Still Breathing

by Donnelly, Anthony; Donnelly, Christopher; Spence, Simon

  The night shift in the factory caught a sneak thief in the office one night, down in the warehouse. It was a pal of Chris and Anthony’s. When they arrived, because it was an old friend, they didn’t know what to do with him as he was pleading he didn’t know it was their warehouse. They allegedly stripped him, put him in the boot of the car and took him to the Bench [pub]. When Anthony opened the boot everyone from the pub started bombarding the kid with pots. Then they let him run off naked. I think the kid probably shit himself but he got away lightly with that one. No one attempted to rob the warehouse again after that.

  Christopher: We thought we were getting professional – we got loads of Gio-Goi tape to put around the delivery boxes. It was at a time when we were getting boxes of clothes stolen by the delivery drivers. So we decided to set up a bogus delivery and follow it. We were all sat having a chippy [fish & chip shop] dinner that day and we got our chip papers and threw them in the box and any shit that was hanging round the office, old tins of paint, were put in as well. We gave the box a value of four grand and sent it out. Anyway, it didn’t get nicked and it went to the shop. This box has turned up and it was cash on delivery – so the geezer handed £4,000 over and opened the box. It was a laugh for us and then the story would go round the industry. He’d just paid four G for a load of shit from Gio-Goi.

  Harry Franco: There was a band from London called Flowered Up, they were like the London version of the Mondays and they were just as fucking mad. They might have the edge on the Mondays actually, because even their management was loopy. Anthony had known them for a while and we were supplying them clothes for the ‘Weekender’ video. I went to meet them to give them a box of clothes. They were playing in Warrington at Legends. I think I nearly had a heart attack that night. These lines of coke were like the M1. I thought they must have been doing speed. It was cocaine and it nearly killed me. I drove back in my car, all hunched over, driving with one hand clutching my chest, thinking, ‘I’m dying, I’m fucking dying.’

  I had half an ounce of powder hidden in the steering wheel of the Peugeot. I was knocking a bit out because we were in between seasonal ranges. I got this stuff and then someone showed me how to rock it up. This was just completely insane – drug dealing and selling Gio-Goi clothing seemed to go hand in hand at one time – let’s sell some drugs to keep it going. I watched someone throw an ounce of powder into a pot of boiling water and then the bicarb [bicarbonate of soda]. I’m thinking, ‘This is mad.’ You knew yourself that it was totally insane, that you were now a dealer as well as moving your clothes around.

  I smashed my car up, actually. I was coming back from somewhere and I was holding a parcel – it could have been prison for a long time. I was right out in the country and I hit a tree. It was the only thing that stopped me going down a huge drop. There was a big bag of the stuff, a fucking snowstorm going on inside the car.

  Anthony: Around that time we got heavily involved with quite a heavy team from Loughton, Essex. They had a breaker’s yard and other business. We had an on-going interest with them in the secondary car market. They gifted me with a BMW convertible and sent Chris an Astra GTE. There were lots of other things going on. Our horizons were expanding: there’s nowhere we can’t go, nothing we can’t do.

  Christopher: The business is booming but we’ve got all this stuff going on outside of the business. We then decided to put our money into a club with our cousins Tony and Dominic. It was part of the Apollo Theatre [in Ardwick]. It must have been an old ballroom because the dance floor was still there. It was all set up but it was disgusting, no one had been in there for fifteen years, maybe longer. So we started to refurbish it. At that time it was birth of the superclub [Miss Moneypennys, Cream, Renaissance,Ministry] so it made business sense. The PA system cost £100,000. We bought a £16,000 light for the roof and had to get permission from Manchester Airport to use it.

  Anthony: We thought that we’d have a club. We wanted a nightclub. We looked after an awful lot of people. People we were hiring to work on the club were our friends. The police were watching us more intensely now, unbeknown to us. What we’d do is one day a week we’d close the office and our friends would come down and sit in the office and smoke and drink and play music. We heard that people we know were getting taxed from people outside our estate. That was how it was moving in town. One particular person wanted to speak to me around this time and I had to go and confront the situation because I thought it was a direct challenge. It was exactly what I was trying to avoid. I didn’t need this shit.

  The meeting was arranged in a quiet location on the edge of my council estate. Manchester was a dangerous place. I had no choice. As it turned out it was not a problem, more a case of finding out where we actually stood with certain people. We have always acted independently – we do our own thing, mind our own business and do what we need to do. So we were both relieved that we didn’t have a problem but there was clearly still a situation brewing. Our friends were doing their own things and we were doing ours. We had no idea of half of the shit that was happening on the estate, so it was no surprise when something bad happened.

  Six days before the Donnelly Brothers planned to open their club Parliament, in late November 1992, Christopher’s best friend, who he had know since nursery school, Stephen Yates, age twenty-five, was brutally murdered in Wythenshawe.

  Christopher: Stephen was my best friend and I loved him with all my heart, but he was getting friendly with firms from all over and I thought immediately it would end in tears. He was bringing different people to the office. One Friday night I was sat watching The Word, waiting to see which band was wearing our clothes, and Stephen burst through the door, shouting, ‘Get me a gun, get me a gun.’ He was stood there crying he was that frustrated. He was going mental. He was having trouble with these kids like I knew he would. I sent him on his way, told him I couldn’t get him a gun and to get his head down. The next I heard was Stephen saw them in a car, chased them and shot at them about five or six times. Stephen knew there would be repercussions.

  On another night Stephen had a fight in a pub. I said, ‘You can’t keep doing that shit, you’ll end up getting done in.’ He said, ‘It was all right afterwards.’ But Stephen recognised there was going to be trouble and he was in the process of moving house off the estate. I’d just moved another pal off the estate to Didsbury, near where I was living, and Stephen was going to move house to get himself away from the trouble. He had his bin bags with his stuff in and was on his doorstep leaving to get away from it all. That was when he got killed. He knew it was on top. He was saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ but it was too late.

  Harry Franco: After Yatesy had been shot Anthony and Chris went missing and I got a call to come and pick them up from a pub in Wythenshawe at half ten in the morning. You could tell the landlord had the ‘wasp’ in the room with Anthony. He’d been there for about two days and this landlord was all on edge, at the end of his bar shaking. Anthony claimed that the inside of his head had caved in and he couldn’t feel the roof of his mouth. He’d been taking cocaine for about five days non-stop. He kept trying to show me, saying, ‘Look, look, there’s nothing. My head’s hollow.’

  Tracey: Stephen was like a brother to them. Chris locked himself in his house, wouldn’t let [his wife] Natalie in there or anyone. He started drinking heavily. Stephen didn’t get buried for about two months, because of the investigation [into the murder]. That was an awful time. I always remember Chris and Anthony telling me not to go to the opening of their club because I may get hurt. They said the mood was too hostile and there were too many guns on the premises.

  8

  IT’S COMIN’ ON TOP

  Anthony: How can you enjoy the opening night of your club when your pal has just been blasted to death? But we’d signed leases and we had to get the place open because it was costing us all money. Everyone from the music and fashion industry turned up for the launch but also every gangster in the town was in there as well. I
t was a blinding club, Parliament. We all spent a lot of money on it but we put no thought into what we were doing because the clothes were that successful. It was in the wrong area of town. Ardwick was not a nice area. The light on the roof was supposed to attract every top clubber in Manchester but it brought the wrong crowd. On the opening night all the villains were stood around the edge of the club looking at each other – it just wasn’t a very relaxing vibe. We used to wear bulletproof vests on a regular basis to get in and out of the club. It came with the territory, really. Everybody carried guns around that time. Manchester was a very, very violent place. If the club had been in the heart of the city centre it would have been successful but it was in a dark, desolate out of town spot. It was destined for failure.

  Christopher: We tried to make it into a really nice vibe. We booked all the best DJs of the time, people like Justin Robertson. Tracey was trying to book credible things but it just didn’t pan out to be a cool place. In fact, it was fucking crackers. Stephen was my best mate from the age of three, so opening the club a week after he died, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. In Parliament you felt completely on offer. You just didn’t know where it was going to come from next because of the shit that went on in there every fucking night. We were constantly fighting with different people for a variety of reasons. I turned up one day and the builder said, ‘Two blokes have been asking after you.’ You just didn’t know if someone was going to run out of an alley and put one in your head. If it wasn’t the door politics, it was something else. It was just one big headache that club. I was caning the booze and drugs to null the pain I was in.

  Harry Franco: The slogan for Parliament, on the posters and everything, advertising the opening, was, ‘No Guns, No Drugs, No Paranoia’. Out of all the clubs I’ve been to in my life, Parliament was the one that was most full of drugs, guns and paranoia. The atmosphere was just nasty. It was on the edge of kicking off all the time. Everybody knew who Anthony and Chris were and they’d know that most of their pals would be in there, so that could attract people from all over Manchester. People would want to get in amongst it. It was high profile, all of it.

  All the Gio-Goi staff were made to go to the club for certain events and it was like, ‘Ah fuck, got to go to Parliament. One night I’m going to lose me life in there.’ There was a platform above a bar and a little door round to it so you sat in there with your girlfriend. They built a cage round it so you got a drink and then went and sat in this cage with your girlfriend to watch the madness.

  One of my accounts came down from Scotland and I took them to The Hacienda. At about half one they started saying, ‘We want to go to this Gio-Goi club.’ So we left The Hacienda and drove over there. These four guys from Glasgow went off wandering around. They came back after no longer than ten minutes and one of them had been threatened with a broken bottle. They said, ‘Just get us out of here.’ So we went out and, sure enough, all their coats had been nicked and the motor had been done outside as well.

  Anthony: It was the biggest mistake we ever made. We spent fortunes on the refurbishment with Tony and Dominic. The sound system was a Peavey and it was brought in from America – state of the art. We were the first people with a paramedic for people in the nightclub. But I pulled up one night and there was a kid leaning out of the window firing a gun. It was like the Wild West. We were trying to do something nice, we’d spent a fortune, but it just attracted violence.

  One night I was hosting a big player from London and someone fell out of the ceiling in between us – head to toe in black soot. He’d taken loads of Es and crawled through the ducting. On a couple of occasions I flushed ears and bits of bodies down the toilet. The paramedics were for saving kids on E, but being able to stitch noses and ears back on was another thing. Guns were fired in the ceiling regularly. We built the cage above the bar where we locked our birds and then sent in the champagne. They banged on the window when they wanted the toilet.

  The women were actually so violent that we got a psychologist to come down to identify what was happening. The women were kicking fuck out of each other. The psychologist said, ‘The root of your problem starts with your toilets, so let’s go and have a look.’ When we walked in they said, ‘Your colours are a bit anti-social and you’ve got no whale music.’ We employed this firm to come in, paint the doors pastel colours, put flowers in, new sinks, paint the walls, put mirrors up and put this ambient tranquil music on so they can chill out. We thought it was going to be great, the women were going to be really mellow. We opened the club doors; the women smashed the mirrors, kicked the doors off, broke the tape cassette and ate the fucking flowers. It was known as the most violent club in town – and still is. Even though it’s closed down its reputation lives on.

  Christopher: Some nights you’d have five or six different firms in there. The politics of that situation were just a stress. It was a situation where they don’t like them and we’re mates with them. We were dealing with all that and still grieving for Stephen. The clothing business had been going from strength to strength but now we don’t feel like going in to work and we’ve been boozing all night. The business suffered and started to take a bit of a nosedive. Gio had been taking £100,000 a week and we owned a club and things were about to kick on further. It wasn’t the business that nosedived, it was us – our personal lives. Now we were going to our own club in our own bulletproof vests that we were selling three months before to other people. I used to put a vest on coming out of my front door with Natalie in the morning and took it off when I got to the office. Then I’d put it back on when I finished work to go home in.

  Anthony: We had this nightclub but the police wouldn’t leave us alone. The licensee, Richard Singleton, was registered from Gio-Goi’s office and the police were trying to close the club. They sent faxes to Richard saying, ‘Anthony Donnelly walked in, Donnelly was joined by other males known to the police.’ The police were obviously sending undercover in there to watch us. Basically the faxes said, ‘Donnelly’s the promoter in that place, how can we allow this man to run that club.’ That was like sending us a postcard saying, ‘It’s on you.’ That was another reason to get away. It felt like the film Scarface in that club.

  Christopher: The police were investigating us. We met our Tony and Dominic in the club for dinner one day and told them, ‘Listen, it’s not for us. We’re going to continue with our clothing company and we just want out of the club.’ It was too much aggravation.

  All through this the only thing that kept me going was running. I was running marathons. I ran into the office every day eight miles, sometimes in the bulletproof vest. I ran home. That kept me sane. Then on a Sunday morning Natalie would drive me out thirty miles and I’d run back. I’d been done drink driving so I was banned from driving.

  Anthony: We left Parliament after about eight weeks. We put a piece in the Manchester Evening News saying, ‘We’ve had enough, we’re going to concentrate on our clothes and we’re opening a fish restaurant in Cornwall.’ Funnily enough, they printed it in the Manchester Evening News and that was that, we were out of there.

  Christopher: We started taking some extra-long holidays in Tenerife because we had friends there. They were from Nottingham and London. They were out in Tenerife running the timeshares with the Italian Mafia but one of them had decided to open a shop in Las Americas and we just kept sending the [Gio-Goi] product out there. They were also looking after Nigel Benn when he was out there training for a fight. Nigel’s daughter and Anthony’s daughter had a joint birthday party out there. Daryll was five and Nigel’s daughter was a similar age. We went for a nice meal with both families. Then Nigel started wearing Gio-Goi baseball caps in his press conferences before his big fights with Eubank.

  Anthony: We were looking after our families – after Stephen’s death we were trying to disassociate ourselves from a lot of shit. Trying to put a gap between all the trouble and us. We were about to clinch the rich title. We could see the Bentleys, we could see the
mansions and we were mixing with people who were giving us million pound orders. If we could fulfil them we would be very rich. If we had any kind of management we would have made it. But people were afraid to get involved with us.

  Christopher: If we had some decent management the business would have gone from strength to strength no matter what. But you know what? No one could have managed us in that period anyway – we were unmanageable. So it was always going to be a car crash. When we were in Tenerife I told Anthony I’d had enough. It felt like we were fighting with every fucker. I said, ‘I’m going home and if anyone gets in my way, any fucker, anybody at all gives me any fucking hassle, I won’t be responsible.’ If anyone had approached me in a couple of months’ period after leaving Parliament, I don’t know what I would have done. I was about to combust. I started to go a bit demented with grief and frustration.

  Then on top of everything else that was going on, when we came back from Tenerife we found out the knitwear brothers were trying to nick the brand. They had removed our names from the paperwork, allegedly forged our signatures, and put themselves as sole company directors. It was made to look as if we had resigned and handed over our shares. They must have seen we were vulnerable and thought, ‘We’ll have this for ourselves.’ They had made more money with us than they’d ever made in their lives. The factory was on twenty-four hours a day, they couldn’t keep making the stuff fast enough. They didn’t think we would understand what they were trying to do.

  Anthony: They could see we weren’t spending any time on the business and were trying to take it over. So that was something else we had to deal with. We needed some information from Companies House and we found out what they were up to.

  Christopher: The atmosphere in our building was not great. To get into our office you walked through the loading bay, up a set of stairs, and then through a bit of their factory – and their office had all glass windows. So none of us are talking and we’d have to walk past their office to get in to ours. It made life uncomfortable knowing what they were trying to do. They were saying, ‘We are this business.’ I said, ‘No you’re not. You make fucking jumpers.’ We decided to up sticks and take the office, all the staff, the stock and the desks. We got a forty-footer and emptied the lot in a day, left this massive big empty space.