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Jailed UK house DJ and club promoter Tom Costelloe pleaded his innocence in a letter published in Mixmag recently as he begins his 5 year sentence for tolerating ‘the rampant and blatant sale of ecstasy’ at the Plymouth Academy. “There was not one piece of evidence that the purchase of tablets took place in front of any members of staff. There was no real evidence that we allowed anyone or permitted or suffered any dealers to operate, ever,” Tom pointed out. “I seek no glorification or PR from this letter,” he added. “I just want you to warn club owners, promoters and fellow DJs – for God’s sake, be careful and make sure what’s happened to me doesn’t happen to any other innocent lovers of dance music like myself.”
Tom has become the highest profile UK promoters to be jailed under UK RAVE Act style laws, though as early as 1989 authorities were using prison sentences to attempt to crush dance music culture, most notoriously against rave pioneer Rob Tissera in Blackburn. Rob was busted when convoys of police smashed into a warehouse party, arresting all 800 revellers inside, in what was Britain’s biggest mass arrest of the 20th century. He was subsequently charged with inciting a riot after being filmed on camera screaming into the microphone ‘if you want this party to continue, you’ve got to keep the bastards out’, landing a 3 month sentence after the judge found him guilty.
“When I was sentenced it was probably the most difficult and humiliating moment of my life because I was going to jail,” Rob recalled in an interview with Skrufff in 2002. “But what can you do? I’d been expecting a fine and had even taken the money to court to pay it. The judge was really harsh. I got three months though got out on appeal after three weeks, thank goodness. They weren’t really within their rights to sentence me like that but they wanted to make an example of me. I can’t tell you how long those three weeks in jail felt like,” he said.
The brave DJ said his time in prison was made easier by the sympathy and support of fellow prisoners, none of whom caused him problems. “The other prisoners were absolutely fine, there were loads of ravers in there and loads of them were aware of the situation, which probably made it easier for me since they didn’t see me as a serious criminal,” said Rob. “But having said that I was sharing a landing with a couple of murderers. But that’s how prison is, it’s not the best experience in the world.”
“It was a mad thing that went wrong but in the long term it worked out very well,” Rob told Clubbers.net in a subsequent interview. “Because as soon as I got out of there, people were saying ‘f**king nice one, would you like to come and play at our night club?’” he recalled.
CloudTwo says...
Why don't they arrest the dealers rather than the promoter who allowed the dealing to go on which is a pretty hard thing to prove anyway. So he's going to jail for not preventing dealers from selling...which is the police's job.. right.