The Dark Secrets Of SHARON OSBOURNE's Dad Revealed

Mick Wall of Britain's Daily Mail reports: Like everybody else who ever knew him, I'd heard about Don Arden, who died last week, long before I met him: he was the self-styled Al Capone of Pop, as he enjoyed being known.

He was the music-business gangster who'd hung fellow pop impresario Robert Stigwood by his legs from a balcony window for daring to cross swords with him; THE SMALL FACES manager who, they later claimed, kept their money for himself; the gun-toting former manager of Gene Vincent, BLACK SABBATH and many others including, most lucratively of all, the ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA, whose phenomenal record sales in the Seventies allowed Don to purchase Howard Hughes's old Hollywood mansion for $8 million (the equivalent of £40 million today) in cash.

His daughter, Sharon Osbourne — known then as the wife and manager of Ozzy Osbourne, famous now as the glamorous if foul-mouthed matriarch of "The Osbournes", as a star of "The X Factor" and her own teatime chat show — rang and asked me if I'd consider working with Don on his memoirs.

I was taken aback. As a music journalist and biographer who'd known Sharon and Ozzy for more than 20 years, I knew of the antipathy that existed between her and her father.

Once a daddy's girl who'd learned everything about the music business from working for Don, Sharon had fallen out with her father so badly some 20 years before that they'd waged war on each other ever since.

Sharon had thrown soup over the woman Don had begun an extramarital relationship with in Hollywood in the early Eighties (leaving Sharon's mother to live alone in England) and once even tried to run over Don in her car — as Ozzy cowered in the passenger seat.

Read the entire article at www.dailymail.co.uk.