The Dark Secrets Of Sharon Osbourne

The Dark Secrets Of Sharon Osbourne's Dad, The Al Capone Of Pop




The following report is courtesy of the Dailymail.co.uk:

When music mogul Don Arden, a notorious thug with Mafia links, died last week, people assumed he had taken his secrets to the grave. But here, Mick Wall, who spent an extraordinary year with Arden, reveals the shocking – and hilarious – truth about Sharon Osbourne's terrifying father. You could feel a hush descend in the pub as the well dressed old gentleman at the corner table began speaking in his overloud voice, the result of encroaching deafness in one ear.

Daddy's girl: Don and Sharon joking at their reunion - after being estranged for 20 years - at Don's Hollywood mansion in 2002

"I looked him hard in the eye and said, 'One false move from you, you bastard, and I'll rip your heart out with my bare hands and shove it down your fucking throat.''

"And, er, how did he respond to that?" I asked nervously.

"He didn't move a muscle," said Don, turning his ice-cold eyes on me.

"A bloody shame as I would have enjoyed doing that to him. Enjoyed it very much, I would."

He smacked his lips together and picked up his drink. I glanced around.

Everybody else was either madly pretending to read their newspapers or staring at us, astonished. I tried to steer the conversation on to slightly less lurid ground.

"But what did you do for fun, back then?" I asked.

"Fun?" roared Don, regarding me as one might an idiot.

"That was my fucking fun, don't you see? I'd go in there, smash the place up, bang some heads, then go out and have dinner and champagne at Annabel's.

"Have a good laugh about it. You have to remember, these people were shit bags! They all deserved to die, as far as I was concerned."

To die? Surely he'd never killed anybody, though? "Well," he smiled, "let's just say no bodies were ever uncovered."

He began to laugh – a long, lusty chuckle that thawed the ice in his pale blue eyes.

By now, however, both tables either side of us had emptied, and although the pub was as packed as one would expect any lunchtime drinking establishment in Mayfair to be, no one was in any hurry to occupy them. Don Arden had worked his intimidatory magic again.


Like everybody else who ever knew him, I'd heard about Don Arden, who died last week, long before I met him: he was the self-styled Al Capone of Pop, as he enjoyed being known.

He was the music-business gangster who'd hung fellow pop impresario Robert Stigwood by his legs from a balcony window for daring to cross swords with him; the Small Faces manager who, they later claimed, kept their money for himself; the gun-toting former manager of GENE VINCENT, BLACK SABBATH and many others including, most lucratively of all, the ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA, whose phenomenal record sales in the Seventies allowed Don to purchase Howard Hughes's old Hollywood mansion for $8 million (the equivalent of £40 million today) in cash.

His daughter, Sharon Osbourne – known then as the wife and manager of OZZY OSBOURNE, famous now as the glamorous if foul-mouthed matriarch of The Osbournes, as a star of The X Factor and her own teatime chat show – rang and asked me if I'd consider working with Don on his memoirs.

I was taken aback. As a music journalist and biographer who'd known Sharon and Ozzy for more than 20 years, I knew of the antipathy that existed between her and her father.

Once a daddy's girl who'd learned everything about the music business from working for Don, Sharon had fallen out with her father so badly some 20 years before that they'd waged war on each other ever since.

Sharon had thrown soup over the woman Don had begun an extramarital relationship with in Hollywood in the early Eighties (leaving Sharon's mother to live alone in England) and once even tried to run over Don in her car – as Ozzy cowered in the passenger seat.

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