flown in from Hong Kong –and the next year he was forbidden to leave the Philippines pending investigations into his links with drugs and prostitution.
In a series of bombshell front page articles, a local newspaper accused him of being a drugs king, murderer, industrial scale sex trafficker and brothel owner, allegations he fiercely denied.
But the writing was on the wall, with Moynihan vulnerable to pressure from Scotland Yard and the US DEA to help them catch his friend, Oxford-educated drugs baron Howard Marks who controlled an estimated sixth of the global market in marijuana.
He approached Marks with a bogus offer to sell him an island in the Philippines on which to grow marijuana. In return for immunity, Moynihan wore a secret tape recorder to ensnare his friend.
Marks was duly convicted in Florida, with Moynihan as chief witness for the prosecution.
It was during the court case in 1989 that Moynihan’s lucrative business in procuring false passports, with the help of a corrupt society lawyer from London, Jimmy Newton – a fellow Stowe old boy – was laid bare.
He said that following his arrest in Manila in 1987 he ‘made it clear’ to a DEA agent and a Scotland Yard detective that he ‘was involved in false passports’ for himself and his associates.
He was paid $21,700 as well as being granted immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against his fellow drugs conspirators, including Marks.
While giving evidence in 1989, he spoke at length about committing identity fraud for criminal associates, but did not name Lucan. Maybe it was a matter of honour not to betray someone from high society, however heinous the crime of which he was accused.
Explaining his title, Moynihan told the US court: ‘I owe my allegiance to the Crown and what I believe would be the best service to the Crown.’
He snapped after a US lawyer said ‘being a member of the aristocracy in England has many advantages including wealth, education and family connections’.
Moynihan replied: ‘Not necessarily, I am sorry to tell you. Certain advantages, getting good tables at restaurants and good seats in theatres, but whereas some of the members of the House of Lords are indeed the world’s richest people – I could name the Duke of Westminster – some are completely poverty-stricken.’
Lawyer: ‘Are you included among the poverty-stricken Lords in England?’ Moynihan: ‘I have lived a life like a yo-yo. I have been up and down many times.’ He certainly had.
Amid claims that there was a £1million underworld contract on his head, the DEA gave him refuge and protection in the US for a time and hailed him as ‘a hero, one of the good guys’. Marks saw things differently: ‘He’s a first-class bastard.’
According to Editha, Moynihan would often wear a Santa Claus-style beard as a disguise.
In Manila, to which he returned after his supergrass testimony in the US, Moynihan lived in the
suburbs in his heavily-fortified mansion, where he is said to have entertained Lord Lucan and where, according to legend, he hosted Wolf of Wall Street-style naked pool parties and noshed his favourite pork pies from Fortnum & Mason in London.
He had as his base in Manila a brothel named the Yellow Brick Road, where he liked to be called ‘Uncle Tony’. ‘I just sit back and collect the money,’ he said, ‘the girls do all the work.’
His sudden death in 1991, after dining at his favourite restaurant Le Souffle, was not the end of the story. A few months before he died, his fifth ‘wife’ Jinna had given birth to a son, Daniel, who Moynihan wanted to be his heir.
But in 1996, London’s High Court ruled that the marriage was null and void as he was not legally divorced from fourth wife Editha, so Daniel could not inherit the Baron’s title. It went to former Tory Sports Minister Colin Moynihan, his half-brother.
The Moynihan family were back in the headlines in 2016 when one of the rogue’s daughters from his third marriage was shot dead in the Philippines amid a savage war on drugs.
Aurora Moynihan was born into a life of privilege. Educated at a private school in Malvern, Worcestershire, before attending a top Swiss finishing school and studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, she was considered by her family to be ‘brilliant’.But she fell into the same trap as her playboy father after dabbling in drugs as a young woman.
Miss Moynihan, 45, who was on a police drugs watch list, was found by the side of a Manila road with multiple gunshot wounds.
Next to her body was a chilling message scrawled on a piece of cardboard: ‘Pusher to the celebrities. You’re next.’
She was found with four sachets of shabu, or methamphetamine, and ‘drug paraphernalia’, according to police, who have been accused of carrying out extra-judicial shootings of drug dealers on behalf of former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte.
Her father had contacts at the top of the police force and one cannot help wondering whether if he had still been alive, she might not have died.
Her ashes are at St Alphonsus parish church in central Manila, a few miles across the city from her father’s resting place.
The old bounder once called himself a ‘cheat, liar, thief and scoundrel’. Yet the inscription on his grave paints a different picture, describing him as the ‘RIGHT ONORABLE, LORD MOYNIHAN OF EEDS’ (sic) – ‘a loving father, a big brother and a magnanimous friend’.
Someone, it is claimed, who also took the secrets of his relationship with one such ally, Lord Lucan, to his grave.
