Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang

by Chugg, Sandy

  The good mood lasted for all of thirty seconds. A dark-coloured, unmarked car screeched to a halt in front of the coach and two senior FI cops promptly got out and boarded the bus. They walked up and down the corridor, peering intently at our faces. Thanks to the contented looks on their faces I could read them like a book.

  ‘Did they really think we would fall for a trick like that? There’s Sandy Chugg, that’s Davie Carrick and that must be Boris,’ they were no doubt thinking.

  We were well and truly screwed.

  ‘Are you boys having a fucking laugh?’ one of them chortled.

  The air blew out of our tyres. We were close to despair. The most heartbreaking thing was that we had come so close, now we were going to be sent straight back down the road. Surprisingly perhaps, we were not escorted out of the city and back down the A90. One of the FI cops radioed in for instructions and was told that any of us with match tickets were to be escorted, on foot, to the stadium and allowed in to watch the game. Those without tickets were kept on the bus and driven, with a police escort, to the car park at the Aberdeen exhibition centre.

  For the next hour-and-a-half we were confined to our seats on the coach, which we felt was an infringement of our civil liberties. At that point we were becoming more and more agitated, not to mention very hungry, and to relieve the mood, which was turning ugly, the Old Bill took an order for McDonald’s. As everyone shouted out ‘burger and fries’ or ‘cheeseburger’ one well-known ICF boy, who is deaf and dumb, wrote ‘Twix’ on a piece of paper, at which point the whole bus, including the cops, burst out laughing. He was quickly clipped round the ear and told it was a Big Mac or fucking nothing. Let me tell you he has never lived it down to this day.

  At the end of the game the bus was driven to the coach park occupied by Rangers supporters and we phoned our mates who had gone to the game to let them know where they could get picked up. As we walked back to the bus a group of thirty ASC appeared from nowhere and tried to set about them. Seeing they were outnumbered Rangers scarfers joined in and Aberdeen were sent packing before the cops could get there and make arrests.

  We were accorded the honour of a police escort out of the city and on the way down the road we stopped off in Dundee for a carry out. Our only consolation was a wee drink and a few snorts. Once again it was a case of what might have been where Aberdeen were concerned.

  Despite the disappointment of that day in 2001 we were still determined to get the Aberdeen mob on its own patch. We had heard so many stories of our scarfers getting a doing up there and that was a situation that couldn’t be allowed to stand. We were now number one in Scotland and we had a duty to stick it to the other leading firms every chance we got. A year later, in January 2002, we put together one of the most formidable mobs I have ever been a part of. There were at least a hundred and fifty of us there that day; from hardened veterans to Rangers youth. In Schooners pub in Aberdeen I looked around in awe at the legends that had turned out. Guys like Barry Johnstone, Davie Carrick, Harky, Andy Curran, Craw and Bomber Morrison, to name but a few. We would have been a match for any mob in Britain with faces like those on our side. The police presence inside and outside the pub and in a pub close by, which was also full of ICF, was massive. Aberdeen knew we were there in numbers and one of their leading boys – Muirhead, I think – stuck his head round the door of Schooners and did a quick head count.

  We got an escort to the ground and were channelled into the area reserved for Rangers, which is adjacent to the stand occupied by the hardcore Aberdeen fans and their mob. I remember that the atmosphere – it was a Saturday evening game, if memory serves – was poisonous. We had been drinking and taking lines for hours and were well up for the fray. Most of us would have taken a jail sentence just to have a crack at Aberdeen.

  As the mood turned uglier one of the Aberdeen players, Robbie Winters, came over to the touchline in front of our stand and lifted the ball to take a throw in. As he limbered up one of the ICF threw a coin, hitting him right on the head. Pittodrie was in bedlam and as the referee and police came over to Winters we saw our chance and tried to get onto the park. Our aim was to goad the Aberdeen mob and get them onto the pitch for a ruck. But as we surged forward the police drew their batons and pummelled us, forcing us back into the stand. The ASC, give them their due, weren’t about to take this lying down and tried to get onto the pitch but they too were beaten back by the filth. As tempers flared Lorenzo Amoruso, the Rangers captain, came over and pleaded with us to calm down. It didn’t seem to do much good because the referee decided to take the players off the field while the police tried to restore order by lining the track with officers in full riot gear.

  It was at that point the Aberdeen mob showed their true colours.

  We were aware of a commotion but it was only after the game that we got the full story. In another part of the stadium, which we couldn’t see, some ASC had got onto the track and were attacking Rangers fans. They didn’t give a fuck who they hurt, whether it was scarfers, young boys, women, or, in a particularly cowardly move, a seventy-year-old man called Tam Perry. Mr Perry later told a newspaper what happened:

  These young guys started running up the pitch towards the Rangers fans. As they passed me one of them swung a punch and hit me in the face. I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely raging. . . . Then, a few minutes later, bang; something, part of a seat, I think, hit me on the back of my head. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Aberdeen.

  Real fucking heroes. And you wonder why we hate them.

  After the game we spread out and went hunting for Aberdeen. But it was always going to be difficult because of the huge number of cops on duty and the presence of closed-circuit-television cameras. There were a few skirmishes but nothing to write home about.

  The press had a field day after that one. In the Daily Record Jim Traynor, noting the long-standing animosity between Rangers and Aberdeen fans, wrote a long piece arguing that both clubs, the Scottish Premier League and the police had ‘turned a blind eye to this hatred’ while other observers took the view that it was the worst violence seen in Scottish football for many years. Of course there were the usual attempts to blame the English and the far right, with the papers reporting that every bogeyman from Combat 18 to the Chelsea Headhunters were behind the violence. ‘Nazi Link to Thugs,’ screamed one headline; ‘Football Riot Yobs Are English,’ splashed another. Pathetic. There was no evidence that anyone apart from the ICF and the ASC were to blame. When will the Scottish media learn that we don’t need the English to do our fighting for us?

  That was yet another example of us doing everything in our power to meet Aberdeen head on and of them being chancers who attack women, children and the elderly. For some reason they never wanted to meet us mob-on-mob away from the prying eyes of a police escort or the cameras. We did our best to engineer them away from the surveillance apparatus but they very rarely played along. They were great in the Eighties but have been living on their reputation for too long. I am retired from the FV scene but I will always regret that we never gave Aberdeen the pasting they deserved.

  CELTIC

  When it came to Celtic nothing was out of bounds. And I mean nothing. We ambushed their scarfers, trashed their pubs, took the piss out of their mob, invaded their heartland and threw them off motorway bridges. We even held slashing contests, with the gold medal awarded to the boy who gave the highest of number of their fans a stripe.

  I made sure I was always at the heart of the action for our encounters with the Soap Dodgers and, as I became more prominent in the ICF, I became well known not only to their mob but also to whole swathes of their ordinary fans. As well as my penchant for attacking them I am sure my reputation as a staunch supporter of Loyalist causes got right up their noses. In the eyes of the ordinary, everyday Celtic supporter I was public-enemy-number-one.

  That was fine with me. I hated them, they hated me. With Celtic there was never any quarter asked for, nor given. It was all-out war. Despite the
size of their support I never worried about retaliation. Their mob was only decent for a couple of seasons and as for their scarfers they would only fight when you pushed them into a corner and only then if they had vastly superior numbers. So I felt able to have a go at them every chance I got and not give a second thought to the consequences.

  Until, that is, they played their joker.

  Fed up with the constant attacks Celtic fans contacted the IRA and asked them to shoot me.

  It was 1997. Although I was then in the Scottish National Firm (of which more later) we could always pull a mob for Old Firm games. For years we had targeted the Celtic pubs in the Gallowgate but the closed-circuit-television cameras that now panned every inch of the street had made that impossible.8 We moved on to the Candleriggs area, just east of the city centre. Candleriggs also had a raft of Irish-themed bars that were popular with Celtic fans and after we had played them they would be full to the gunnels with their scarfers. Their mob was in terminal decline by then but we saw their ordinary fans, many of them hard-line Republicans, as a legitimate target. It was also a good training ground for the Rangers Youth firm, which was pulling healthy numbers at that time. It gave them a taste of real FV.

  It became a regular occurrence, panning in those pub windows and pelting the customers inside with bricks and stones. You might even call it a turkey shoot, simply because the pubs were so crowded that they couldn’t get out of the way. And if a few brave souls did come out to fight we would wire right in to them.

  This went on for a long time. We thought it would never end. But as sure as night follows day there had to be a backlash. One day Davie Carrick and I discovered that our names and addresses had been printed in a Republican magazine. I was outraged. It was a fucking liberty and it had potentially serious consequences for both of us and for our families. I phoned a friend, TB, who, ironically, was a prominent Republican himself. He had shared a cell with a good mate of mine and even though my pal was in the UDA, and the Republican was doing time for firearms offences, the three of us had become firm friends, which shows that you can reach out across the sectarian divide if there is mutual respect.

  ‘What the fuck is all this about?’ I asked him.

  ‘Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do. But you’ve obviously pissed someone off,’ TB told me.

  A couple of days later the phone rang. It was TB. When he started speaking I noticed it was in a very serious tone.

  ‘The good news is you won’t be appearing in the magazine again. The bad news is you’ve pissed off some prominent Republicans because you keep attacking Celtic fans when they’re having a drink.’

  There was a pause and then he delivered the news I didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Your names have been mentioned with a view to finding out how much it would be for you and Carrick to be sorted.’

  ‘To be sorted.’ I knew only too well what that meant. It was a euphemism for ‘to be shot’.

  TB advised me to be careful about my movements, because he had information that thousands of pounds had been raised to pay someone, most likely an IRA soldier or associate, to shoot us. I was worried, who wouldn’t have been. This was a step up from football hooliganism. TB was a player in the Republican movement and I knew he was on the inside track.

  Despite my anxieties, it didn’t stop me from attacking Celtic fans, or their pubs. I was worried but I wasn’t about to give into their threats, no matter how credible they were. I am still in one piece and I probably have my Republican mate to thank for that. TB phoned a few weeks later and explained that I was now off the IRA’s radar. Whether he had persuaded them not to go through with the hit or they had changed their minds for operational reasons I will never know. As soon as he hung up the phone I breathed an enormous sigh of relief.

  The attacks on the Candleriggs pubs did come to an end but not because of the threats. By the late 1990s the ICF numbers had dwindled, with many boys, including me, getting more heavily involved with the Scottish National Firm.

  *

  As I explained earlier my history with Celtic’s mob goes back a long way, to the time they nearly kicked me to death in Mitchell Lane. However, I was well aware of the potential for sectarian clashes long before that episode. That was because my brother, Christopher, would come home from a night’s clubbing in the city and tell me all about the fights he had had with Celtic supporters.

  In the early 1980s there was such a divide between the two sides that we even went to different nightclubs. Rangers used Viva in Union Street (which is now renamed the Cathouse) while Celtic frequented Daddy Warbucks on West George Street. When the clubs spilled out at three in the morning there would be thousands of drunken young people on George Square desperately looking for a bus or taxi. Celtic would congregate on one side of the Square, Rangers on the other. Mass battles would break out, with both sides backed up by gangs sympathetic to their cause: Possil and Springburn would side with Celtic; Barrowfield and other east-end gangs with us. While the police had their hands full, shops would be looted. We targeted the ones that sold the good gear, like Hoi Polloi and Olympus, although you had to be careful when you kicked the windows in as they were huge sheets of plate glass that seemed to explode when they shattered. Chris’s tales intrigued me and I couldn’t wait to go out clubbing and get into the fighting.

  By the time I reached my late teens, early twenties I was a regular on the scene and it was then I discovered just how dangerous Glasgow was. It wasn’t just the neighbourhood gangs or the football mobs; there was also the Troubles in Northern Ireland to consider. There is no doubt in my mind that what was happening across the water during the mid-to-late Eighties made things infinitely more tense, and therefore more dangerous, in Glasgow.

  A good example of how gang, football and sectarian violence seemed to blend into one came at a Scheme concert in, I think, 1987.9 Despite his Irish Catholic-sounding name Joe Bradley was an ICF boy who also happened to be in the Possilpark gang and had gone to see Scheme at the Pavilion theatre. A fight broke out with a gang from Barmulloch and Joe was stabbed to death by one of the Barmulloch team, who also happened to be a prominent member of the Celtic Soccer Crew. No one knows why it happened. Was it gang-related, a football thing, or religious? Or, Glasgow being Glasgow, a lethal cocktail made up of all three ingredients? The next day the ICF played the Rangers Soccer Babes at football. Quite understandably, we mourned Joe’s loss but it also brought home to us just how dangerous the city had become. We knew that we were targets for a whole network of gangs and, of course, for the CSC and that we could be attacked anytime, anywhere. There was another emotion: a hatred for Celtic that had become even more intense, if that was possible.

  As I said the Celtic mob was pretty good in those days and I remember many battles with them. I would only have been twelve at the time but one of the most-talked about incidents came before an Old Firm match at Ibrox in 1985. We had arranged to meet the CSC at Kinning Park industrial estate, which is not far from the ground. We had a mob of about two hundred and I will always remember the sense of anticipation as we walked down Paisley Road West. As we approached the narrow footbridge over the M8 motorway it became clear that Celtic were as keen to get it on as we were. As they headed for the bridge both sides picked up pace and within seconds we were going hell for leather. A cry went up.

  ‘ICF, ICF. Let’s get into these Fenian bastards.’

  The police – worried that someone would be thrown off the bridge – did their best to head us off but seventy of us managed to evade them and met Celtic head on. It was chaos on the bridge, where there was room only for three boys on each side. But despite the crush we quickly swamped them and pushed them back to the other side of the motorway.

  Most of them managed to scurry back to safety. One wasn’t so lucky.

  Amongst all the confusion I heard a thud and looked down to see a Celtic boy called Joey Laird lying on a patch of grass. I suppose he was lucky. If he had landed on the concrete he would have been de
ad, but as it was he suffered brain damage. It was no accident; it wasn’t because of the crush. Two Rangers boys had lifted him up and deliberately thrown him off.

  As you might imagine the cops were outraged by the Laird incident and it was all hands to the pump to find out who did it – or, the Glasgow polis being the Glasgow polis, to stitch some poor cunt up for it. And that’s exactly what they did. After rounding up dozens of ICF and taking us for interview at the procurator fiscal’s office it became clear that they were intent on putting Barry Johnstone in the frame. Not because he did it – it was nothing to do with him – but because he was our top man and probably the most feared hooligan in Scotland. We stood firm. Every single one of us stonewalled them and no one was ever prosecuted.

  How did we feel about Joey Laird? To be perfectly honest most of the boys were buzzing. They felt it was a right result. Me? I knew Joey and had mixed feelings about what happened to him.

  While that was an interesting day out I had been too young to make a real contribution. Two years later, however, after another Old Firm encounter, again at Ibrox – older, bigger and stronger – I really came of age, not least in the eyes of the more experienced ICF boys. It was January 1987, which would make me fourteen. After the game, we met the CSC behind Ibrox primary school and a vicious battle broke out. There were no cops around to break things up so you had to choose whether to get into the fight or to cower on the sidelines. It was one of those situations that define you as a hooligan.

  We had some Chelsea boys with us; members, it was said, of Britain’s toughest mob. Don’t make me fucking laugh. They stood and watched, paralysed with fear, as it went off. Those ‘hard men’ from London took one look at the reality of Old Firm violence and stayed in their front-row seats. That was their choice. That was how they would be defined.10 Meanwhile the teenage Sandy Chugg got wired in. That was my choice. That was how I would be defined. It helped cement my reputation and afterwards our older boys were full of admiration for the ‘game wee cunt’ who had gone toe-to-toe with Celtic.