Medidas de la Inteligencia

THE ‘SALFORD LADS’, like ‘Quality Street Gang’

twenty years earlier, was a loose description, encompassing a broad alliance of young criminals from Ordsall, Lower Broughton, Higher Broughton, Pendleton, Weaste, Seedley, Charlestown, Trinity and other benighted areas of the inner-city. These shock troops could be called out by the main heads – numbering less than half a dozen – when the occasion demanded. A few of them had been part of the ‘proper rum outfit’ that had coalesced in inner Salford ten years earlier. Some had since gone their own way, others had fallen by the wayside, but those that remained were older, cannier and more hardened.

They announced themselves, dramatically, at the Hacienda, the flagship of Manchester’s pop-cultural renaissance. Having closed the club in January 1991, the Hacienda owners began moves to re-open after the death of White Tony Johnson a month later. This time they had a new strategy: they were going to try to reach an accommodation with the gangs. ‘The Hacienda has held secret negotiations with gang leaders to prevent trouble when it re-opens,’ reported the Manchester Evening News.

‘They have been offered complimentary tickets as peace offerings.’ The club’s bosses also met the police to discuss security improvements, though they received little help. Staff were to have radio pagers

so they could be warned if certain faces were about, but when the owners pleaded for uniformed officers to stand on their doors, in the same way they policed soccer matches, the police chief chairing the meeting flatly refused. He did say that ‘city centre task groups’ would do the rounds at night to monitor known troublemakers.

One woman had already complained to the Press that she had been refused entry by police and doormen to a club in Hanging Ditch, in the city centre, because of her boyfriend. ‘They also said it was because I was from Salford,’ said Louise Lydiate. ‘There were loads of police around and two uniformed officers on the door.’⁴⁴ The story didn’t identify her boyfriend – Paul Massey.

The Hacienda re-opened in May 1991 with an event dubbed ‘The Healing’. It had airport-style metal detectors at the door and enhanced video surveillance. People known to cause problems, management told the media, would not get in. The Sunday Mirror, however, reported:

A drug gang gatecrashed the grand reopening of Britain’s trendiest club, despite tough security.

Thirty thugs barged past bouncers at Manchester’s Hacienda nightspot, closed three months ago after violence between warring gangs.

Sixty police officers backed by a riot vehicle were called to throw out the smartly dressed ‘Cheetham Hill Mob’ after they refused management pleas to leave.

The gangs were not going to accept any control at

‘their’ club, but it would be Salford, not Cheetham Hill, who seized the moment. ‘As Cheetham Hill faded as a force in the town, police clampdown and internal whacking doing their bit to silence them, Salford rose again. Like a phoenix. Salford rose like a great big fucking bird, from the flames of rubbish burning on the Ordsall estate, a great big fucking bird with wild, staring eyes and a beak that would peck your fucking head off if you dared to return its stare,’ wrote Hacienda co-owner Tony Wilson. ‘The designer bars followed the clubs, the cool shops followed the designer bars, and the heads and young fuckers who sheltered under the head’s protection followed all.’⁴⁵

They waited a few weeks for the media hype and police presence to subside, then moved in. A large firm arrived at the Hacienda one night, some armed.

The entrance was closed, but one of the club staff opened a side door to let them in. In the ensuing chaos, six of the doormen were stabbed. One was clubbed across the head with a bottle, then jibbed four times in the thigh. Another was saved from serious injury when a rib blocked a knife blade.

Police arrived quickly and sealed the building, while a force helicopter with spotlight hovered overhead.

Ten customers, aged between eighteen and twenty-five, were questioned the next day.

Having closed down their business once, the Hacienda owners were not prepared to do so again.

They beefed up security even further, with video cameras monitored on four screens near the entrance, two rottweiler dogs on standby and plans to issue doormen with chain-mail vests. Customers were told to hand in weapons on their way in – and were given them back on the way out. Perhaps

sensitive to the club’s pivotal role in the city’s nightlife, and its national image, the police withdrew an application to have its licence withdrawn. ‘This is a marvellous moment for the Hacienda,’ said Tony Wilson. ‘The club is now playing a full role in the cultural life of the city.’ Striking a deal with the gangsters was not mentioned but that is what they had done. ‘The management employed a door firm controlled from Salford, some of whose employees were alleged to have taken part in the violence, and charged, though cleared, with matters relating to the killing of Tony Johnson, Wilson reasoning that the only effective security firm was one unafraid of anybody or anything,’ wrote DJ Pete Haslam. ‘The doormen maintained a hard reputation but believed in giving leeway to certain characters in order to keep the peace; there were one or two untouchables. The bad vibes hung around.’⁴⁶

Three men were charged with affray for the attack on the Hacienda bouncers. They were all from Ordsall.

***

Ordsall, pronounced odd-sel by locals, sits like a lost island by the basin of the Manchester Ship Canal, in an area once known as the Barbary Coast. A triangle bounded by Trafford Road, Regent Road and Orsdall Lane, it is a former dockside community that has seen its traditional employment disappear.

The ships, cranes and dockers departed, eventually to be replaced by the waterside flats, businesses and suits of the modern Salford Quays development:

close in geography but a world away in outlook.

Ordsall too was re-developed, its semi-derelict

maisonettes and council blocks replaced by single-storey bungalows with gardens and tall fences, and millions of pounds more would be spent in the nineties to upgrade the housing stock and amenities. Compared to the wastelands of east Manchester, it was neat, tidy and unforbidding, but its social and economic problems were acute. It remained an introverted community held together by strong family ties, similar in size to Alexandra Park and equally scourged by unemployment. The 1991 census showed that a third of young people were jobless and less than a quarter of residents owned their own homes. The north of the estate was seen as particularly problematical, with those living in the south end sometimes referred to as ‘lemons’

because they were ‘softer’.

Ordsall and neighbouring Pendleton, with its intimidating high-rise blocks, were heartlands of the Salford Lads, their numbers bolstered in particular by a Higher Broughton mob run by a family of brothers of Irish descent. Locally they were known not as the Salford Lads but as ‘the Firm’ or ‘the Young Firm’. Armed robbery, burglary, ram-raiding and car and computer theft were specialities of their acolytes. Their grip was first evinced on the Ordsall estate around 1989 in a series of confrontations with Salford Police. The area had been on a slow burn for most of the decade, with street disturbances flaring sporadically. Now they grew fiercer. In November 1989, a police van was lured to a block of flats in Ordsall by a bogus call and then wrecked by a firebomb. A gang attacked another bobby on the estate after he stopped a joyrider. The Firm saw the

‘dibble’ as their natural enemy; a few even began to dabble with the bash-the-rich anti-capitalist group

Class War.

January 1990 saw a major stand-off after a shooting at a club. Paul Massey’s cousin held a surprise thirtieth birthday party for him at Valentine’s in Higher Broughton, and among the guests was Paul Doyle’s brother Bradley, who was standing at the bar when a masked man strode up and shot him in the leg. He staggered out to a cab firm where his fifty-four-year-old mother Lillian worked. ‘He was very pale and his tracksuit bottoms were covered in blood,’ she recalled. ‘He said, “Don’t worry, I’m okay.” He was in shock and I wanted him to go straight to hospital but he kept saying he was fine and wanted to go home.’⁴⁷ Doyle took a cab home;

he was later treated in hospital for a flesh wound.

Meanwhile scores of officers had arrived outside Valentine’s, some with guns and dogs, and sealed off surrounding roads. A helicopter hovered overhead. Instead of leaving, the customers barricaded themselves inside and there was a long, tense face-off until eventually they trailed out. Massey later denied all knowledge of the incident. ‘I came in an hour later,’ he said. ‘Everyone was dancing, there were six hundred people enjoying themselves.

Someone said that someone had got shot but I looked around and everything just looked like a normal night, so I thought it was a wind-up. People were there, like myself, for a party and the police tried to spoil it.’

Armed police descended on the estate the following week in a hunt for the gunman. In response, a crowd of about 100 protesters besieged the Crescent police station in Salford. Some wore balaclavas and paraded pit bull terriers. One, in a full-face mask, emerged from the crowd and walked

along the line of police officers, pointing his finger as though it was a gun. A couple of weeks later, Paul Massey was charged with intimidating the officers.

The charges were later dropped. In June 1990, there were further serious disturbances in Pendleton after police arrested youths who crashed in a stolen car.

Missiles were thrown at the police and fire brigade and twelve people arrested.

The distancing between Salford Police and sections of the Ordsall community gave the Firm an opportunity to put themselves forward as alternative authority figures, meting out their own summary justice to transgressors and spraying the names of alleged ‘grasses’ on the estate in prominent positions. They also began to have a disturbing effect on grassroots democracy. Both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives announced they would not contest certain Salford wards in the local government elections of May 1990. ‘We are not standing in Ordsall, Blackfriars or Pendleton,’ said a LibDem spokesman. ‘It is an indictment on these areas but we regard them as unsafe. We would not put any of our candidates and party workers at risk by sending them into high-rise flats in areas which are known to be a target for criminals.’ The Tories could not find anyone at all willing to stand in Ordsall, Blackfriars or Lower Broughton.

Members of the Firm also arrived at Seedley Labour Club in an attempt to intimidate Labour MP Stan Orme. ‘A group of them were trying to organise a meeting, ostensibly about police activity in the area,’ said Salford councillor John Merry. ‘We smelt a rat fairly quickly and said the MP wasn’t prepared to attend. Then things got rather unpleasant. Myself and the other staff working for me were threatened.

They implied that we would find ourselves in severe trouble if the MP didn’t turn up. There were three or four of them. One advanced towards me in a very intimidating manner and the others pulled him off.’

The civil unrest was one indicator of how the rule of law had broken down in the area. Another was a sudden increase in firearms incidents, including the shootings of a couple of ‘old school’ hard men. Guns were much in demand for the area’s young blaggers or armed robbers, a crime that had become a Salford speciality. One batch of eight weapons was stolen from a safe at the flat of an ex-police officer and gun enthusiast who had held them legally. They would be used to kill three people and injure two others. One of the batch, a Magnum revolver, found its way into the hands of Ian Spiers, a young man who lived on the Ordsall estate. In January 1992, Spiers shot his girlfriend Donna Maloney, who was only seventeen, after a row, and then turned the gun on himself. Both died.⁴⁸

Ian Spiers’s wake saw yet another large-scale disturbance. About eighty mourners had gathered at the Brass Tally pub near Liverpool Street when a passing beat bobby saw a man outside who was suspected of burglary and tried to arrest him. The man was one of the pallbearers. Mourners poured out of the pub and in the ensuing fight several officers were hurt. A senior officer tried to defuse the situation by entering the pub to talk to the ringleaders. He was warned that there were firearms in the area, and if there was any attempt to storm the pub, they would be used. Police sealed off the street.

They returned in force four hours later and the mourners dispersed. ‘The whole family is furious,’

said the dead man’s mother, Mary. ‘One of the

pallbearers got out of the car and, the next minute, police were diving at him, and then everyone else got involved.’

It was becoming clear that law and order were breaking down among sections of the Ordsall community. There were persistent rumours that some tenants were paying protection money so they wouldn’t be burgled, something that was eventually confirmed by the city’s housing chief. Shopkeepers were also being leaned on to pay a few pounds a week to avoid being robbed or torched. That wasn’t enough; the Firm wanted more. They had the numbers and now they had the guns.

***

When a Coronation Street scriptwriter Tony Warren invented the Rovers Return, he had a thousand role models. Salford, locals say, was built on pubs, with Regent Road often described as the best pub crawl in Europe. But as economic blight bit and the city’s population fell (by eleven per cent between 1981 and 1991), the pub stock started to deteriorate and many began to close. Those that remained were vulnerable, especially in the rougher areas – which, in inner Salford, was most of it. Pubs are a cash business and licensees are isolated. Robbery, especially late at night when the customers have gone and staff are cashing up, is a constant threat, while the danger of extortion is never far away.

The first sketchy reports of an organised protection racket emerged in the Manchester Evening News in February 1990, with a story that a dozen men were trawling pubs demanding money to

‘stop trouble’. Typically a gang of young thugs would

be sent into a premises to start a fight, then a day or so later the landlord would receive a visit from one of the heads offering to prevent any further aggro, even to put bouncers on the door – for a price. Non-compliance meant the threat of violence or the destruction of the pub. It was hard, very hard, to say no.

In July 1991, the landlord of a Salford pub called the Bowling Green lost an eye in a beating. A month later, the Lowry in Pendleton, named after one of Salford’s most famous sons, closed its doors after repeated attacks by gangs. In September, Spats in Swinton closed after constant intimidation; three different teams of doormen had quit after hoods threatened their families and a bouncer who asked a youth to drink-up after closing time had a revolver pulled on him. In January 1992, four firebombs were thrown through a window of the Weaste Hotel. The Salford Arms in Chapel Street was petrol-bombed.

Twenty-five men smashed up the popular Inn of Good Hope in Eccles.

The essence of ‘protection’ was fear, and that extended to customers and witnesses as well as licensees and their staff. One rare prosecution saw three men jailed for a pub attack but only after the police had been forced to apply for arrest warrants compelling witnesses to turn up. A manager at the Langworthy Hotel was so terrified by racketeers that he even faked a robbery to pay off his tormentors.

He was found on the floor of the pub with cuts to his arms and claimed robbers had taken £1,100 from the safe. Later he confessed to stunting the theft himself; his barrister told a court that he had been beaten up twice and received threats over the telephone.

He was replaced by a new licensee, who did not have long to wait for his own initiation into the ways of Salford gangland. On a busy Sunday night, a short, stocky man entered the building with a sawn-off shotgun. ‘This chap came into the pub, first going into the vault, and then pointed the gun at one of the staff,’ said the assistant manager. ‘Then he came into the lounge, where I was sat at the bar having a drink. He put the gun in my face. I was really scared.

He was jumping up and down, wanting to know where the licensee was, then he fired a shot into the ceiling.’ The licensee was not on the premises and the gunman left. ‘Despite the pub being packed we have not had a single call from anyone with information,’ rued a detective two days later. ‘The public have got to ask themselves whether they want the bully boys to get away with acts like this or are they going to give us some help.’⁴⁹ But no-one was talking. Two arson attacks later and the pub was closed, its front door heavily bolted and steel grilles placed over the windows.

Others followed with depressing speed: the Kings Arms, closed after the landlord was threatened; the Rovers Return, razed; the Hobson’s Choice, torched;

the Sabre, burnt out; the Brass Tally, torched and its licence revoked; the Unicorn, severely damaged by fire; Poet’s Corner, destroyed by arsonists; the Pen and Wig, razed; the Butchers Arms, smashed up after the landlord appeared in a local paper discussing his improved security measures; the Grosvenor, burnt out; the Regent, forced to close by the strongarm tactics of a ‘security company’ and then burned; the Castle, torched after the landlord quit; Summerfields, burnt out; the Winston, smashed up and robbed by seven men in balaclavas.

Perhaps the worst loss was the Tallow Tub, which was damaged by fire and later bulldozed. ‘It had a unique Victorian interior, wonderful tiling, a curved bar and stained glass screens, the kind you see in old films,’ said Peter Barnes of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) pressure group. ‘If it had been in Chester, York or London, it would have been cherished, but it happened to be in Salford, so we

Perhaps the worst loss was the Tallow Tub, which was damaged by fire and later bulldozed. ‘It had a unique Victorian interior, wonderful tiling, a curved bar and stained glass screens, the kind you see in old films,’ said Peter Barnes of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) pressure group. ‘If it had been in Chester, York or London, it would have been cherished, but it happened to be in Salford, so we