Runaway British Gangster Is Africa’s Least Likely Do-Gooder
“I’ve wasted 17 years of my life in prison since I was a kid. I used to sit there thinking: Is this all my life is, to be fucking resigned to jail? What I do in Africa, this gives me a purpose in life, something to fight for. I know I can make a genuine change.”
So says Sam Walker, speaking to The Daily Beast by phone from a compound guarded by former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, the West African state where the Liverpool crook-turned-social media celebrity—and, apparently, international fugitive—posts videos of himself digging wells and other humanitarian work in the slums to his 150,000-plus Instagram followers, positioning himself as a scouser MrBeast… if the YouTube philanthropist had a Liverpudlian accent and a rap sheet with over a hundred felonies to his name.
“If you look at a slum, you think why is it they can install oil pipelines thousands of miles across the sea, but they can’t install fresh water here?” the ex-con continued.