Agentes en la Red

IF ALL THAT Greater Manchester Police believe is true, by the age of twenty-two Tony Johnson had murdered one person, been present at the killing of two others, pulled off a string of lucrative armed robberies, made the wearing of body armour de rigueur on the city’s gang scene, and forced the closure of the most famous night club in Britain. A one-man maelstrom, he epitomised the new breed of young, urban gangbanger.

Johnson was raised in a home mired in tragedy.

His mother was only fifteen when he was born and neither she nor his natural father spent much time with him; for most of his childhood he lived with his grandmother, Winnie Johnson, in her modest semi in Fallowfield, south Manchester. Winnie was a good woman with a tortured soul; in 1964, she had watched her own twelve-year-old son, Keith Bennett, head off down the street to his gran’s; it was the last time she would see him. Somewhere along his route, little Keith was abducted by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors Murderers. They took him to windswept Saddleworth Moor and killed him. His body has never been found. Winnie kept a small, morbid shrine to her dead son on her living room wall, around a framed print of the only photograph of him: Keith with his toothy grin, round glasses and shock of fair hair he had cheekily cropped himself with scissors. On each side of the picture was a

cross and next to it were his spectacles, with one cracked lens. He wasn’t wearing them when he vanished; he had broken them the day before.

Johnson was not big but was muscular in a wiry way, and he could fight. Once he was with a friend in the Arndale Centre when two black youths attacked them. ‘Tony didn’t hesitate; he just went straight into them, and the black lads backed off,’ said the friend.

‘He had no fear at all.’ He left school at sixteen and began work as a window cleaner and glazier, but not for long. ‘I knew he was into something shady because you don’t claim dole and drive round in a flash car,’ said his mother. When the police came round to search her house, Winnie knew he was heading in the wrong direction, and fast. One day she had had enough and asked him outright what he did.

‘Mind your own bleeding business,’ came the reply.

What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her; it was better to be in the dark about Johnson’s crazy life.

Even so, he still returned home regularly with clothes for Winnie to wash. Johnson was obsessive about dress and would supervise the ironing to make sure the creases were sharp. He had a girlfriend, and soon a baby daughter. ‘He loved his little daughter.

But I don’t think his girlfriend’s parents wanted her to have anything to do with him,’ said the relative.

Johnson had befriended Tony McKie, sometimes known as ‘Black Tony’, and the Adetoro brothers, all associates of Cheetham Hill, and was gradually accepted into the mob. The Hillbillies then were at their height, the most ruthless and systematic gang in the city. They had a number of leading figures with big reputations, yet Johnson was to impress even

the most hard-bitten villains with his daring and cool.

What he and others did was to take their private war outside the confines of a small area of south central Manchester and make it public. He may have murdered Scratch Gardener to prove himself to the older heads, but waiting calmly for his victim for half an hour in a ginnel was hard-core. Johnson bragged about it to friends and his rep was cemented when he became the driver and unofficial bodyguard for the Cheetham Hill leader, ferrying him around in a Ford Sierra Cosworth, a highly fashionable car at the time.

Others were not impressed. ‘One person described White Tony Johnson to me as a trainee painter and decorator one day and a gun gangster the next,’ said Anthony Stevens. ‘One thing that the gun culture taught me was that you didn’t have to be hard any more. All the years of me breaking my knuckles on people’s faces, and getting my face battered all over the place, counted for nothing, because all you needed was some little sneak to walk up to you and go “bang” and you were dead.

You didn’t have to be hard to do that, all you had to have was the nerve and the bottle. It gave prominence to a lot of people who, let’s take the guns and weapons out of it, would have been absolute nothings. These guys would have been postmen or whatever, but because they were game enough to pull out a firearm and use it to deadly effect, their reputations grew and this whole thing got completely out of hand. So there is this wannabe called Tony Johnson who wanted everything the others had and he was willing to commit any kind of madness to get himself a reputation, and that is what he did.’

***

In February 1990, two Pepperhill men stepped off the London train at Manchester’s Piccadilly Station.

Ian McIntosh and Maurice McPherson carried bags containing almost a kilo and a half of heroin, worth more than £225,000 on the street. It would have taken their firm to another level, but the police were waiting for them, and both were arrested.

‘McPherson and McIntosh were quite intimidating people but were both out of the frame for a long time,’ said detective Tony Brett. ‘They were going to London to meet Turks, buying heroin in bulk, bringing it back to the estate, then distributing it. They could buy a kilo then for £30,000 and didn’t even interfere with it, then sold it at £15 a hundred-mil bag. Ten bags per gram, you are talking a profit of £120,000.

They built the supply line through a Manchester criminal living between here and London. He wasn’t convicted. There was also intelligence that people were getting stuff from Liverpool. It was wherever they could get it at the time.’

The bust created a temporary heroin drought. It was also a double-edged sword for Delroy Brown.

On one hand it weakened him, as he relied heavily for support on McPherson and on Ian McLeod, who was also in jail for robbery and possessing a firearm. The Pepperhill crew suddenly appeared vulnerable and their enemies, with Tony Johnson a prime mover, saw a chance. On the other hand, Brown was now able to assume the mantle of gang leader – and as one police officer who knew Brown very well asserted, ‘He was absolutely fearless.’ If there was going to be trouble, he was up for it. The

third phase of the Moss Side-Cheetham Hill War was about to begin.

Ice T was one of the seminal figures in gangsta rap, a genre which both chronicled and celebrated street life, gang loyalty, guns, killings and cop hating, and portrayed women as bitches and whores. So when he came to Manchester to play at the International II Club in Longsight, an ugly, low-roofed building, it was a must-see gig for many of the city’s black gang members. In fact just about the only white faces in the crowd were a small group from Blackpool. They found themselves watching a sporadic battle between Moss Side and Cheetham Hill youths. ‘It kicked off all night, and it was bad,’

said one of the Blackpool contingent. ‘It was hard to tell who was who. There was blood everywhere: the floor, the stage, the stairs. Ice T came out and was shouting to the crowd, “Cool your posse, cool your posse,” but it made no difference. We stayed at the back and kept our mouths shut. When we came out of the club at the end, every car along the road for about a quarter of a mile had had its windows put through.’

In March 1990, a hard-core crowd was again in attendance at the International to see the controversial rappers Two Live Crew, whose sexually explicit album As Nasty As They Wanna Be had caused outrage in the United States. It was another three-line whip for the gangbangers, though many ‘civilians’ were there too to check out a group that had earned reams of indignant Press coverage.

Ten unsmiling young men arrived once the gig was underway. At their head, police were later told, was White Tony. They brushed past the doormen and into the club in a wedge, scanning in the dark for any

Pepperhill. Their intelligence was good: Delroy Brown and friends were spotted across the club.

With no compunction, the Hillbillies opened fire.

Several hundred concert-goers ducked as someone fired back. Brown was hit in the back with a nine-millimetre bullet. Then the Hillbillies raided the box office and took £1,000.

‘It was an Irish club,’ said detective Ron Gaffey.

‘There were something like four hundred people in there. Someone is firing at Delroy Brown, with four hundred dancers in between, and allegedly someone is firing back. Brown was wounded and those responsible escaped. One thing that still irritates me is that there were potentially four hundred witnesses yet not one of them came forward to tell us what they saw or, if they did, they weren’t prepared to write it down. That included two young barristers who were there as revellers and who have supposedly taken an oath to uphold the law. I was flabbergasted. If we can’t get people like that on our side, then what chance do we have? Then the very next day, we have got vehicles chasing each other and firing down the streets, like Chicago.’

Police announced the formation of a ‘task force’ to head off a repeat of the previous gang war, under the codename Operation Takeover, and set up a confidential telephone hotline for information. ‘When we launched Takeover, we were also astonished to find the villains were wearing body armour,’ said Gaffey. ‘We were trying to find out where they got it, and also asking if we should have it ourselves. It was Johnson we clocked wearing it first. Suddenly there was a realisation of how big the weapons problem was. Several houses were raided and we recovered quite a lot of weapons. One guy was actually

reaching for a gun in his bedroom as we were walking in. Does he know it’s us? If he doesn’t, what is he going to do? If he does, what is he gong to do?

You felt vulnerable. It was very risky in those days.’

Gaffey was in no doubt about White Tony’s status.

‘Johnson was a killer. He was the hit man. He was a very nasty piece of work, very dangerous. He would swan around, go to the clubs, refuse to pay, just waltz in. People were so fearful of him.’ His audacity saw him rise swiftly in the hierarchy of the Hillbillies.

‘Cheetham Hill were quite well organised. All of them were intelligent in a streetwise sense and were acutely aware of police methods. I never found any of them to be unintelligent, though they weren’t particularly pleasant. There was a bond in terms of the drug business. There were dangers in working in isolation, so it was much safer and more businesslike to operate in a group.’

The police targeted the Hillbillies in earnest but witnesses were loath to talk. Officers were also hampered by the failure to ensure a consistent flow of intelligence. The original card files put together in the mid-eighties during the first Cheetham Hill-Moss Side war seemed to have been thrown out, while many of the officers who had worked on phase one of the gang war had moved on. ‘It was a new phenomenon, and our intelligence sources weren’t good at that stage to infiltrate some of these gangs,’

said Gaffey. ‘We were a bit behind. We weren’t properly focussed. They were very difficult to infiltrate anyway. It was difficult to know what had caused this but I think it was something very flimsy.’

While Delroy Brown recovered in hospital from his third serious attack in as many years, a young man was killed outside the Pepperhill. Egbert Williams, a

nineteen-year-old partner in a Moss Side bakery, was stabbed through the heart in a fight in the car park and died as he lay on the ground. It followed an argument inside the pub and was not gang-related, but it added to the air of fear.

***

The annual Moss Side Caribbean carnival is Manchester’s answer to Notting Hill, a noisy, colourful celebration of an exuberant culture. In May 1990, up to 40,000 people were out in shirt-sleeve weather, having fun, but the dealers were expecting trouble. ‘This was a hot day [yet] all the Frontline had on long Macs and ski jackets,’ recalled one. ‘It means they’re carrying.’³⁰ Then the Hillbillies arrived.

Stone-faced and tooled-up, they marched into the throng, cutting a swathe. ‘These guys were walking around with their hands in their coats and that was scary. That was really, really scary. They were armed,’ said the dealer. ‘There was a lot

of rushing around, not knowing what was going on.

People screaming. And then I don’t know where they came from but I heard two shots. It didn’t look as though they had found the person they were looking for but they had certainly found his car.’ The Hillbillies had reached the Pepperhill pub and found Delroy Brown’s red BMW outside. Some produced sledgehammers from under their coats and proceeded to smash it up before turning it over onto its roof. ‘That was just a blatant show of strength,’

said the dealer. ‘It was like, intimidating people, wanting people to know how strong they were.’

Among the crowd was Ian Brown, lead singer of the then-hugely popular Stone Roses. ‘I watched the

Cheetham Hill Gang walk through in army formation, eight-strong in rows, each man with a holster,’ he later said. For Brown it was a turning point, the day the hedonism of Madchester turned sour. ‘This is June ’90, this is a different day. It’s like America, the way the ghettoes of America were flooded with crack and coke, and so were the ghettoes of England, and the gangs and guns are going to come. Where there’s drugs, there’s money, and where there’s money, anything goes.’³¹ The Hillbillies’ arrogance, even as some of them were under intense police investigation, was undiminished, with the swaggering Tony Johnson taking centre stage.

They even began to threaten the police. That summer the Operation Takeover detectives seized weapons, body armour and drugs including crack cocaine, and arrested two dozen people for offences ranging from possession of drugs to attempted murder. ‘We started to recover a lot of firearms,’

said Ron Gaffey. ‘A picture of their weaponry began to emerge.’ The result was death threats; one of the gangs said an officer would be lured into a trap and shot if the clampdown wasn’t lifted. ‘I got a couple of letters sent to the police station,’ said Gaffey. ‘They threatened to blow me up. That was happening to some of the other officers as well, but it didn’t particularly bother us.’

However, one black constable was moved out of the area after threats to shoot him. The Pepperhill, mainly black or mixed-race themselves, had singled him out. He later returned but was advised not to patrol Alexandra Park. The threats were not idle.

Two officers who stopped a car to check documents were surrounded by twenty youths outside the

Pepperhill. One was butted and the other kicked before help arrived. A firearms team was moved into the area, mobilising every night at a base in Moss Side. Normally it would have been on standby elsewhere in the city and sent out only after a telephone request to an assistant chief constable.

Now it could be sent out immediately. Talk of ‘no-go’

areas was robustly denied.

***

The West Indian Carnival in Chapeltown, Leeds, was another magnet for young black people that August.

With its costumed masqueraders, soca and calypso, steel bands and garish floats, the noisy parade attracted 60,000 people. A contingent of young Cheetham Hill, including White Tony, also made the journey. As usual, they were armed.

The carnival officially finished in the early evening, but street dancing and loud music continued into the night. Even when a visitor from Birmingham was stabbed to death in Harehills Avenue in a row over a sound system, the bass thumped on. At 1.20 a.m., again in Harehills Avenue, another fight broke out, escalating from raised voices to pushing and shoving. One of the Cheetham crew, Gary Shearer, was attacked, and a twenty-eight-year-old Birmingham man, Sedley Sullivan, intervened to stop the scuffle. One of the Cheetham men responded by whipping out a gun and firing shots into the crowd.

Sullivan and an innocent bystander, Rachel Soloman, aged eighteen and also from Birmingham, were both hit in the torso. ‘Sedley and this girl were dancing by the sound system and they just shot at them,’ Tresha Mitchell, a friend of Sullivan’s, told the

Yorkshire Post. Most of the crowd scattered. Then people began to shout that someone had been shot, and came back to help. ‘There were no police on the scene and no ambulance after fifteen minutes. We had to shove him into a car to get him to St James’s Hospital,’ said Mitchell. The gunmen had left in a car.

Both Rachel Soloman and Sedley Sullivan died from their wounds.

The police soon believed that Tony Johnson was involved. He was arrested and put on an identity parade, but wasn’t picked out and denied any involvement. Instead two of his friends, Gary Shearer and nineteen-year-old James Walber, were arrested and charged with manslaughter.

Rachel Soloman’s relatives issued a statement that summed up the feelings of many:

As each day goes by, the bitterness, disbelief and contempt it’s hard to justify.

Why do innocent people who go out to enjoy themselves always suffer?

Why do the innocent suffer injuries and even deaths from trigger-happy hoodlums?

Why is it an innocent bystander is gunned down in cold blood without mercy?

What is the motive? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

***

Two innocent people were dead, yet there was no let-up in the war. Someone tried to kill a drug-runner in Gooch Close, a small cul-de-sac in the heart of the

Two innocent people were dead, yet there was no let-up in the war. Someone tried to kill a drug-runner in Gooch Close, a small cul-de-sac in the heart of the