Hackman - Young guns : inside the violent world of Britains street gangs

YOUNG GUNS

Inside the Violent World of Britains Street Gangs

Steve Hackman

Milo Books Ltd

Published in November 2010 by Milo Books

Copyright 2010 Steve Hackman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Edited by Rebecca Macklin

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Contents

ON 22 AUGUST 2007, an eleven-year-old boy named Rhys Jones was shot in the neck as he walked home from football training on the Croxteth Park estate in Liverpool. He died the innocent victim of a feud he neither knew nor cared about. It was a tragedy that thrust an age-old issue back into the public consciousness: gangs.

Gangs take various forms, and academics argue over definitions. Some are territorial; others are focussed on acquisitive crime. For most purposes, a gang is simply a criminal collective working towards a common goal. They are not a modern phenomenon in Britain. Newspaper articles from the mid-1800s spoke of rising rates of mob violence and the corrosive impact of youth crime in our bigger cities: Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Criminal subcultures are neither new, nor are they necessarily more violent than they have been in the past. They are a constant, immovable threat.

Today, however, Britain is enduring a gang crisis. One in ten young people, between the ages of ten and nineteen, class themselves as belonging to a gang. Gang members are responsible for just under a third of criminal offences and represent around fifteen per cent of known offenders. Although the situation in the UK is nowhere near as severe as it has become in the United States, it is widely accepted that gang membership has seen a substantial, and continuing, rise.

So what is my connection to gangland Britain? What makes me suited to writing a book about such a difficult area? My knowledge of this little-explored area stems from a year of immersion in the British prison system. I have worked, eaten and slept within the company of convicted gang members. I have spent time with every sector of criminal society, from low-level drug runners to national crime bosses. I have studied gangs from within their midst in one of the toughest jails in the UK.

In August 2008, I was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for selling ecstasy whilst at university. It was a crime of immense naivety: I was attempting to supplement my student loan by dabbling in things I knew little about. The second I stepped through the prison gates, I realised that I was in for a rough time. HMP Leeds, commonly known as Armley Gaol, is one of the longest-running operational jails in the country. It is a large, stone building covered from top to bottom in barbed wire. It is icy cold during the winter and swelteringly hot during the summer. The walls of the cells are caked in racist graffiti and a thick, brown phlegm. Rapists, paedophiles, torturers and murderers are indistinguishable from the general population.

Prison inmates are fiercely territorial. The first question a new arrival is asked is Where are you from? closely followed by What estate? Many of the offenders have their postcodes tattooed on their arms and some have maps of their hometowns etched across the back of their necks. They segregate themselves in terms of the town or city that they were living in up until their arrest, slotting into one of a number of different firms geographically determined gangs. Acceptance into a firm is the key to survival: prison is a hostile environment and membership of a gang can mean the difference between an easy sentence and an unbearably hard one.

I was intrigued by the territorialism of the other inmates on the wing. There were inter-county rivalries: South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire were in a state of constant competition to prove whose area was the hardest. Then there were individual cities that hated each other, and there were even different parts of the same city that were at each others throats. I began to wonder if the same area-based conflict existed outside of the prison. I started asking questions, quizzing the other prisoners on the exact nature of their rivalries and why they had started. The majority of the inmates that I encountered had been in a gang at some point in their lives. So I conducted interviews, carried out research and attempted to gain an insight into the daily workings of a modern British street gang, all within the prison system.

Young Guns tells, often in the words of gang members themselves, the reality of life for many of what are a new breed of young gang member: youths who, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, have dragged the problem in the UK to new depths. Almost all of those I interviewed spoke on the strictest conditions of anonymity, which is why I have changed the names of interviewees throughout. Most are still involved in the game, despite protestations that they have given it up. What this book is not is an attempt at a comprehensive history of the problem, nor is it an exploration of the various solutions that have been tried or mooted. Rather it is a series of personal accounts, and telling snapshots, direct from the streets.

While gang culture has been documented in places like Croxteth and Norris Green, there are regions where it has received almost no media attention. So I have written this book as a guide to the various firms that exist throughout the UK some in places where you would expect to find them, others in more obscure locations. Partway through my sentence, I was transferred to HMP Wolds, bringing me into contact with prisoners from another diverse range of towns and cities. Gangs are rife within the worst estates of every town in Britain and even in the most surprising places.

The true extent of the problem is far greater than the authorities currently admit. From feral groups of territorial youths to major drug-dealing cartels, gangland violence is a threat to the fabric of our society. For those at the more affluent end of the social scale, the UK is a gang-free paradise, where fear is an abstract concept. For those within the bottom one per cent, it is a different story altogether.

TO THE NATIONAL newspapers, he was The General. To fellow inmates in HMP Wolds, Nigel Ramsey was Rocky. He was a popular prisoner with a lot of friends; he had a kindly demeanour and, when I arrived, did his best to make me feel welcome on the wing. You can imagine my shock when I heard that he had ordered a gangland execution. I knew that Rocky was involved in gangs in his native Sheffield but I had assumed that he stuck to drug dealing and robberies. I had no idea that he was responsible for the shooting of a seventeen-year-old boy. He had called an accomplice on a mobile phone and arranged for a rival gang member to be shot in the back in broad daylight. It was the talk of the jail.

Rocky was the leader of the S3 gang, named after the postcode for Burngreave and Pitsmoor. They are a largely black and mixed race firm who sell crack and commit armed robberies. Their main rivals, S4, live a matter of minutes away. Its some dumb shit really, another inmate from Sheffield told me. Some of Pitsmoor is in S3 and some of its in S4, so it isnt even two rival areas, its parts of the same area. The conflict is thought to have stemmed from a row over drug money. It has since escalated and claimed the lives of several members on both sides.