This is a Global Player original podcast.

A quick note at the start.

This episode contains strong language and references to sexual abuse that listeners might find traumatic.

In every story, in every good story, there's light and there's shade, there's good and there's bad.

And the places where those stories happen are much the same.

There are the salubrious spots, but then there are corners from which we

reverse our gaze. Wander around Blackpool's back streets, and you'll feel this instantly.

The town's facade is one thing, but what it masks is another.

We have moved on from the pleasant aromas of chips and hot dogs and vinegar. And instead that there is now the very, very pungent smell

of wheat, which is pretty much everywhere in this street, which is only just a couple of streets

behind the fun of the fair and the pleasure beach. And this is the other Blackpool that is Morial, which is a town of deprivation, some of the

most deprivation that you will find anywhere in Britain of real poverty.

Bluntly, Blackpool is poor, really poor.

Huge numbers of rental houses in the town, and I mean where people live, not go on holiday,

have chronic damp or black mould problems.

In fact, the town's own council calls it, by many measures, the most deprived local authority in England. And it is really, in this part of Blackpool, such a juxtaposition,

such an incongruity with the old faded majesty of the seafront, that most of this story takes place.

And it is the actual town that James Parker, and many people like him,

lived and lived day after day.

Appearances and reality.

Beyond the crypto, the money, and even the crime, that is the real question that I'm searching for at the very heart of this podcast. Who was James Parker? Who was

he really? I'm Luis Grona, and this is coining it

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