El Dilema del Prisionero en el Sistema de Agentes

THE FIRST SERIOUS assault on the hard-drug traders of Moss Side was late in coming. For several years, Moss Side residents had been complaining that the drugs market around the precinct centre was effectively allowed to operate;

they believed this was a deliberate, even racist ploy to keep the trade in one place, among the black community and away from white areas. For their part, the police were wary, perhaps too wary, of provoking a backlash. Memories of the riots were still fresh, while the more recent killing of PC Keith Blakelock during a disastrous intervention at Broadwater Farm in north London starkly showed the dangers of ill-planned operations.

By 1990, however, GMP was in possession of video technology that allowed for more discreet surveillance and evidence gathering. It also had sufficient numbers of trained undercover officers who looked the part and could make drug buys without arousing suspicion. The undercovers were used successfully in Operation Palace. ‘After long intelligence gathering we identified sellers and customers in and around the Alexandra Park estate, which some dealers regarded as a police no-go area,’ said Superintendent Paul Cook. ‘Rather than go in mob-handed, as happened at Broadwater Farm, we picked offenders off over a six-week period and there was no trouble.’

Video cameras were used for the first time in an even more successful operation, codenamed Corkscrew, between September and early November 1990. A camera with a zoom lens was hidden in high-rise flats overlooking the Moss Side precinct and captured remarkable sequences of dealers trading openly. Twelve men, including two of the principal heroin dealers in the area, were jailed for between seven and ten years in what police hailed as a major success. Many were in their mid-to-late twenties or even their thirties, veterans in street dealing terms.

Yet while Corkscrew removed some of the most blatant drug dealers from around the precinct centre it could not deter the junkies who haunted the area.

Moss Side had become the prime drugs market in the north of England and the remorseless demand for heroin and cocaine ensured that the sales pitches there would regenerate. In the four years to the end of 1990, the number of notified drug addicts in Greater Manchester alone more than doubled, and no-one knew the number of non-registered users. It was inevitable that more suppliers would emerge to meet the incessant demand.

These dealers would not operate so conspicuously. ‘They realised that if they stood out in the open with no cover, the police were going to get them, particularly with film,’ said Tony Brett. ‘A lot then decided to move away from the shopping precinct because it was too public, and go into different methods. You had a split between those who had the nous to go into the mobile phone side, which remains the best method of selling drugs at street level, and those who were still prepared to stand on the street.’ The main dealing area also

crossed over the road to the Alexandra Park estate.

‘There were still pockets to be found on the parade, because it is all about catching the customers, but eventually we started to get intelligence that it was happening on the estate, and this was the first time we saw the split of the two rival factions.’

The factions concerned came from either side of Alexandra Road, which divides the estate neatly down the middle. On the east side were the Pepperhill Mob, in their stronghold on Bedwell Close. On the west side was a group of young men who hung out around a shebeen in Gooch Close, a small cul-de-sac of semi-detached houses with an alley at one end. The shebeen brought in customers and the gang sold them drugs. Like the Pepperhill crew just a few hundred yards away, they had grown up together, could not find jobs, and turned to crime.

Four of them had been sent to a detention centre for mugging a man in a churchyard in 1987; unluckily for them, a group of police officers was keeping watch from a clump of bushes. The police first noted their existence as a separate group when a car was shot up in Gooch Close in the summer of 1990, while at least one of the gang was involved in shooting Keith Erskine in the Spinners pub in Hulme at around the same time. Then, early in 1991, a gun was fired at a police officer in the close.

The Gooch lads looked like an American street gang: they had razor-cropped hair, athletic builds and wore bomber jackets, hooded sweats, baggy jeans and training shoes or baseball boots. Their affiliation was based on friendship and mutual reliance; there was little evidence of hierarchy. ‘It wasn’t a strict gang structure,’ said Tony Brett. ‘The Gooch all frequented the same area and realised

there was strength in numbers, and they were prepared to enforce that strength if they had to. They were all born around there and had very strong links to that part of Moss Side. They were very proud of the fact that they were Mancunians, not yardies, whereas the other faction had a very significant person [Delroy Brown] who was an outsider.’

Their relationship with the Pepperhill lads was friendly, even as the two ‘gangs’ – they saw themselves simply as groups of mates – came to control much of the drug trade in the area, reining in the lone dealers and bringing order to a chaotic marketplace. ‘In the whole of Moss Side you will have lots of independent dealers,’ said a former gang member, ‘but if they are making a lot, the Gooch or whoever will come along and say, “You are working for us now.” Which makes sense.’ It meant that ‘for once somebody had got a grip of the dealing,’ according to Brett. Independents found it unwise to compete.

In March 1991, the newly knighted Sir James Anderton announced his retirement at the age of fifty-eight. The colourful officer, who believed he might have been Oliver Cromwell in a previous life and declared he was moved by the spirit of God, was succeeded by his deputy, David Wilmot, a politically safer pair of hands credited with helping to rebuild police-community relations after the Toxteth riots as a Merseyside chief superintendent. Sir James went with a typically apocalyptic parting shot:

‘I see around me a great sea of wrongdoing that seems not to lessen. I did have a kind of dream that I might, by example and protest, change the course of things so powerfully, and influence society and the country in the matter of rightful conduct, that they

would turn away from crime and disorder and wilful criminal behaviour. Sadly, that has not happened.’

Yet to his officers, the death of Tony Johnson and the drug busts in Moss Side, the guns seized and the squeeze on Cheetham Hill, seemed to represent some kind of progress. No-one could predict what was around the corner.

***

The Gooch boys had no beef with Cheetham Hill.

One of their leading figures was the cousin of a Cheetham Hill head, and the two groups often bought drugs from each other to re-sell. Delroy Brown, however, objected to the Gooch helping to enrich ‘the enemy’ and, in typically cavalier fashion, ordered them to stop. They told him where to go. ‘As far as the Gooch were concerned, they were just getting on with what they were doing,’ said Anthony Stevens, ‘and they had some madman coming over there and saying, “You can’t do anything in south Manchester and certainly not if you are dealing with people from north Manchester.” The Gooch turned round and said, “Sod you, pal, we do what we want.”

You try to bully them, they are not having it.’

The chain reaction that became the Alex Park War began early in 1991 with a minor spat between a Gooch man and one of the Pepperhill crowd. Delroy Brown, recently released from remand after charges of gun possession had been dropped, became embroiled and shortly afterwards his car was stolen from outside the shebeen off Gooch Close. Brown blamed the Gooch lads. In a subsequent fight, Julian Stewart, a young lad who hung around on the east side of the estate, lost part of an ear. A car

belonging to a Gooch man was torched in retaliation.

Having been singled out by Cheetham Hill, Brown now became a hate figure to the Gooch too. He was also being informally identified as ‘public enemy number one’ by Greater Manchester Police. ‘In my opinion, it was more about personalities than drug dealing,’ said Brett. ‘The Gooch had some very strong individuals who were not fearful and would have done him serious harm if they could.’

The mayhem that followed was remarkable because it was concentrated in such a small area:

like two men fighting in a phone booth. Many young men who were to spend the following years trying to kill each other lived literally yards apart. They had grown up together, gone to the same schools, attended the same churches, played for the same football teams. Each side would draw members and allies from further afield – Longsight, Hulme, Chorlton, Rusholme, Whalley Range, Stretford, Old Trafford – but the battleground was invariably the Alexandra Park estate, with Alexandra Road its front line, dividing the two sides like no man’s land. The estate became an eerie battleground of shifting no-go areas, unlit rat-runs, sudden ambushes and the crackle of gunfire after dark. Every hooded youth was eyed with caution, even fear.

At nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, 27 March 1991, a group of four boys were standing in Gooch Close talking about football. They included Junior Richards and his younger brother ‘Darkie’. Around a dozen other youths were congregated nearby, some dealing drugs. ‘The four of us were just talking when I saw a dark-coloured Cavalier come slowly down the close,’ Junior later said. ‘The front and back windows on the passenger side were wound down. I

saw a flash of fire and then heard six loud bangs. We dived for cover and ran.’³⁵

One fourteen-year-old took a bullet in the hip.

Darkie was hit in the head, his left eye blasted out.

Some children ran to get his mum, Maureen, who lived nearby. ‘I found him at a house nearby,’ she recalled. ‘His eye seemed to have gone and he had a hole in his temple. He was holding his head and crying, saying, “Mum, am I going to die?” I just couldn’t take in what had happened. I went in the ambulance with Darkie. He had an emergency operation. They took away what was left of his eye and fragments of a bullet from his head. The surgeons told me that a fraction the other way and the bullet would have instantly killed my son.’

The Gooch marshalled their forces. Within two hours, they closed in on the Pepperhill pub, charged through the doors, grabbed a twenty-year-old man and cleaved him with a machete. He was taken to hospital with head injuries, and from then on it was tit-for-tat. Shots were fired from a moving car in Whalley Range; a Gooch man was stabbed in the city centre. Each attack made things worse. Instead of focussing on the two or three people at the heart of their dispute, the Gooch retaliation was indiscriminate. ‘They decided that everybody over that [east] side of the estate is our enemy,’ said Anthony Stevens. ‘So when the Gooch retaliated, they retaliated on everybody over there. They started troubling people who were innocent, and these people who were innocent had no choice but to defend themselves.’

Early on a Saturday evening, the Gooch again hit the Pepperhill pub. This time the attack was led by a man in a shiny home-made mask: he loosed a

nine-millimetre handgun at a fleeing group, hitting one man in the leg while other bullets smashed through the dining room window of a house where a family were watching television. The next day, Che Cole was shot in the hand and arm by a man on a motorbike in Doddington Close, yet another dead-end street in a secluded position in the heart of Pepperhill territory. Minutes later, four Pepperhill men attacked Henri McMaster with a machete. Then they cornered some Gooch lads and poured fluid on them before setting them on fire; the Gooch escaped without serious injury.

The bloody picture was confused by an unrelated murder that same weekend of a junkie who regularly travelled from his home in Birmingham to buy heroin and crack; he made the trip three times a week and spent £1,000 a week on drugs. This time two men were waiting for him; he was ‘taxed’ and shot dead by a twenty-five-year-old gunman who was later jailed for life. Although unconnected to the gang wars, it added to the growing image of Moss Side as a war zone.

The savagery was making national headlines and local Labour MP Tony Lloyd appealed to the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, to raise the issue with the Prime Minister. ‘If law-abiding residents of Moss Side are aware of people in possession of firearms, I urge them to tell the police,’ responded Baker lamely. Moral choices on the Alex estate were not that simple. Few people dared speak out, as the tension became unbearable. Two council workmen who parked their van in the street were beaten up by a gang who mistook them for undercover cops. The police themselves asked for bulletproof vests to be standard issue for patrols in the area but were told

they were too expensive and not practicable. One officer contacted a newspaper anonymously: ‘We can buy our own body armour for more than a hundred pounds and wear it under our tunics without breaching regulations. Some are considering it. It is getting very ugly and is reaching the stage where we expect a shooting every time we come on duty.’

Their bosses said they had a stock of equipment that could be issued ‘when appropriate’.³⁶

Police made a series of raids, smashing in doors and rousting gang members in their underwear. They found a stash of weapons near Gooch Close, including a Demon crossbow, a handgun, knives, a machete and a selection of full-face masks. Another cache, including a loaded shotgun, was recovered in the Pepperhill base of Bedwell Close. Detectives were also getting a clear picture of who was involved but had little evidence to use in court, even from victims.

Anthony Stevens saw his friends getting pulled into another needless war. ‘If someone had stopped to think for a minute, they would have realised we all grew up together. In the past, they would come over to the Pepperhill and we would occasionally visit the Talbot, where they drank. Now, if you stepped across the border you were dead. It was ridiculous. I tried to explain to my lot that you can’t make money if you are consistently caught up in violence.’ They wouldn’t listen. The Pepperhill shot at some Gooch men in a Golf GTi, the favourite car of the young black gangs. There were more attacks outside the Pepperhill pub. The Manchester Evening News ran a double-page spread under the headline ‘Hell is a city’ about Manchester’s ‘gun culture’, and CID boss David James told the paper, ‘There is a hard-core of

people driving around in high-priced cars, dressed in designer clothing and wearing expensive jewellery. They don’t have employment, so draw your own conclusions. Our information shows that the main players in the current problems are between nineteen and twenty-six. We know who they are, but people have to have the courage to give us evidence.’

As the paper hit the streets, the Gooch were out trying to kill one of their most feared rivals. Nineteen-year-old Winston Brownlow was one of a younger group on the east side of the estate who hung around on Doddington Close and had teamed up with the Pepperhill. Brownlow was walking from the Pepperhill pub when two men on a motorbike pulled up and the pillion passenger, wearing a helmet with the visor down, climbed off and fired a gun. He was a poor shot, and Brownlow was hit only in the hand.

The gangsters’ ineptitude as marksmen would prevent many fatalities. This time, however, the payback was lethal.

Carl Stapleton was seventeen, a slim youth with cropped hair. Like many recent school-leavers in the area, he was unemployed and tended to rise late and go to bed late. As a child of the estate he knew many of the young men involved and was friendly with some of the Gooch; one of his cousins was said to be a Goochie. Stapleton had been watching TV at his aunt’s house one evening when he set off to walk the short distance home on the west side of the estate. He was seen talking to three black men and two white women in a walkway. Some time afterwards Junior Richards, whose brother had been shot at the start of the feud, was riding his mountain bike past an alley when he saw the body of a youth

lying on his back in a pool of blood, with his hands held up towards his face. Yards away, music thumped out of a house party, the occupants oblivious to the horror outside. Richards ran for help, and an ambulance crew tried to revive the injured teenager, without success. Carl Stapleton died within twenty minutes. Fifteen stab wounds had lacerated his heart, lungs, liver and spleen. ‘An innocent kid gets shot in the eye and now another innocent boy is stabbed for nothing,’ said his father, Michael Bellamy. ‘The killing has got to stop, but I just don’t know how.’

The Gooch were once again out for vengeance.

The following day a gang of them attacked Delroy Brown in the street, clubbing him over the head with a machete. Brown fled into the Big Western pub, with blood pouring from his head and the Gooch in hot pursuit. ‘Call the police!’ he yelled as he tried to get upstairs to the pub’s living quarters. He managed to snatch one knife as it was thrust at him and vaulted over a stairwell before finding refuge in the cellar. The Gooch boys tried to break down the cellar door until they heard on a radio scanner that police were on their way. They fled seconds before the cops arrived. ‘They were trying to kill me,’ the

The following day a gang of them attacked Delroy Brown in the street, clubbing him over the head with a machete. Brown fled into the Big Western pub, with blood pouring from his head and the Gooch in hot pursuit. ‘Call the police!’ he yelled as he tried to get upstairs to the pub’s living quarters. He managed to snatch one knife as it was thrust at him and vaulted over a stairwell before finding refuge in the cellar. The Gooch boys tried to break down the cellar door until they heard on a radio scanner that police were on their way. They fled seconds before the cops arrived. ‘They were trying to kill me,’ the