Johnny Vaughan - Life and Career

Life and Career

When Vaughan was 16 years old, his father went bankrupt. On leaving school, Vaughan moved to London and originally wanted to become a writer. He ended up with a variety of jobs ranging from a grill chef to even starting his own business selling boxer shorts.

In 1988, aged 21, Vaughan was arrested for trying to sell £15,000 of cocaine to undercover police officers in a hotel on the M1 motorway near Northampton. He was found guilty of being "concerned with the supply" of class A drugs (namely cocaine) and sentenced to 4 years in Stocken Prison, of which he served 25 months (2 years and a month). In the immediate aftermath of his initial success with Moviewatch, Vaughan claimed in interviews, including one with Mayfair magazine that he had been incarcerated for the distribution of pornographic videotapes.

Latterly, Vaughan recalled the event in an interview with the Daily Telegraph:

One night, an old schoolfriend, a student, called and asked him if he had any drug connections; the friend had met somebody who wanted to know. (The somebody, it turned out, was a drug dealer who had been arrested and was now working for the police.) No, said Vaughan, he didn't. 'The next day,' Vaughan says, 'I do bump into someone. He calls me and says, "Tell your friend it's all sorted."?' Vaughan arranged the meeting at a service station on the M1, and went there to introduce the protagonists. He was slammed against a wall by a policeman who asked him how old he was. When Vaughan said 21, the cop said, "You won't be seeing sunshine again until you're 36."

It was during his time in prison that Vaughan began to take an interest in literature and philosophy. On release from prison, Vaughan decided to turn his life around and started a job working as a journalist for the Peterborough Herald newspaper, reporting on legal cases in his column, Johnny Vaughan in the Courts.