Still Breathing

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

  The knitwear brothers were shouting, ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘Who’s going to stop us?’

  We refurbished the stables at my mum and dad’s place and we moved the business to the sticks. It was the only place we could take it.

  Harry Franco: It all retreated to the barn and Chris was just keeping it going with some shirts and stuff. We released a girl’s range called, ‘Gio-Goi Jus’. Everybody wanted it but there was no stock. The hunger for it was still there but a lot of the really good accounts were abandoning us because of not getting their orders, not because the gear wasn’t selling in their shops – they just couldn’t get the gear, and so they’d lost faith in putting orders in, really.

  Christopher: We didn’t have a Gio-Goi Jus collection as such. I made 2,000 T-shirts to take to the Clothes Show [Live, trade show at the NEC, in Birmingham]. We just had a load of fabric – pink, red, green – and I got a long-sleeve women’s T-shirt made up and mixed up the sleeves. You’d get a T-shirt with a green body, one pink sleeve, and one red sleeve with Gio-Goi Jus on. I sold out in day. It was a different business model. If we knew we could make £50,000 at the Clothes Show we would make the clothes just for that. I bought a load of check miniskirts, £8 each, put the Gio-Goi name on them and put them out for £15 at the Clothes Show.

  Two of the reps, Nico and Joycey, opened a showroom in the building where Factory Too was [Factory Records had collapsed in 1992 and now Tony Wilson was attempting to revive the label]. They were all reps exclusive to Gio-Goi – they got a wage, we paid for their car, petrol and they got commission. If you were an agent you got no wage, you used your own car and you got a higher commission. We’d sacked everyone as reps so we didn’t have the overheads and they’d all become agents. Nico and Joycey were selling Gio and whatever other brands they could get their hands on. At that point they didn’t want us anywhere near their office! They thought they could go it alone, I guess.

  Anthony: We’d disappeared to do the label from somewhere more tranquil and peaceful. We just wanted to be left alone. It was a very violent time; we could only trust our immediate crew. We did a photo shoot with some pals from Moss Side and one turned up with a bullet in his leg. Our models were turning up with snapped knives in them and bullet wounds. We were blagging it, saying we were proper businessmen, but we had not made that complete transition.

  Christopher: We then found out the knitwear brothers had attempted to register the brand name Gio-Goi to themselves solely. It was coming from every angle.

  Anthony: It was full-on, non-stop shit. The knitwear brothers thought they had a claim on the label. It was a business arrangement that they’d misinterpreted. We felt it was ours and they felt it was theirs. We were ready to prove it beyond any doubt, but we weren’t ready for the fact statements had been made saying we’d coerced and threatened the label out of them.

  Christopher: Anthony and I had a meeting with some acquaintances on top of the Arndale Centre car park. Both sides decided it would be best left alone at that point. It was agreed to let the legal dispute be settled by lawyers.

  Anthony: Around this time, Chris went to see a psychologist because of the way his head was. He lay down on the shrink’s sofa and the shrink got all geared up and ready with his pen and paper. He told Chris to close his eyes: ‘I’m going to help you.’ Chris put his head down and started to rattle off what was going on in his life and when he woke up the shrink’s hair was on fire. He turned round to Chris and said, ‘There’s nothing at all I can do for you, son, but could you do us a favour? Can you come back when it’s all finished and tell us what happened?’

  Christopher: We had legal bills coming out of our ears. We were living hand to mouth regarding the business. It was getting harder and harder to make stuff. We had taken our eye off the ball. The product wasn’t great. We couldn’t concentrate with all the other stuff going on. We were trying to run a business, but one minute I was picking buttons the next I was in a dark alleyway having a meeting with a load of lunatics carrying guns. The whole thing was chaos.

  While we were out at the barn, we tried to inject new blood into the company. We took staff on. A kid left Bozo, one of our stockists, to work for us. He got pally with Anthony but he had a nervous breakdown. Anthony ran him into the ground. We took another kid on, a friend of a friend. He said he was a black belt at karate but he was a compulsive liar. He was packing boxes for us. Soon after all our clothes were turning up on the street around Manchester and we couldn’t figure it out. It was this kid. I put it on him; I didn’t hit him, just shouted at him. He pissed his pants in front of everyone. It was in his trainers and he squelched as he walked out. He’d been robbing us for months. He’d had about £5,000 of gear. He repaid us.

  Anthony: It was a struggle to keep things going at the barn. So much was going on that our concentration waned – the candle was burning out. We were in the barn around six months and then we decided we should move back to town. We met a third party who found us a building. They didn’t know exactly what was going on and they got the story same as everybody else: everything is fine. So we agreed to buy this building for the business. It was at the top of Princess Parkway near Castlefield. It was an easy location to do business from. Business was suffering from a barn in the country. It made more sense to move back to town.

  Christopher: All our stock was in the barn at my mum’s house! It doesn’t look very good. So we moved in to this new building. We wanted to get Gio-Goi back to where it belonged. It had gone through a very sticky patch. We were getting fabrics from where we could, whoever would give us credit – so they were not necessarily the fabrics we wanted to use. We were trying to put a range together but we still had these problems with the litigation over Gio-Goi. We found a shirt manufacturer in Manchester. We made some nice shirts but there was no real vibe behind the label anymore, there was no energy or rawness. I found this peach check fabric and made thousands of beach trousers, basic chino shape, pockets and drawstring. We sold loads of them. I made these gold and silver parka-style coats, 500 of each, and we could not give them away. They were the statement pieces. A year later everyone was doing gold and silver coats. I did some press and was talking about using natural fabrics: wools, sheepskin, leather. Blur started to wear the stuff. The PR kept the brand alive.

  We were trying to rebuild our lives. A friend of our cousins, Perry Hughes, was helping out. He had got involved with Parliament during the licensing problems. Perry was good at dealing with the legal side of things regarding the ownership of the brand. He now took over the legals, allowing Anthony and me to concentrate on Gio-Goi. A friend of ours came in to do the sales called Bobby. Our pal John [Faulkner] turned up and was with us. I trust him with my life. He’s a great lad, a grafter. He wasn’t really working for Gio-Goi, but he came in the office every day to help out. It was a bit of a difficult situation because we were still in litigation and we might lose the label. We were just trying to push things forward.

  For some strange reason we also decided that we would open a shop in London, in Covent Garden. We took a lease and started working on the refurbishment of the shop. We also took a flat in London. The shop soaked up a hell of a lot of money.

  Anthony: The London flat was above Issey Miyake in Knightsbridge overlooking Daphne’s restaurant. It was not cheap. The litigation with Gio-Goi came to a head in February 1994. I was running through town with a barrister to overturn a judgement that the knitwear brothers had got to say that they’d won. The barrister was putting his wig on as he was running through town. We overturned the judgement. One of the knitwear brothers took his Gio-Goi shirt off in court and spat on it.

  Christopher: He was shouting at our representative, ‘Go on, you might as well take the shirt off my back.’ We were fifteen minutes away from losing the label. It was one of those where it was going to get stamped at 4 p.m. We ended up getting the brand back fully. We were the ones doing all this work, trying to keep the brand going anyway, so it was justified. Gio
-Goi was ours and is in our bones.

  Anthony: So finally there was some good news. But what we didn’t know was at the same time there was now a serious police investigation that had been put on us. The police called it Operation Bluebell. It was just a progression of the observations they were making when we were at the building where the trees had gone missing earlier. Twenty-five of us went over to Puerto Banus [on the Costa del Crime] for our Tony’s stag do. The hotel had a casino; after twenty-four hours the casino couldn’t take any more bets because we’d bought all the pesetas in the place. We were young, talented men but there were all kinds of rumours circulating about us and our associates still.

  The police had been looking to break this thing [Quality Street Gang] for years but they couldn’t infiltrate. Now they had new powers and new technology, this right to infiltrate gangs, introducing informants to people. The informant who was put on to us went on that stag do without anyone really knowing him after befriending my dad. My dad was none the wiser – it was a piss up, so it didn’t matter. We just thought he was my dad’s mate. He was called Neil Thompson and he was from Warrington; he was reporting back to the police. He was an active criminal, a paid informer. That whole stag do must have been under observation. The twenty-five people on the table, a mixture of fresh and older faces from Spain, London, Liverpool and Manchester. It must have looked like an empire, a big organisation, when in reality it was just a family stag do, not the meeting of the five families.

  Thompson got in to my dad first. They did a fifteen-month surveillance on my dad, maybe only six months on Chris and me. We started getting wind that Thompson was trying to do things that my dad wasn’t normally involved in – he was asking my dad to get him things, especially drugs. So we didn’t like him around our dad and we tried to lead him away. We did that good of a job at pulling him away from my dad that we got all the attention on us. They were not getting anywhere with my dad, we were much more interesting – it was the Ecstasy scene they were after.

  Thompson had introduced himself as being on the run and was hiding in Newquay. He said he was going to open a clothes shop. We were having trouble on so many fronts that our guard was down. Thompson then introduced us to what we now know to be an undercover police officer, Quinny, who said he was from Newquay as well and wanted to buy Gio-Goi clothes off us. He kept coming to the office, saying, ‘Your clothes are great and, by the way, can you get me some drugs?’ He’d been vouched for by Thompson and at the time we thought he was a reliable source because of my dad. We had no idea he was an informer. I kept saying, ‘You give me some orders and I’ll get you anything.’

  Thompson and Quinny spent the next six months asking us – on the pretext they were going to buy clothes – ‘Can you buy us drugs?’ That was all the time. We gave them fuck all.

  Christopher: They were saying to me, ‘We want to spend £100,000 for our shops.’ So we’re saying to them, ‘Sweet, give us your orders.’ They were saying can you get me this and can you get me that? We said, ‘Yeah we can get you whatever you like. We’ll get you the Eiffel Tower if you want it, but spend your money with the company first.’ They were mugs but we just wanted the money for the company. The rent in London was a grand a week just for the flat; we had a quarter of a million pound investment in the shop refit in London. This was all still going on. We just wanted the clothes order.

  Anthony: I gave Quinny a nervous breakdown. Everything he asked for I asked for the same back. I made his job impossible. He’d say, ‘Here, can you get me twenty stolen cars?’

  ‘Yeah, you can have them, fucking give us £100,000 for the clothing order.’

  He’d ring me on a Spanish number, so I’d ring this Spanish number back, and he’d be in a police station but on a Spanish divert. He’d go, ‘Are my drugs ready yet?’ I’d go, ‘Have you got the order for my clothes?’

  They got fucking nowhere. That’s why they introduced another officer, Scouse Paul. We’d turn up at work and see his silver Saab that we later found out had got all the secret recording equipment in it … and we’d think, ‘What the fuck is he doing here again?’ You’d think you’d just got rid of them. ‘Have you put your order in, Paul?’ He’d say, ‘No. Listen, can I have a word? I’d like 30,000 pills.’ It was just bullshit.

  He was after tonnes of pot as well. I’d talk to him because he was a potential customer for the clothes. I was being polite. Then when he leaves I’m saying, ‘He’s a fucking loon; he keeps asking for tablets and smoke.’ I was just giving him a load of waffle. We wanted his money for the clobber.

  Christopher: Then they’d come to me and try the same thing and get nowhere. Then they’d go to our pal John Faulkner. They offered us the Saab at a fraction of the book price – the one with all the secret recording equipment in it. They were turning up every other day with car boots full of crates of whiskey. We were buying it off them for three or four quid a bottle. They were buying it from the wine shop round the corner for £15 a bottle. It was just to make themselves look right and to try and impress us.

  Anthony: They were confusing everybody and confusion is a great method. They were actively concentrating on how to manipulate us and then monitoring phone calls. You’d be ringing each other and saying, ‘Do you know about this bloke?’ Everybody didn’t know what everybody else was talking about but everybody was just talking. They get you into a state of confusion. It was a well thought out process. The police had thousands of pounds’ worth of expenses to spend on us, just to impress us, to get us to do business with them.

  We had businesses. You could come and ring our bell or go to my dad’s yard. So it was a great platform for them to start the investigation from, as you could just walk into the yard unannounced. Although they tried to embroil everybody, nobody wanted to speak to them. My dad was allegedly threatening to blow heads off and all kinds of mad shit around this time. He was behaving totally out of character. He was the most difficult person in the world to deal with. You couldn’t have a conversation without him wanting to kill you because of the shit that was going on with these fuckers mithering him. It’s a tight family and it’s a well-oiled machine but our dad will help anybody and that was his downfall with this shit [undercover investigation] that was going on – talking to Thompson the grass was affecting his personality. He was like a different person, all caused by these fucking undercover officers badgering him for drugs, and I mean constantly.

  They never had the opportunity to do anything before so now that they had the technology, new toys, they were going to do their utmost to get our dad and us. We were the number one targets. This new ‘squad’ had the powers to bug, video, but what they didn’t say was entrap, ensnare. My dad’s never been involved in drugs in his life. My dad’s notorious but he’s old school, he’s not a drug dealer.

  We were heavily suspected of being involved in the importation of Ecstasy because of the success of Gio-Goi and the illegal raves. We were not whiter than white … but we had no involvement in what they were asking for. Little did we know that this investigation by the undercover police and the paid informant was going to bring our business and lives crashing down, leaving us almost on the edge of being totally broke.

  9

  WAR IS OVER

  Anthony: It was a Saturday night in Manchester and 808 State were playing at a live venue. I was in the dressing room and four or five doormen came in and approached me. I turned around and I said, ‘I don’t want any problems.’ It was part of some old shit that had not fully been resolved around the Parliament days. I just gave them the body language that I wasn’t up for a fight. One of them wasn’t having it and the situation was looking very dangerous. So I suddenly pushed my way past them and grabbed the door. Someone pulled out a blade and was trying to chop me. I was surrounded. I fought my way through the door and it led out to the stage. In the struggle, my coat got pulled off with my car keys in the pocket. I was going under the stage like a monkey on the scaffolding while 808 were playing live. The doormen were
chasing me. I popped out in the pit, dived over the barrier into the crowd and then ran through the club and out the front door, leaving my jacket and keys behind.

  I wanted my keys and my jacket back. So I went to another club and asked my mate for help. Within thirty minutes I was back at the venue. I went in the club and someone with me sprayed CS gas in the reception. I couldn’t find the kid in the club who started the trouble, so I came back outside and he was stood there with his firm and all their men. It went right off. It was a vicious fight that went into the main road. Someone got stabbed. People were trying to diffuse the situation. I got bust in the face with a Maglite [torch], lost a couple of teeth. I got my car keys back, etc., I then went out and went to a rave in the woods with a big gash in my face and partied all night.

  Christopher: On the Monday morning I was in the office with the staff and this firm turns up and wants to know where Anthony is. I’ve ended up having a bit of a row. There weren’t a lot of them in there, three or four. I’ve gone, ‘Get out of the fucking office. There’s normal working people in here; you’re in a fucking work place.’ I had a pair of stepladders and I was trying to push them out with these stepladders but ended up fighting with them. They overpowered me. I ended up with the stepladders pinned against me chest and they stabbed me a couple of times as I fought them. It was only a brief struggle and was over as quick as it started.

  Anthony: Then it just went off. There were others parked up the road but we had not noticed them. My car windows got put through and there were fights breaking out all over the car park. Then the police turned up and both groups were allowed on their way.