‘A MATE OF mine’s sister used to live in Alexandra Park estate, on the east side of it, and that is where we used to hang out. We used to stash guns and drugs at her house. There was a pub across the road called the Pepperhill. That’s where we used to drink, so people trying to describe that group of lads, instead of going through their names, they would just go, “the Pepperhill lot’. That is how that came about.
It wasn’t like we would sit there and say, “We need a name, what do we call our gang?”’
Anthony Stevens, a stocky, bullet-headed black man, was born and raised in Whalley Range, in a close and disciplined family environment. ‘We weren’t angels but we knew what it was like to have to grow up with manners and respecting people around you.’ He had to attend church every week, address adults respectfully, be polite and well-mannered in public. The rod was rarely spared and backchat earned a backhander. ‘A friend of mine did some graffiti all over the park wall and I remember seeing his mother stood there beating him whilst he was trying to scrub it all back off again.’
Stevens and his close friends formed a tight-knit group of eight or nine, many from Whalley Range, who came to adulthood at a time of the highest unemployment since the 1930s. Jobs for black youths with a Moss Side postcode were almost non-existent, despite the efforts of bodies such as the
Moss Side and Hulme Task Force, which spent large sums on employment schemes. The area had a high percentage of single-parent families and more than a quarter of its population was aged between fifteen and twenty-five. If any zone was ripe for an American-style gang culture, it was this. Its bored, disenchanted young men turned to whatever means they could to make money: opportunist crime, drug dealing, whatever. The fortnightly £32.50 Giro cheque was never going to be enough.
‘When it came to the Thatcher years, young black males were at the bottom of the pile,’ said Stevens.
‘There was no hope. I was in the top class all the way at school but I couldn’t get a job. I can honestly say that when we all left school and college, we were actively trying to find employment, and because we couldn’t, we saw other ways to fund our lives. We wanted flash cars. What am I supposed to do with thirty-two pounds fifty a fortnight?
‘A lot of us tried – I’m talking about some very notorious gangsters, some of them now dead, some in jail and some still on the street. One tried to start a garage business, fixing cars. I tried to start a PA business because I was always interested in music.’
Nothing worked; it was a bad time to start a business as well as to look for a job. ‘The ones who had the balls turned to armed robberies and God knows what, and those who had the brains thought, there is the drugs market. Up to that point, hardly any of us knew what heroin or cocaine was. There was no sort of gang culture. People just did what they did to make money.’
Their base became the Pepperhill, a squat, brick-built public house with living accommodation above that was part-owned by Great Britain rugby league
star Des Drummond. It sat in a secluded position in a tiny road on the Alexandra Park housing estate, which lies beside the main Princess Road thoroughfare and just north of the parkland from which it takes its name. Alex Park had been built in the seventies to a Radburn layout, a style pioneered in the United States to separate pedestrians and cars and emphasise secluded areas, cul-de-sacs and patches of green. It was meant to provide an attractive, calming, natural environment. Instead the estate had poor lighting, dangerous walkways and a lack of clear definition between public and private space.
The Pepperhill lads were of West Indian descent, younger and distinct from the local ‘Africans’ who warred with Cheetham Hill. ‘They were the big, old-style gangsters and they didn’t mix with us,’ said Stevens. ‘They were a bit classier than our lot, in flash BMWs. Their women were always beautiful.
Our lot came raw off the streets, every low-down critter you can imagine, though I don’t know why. We were all raised well.’ The older Africans were more anglicised: they listened to rhythm and blues and soul, went to the Reno and drank Guinness stout.
‘They were very English and didn’t seem to have much of a connection with us on a cultural level. I was unaware at the time that quite a few of them did have connections with their homelands, with Gambia and Nigeria. They were heavy characters, guys we had heard of on the street, but their world was different from ours.’ The younger West Indians were into reggae, spliffs and Red Stripe lager, frequented nightclubs in the city and riffed in patois, which the Africans couldn’t understand. When the first war kicked off with Cheetham Hill, the Pepperhill lads
stayed out of it. ‘We were smoking ganja and weed and arguing over sound systems,’ said Stevens.
‘What did this fighting have to do with us? There was a big African influence among Cheetham Hill as well and many of their leaders had African surnames. It didn’t involve us.’
A trait the Pepperhill boys shared with the older crowd was the urge to look good. Moss Side lads generally regarded Cheetham Hill as scruffy – loud gold necklaces and bracelets that had gone out of fashion on the Moss were referred to disparagingly as ‘Cheetham Hill chains’. The more businesslike Hillbillies might have earned the money but they didn’t have the style, or so the Moss lads believed.
They cultivated a ‘rude boy’ demeanour: good clothes worn well, a devil-may-care attitude, and take no man’s disrespect. ‘Cheetham Hill, with all their money from crime, couldn’t understand why the women still looked over their shoulder at us,’ said another Moss Side gangster. ‘That caused a lot of conflict.’
On a typical day, Stevens and his mates would rise late, make a few phone calls to see who was around, perhaps run a couple of family errands, then amble over to the Pepperhill in the early afternoon.
There they would smoke weed, drink, play pool, sell drugs, perhaps duck out for a pattie or fish and chips, while the resident sound system churned out leaden-bass roots reggae.
‘Every day was like a holiday. You don’t realise it at the time but you are in a permanent state of being stoned. We sold anything. We didn’t give a shit. The cops didn’t raid us; they didn’t care. They would rather know where we were and not have us troubling other people. This was when they had what
I call Operation Container, which was to keep the drugs problem on the estate and not let it spread, though they deny it.’ It would become Moss Side folklore that the police allowed the drug trade to flourish there in the mid to late eighties and so kept it away from more affluent, white areas.
At weekends, the Pepperhill lads would head for the Gallery, the most popular black club, on the corner of Peter Street and Deansgate. ‘The Gallery was maybe intimidating if you weren’t used to it, and jeeps parked up outside the club on a Saturday night blocked the highway, but the music was pure gold and the club rocked,’ according to DJ and author Dave Haslam.11 The crew would spend the night dancing in a fug of marijuana smoke before ending the night at one of the many shebeens, often until sunrise. ‘On Friday and Saturday nights, people just cruised around listening for the bass. That told you where the party was,’ said Stevens.
The Pepperhill crew may have had respectable family backgrounds but they hung out in one of the toughest inner-city areas in Britain, and they were ruthless when crossed. ‘Anyone who fucked with us got severely, severely dealt with,’ said Stevens.
‘When people troubled us, we annihilated them. We were tight and we were insular. No-one knew that much about any of us.’
***
Their first sign of serious trouble came when a fresh teenager called Julian Bradshaw took to hanging out with some older Pepperhill lads. They found him funny. Bradshaw liked to wind up the ‘yardies’, native-born Jamaicans who drank in the Big
Western pub on the estate, and would skit their accents and mannerisms. Had he been older, he would have known it was a mistake. The Jamaicans were not to be messed with: while their homeland is a tropical paradise for tourists, its ghettoes or ‘yards’
are among the most violent places on earth. One day one of the yardies slapped Bradshaw and threw him out of the pub. The next day, the teenager walked into the bookmakers in the shopping precinct and, in retaliation, hit Anthony ‘Soldier’ Baker over the head with a baseball bat.
Soldier was over six feet tall, a former British infantryman who took no shit. So when Bradshaw also took two of the Pepperhill to assault his girlfriend, he snapped. Two of the men were arrested, and Baker and his girlfriend called at Moss Side police station, where they were being held. She told officers she did not want to pursue the complaint, but Baker shouted across the cell area to the two men to go to his home ‘to sort something out’.
The two men were released and two hours later drove with Bradshaw and a fourth man to the Alex Park estate. Bradshaw was belligerent, bragging he was going to give Baker ‘some Englishman’s licks’.
No doubt they felt there was strength in numbers, but when Baker arrived he was in no mood for talking.
He pulled up a hood to cover his face, produced a shotgun and fired. Bradshaw and one of his companions, a Pepperhill stalwart called Ian McLeod, jumped into their car while the others fled.
McLeod knew Baker and tried to reason with him but Baker fired again through a window and hit McLeod in the stomach. Bradshaw, who was wounded in the arm, drove off but crashed. He abandoned the car
and ran into a small close but Baker tracked him down and found him leaning against a wall. He fired again. Bradshaw fell and lay on the pavement, bleeding, as Baker approached.
‘Please, please don’t,’ begged Bradshaw. ‘No more.’
‘You were warned,’ muttered Baker. Then he shot the teenager dead.
Baker would strongly deny involvement, claiming he was at a friend’s house at the time of the shootings, but was later jailed for life for murdering Bradshaw and wounding McLeod. ‘You were persistent and merciless,’ said the judge.
The Pepperhill had let someone into their tight crew and it had cost them. It was a lesson they failed to learn. Anthony Stevens later saw it as the beginning of the end for him. ‘My influence with my lads was diminishing. I was always the more business-minded. I wanted us to have money. The less I was about, the more trouble crept in. The first skirmish they had was when we opened our borders to outsiders. The very thing that brought us together was being eroded.’
That July saw a Manchester record: four armed robberies in one day. Guns were becoming ubiquitous and the average robber was no longer the experienced villain in his thirties but a young man or even a teenager. Some were just fifteen. ‘We are now in the shotgun era and the pickaxe handle is almost a thing of the past,’ commented Assistant Chief Constable Ralph Lees. There seemed to be robberies almost every day: kidnappings, jewellery snatches, payroll heists, post office stick-ups, and they were more and more violent, with shots often fired. Both Cheetham Hill and Moss Side had teams
out regularly, scouring for targets. The gun was also replacing the knife and the machete in inter-gang disputes. Summertime was always especially edgy.
***
One Cheetham Hill stronghold was the Apollo public house on the Waterloo estate, a base for drug dealing, fencing stolen goods and planning robberies. On a Thursday night in July 1987, two traffic cops stopped an eighteen-year-old outside on suspicion of a motoring offence. He was one of the Cheetham crew and a hostile crowd emerged from the pub. Local beat bobby John Piekos went to assist his two colleagues. A punch broke his nose.
Back-up was quickly on the scene and the cops arrested three men and bundled them into a van. The Hillbilly mob of thirty split up and the police pulled out.
Shortly afterwards, another constable was driving through the area in a panda car when a brick came through one of his windows, breaking his arm. A police dog handler on stand-by was attacked in his van and hit on the head with another brick, and a traffic patrol car was dented by another missile. Two parked cars, one a police vehicle, were turned on their sides and another was stolen and set alight.
The local inspector activated contingency plans put in place after the Moss Side riots and police from other divisions were drafted in. They had the desired effect; as night set, in the incident fizzled out and the crowds drifted off.
The next day, Collyhurst Division commander Walter Elder played it down as a ‘routine incident’, but a city council report asserted that ‘police
harassment and misconduct’ had worsened problems in the area. Only one in 100 GMP officers was non-white and accusations of racism were routine. Jim Anderton had a terrible relationship with the left-wing city council, and the chairman of the police committee and certain councillors delighted in undermining him, or holding him to account, depending on which side of the fence you sat.
Privately, officers were furious about the report, blaming a hard core of between eighteen and thirty local men who persistently broke the law. ‘We police the Cheetham area as sensitively as we can,’ said a superintendent. ‘We don’t harass or wish to offend but we have a duty to protect all people and if people break the law, whatever their colour, we have to act accordingly.’12
***
A growing contempt for the police spread to the Moss. On a Sunday night that September, a patrol car spotted four men in a Ford Escort reportedly stolen from Cheetham. They gave chase and tailed the vehicle to the car park of the 8411 Centre, a community building near Moss Side’s so-called Frontline, where the men in the car knew they would get help. As they piled out of their vehicle, the officers managed to grab two of them; one butted a policeman in the face.
The other two got away and shouted to groups nearby. Some piled out from a party at the 8411. The outnumbered officers came under a hail of bottles, bricks and clubs and were forced to release the arrested men. Three hundred rioters gathered in the street and in the ensuing battle eleven police officers
were injured. Reinforcements were called in but eventually made what was described as a ‘tactical withdrawal’ to let the rioters disperse. Nine police vehicles were damaged, including one that was burned out.
It was open war between the cops and the gangs.
***
‘It happened so quickly. It was very violent. I thought I’d been punched. It was a knife in the chest.’ Three weeks after the battle at the 8411, twenty-six-year-old PC Allan Donohue was in the car park of the Great Western Hotel on the Alex estate, trying to make an arrest. The Moss Side lads had other ideas. Forty of them closed in and one plunged a knife into the officer. The radio in his breast pocket deflected the blade into a rib and probably saved his life. Another thrust severed an artery and soaked him with blood. Someone hit him over the head with a bottle. ‘I was very dazed. My colleagues dragged me away. If they hadn’t helped, I’d have been dead.’13 As his constable lay strapped up and recovering in Manchester Royal Infirmary, James Anderton declared, ‘It is impossible to provide routine policing of the character we are so often told is desirable if our officers, often working alone and always unarmed, stand to be attacked whenever they seek to arrest someone in the street.’ Once again, not one witness came forward.
The reason for this overt hostility towards the uniform was that Moss Side had become Manchester’s centre for dealing hard drugs, which carried potentially bigger jail sentences than cannabis and pills, and so dealers would go to
greater lengths to escape arrest. One of those who noticed the change was a young detective called Tony Brett. Tall, slim and articulate in a mildly-spoken way, he was a keen observer of the streets.
‘I went on the drugs squad around 1984. There didn’t appear to be any drug gangs then. There was small-scale drug dealing going on all over the place on a self-financing basis; it tended to be addicts who sold themselves. What changed it was the entry of people who came in purely for profit. And the first time I really noticed that was in and around the Moss Side shopping precinct in 1988. There had always been cannabis dealers in Moss Side but now we were seeing people selling heroin in the street.’
The Moss Side Leisure and Shopping Centre, an unprepossessing, indoor block of shops and a small covered market, provided an important service for the community in an area ignored by supermarket chains. It had also been yardie territory for weed-dealing purposes, as the Jamaicans liked a bet and hung out at the bookies there. When Class A powders began to arrive in significant quantities, a younger element began dealing by the Hotpot pub at the back of the precinct. Another main dealing area, in front of a row of shops on Moss Lane, became known as the Frontline.
Heroin, which had fallen in price, was the drug of a disenchanted generation. The young men who started selling it did not really know what they had but soon a ghostly army of addicts was patrolling the city, ‘grafting’ and stealing to feed their insatiable habits. Addicts or users in outlying districts and towns might once have bought locally from other users but now a market was consolidated in a single location, with a regular supply guaranteed. ‘In