'Teflon Don' Arran Coghlan walks free again as assault charges are dropped

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Arran Coghlan, 39, was cleared of assaulting two policemen who were investigating a burglary
He has previously been cleared of three gangland murders after the CPS dropped the charges

By Jaya Narain for MailOnline
Updated: 07:32 EST, 26 July 2011

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'Teflon Don': Walked free after he was cleared of assaulting two police officers

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His nickname is the ‘Teflon Don’ because criminal charges against him never seem to stick.

He has been accused of three separate murders and conspiracy to flood the UK with cocaine, but each time Arran Coghlan has been cleared or the charges have been dropped.

Now he has walked free again after a case of assaulting two police officers collapsed.

Coghlan, 39, who insists he is a law-abiding businessman, was accused of causing actual bodily harm to two officers in Manchester.

One suffered a broken nose and the other needed stitches to his lip after a confrontation in a back street.

Coghlan said he thought he was being attacked by two men in dark clothing and hit them in self-defence.

He said: ‘I was approached on a dark back street by two men in dark clothing. They didn’t identify themselves as police and I had no idea who they were.

'I turned around and one was behind me. Considering this as an attack strategy, I hit the guy. The other guy then came in and they both got knocked to the floor. I was acting in self-defence and I would do the same again tomorrow. The greatest crime is the inaction of a capable man.’

Coghlan was alleged to have attacked the officers as they were investigating burglaries outside high-rise flats in Stockport, Greater Manchester.

But the charges were dropped when the Crown Prosecution Service told Liverpool Crown Court that it was no longer in the public interest to pursue the matter.

The judge ordered two not guilty verdicts to be recorded.

Coghlan, who drives a Bentley Turbo, lives in a mansion in leafy Alderley Edge, Cheshire, where he rubs shoulders with Premier League footballers and soap stars.

He has always denied allegations he is the godfather to a vast criminal empire and claims he runs a legitimate enterprise offering consultancy services to businesses.

The nickname ‘Teflon Don’ was first given to American mobster John Gotti, after frustrated FBI agents failed to get any of their charges to ‘stick’.

Coghlan says he has been victimised by detectives in a decade-long campaign to put him behind bars.

Coghlan was arrested in September last year by officers for the Serious Organised Crime Agency as he stepped off a flight from Amsterdam at Manchester airport.

It was alleged he and others were heading a multi-million-pound drug-smuggling ring and he was the mastermind behind a plot to flood the UK with cocaine.

But after spending nine months in prison on remand, charges were dropped at Liverpool Crown Court for lack of evidence.

As he was freed last month, Coghlan – who survived an attempt on his life in a Stockport bar on New Year’s Day 2009 – rubbed his hands, laughed and told the judge: ‘I’ve booked a two-week cruise.’

Commenting on the dropping of the assault charges, a CPS spokesman said the decision took into account the ‘significant amount of time’ Coghlan had spent on remand.