Ronnie O'Sullivan Sr and the killing of the Krays' driver at Stocks

Kelvin Bryan held his brother in his arms on the pavement of the King's Road. Bruce had been stabbed inside the club and had staggered to the door. Kelvin screamed at him to run. Bruce looked up at him and spoke.

"I'm finished. I'm dying."

He shook his head one more time, and he died there. Kelvin had been stabbed too, in the chest and the stomach. Then, Kelvin told a jury later, the man who had stabbed them both came out of the club and kicked his brother in the head as he lay on the ground.

I'm finished. I'm dying.

Bruce Bryan to his brother Kelvin, as Kelvin told the court

The man with the knife was Ronald John O'Sullivan. Most people called him Big Ronnie. He was a millionaire with a chain of sex shops in Soho, and his fifteen-year-old son was a snooker prodigy, months away from turning professional.

It was the night of Saturday 12 October 1991, at Stocks, a members' nightclub on the King's Road in Chelsea. Ronnie's son, also Ronnie, was in Amsterdam playing in a tournament. His father had gone to Stocks with a friend, and by late in the evening the night was getting loud.

At a table nearby there was a birthday party for Angela Mills, a former girlfriend of Charlie Kray. Charlie was the older brother of Ronnie and Reggie, the twins who had been locked away since 1969. Among her guests were two brothers, Bruce and Kelvin Bryan.

Bruce Bryan was thirty-seven and a father of two. In certain circles he was known as Charlie Kray's old driver. That night he and Kelvin were out with four women. They were black, and the women were white, and that, by the evidence given in court, was where the trouble began.

Big Ronnie came from fighting people. His father, Micky, was a boxer, and so were Micky's brothers. Danny O'Sullivan was British bantamweight champion from 1949 to 1951, and Dickie was known as the Toy Bulldog. The boxing crowd called them the Fighting O'Sullivans. There was an old thread between the two families. In his memoirs, writing about the twins' early boxing days, Charlie Kray listed the O'Sullivan boys among the members of the Fitzroy Lodge club. Decades later, Charlie's old driver would die at the hands of the next generation of O'Sullivans.

Ronnie senior met his wife, Maria, when both were working at Butlins. She was seventeen and he was eighteen. They took a council flat on a grim estate in Dalston and cleaned cars in a car park in Wardour Street. Then he got a second job in a sex shop, and soon he opened his own. It turned over £360,000 in its first year. Through his company he would build up about twenty shops.

The family moved to a big house in Chigwell, Essex. At the bottom of the garden he built his boy a snooker room. By 1991 the boy was one of the best young players in the country. His father was rich, and on the night of 12 October he had been drinking heavily.

The trial came a year later. Kelvin Bryan gave evidence about what happened at Stocks, and Ronnie O'Sullivan's biographer, Clive Everton, later set it down from the court reports.

The court heard that Big Ronnie and his friend started singing football songs and then turning on the Bryan brothers, with comments that included racial abuse. According to Kelvin, the two men came over to their table late in the evening and tried to chat up the women. They waved a £250 drinks bill "under their noses to be flash".

When that did not work, Kelvin said, they turned nasty. The abuse got worse. "They said 'who do you think you are, coming in here with four white girls? Do you think you're Nigel Benn or something?'"

One of the women was slapped across the face. People started to panic and run.

"Then O'Sullivan produced a hunting knife and stabbed my brother," Kelvin said. The knife had a six-inch blade. Kelvin picked up a champagne bottle and smashed it over O'Sullivan's head to get him away from Bruce. O'Sullivan stabbed him in the chest and the stomach.

Bruce made it out of the door, bleeding badly. Kelvin found him on his knees outside. That was where he died, and where, by Kelvin's evidence, O'Sullivan came out and kicked him.

The prosecution told the jury that O'Sullivan had gone looking for trouble that night.

The O'Sullivans told it another way, and the son grew up believing it. In his first autobiography he set out what he had been told.

In that version Big Ronnie and his friend had been arguing between themselves over which of them would pay the bill. The Bryan brothers misheard, and thought the two men were refusing to pay at all. A row started. One of the brothers picked up an ashtray, and when it broke, two of Big Ronnie's fingers were cut off. The other brother hit him with a champagne bottle. "Dad then picked up a knife that was on the side of the bar and that was it," his son was quoted as saying.

Big Ronnie spent four days in hospital. The family tried to keep the worst of it from the boy and sent him out to the World Amateur Championship in Bangkok early. Late one night his mother rang him there. His father had been arrested and charged with murder.

For a few days the boy kept winning. He went through his group as the favourite and nearly made a maximum break for a car on offer. Then, in the last sixteen, he went 4-2 up against a Welshman called David Bell and lost 5-4. His biographer says the feeling that stayed with him was guilt, as if he had somehow let his father down. He was in his GCSE year at Wanstead High School. He never went back.

The family's version was never tested. At his trial Big Ronnie did not go into the witness box, so nobody ever asked him in court what a six-inch hunting knife had been doing on the side of a bar in Chelsea.

He always denied that the attack had anything to do with race.

Rather watch it?The film is on Gangland & True Crime Docs.Watch →

In September 1992 the jury found Ronald O'Sullivan guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life, with a minimum of eighteen years.

As his son remembered it, his father's last words to him from the dock were "Tell my boy to win." The boy turned professional that same year, aged sixteen. Straight off the plane from Bangkok, he had gone to see his father in Brixton prison, in a prison uniform. The sentence hung over the next eighteen years of his career.

Big Ronnie was released in 2010, after eighteen years inside.

In 2023 he spoke about the killing on camera, in The Edge of Everything, a documentary about his son. "But I know I took that man's life," he said, "and I know I hurt the other one."

Bruce Bryan's name is rarely in the stories about that night. He went out to a birthday party on the King's Road and died on the pavement, aged thirty-seven, with his brother holding him. The full story is in our film on Gangland.