Dance Academy trial: 'I cleaned up nightclubs'
Manoucehr Bahmanzadeh, 52, was in the witness stand for most of yesterday and described working 24 hours a day to make the club a success.
He said: “I cleaned up nightclubs in this city. I got rid of the gangs. I did it and did it all on my own.”
He also told the jury in giving evidence:
Offered to pay for a uniformed police officer to stand outside the Dance Academy
Couldn't get decent door staff and suspected one was working for a drug gang
Plymouth City Council had wanted to buy the Dance Academy for 12 years – and suggested that's why they closed the club down.
Bahmanzadeh, who the court heard was born and brought up in Teheran and worked for the Shah of Iran before the country's Islamic revolution, said he had asked for help from the police but was told to shut down.
Bahmanzadeh told how he had come to the UK in 1979 and ran a nightclub security firm in Brighton, branching out into other business ventures until he bought the old theatre on Union Street, by then an occasional club known as The Academy.
He said he spent £550,000 on the freehold, raising the last £50,000 “from family and friends I desperately asked”.
He originally ran the club with his business partner Cathy Drake. It opened seven days a week and Bahmanzadeh said they both worked 24 hours a day to make the club a success.
“I lost about a stone,” he said.
“We tried everything. I even tried a Greek night, would you believe.”
But later Bahmanzadeh told how health problems kept him away from the club, which by 2005 was open only on Saturday nights.
Bahmanzadeh said he obtained a late licence and had a “fantastic” relationship with licensing officers, but bemoaned the fact the council's licensing officers and police were often at cross purposes.
He said he attended meetings of Clubwatch but they were “always the same”, talking about alcohol problems but never drugs.
When asked how he met co-defendants Tom Costelloe and Justin Hayward, he said he met Costelloe at a charity event in London's Camden palace and observed Hayward “working hard” at the Dance Academy.
“I needed a second person to be licensee, therefore I asked Justin,” he said.
The flamboyant club owner told the court of the problems he had in recruiting security staff.
He repeatedly derided SIA training, which he said was just one day, and said he had offered to pay police £200 to put a uniformed officer on the door, because the door staff he could hire “did not know their right hand from their left”.
He claimed on one occasion, all his door staff left because they were told “The Swilly” were coming down, leaving him to guard the door alone.
On another occasion he fired a doorman for eating a kebab, and all the other security staff left in protest, he said.
Bahmanzadeh spoke of Gareth Grimes, the doorman who gave evidence against him earlier in the trial.
He said he had been suspicious that Mr Grimes wanted to work for him for just one night a week.
He said Mr Grimes was doing a good job, but added: “Sometimes people do a fantastic job for you – they clean up the club, but only to put their own dealers in there and make thousands of pounds.”
Bahmanzadeh said he sacked Mr Grimes after hearing he and another bouncer had “taxed” a drug dealer for £150 – allowing him to stay in the club after a search but pocketing his money.
The court heard in 2005 Bahmanzadeh had become ill, suffering from arthritis and eye problems, and had begun to spend a lot of time away from Plymouth, in Sussex and Cyprus.
The court heard how pressure from the police to deal with the drug problem at the Dance Academy had become more persistent, culminating in the raid which closed the club in May 2006.
Bahmanzadeh said police had kept him in custody, preventing him from contesting their temporary closure application in Magistrates court, and suggested this was because the city council had always wanted to buy the Dance Academy building.
He said the council had even sent surveyors and held discussions with him, but he had refused to sell the venue.
“When the mayor came to the opening of the Cooperage (his other club, opened in 2006) he shook my hand and told me what good work I had done for the city. Six months later I'm a drug dealer,” Bahmanzadeh said, referring to the council's attitude to him.
He also said the police had targeted him because he made “too much money too quickly”, and accused officers of playing at being James Bond.
Bahmanzadeh, 52, of Union Street, Costelloe, 37, of Westminster Close, Honiton, and Hayward, 26, of Limerick Place, St Judes, all deny allowing a Class A drug – ecstasy – to be sold in the Dance Academy.
The trial continues.
