THE NEXT WAVE of south Manchester gangbangers was even more dangerous than the twenty-five-year-old ‘veterans’ of the streets.
Seduced by the glamour, money and status of the gangsta life, they were the first generation to move into existing gang structures, to adopt pre-ordained roles. ‘Those criminal elements which exist in Moss Side ... seem to be influenced by, or be modelling themselves on, the posse type seen particularly in America,’ said Detective Superintendent David Brennan, then head of Greater Manchester Police drugs squad. ‘Quarrels can begin over women, over cars or over territory, in that these gangs tend to dominate an area for no other reason than that it is theirs. They have no fear of anything: arrest, prison, injury, even death. They actually enjoy the buzz that comes from the fear of being shot at, or the sense of power when carrying a gun. They love walking around with a gun on them. They revel in the respect that goes with having money, access to drugs and a gun. Their sense of well-being comes from “status”.’
That status was often achieved by violence. ‘For them, violence works. The more extreme the violence, the more status it brings.’38
Julian Stewart was typical of the younger element.
He came from Old Trafford and had been an active, sporty boy with a gregarious personality. ‘When he
was a child, he was very loving,’ said his mother Sonia. ‘He made friends very easily and he was very outgoing, very generous and very popular. He played a bit of rugby in the early years, he also did a bit of boxing as he grew older but didn’t keep that up for very long. He was interested in computers.’ Julian changed, however, when his parents’ marriage broke down. ‘He wasn’t very happy about that and children react to breakdowns in different ways.
Some can cope and some can’t. Unfortunately he was one of those who can’t. He began to become a bit disruptive in his relationship towards me. He wanted to live with his dad, so there were a few problems there. It unsettled him at school at one point and he began to become quite disruptive.’39
Julian found the allure of the Moss Side gangs attractive. In his mid-teens, he joined bad company, just at the time when the Gooch-Pepperhill War was kicking off. He soon had the mountain bike, the stoney stare and the streetname: Turbo. ‘Julian was a youngster, and he was a bit misguided with his loyalties,’ said Anthony Stevens. ‘There were older people above him who should have known better.
These kids were at a very impressionable age and I don’t think they realised what they were getting into.
It is like accepting the devil’s shilling: once your face is known, that’s it, you’re one of them. They were just little runners who took the pressure off the big guys.’
Stewart was also driven by a sense of revenge: the Gooch had cut off part of one of his ears in a fight.
They were said to keep it pickled in a jar as a trophy.
In the spring of 1992, Stewart appeared with Delroy Brown and two others at Preston Crown Court, charged with the brutal murder of Carl Stapleton. The case collapsed: a young female
witness vanished after the judge refused to allow her to give evidence from behind a screen, and the Crown was forced to offer no evidence. ‘I was told that he was basically dragged into that matter,’ said Sonia Stewart. ‘He didn’t give certain information about other people, that’s my understanding of it. He didn’t tell me about what he might or might not have been doing, because it wasn’t that type of relationship.’
It was the first in a line of gang trials in which the prosecution case fell apart through fear or reluctance. A month later, masked men tracked a teenage witness in a kidnap case to a house on the Alex Park estate; they burst in and pistol-whipped him, causing severe injuries. In July, three of the Pepperhill hierarchy – Delroy Brown, Ian McLeod and Julian Stewart – and a fourth man faced trial charged with wounding and attempting to murder Henri McMaster, one of the first attacks in the Alex Park War. The case was moved to Liverpool Crown Court to avoid jury intimidation, but key witnesses still turned hostile, leaving the prosecution without a case. McMaster and a man called Andrew Yankey originally had made statements saying McMaster had been attacked with machetes by the four men in Whalley Range. At trial, however, McMaster said his injuries might have happened in a car crash. Yankey disclaimed ever seeing an attack, and when handed his previous statement in the dock, he denied having made it. Two other witnesses could not be produced. The defendants were cleared but kept in custody facing further charges.
Other important cases went the same way. One Young Gooch hothead faced serious charges including kidnap and violence but his alleged victim
refused to give evidence and was himself jailed for twenty-eight days for contempt of court. December of that year saw the trial collapse of two men charged with the murder of Darren Samuel. The chief witness, an eighteen-year-old woman who had been with Dabs when he was shot, took an overdose rather than turn up at court. Police found her on a hospital ward, where she refused to talk to them.
‘She is only just eighteen and a kid really,’ said her mother. ‘I understand the police problems and I am not complaining about their conduct, but surely they understand the pressure she has been under? She was just about conscious when I saw her and I think she is going to recover, but she has lost a lot of weight and is having psychiatric care.’40 With no reasonable prospect of her testifying, the prosecution was forced to offer no evidence, and the two men were formally cleared. ‘We were locked up on the say-so of a girl I don’t even know,’ said one of them, Kevin Reid, outside court. ‘We were innocent.’
(Reid would later attain a certain comic notoriety when he was found hiding in a wheelie bin after a robbery and shouted, ‘Squatter’s rights, I’ve been living in the bin!’)
The rule of silence had been established. No-one has ever been convicted for the murders of Anthony Gardener, Carl Stapleton or Darren Samuels
***
Nicholas ‘Sailor’ Murphy was another young man from Old Trafford who associated with the Doddington gang. He came from a large, close family and he was smart. ‘I knew him when I was a detective in Old Trafford,’ said Tony Brett. ‘I next saw
him at the shopping precinct during Operation Corkscrew but he left; he had the sense to move away.’ According to Brett, Sailor knew that it was safer to sell drugs by mobile phone than standing on a street corner, allowing the seller anonymously to control when and where the gear was delivered and so avoid video surveillance. A young runner on a mountain bike would be sent with the wraps so the dealer would not even touch them. ‘Your punter … can phone you from wherever he likes and if he wants to talk to you personally, they’ve got no money and need a lay-on or whatever, they can speak to you over the phone without getting embarrassed,’
explained one dealer. ‘It’s not so much sophisticated, it’s just an easier way to do business.
The aim is to make as much money as quick as possible, as easy as possible.’41 The drugs would usually be kept at a safehouse, sometimes with a diary to record transactions in crude code, a wall safe, snapseal bags, scales and radio scanners.
The scanners were a useful tool in the days before digital trunk systems allowed all police messages to be encoded. The gangs were still ahead of the police, with their ageing handheld and in-car radios.
Tony Brett said Murphy was so prominent in one dial-a-drug ring that the police actually named it after him. ‘It was suggested that Nicholas Murphy controlled a lucrative network called the Sailor System.’ Other dealers used similar trading names:
Queen, Sunshine, Slim, Jasmine. Drugs squad officers were especially concerned because they believed it was being used to sell crack, and Manchester had been waiting for a cocaine epidemic. As early as 1984, James Anderton had declared, ‘We are virtually waiting for an explosion in
the incidence of cocaine in this area and in the country as a whole. Production is expanding. New markets are being sought and this country is a prime target.’ Crack, which came to public consciousness when it ravaged America’s cities in the late eighties, was seen as the harbinger, and became the bete noire of drug enforcement, despite its relative scarcity in the UK. Operation Miracle was conceived both to smash the phone network and to head off a predicted crack explosion.
‘We bought all over Moss Side, at various locations,’ said Brett. ‘There were lots of independents, and in Operation Miracle there were people not gang-related at all. These were people who had seen that the market existed and decided they were having it, with a system that made it harder for the police to deal with them. They were all quite tasty individuals in their own right. And with that came crack as well. We heard of one-to-one, a bag of heroin and crack. People will take crack with heroin to calm down. I was very sceptical but we asked for it and got it wherever we went.’
Another senior detective on the operation was Ron Clarke, who later went on to write a drugs strategy for GMP. ‘We were given information by informants that crack was being sold,’ said Clarke.
‘One hundred and thirty drug dealers were targeted.
We had all of their pictures on a wall in the incident room and sent undercover officers in to buy crack.’
According to Clarke, however, they didn’t find it. ‘We went in to buy crack but found brown-powder heroin dealers. They said words to the effect that they didn’t have crack but they knew how to get it. We arrested thirty-five people and stopped because we couldn’t handle it any more.
‘They were actually selling heroin but we got them to go and buy crack. The crack house couldn’t handle it and got out the demand elsewhere. By insensitive policing and targeting an area rather than individuals, you can make the matter worse.’ Though he wouldn’t say it explicitly, Clarke implied that the operation inadvertently encouraged the manufacture and supply of crack in the Moss Side area. Other evidence would appear to back up this view. There certainly was no cocaine glut at the time; on the contrary, a huge Customs bust that January had uncovered nearly a tonne of Colombian powder imported by a Liverpool gang and led to a temporary
‘drought’ in the north-west. Within a couple of years of Operation Miracle, however, genuine crack rings were operating in the area, including one in Bedwell Close that used a very similar system of cellphones and hire cars to make drops, selling crack at £25 a rock.
In terms of arrests and convictions, Miracle had been a success – but had it unwittingly helped to propagate crack cocaine in south Manchester?
***
Nicholas Murphy somehow escaped arrest in Operation Miracle but was attracting the attention of dangerous people. Three armed men bundled him into the boot of his own black Golf GTi outside a snooker hall in Old Trafford; he was found twenty-four hours later with minor injuries. Cheetham Hill were suspected, possibly on a taxing mission, though Murphy wasn’t saying. Two months later, he and a friend were driving through Moss Side in Murphy’s 140mph VW Corrado when another car pulled
alongside. The two vehicles raced as shots were fired. Murphy was hit in the head but managed to keep the car under control; his passenger was hit in the shoulder. Their car eventually crashed and they ran off. The Corrado was later found with all its windows smashed in a Moss Side close. Murphy needed surgery to remove the bullet from his skull and surgeons fitted a steel plate over the wound.
The summer of ’92 saw a spate of shootings involving soldiers from the Gooch, the Doddington and Cheetham Hill, who had re-entered the fray. One Doddington man was shot in the chest while driving his GTi. Another needed thirty stitches in a head wound after he was macheted; he acquired the nickname ‘Peanut’ because of the long scar on his head. A well-known door boss from Moss Side was badly hurt by the Gooch outside the Phoenix club on Oxford Road. August saw a daytime clash between Doddington and the Hillbillies in the Moss Side precinct, leaving a convicted armed robber from Cheetham with bullet wounds to his shoulder and chest.
The precinct had become a virtual no-go area for the law-abiding, deserted by shops and businesses, waiting for the inevitable bulldozers. Even junkies were scared to go in. ‘The precinct was hell on earth,’ said an officer who served in the area at this time. ‘There were quite a few battles there. The worst one was between the drug dealers and the old Operational Support Unit – they were animals, a motley crew of officers, a couple of them former marines, who really wanted to annihilate the gangs.
They did a job on that precinct. The centre had a police room in it but whoever was on duty just locked the doors and pulled down the blinds and got on with
paperwork for a month. It was a form of punishment;
you had your radio on but otherwise you didn’t go out.’
More shootings followed, in Hulme, Moss Side, Stretford, Longsight: drive-bys, car chases, attempted hits at pop concerts, shootings in pubs and at houses. So many young men were cruising the streets with guns that it was impossible to keep up. Even ambulance crews were at risk. A man from Doddington Close was shot in the side outside a reggae evening in Trafford Park. ‘I started to dress the wound with help from my colleague,’ said an ambulance paramedic. ‘About forty people were gathered round the vehicle. Suddenly it started to rock and a side window was smashed by someone using their fist.’42 The crew had to drive away to continue treating their patient. In six weeks during August and September 1992, police dealt with 110 reports of gunfire in the Moss Side area alone.
November saw another blaze of gunfire, beginning with a fight between two gangs at the PSV Club in which a man was shot in the leg and a teenager was hit with a machete. Someone fired at least five shots in yet another afternoon attack at the Moss Side precinct. A man being taxed for £30,000 by four youths in bandanas leapt to freedom through a plate-glass window at a derelict house in Moss Side. In December, the Doddington’s top shooter, hell-bent on revenge for the death of his friend Darren Samuel, came across eighteen-year-old Marlon Jones, one of the leading Young Gooch, and two friends using a telephone in a shop on the Alex estate. Jones was high on the Doddington’s hit list and the gunman drew a semi-automatic weapon and fired at least three shots through the shop window.
Two bullets hit Jones in the chest. They were later removed by surgeons, the glass having reduced some of their velocity.
A dozen people had been shot in three months, and at least three more would be wounded that December. It was hard to know exact figures; many injuries went unreported. Chief Constable David Wilmot asked for detailed CID reports on the shootings as a report to the Police Authority showed serious woundings up by two-fifths year-on-year on the C division, covering Moss Side, Whalley Range, Hulme, Rusholme and Fallowfield. Two Manchester drugs squad officers were sent to Miami, Florida, to see how police there dealt with drug-related gang conflict. Wilmot’s most important reform, however, was the formation of a dedicated armed crime unit to deal with the escalating violence. The police continued to make arrests and weapons seizures, but many of the younger elements now affiliated to the gangs were unknown to them. One detective opined that at least half a dozen of the hoodlums involved were aged seventeen or under, and almost all were under twenty-one. They wore bullet wounds as badges of honour.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, police officers raided a party at the Nia Centre, a music venue and theatre for black artists. As they entered the building, a boy of fifteen fired two bullets over their heads. There was instant panic, with people being crushed in the melee. The boy was Thomas Pitt, one of a family of brothers from Longsight who were making a name for themselves in the Doddington Gang. He was later given twelve months’ detention, the maximum allowed given his age. ‘Menace of Gunchester’ declared the headline
in the Manchester Evening News, reprising a sardonic but memorable nickname for the city. It had been another bad year.
***
On 2 January 1993, two teenage boys were queuing in Alvino’s Pattie and Dumplin’ Shop for something to eat. John Benjamin Stanley, fourteen, was with his pal Neville Gunning, fifteen. ‘Benji’ Stanley had been adopted at twenty-two months and lived with his adoptive mother, stepfather and two older brothers barely a hundred yards away in Cadogan Street, one of the old Moss Side terraced streets. Benji was an average student at school; his friends thought he was ‘a good laugh’. It was 8 p.m. on a Saturday night.
A gunman in a camouflage combat jacket and balaclava with a single-barrelled shotgun jumped out of a silver car and fired through the glass front door of the shop. His first shot missed the boys, so he entered and shot Benji in the chest at close range before walking out. The fourteen-year-old collapsed, and died later in hospital. It seemed Benji had been singled out. Gunning had been hit by a few stray pellets and was in ‘serious shock’, according to the police, but was otherwise unhurt.
The Press coverage of Benji Stanley’s murder outstripped that for any of the previous Manchester murders. Horrific as the murder of a schoolboy is, it also came in a traditionally quiet ‘news time’ and the papers, TV and radio went to town on the story.
Benji’s age, his innocence, the shockingly public
Benji’s age, his innocence, the shockingly public