The convicted 1967 killer who had an axe to grind with Michael Caine: “Hardly helped my case”
Most actors with careers that lasted 70 years would make at least an enemy or two along the way, but not Michael Caine. Instead, nobody in the industry had much of a bad word to say about him, and vice versa.
However, that didn’t prevent the two-time Academy Award winner from becoming the subject of a grudge. Not just any old grudge, either, but a grudge that was held by a man convicted of a 1967 murder, who spent a dozen years of a life sentence behind bars before being released.
Angus Sibbet was a debt collector for a company run by the brother of Michael Luvaglio, which specialised in selling fruit machines to working men’s clubs in the 1960s, and with organised crime reaching its peak during the decade, it proved to be a lucrative business.
Caine, who was no stranger to gangsters, having been a familiar face to the Kray twins, was completely oblivious to all of this, of course. However, when Luvaglio and his associate, Dennis Stafford, were tried for Sibbet’s murder on January 4th, 1967, they were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
The authorities alleged that the pair’s crime had been motivated by the deceased skimming the earnings from the fruit machines, siphoning off at least four figures a week, and his body was discovered in the back of a car in County Durham, with the three gunshots giving away the means of execution.
What does this have to do with one of the greatest British actors of all time? Quite a lot, actually. The case partly inspired the 1970 novel, Jack’s Return Home, which in turn served as the basis for the following year’s feature-length adaptation, Get Carter, a Caine classic that finds his ruthless enforcer cutting a swathe through the London underworld.
During his time behind bars, Stafford mounted two unsuccessful appeals and profusely maintained his innocence. Thanks to the added notoriety that the killing’s ties to Get Carter had generated, he held both the movie and Caine responsible for permanently tarring his image in the eyes of the law.
It was hardly a biopic, but Stafford nonetheless once said, “Michael Caine charging round onscreen blasting away with a shotgun hardly helped my case.” Whether that’s true or not remains immaterial, since it wasn’t like Get Carter was going to be trotted out in court as a gauge for his guilt or innocence.
The picture was another huge win for Caine on the critical and commercial front, one that cemented his leading man status and reputation as one of Britain’s biggest breakout stars. Throughout it all, though, Stafford was stewing.
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