In a pub in the heart of Handsworth, another notoriously violent area of the city, I tracked down a nineteen-year-old Burger Bar boy who goes by the street name of TC.
‘The Johnson Crew were our rivals from day one and that rivalry has just escalated and escalated. As crack cocaine came on the scene the firearms became more and more openly available so the levels of violence increased.
‘In the drugs trade ten out of ten people either carry guns or have access to them. If I’m rolling with a Rolex I am up in the money. That means I have to carry a gun because I have to watch my back. My gun brings fear to people. So now everybody has to have a gun. Since I got my gun nobody fucks with me. Fucking with me is like fucking with death because I will put you down for good.
‘It’s a way of life now. Once you get into the gang culture it is very difficult to get out. Your gang is your family and people are willing to die for their families. You are pressurised to continue doing what you are doing and your own pals will shoot you down if you cross them. It’s not something you can just walk away from. You become a liability. If you’re not in then you’re an outsider like anybody else.
‘We grow up this way, we don’t know anything else. How can you teach people not to be violent if they see people getting stabbed, people getting shot every night? Everyone I know has been to a funeral of someone they knew. I know death in a way even my parents can’t understand.’
The situation is also repeated in parts of Manchester where one of the fastest-selling T-shirts at the main city flea market features a picture of a chalk outline drawn round a dead body accompanied by the words: ‘Welcome To Longsight’.
Just three miles south of the city centre, Longsight, with Moss Side and Hulme, forms a ‘gang triangle’ where violent death has become an all-too-familiar occurrence. In July 2002 a dozen members of one of the most notorious gangs – the Pitt Bull Crew – were jailed for their part in a turf war that saw fourteen young men shot in the space of three years.
The Pitt Bull Crew was founded by Thomas Pitt soon after he was released from a young offenders’ institution after a drugs conviction. He dedicated the enterprise to the memory of his brother, Ray, who had been shot dead outside a nightclub on New Year’s Eve in 1995. Ray Pitt had been the leader of the Doddington gang, which had made millions by selling drugs in the city, and Thomas and another Pitt brother, Ken, had been members. The scale of their operation became clear when police filmed a dealer making 219 sales in a few days.
Thomas decided to pick up where his brother had left off. He recruited boys as young as fourteen to sell drugs on his behalf. Using mountain bikes, they could cruise around the city in pairs with at least one carrying a gun for protection. Those who impressed Pitt were rewarded with gems, gold chains and bullet-proof jackets. The gang used police scanners to evade capture and always wore gloves so police would not be able to get fingerprints.
The gang had access to an array of guns, but Pitt was the only one allowed to use the deadliest weapon in the arsenal, a MAC 10 submachine-gun fitted with a silencer and capable of firing up to 300 rounds per minute.
They regularly sold more than three thousand pounds’ worth of drugs each day. The money being made soon attracted interest from all quarters. Members of the rival Longsight crew tried to install their own dealers in the same patches, so Pitt declared war on his rivals.
The two gangs fought at least seventeen gun battles, including drive-by shootings, which left four people injured and two dead. In September 2000, Pitt tried to shoot two rival dealers with his MAC 10 but it jammed. By the time he had cleared the blockage the two men had gone, so he searched for another victim. Within minutes he had found Marcus Greenidge, twenty-one, a drugs courier with the Longsight Crew. Greenidge had a loaded automatic pistol in his pocket but had no time to reach it. Later Pitt boasted, ‘I’ve just whacked one of the Longsight Crew boys. I struck with five bullets out of seven.’
Pitt was equally ruthless with members of his own gang. On the night Greenidge was shot, Pitt asked his friend and fellow crew member, Thomas Ramsay, sixteen, to move a gun that was hidden in a flat in Longsight. Ramsay forgot, and a few days later the police obtained a search warrant to the flat and found the gun. Forensic tests linked it to Pitt, who was furious. A few days later Ramsay was dead. Pitt was charged with the killing but acquitted.
Less than a week later Pitt himself was shot at by a hooded man on a mountain bike. He survived, but was arrested soon afterwards when one of his fellow gang members, alarmed by Pitt’s increasingly violent behaviour, agreed to give evidence against him.
While Pitt was awaiting trial the violence being carried out by his gang continued. Taxi driver Mohammed Ahmed, who had been working as a courier for the Longsight Crew, was ambushed while taking Lee Fielding, another Longsight Crew member, to a meeting. Two Pitt Bull Crew members appeared on the scene and shot Ahmed four times in the head as he sat in his cab.
The killers then bundled Fielding into a stolen car and took him to a disused railway line in Longsight. There, he was shot with a sawn-off shotgun, doused with petrol and set alight. Amazingly, he survived, although he suffered horrific burns.
‘Twenty or thirty years ago, a gun was just a tool of the trade,’ says retired villain Joey Pyle. ‘You carried it while you were working, used it only if you were brave enough and felt you had no option, then stashed it when you were finished. These days, the kids stick them down the backs of their trousers just to go out clubbing. The first sign of trouble, they whip it out. And they shoot first because they know that, more than likely, the other guy is going to be tooled up as well.’
It didn’t take long for me to discover just how easy it is to buy guns in today’s black market.
Chris, an affable thirty-something south Londoner recently retired from a career in armed robbery, comes bounding back from the bar with a cheeky grin on his face. ‘It’ll be about twenty minutes,’ he says. ‘Less time than it takes to deliver a pizza and plenty of time for another drink. Same again?’
We are sitting behind a busy pool table in the dingy annexe of a pub on the outskirts of Catford, which, according to Chris, is one of the easiest places in the capital to buy an illegal gun. After spending a few minutes obtaining the phone number of a local underworld armourer from one of the pub’s regulars and placing an order, the only thing left to do is wait. It all seems almost too easy.
‘I’m known in here so there’s no problem with people trusting me. That’s why it’s going to be so quick. If you came here on your own as a new face, you would be under suspicion, but that just means it would take a bit more time and a few more calls. But at the end of the day, there are people out there who would much rather have the money than the gun, so they’re always willing to sell. To get in touch, all you have to do is get friendly with the barmaid or a bouncer and, sooner or later, you’ll be put in touch with someone,’ he says cheerfully.
Although he officially retired a few months after his last spell of imprisonment, Chris is still fully tuned into the growing gun culture. ‘Pricewise, you’re looking at around two hundred and fifty quid for a small, newish .22 revolver. You can get .32 automatics for a lot less, around a hundred pounds, but it’s almost impossible to get ammunition for them so they’re just for show. The older generation like .38 revolvers, good old-fashioned guns. The younger boys all want 9mm automatics and Uzi submachine-guns but they tend to end up with .22 revolvers because there are so many of them around. There are also some .22 automatics but because they’re usually converted from blank-firing guns, they tend to jam after each shot. You’re better off with a revolver.
‘The last gun I had was a Glock,’ says Chris. ‘It was brand new and cost me nine hundred pounds. Beautiful gun. I also had a .22 Derringer, which was just for my personal protection as it was easy to hide. It’s only one shot, but sometimes, up close, that’s all you need.’
According to Chris, guns are easy; the hard part is getting hold of the ammunition. Tricks for dealing with the general shortage include wrapping clingfilm around smaller rounds to make them fit into larger calibre guns; converting blanks by adding special metal caps or, most commonly, ‘reloading’ used cartridges with new gunpowder and bullets.
It’s just over half an hour before Matt, the gun-dealer, arrives. He nods at Chris and the three of us make our way to the gents’ toilets, squeezing into the cubicle furthest from the door. Anyone looking on would probably think we were buying drugs not guns, but this is how the majority of weapons are bought and sold – in the dark corners and lavatories of dodgy pubs.
With Chris acting as lookout, Matt swiftly pulls a plastic bag from the folds of his jacket, delves inside and shoves a black lump of metal into my palm. The first thing that strikes me about the gun is that it’s much heavier than it looks, so heavy, in fact, that it’s almost a struggle to hold it with one hand. It’s as cold as ice and covered in a thin layer of oil, which stains my hands as I examine it, fascinated.
‘It’s a Browning Hi Power 9mm,’ says Matt. ‘Argentinian, someone’s souvenir from the Falklands, but it’s in good nick. Been well looked after. Guns last for ever, it’s only the ammo that gets fucked up. The clip’s half full of good stuff, but I can get you more if you need it.’
I’m still turning the gun in my hand, too dumbstruck to speak. Then I start to panic: I’m a writer investigating a story. The last thing I want to do is actually buy the gun but I realise that I’m getting my fingerprints all over it – and, besides, Matt seems to think the sale is a foregone conclusion.
I hand back the weapon and try to think of a way to avoid upsetting him, especially as he now has a loaded gun. Thankfully, Chris is there to smooth things over.
‘What’s the history?’
‘It’s been fired,’ says Matt, scratching his nose. ‘Dunno if anyone got hurt.’
‘I need something clean,’ says Chris, without missing a beat. ‘Sorry, mate, have to pass on this one. Let me buy you a drink for your trouble.’
These days, a ‘clean’ gun generally means a reactivated one. Top of the gangster shopping list is the Brocock ME38 Magnum air pistol, which fires pellets using a cartridge of compressed air. Manufactured to high standards, gangsters quickly discovered that the air cartridge could be drilled out and used as a sleeve to hold a live .22 round. The simple procedure turned an innocuous air weapon into a lethal firearm.
Within months of the discovery, converted Brococks became the choice of a new generation of wannabe gunmen. There were dozens of murders, shootings linked to the gun, including two separate high-profile incidents where Asher D of the south London music collective, the So Solid Crew, was caught in possession of a converted Brocock.
Banned from general sale in the early part of 2003, the guns are still widely available. In the course of my investigation for this book I was offered three and actually managed to buy one legally, long after the supposed ban had come into place.
After that, it was simply a matter of paying a visit to an underworld source to find out how to make the conversion and obtain some live ammunition. Hundreds of back-bedroom gun factories have been set up in homes across the country and detectives everywhere admit guns are being put on the streets more quickly than they can take them off.
It didn’t stop there. I also managed to get hold of a brand new Glock 17, which had been converted to fire steel ball-bearings with all the force of a bullet, numerous canisters of CS gas, and a riot pistol.
Then there was the stun gun. These weapons, which incapacitate victims for up to fifteen minutes, are officially classed as firearms, but have become increasingly popular with muggers and robbers as they are highly effective but cause no permanent damage.
Stun guns are widely available on the Internet. I placed an order with a French company, and within a few days received a 200,000-volt stun gun through the post, even though they are prohibited in the UK. The stun gun I received is four times more powerful than the Taser models being used by British police forces.
There are now as many as thirty thousand gang members across England and Wales and the numbers are rising rapidly. The number of gang members aged under sixteen doubled in 2003, and nearly half of all gang murders committed with firearms now involve victims under the age of eighteen.
For many, it is the rise of these younger gangs that forms the most worrying aspect of modern organised crime. Youth gangs have always existed and, to some degree, have always been associated with violence, but as little as ten years ago, they were still considered a phase that teenagers went through.
Today, however, those in youth gangs find themselves on the edge of organised crime proper. They have the opportunity to earn vast sums of money through crime and drug-dealing. They can look to older or former members of the gang and see the success and material wealth they have gained and set themselves a goal for achieving the same. Rather than a phase, gang membership now is the first step on the criminal career ladder.
Steve Shropshire, an expert on gangs and youth culture told me: ‘Young people are being drawn into the gangs and crews in ever-increasing numbers and the average age of new members is falling dramatically. The gang culture is now inextricably linked with gun violence.’
2002 saw a record 35 per cent jump in gun crimes. During that year there were almost ten thousand incidents involving firearms recorded in England and Wales and, although the largest increases were in metropolitan areas, the figures showed use of handguns was also growing in rural communities.
Handgun crime has soared past levels last seen before the Dunblane massacre of 1996 and the ban on ownership of handguns introduced the year after Thomas Hamilton, an amateur-shooting enthusiast, shot dead sixteen schoolchildren, their teacher and himself in the Perthshire town. It was hoped the measure would reduce the number of handguns available to criminals. Now handgun crime is at its highest since 1993.