Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (26 page)

Meanwhile Carrick and Fat McLeod had spotted the ASC bus, which was in the middle of a long line of Aberdeen scarfers buses. I saw them jump onto the bus, which was only about a quarter full. I expected the ASC who were on board to attack Davie and James but they bottled it. All that our two guys could do was to tell them to ‘get your fucking mob down here sharpish’.

By the time the main body of the ASC arrived the cops had worked out something was amiss and had flooded the area around the coach park. But in the dark, with thousands of fans milling around, it was chaos. The filth couldn’t get a handle on what was going on, especially as we were in small groups, making detection even more difficult. We seized our opportunity and attacked Aberdeen. Fights went off everywhere. I remember steaming into a group of the cunts and while some of them stood and fought others shat it and ran like fuck. It was so dark that some of our boys, perhaps still unfamiliar with their new mates, fought each other.

As the skirmishing continued some of us mobbed up again and ran towards their bus. But when we got closer we could see that the Old Bill were in control and had lined up the Aberdeen boys against a wall. Those Sheep were a sorry sight. Some had black eyes, others looked dazed; many were bleeding. We didn’t get away scot free because two of the ‘Hibs’ SNF had been arrested and were being held in a police van. But one of the boys made a break for freedom and I will never forget the sight of him being pursued by a burly cop while handcuffed. It was hilarious, like something out of a Keystone Cops movie.

With the Old Bill now well on top, Carrick and I and a contingent of the Hibs boys hid out in Factor’s Park until the heat died down. While we were hiding one of the top FI officers was shouting: ‘McLeod, McLeod, we know it’s you. I will get you for this.’ We were pissing ourselves and I was surprised that the cops didn’t hear us laughing. But they didn’t and after hiding out for an hour we managed to make good our escape.

*

We were innovators in the Scottish National Firm. There is no doubt about that. We would try anything and everything, going boldly where no Scottish mob had gone before. One of our most audacious forays came in January 1998 (it could have been 1997), when we took fifty-five boys down to fight Middlesbrough, who were playing Manchester City at Maine Road in the FA Cup. It would be the first time that a mob from outside England had targeted an English club game. We tied it in with a day out in Blackpool. The boys were always keen on a good piss-up at the seaside and that made the whole trip a much bigger draw.

The coach left from Pitz five-a-side soccer centre in the Townhead area of Glasgow, where twenty-five ICF were joined by the cream of Edinburgh’s hooligans, including Fat McLeod and Bobby T. We now felt comfortable with the whole concept of the SNF. After the trips to Pittodrie and Tynecastle a real camaraderie had developed; there was trust and mutual respect. When I looked around the bus at some of the faces on board I knew we would be a match for anyone. These guys would back down for no cunt.

Gallons of beer were drunk on the road south, and those who had it were sniffing coke as if it was going out of fashion. But you can never have too much of a good thing and when we got to Manchester – where we parked outside the famous, but now closed, Hacienda nightclub – it was straight to the nearest pub for another session. After half an hour Boro’s spotter – a big, baldy, formidable-looking guy – walked in to do a headcount. Bizarrely, he was accompanied by two attractive women. The moment he left plans were made to have it with the Frontline after the game. We were genuinely excited. Boro were one of the most respected firms in England, with a reputation for always fronting up. If their spotter was anything to go by we would need every single boy to be at the top of his game.

We stayed in the pub for another hour, by which time there were five minutes to go in the cup tie. We decided to go looking for the Frontline, rather than have them come to us. It would give us the element of surprise and ensure that the Old Bill didn’t rumble us. We split up into small groups and made our way up Oxford Road in the direction of Maine Road. After ten minutes we mobbed up and to avoid detection we walked at a fair rate of knots. We were passing groups of City scarfers coming back from the game and when we got to the edge of the Moss Side district there were
thousands of them milling around a road junction adjacent to a park. But where were Boro?

Bang! There they were, in the middle of a police crocodile. We thought, ‘It’s show time,’ while for some strange reason someone started to chant ‘Scotland, Scotland’. That lit the touch paper and the two mobs charged. I saw one of their main boys trying to slow them down, and then Bobby T decking him with a punch that would have done George Foreman proud. But, as we later discovered, he wasn’t a lad; he was an undercover cop!

By this time the two firms had collided with a ferocity and momentum that put me in mind of one of those battle scenes from
Braveheart
. There were individual skirmishes all over the street and from the looks on the Frontline’s faces I could tell that they were shocked by our ferocity. As the fight went on I tried to drop kick my immediate opponent, who immediately backed off. It was the same story with the other SNF; they were getting the better of the exchanges and pushing the Frontline back.

Time froze. It always does when it goes off. It seemed like five minutes before the cops arrived but in reality it was probably less than a minute. They penned in the Frontline, who rather meekly accepted it, which surprised me after all I had heard about them. Then the cops turned their attention to us. They drew their batons and charged, trying to push us back up the street and away from Boro. Fuck that. We were taking that treatment from no cunt so we regrouped and charged the baton-wielding bullies. I fronted up to one of them, a massive plod, doing my best to goad him into lashing out. ‘Come on then, let’s have it.’ But he didn’t respond. Nor did I hit him because I knew that would mean certain jail time.

The police weren’t interested in making arrests. Their plan was to split us up into smaller and smaller groups and disperse us. Having said that, however, one SNF boy did get picked up for hitting a cop with a lump of wood while another got lifted for affray. Several baton charges later they had managed to push half-a-mile up the road, at which point the cop I had been having verbals with started trying to clip my heels. ‘Fuck you, you big English bastard,’ I sneered. That was the proverbial red rag to a bull and he lunged at me, baton flailing. He had lost the plot and his dispersal tactic was a distant memory. He wanted Scottish meat, which to his way of thinking meant arresting me with a couple of baton blows thrown in for good measure.

Fuelled by coke, lager and sheer adrenalin I legged it, pursued by an indignant, six-foot-plus boy in blue. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and I could also hear him trying to swipe my feet away with his size eleven standard-issue police boots. I had another problem; in my pocket there was a quarter (seven grams) of Colombia’s finest. ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘I don’t want to get caught with this on me.’ So as I was sprinting I threw the gear into a bus shelter.

He didn’t see me dumping the coke but he was still fucking raging and determined to put me in handcuffs. ‘You’re for it if I catch you, you little Scotch cunt,’ he assured me. I was zigzagging like fuck trying to prevent him from tripping me up but I was now exhausted.
²⁴
As we passed a side street I saw my chance and made a sharp left, into ground owned by Manchester University. My heart sank. It was probably a dead end, which would mean arrest and a few digs from my pursuer’s baton.

Thud! What the fuck was that. I turned round and saw that the big bastard had run straight into a bollard and taken a tumble. He was writhing around in agony, clutching his knee. I didn’t miss him and hit the wall. ‘Aye, ya stupid big English prick. That’ll teach you,’ I gloated. By this time a few of the boys had arrived to help me evade arrest. But they weren’t needed now and we all had a right good laugh at the plod with the gammy knee.

Back at the bus we were buzzing. Everyone had a tale to tell about Boro, which was one of the best episodes of FV we had ever been involved in. But my elation was short-lived. I was minus three-hundred-quid’s-worth of Charlie. ‘Fuck it. I am going to get a taxi and find it,’ I told the others. I hailed a cab and it took me back to the bus stop. And there it was, shining like a diamond. My gear. When I got back to the pub I was ecstatic. Getting the better of the Frontline, seeing the cop injure himself, recovering the coke. What a day.

But it wasn’t over yet. We still had Blackpool to look forward to, where half of us went to one nightclub and the other half to another one. The group I was with didn’t have any hassle but when we came out a couple of hours later it was mayhem. There was a pitched battle going on between the other half of the SNF and a group of bouncers. It started when a bouncer got wide with one of our boys in the toilets. The bouncer saw him snorting coke and tried to eject him. Little did he know who he was fucking with and it all kicked off outside. We immediately steamed in and
the reunited SNF chased the bouncers back inside the club, just as the Blackpool Old Bill came flooding onto the scene.

The cops escorted our bus out of Blackpool and from there we were passed from force to force for the four-hour journey back up the road to Glasgow. It made a nice story for the local television news the next day and we also made the front page of the local papers, ‘Marauding Scots hooligans,’ etc. We had made our mark.

There is a postscript. The two boys who were arrested faced up to two years inside for assault and affray. At their trial the jury couldn’t make up its mind and a mistrial was recorded. At their retrial they were found not guilty after only forty-five minutes of jury deliberation.

Given its name the Scottish National Firm was never going to be satisfied with matters domestic. We needed to branch out, to perform on a bigger stage, and there is no bigger stage than international football. In May 1997 Scotland travelled to Gothenburg to play Sweden in a friendly. We were determined to make sure it was anything but a friendly and we hoped to track down either Stockholm’s notorious Black Army, or Gothenburg’s own thugs, and take our first scalps on foreign soil.

I had better explain my attitude to the Scottish national team and to the bank clerks, accountants and other ne’er-do-wells who follow them, known to one and all as the Tartan Army. I have never had more than a passing interest in the national side, perhaps because it has never been that good in my time as a football fan. The SFA doesn’t help either: to me the blazers, egged on no doubt by high-profile Celtic supporters within the Scottish establishment, have always treated Rangers and Rangers players like shit. I would support Scotland in a game against England but in major finals I would want all four home nations to do well. (I exclude the Republic of Ireland, a foreign country, from that list.)

Then there is the Tartan Army, a cultural phenomenon about as welcome as acid rain. With their kilts, glengarries and ‘See You Jimmy’ wigs, and the repertoire of songs from the
Sound of Music
, they are a permanent embarrassment to Scotland. Nor are they the friendly, cosmopolitan bunch of media myth. I have seen them getting pished and exposing themselves to women and children. There was an infamous episode in the Algarve in the early 1990s (heavily reported in the Scottish media) in which hordes of them ran naked through the streets of Albufeira shouting abuse at locals and urinating in public, while other Tartan Army ‘foot-soldiers’ played
football naked in a park. Strangely enough, the Portuguese no longer see them as friendly ambassadors for Scotland.

The Tartan Army’s ‘anyone but England’ philosophy is also objectionable. Why do they get away with abusing our English cousins? The media would come down on Rangers fans like a ton of bricks if we spouted similar anthems of hate about the Republic of Ireland. But for some reason anti-English racism is acceptable in modern Scotland.

When twenty-five of us got to Glasgow airport for our flight to Gothenburg the tension in the terminal building was palpable. The Tartan Army could tell by the way we were dressed and by our aggressive demeanour that we weren’t foot-soldiers. They knew right away who we were and what we were. We felt like gatecrashers at a wedding and they did their best to ignore us in the airport and on the plane. We didn’t give a fuck about getting the cold shoulder, especially after a few beers and some of Colombia’s finest.

In Gothenburg we stayed at a floating hotel on the river, called The Ship, and once we had unpacked we went out on the town. The women were lovely, right at the top of the gene pool, and it may sound corny but they really did remind me of the blonde one from ABBA. The only problem was that they were obsessed by the Tartan Army and what they had on underneath their kilts. We were in a nightclub full of TA and the women swarmed around them like flies on shite. We didn’t get a look in, although we still had a good night fuelled by coke, ecstasy and beer.

Despite the presence of the Tartan Army babe magnets one of our boys, Kinky Keek, did manage to pull. He got off with a highly attractive local woman, or at least she seemed to be a highly attractive woman. Some of the boys noticed that Keek’s bird had a very pronounced Adam’s apple and a rather square jaw. He got the third degree when he came back to the hotel the next morning with a big smile on his face.

‘How did you get on last night,’ we asked.

‘Aye fine. I done her up the arse,’ Keek replied.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t a ‘him’?’

But he wouldn’t admit it, telling us only, ‘That she made me a cracking breakfast.’

Keek had pulled a transsexual but it didn’t seem to worry him and I have heard that he keeps in touch with him/her by e-mail. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.