In a career spanning more than half a century, Don Arden managed some of the biggest names in rock music, including Gene Vincent, the Animals, the Small Faces, ELO and Black Sabbath.

His reputation as the toughest and roughest manager in the business and his confrontational style earned him the nickname “the Al Capone of the pop world” and he did nothing to deny rumours of links with the Mafia.

He was born Harry Levy in Manchester in 1926 and although he claimed to have left school at the age of 13, he briefly attended the Royal College of Music, before changing his name to Don Arden in 1944 and beginning a youthful career entertaining troops as a stand-up comic and singer. He continued on the music hall circuit into the 1950s but by the end of the decade had decided there was more money to be made as a promoter.

In 1959 he brought the American Gene Vincent to Britain for his first tour. It proved such a success that Arden persuaded Vincent to move to the UK and became his manager. They worked together for six years before parting acrimoniously in 1965. By then Arden had concluded that 1950s rock’n’roll was finished and had turned to the British beat group scene.

After promoting some early Rolling Stones gigs, in 1963 Arden became agent for the Newcastle-based Animals and brought them to London for a residency at the fashionable Scene club. The group swiftly hit No 1 with House of the Rising Sun but Arden’s association proved to be short-lived after a dispute with the group’s manager Mike Jeffrey.

Arden then took on the management of a sextet called the Nashville Teens. The group made the Top Ten with their first single, Tobacco Road, but swiftly fell out with Arden over money. The group’s singer, Ray Phillips, recalled Arden’s method of payment: “We had to go up and barter for the money. If we were owed a grand he’d say, 'Would you settle for £600?'." When the band’s pianist, John Hawken, challenged Arden’s authority, the manager seized him by the throat and dragged him towards his second-storey office window, yelling “You’re going over!”. Hawken managed to free himself and fled the office.

Arden’s next signing was the Small Faces, whom he cleverly hyped as icons of the mid-Sixties’ mod scene, opening an account for them at every clothing boutique in Carnaby Street and installing them in a bachelor flat in Pimlico with a maid and chauffeur. He later admitted to having spent £12,000 on chart manipulation to turn the band’s debut disc, Whatcha Gonna Do About It into a hit.

“Of course, the Small Faces had no idea what went on,” he later boasted. Meanwhile, he kept the band on a meagre £20 a week pocket money, despite their chart success. By now a pattern was emerging in Arden’s financial dealings with his clients. By 1966, the Small Faces were highly disatisfied with his stewardship. When he refused to supply them with accounts, the group’s parents paid Arden a visit and demand an explanation. Arden fended off all questions about where the money had gone by telling the concerned parents that their teenage children were drug addicts.

On learning that the Small Faces had talked to the entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, he paid his rival a visit, accompanied by a number of toughs. Pretending to have gone berserk, Arden lifted Stigwood from his chair, held him over his balcony looking down at the pavement four storeys below. “I warned him never to interfere with my groups again,” Arden recalled.

Arden eventually sold the Faces’ contract for £12,000. But he still owed them royalties and the legal battle to drag the money out of him continued through the courts until 1977, when the group finally recovered a third of the sum. While looking for a new chart act to replace the Small Faces, Arden temporarily revived his singing career, recording the ballad Sunrise Sunset. Despite his boasts of being able to hype any record into the charts, his fixing skills failed him on his own record and he swiftly returned to management with Amen Corner.

Once again relations turned sour and a battle ensued between Arden and an un-named rival management consortium who, according to Arden, warned him that unless he agreed to let Amen Corner go, a contract killer would take out a member of his family. He took the threat seriously and responded by employing nine bodyguards. Typically, he also retaliated and dispatched his heavies with a sawn-off shotgun to put the frighteners on a member of the consortium. Despite a police investigation, charges were never laid and Arden went on to sell Amen Corner’s contract for a profit of £50,000.

Arden’s next clients were the Move. By the time he signed them they had already enjoyed several hits and, via a series of provocative publicity stunts, had generated more controversy than almost any British pop group since the Rolling Stones.