In the 1950s and 1960s, “fun-loving Maltese criminals” ran “an underworld of brothels” in Soho, London, wrote Stanley Borg in an article entitled ‘Nice and sleazy’ in Modern Elegance magazine (April, 2006).

In Archbishop Michael Gonzi’s Malta, sex was considered the chief sin while in London, “the industrious Maltese took over the running of the sex industry: brothels, nightclubs, strip clubs, topless bars and porn cinemas. In their heyday, around 500 hundred snappily-dressed Maltese men controlled an industry with a turnover that run into millions. It was a world of ruthless excess.”

The indoctrination that these men had been subjected to as children – including the precepts of the Catholic catechism and the “sanctifying grace” of the sacrament of Confirmation – proved ineffective in dissuading them from pursuing an immoral living from prostitution and porn. It was not the fear of God that kept these men in check but the fear of the police!

Borg wrote: “A number of Maltese women would visit Soho where they would work for a fortnight as strippers, then return to Malta with a couple of hundred pounds for their efforts, which at the time, was a lot of money.”

These strippers from Strada Stretta were, most likely, devotees of ‘id-Duluri’. When they went to church, they were told by priests to dress “modestly” and to “emulate” the chastity of Maria Goretti – the ‘saint’ then in vogue in the sexually-repressed Malta of the 1950s!