A world champion's father, a millionaire Soho sex-shop baron, pulled a six-inch hunting knife in a swanky Chelsea members' club. When it was over, the man who used to drive for Charlie Kray was dead. Big Ronnie O'Sullivan, father of the snooker legend Ronnie O'Sullivan, had the world at his fingertips and lost it all in one drunken attack.
From Butlins to Soho
Big Ronnie, as he was known, met his wife-to-be at a Butlins holiday camp, where they were both working as teenagers. They married and moved into a high-rise in Dalston, near his father's stamping ground of Hoxton. He worked as a steward on the railways. She came from a family of Italian ice-cream makers and looked after their young family.
How he got into the underworld is unclear. But he began building an empire of sex shops around Soho and the outskirts of London, and by the 1980s, as is the custom for East End boys made good, he had moved out to Essex.
The Fighting O'Sullivans
The roots ran deep in the East End. His dad Mickey was a boxer, and so were Mickey's brothers Danny and Dickie. They were known as the Fighting O'Sullivans, and Danny was a British bantamweight champion from 1949 to '51.
The brothers even turn up in the memoirs of Charlie Kray, in a chapter on Reggie's early boxing at the famous Fitzroy Lodge club, where the O'Sullivan boys were members. Charlie could not have known that decades later his friend and driver, Bruce Bryan, would lose his life at the hands of the next generation of O'Sullivans.
The night at Stocks
Around the turn of 1990, Big Ronnie was a millionaire, doing well for himself. He and a pal went out on a big bender and ended up at Stocks, a members-only club in Chelsea. That night it was hosting a birthday party for a former girlfriend of Charlie Kray, who with his infamous brothers Reggie and Ronnie had been at the centre of organised crime in London's East End.
Bruce Bryan was there. He was a black man who had driven for Charlie Kray, and he was with his brother Kelvin and four women.
Football songs and a hunting knife
Big Ronnie and his friend were in high spirits, singing football songs. According to Kelvin Bryan's account in court, the two men showed off their hefty drinks bill and tried to chat up the women, whose attention was not wanted. The bravado soured into racial insults aimed at Bruce and Kelvin.
One of the women remonstrated and was backhanded. She fell to the floor, and it all kicked off. Ashtrays and chairs went flying. Big Ronnie produced a six-inch hunting knife and went for Bruce Bryan. Kelvin, in an act of defence, struck him with a champagne bottle. It did not stop him. Bruce Bryan suffered fatal knife wounds. Kelvin was stabbed three times.
Bruce managed to stumble out of the club, his brother telling him to run. Then he collapsed on the pavement. In harrowing evidence, Kelvin told the court he held his brother in his arms as he died.
Two versions of one night
The O'Sullivan family believe a different story, the one told in Ronnie O'Sullivan's autobiography. In that version, a misunderstanding over the bill turned violent. Big Ronnie and his friend thought they were under attack, Big Ronnie was badly hurt, and he acted in self-defence. He told his son he picked the hunting knife up off the bar.
The film is blunt about that. Who finds a six-inch hunting knife lying idle on a bar? And Big Ronnie never took the stand to give his version.
At the time he was painted in the papers as a porn baron, a label that stuck. His son, a snooker legend in his own right, grew up in the shadow of that night, and the film looks at how he came to terms with his father's past. It also remembers the man at the centre of it. Bruce Bryan's family should never be forgotten.
What happened outside Stocks after Bruce collapsed, what the witnesses told the court, and what the judge decided, the film lays out from the court papers and the news archive.