Retired Judge Michael Argyle and Felix Dennis will switch places in a

libel re-run of the Oz trial. Twenty four years ago Felix was a young

co-defendant in the controversial case and today he is a

multi-millionaire publisher determined to clear his name, as Roger

Hutchinson reports

IN THE sultry early afternoon of Thursday, August 5, 1971, the

56-year-old High Court Judge, Michael Victor Argyle, peered over the

rims of his half-moon spectacles in Court Number Two of the Central

Criminal Courts at the Old Bailey, and passed his sentences on the last

of the three editors of the underground magazine Oz.

''You are younger than the other two,'' pronounced Argyle to a

24-year-old Londoner named Felix Dennis, ''and very much less

intelligent. Nine months.''

''I am very sorry you had to do that,'' said Dennis as they led him

away.

What does it mean in Westerns, when the reluctant gunslinger utters

those words? It means: ''This may take some time, but watch out.''

Last month the papers were finally served. The street-selling hippie

who disappeared from Justice Argyle's sight 24 years ago, who was hauled

off by uniformed officers to serve a jail sentence which Argyle said he

felt he had to impose because the defendant could not possibly afford to

pay a fine, re-emerged into the retired judge's life.

Having spent the intervening years amassing, through publishing, a

personal fortune of #155m, the 48-year-old Felix Dennis engaged the most

expensive and successful libel lawyer in the country and issued a High

Court writ against the 80-year-old Michael Victor Argyle. It conjured a

gorgeous, improbable analogy: like some latter-day lost Dickensian hero,

Felix Dennis had burst back into the drawing room to avenge his family's

name, do down the erstwhile persecutor of his friends, and claim his

inheritance.

It has been a long haul. Three years after the trial Oz closed down,

and Felix Dennis began to lay the foundations of his own independent

publishing empire.

He started with a poster-magazine based on the popularity of the film

star Bruce Lee. Kung Fu Monthly enabled its publisher to branch out into

the vulnerable young world of personal-computer magazines, and to

establish himself in New York. By 1983 he had sold his first title, and

had become a millionaire. By 1991 Paddy Ashdown was presenting him with

a UK Magazine Publisher of The Year award, and by 1995 he was allegedly

the 56th richest British citizen.

He has a condominium in New York, a mansion and 450 acres near

Stratford-on-Avon, an apartment in the West End of London, a large chunk

of the Caribbean island of Mustique, and a helicopter and Rolls-Royce to

get about in. Felix Dennis has played the money game on both sides of

the Atlantic, and won.

It has become a popular received wisdom that Dennis was prompted to a

single-minded pursuit of wealth by Justice Michael Argyle's unpleasant

dismissal of his intelligence back in 1971.

But Dennis was a natural businessman. When he started hand-selling Oz

on London's King's Road its sales rocketed; when he progressed to

selling advertising for the magazine, Oz found itself with money in the

bank. Those streetwise qualities, coupled with the crash-course facility

in hands-on publishing which the underground press gave most of its

graduates, was enough to make his millions. No gratuitous insults,

however publicly announced, were needed to make this man rich.

And since becoming rich . . . well, he has had a busy life to lead.

There are plenty of stories about Felix Dennis late at night, but none

of them involves him sitting around obsessively swearing vengeance on

the judge. The legal papers which have just been served on Michael

Victor Argyle are, rather, the retired judge's own doing.

After the Appeal Court judges had quashed the Oz convictions

(''because of the serious and substantial misdirection of the jury by

Michael Argyle,'' said Lord Chief Justice Widgery), Argyle continued on

his kenspeckle way. The Scottish adjective is appropriate: Michael

Argyle claims direct descent from a member of Charles Edward Stuart's

Jacobite army who was supposedly marooned in the English Midlands in the

winter of 1745. This ancestor and his kin, says the retired judge, went

on to become highwaymen . . .

He has survived more than one scrape with the libertarians of the

national press, raised minor furores for freeing rapists and issuing

racist comments, but they were comparatively small beer. There would

never again be an event so suited to Justice Argyle's temperament as the

Oz trial. Michael Argyle had peaked early. And he has spent the

subsequent years fine-tuning, in after-dinner talks and lectures to

public schoolboys, his own instructively idiosyncratic version of what

was happening at the Old Bailey in the summer of 1971.

In 1988 Michael Argyle retired from the Old Bailey bench. He continued

to be active in a number of his favoured causes, most notably the

campaign to restore the death penalty. In 1992 he travelled to Australia

to visit some members of his family. Alerted to his arrival, the

Australian press waylaid him at the airport and asked him about one of

their own, Felix Dennis's co-defendant Richard Neville, who was, by

then, settled back in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.

''Richard Neville was a card-carrying communist,'' Argyle told them,

blithely ignorant of the fact that Neville was incapable of joining a

bus queue, ''and the Oz trial was about a dirty little magazine being

peddled to children -- but it was a front for pornographers and drug

barons.''

To those who did not frequent Michael Argyle's social evenings, this

latest departure into the realms of fantasy came as something of a

shock. It had long been realised that the judge had been uncomfortable

with the rude ingredients of Oz magazine. But drug barons? Where did

that come from?

Far from being ''drug barons'' themselves, the editors of Oz had

campaigned against drug barons. Far from being ''card-carrying

communists'', they had argued, in true hippie fashion, that the

established right/left political polarisation was anachronistic.

But Richard Neville had neither the inclination nor the money to take

Argyle to court three years ago, and there the whole, odd story might

have foundered if Neville had not decided to publish his reminiscences.

Last month Hippie Hippie Shake was indulgently reviewed in The Spectator

magazine by the former defence counsel at the Oz trial, John Mortimer.

And this brought Michael Argyle snarling once more from his lair.

In the very next issue of The Spectator he offered his own version of

events. It made sensational, jaw-dropping copy. ''Behind the Oz

magazine,'' offered Argyle, ''was a conspiracy of criminals who were

selling it, together with soft drugs, at the entrance to state schools,

youth clubs and such. The stuff (drugs) was pouring in by ship . . . ''

When, he continued, he had put the Oz editors behind bars, ''the

imports seemed to slacken''. But after the Appeal Court had quashed

their convictions ''the traffic picked up again''.

Felix Dennis promptly hired the #3000-a-day QC, George Carman, and

issued High Court writs for libel against the editor of The Spectator,

Dominic Lawson, against The Spectator itself, and against Michael

Argyle. Carman's reputation is such that -- with the notable recent

exception of Graeme Souness -- his opponents tend to settle quickly and

out of court.

It is said that Dennis has no real interest in taking Argyle all the

way to court, that he is not about to make of the judge a hoary martyr

of the right. After 24 years, it seems that Felix Dennis just wants to

stop all of the nonsense. And sure enough, the latest issue of The

Spectator contains the grovelling apology which Dennis had demanded.

But Michael Argyle is being less than co-operative. He refused an

invitation to attach his name to The Spectator's disclaimer, and told a

photographer that he looked forward to ''taking Felix Dennis'' in a

counter-action ''for five million pounds . . . ''

After all of the threats, the court cases, libels, after-dinner

speeches and pronouncements to the press, there are still outstanding

questions concerning the trial of Oz, which might ironically only be

answered from the witness box if Michael Argyle proceeds with his

counter-action.

Where, for example, was his Apocrypha born? He was obviously under the

impression, in 1971 and ever since, that rather than merely presiding

over the ridiculous prosecution of a harmless and impecunious hippie

magazine, he had been detailed to stamp out a major threat to

civilisation in Britain.

The judge was working to a different agenda from anybody else at the

Old Bailey. He was locking away ''communist drug barons'' and ''a

conspiracy of criminals''. He was, by his own admission, trying and

sentencing the three men not for the mild offences of which, after his

misdirection of the jury, they had been found guilty, but for other

rumoured activities of which they had never been accused or charged.

That was in itself a disturbing interpretation of the judicial

process, and it begs further questions. Did he invent those fantastical

activities of the three Oz editors all on his own? Or was he briefed

about them? If it was the latter, who whispered such extraordinary lies

into his receptive ear, and why? If this latest retrial of Oz magazine

collapses after an apology in The Spectator, Michael Victor Argyle may

take the fascinating answers to those questions with him to the grave.

'It has become a popular received wisdom that Dennis was prompted to a

single-minded pursuit of wealth by Justice Michael Argyle's unpleasant

dismissal of his intelligence back in 1971'