Source: Bigstock

At last! The benefits of diversity have finally arrived in my hometown! Recently, the front-page regional news story was all about a big black man named Mohammad Alhadi who had decided to begin spreading spontaneous joy across the locality by accosting random young men—some of them underage—and molesting them.

Sentenced to eight months behind bars, Alhadi pleaded guilty to Sexual Assault by Touching, having approached a 15-year-old boy claiming he “needed help.” Whilst seeking vital aid from the child, Alhadi made “a sexual hand gesture” toward him, before touching his victim’s genitals through his trousers. The lad fled, so Alhadi turned his attention toward a passing 21-year-old male dog-walker, to whom he made “inappropriate comments,” before “touching himself” equally “inappropriately.” He then bothered a second nearby 15-year-old boy, yet again requesting “help.” When asked, “What with?” he replied, “Sex,” and offered the teen the princely sum of £10 to oblige, before following him home.

Sexual Black Male
The story of a large negroid individual approaching youths and trying to feel them up reminded me inescapably of another homegrown bogeyman figure who it seemed worth profiling for Halloween. This Papa Lazarou-like folk devil is known to all the children of the Merseyside region (the area surrounding the northwest English city of Liverpool) as “Purple Aki.” When I was a Merseyside child myself in the 1980s, tall tales of Aki were rife in playgrounds and parks: I knew several people who claimed to have met him personally.

Rumor had it Aki was a gigantic black male of bizarre fetishistic tastes who would approach boys in the street and “request” to feel or measure their muscles. If you refused, you then had two inescapable alternatives offered up to you: “pop or slash.” If you said “slash,” Aki would produce a knife and carve his initials “PA” onto each of your bum cheeks, one letter per buttock. If you said “pop,” meanwhile, he would “Pop yo’ Ass” (“P&A” again), as in sodomize you, then and there.

As for why he was called Purple Aki, it was due to him being “so black he’s purple,” like in comic books where you see images of sinewy figures like black panthers with blueish-purplish highlights painted around their rippling muscles to make them stand out, although a minority of dissenters argued he just dressed head to toe in the bright royal color. He was supposedly the son of an African diplomat based at the (nonexistent) Nigerian Embassy in Liverpool, which lent him diplomatic immunity for all his alleged sinister crimes.

The Candyman Can, But Aki Can’t
Aki also possessed supernatural powers. No matter how many times frustrated Merseyside citizens took the law into their own hands as vigilantes and assaulted him en masse with baseball bats, guns, and knives, he would just shrug off their efforts like an African Rasputin, it was whispered, and keep on going, brushing his assailants away as mere gnats.

Meanwhile, if you were stupid (or perhaps just gay) enough to say his name out loud five times in front of the mirror, it was said he would suddenly walk straight out of the glass and bum you in front of it, so you could watch your own sad sodomitic fate playing out before you in crystal clarity.

By this stage his legend had clearly merged with the titular character of the 1992 Hollywood horror film Candyman, an undead black murderer who also manifested through a mirror after you repeated his name.

As Clive Barker, who wrote the original short story upon which the film was based, grew up gay in 1980s Liverpool himself, it is sometimes (dubiously) said he based the Candyman upon Aki.

So, all in all, viewed through the disenchanted lens of adulthood, it should seem quite clear that this particular homo Halloween horror did not in any sense actually exist. Or did he…?

Aki Mug in Taki Mag
Actually, although the above legends are wholly untrue, Purple Aki is a real man, and a real nightmare for both the region’s young males and their spell-checking software, named Akinwale Oluwafolajimi Oluwatope Arobieke. He is no son of a Nigerian diplomat but does now have his own range of unofficial merchandise (produced by others, not himself), advertising his alleged past great achievements in the field of boy fondling, such as this mug featuring a genuine photo of him grinning and asking, “Can I feel your muscles?” with Aki sticking his thumb up (in the air, not inside anything or anyone else).

There is even an entire Facebook group, called “Aki Watch,” devoted to tracking his movements across the nation, with delighted members of the public posting smartphone images of Aki captured without him noticing, like human wildlife photography, or even snaps of them posing happily alongside him like some minor celebrity.

Extraordinarily, in our twisted online age, Aki is now actively approached by young men asking him to squeeze their muscles so they can then boast about it on social media, rather than the other way around, as in the 1980s and 1990s of my youth. In 2017 an English restaurant even sold a dish of “Purple Teriyaki”; would they dare try doing the same with a “Jimmy Saveloy”?

Unsporting Behavior
Had I ever bothered to read British newspapers as a child beyond the pages with tall tales about people purportedly being abducted by aliens or attacked by ghosts on them, I may have been able to read more genuinely disturbing tabloid scare stories, such as a piece in The People from 16 March 1997 headlined “6ft 5in GIANT STALKS RUGBY SUPER LEAGUE STARS.” Here readers were warned that “Strapping stars at Warrington Wolves and Oldham Bears [Rugby Super League clubs] are living in fear of 6ft 5in bodybuilder Akinwale Arobieke.”

U.S. readers may be unaware of the sport, but rugby is our rough British equivalent of your own athletic diversion of football (or “American football,” to U..K readers), i.e., a rough, physical-contact game with an oval-shaped ball played mainly by large, well-toned young men of distinctly sculpted appearance. Naturally, such individuals would represent prime targets to get their muscles massaged or have a tape measure wrapped around their biceps, as in Aki’s unique playground-rumored modus operandi.

According to the tabloid version (though not necessarily Aki’s own account), The Purple One had managed to enter rugby grounds with a fake press pass, or taken to “loitering around stadia in flash hire cars,” waiting to nab emerging youth-team players. Then he would allegedly perform curious actions, such as lifting a 17-stone 18-year-old Warrington player named Warren Stevens off the ground, throwing him over his shoulder like a human dumbbell, and performing “squat exercises with him” in order to demonstrate his all-time super-strength.

Warrington Wolves chairman John Smith said: “This man’s a menace. He has an astonishing ability to get hold of players’ addresses and phone numbers and they just don’t feel safe.” As some club employees got bomb threats, bricks through their windows, or had their cars paint-stripped in the night—they suspected by Aki, though this was never proved, and Aki himself denied it—you can see why they thought this way.

The Color Purple
Weirdly, today Aki seems to have become increasingly reassessed in a newly positive fashion as a local mini–George Floyd figure, the tragic victim of racial and sexual prejudice. His record at the hands of the law is long and complex. Most notoriously, in 1986 a 16-year-old boy died after jumping onto the tracks at a Merseyside train station, ostensibly whilst fleeing from the man-mountain. Aki was initially convicted of manslaughter but later had this overturned, saying he wasn’t actually chasing the lad, and winning £35,000 in compensation, after he claimed the prosecution case against him contained racial overtones.

During the 2000s, he was convicted (and sometimes cleared) more than once, with a judge calling his behavior “both strange and obsessive.” When released from prison in 2006, Aki had what must have been the oddest interim Sexual Offences Prevention Order ever produced issued against him, under the terms of which he was “banned from touching, feeling, or measuring anyone’s muscles; asking people to do squats in public; entering the [rugby club] towns of St Helens, Warrington, or Widnes without permission; and loitering near schools, gyms, or sports clubs.”

However, as time passed by and the West became more woke, and both blacks and gays became living saints who could do no wrong, Aki’s persistent attempts to get his Prevention Order overturned finally succeeded in 2016, with a distinctly lenient judge accepting the assertions of psychologists that Aki’s actions were not sexually motivated, but driven by mere “emotional needs to feel…connected to others” (we should note that he has never specifically been convicted of any actual sexual offenses at all, but “just” for trivialities like witness harassment and threatening behavior, and I can find no record of Aki explicitly saying he is gay, as most members of the public automatically presume).

The judge said he did not agree with the basis of the 2006 order, empathizing that “I’m not into bodybuilding myself [like Aki was], but I’d have thought men who have muscles in their arms the diameter of my leg are the sort of men who will admire each other’s bodies.” Even more sympathetically, the official commiserated with Aki on the fact that “You are still carrying the stigma of the boy who died on the railway tracks” back in 1986. Yes, but I think the overall long-term effects upon the boy who died himself might have been rather greater in most respects, no, m’lud?

Purple Prose
Aki has also lodged grievances with the U.K. Press Complaints Commission that media coverage of him using the label “Purple Aki” is racist, and that his full name ought to be used instead, besides complaining to police about a 2016 BBC documentary, The Man Who Squeezes Muscles, which supposedly constituted a “race-hate crime” as it referred to him as being “a big black man.” In that case, Aki really ought to try taking legal action against himself, as during a 2008 hearing, he pleaded psychiatric counseling had made him realize of his many muscle-touching victims that “if I am towering over them, and I am a big black man, they may not be consenting, they may be consenting out of fear.”

Nonetheless, in online write-ups of Aki’s legend, we now get anguished “I’m not racist, me!” rationalizations of his case like this:

“Let’s be realistic. If he was a white guy, he’d be just another pervert. I’ve watched a bunch of videos of people describing him, and several say things like, ‘I’m not being racist; he’s just purple.’ That is racist, though. Even if his skin was a bit purple, why mention it? Nobody calls Charles Manson ‘Beige Charlie.’ Are there really so many Akinwales of note in Liverpool that people have to classify them by their color? There is a part of me that feels sorry for Aki. He grew up without a family, and being a big gay Black lad in Liverpool in the 1980s doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”

Neither does getting literally “picked up” by him either.

The true horror story to have emerged from Aki’s legend, I would suggest, is not that of Candyman, but Sympathy for the Devil. Once upon a time, a “big black man” (Aki’s own verbatim words, remember) approaching English kids in the street and asking to feel them up, biceps-wise, was an idea so incredibly rare, comical, frightening, and worthy of note that schoolboys all across the region invented whole absurdist folktales about it. Nowadays, as the mass-immigration-driven surge in similar cases grows larger with each passing year, there is a risk they almost begin to sound normal.

Despite his promising name, I doubt that, come Halloween in thirty of forty years’ time, Mohammad Alhadi will still be remembered in awestruck terms by Merseyside’s still-terrified schoolboys as Purple Paki.