Don Arden, the most notorious of all British pop-rock music managers, has died in Los Angeles after a long illness aged 81. In a career that spanned 60 years, he promoted and managed some of the biggest names in pop music. His ruthless business dealings and willingness to intimidate both his charges and his competitors earned him the nickname "the Al Capone of pop".
Arden was born Harry Levy in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. He would describe the neighbourhood as "a Jewish ghetto" and recall "my family were good Yiddisher folk - poor but very hard-working". He left school aged 13, determined to work in show business and adopted the name Don Arden to avoid encountering anti-Semitism from bookers. During the second world war, the teenage Arden found work as a stand-up comic and singer on the vaudeville circuit, entertaining the troops before he was drafted.
With the war over, Arden returned to vaudeville, and contemporaries remember him as a gifted comic whose imitations of Enrico Caruso and Al Jolson were excellent. But his bad temper and aggressive approach alienated bookers to such an extent that he began working as a promoter, initially booking Hebrew folk-song contests. In the early 1950s he settled in Brixton, south London, marrying Irish ballet teacher Hope Shaw, and returned to performing briefly as a member of the Black and White Minstrels.
In 1959, Arden promoted the first UK tour of American rockabilly singer Gene Vincent, who was so impressed by his British following that he shifted to the UK, employing Arden as his manager. Arden kept Vincent busy touring western Europe, but the two men parted in 1965 amid much acrimony, so setting a pattern for Arden's working relationships. By then he had begun to earn considerable sums by promoting package tours of American 1950s rock'n'roll artists, yet the onset of Beatlemania caused him to lose £100,000 on one 10-week tour as British teenagers declared US artists passé.
Arden set off in search of young British talent and met the Newcastle-based band the Animals, whose manager, Mike Jeffrey, was looking for an influential agent. Arden brought the band to London and helped secure them a recording deal. Their huge immediate success benefited Arden - now their worldwide agent - but he soon fell foul of Jeffrey, so sold his rights to book the band and began managing the Nashville Teens.
Arden offered little artistic direction to the Teens, instead keeping them on a gruelling tour schedule. When band pianist John Hawken chastised him in his Carnaby Street office for the meagre sums he advanced the group, Arden began to strangle the musician before attempting to throw him from the second storey window, shouting: "You're going over, John, you're going over." The distraught Hawken freed himself and fled, but this story is not untypical of those concerning Arden's handling of anyone who challenged him.
In 1965 he signed Cockney teenagers the Small Faces and ensured their debut single was a hit by outlaying several hundred pounds to chart fixers. Arden kept the highly successful band on a £20-a-week salary while cocooning them in pop star luxury. When the band demanded to see their royalty statements in 1966, he countered by informing their parents that the band were drug addicts.
Hearing that Australian entrepreneur Robert Stigwood was interested in the band, he and his heavies paid Stigwood a visit with Arden hanging Stigwood off his fourth-floor balcony as a warning. The Small Faces eventually won their freedom, but all attempts at retrieving royalties due from Arden found them locked in court battles, finally receiving payment only in 1977.
Arden briefly attempted to revive his singing career in 1967 before returning to management with Amen Corner. A similar pattern of hits and disputes followed leading to a threat of assassination - which Arden took seriously and resolved by threatening certain of those involved with his gun-carrying heavies. All this helped give rise to rumours that Arden was connected to the mafia, rumours that he encouraged.
Arden then took over managing the Move, and out of this band came the Electric Light Orchestra, which went on to sell millions of albums internationally, generating huge wealth for Arden. He settled in Los Angeles, purchasing Howard Hughes' mansion in 1972. Again, the relationship ended acrimoniously.
In 1979 Arden found himself under scrutiny from the BBC Radio 4 Checkpoint programme, and so he threatened the investigative journalist Roger Cook.
By 1980 Arden was managing Ozzy Osbourne after the singer's split from Black Sabbath. Osbourne left his wife to marry Arden's daughter Sharon - she, having worked for Don since her teens, had inherited his tough management skills - and when the couple left Arden to go it alone in 1982, Don ensured that much litigation followed.
In 1986 Arden and son David were charged (as Harry and David Levy) with blackmailing and imprisoning an accountant who they had fallen out with. The sensational court case found a jury declaring David guilty, while Don was acquitted.
Arden soldiered on, managing the declining Black Sabbath while Sharon Osbourne turned her husband (and, subsequently, children and herself) into a hugely profitable enterprise.
Osbourne had told her children that their grandfather was dead, and they first saw him when she began screaming abuse at the elderly Arden upon encountering him on a Los Angeles street. In 2004 Arden published his autobiography, Mr Big: Ozzy, Sharon and My Life As the Godfather of Rock, to modest interest.
Sharon Osbourne's 2005 autobiography Extreme sold two million copies and, although she was reconciled with her now ailing father, portrayed him as a villainous, if occasionally generous, man. His wife Hope predeceased him. He is survived by Sharon and David.
· Don Arden (Harry Levy), artists' manager and promoter, born January 4 1926; died July 21 2007