Michael de Freitas was born in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, to an "Obeah-practising black woman from Barbados and an absent Portuguese father from St Kitts".

[2] Encouraged by his mother to pass for white, "Red Mike" was a headstrong youth and was expelled from school at the age of 14.

[2] In 1957, he emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he settled in London and worked as an enforcer and frontman for Peter Rachman, the notorious slum landlord.

[7] Later that year, he became the first non-white person to be charged and imprisoned under the UK's Race Relations Act, which was designed to protect Britain's Black and Asian populations from discrimination.

[8] He was sentenced to 12 months in prison, having been arrested on the accusation of using words likely to stir up hatred "against a section of the public in Great Britain distinguished by colour".

[17] In February 1971, Michael X fled to his native Trinidad and Tobago, where he started an agricultural commune devoted to Black empowerment 16 miles (26 km) east of the capital, Port of Spain.

At the time of the discovery, Michael X and his family were in Guyana by invitation of the Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham.

[18] A witness at his trial said that Skerritt was a member of Michael X's "Black Liberation Army" and had been killed by him because he refused to obey orders to attack a local police station.

[19][18] Stanley Abbott was hanged for the murder of Gale Benson in 1979, while Edward Chadee's death sentence was reduced to life in prison.

[22] Michael X also left behind fragments of a novel about a romantic black hero who wins the abject admiration of the narrator, a young woman named Lena Boyd-Richardson.

The film claims that Michael X was in possession of indecent photographs of Princess Margaret and used them to avoid criminal prosecution by threatening to publish them; according to the movie plot, X killed Gale Benson because she was a British Secret Services agent and revealed where he kept the blackmail material.

[26] Michael X is the eponymous title of a play, by the writer Vanessa Walters, that takes the form of a 1960s Black Power rally and was performed at The Tabernacle Theatre, Powis Square, London W11 (Notting Hill), in November 2008.