Mick Kelly came to London from Ireland in 1983 with no door experience at all. By the end of the decade he was standing on the door of Hollywoods in Romford beside Tony Tucker, and within a few years he was running security across several clubs of his own. He says he came through the worst of the 1990s by never doing business with gangsters.
Off the boat
Kelly was working on the buildings in London when he saw an advert in a job centre for a doorman on Fridays and Saturdays. The interview was going badly, he says, until he mentioned his time in the Irish equivalent of the Territorial Army to a boss with a wall of army photographs. That got him the job: first at Whites, just off Leicester Square, then as a runner between the clubs around the Hippodrome.
It was there he worked with Lenny McLean. He remembers a gruff man with a real soft side, exceptionally polite, who liked to give advice to the younger doormen, and who would come out of the back when trouble started and lead with a shoulder charge. Kelly thinks the film about McLean made him out to be far more violent on the streets than he was.
Hollywoods
Homesick and tired of the late trains, Kelly moved to a pub door in Barnet. When its manager took over a big new club in Romford in 1987, Kelly went with him. Hollywoods was owned by two brothers Kelly describes as posh, private-school gentlemen. It was still Essex and East London, he says, so it could be very posh and very violent at once.
The door was stacked. Kelly names Tony Tucker as the most famous of them, and says nobody on any door he ever worked, McLean included, came close to Lee Chapman: six foot four, 24 stone at 22, and faster than any big man he had seen. In the first week Roy Shaw turned up and a fight started. One doorman ran upstairs. The ten who went out together, Kelly says, were bonded from that night on.
His Tucker is not the man in the films. When Kelly first knew him, he says, Tucker was broke, drove a third-hand Porsche and did not swear the way the films have him swearing. Kelly says he was a national-level judo competitor with a cocky Essex sense of humour, always out there when a fight started, though no great street fighter.
In the end the doors contract Kelly had been hoping for, worth over a thousand pounds a week, was given to someone else. Kelly says he lost his temper in the office, told the doormen downstairs what he thought, finished the night and left.
His own firm
In 1990 he started at Secrets, a smaller club in Romford owned by a Greek businessman, Savvas, on one condition: he would set up his own company and hire his own men. He also recalls how the original Hollywoods door lost men to prison: two of its doormen were jailed over a 1988 robbery of more than £400,000, arrested at the airport on their way back from Spain.
Savvas went on to buy a huge, rundown hall in Tottenham, and Kelly, now managing as well as running security, filled it with raves. By his account, when a Kurdish group demanded £20,000 in protection from a Turkish promoter using the venue, Kelly rang them, told them the club had Irish owners who would not stand for it, and heard nothing more. It was, he admits, a blag. He says he used the same story years later when a man claiming to speak for the New York Mafia tried to squeeze them over a show in Manhattan.
Olympia
The strangest job came when Savvas decided to put on a sex trade show at Olympia with police approval. On the first Friday, Kelly says, around 6,000 cash buyers arrived in an hour, and with them ticket touts working out of the pub across the road. When their boss waved a wad of money at him, Kelly walked across Kensington High Street and headbutted him. He was arrested, held at Kensington police station for two hours and released. By his account the show grew to 70,000 visitors and outgrew Olympia altogether.
The end of the Essex Boys
Kelly says that in July 1995 two doormen he trusted visited his birthday party and asked how close he was to Tucker, because friends of theirs had issues with him and it might go south. Kelly told them he would not back Tucker against them. By then, he says, Tucker had changed, confident had turned to arrogant, and in his last months he was winding people up.
Tucker was killed in 1995. Kelly does not believe the films' version of him as a man robbing small dealers, and he does not believe anyone would do such a thing for £40,000. Whoever did it, he says, was terrified of him. He adds that he knows no more than anyone else.
His own rule, he says, is why he came through. He never did business with gangsters, so they never knew where they stood with him, and 95 per cent of the threats he heard in his life were only ever words.