Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (6 page)

The score was Sandy Chugg 1, police intelligence 0, but I still had another mountain to climb for the fight with Hibs in Dundee. I was worried. I really was. The twenty-month sentences handed down for George Square were to my way of thinking excessive and no doubt due, to some degree, to the pressure the police were exerting. The incident with Hibs was on a bigger scale and looks much more dramatic when you see it on screen. In addition I had no illusions about the attitude of the Old Bill; they would be keener than ever for me to get sent down for a long time, having lost out in Glasgow. The sensible thing would probably have been to plead guilty in the hope of a lighter sentence but when I watched the closed-circuit tapes with my lawyer we noticed right away that although I had been caught much more clearly you could only see the back of my head.

I had a big decision to make, one made even more difficult because by that stage in my life I had a mortgage to pay and two young kids to support. ‘Fuck it,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’ll go for not guilty and hope for two in a row.’ But when I got to the initial hearing I realised what a stupid mistake I had made: one of the CCS pleaded guilty and got off lightly, with a heavy fine and community service. With a full trial coming up I was facing a lengthy jail term – for mobbing and rioting – when I could have held my hands up and got the same lenient sentence as the Hibs boys. Just before the trial started, after a meeting with my lawyer, we decided to switch from not guilty to guilty. With my form I was still looking down the barrel of some serious bird but I hoped that the last-minute change of plea might persuade the sheriff to cut me some slack when it came to the length of the term.

Lucky for me I had an excellent lawyer, Kevin McCarron, who is actually a Celtic fan. He argued strongly that the sentence had to be comparable with the Hibs guys and so I was fined £1,500 for a reduced charge of breach of the peace and given time to pay.

I have never been so relieved in my life.

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Because of the way we felt about the Sheep we were regular visitors to Aberdeen. Our problem in the frozen north was getting even a sniff of FV. There were two reasons for this. The first was football intelligence, which by the late 1990s, early 2000s was taking a much more pro-active stance.
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The FI Old Bill watched us like the proverbial hawk when we got within fifty miles of the place and they kept on watching. You had to be up early in the morning to get one over on the cunts. Our other difficulty was in getting Aberdeen to front up away from the CCTV cameras and the Old Bill. A visit we made in 2001 was fairly typical of the challenges we had to overcome up there.

Our bus left from Glasgow city centre, packed with fifty full-on hooligans, every man jack determined to do the ASC some real damage. When we got to Dundee, instead of taking the main road to Aberdeen, the A90, we decided to go the scenic route via Arbroath and Montrose, figuring that was the best way to avoid plod. We reached the small seaside town of Stonehaven, fifteen miles from Aberdeen, and made straight for the pub. Our task now was to get to the area around Pittodrie without being spotted by Grampian Constabulary. As we sank a few beers and hoovered a few lines one of the boys came in and said there was a souvenir shop along the main street that sold not only the usual tartan tat but also Aberdeen scarves and hats. It was then that someone came up with the bright idea of buying the Sheep gear and pretending to be home fans.

The aim was to get to the main Aberdeen coach park and surprise the ASC. If they weren’t there it wouldn’t be a wasted journey; we would attack some ordinary fans as payback for the number of times their mob had attacked our scarfers. It all went according to plan. Dressed as Aberdeen scarfers we sailed through several police cordons and drew nearer to the city centre.

Then our luck ran out. When we reached the harbour area, not far from the stadium, the bus was stopped by police motorcyclists. One of them, a real fat bastard, strode onto the coach. He could see that some of us were dressed in casual gear but because a lot of the boys had Aberdeen scarves on he seemed happy enough, walked down the steps and closed
the bus door. We were on cloud nine. Our plan had worked and the ASC were about to get a bloody good hiding.

The good mood lasted for all of thirty seconds. A dark-coloured, unmarked car screeched to a halt in front of the coach and two senior FI cops promptly got out and boarded the bus. They walked up and down the corridor, peering intently at our faces. Thanks to the contented looks on their faces I could read them like a book.

‘Did they really think we would fall for a trick like that? There’s Sandy Chugg, that’s Davie Carrick and that must be Boris,’ they were no doubt thinking.

We were well and truly screwed.

‘Are you boys having a fucking laugh?’ one of them chortled.

The air blew out of our tyres. We were close to despair. The most heartbreaking thing was that we had come so close, now we were going to be sent straight back down the road. Surprisingly perhaps, we were not escorted out of the city and back down the A90. One of the FI cops radioed in for instructions and was told that any of us with match tickets were to be escorted, on foot, to the stadium and allowed in to watch the game. Those without tickets were kept on the bus and driven, with a police escort, to the car park at the Aberdeen exhibition centre.

For the next hour-and-a-half we were confined to our seats on the coach, which we felt was an infringement of our civil liberties. At that point we were becoming more and more agitated, not to mention very hungry, and to relieve the mood, which was turning ugly, the Old Bill took an order for McDonald’s. As everyone shouted out ‘burger and fries’ or ‘cheeseburger’ one well-known ICF boy, who is deaf and dumb, wrote ‘Twix’ on a piece of paper, at which point the whole bus, including the cops, burst out laughing. He was quickly clipped round the ear and told it was a Big Mac or fucking nothing. Let me tell you he has never lived it down to this day.

At the end of the game the bus was driven to the coach park occupied by Rangers supporters and we phoned our mates who had gone to the game to let them know where they could get picked up. As we walked back to the bus a group of thirty ASC appeared from nowhere and tried to set about them. Seeing they were outnumbered Rangers scarfers joined in and Aberdeen were sent packing before the cops could get there and make arrests.

We were accorded the honour of a police escort out of the city and on the way down the road we stopped off in Dundee for a carry out. Our only
consolation was a wee drink and a few snorts. Once again it was a case of what might have been where Aberdeen were concerned.

Despite the disappointment of that day in 2001 we were still determined to get the Aberdeen mob on its own patch. We had heard so many stories of our scarfers getting a doing up there and that was a situation that couldn’t be allowed to stand. We were now number one in Scotland and we had a duty to stick it to the other leading firms every chance we got. A year later, in January 2002, we put together one of the most formidable mobs I have ever been a part of. There were at least a hundred and fifty of us there that day; from hardened veterans to Rangers youth. In Schooners pub in Aberdeen I looked around in awe at the legends that had turned out. Guys like Barry Johnstone, Davie Carrick, Harky, Andy Curran, Craw and Bomber Morrison, to name but a few. We would have been a match for any mob in Britain with faces like those on our side. The police presence inside and outside the pub and in a pub close by, which was also full of ICF, was massive. Aberdeen knew we were there in numbers and one of their leading boys – Muirhead, I think – stuck his head round the door of Schooners and did a quick head count.

We got an escort to the ground and were channelled into the area reserved for Rangers, which is adjacent to the stand occupied by the hardcore Aberdeen fans and their mob. I remember that the atmosphere – it was a Saturday evening game, if memory serves – was poisonous. We had been drinking and taking lines for hours and were well up for the fray. Most of us would have taken a jail sentence just to have a crack at Aberdeen.

As the mood turned uglier one of the Aberdeen players, Robbie Winters, came over to the touchline in front of our stand and lifted the ball to take a throw in. As he limbered up one of the ICF threw a coin, hitting him right on the head. Pittodrie was in bedlam and as the referee and police came over to Winters we saw our chance and tried to get onto the park. Our aim was to goad the Aberdeen mob and get them onto the pitch for a ruck. But as we surged forward the police drew their batons and pummelled us, forcing us back into the stand. The ASC, give them their due, weren’t about to take this lying down and tried to get onto the pitch but they too were beaten back by the filth. As tempers flared Lorenzo Amoruso, the Rangers captain, came over and pleaded with us to calm down. It didn’t seem to do much good because the referee decided to take the players off the field while the police tried to restore order by lining the track with officers in full riot gear.

It was at that point the Aberdeen mob showed their true colours.

We were aware of a commotion but it was only after the game that we got the full story. In another part of the stadium, which we couldn’t see, some ASC had got onto the track and were attacking Rangers fans. They didn’t give a fuck who they hurt, whether it was scarfers, young boys, women, or, in a particularly cowardly move, a seventy-year-old man called Tam Perry. Mr Perry later told a newspaper what happened:

These young guys started running up the pitch towards the Rangers fans. As they passed me one of them swung a punch and hit me in the face. I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely raging. . . . Then, a few minutes later, bang; something, part of a seat, I think, hit me on the back of my head. I don’t think I’ll be going back to Aberdeen.

Real fucking heroes. And you wonder why we hate them.

After the game we spread out and went hunting for Aberdeen. But it was always going to be difficult because of the huge number of cops on duty and the presence of closed-circuit-television cameras. There were a few skirmishes but nothing to write home about.

The press had a field day after that one. In the
Daily Record
Jim Traynor, noting the long-standing animosity between Rangers and Aberdeen fans, wrote a long piece arguing that both clubs, the Scottish Premier League and the police had ‘turned a blind eye to this hatred’ while other observers took the view that it was the worst violence seen in Scottish football for many years. Of course there were the usual attempts to blame the English and the far right, with the papers reporting that every bogeyman from Combat 18 to the Chelsea Headhunters were behind the violence. ‘Nazi Link to Thugs,’ screamed one headline; ‘Football Riot Yobs Are English,’ splashed another. Pathetic. There was no evidence that anyone apart from the ICF and the ASC were to blame. When will the Scottish media learn that we don’t need the English to do our fighting for us?

That was yet another example of us doing everything in our power to meet Aberdeen head on and of them being chancers who attack women, children and the elderly. For some reason they never wanted to meet us mob-on-mob away from the prying eyes of a police escort or the cameras. We did our best to engineer them away from the surveillance apparatus but they very rarely played along. They were great in the Eighties but have been living on their reputation for too long. I am retired from the FV scene but I will always regret that we never gave Aberdeen the pasting they deserved.

When it came to Celtic nothing was out of bounds. And I mean nothing. We ambushed their scarfers, trashed their pubs, took the piss out of their mob, invaded their heartland and threw them off motorway bridges. We even held slashing contests, with the gold medal awarded to the boy who gave the highest of number of their fans a stripe.

I made sure I was always at the heart of the action for our encounters with the Soap Dodgers and, as I became more prominent in the ICF, I became well known not only to their mob but also to whole swathes of their ordinary fans. As well as my penchant for attacking them I am sure my reputation as a staunch supporter of Loyalist causes got right up their noses. In the eyes of the ordinary, everyday Celtic supporter I was public-enemy-number-one.

That was fine with me. I hated them, they hated me. With Celtic there was never any quarter asked for, nor given. It was all-out war. Despite the size of their support I never worried about retaliation. Their mob was only decent for a couple of seasons and as for their scarfers they would only fight when you pushed them into a corner and only then if they had vastly superior numbers. So I felt able to have a go at them every chance I got and not give a second thought to the consequences.

Until, that is, they played their joker.

Fed up with the constant attacks Celtic fans contacted the IRA and asked them to shoot me.

It was 1997. Although I was then in the Scottish National Firm (of which more later) we could always pull a mob for Old Firm games. For years we had targeted the Celtic pubs in the Gallowgate but the closed-circuit-television cameras that now panned every inch of the street had
made that impossible.
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We moved on to the Candleriggs area, just east of the city centre. Candleriggs also had a raft of Irish-themed bars that were popular with Celtic fans and after we had played them they would be full to the gunnels with their scarfers. Their mob was in terminal decline by then but we saw their ordinary fans, many of them hard-line Republicans, as a legitimate target. It was also a good training ground for the Rangers Youth firm, which was pulling healthy numbers at that time. It gave them a taste of real FV.

It became a regular occurrence, panning in those pub windows and pelting the customers inside with bricks and stones. You might even call it a turkey shoot, simply because the pubs were so crowded that they couldn’t get out of the way. And if a few brave souls did come out to fight we would wire right in to them.