Gangs

by Tony Thompson

  ‘It’s easy,’ came the reply. ‘You just point this end towards the person you want to kill and pull the trigger.’

  Gregson laughed. ‘I know that, but I’ll never be able to pull the trigger with the bike gloves on.’ To prove his point, he tried to force his gloved finger into the trigger space. The loaded gun went off immediately. After realising no one had been hurt, the two men burst out laughing.

  By now the police were hot on the gang’s trail, with both Shenton and Kent having identified their captors and the places they had been held. A lengthy surveillance operation had tracked them down to a flat in Redmires Court where they had moved after leaving Roberts’s flat. When they were finally arrested, detectives recovered dozens of guns, body armour, machetes, false beards and police scanners. The reign of Salford’s most notorious gang was finally over.

  Tying Gregson and Shawcross to the crimes was relatively easy – they were identified by Kent and Shenton, their prints were found at the places the men had been held and the guns they were found with matched the wounds. What was more difficult was tying Lydiate into the crime. A man taken captive before Kent – the gang tortured him to get Kent’s address – claimed he saw Lydiate at the farm. Dozens of phone calls were also made to Lydiate during the course of the kidnappings. During the trial that followed, Lydiate insisted that Shawcross, Gregson and the others had been acting independently of him, that he had no idea what they were up to. He claimed he was being picked on by the police because in 1993 he had been convicted of kidnapping and torturing two drug-dealers in order to find the whereabouts of a third. On that occasion he had pleaded guilty, but he insisted he was innocent this time.

  The jury, however, chose to believe the prosecution’s account: that Lydiate had instigated and directed the kidnappings as part of a plan to seek revenge of ‘biblical proportions’ against those who had shot him. In all, six members of his gang were jailed for a total of sixty-three years, Lydiate receiving twenty-two, Gregson sixteen and Shawcross and Boyle fifteen.

  GUNS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  He wears a baggy white collarless shirt that seems to glow against his black skin and black jeans. There’s a rope-thick gold chain around his neck and his hair is a mass of tightly bunched locks – I can see them at the sides of the baseball cap that he wears pulled down low over his yellow-tinged eyes. When he talks, his voice low and surly, I can see that one of his bottom front teeth is missing.

  Although I do not know his name, this is the kid – he is at most twenty years old and probably a good deal younger – who has promised to help me to get in touch with one of London’s most notorious gangsters, a twenty-two-year-old known as G-man who walked free from court a few days earlier after being cleared of involvement in a shooting for the second time in six months.

  G-man first came to prominence in 1998 when a fourteen-year-old mugger who tried to sell him a stolen watch was shot in the back by two of G-man’s friends. G-man was sentenced to five years for conspiracy to rob, reduced on appeal to three years. In September 2002 he appeared at the Old Bailey in connection with the murder of a DJ who was shot dead at a fast-food restaurant in west London. The victim was carrying a gun but by the time he got it into his hand, he had already been hit in the chest by his opponent’s bullet. Eyewitnesses likened the incident to a Wild West shootout.

  I covered the case for my newspaper and for the first time I saw G-man in person. I arrived in the court’s press box just in time to see his brooding face and stocky form, flanked by three security guards, standing impassively as the indictments were read out: murder, wounding, possession of an 8mm pistol, a Webley .455 calibre revolver and an Uzi submachine-gun. Ever the showman, each and every time he was taken back to the cells, G-man blew a kiss to the public gallery.

  The prosecution case was built around CCTV footage from the restaurant, which showed a figure, with a startling similarity to G-man, pulling out his gun and firing as other terrified diners dived for cover. A nearby waitress caught in the crossfire was wounded in the hand. The trial was hampered by violent clashes in the public gallery between supporters of G-man and friends of Bobb, the victim, but ultimately G-man’s claims that he was not the man on the film were upheld by the jury and he was allowed to go free.

  Six months later he was back at the Old Bailey, accused of driving a car that sprayed bullets at police and partygoers outside a Croydon nightclub. One man was injured when he was hit by bullets from an Uzi. Police appeared on the scene and gave chase, dodging bullets from at least three weapons. By the time they caught up with the vehicle – which had crashed into a wall – the occupants were long gone.

  G-man’s fingerprints were found both inside and outside the vehicle but the jury accepted his claim that he had had nothing to do with the shooting and, once again, he was allowed to go free.

  Eager to secure an interview with G-man about guns and their role in gang culture, I have ventured to the edge of his Notting Hill turf in a bid to see if I can track him down. The man in the white shirt, who I first approached tentatively immediately after G-man’s acquittal, seemed friendly enough and told me to return a day or two later. Now he is asking me to follow him into an alleyway on the edge of a large council estate in the shadows of the flyover known as the Westway.

  ‘Come,’ he says, motioning with his hand and walking ahead. For a second I hesitate, but then I remember that in the world of street gangs, image is everything and to show weakness is to invite others to treat you with no respect. I take a deep breath, puff myself up to my maximum height and follow.

  We stand there in silence for a few seconds, so I break the ice by asking if he has managed to talk to G-man. ‘What’s in it for me? Are you gonna give me a little something?

  I wonder if he is simply stringing me along but subconsciously my hand gently touches my wallet, which is tucked into the right pocket of my jeans. That same moment the man in the white shirt is on me. He pushes me back with the flat of his palm, knocking the wind out of me as I hit the wall behind me. Then his hand delves into my pocket and grabs my wallet.

  I am in shock. I can’t believe this youngster thinks he’s going to get away with this. The wallet is nearing the top of my pocket when my own hands land on top of his and clamp it tight against my body. We start to struggle, grunting and pushing and heaving against one another, moving away from the wall never uttering a word.

  And then it happens.

  The man in the white shirt twists his body and, with one free hand, moves around to the small of his back, lifting the material. For a split second I see something in the half-light. At first it looks like the misshapen head of a hammer, carved out of wood. But then I spot the telltale screw in the centre and the two subtle peaks carved on the inside. I know exactly what it is: the handle of a gun.

  I release my grip on him and jump back what feels like fifty feet. My heart is pounding in my chest; I can hardly speak because there’s so much tension and adrenaline flowing through my body. He doesn’t reach for the gun again but he knows I’ve seen it. He has my wallet. He stands there calmly, flicking through its contents but his voice is pure rage.

  ‘Who the fuck are you? You ain’t no Babylon. Why you looking for G-man? Where you from? Peckham?’

  ‘No, no, I’m a journalist. A writer. Really. I’m just a writer. You can see my press card, business cards, everything.’

  He pulls out the cash and looks through my credit cards. I curse myself for not having carried a ‘dummy’ wallet – one with just a few pounds and some old storecards that are no longer valid. Something you can hand over and act concerned about. I’ve done it in the past and I kick myself mentally for not having done it this time.

  He examines the cards, takes the cash and tosses the wallet on to the ground behind him. ‘Fuck off. You hear me. Just fuck off. No one is going to talk to you about anything. Not now, not ever.’ He vanishes into the shadows. I try to pull myself together and get out of the area as fast as I can.

/>   It isn’t until the following day that I found out why everyone in the area is so jumpy. G-man had been acquitted on the Friday afternoon and spent most of the weekend celebrating. On Monday evening, while walking along Kingsdown Close with a friend, someone had run out and shot him in the chest and arms at least five times. He was hit in the liver, spleen and kidney. One of his lungs had collapsed. At the time I was trying to track him down he was in hospital under armed guard, fighting for his life.

  The fact that I, a stranger to the area, had been asking after him, trying to find out where he lived just a few days earlier did not look good, even though the streets were alive with rumours of who had been responsible. Believing he was literally minutes from death, G-man had gasped the name of his attacker to passers-by who came to his aid. By the time the ambulance arrived his steely resolve had returned and he refused to say any more.

  While it is difficult to understand how people this young can be using their guns so freely, it is increasingly common among a whole new generation.

  ‘Children come out of school talking about guns,’ says Paul Simpson, a church youth worker on the Stonebridge estate in north London. ‘The mentality is so much more vicious now. They don’t talk about beating each other up; they talk about killing each other. The simple fact is that with a gun, you are someone, you can hold your own. Without one, you are a dead man.’

  Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in Birmingham, where in January 2002 gang warfare claimed the lives of two girls, eighteen-year-old Charlene Ellis and her seventeen-year-old cousin Latisha Shakespeare. Charlene’s twin sister, Sophie, and her other cousin, Cheryl Shaw, were also hit but survived. The four had spent the night seeing in the New Year at a party at the Unisevens hairdresser’s on Birmingham’s Birchfield Road and had gone outside for some air when a car rolled past and sprayed dozens of bullets from at least three weapons.

  Originally portrayed as innocent victims, it has since emerged that at least one of the dead girls might have had links to local street gangs and that the group may have been targeted deliberately. (Surveys suggest at least half of all teenage crime gangs have female members. The week before the two girls were murdered, two women were charged with the murder of a male gang member who had been shot dead three months earlier.)

  The girls were shot in an area known locally as ‘Checkpoint Charlie’: cross it at the wrong time and you may end up dead. The area is the undisputed frontline between Birmingham’s two main gangs, the Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys, which are made up of predominantly young men with guns.

  Both Burger Bar and Johnson Crew gangs formed in the mid-1980s. Burger Bar took their name from a local burger joint in Lozells while Johnson Crew used to meet regularly at Johnson Street Café in Nechells. Ostensibly the two gangs were created as a home defence against the growing right-wing element, which was terrorising the city’s black community. But when the threat died down they evolved into crime syndicates.

  In a pub in the heart of Handsworth, another notoriously violent area of the city, I tracked down a nineteen-year-old Burger Bar boy who goes by the street name of TC.

  ‘The Johnson Crew were our rivals from day one and that rivalry has just escalated and escalated. As crack cocaine came on the scene the firearms became more and more openly available so the levels of violence increased.

  ‘In the drugs trade ten out of ten people either carry guns or have access to them. If I’m rolling with a Rolex I am up in the money. That means I have to carry a gun because I have to watch my back. My gun brings fear to people. So now everybody has to have a gun. Since I got my gun nobody fucks with me. Fucking with me is like fucking with death because I will put you down for good.

  ‘It’s a way of life now. Once you get into the gang culture it is very difficult to get out. Your gang is your family and people are willing to die for their families. You are pressurised to continue doing what you are doing and your own pals will shoot you down if you cross them. It’s not something you can just walk away from. You become a liability. If you’re not in then you’re an outsider like anybody else.

  ‘We grow up this way, we don’t know anything else. How can you teach people not to be violent if they see people getting stabbed, people getting shot every night? Everyone I know has been to a funeral of someone they knew. I know death in a way even my parents can’t understand.’

  The situation is also repeated in parts of Manchester where one of the fastest-selling T-shirts at the main city flea market features a picture of a chalk outline drawn round a dead body accompanied by the words: ‘Welcome To Longsight’.

  Just three miles south of the city centre, Longsight, with Moss Side and Hulme, forms a ‘gang triangle’ where violent death has become an all-too-familiar occurrence. In July 2002 a dozen members of one of the most notorious gangs – the Pitt Bull Crew – were jailed for their part in a turf war that saw fourteen young men shot in the space of three years.

  The Pitt Bull Crew was founded by Thomas Pitt soon after he was released from a young offenders’ institution after a drugs conviction. He dedicated the enterprise to the memory of his brother, Ray, who had been shot dead outside a nightclub on New Year’s Eve in 1995. Ray Pitt had been the leader of the Doddington gang, which had made millions by selling drugs in the city, and Thomas and another Pitt brother, Ken, had been members. The scale of their operation became clear when police filmed a dealer making 219 sales in a few days.

  Thomas decided to pick up where his brother had left off. He recruited boys as young as fourteen to sell drugs on his behalf. Using mountain bikes, they could cruise around the city in pairs with at least one carrying a gun for protection. Those who impressed Pitt were rewarded with gems, gold chains and bullet-proof jackets. The gang used police scanners to evade capture and always wore gloves so police would not be able to get fingerprints.

  The gang had access to an array of guns, but Pitt was the only one allowed to use the deadliest weapon in the arsenal, a MAC 10 submachine-gun fitted with a silencer and capable of firing up to 300 rounds per minute.

  They regularly sold more than three thousand pounds’ worth of drugs each day. The money being made soon attracted interest from all quarters. Members of the rival Longsight crew tried to install their own dealers in the same patches, so Pitt declared war on his rivals.

  The two gangs fought at least seventeen gun battles, including drive-by shootings, which left four people injured and two dead. In September 2000, Pitt tried to shoot two rival dealers with his MAC 10 but it jammed. By the time he had cleared the blockage the two men had gone, so he searched for another victim. Within minutes he had found Marcus Greenidge, twenty-one, a drugs courier with the Longsight Crew. Greenidge had a loaded automatic pistol in his pocket but had no time to reach it. Later Pitt boasted, ‘I’ve just whacked one of the Longsight Crew boys. I struck with five bullets out of seven.’

  Pitt was equally ruthless with members of his own gang. On the night Greenidge was shot, Pitt asked his friend and fellow crew member, Thomas Ramsay, sixteen, to move a gun that was hidden in a flat in Longsight. Ramsay forgot, and a few days later the police obtained a search warrant to the flat and found the gun. Forensic tests linked it to Pitt, who was furious. A few days later Ramsay was dead. Pitt was charged with the killing but acquitted.

  Less than a week later Pitt himself was shot at by a hooded man on a mountain bike. He survived, but was arrested soon afterwards when one of his fellow gang members, alarmed by Pitt’s increasingly violent behaviour, agreed to give evidence against him.

  While Pitt was awaiting trial the violence being carried out by his gang continued. Taxi driver Mohammed Ahmed, who had been working as a courier for the Longsight Crew, was ambushed while taking Lee Fielding, another Longsight Crew member, to a meeting. Two Pitt Bull Crew members appeared on the scene and shot Ahmed four times in the head as he sat in his cab.

  The killers then bundled Fielding into a stolen car and took him to a disused railway line in Longsig
ht. There, he was shot with a sawn-off shotgun, doused with petrol and set alight. Amazingly, he survived, although he suffered horrific burns.

  ‘Twenty or thirty years ago, a gun was just a tool of the trade,’ says retired villain Joey Pyle. ‘You carried it while you were working, used it only if you were brave enough and felt you had no option, then stashed it when you were finished. These days, the kids stick them down the backs of their trousers just to go out clubbing. The first sign of trouble, they whip it out. And they shoot first because they know that, more than likely, the other guy is going to be tooled up as well.’

  It didn’t take long for me to discover just how easy it is to buy guns in today’s black market.

  Chris, an affable thirty-something south Londoner recently retired from a career in armed robbery, comes bounding back from the bar with a cheeky grin on his face. ‘It’ll be about twenty minutes,’ he says. ‘Less time than it takes to deliver a pizza and plenty of time for another drink. Same again?’

  We are sitting behind a busy pool table in the dingy annexe of a pub on the outskirts of Catford, which, according to Chris, is one of the easiest places in the capital to buy an illegal gun. After spending a few minutes obtaining the phone number of a local underworld armourer from one of the pub’s regulars and placing an order, the only thing left to do is wait. It all seems almost too easy.

  ‘I’m known in here so there’s no problem with people trusting me. That’s why it’s going to be so quick. If you came here on your own as a new face, you would be under suspicion, but that just means it would take a bit more time and a few more calls. But at the end of the day, there are people out there who would much rather have the money than the gun, so they’re always willing to sell. To get in touch, all you have to do is get friendly with the barmaid or a bouncer and, sooner or later, you’ll be put in touch with someone,’ he says cheerfully.