Strangeways

by Neil Samworth

  We trained as twelve-officer units which, when qualified, were theoretically at the prison service’s disposal, primed to be sent to whatever jail had a riot, or ‘mutiny’ as they now call it, on its hands. But as Manchester is in the high-security estate, we were rarely called out: it’s not the sort of jail where you can afford to send, say, twenty-four lads away for three days at HMP Haverigg, a Cat C prison in the Lake District. It used to piss me right off. I’d got the Tornado training and wanted the opportunity to experience a real-life situation, but it didn’t happen. Instead our four units, filled by forty to fifty staff, were mainly used in-house, where at least you’d get scenarios that might require such skills.

  Normal prisoners would be taken to hospital, say, on a minibus or van. It would have a cage in, but wasn’t bulletproof or anything, just an ordinary Transit with a driver and someone cuffed to the criminal. For taking people to court you had sweat wagons, the white vehicles with little square windows that everyone’s seen on the news, mobs of people spitting at them, usually. Cons are locked in little cubicles similar to Catholic confessionals. Cat A transport is different again: they might have up to four mini-cells aboard for fuckers like that, and the vehicle is armoured, with big bumpers, and often has a police escort. They’re called heavy vehicle ballistics, or HVB, for good reason: they can go through walls if they have to. Whatever the transport, if someone is non-compliant you go on in your kit, get them out of their box-cell and take them off safely.

  I couldn’t wait for my first chance to put the Tornado training into action and it came when an HVB was scheduled to arrive at Cat A reception with a Muslim lad on it from Belmarsh. He was a violent extremist, we were told, a lot of staff and prisoner assaults, all sorts flying about, so they wanted six tough guys to greet him. There we all were, fully kitted up, yet when he came off he was about five foot eight and sobbing. What a let-down. Yeah, he was extremist. Yeah, he was a Muslim. But he was not big, not hard and he’d been brought to Manchester because he was on trial in Liverpool and they weren’t going to transport him up to Merseyside from the Smoke every day. It was my first taste of Tornado and I was left bitching about it.

  Now here was my phone ringing on a Saturday night about Danny Gee.

  I knew that going in a cell with that monster was not going to be fun, but also that I couldn’t turn the chance down. Something in my personality, I suppose. Anyway, all the old rugby adrenaline began to kick in.

  The Gee family are infamous in Liverpool: notorious local gangsters. We had Danny’s brother Darren, the brains of the operation, on K Wing for two years on remand. Me and him got on well in the end, though I’ve no doubt he was a naughty lad. You would not want to cross him. Eventually, Darren Gee was found guilty of conspiracy to murder. No witnesses, but he was caught within a mile and a half of the victim, and it had been common knowledge in the underworld that he was out to get him. The guy had tried to take his own life and killed a friend of Gee in the process. Gee got an eighteen-year sentence, but with time served call it sixteen. With good behaviour and parole, he might be out in eight.

  Darren Gee spoke to very few officers; in fact it was six months before he spoke to me. He was a cleaner, not a Jack the Lad type, but quite definitely cool, calculating and devious. I’d sum him up as a brutal, ruthless enforcer.

  When he got sentenced he was moved down to C Wing, as a lifer. By that time I’d moved on myself, to healthcare, a part of jail there’ll be plenty more about anon. For now, all you need to know is that one particular morning we had a kid come on shitting himself, and I don’t mean diarrhoea. He was a well-behaved and likeable prisoner normally, so I said, ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve done something very stupid, Mr S.’

  ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I didn’t know who Darren Gee were and some of the lads paid me to do him in.’ Segregation was full; Gee could still have reached him on OP, so he’d come to us for protection.

  That tells you something about Darren Gee, the fact that people had wanted him done in but were only brave enough to get someone else to do it.

  What had happened was this: Gee had been playing pool when this kid walked up and twatted him with a tin of tuna in a sock. After being knocked to the floor, Gee then got up and chased his attacker back to his cell. Although Gee’s not as well known in Manchester as he is in Liverpool, there are plenty of Scousers in Strangeways who were happy to enlighten the kid, so he is now panicking and wanting out of the jail.

  I didn’t blame him. Security reports came back that if he returned to a normal wing, they were on his trail and he’d get stabbed, so he got his wish.

  The concern now, though, was Darren’s brother, Danny, who’d been playing up in the seg’ special cell. He was here on accumulated visits, back in Manchester from some long-term dispersal prison to be temporarily closer to home. He’d been inside since his youth and battered senseless as a young offender. The system had made this guy: he’d had some hidings. But as a gangster his reputation had grown, and now he was fucking ruthless. He was once shot at point-blank range in the chest with a revolver – it’s not an urban myth, this – which had removed a sizeable chunk of his back. When he’d regained consciousness, he’d discharged himself from casualty.

  Not only was he tough, he was physically dominating and powerful. American jails have realized that when you have yards full of Olympic weights and get people locked up for twenty years using them every day, they end up huge: not great when battle lines are drawn. Danny Gee’s neck measured about twenty inches. He stood six foot one and weighed seventeen stone fit, twenty-one stone unfit. His wrists were like my thighs, tree trunks. Ankles too. He could’ve bench-pressed an oak tree and squatted nearly 300 kilograms.

  Now, I’ve met people like that on K Wing, and we’ve restrained them easily. Even with decent muscle mass, when someone puts you in an arm lock it will throb, perhaps even more so. Gee’s mentality was something else. He’d been in prison forever, seen and done it all – cell fires, restraint, dirty protests, the lot. He’d fought prisoners, had staff coming at him with shields: the guy knew no fear. He was one in a hundred, him.

  The night before, he’d been in a normal cell and threatened to do untold damage, so they’d wanted him shifted. He’d refused to move, and ended up battering eleven staff in full riot gear, a fair few hard nuts among them. He’d not attacked anyone specifically: he’d just stood in his cell and swung them around, like a grizzly bear swatting mosquitos. He got one lad by the back of his helmet and lifted him up and down as if he was sucking his cock. Eleven staff! They were coming out, taking helmets off, wiping away the sweat, putting them back on and going back in. They got nowhere fast. This was one incident that couldn’t be de-escalated. He was yanking their chain because he could.

  ‘Why are you being like this, Danny?’ I was told the governor had asked him. ‘We just want you to move.’

  ‘You want me to move, guv, ask nicely. Get these muppets out.’

  So that’s what had happened. The staff came out. Gee collected his burn and was led away to the special cell. You couldn’t even call it a score draw.

  When we assembled it was about nine o’clock that night. There were twelve of us in total. At the briefing, we were told not only had Danny Gee been given tobacco, but he’d also got a lighter, and he was now threatening to set his new cell alight.

  ‘We are taking no shit,’ the big daft Scouse PO said. ‘We are not having this prick dictate to us.’

  He was right about that, the PO. If we backed off, Gee’d take the piss. We had to stand up for the jail. We were going into battle.

  Most of us were in our standard PPE gear, but the C&R instructors wore full-on SWAT outfits, like the elite Tornado national squad wear: German helmets, goggles, fitted overalls. Their tactics were impressive too; shame about the execution. The first guy would go in with a small shield a foot and half wide, handy for manoeuvrability. He’d be followed by two more and a fourth German helme
t with a large shield – about three foot wide – behind him, two more at the rear. Hands on shoulders. The rest of us were sweeper-uppers, coming in on the tail – two of us literally with brushes to clear any debris so Gee couldn’t set it on fire. In we all filed as ordered, me at twelfth man with a broom. I’d been shitting through the eye of a needle for this and missed Ant and Dec, but being professional I took it on the chin.

  Now, this special cell was about eight foot wide. But what this strong fucker had done somehow was climb onto the ceiling like Spiderman, an arm on each wall – it wasn’t that high, but Christ – and blocked up the observation panels with wet toilet paper, so no one could see him. He’d also blocked the door panel, so we went in blind.

  The bolt was cracked, and what a fucking car crash. He’d done the old cons’ trick, wet the floor with piss, shite and soapy water, and people were slipping everywhere. While the first through the door were falling arse over tit, the lads behind pushed further in, and the German helmet brigade wasted no more time. They dived on Danny Gee, five of them took his head and upper arms, a fellow Yorkshire lad called Gilly the other end, one or two in between. I’d got my sweeping brush. Here was something else nobody had thought about. The fucking light was out – we were in the dark.

  Someone hit the switch and reality dawned. Gee wasn’t a normal prisoner. They’d assumed his head was at the top of the bed but it wasn’t. It was at the bottom. So actually there were five lads in German helmets on his legs and one lad, Gilly, on his top half. More lads piled on and there were ten people swarming over him now. But guess what? The fucker started to rise. Sod the sweeping up. I threw the brush into the corridor and jumped on his shoulders with Gilly. We were both looking directly in Gee’s face.

  ‘You dirty sneaky screw bastards,’ he said. ‘Coming in here to fucking twist me up when I’m asleep. I’m going to fucking kill you.’

  I had a bit of a nervous chuckle because he had the potential to do that, trust me. One or two lads were panicking, and a couple had evacuated the cell already, so the dirty dozen was now ten.

  I can’t tell you exactly what happened next, it was like when you’re a kid with your schoolmates, a copper chases you and you’re pissing yourself, pushing each other out the way. You don’t want to be at the back. I do know that I was one of the last to get out and that by then Danny Gee was up to his full height and going for it, desperate to have somebody.

  You know those old cartoons where the puddy tat passes the bulldog and the dog grabs its collar but the legs keep going round and round? Danny Gee did that with one of our troops, the officer’s legs and arms reaching out in vain as he was ragged back into the cell. Shit. So we piled inside again, four of us anyway. Eventually Gee was sent sprawling to the deck – it was only a glancing blow, but the floor was covered with all sorts and he slipped, freeing the lad. This was about survival now. We battered him a few times so he’d stay down and give us time to get out – we had gloves on, but even through padding it would have hurt.

  For a moment, he started crying, which is not to knock him. He’d single-handedly fought twelve trained and mostly hardened prison officers and had us on a string. I dare say there’d be some who’d see this as mindless macho brutality on our part, a goon squad mentality. In which case, I’d have been happy to swap places and ask how they saw it then. We were desperate, stretched to the limit. This wasn’t about coming out of there saying, ‘I’ve twatted Danny Gee’ – we were making sure we could grab his lighter and clear the cell, full stop.

  It worked as well. Mostly. We’d got our opportunity, maybe ten seconds, so we got up and rapidly backed out one at a time, keeping our eyes on him. But by the time we’d cleared the cell, he was back on his feet and he still had his lighter.

  What I expected when that cell door shut and I took my helmet off was not what I found. Apart from us four, only the governor and the Scouse PO were there. The landing was clear. What if he’d got the better of us and got hold of someone and began to rip their arm from its socket, or worse?

  So we walked across to the adjudication room and, fuck me, one of the southern softies already had his overalls off.

  ‘You need to get the nationals in. We’re not going back in there,’ he said.

  I asked another if he was all right. He was in shock. I’m not saying they were cowards; adrenaline got the better of them, that’s all. Fight or flight, and they chose the latter. I was pissed off at the time though.

  The PO went ballistic, ‘If we need you back in that fucking cell, you’re going back in.’

  ‘We ain’t phoning the nationals,’ said the governor. Prisoner kicks off and we can’t handle it – how would that make us look as a jail, however big he was? We’d already looked like the Keystone fucking Cops.

  Danny Gee then hit his cell bell.

  Oh, no – what now? We’d already gone in there mob-handed to get a lighter off him and been lucky to escape with us lives. And when we got back to King Kong’s cell, there he was, dancing around in a pair of goggles he’d got from one of the C&R team’s precious German helmets.

  ‘Hand them over, Danny,’ said the PO, trying not to laugh. ‘Let’s have the goggles.’

  ‘Nah, fuck off,’ he said.

  ‘Danny, please,’ and at that point please was appropriate.

  ‘Give me some burn and you can have ’em,’ he said.

  There were two ways of looking at this. You could give in, but in doing so de-escalate the situation. Or you could resume battle. Having had a breather, four of us would be up for it, but that was all, it seemed. So they gave him his smoke. It was three o’clock in the morning by now, but we’d got the goggles, had a fight and shown him that he couldn’t dictate at Strangeways, the best result on offer.

  The incident became legendary in the jail, and not everyone’s reputation survived intact. I am proud to have got a letter thanking me for my part in the operation from the number-one governor. Otherwise, it was one of them events like the Sex Pistols’ gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, when afterwards everyone swore they were there even though only a handful actually were.

  Some years later, when Danny Gee was back in HMP Manchester, this officer I’d never met before started telling me the story, from his own point of view, of how he’d been part of our human centipede. I sat and listened to this lad for twenty minutes, telling me how he went in and fought Danny Gee. It goes on a lot in prison, that. Some people steal your lives.

  As distinct from crime families, gang-bangers made up as much as a sixth of the K Wing population; in 2006 we had thirty-five in our total of two hundred. And by gang-bangers I don’t mean dodgy parties in suburbia with car keys and fruit bowls, I mean violent gang members drawn from the meanest and toughest Manchester estates.

  Who’s deadliest, crime families or gangs, because they are two different things? That would be like saying who’d win a fight between a shark and a crocodile.

  There’s one particular crime family in Manchester and Salford who saw themselves as Robin Hoods. The reality, though, was different.

  One of their slogans was ‘Keep drugs out of Salford’, but what they were really doing – according to the grapevine – was robbing dealers and giving the drugs to someone else to sell on for them. Doing that on the quiet would have been necessary because gang-bangers and crime families operated an uneasy truce. They know each other, have very often been banged up together, but there is hate and distrust there quite definitely. All out war, though, would be in no one’s interest.

  It’s very much like The Sopranos or The Godfather, with lots of sit-downs refereed by trusted intermediaries. Let’s say one family member has been out for a drink on Saturday night and filled in a gang-banger. This third hard bastard will be approached to sort the beef out. There are a lot of peacemakers inside, too, who’ll do exactly that job when needed.

  Every prison officer knows not to push some of these lads too far or there might very well be repercussions. You can’t let th
em see that you know that, but you’d be daft not to be a bit wary, wouldn’t you? That said, what happens in jail tends to stay in jail.

  Where you live on an estate dictates the gang you’re in. Manchester’s gang culture is well publicized; shootings, drugs, lots of pretty hard-core stuff. Most cities have one – Sheffield has at least two gangs based on postcodes. Bottom line is, if your dad was a gang-banger it’s odds on you’ll be one too. Prisoners with infamous fathers come in with different surnames that their mother gave them in the hope they wouldn’t get involved.

  A lot of YPs at Forest Bank were gang members, and quite a few ended up dead. One lad I remember really well was Justin Maynard, who came in aged eighteen. Lanky, funny and clueless about prison, he was always getting in trouble, but was a naughty boy really, not a hardened crook. You had to like him. Driving into Strangeways one day, I heard he’d been gunned down; it was quite shocking. You’d have taken him to your grandma’s for tea.

  The majority of gang-bangers in Strangeways were from Doddington and Gooch Close, the city’s most infamous gangs, in Moss Side. A lot of other gangs, Wythenshawe, say, were affiliated to them. I’m not from Manchester, so to find out that they are just named after streets was a surprise. I’d been thinking Crips and Bloods but no, it’s really not that complicated.

  Gangster life is brutal. If you’re from Moss Side and a gang member and go back to that area on release from jail, there’s no way you are going straight. Once in you stay in and chances are you won’t live through your twenties. Later on at Strangeways, we had a kid on healthcare in the gated cell, face an absolute mess. The police had brought him in for his own protection. I was on nights then and he was under constant watch. He had scars all over his body – stabbings, gunshot wound – and had also been leathered with a baseball bat. He’d a gang tattoo on his arm. We got to talking.