Still Breathing

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

Anthony: We wanted to prove Thompson was a registered police informant and he got paid for setting people up. Why is there no mention of Thompson passing my dad the drugs to pass to the police? You have to go out and collect the information. Nobody else had ever put the time and effort into looking at Thompson and he was still walking around acting like he was a bad guy. We went to a jail in Cornwall on a visit and spoke to a pal from Manchester who he had set up in Newquay; we found a kid in a Staffordshire jail from Warrington doing seven years he had set up. We gathered all the information on Thompson. It became a personal crusade to get my dad out of jail and expose Thompson for setting us up – and to destroy him and to warn others against him.

  After twelve months of our own investigation we produced 35,000 books and deposited them all over his town, Warrington, in bars, pubs and clubs. We distributed them around Manchester and the north-west and gave them to all the relevant gangs. We put his face on the front cover with his home address. The book included the transcripts and witness statements from other trials he had made.

  The books were too much for him. We went on a meeting with him. We went to Warrington and met him in a club car park; again it was arranged that no harm would come to him on this occasion because we wanted him to testify on behalf of our dad. I said to him, ‘You set me and my dad up.’ He denied it. We wanted my dad out of jail so we wanted him to stand up and tell the truth – that he set us up – he said he would help where he could. After that he just went missing but we had done enough to destroy him at that point anyway, we thought. He ended up in prison. He’d battered someone because, as well as being a grass he was a bully, and he’d been sentenced to three months. He was in a jail in Cumbria. We had him subpoenaed through his jail to Manchester Crown Court. On the morning of my dad being sentenced he wouldn’t come upstairs to give evidence for my dad because he said, ‘If I come out of my cell I’ll get killed.’

  Christopher: My dad went guilty [February 1996]. They said he was getting fifteen years if he went not guilty and run a trial and he’d get three if he went guilty. He went guilty and he got eight. We got it down to six and half in the Court of Appeal. Next it was Anthony’s trial.

  Anthony: That’s still a long stretch my dad got. We destroyed Thompson as best we could but he didn’t give a fuck, he still carried on setting other people up. What’s ironic is that he died of throat cancer – probably through talking too much.

  My case and Faulkner’s ended up falling apart. We’d sold them legal Ecstasy tablets, legal ones! They had all kinds of charges for everybody leading up to the court case but it all got reduced to nothing in the end. Neil Thompson was an active criminal and the police decided not to use him for that reason. Thompson was a loose cannon and we think while he was undercover investigating us he was doing stuff without the police knowing, stuff they hadn’t condoned – being a bit too devious. All they had in the end was I served these pills through a third party and they turned out to be legal highs. I actually got a nine-month sentence. Faulkner got six months after it all panned out, and as we both had already done time on remand, we had months to serve.

  Chris was there in court. I burst out laughing in the dock as I got sentenced, for supply of a class C drug, namely diazepam. There was a grain of diazepam in the tablets. The rest was just shit herbal high. I had gone from a big sentence to a shit and a shave.

  I served my sentence in Strangeways but this time in the normal part as a Cat C prisoner. As it happened, the other firm we had been fighting with on the outside were in there running the jail. We were supposed to be all good with this other firm, but it was a very volatile situation still. I was pretty concerned that I was on my own in prison. Faulkner went to Risley. I knew they went to the gym every day and so the following morning I put my name down for gym. I met the main man who we had been fighting with over the years and he said, ‘What you doing here, Tricky?’ I said, ‘I’m doing my sentence.’ He said, ‘Well you better watch you don’t get a bar on your head.’ I said, ‘You better watch you don’t get a bar on your head.’ With that the ice was broken. I said, ‘What about them machines in there, can we get on them and have a private chat?’ Next minute, he’s on one, I’m on one, and unbelievably having a good laugh about how things had turned out and the shit we had all been through. We shook hands and remained on friendly terms. The war was officially over.

  The time spent finishing my sentence was bliss, as much weed as I could smoke and three square meals a day. It sounds daft but that sentence after that meeting was great, but I couldn’t wait to hit the streets again. All the trouble was over, it really was over – I thought, ‘Let’s get back to what we’re good at, making money.’

  10

  GONE FISHING

  Anthony: I’d been home for a while and I was trying to get back out there. Finally, we were starting to live again. We were back out there wining and dining people, faking it, making it look like we had a million quid when we had nothing. I got involved with some financial people from overseas and they decided to put a few quid behind Chris and me to get Gio-Goi going again.

  Christopher: Anthony came to see me and said he had someone who wanted to invest in the brand. I was very, very reluctant to do it. Anthony had to twist my arm. We set up the business back at our mum and dad’s barn. We paid out to have it done up as offices downstairs and we put a showroom upstairs. I then went out and bought a load of second-hand fabric – the alarm bells should have started then, this was the beginning of it. I made about twenty or thirty different shirts and rebranded everything. The Gio-Goi logo was written in a new way. We made all the advertising look good. Anthony went out on the road as a salesman. We had Tracey in the office. We were trying to launch it on a shoestring – which you can’t do. Anthony and Tracey would argue and our mum used to have to pull them apart. It was like being back on Benchill Road.

  Anthony: The investor put in about £100,000 and we took £400,000 in orders over a very short period of time. We were trying to make a go of it and we picked up some momentum in the press. Then we had problems with the manufacturers who’d already been paid. It all looked rosy on paper but we were pissing in the wind. I even tried to get Alan McGee [boss of Creation Records] to back the label. He had signed Oasis and they were smashing it. We’d had money and now it was gone, that was part of our problem.

  Alex Ferguson [legendary and now retired manager of Manchester United] was wearing Gio-Goi. We always wanted to meet United players to get them to wear Gio. You could always get a ticket or two off Ned, who did United’s security, but you could never get to meet the players. We saw [United player] Clayton Blackmore in a pub in Altrincham. One of the boys stole his coat. It was rumoured we had stolen it to get his attention. This wasn’t true – our pal robbed it and we took it off him because Clayton played for United. His car and house keys were in his coat and on them was a 0845 number to ring if they were lost and found. So we rang the number and said we have got Clayton’s coat. We got it back for him. We said, ‘We live in Altrincham, he lives in Altrincham. Can you set up a meet?’ The next minute the phone rings and it’s Clayton. He came to meet us and brought Remy Martin champagne brandy, champagne and tickets for a game to say thanks.

  We then overwhelmed him with product. We sent thirteen Gio-Goi beanie hats back to the training ground. That was 1994 and Alex didn’t stop wearing one of those hats for the next ten years – at every game. The treble in 1999, that hat was there. I met Alex in a restaurant and thanked him for supporting the brand. I also asked him why the hat had been with him for so long. He said it was his lucky hat and his wife washed it before every game. He said she always put it on the top of his case wherever he went. Every interview he did, every time that hat appeared on the telly I thought if only people knew – including Sir Alex. It still makes me smile.

  Christopher: With the investment we made some stock and we had a go. We made about 10,000 pieces – we did some denim stuff and a hooded top with the logo ‘University of Life’. I took the rang
e to the Clothes Show Live [at Birmingham NEC, February 1998]. But by then the communication was starting to break down with our investor. The label was selling okay but we were having cash flow problems. The kid who we were working with put so much money in and then didn’t want to invest any more dough. We were just too long in the tooth for this so we went, ‘Right, fuck it.’ It was coming up to Christmas and we needed some spending money. We downed tools and moved on. That’s the problem with most investors – they want an easy ride. The reason we always seek investments in our projects is firstly we don’t like using our own money and we generally think big, so we need someone with pots of money and balls, which, trust me, is like finding a needle in a haystack.

  Anthony: He put the money in but he didn’t get the return as fast as he wanted. That was the end of that one. I went back to selling tickets. I was living on my luck. I sold sunglasses for the Triads during the solar eclipse in 1999. We were doing clothes in a different way now. Ten thousand T-shirts turned up. I could move them. Every now and again something would come up. We had 20,000 pairs of Armani underpants at one time. We were buying and selling in Europe.

  Christopher: Basically, we were back on the streets – doing whatever. Anthony and me were doing the grey market clothes together, that was the main focus – boxer shorts, polo shirts. I was back on the street grafting. Then I borrowed a few quid off Tracey and I bought a house to do up and sell. I was having my first kid. I knew I had to start getting proper work together.

  Anthony: For the first time ever, we had time apart – eighteen months. I got my family in order and Chris got his family in order. We didn’t see each other. It just became quite apparent that you were better off doing your own thing. He started buying houses, picking up bargains, doing them up and selling them on. He was not scared of getting his hands dirty. I went abroad on a couple of trips, met some people off shore and did a couple of things out of the country. I went to Florence to buy Stone Island gear to sell on the street.

  Christopher: Anthony and I weren’t speaking. We’d done a few moves together. I was doing some stuff out of Luxembourg – a strange place to be, I know. I can’t remember what we fell out about – probably money. Gio had gone as far as I was concerned. I was not interested at all. I was not interested in fashion. I put on my marriage certificate, as my occupation, builder. I didn’t want to know anything but going to work and doing up the houses. I was on my own and grafting. I did that for two years.

  Then one day I get a phone call from Perry Hughes, an old friend, who was now managing Russell Watson [the ‘People’s Tenor’ whose debut album The Voice was a huge hit in the UK and US]. Perry rang me from LA. They’d just got the theme for the Star Trek film [Star Trek: Enterprise, 2001 – the song was called ‘Where Will My Heart Take Me’] and they couldn’t find a stylist for the video and would I do it. I said no, not interested. But Perry is hard to say no to, very persistent and loveable. So I asked when it was. He said the video shoot was in London in a week’s time. I’d never been a stylist but I knew how it worked – you get loads of clothes and take them to the shoot.

  Tracey and me went to London. Tracey was ringing Paul Smith the day before the shoot but they wouldn’t give us anything. So I ended up with one pair of shoes, black Chelsea boots, a pair of black jeans, one black three-quarter-length Crombie coat and a black V-neck T-shirt – that was it. They were used to seeing sixty or seventy garments on a rail. I took the stuff round to their apartment and I’d had a few bottles of wine. It was the first time I’d met Russell. Perry said no way will he wear that. I said, ‘Get out of the way’ and shouted Russell in. I said to him, ‘There’s your outfit for tomorrow, that’s it. I don’t really care. I’m doing this for Perry and that is the outfit you’re wearing tomorrow and if you don’t like it it’s fucked.’ Next day I got up, got to the studio and he was in the gear. He probably wore that outfit for the next six months. I knew it was right.

  He was playing Wembley Arena, all over, 15,000-capacity venues. They asked if I’d style the show. I’d get him twelve outfits and do all the quick changes during the show. I did Carnegie Hall, Japan and Los Angeles. I sang as a backing singer at Wembley Arena for a bet. Perry was paying me good money but I was still doing the houses. I’d buy the house and live in it. I had them down to a fine art: twelve weeks from buying to finishing. So one day I’d be in hob nail boots knocking a wall down, the next I’d be on Savile Row picking suits. Photographers would ring me up and ask what the inspiration was for the photo shoot. I’d be covered in shit in the back garden with a tonne of bricks.

  I got Russell in some far out gear that he’d never had picked himself, stuff like red satin suits [worn when singing at the opening of the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002] and pink shirts. He was a big star. Although Perry was good at managing him and he had talent, no opera singer was wearing what I had him wearing. It was a breath of fresh air in that world.

  Anthony: During the time we spent apart, I entered into litigation with Giorgio Armani. He’d brought out some perfume as ‘Gio’. I registered our brand as two words, Gio and Goi, for perfume, a Class 3 trademark. I then sent a letter to Giorgio Armani’s lawyers with egg and beans all over it. I said, ‘Stop trading as Gio, we own the name.’ Okay, I wasn’t expecting them to stop trading, but I thought they might give us some money to fuck off.

  Armani fell into my trap and wrote back. So I started litigation with them. They had scores of lawyers in Milan and Switzerland and I had my mate Dermot, who laid tarmac and could work a computer. I paid him £10 a letter and sent them out from a mailbox in Cheadle. This went on for two years. In the end we agreed to an out of court settlement. I can’t speak about it because I signed a confidentiality agreement. It all got pretty tricky. They were doing a billion dollars a year with the name Gio. I had Gio-Goi registered as two separate words and if you put Gio-Goi on a rounded bottle it would look like Gio anyway. The documentation would be a great plus for Gio-Goi to use for any future sale. My plan had worked.

  I was also keeping the registrations alive for the business, doing the dot coms. I updated all the intellectual property. We’d been let down so badly with the last episode, when the investor pulled out, but it was as a consequence of that deal that I did all this. I did what I felt was necessary.

  I drove to Chris’s house. He was building a lovely palatial house in Bramhall. Chris was bricklaying the wall. I said, ‘It’s taken me two years but I’ve beaten Armani’s lawyers and I have all the trademarks.’ He said, ‘All right, but I’ve got to go to the builders’ yard.’

  Christopher: Anthony did a good job. I didn’t give a fuck. It could have gone up in smoke for all I cared. I just didn’t care. He did a fantastic job.

  It was actually our mum who made us friends again. I was getting married and my mum said you have to invite your brother. My mum made me ring him and we became friends again. The Armani thing was done and dusted, we had a certificate – now what are we going to do? We’d been missing now for years. In that time nobody picked the phone up and offered help. Not one person. It was a lonely period.

  Anthony: We were getting back on our feet, reintroducing ourselves. We made a book, a company portfolio, and I said to Chris, ‘Right, we’re going to sell the brand.’ I said we should do it again but do it properly. Instead of trying to find a manufacturer and to sell it into stores, we did the book to showcase the brand to potential investors. We printed 200 and targeted Drapers [leading fashion business magazine] and various interested parties. The book was silver, large format, had a brief biography, a ‘giography’ I called it, and in it we spelled out what trademarks we owned. I’d done all the work on it. It was a detailed document of what Gio-Goi was and it explained that we were coming back, we were seeking investment, how we’d beat Armani, how we’d separated the name, details of all the dot coms … it worked. We were getting meetings and talking to magazines about what our intentions were. It was all about strategy. We were planning our re-entry into the fash
ion world. For me it had always been on the back burner – Gio-Goi had never gone away.

  I was actually living in Spain on and off. My cousins had opened a sports bar in Fuengirola and I had a lot of friends on the Costa del Sol. I’d done a few bits of work and now I had brand new clothes and a brand new Mercedes convertible – and £5,000 spare cash to produce the Gio book. I was still doing tickets. I made some money at the European Championships selling tickets in 2004 in Portugal. I was back on the festival circuit, mixing, networking – gaining strength. It was about getting back out in the clubs, having holidays blowing money in Mexico and Cuba with my girl Rhianwen and learning to live again. Chris had some good luck with his houses. It was a slow climb, the coming together of Chris and me, and the closing of that dark period.

  Christopher: I’d been out in America working for Universal Records with Russell and Perry and a few other artists. Russell was in New York having dinner with the Police Commissioner from LA. He was a big opera fan and he told me how his new boat was moored next to Armani’s, George as he called him. George was having his boat repainted by Mercedes, in Mercedes black. I was thinking of Anthony in the Cheadle post office sending letters to Armani’s solicitors. This police guy owned about ten shopping malls as well. We also went to John Gotti’s restaurant on a regular basis while we were in New York with a couple of the cast from Goodfellas.

  Anthony: Our friend was going out with Davinia Murphy and she’d had her car robbed I think. Our pal called us for help and we made some calls. We were instrumental in her problem getting solved and she got her car back. I was trying to sell the brand, so I decided Davinia’s family owed me a favour. We were looking for a serious level of investment and her dad [Alan Murphy, the Toilet Roll King, who made multi-millions manufacturing toilet roll] was a big hitter based in the South of France. I flew over to Nice and was taken to Antibes, to his £20 million yacht. Alan Murphy drove from Monaco in his DB9.