Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  The European Championship would also mark the first time, since crowd trouble had become recognized as not only an English but a European problem, that the notorious supporters of so many different countries—the Germans, the Dutch, the Italians as well as the English—would be in the same place. England was scheduled to play Holland in its second match in Düsseldorf, and, as the border with Holland was but a few minutes away, a large number of Dutch supporters would be attending. England was not scheduled to play Germany, unless it got through the first round, but German supporters would be everywhere. DJ knew there would be trouble and wanted to be taking pictures of it. It would be the start of his new career.

  Even so, he seemed to be prospering in his old career, although I was not certain what it was exactly. Import-export, he said at one point, and it did seem to be a trade of some kind. He had returned that very morning from Bangkok, where he had done some ‘deal’ involving children’s clothes and had ‘cleared’, he said, a thousand pounds. I could not imagine how this worked, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him about it until the end of our meal.

  Underpants, DJ then explained. He had come back with suitcases full of children’s underpants.

  You trade in children’s underpants? I asked. It sounded a little unsavoury.

  Among many other products.

  And then, perhaps feeling a little defensive, he listed them. They included watches, fashion accessories, men’s suits, women’s and children’s clothing, shoes and cars. For some time he did a line in Mercedes. The travel involved in trade of this kind was considerable, and DJ mentioned that, in the last year alone, he had been to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tel Aviv, Manila, Cairo, Luxembourg, Mexico City and Los Angeles. He liked to travel; it was important to him. He said that even this morning, just off the flight from Bangkok, he had phoned his travel agent—after so much work, it was time for a holiday—hoping to arrange a little trip, leaving tomorrow perhaps, to Sun City in Southern Africa. The idea of Sun City appealed to him and he described its attractions. I don’t know if he went. I suspect that the holiday was described in the same spirit that informed his homilies about the virtues of the economic practices of the Conservative Party and the philosophy of Margaret Thatcher: he knew the liberal politics of his new media friends.

  He paused to admire the label of the jacket I was wearing. He was putting on a good show. Before the evening was finished, he would mention the house he had just sold. He would also say something about the Jag he wanted to buy, the movement of his investments on the stock market, the races at Newmarket and his drive there in a Mercedes along the Six Mile Bottom Road, the automatic speedometer fixed to 135 miles per hour, throwing empty champagne bottles out the window. DJ was twenty-three years old.

  The managing director of the photo agency arranged to give DJ some photography lessons, and he and I agreed to meet for a drink at a later date. The bill for the meal was £120; DJ insisted on putting it on his account.

  DJ and I met several times before the European Championship. He had been a football supporter since the age of ten and had stories to tell. Some of these involved the lads from Manchester United. I was amused to learn how far Sammy’s reputation extended. Among West Ham supporters he was known as ‘Steamin’ Sammy’ because he was always the first one from Manchester United to ‘steam into trouble’. On one occasion, Sammy’s spectacles were seized and displayed as a trophy behind the bar at the Builders’ Arms, one of the West Ham pubs, and when Sammy, nearly blind, wandered into the pub later that day, he was set upon. DJ was also on the train from Manchester in which Roy Downes was beaten up and nearly killed. According to DJ, however, the trouble started when Roy threw a cup of hot tea at Bill Gardiner, West Ham’s famous ‘Top Man’.

  As we drove through London together, DJ would recall the spots where great liberties had been taken—‘taking liberties’, a recurrent DJ phrase, was one of the more serious of possible misdemeanours and involved violating the territorial claims of a rival. At one time, he alluded to his scars. And although I would later hear his friends describe him as an animal—‘Lunar the Lunatic’ was one of his nicknames—DJ’s talk was not dominated by the subject of football violence. His agenda was more complicated.

  DJ was different from most other West Ham supporters. For a start, he was Jewish—he mentioned getting ‘nicked on Yom Kippur on a West Ham away’—and, although he spoke in a flat East London accent, I came to suspect that it was cultivated. He mentioned once that he had been to a small public school, and, when I pressed him on the point, I discovered that he had five A-levels. He spoke French. He read regularly, mainly non-fiction dealing with social issues: police, crime, development problems in the inner city. I also learned—the information was admitted reluctantly—that his family, although of a working-class background, was well off and that his father had a successful furniture factory somewhere in the East End. His brother worked for an investment company in New York. Later, I would see that DJ was a conspicuous spender, known also among friends as ‘Bags-of-money’, although it was my belief that the money had been earned by DJ himself, that it never came from his father. It was my hunch that DJ was conducting some kind of private rebellion against his upbringing.

  DJ was an eccentric, and my sense of journalism told me that the details of his life justified spending more time with him. But there were other reasons, too.

  I began work on this book because I wanted to know why young males in England were rioting every Saturday, and, although I knew very little about the game of football and only a little more about the people who attended it, I thought that my ignorance might not be such a bad thing. I believed that by entering an experience of this kind unencumbered—by history or tradition or even the habits of a Saturday afternoon—I might see it in a clearer way than someone for whom it was a familiar feature of the culture. I wasn’t interested in questions of right or wrong, and I didn’t ask them. I wanted to get close to the violence—very close, as close as I could possibly get—because I thought that this way I would find out how it worked.

  I was surprised by what I found; moreover, because I came away with a knowledge I had not possessed before, I was also grateful, and surprised by that as well. I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable. I would have assumed, if I had thought to think about it, that the violence would be exciting—in the way that a traffic accident is exciting—but the pure elemental pleasure was of an intensity that was unlike anything I had foreseen or experienced before. But it was not just any violence. It wasn’t random violence or Saturday night violence or fights in the pub; it was crowd violence—that was the one that mattered: the very particular workings of the violence of numbers.

  This is, if you like, the answer to the hundred-dollar question: why do young males riot every Saturday? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic drugs, or behaved badly or rebelliously. Violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenalin-induced euphoria that might be all the more powerful because it is generated by the body itself, with, I was convinced, many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically-produced drugs.

  I understood this and was convinced by it, but was still not satisfied. Why this kind of antisocial conduct? I couldn’t separate the end—this exhilaration—from the means that got people to it; I couldn’t treat it as this generation’s thing, its rock and roll. There are endless precedents for extreme forms of behaviour—especially violence—but not for organized violence, not for violence pitched at achieving this kind of frenzied high: the crowd high. This was unusual. And, amid all the different factors that contribute to why an assembly of people becomes a crowd and then, ultimately, a violent one, there is almost invariably a political or economic cause of some kind, even if the cause is cosmetic or rhetorical—a grievance or an injustice or at least a hardened feeling of social frustration—and I couldn’t get away from the starkness of the conclusion I kept reaching
: that there was no cause for the violence; no ‘reason’ for it at all. If anything there were ‘unreasons’: rather than economic hardship or political frustration, there was economic plenty and an untroubled, even complacent faith in a free market and nationalistic politics that was proud of both its comforts and its selfishness.

  I couldn’t believe that what I saw was all there was.

  This was where DJ came in. In the figure of DJ I had the fundamental contradiction at its most concentrated. He had so many things going for him—education, intelligence, an awareness of the world, money, initiative, a strong and supportive family. Even if he had had no interest in crowd violence, he would have been a fairly exceptional member of his generation. Here was someone on whom the social order of the day had bestowed so many advantages and opportunities that he would have to go out of his way not to be successful in society. Implicit in my thinking was the liberal commonplace that those who ‘turn against society’—I felt that destroying its property and inflicting injury on its members could be described as ‘turning against society’—have been denied access to it. This wasn’t true of DJ. DJ, I hoped, could teach me.

  I had started to feel troubled by the fear that I didn’t know enough, even though by now I had been going around with violent people for about four years. My anxiety went hand-in-hand with my belief that what I saw couldn’t possibly be everything, and I grew convinced that I needed to do more research. By restricting myself to only what I could witness, I was sure that I wasn’t getting the whole picture.

  I STARTED SUBSCRIBING to a press service run out of the Old Bailey. The easiest thing not to miss, it seemed to me, was what appeared before a judge in the criminal courts, and the service, run by a group of young copy-writers, would be an insurance policy of sorts. It produced stories on the day—they arrived by fax—which were always a little over-written and over-packed with detail so that journalists could pick and choose according to the needs of their papers. The first story was much like any other. It was an account of the prosecution’s case against John Johnstone.

  John Johnstone belonged to a large group of Millwall supporters who, after attending an afternoon match against Crystal Palace, boarded the train to Charing Cross in London. The journey is only ten minutes, but during it Johnstone became violent. According to the prosecution, Johnstone approached one of the ordinary, paying passengers and ripped the newspaper that he was reading out of his hands. He then punched him repeatedly in the face. A ticket collector intervened, and Johnstone turned on him.

  Word of the trouble reached the driver, who radioed on ahead to the Transport Police at Charing Cross, and John Johnstone and his friends—there were six in all—were apprehended when they arrived. They were not held for long, however, and were soon free to carry on with their plans for the evening.

  These plans were not ambitious. In fact, Johnstone and his friends never ventured further than three hundred yards from the station where their evening began. Their first stop was the McDonald’s on the Strand. They were there for a only few moments before Johnstone pulled out a knife and threatened a skinhead who was eating a hamburger. When another skinhead appeared, one of Johnstone’s friends walked up to him and poked him in the eye.

  Johnstone and his friends made their way to Trafalgar Square, stopping briefly at the Admiral Nelson Pub on Northumberland Avenue, where they posed as doormen, charging people money to enter, threatening them if they didn’t pay. When they finally reached Trafalgar Square, there was more trouble, occasioned by a man with a spider-tattoo in the middle of his forehead. Johnstone and his friends found a spider-tattoo to be an intolerable thing, and so they beat the man up.

  They made their way back to Charing Cross Station, where one of Johnstone’s mates, Gary Greaves, hit a young man across the face—a stranger, standing on his own—and knocked him down. Greaves then kicked the man in the head, and the others joined in. A coach driver and his wife, parked nearby, waiting to pick up passengers from a train arriving later in the evening, witnessed the violence and felt compelled to try to stop it. And, to an extent, they succeeded—the lads abandoned the man on the ground—but they then turned on the coach driver and his wife, and both of them, man and woman, were badly beaten.

  I don’t know how long Johnstone and his friends remained at Charing Cross. The next sighting was in the Underground station. The Charing Cross Underground station is large and complex, a network of passageways connecting the three tube stops at Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross and the Embankment. Near the steps of the Embankment they met up with Terry Burns. Terry Burns was with friends, and they were panicky and frightened, having run into the Underground to flee a fight that had broken out at a Covent Garden pub. I infer from the prosecution’s depiction that the West End, on this Saturday night, was a menacing place to be. There is no mention of the much larger group of Millwall supporters from whom Johnstone and his friends were separated when they arrived in London. It is likely that, if the larger group was not involved in the fight that Terry Burns and his friends were fleeing from, then it would have been in another fight not far from there. There would have been many gangs of football supporters that night in the West End.

  As it turns out, Terry Burns was a West Ham supporter. Johnstone and his friends had been looking for football supporters all evening, knowing that they were about, and would have been frustrated at continuing to meet up only with skinheads, men with non-conformist tattoos, strangers, bus drivers and lonely British Rail commuters. It must have been an exciting thing finally to find some genuine football supporters. I am sure, as well, that Johnstone detected the panic and fear that Terry Burns felt—it would have been apparent in his face; it would have been a presence like a smell—and Johnstone would have found this to be exciting as well. The result was violence of an altogether different order.

  Johnstone and his friends charged into the strangers, stabbing one in the neck and arm. Burns fled and ran out of the station and up into Villiers Street. According to the prosecution, Johnstone then ran after him, shouting, ‘Kill the bastard’, his friends not far behind. They caught up with him in the street, and the group sprinted through Covent Garden in pursuit. They were chanting ‘Millwall’ over and over again. Terry Burns was unable to run fast enough—the Millwall supporters were directly behind him—and he tried to escape through a side street that turned out to be a dead end. The only detail we have is of a bicycle—Terry Burns picked it up to defend himself—but I imagine the bowel-seizing terror that Burns must have felt on realizing that he was cornered. I imagine him casting round for a way out—the door bells, the wall—before he picked up the nearest thing to hand, this unmanageable shield of spokes and tubes, to fend off what he knew would come pounding down the pavement in a moment’s time.

  Terry Burns died. He was stabbed six times. Each stabbing punctured the heart.

  Terry Burns was not killed by a crowd; he was killed by a gang; but the distinction between crowd and gang violence is probably not meaningful in this case: it was only by chance that John Johnstone and his mates were separated from the crowd of Millwall supporters. The killing, however, wasn’t in itself of interest. It was the quality of the evening—the desultory episodic nature of the violence and the sense of boredom that characterized it: this was violence of the most extreme kind, because there was nothing else to do.

  The individuals also interested me. Why were they so bored?

  John Johnstone was from Lewisham—a London suburb—and was working as a decorator at the height of the housing boom. His pockets would have been full of twenty- and fifty-pound notes. Although he was only twenty-one, he had a highly patterned criminal record. At the age of sixteen, he was convicted for causing actual bodily harm; at seventeen, for threatening behaviour; at eighteen, again for threatening behaviour; at twenty, for carrying a jack-knife. His mate, Trevor Dunn, also had a criminal record; he, too, was from the London suburbs, working as a successful decorator. Gary Greaves, twenty-seven, had his own business.r />
  In the end, murder charges against all the supporters were dropped. John Johnstone was convicted of affray, two assaults and possessing an offensive weapon. He was sentenced to three years in prison.

  It doesn’t seem like much—a man was killed, after all—but in the eyes of the law Terry Burns’s murderer has never been found. In fact, John Johnstone’s sentence was, given the nature of the convictions, fairly severe: in the past, it is unlikely that he would have been put away for longer than two months. The longer three-year sentence was in keeping with the attitude that had come to characterize the judiciary’s approach to football ‘hooligans’: to ensure that they were given the most severe sentences possible; to make them ‘examples’ to their peers. Earlier in the year, two of Chelsea’s so-called ‘generals’—Stephen Hickmott, then thirty-one, and Terry Last, twenty-four—were each sentenced to ten years in prison, having been found guilty of conspiracy to fight and cause affray. Hickmott, who ran his own courier business, was, like his Millwall counterparts, from the suburbs (Tunbridge Wells); Last worked as a clerk for a solicitor in the city. The others arrested with them included a decorator, a chef, a builder and a Falklands War veteran—a former Royal Navy submariner.

  Around this same time, I had also begun subscribing to a newspaper clipping service. Every two days, a package arrived, and I was surprised by how many clippings I found inside. There were usually between fifty and hundred, but sometimes many more.

  Most were from small town and county papers, reporting the violence that had occurred at the local match that Saturday. For the first month or so, I went through every story, but it was too much to take in. I didn’t know what to do with the information. I thought about discontinuing my subscription, but felt that wouldn’t be right—that it would amount to choosing to neglect what was out there, to ignoring the historical facts. Even so, I had lost any desire to go through the stuff. I’m not sure when I stopped the service, but it wasn’t until I had filled three large boxes—they are still stacked on top of each other in my study, most of the envelopes, with their detailed accounts of the violence of the week, still unopened.