One of the most mysterious characters in the Paul Is Dead phenomenon is the Moroccan born Mohammed Chtaibi. His story appeared in Gadfly in 2000.
The article, "
The Man Who Killed Paul McCartney" (available online) was written by Jim Yoakum, who is actually the executor of the estate of the late member of Monty Python, Graham Chapman.
The article was reprinted in issue #150 of
Beatlefan in 2004.
According to Yoakum, Chtaibi (formerly Mohammed Hadjij) was taken under the wing of McCartney friend and Gallery owner Robert Fraser in the early 1960s. It was Fraser who exposed McCartney and members of the Rolling Stones to artistic influences from various far reaches of the underground. For example, he hung out with William S. Burroughs, who apparently watched Paul composing Eleanor Rigby. Most of McCartney's Crowley connections are through Fraser. In "Many Years From Now" Paul writes:
It was a showbizzy thing which came from more the Hampstead crowd. You'd rent a movie from a movie house and you'd have an evening for your children, 'We're showing Jason and the Argonauts tonight.' Ringo used to do it a lot, every night he'd just hire a movie. Robert rather liked that and turned it more into an art thing. So he would hire Bruce Conner's A Movie, Kenneth Anger, he'd pull in the harder West Coast stuff. I liked it, it was very liberating. Kenneth Anger is one of the most well known disciples of Aleister Crowley. Around the same time Fraser probably accompanied McCartney on visits to the home of
Jimmy Page, another Crowley disciple.
It was Fraser who commissioned Peter Blake to paint a copy of Sir Edwin Landseer’s 1851 painting "The Monarch of the Glen" to hang above McCartney's fireplace in 1966. Blake, of course went on to design the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I couldn't find a picture of Blake's version of Landseer’s painting, but I did find another Blake piece that I thought was interesting. It is called "Love."
Mohammed Chtaibi became Robert Fraser's personal assistant and according to the article, his primary duties were to "cook, drive and carry dope." He was probably doing all three activities on a day in January of 1967 when he became a key component in the debunking of the Paul Is Dead theory. On that day, Fraser and Chtaibi pulled up at Paul McCartney's residence at 7 Canendish Avenue in a taxi. Fans camped outside the gate mistook Chtaibi for Paul McCartney. Once the two got inside McCartney's house it was party time with a variety of drugs pulled a secret stash from the inside of a hollowed out book. With the party in progress, three members of the Rolling Stones arrived. That is a picture of Mohammed Chtaibi with Keith Richards below.
Around nightfall, they decided to move the party to Keith Richards' place. Everyone except Chtaibi piled into Mick Jagger's car. Chtaibi followed in McCartney's custom made Mini Cooper. Supposedly it was a dangling seatbelt that was run over by a passing vehicle that caused Chtaibi to lose control of the car and crash it into a pole, leaving the driver seriously injured and unconscious. Chtaibi was taken to a nearby hospital as rumors spread for the second time in a month or two about a Paul McCartney car crash. A short time later, the Official Beatles News Machine reported that this car crash started a false rumor about McCartney being dead. You have seen the quick shot of the Beatles Monthly article in several Rotten Apple videos.
Okay, so here is Paul Is Dead Crackpot Theory #587:
The Beatles brain trust has a meeting in early January of 1967 in an office at Savile Row within the building they would eventually use for Apple headquarters. A month or two have passed since Paul McCartney's fatal accident and the members are trying to figure out how to dispel the rumors that have been working their way around London. One of the members, probably John says, "I have an idea of how to throw them off the track." Everybody waits for John to reveal the plan. With his mind churning with creativity he says, "Let's have a car accident." The others groan and roll their eyes, but John sticks to his guns.
"No, wait, hear me out," said John. "We get Mohammed over there to take Paul's car out and wreck it. Make sure there are some witnesses around. Then after a few days, bring out that Mohammed was driving Paul's car. He's injured, but he'll be all right. Then Bill here, uh I mean Paul, comes out and tells everybody that it was his car, but not him in the accident. We're completely above board about it. We even put a little blurb in the Beatles Monthly about the accident and the rumors of Paul's death. Years from now the line will blur between what happened in November of 1966 and January of 1967 and everyone will think that the rumors of Paul's real death were based upon Mohammed's accident."
The Beatles follow through with John's plan and invite "insider" Mohammed Chtaibi to various activities related to Sgt. Pepper. That's him pictured to the left of the Ringo, George and John at the photo shoot for the Pepper cover.
Mohammed Chtaibi, now in his mid 60s, has outlived his compensation for his role in the cover up. He spots Iamaphoney's Rotten Apple videos on YouTube. He emails him and tells him, "You don't know what you're doing, but I can tell you the whole truth." Then he agrees to film an interview that is shown in part at the beginning of
Rotten Apple 101
Did I have you going there? I can dream, can't I?
