Still Breathing

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

  Christopher: We were under surveillance at the time, weren’t we? We still hadn’t clocked what was going on with the undercover investigation. But apparently they were watching from a flat across the road but that actual situation wasn’t recorded, we found out later, as the observation camera had run out of tape and they missed it all. The surveillance crew radioed through that there was fighting and gunshots at the scene of the observation. The police turned up and found a gun in the car park; a 15-shot Beretta, fully loaded. The police were like, ‘All right you lot, don’t do it again,’ and they left. We’ve gone, ‘That’s not right,’ because nothing came of it. Alarm bells started ringing in my head. None of it made any sense.

  Anthony: The next day Quinny and Scouse Paul came to the office asking for tablets again. We were already wondering who they were and we decided we needed to get rid of them. There was enough shit going on without these pricks driving us mad. I actually rang my pal and said, ‘Do you want to serve these mugs? Do what you want to rob them, they’re mugs.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’ll rip them off.’ So I sent them to pick up the supposed drugs. They were nuisances, so the best thing to do was fuck them and they’d go away. They were sent to a house in Wythenshawe and they came back to town after being served with the tablets. They went straight to my dad’s yard. Something clicked. I knew the minute I sent them to get served that it was a wrong move. The way they’d been behaving, there was only one thing they could be. It all clicked into place but it was too late. I said to Chris, ‘They’re police’ and we drove to my dad’s yard to tell him what we thought. I’ll never forget when I looked at Scouse Paul in the yard. He knew that I knew he was an undercover. He left sharpish and I said to my dad, ‘You’ve been dealing with the police. What have you been doing?’

  Christopher: We twigged that they were old bill and they twigged that we knew exactly at the same time. They would have liked to take the investigation on another year but we’d got on it and they knew. That night, about five in the morning, I was in bed and my door came off. I jumped up and it was the old bill. The police had these big lights on the house, shouting, ‘Come out with your hands up.’ The old lady next door came out with her nightdress on with her hands in the air. The police were shouting, ‘Not you, love, you go back in.’ The Armed Response Team had me on my knees with a gun at my head. They’d blocked the whole of Kingsway off. They put me in a van with a dog because I wouldn’t shut up and left me sat in pyjamas handcuffed. They took ten of us down all at the same time in different parts of Manchester. It was 5 October 1994.

  Arthur Donnelly: They blocked my road off. I opened the window and I said, ‘I’m coming down, don’t be fucking smashing anything.’ Anyway, smash, smash, smash, wrecked my house. They grabbed me by the hair, slung me on the floor. I was only wearing underpants. The back door was wide open: I was lay on the floor freezing, shaking and every time they walked past they stood on my back.

  Anthony: They had no regard and no respect. They actually fired a shot on the farm. That was the first shot ever fired by the GMP. The copper tripped up with his shotgun and nearly blew his daft mate’s head off.

  June Donnelly: The place was crawling. They were armed. I knew what was coming because I’d had it at Benchill. Before you had time to turn round, they were in. They smashed the entrance – they’d obviously done all the pre-planning. We had big red dots on our heads from the laser sights on their guns. They ripped the carpets up, they were in the loft, everywhere. They came at five in the morning and didn’t leave until about dinner time – different teams kept coming in with metal detectors and God knows what. There was nothing to find. And then we couldn’t find out where they’d taken Arthur. I didn’t even know what this was for. When they took him off, I thought he’d go in court and be out in a couple of days, whatever it is. And then I found out they had Chris and they had Anthony. I thought, ‘Same thing again: they’ll be straight out.’ When they let Arthur make a phone call, he told me what it was for. He said, ‘I can’t even bring myself to say it.’

  Tracey Donnelly: Getting nicked was like an everyday thing – they go off and they come back. And then they didn’t come home that night and the next day you read the papers and you’re like, ‘Shit!’ This was totally different. It was a shock to everyone. I lived across the road from Chris. I was due that day to have [my son] Milo. Our dad would have been working away and the only reason he was in Manchester is because I’m due. My mum was like, ‘Don’t come here, don’t come near here,’ but I went up and the house was smashed to bits. Because my dad had always worked away they tried to make out that he was working away transporting drugs. Unfortunately my dad was the fall guy in this instance. That was the start of the end then. I went ill about five months after the arrests. It was the shame.

  Anthony: Eight addresses and the [Gio-Goi] warehouse were done. There were eighty police raiding the warehouse with the Armed Response. One hundred and twenty officers it took, all told. They were on me, Chris, my dad, John Faulkner, anyone who was around us at that time. The front page in the paper said, ‘Fashion Brothers Arrested in Drugs Raid’. Allegedly we were key players.

  Christopher: These geezers had come to the office, pulled me around the corner and said, ‘Can I have a quick word with you. Can you give this to your dad?’ They put two grand in my hand and said, ‘It’s for something I’m doing with your dad. Do you know about it?’ I said, ‘I don’t know fuck all.’ And when it came down – the police nicked me for laundering money. They gave me the money and then charged me with conspiracy to launder money as well as conspiracy to supply drugs.

  Arthur: They wanted the firm. He [informant Neil Thompson] came here buying engines and got into my confidence and blah, blah, blah. The police got hold of him, nicked him selling drugs; he’d stuck people in before and was working for the police. He mentioned the name Donnelly, so they’d asked him to infiltrate the family. Really, though, they got fuck all. Got nothing. In the end, I got eight years for it. I’ve never dealt in drugs in my life. No matter what you believe – I was set up. I was entrapped selling drugs. I did what I did. And then my sons – they said that it was all drug money that they started Gio-Goi off with. They were after the QSG. They were after Gio-Goi as well. I was on remand for seventeen month. I thought I’d get out. I was going nowhere.

  Anthony: In the police car on the way to the Central Detention Centre [CDC, above the Manchester Magistrates] my brain was in overdrive thinking about how this had happened. The first thing I said to my lawyer on arrival at the CDC was, ‘Are tapes allowed in court?’ I knew that I’d been talking to the police on tape.

  I knew it had to be taped by Scouse Paul and Quinny. How else could I be being arrested when I hadn’t served them? When I got to the CDC, Chris was there. So was my dad – he’d been there three hours and got everything boxed off already.

  Chris got released after two days and I got taken to Salford Crescent. I went there because Strangeways was overcrowded. There was a police officer, a little woman, and she had a brown envelope and it said ‘Major Incident’ right across it. They read the charge and that was it. I was aware that I was being watched in Salford Precinct. I was locked up for twenty-three hours a day and I was there three weeks. We’d just made Gio-Goi footballs, so I kept getting balls sent in for the one-hour exercise. I kept on kicking them back over the roof.

  They charged me with conspiracy to import 32,000 pills. I was charged with four conspiracies. What they tried to do was charge us all with the same thing, making out we were all in it together. We weren’t. That was the first thing to do, to try and separate the charges so we didn’t all appear together in the dock looking like one of these Italian Mafia family trials.

  Christopher: In the paper it had ‘drugs, guns, cash’. The cash was probably a couple of grand and they might have found a quarter of weed in someone’s house. They blew it all out of proportion. I was only there two days – I got [£10,000] bail and then [after seven weeks during which he had to report
to a police station in Chelsea twice a day as part of bail] they dropped the charges against me. They didn’t have anything to charge me on. The Manchester Evening News had done a massive front-page piece on us getting arrested, but when my charges got dropped I got them to do a retraction, an apology. They put it in [20 November] but tiny. [In the apology, Chris is quoted as saying, ‘The police kicked down the door at 6.30 a.m. when I was in bed. They had me handcuffed in the street, face down with a gun at my head. They told my neighbours I was a drug dealer. Now the charges have been dropped I don’t suppose they will tell my neighbour that.’] There was a picture of me with the caption, ‘Angry’. So in jail my dad had the picture up and everyone started to call me ‘Angry Donnelly’.

  I had the business; the shop in London was about to open. It was hard, hard work. The story had made the front cover of the nationals, so any customers, or suppliers of fabric, they didn’t want to supply us. I’d ask why. They said, ‘Well, you could refuse to pay us and there’s nothing we can do – don’t take it the wrong way.’ The bank shut us down; the police froze all our assets. The Financial Investigation Unit was doing a drug trafficking order against the family. The bank took my house. It was put up as collateral for the company. They took the cars, everything – we lost everything. And we’d borrowed money against the deeds for my dad’s scrapyard, £50,000, so we had to try and raise that. I was on a pushbike. I’d gone from a millionaire to riding a bike. We couldn’t move because of the police. They were all over us. They’d got what they’d been trying to do for years. They ruined us. The only thing they didn’t ruin was our spirits.

  But we had to open the shop. We’d spent so much refurbishing it. Anthony was in jail. The only person who came to the launch was my mum. I had to get clothes off different brands; we didn’t have enough of our own Gio stock because everyone was shutting doors in my face. I was pulling in favours. I’d buy cheap garments for cash and send them down to London. The lads in the shop didn’t know and they’d put it out. It was anything I could get my hands on to feed the shop. We had three staff in the shop and they all went on to be names in fashion: Fraser Moss started YMC with Jimmy Collins. Steve Davies partnered Eddie Prendergast from Duffer and they started the Present shop in Shoreditch. Robert Excell is head of sales for Moschino. I did two T-shirts at that time: ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’ and ‘Framed’. I went out and bought Screen Stars T-shirts and sweatshirts and printed on them. I don’t know what I was trying to achieve. No one gave a fuck.

  Anthony: Chris was sending me pictures of the shop in jail. We’d spent £250,000 refurbishing the shop. Celebrities were coming in there, all the pop stars of the day, but it was not making enough sales. I was sent to Strangeways. I was on induction there for seven days on twenty-three hour a day bang up. On induction they explain the rules and you’re evaluated, you find out what you’re to be categorised as, what level of threat you are to yourself and to others. I spent a week in there. I was quite happy. My pal John Faulkner was with me. The next thing my door goes and three screws with a dog enter the cell and tell me, ‘You’re going to a special place.’

  At that point I knew I was being labelled the serious person that they thought I was. I could see a book with a red letter ‘A’ on it. They said, ‘Come on, you’re going to see your dad in Category A.’ I’d gone from smoking pot for a week in a prison cell with Faulkner, laughing like kids about the whole situation, to now I’d got to ride this thing that had just got a whole lot more serious.

  My QC told me that I was getting twenty-two years. Ecstasy was poison at that time. Every 10,000 pills equates to a kilo, so if you weigh 32,000 pills which I was charged with conspiracy to import, that’s three and half kilos. They were talking about drug smuggling, gunrunning, murder. It said on the top of my paper work: ‘Gang-affiliated, means to escape, access to fire arms and aircraft.’ To visit me you had to put an application in that took three months to vet. Any visitor’s house could be raided at any given time.

  They sent me to the G wing – home to the dangerous of the dangerous. I walked into the wing and my dad walked toward me and held his arms out and said, ‘Look who’s here,’ as if it was great to see everybody – all my pals, some armed robbers who used to frequent Parliament were there. It was the last place I wanted to be. Everyone was going to jail for twenty to thirty years. It was a high-risk unit; everyone had their own cell. It was a segregation unit – where there should be 200 men on a wing, we had twenty-five. I got to my cell and two people were sat on my bed waiting for me, people affiliated with my dad, and they told me whatever I needed, whatever I wanted, was available to me – should I need anything to speak to them if my dad was not there. Within forty-eight hours I was having my own way in there. There was nothing I didn’t want for. I had booze and sleeping tablets – plus I always had a great supply of weed. I met good people on the Cat A section but at times I just thought, ‘This is it, it’s over.’

  Another pal from Wythenshawe was in with me. He’d been charged with smuggling millions’ worth of drugs. I was there when he came back from the Crown Court. The night before court he gave me a spliff and was laughing. When he came back he was almost unrecognisable. He looked dazed. He’d been handed a twenty-five-year sentence.

  I made some very good friends on that high-risk section from all parts of the country. People were coming to my cell for a booze-up. My dad had it boxed off. He had the orange juice, Vimto, Pot Noodles, mackerel, Old Holborn, phone cards – he had everything. There was always a queue outside his pad. It was like a corner shop.

  Arthur: The screws called my cell the ‘Off-licence’. At the time there was a thing in the paper about the ‘Golden Polo’ mint. So I got a Polo and painted it gold and put it back in the packet. I opened it up in front a screw and he shouted, ‘Whooooaaaa … The Golden Polo, a million pound!’ I said, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ They took the golden polo and put it under guard in Strangeways and someone fucking nicked it! It was in the papers after that, somebody handed it in and that was when they found out it was a wind up.

  Christopher: While Anthony was in Strangeways the thing with the rival gang got put to bed. I was at the meeting before the meeting. It was agreed that they wouldn’t interfere with anything we were doing and we wouldn’t interfere with anything they were doing and we would all live happily ever after. It was all talked out but it was still messy. Then most of the charges were dropped against Anthony and Faulkner and they were released on bail just in time for Christmas [23 December 1994]. We picked Anthony up in a limousine. Someone had given us a limo and I picked up a hearse at the same time. I thought it’d be funny to deliver our clothes in a hearse. It was bit of fun.

  Anthony: We still had a good sense of humour when we were going through all this shit, but once those things had been in the newspapers no one in their right mind would work with us. We had all our bank accounts frozen so it cut us off completely.

  They took me home to my new flat and then on to my kids, who were playing in the avenue. We pulled up at the house and the kids got in the back of the limousine. I was hiding under a pile of coats. Their dad was back. The next day I landed in the Gio-Goi car park and the business was dire. Even though the fighting was supposedly over, there were still tremors from the gang war. We changed our lifestyle. We weren’t going out in town as much.

  The documentary programme Forty Minutes wanted to make a film on us. There was interest from overseas TV companies, magazines, TV in the UK, but we really didn’t have the stomach for it. It was such a bad time, the answer was no to everything. We just wanted peace and quiet.

  Christopher: We decided to fold Gio-Goi – that old saying ‘Gone fishing.’ We kept the name and sank the company. We lost the deposit we put on the new building in Castlefield because we failed to complete on it. People were still coming to the office that we didn’t want around us. The staff were a constant worry and needed paying. I didn’t need the stress but at this point we still had the shop and the flat in
London. We’d not paid the rent on the flat and the landlord was keeping all our gear until we paid him. We got a van, drove to London after all the shops had shut: Anthony, me and a guy called Bobby. We went to the shop first and emptied it – robbed our own shop – then went to our flat in Kensington and took all our stuff out and went back to Manchester – another headache gone.

  Anthony: We’d been reduced to nothing. We had no credit facilities. You go to London and there’s £1,000 in the till – why wouldn’t you take it if you had to feed your family? This is where the disappointment came with us. I reckon we had given away a million pounds’ worth of stock and money to friends. We employed all our friends and now we were experiencing all this shit, no one was helping. We were dumped high and dry by everyone. It was just a mess. Our family really suffered and there didn’t seem to be any help coming from any of the other quarters, including from our own camp. We had a problem and we were left under no illusion that it was our problem and we had to deal with it.

  The stress took its toll on my relationship with Annette. Things hadn’t been good at home for some time and she’d asked me to leave before the arrest. I already had my own place in Salford Quays and was seeing a new girlfriend, Rhianwen, who I had met at Parliament.

  Christopher: After we closed the business we were concentrating on exposing the informant, Neil Thompson, in the case. The idea was to help my dad. I went to see people all over the country, other people he had set up. That’s what we spent our time doing, driving around prisons visiting people. I found out where he lived in Warrington; I followed him to find out his routine. We employed a private investigator. We wanted our dad back home.