How My Elaborate Plans Backfired and Landed Me in Jail

In this series, professionals reflect on their inevitable career mistakes. Follow the stories here and write your own (please include #BestMistake in your post).

April 1st is one of my favourite days of the year. I love seeing what hilarious ideas everyone comes up with to fool people. While I would never admit to doing an April Fool myself, there have been certain projects that others suggested may have been fortuitously timed for release at the start of April. Ones that come to mind include Virgle, our partnership with Google to go to Mars, and Virgin Volcanic, our project to explore the world’s volcanoes.

There was one April Fool joke I was forced to admit – to some members of the British police. It was March 31st in the early 1990s, and I decided to play a trick on my good friend and Virgin Records partner, Ken Berry. It turned into one of my biggest mistakes. Twenty-four hours later, I was spending the night in a cell.

I invited Ken and his girlfriend for dinner at the Roof Gardens, our restaurant in Kensington, London. While we enjoyed a lovely meal, my main aim was to keep Ken away from his home. As the clock struck midnight, some other friends went round to his house and removed every single one of his possessions from the property. I planned to go back to the house with Ken, where some actors pretending to be policemen would arrive to quiz him about the break-in. When he was close to losing it, I would reveal it was an April Fool.

Feeling the plan was going perfectly, I popped to the bathroom. But when I arrived back at the table, Ken and his girlfriend were nowhere to be seen. They had left me a note: "Thanks for dinner. See you tomorrow. Ken." I rushed back, only to hear from my wife on the way. My wife Joan, who wasn’t in on the joke – I always tell as few people as possible – told me something terrible had happened. “Richard, Kenny's flat's been broken into and the police are there now. He called to ask if his girlfriend could spend the night with us as she's too scared to stay in the flat.”

I urgently called Ken to come clean on the joke, but by the time I got through, he had already filed a police report. Soon, two (real) policemen were arresting me in my slippers and dressing gown. I told them it was all a simple misunderstanding, but they wouldn’t listen. I was chucked in a cell in Harrow Road Police Station, and they even took my dressing gown belt as a precaution against me committing suicide. I nodded off and woke up to screams from the next cell – somebody was being beaten up. It was unsettling to say the least.

It was a long, cold night in the cell, but morning finally arrived. At noon, the police officers formally charged me with about dozen offences, and released me. I walked outside to find Ken and all the Virgin Records staff standing side by side with the police. My face dropped as they screamed: “April Fool’s!" with the police laughing their heads off.

Ken had got the police to drop the charges, on the condition they could keep me locked up overnight. They had even thrown in the fake beating to scare me further. I thought twice about doing another prank — but of course had another one lined up for the next April 1st.

While that joke backfired spectacularly, the most inspired ideas can come out of mistakes. What’s more, some of the very best businesses can come out of April Fool’s. On April 1, 1986, I tricked the music world by running an exclusive in Music Week magazine that we had secretly developed a Music Box. It could store every song in your record collection on a tiny little device. For a small fee, users could download every track or album they desired. The record companies worked themselves into a frenzy trying to work out how we had done it – executives were ringing my phone off the hook, begging me not to go ahead and kill the industry.

Years later, a very similar device to the Music Box revolutionised the world – the iPod and iTunes. Steve Jobs told me he had read the Music Week article, and been inspired by the idea. iTunes went on to change the music industry forever and resulted in the closure of Virgin Megastores. Perhaps not acting upon my joke and creating the Music Box for real was my biggest mistake!

Thankfully, as I have said before, the best thing about ideas is that they are like buses – there is always another one coming.