Bushwhackers Manchester Nitemare

After being in UK numerous times for WWE and also independent promoters in the last 20 years, I was refused entry at Manchester International Airport on Friday the 29th of Jan. 2010.

This was an embarrassing situation for me as I have been traveling all over the world for the last 40 years for work and charity organizations.
This is the bloody story mates:

I arrived at Manchester airport at 10am Fri morning and didn’t know that Molly Holly was on the plane till I was held up at immigration. I was one of the last to go through immigration. They read a letter that I had from UK promoter about me doing wrestling clinics throughout UK and I also told them that I was doing a autograph signing. That’s when the immigration woman said she rang the promoter and that he told her that he was picking me up on Sunday. She asked me what I was doing till then and I told her about the signing on Saturday.
At this time I did not know that they were holding Barbarian, Mr. Fuji, Tugboat and Nikolai Vollkoff in a room for the last 2 hours. Their plane arrived from Philadelphia at 8am. What this immigration woman was ticked off about, was she had let Warlord through and he had said nothing about an autograph signing.

By now she knew about WrestleSlam on Saturday in Manchester and was asking about event pay. I told them that I had been paid before hand in USa when promoter was over in here last Oct., which was true. I was held in a room for 7 hours. They went through my bags with a magnifying glass and I mean that as they went through my calendar book and all other paperwork I had there for other promoters in US and Canada. All my packed clothing was thoroughly checked and they even went into the pockets of shirts and jeans which was a first for me. I had a stack of photos to give to fans and they checked them out as if I had hidden drugs or contraband there.

At this time the immigration woman’s shift was over and a male agent took over asking me to do a question and answer test. After answering the questions he thought it was a kind of joke as we had come to do a meet and greet for the wrestling fans of UK and the kids were going to be very disappointed. I got out of there at 5pm and wouldn’t have if Anthony (promoter) hadn’t got a lawyer as they wanted to impound all of us till our flights left on Sat morn. I was finger printed and a mug shot was taken. Did the UK Immigration think that all of us WWE Legends were TERRORISTS? To top this off, I am a British subject.
When i got back to New York i had an immigration problem here too as i had only been gone 24 hours and had a UK visa with a cross through it. I was held up for about an hour or so and had to go into a holding room with a league of nations waiting to explain there situations. I showed them the UK immigration paperwork and they stamped my passport and let me through.
This whole situation was out of my control.

I am appealing the UK immigration charge, as it is suppose to be on file for 10 years. The story out there was that we were terrorists. Look at the size of all other guys who are well known characters and we were all known to some of Immigration agents. I think that some other promoter was the informant, as he did not want Wrestleslam to be a success.