Jeffrey Kruger

Jeffrey Sonny Kruger MBE (né Krugerkoff, 19 April 1931 –14 May 2014) was a British entertainment business executive who owned the Flamingo Club in Soho, London, established the independent record label Ember Records, and set up the music business conglomerate TKO (The Kruger Organisation).

Biography Kruger was born in the East End of London in 1931; his father changed the family's German name of Krugerkoff to Kruger during the Second World War. He started work as a salesman with Columbia Pictures. before forming his own band, Sonny Kruger and the Music Makers. With his father, Sam Kruger, he founded the Flamingo Club in Soho in 1952, initially in Coventry Street; it moved to Wardour Street in 1957.

He established contacts in the US, and persuaded jazz drummer Tony Crombie to form one of the earliest British rock and roll bands, Tony Crombie and the Rockets. Kruger acted as Crombie's manager and record producer, and co-produced the movie Rock You Sinners in 1957. The Flamingo Club became established as a venue for leading American and British jazz performers, and in the early 1960s jazz-influenced rhythm and blues bands such as Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames performed there regularly. The club became a centre of the mod subculture, and by the mid-1960s a regular venue for emerging rock bands. Kruger also set up other clubs such as the Florida. He later concentrated on promoting many dance and theatre productions.

He published an autobiography, Angels & Assholes: My Life With The Stars, in 1999. He died in Miami, Florida in 2014 at the age of 83.