More will agree with investigative reporter John Sweeney, who unearthed the Mafia allegations - three years ahead of the FBI - while making a documentary for the BBC's Money Programme "What is it with newspaper barons?" asks Sweeney. "We had a front-page picture of loads of animals being burned," he said. "He looked at it and announced what headline he wanted: 'Holocaust'. When Desmond was told what offence such a move would cause, he snapped cockily: 'How can I offend people with that? I don't think it's offensive and I am a four-by-two myself.'" Unusually, he was persuaded to change his mind.Meanwhile, for all his faults, Desmond does have a warm side - he is a tireless charity worker, "far beyond anything that is made public", according to a supporter.

As a result, the young Desmond was taken along to his father's business meetings. He says this is where he picked up a love of finance, and partly explains why he was so bored at school that he dropped out at 15 In 1974, Desmond began publishing a magazine for musicians. His move into the "adult" market came eight years later, when he bought the rights to publish a British edition of Penthouse.Of course, his critics need not be snobs or anti-Semites. They may have problems with any pornographer who buys an established newspaper group, donates £100,000 to the ruling party after the Government had given the go-ahead to his purchase and goes on to enjoy drinks with the Prime Minister. (Though Desmond and Blair have subsequently fallen out; the former is now officially a Tory.) They may dislike a show-off: Desmond is famously presented with a banana on a silver plate every day in his office by a liveried butler. ("I pushed the chair," he says.)A former Daily Express executive recalls Desmond walking on to the editorial floor during the height of the foot-and mouth crisis.

Or a bully: Desmond is said to have locked one of his executives in a cupboard and has had to deny throwing a chair at another senior employee. (Desmond hopes that Livingstone's plan to free up London's newspaper market will give him an opening to challenge the Standard.)Livingstone's words echoed the regular trawlings through the grandfather's past by Desmond, who has been at war with the current Lord Rothermere ever since the company wrote to Express subscribers to tell them that their newspaper "has just been bought by one of Britain's most prolific peddlers of pornography". But some of it might be plain old-fashioned snobbery: his is, of course, the newest of new money. Desmond's father was the managing director of the screen advertising group Pearl & Dean, but the family, from north London, found their comfortable lives disrupted when Richard's father went deaf. Had it not been for the New York court case, Desmond would have enjoyed last week.