Features / organised crime
Former bodyguard on guns, gangsters and travelling the globe
On April 5 1985 in Redcliffe, Mike Brosnan was shot in the throat by two men who owed him £200.
Mike has some astonishing stories including this brush with death at the former Bibas nightclub opposite St Mary Redcliffe Church.
The 72-year-old, who now lives in Leigh Woods, speaks in a strong Bristol accent with a permanent husky baritone due to the bullet penetrating his vocal cords.
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He hopes that this deep voice could see him become a voiceover artist, and he has already been approached by a major film studio who want to tell his stranger-than-fiction story, with a possible book deal also on the cards.
Now settled in Bristol, Mike (left) now leads a happy and luxurious life
Mike is still close friends with men whose former livelihoods were perhaps not always on the right side of the law.
“My argument is this: if you grow up with someone and they become a killer, a robber or a terrorist – that’s not your fault,” says Mike. “But you are presumed guilty by contact.”
It all started in 1977 when Mike was on a flight that landed in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.
He was the last person to get off the plane, behind a woman who was struggling with a French horn bag and luggage, and carrying a baby in her arms.
Mike offered to help the woman get off the plane, only to see a Range Rover waiting on the tarmac for her. She bid Mike goodbye, blowing him kisses and thanking him for his kindness.
Three months later, when Mike’s then-boss flew him to Jeddah for a project, he was taken by surprise to find the same woman playing the piano in a room he was taken to by his colleagues.
“When we went into the room, she went, ‘That’s him, that’s the man at the airport’. As my boss was connected to the people in New York, he said to me, ‘You’re not doing any work, where in the world would you like to work?’.”
Mike then started travelling across the globe doing jobs for his new friend. Soon he became a bodyguard, providing close protection to anybody who could afford his rates of thousands of pounds a day, including a growing number of wealthy people from the Middle East.
“I don’t like to call them Arabs. They are friends, feel like my boys,” Mike explains on a recent afternoon within his luxurious home just a short walk from the Suspension Bridge.
But Mike’s life took a turn on that April day in 1985 in Redcliffe. He had lent £200 to two penniless men who had requested to be let into a club in Clifton.
When they couldn’t afford to pay him back, they shot Mike outside Bibas.
Mike says the men were likely jealous of his lifestyle and money, with him by then driving a Lamborghini.
Mike is soon getting married to Sally, who he says he wishes he had met earlier in his eventful life
Through his large network of associates, Mike was connected with the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery of 1983.
This saw an armed gang steal £25m worth of gold bullion bound for the Far East from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport in what remains one of the largest heists in British history.
“The guy with the gold bullion, he asked me six weeks before he got shot, ‘Would you come and babysit me?’” Mike remembers.
“I agreed. Then I got a phone call from a gangsters’ firm in England and they said to me, ‘You’ve been asked to do some babysitting, so we’re going to ask you best not to go.’
“I phoned the guy back and said, ‘I can’t do it’. Six weeks later, he got shot to pieces in his garden here.”
While Mike does not mention any names, if reports are to be believed it was John Palmer, nicknamed ‘Goldfinger’, who was shot six times in his garden after the robbery. Palmer had a link to Bristol, owning a jewellery business in Bedminster.
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Living among crime bosses and gangsters, did Mike ever feel regret or fear during his career as a ‘bodyguard’?
Mike answers without hesitation: “I have no regret. The only regret I would have is if anything had an affect on my children, which I don’t think it did. They all have relatively good lives.
“My children used to say to me, ‘Daddy, pick me up today in a Rolls Royce or the Bentley or the Ferrari’. So they had an affect that way.
“But a dangerous part of the life was this: my brother used to go down to my cars in the morning, depending on whichever car I was taking. He’d have to check the car for bombs with a stick, with a mirror and a torch – just to make sure no one’s going to blow the hell out of you.
“A lot of the people I know are not alive anymore. But I was respected because I never went down the violent path. I was good at protecting people.”
He is sure that his “habibis” in the Middle East – who in his own words are “terrorists” today – would have never hurt him.
“They chose that path, but they don’t want to hurt me. They’ve offered to protect me if anything went wrong. That friendship is all I want and my friendship back.”
So what does life look like now for Mike? He shares a gorgeous home in Leigh Woods with his fiancée, Sally, with the pair due to get married in 2025.
“We share the losses of people we know that we’ve loved. We share so much.”
All photos: Mike Brosnan
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