Saluting Nofio Pecoraro Junior, the Italian-American fugitive who became the landlord of a pub in south London.
It was a dull weekday evening at the end of 2003, and Michael Lafferty was slumped on his sofa in Hampton Wick half-watching London Tonight. Amid the usual local news stories – an accident in the Blackwall Tunnel; a Tottenham teen’s inspirational weight-loss journey; a Newham Hospital baby blunder delivered with stony condemnation by Alastair Stewart – something caught his eye. ‘I was sitting in our living room around dinnertime, when I noticed a live reporter doing a piece literally outside the front of our house,’ Lafferty says. He lived next door to Stryker’s Railway, a traditional locals’ boozer that directly faced Hampton Wick train station. According to the news report, the pub’s landlord, a genial American by the name of Stryker, had been arrested that day. Some heavy words were being thrown around, words like ‘mafia’ and ‘gangster’. It seemed that John Stryker was not who he claimed he was. ‘We quickly went next door for a pint and the Aussie barman filled us in,’ Lafferty says. ‘That’s how I found out about our friend Nofio.’
In 1991, Nofio Pecoraro Junior, the son of a high-ranking caporegime in the New Orleans mafia, was indicted on 41 counts of money laundering and insurance fraud after Certified Lloyd’s, the company he had run since 1987 with his mother, Frances, had allegedly defrauded customers out of $7.2 million. Frances was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in a federal prison (she died in 2003), but Pecoraro – worried that a 1984 drug-dealing and bribery conviction would exacerbate his punishment – fled to England, changed his name to John Stryker (seemingly after John Wayne’s character in the 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima) and for 13 years lived a life on the lam as the landlord of Stryker’s Railway. In December of 2003, he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police while attempting to obtain a passport and a shotgun licence under a false name. Pecoraro spent some time in both Wandsworth and the floating prison ship HMP Weare, before being extradited back to the US. Until now, Pecoraro had never discussed his life in Hampton Wick. This is the first time his story has been told.
The case of Nofio Pecoraro Junior and Stryker’s Railway had been on my mind for a while. I was only 12 in 2003, but having grown up in nearby Kingston, the pub – by then known as The Railway – did play a very minor supporting role in my own personal suburban Bildungsroman. In 2006, I got into a fight with the then-landlord’s son, who had taken umbrage with my penchant for winklepickers and coloured drainpipes. In 2008, I spent a few illicit underage evenings there, back in the days when a tenner would keep you in refreshment for an entire raucous night. And I vaguely remember acknowledging its closure in 2010 with nothing more than a passing shrug; too young and in-the-moment to care about such humdrum things as pub preservation, or the loss of a community asset.
Ten years later, I found myself revisiting The Railway as part of my London Dead Pubs project. It’s a fascinating and barely believable story: the mafioso’s son turned suburban publican. There was a flurry of press at the time – some British papers took to referring to Pecoraro as ‘The Grogfather’ – but, 20 years later, it’s a story that’s been largely forgotten. I wanted to hear Pecoraro’s side of things. How had he ended up in sleepy Hampton Wick, the south-west London locale best known as the setting for George and Mildred? How did someone from Louisiana get on running an unruly English pub? And now he was back in America, did he miss any of it? On a whim, I looked up Pecoraro on Facebook. I found a profile with some mutual friends of mutual friends. So, I sent a request and in November 2022, received a reply.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t believe I know you,’ it read. ‘Was I a friend of your parents possibly?’ His photos showed no sign of either criminality or pubs, with just a handful of images of a handsome olive-skinned man playing polo, each proudly stamped with an ‘I Got My COVID-19 Vaccine’ sticker. It was the Facebook page of a man living his best life, all tagged inspirational quotes and check-ins at steak houses. Had I got the right Pecoraro? I typed up my response, explaining that I’d love to have a chat about The Railway, pressed send, and waited. And waited. It wasn’t until the following year that I eventually got a response.
‘I don’t know what questions you may have, my story was pretty publicised in the UK; but if you wish, contact me on my email.’ I had an in.
Although Pecoraro, now 73, was reluctant to divulge too much information about his time pre-Railway (‘If you’re trying to get background history on my family, I am not interested’) he did tell me that on arriving in England in the early 90s, he lived first in Maida Vale, and then Barnes – before moving to Lower Teddington Road in Hampton Wick and getting a job as an estate agent with Carringtons.
‘I fell in love with it – Bushy Park and Hampton Court Palace.’ For him, it was about the beauty and the convenience, ‘to just walk into Kingston, or jump on the train and go to London, Wimbledon, Guildford – all over the south of England.’ One night, some friends of his dragged him to The Railway for a pint and a game of pool. He loved it, and slowly began spending more and more time in the pub.
At the time Pecoraro was living there, Hampton Wick had eight different public houses. Today there are just three, each one possessing the exact same type of forgettable suburban gastro air. The Railway was always different. ‘It’s not everyone’s idea of… a traditional boozer but when the place is humming and the people are up for it, it’s like no other,’ as one beerintheevening.com reviewer put it at the time. When Pecoraro began drinking there, it was run by an Irishman who had, according to the Louisianan, become a ‘pretty hard boozer’. The landlord’s alcohol use was pushing the pub into decline, and he was eventually forced out. After two years with an interim manager, Pecoraro decided he’d quite like to give it a go.
‘I had just been hired to open Dexters estate agents’ new office in Richmond,’ he says. ‘But I could see The Railway slipping into oblivion.’ After a chat with the pub company, where they ‘talked about the plans [he] had to renovate the pub and bring it back to a higher standard’, he had a second, formal interview. ‘This was more concerning my finances and experience in pub and bar operations.’ Pecoraro had been a partner in two bars in his younger days, and this was experience enough to convince the operators to give him a shot at turning the pub’s fortunes around. At the beginning, it was tough: ‘Cleaning up the mess; repainting; refurbishing fireplaces, flooring and toilets; upgrading kitchen equipment so we could offer food.’ The Railway – now named, in true Yank nomenclature, Stryker’s Railway – reopened in the year 2000 in his image. ‘I started with only one staff member. In the beginning, I’d be there at 9am to clean the pub up from the previous night before opening.’
Lafferty remembers Stryker fondly: ‘I didn’t appreciate it at the time as I was so young, but he was quite simply the greatest landlord I’ve ever enjoyed,’ he says. When his house would throw post-pub parties, Stryker would turn up and ‘sit and drink whiskey with us late into the night, telling (possibly tall) tales about his youth’. Punters loved him, not only for the fact that he had rejuvenated a tired, wet-led pub at a time when similar establishments were regularly closing, but also for his affable charm. Speaking to the Times back in 2004, regular Tony Gardner was all praise: ‘He was a lovely man. He made me feel welcome. I don’t know if he was making a new identity for himself, but as far as we are concerned, he was the best.’
Over the course of his three-year stint, business at Stryker’s Railway boomed, with customers attracted to the pub for its community atmosphere and Stryker’s legendary piss-ups. ‘One funny thing I did was throw a Fourth of July party,’ says the 73-year-old, ‘with hot dogs, hamburgers and over £1,500 spent on fireworks.’ It was a massive success. ‘The place was packed, and the fireworks show awed them. My customers would ask, “Why would we want to come to a Fourth of July party?” and I’d reply: “To celebrate getting rid of us Yanks.” Everybody was really looking forward to the next one.’
It was to be the last Fourth of July party at the pub. After Stryker’s arrest, The Railway died a slow and inevitable death, changing hands several times as trade moved down the road to The Lion or The Old King’s Head (both of which have since closed). In 2010, after years of floundering, the pub shut for good and was sold off by then-operators Greene King to a local couple, who promptly and with little opposition converted it into a family home.
The character landlord is a dying trope. Once, seemingly every other boozer in London was run by a legendary larger-than-life publican, often as famous as the pub itself – your Norman Balons and Gaston Berlemonts; Joe Jenkins, Queenie Watts or Charlie Brown. What makes the story of Nofio Pecoraro Junior so compelling isn’t just his mafia ties. It’s that a man with no real connection to England, or the pub world, was able to start his life over and find his calling in a quiet London suburb, making his mark on countless people’s lives in the way only the very best landlords do. Today, Pecoraro lives as a free man in New Orleans – following his extradition, he served two years in an open prison after reaching a plea agreement – and works in historical restoration. He’s not been back to Hampton Wick since, but does still occasionally keep in contact with some of his regulars over Facebook.
In our last correspondence, I asked Pecoraro what his favourite thing about The Railway was. ‘I think the best part of owning and operating a pub in the UK was the camaraderie; the friendships that are born inside the pub.’ If only every pub had a landlord as charismatic and caring as Pecoraro: cheers to The Grogfather.
An excerpt from our latest book, The Pub. To read more from Jimmy, Clive Martin, Katy Hessel, John Banville, Charlotte Ivers and more, buy your copy today.
