Dennis Rodman's bromance with the dictator

On the surface, the former basketball player Dennis Rodman seems easy to grasp.

He’s a 6ft 8in black guy, with dyed blond hair, pierced nostrils, a pierced lip, and around 100 tattoos, the largest of which is, as he puts it, “a spread-eagled beauty pleasuring herself”.

He is, in his own words, “America’s No 1 badass”. So: he’s big, brash, edgy and horny. He says he’s slept with 2,000 women — including Madonna, whom he tried to impregnate. His lived life has been a rolling tabloid pageant — hotels, nightclubs, booze, brawls, cops, motorbikes, doctors, rehab, hundreds upon hundreds of strippers, more hotels — and, recently, increasingly extreme PR stunts. I’m meeting him to talk about his latest, a strange concoction that involves Rodman, an Irish bookmaker and a Third World dictator.