Wikipedia:Today's featured article/November 22, 2020

James Humphreys (1930–2003) was an English businessman and criminal who owned a chain of adult book shops and strip clubs in London in the 1960s and 1970s. In March 1958 he was sentenced to six years' imprisonment after using explosives to open a safe and steal £8,260 in money and postal orders. On his release he opened a strip club in Soho (pictured in 2008), the centre of London's sex industry. When Humphreys expanded his business and opened sex shops and book shops selling obscene material, he could only operate by paying large bribes to policemen, particularly those from the Obscene Publications Branch of the Metropolitan Police. In the late 1970s his diaries detailing his meetings with police officers and the bribes he paid were used as evidence against twelve policemen imprisoned for corruption. The character Benny Barrett, played by Malcolm McDowell in the 1996 BBC television series Our Friends in the North, was based on Humphreys.