Can the Bitcoin Batman save Bedford? He's seen his hometown ravaged by shoplifting, drug abuse and homelessness. Now he's splashing his own cash to make the streets safe

Daily Mail​

3 days ago

A life-size bronze statue of Bedford's most famous son, John Bunyan, stands at the end of the high street – a stone's throw from the prison where he wrote his best known work, The Pilgrim's Progress.
Today, some 360 years after he was banged up for preaching in public, the God-fearing author, whose Christian allegory was set to music in the hymn To Be A Pilgrim, is facing a tough crowd.
By 4pm, the nearby park benches have been entirely taken over by alcoholics.
'Come here at the right time and there will be 20 or 30 of them,' says my guide, local businessman Peter McCormack. 'They'll be shouting or fighting or harassing people who walk past.'
Another group of undesirables can be found at the bus station, where aggressive begging is the order of the day, while visitors to Bedford's pedestrianised shopping precinct have to negotiate doorways filled with the belongings of rough sleepers.
Down an alley next to his town centre coffee shop, McCormack shows me a courtyard where drug addicts gather after dark. It contains small piles of rubbish and the remains of burned mattresses.
'From time to time, people leave used needles here too,' he says.
'This is the centre of town, but there's anti-social behaviour everywhere. Dealers on e-bikes. Crackheads who'll run up and shout in your face. People shooting up in stairwells. Alcoholics in the parks.
'No wonder the shops are all closing and the place looks like a s***hole. People who don't feel safe won't come and spend their money, will they?'
On the basis of our tour, McCormack certainly seems to have a point.
In theory, the centre of Bedford – a commuter town with 185,000 inhabitants and 20 churches, which lies just 40 minutes from London's St Pancras station, and where suburban executive homes fetch upwards of £1m – ought to be bustling and prosperous. In reality, it's a case study in modern civic decay.
Dozens of stores, including an entire arcade, lie empty. Large chain stores, such as Debenhams, are long gone, along with The Body Shop and Marks & Spencer, its former premises now occupied by a B&M discount shop.
Graffiti covers shuttered windows. Several bank branches have closed, together with the once-imposing police station, which has been replaced by a comically tiny 'community hub'.
The only businesses which seem to be doing a decent trade are vape stores, takeaways and a large Wetherspoons pub, The Pilgrim's Progress, where you can buy a pint of Ruddles Best for the bargain price of £1.79.
'When I was a lad, I used to walk around Bedford and feel totally safe,' says McCormack. 'Now I've got a daughter who's 15 and I won't let her do the same thing. That's a problem.
'There's a plague of addiction and crime, shoplifting is a real problem, and the whole place looks a mess.
'The other day, one of the shopkeepers sent me a message saying, 'There's a guy running round off his face, exposing himself.' Who wants to come shopping in a place like that?'
The same could, of course, be said for many of Britain's town centres, which have been in decline for a generation – thanks to the rise of online shopping and out-of-town retail parks and being ravaged by the pandemic, and now having to survive in a world where Chancellor Rachel Reeves is taxing shopkeepers to the hilt.
The justice system has also more or less given up on enforcing laws against shoplifting, casual drug use and other petty crime.
Yet McCormack, a heavily tattooed 46-year-old, who has made a small fortune in Bitcoin and for years hosted cryptocurrency's most successful podcast, is determined he will not sit back and watch his town go to the dogs.
Instead, today – and every Saturday this month – he will pay for ten private security guards to patrol the streets of Bedford, armed with body cameras and radios, to help deter crime, hostile begging, drug-taking, public drunkenness and other anti-social behaviour.
The £10,000 initiative, which has seen him dubbed 'Bitcoin's first Batman', is designed to entice shoppers back to the town.
He also runs a variety of businesses including the Auction Room bar and Real Coffee, a cafe which doubles up as the club shop of Real Bedford, the local non-league football club which he co-owns with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the American twins who co-founded Facebook and have since made billion-dollar fortunes in crypto.
'People tell me they won't come to Bedford because the town centre looks like a s***hole and is dangerous,' he says.
'Every year, we see more crackheads, more aggressive beggars, more shoplifters. Women are being harassed, shops are closing and families no longer feel safe.
McCormack, a heavily tattooed 46-year-old, who has made a small fortune in Bitcoin and for years hosted cryptocurrency's most successful podcast, is determined he will not sit back and watch his town go to the dogs
'I've been saying for ages that if the police won't fix it, then I will do it for them. They haven't, so here we are.'
McCormack's patrolmen are instructed to act as the equivalent of 'scarecrows', deterring crime by their presence. They will follow known criminals, including shoplifters, report law-breaking to the police and, on occasions where they witness a potentially dangerous incident, have been instructed to intervene.
'I've travelled to a lot of failed states, places like El Salvador or Venezuela, and you get parallel institutions, where people take responsibility for their own security. You see it in South Africa, with gated communities. That's what we are doing here in Bedford.
'I am sick of the decline. I don't think the police can sort it. Too much tape and bureaucracy. So I am going to put my money where my mouth is.
'In a few years' time, Bedford is either going to look like Stoke, or like Bath, and I don't want it to be Stoke.'
The project is not without controversy. Some have accused McCormack of talking Bedford down, while the county's police and crime commissioner, John Tizard, has described his project as 'political stunt'.
Mr Tizard says anti-social behaviour is 'at a long-term low in Bedford town centre' and he argues that 'keeping our town centres safe is the responsibility of publicly accountable police and local authorities, not private individuals.'
McCormack promptly hit back on X, where he boasts nearly 600,000 followers, telling Mr Tizard: 'You are a weak man and you should resign.'
His combative way with words will be familiar to listeners of his podcast, which has seen him interview well-known figures and activists from across the political spectrum, including Liz Truss, Ann Widdecombe, George Galloway and the US military whistleblower Chelsea Manning, or those who have followed his topsy-turvy career. As his unusual life story attests, he is quite the disrupter.
Raised by a nurse and an aircraft engineer, who 'worked all hours' to send him to Bedford Modern, a local private school, McCormack says that being 'a poor kid among rich kids' forced him to develop an entrepreneurial streak – selling football stickers and marbles at the school gates before setting up a heavy metal music fanzine to get free tickets to gigs.
The project is not without controversy. Some have accused McCormack of talking Bedford down, while the county's police and crime commissioner, John Tizard, has described his project as 'political stunt'
At Buckinghamshire New University in the late 1990s, he taught himself how to build a website for the publication. Then his landlord, who ran a window company, paid him £450 to create one for their business. A local recruitment business also offered him £2,000 to build its website.
Within a few months, he'd abandoned his studies and moved to London, where a dotcom firm had offered him a £1,000-a-week job.
In 2007, he started his own agency with a friend, titled McCormack & Morrison. It specialised in web design, social media and marketing and quickly grew to 35 staff, generating a turnover of about £3m a year.
But in 2014, McCormack's marriage to the mother of his two children collapsed and following the divorce, his life went spectacularly off the rails.
'I basically got addicted to cocaine,' he says. 'I went hard. To the point where I was taking a gram a day and drinking heavily every night. There's doing the drug at parties or in a bar in London on Friday night, and there's doing it at 11am because your head's gone. And I was the latter.'
There followed a 'Jerry Maguire' moment where he sabotaged his successful career. 'I felt like I was constantly trying to sell people shit they didn't need and lying. So I wrote this article headlined 'Online advertising doesn't work', published it and walked out.'
Then, having sold the remnants of his business for £180,000, he decided to hit the cocaine even harder, sparking a downward spiral. He was eventually hospitalised, his heart beating at over 200 beats a minute, with a suspected heart attack
Luckily, it turned out to be the less serious supraventricular tachycardia, an arrhythmia triggered by drug consumption.
But the near-miss persuaded McCormack to clean himself up. Ignoring doctors, who had advised him to take antidepressants, he bought some running shoes, temporarily turned vegan, quit booze and began jogging every day.
While pounding the streets of Bedford, McCormack began listening to podcasts by Rich Roll, an American former drug addict- turned ultra-endurance athlete and healthy living influencer. A friendship ensued and, in 2017, he asked Roll for advice on how to start a career in podcasting.
'He basically told me, 'Pick a subject and stick with it,'' McCormack says. 'I had come across Bitcoin in the past because I'd used it to buy cocaine. I thought, 'That'll do.' So I got on a plane and flew to America to interview people in the industry.' Later that year, he launched a podcast called What Bitcoin Did.
In the Bitcoin boom which followed, it became the world's most successful crypto podcast, making roughly £10m in advertising revenue and turning McCormack – who invested much of the profits in the online currency – into a very wealthy man indeed.
In 2021, he spent a portion of his fortune on Bedford FC, which was languishing in the tenth tier of the non-league pyramid. They were rebranded as Real Bedford, with a skull and crossbow logo, and marketed as the world's first 'Bitcoin club', where fans can pay in crypto and staff and players can take wages in it.
Games were streamed online to followers of McCormack's podcast, who spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on merchandise.
Consecutive promotions followed and then, in February, the Winklevoss twins came on board.
The brothers, who in 2004 sued their Harvard contemporary Mark Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for a social media website (he settled for $65m and actor Armie Hammer starred as the twins in the film The Social Network), have since made billion-dollar fortunes in crypto and had been meeting McCormack to discuss collaborations with his podcast.
They were apparently fascinated by the concept – alien to American sport and which revolves around closed shop franchises – that a small local team could potentially be promoted to the Premier League. They agreed to pay £3.6m for a 45 per cent stake.
Real Bedford has since been promoted and will start this season in English football's seventh tier.
What is less clear, of course, is how deep someone's pockets need to be to sort out a town like Bedford. 'We need people to come to town, buy stuff and mooch around shops,' McCormack says. 'That starts by making them actually feel safe here'
McCormack, meanwhile, describes himself as a 'budget Ryan Reynolds' after the Hollywood star who owns Wrexham AFC and whose story is the subject of hit Disney+ series Welcome To Wrexham.
'You can buy pretty much any league, depending on how deep your pockets are,' is how he puts it.
What is less clear, of course, is how deep someone's pockets need to be to sort out a town like Bedford.
'We need people to come to town, buy stuff and mooch around shops,' he says. 'That starts by making them actually feel safe here. There are loads of rich people round here but, at the moment, they spend their money in London or Cambridge.
'I have this thing I tell people: that if half the people who live in town spent just a tenner a week more here, that would add up to £50m a year.
'Imagine what that could achieve. A few security guards might not instantly fix Bedford, or any other town for that matter. But it's got to be a start.