Rangers and the Famous ICF: My Life With Scotland's Most-Feared Football Hooligan Gang (7 page)

This went on for a long time. We thought it would never end. But as sure as night follows day there had to be a backlash. One day Davie Carrick and I discovered that our names and addresses had been printed in a Republican magazine. I was outraged. It was a fucking liberty and it had potentially serious consequences for both of us and for our families. I phoned a friend, TB, who, ironically, was a prominent Republican himself. He had shared a cell with a good mate of mine and even though my pal was in the UDA, and the Republican was doing time for firearms offences, the three of us had become firm friends, which shows that you can reach out across the sectarian divide if there is mutual respect.

‘What the fuck is all this about?’ I asked him.

‘Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do. But you’ve obviously pissed someone off,’ TB told me.

A couple of days later the phone rang. It was TB. When he started speaking I noticed it was in a very serious tone.

‘The good news is you won’t be appearing in the magazine again. The bad news is you’ve pissed off some prominent Republicans because you keep attacking Celtic fans when they’re having a drink.’

There was a pause and then he delivered the news I didn’t want to hear.

‘Your names have been mentioned with a view to finding out how much it would be for you and Carrick to be sorted.’

‘To be sorted.’ I knew only too well what that meant. It was a euphemism for ‘to be shot’.

TB advised me to be careful about my movements, because he had information that thousands of pounds had been raised to pay someone, most likely an IRA soldier or associate, to shoot us. I was worried, who wouldn’t have been. This was a step up from football hooliganism. TB was a player in the Republican movement and I knew he was on the inside track.

Despite my anxieties, it didn’t stop me from attacking Celtic fans, or their pubs. I was worried but I wasn’t about to give into their threats, no matter how credible they were. I am still in one piece and I probably have my Republican mate to thank for that. TB phoned a few weeks later and explained that I was now off the IRA’s radar. Whether he had persuaded them not to go through with the hit or they had changed their minds for operational reasons I will never know. As soon as he hung up the phone I breathed an enormous sigh of relief.

The attacks on the Candleriggs pubs did come to an end but not because of the threats. By the late 1990s the ICF numbers had dwindled, with many boys, including me, getting more heavily involved with the Scottish National Firm.

*

As I explained earlier my history with Celtic’s mob goes back a long way, to the time they nearly kicked me to death in Mitchell Lane. However, I was well aware of the potential for sectarian clashes long before that episode. That was because my brother, Christopher, would come home from a night’s clubbing in the city and tell me all about the fights he had had with Celtic supporters.

In the early 1980s there was such a divide between the two sides that we even went to different nightclubs. Rangers used Viva in Union Street (which is now renamed the Cathouse) while Celtic frequented Daddy Warbucks on West George Street. When the clubs spilled out at three in the morning there would be thousands of drunken young people on George Square desperately looking for a bus or taxi. Celtic would congregate on one side of the Square, Rangers on the other. Mass battles would break out, with both sides backed up by gangs sympathetic to their cause: Possil and Springburn would side with Celtic; Barrowfield and other east-end gangs with us. While the police had their hands full, shops would be looted. We targeted the ones that sold the good gear, like Hoi Polloi and
Olympus, although you had to be careful when you kicked the windows in as they were huge sheets of plate glass that seemed to explode when they shattered. Chris’s tales intrigued me and I couldn’t wait to go out clubbing and get into the fighting.

By the time I reached my late teens, early twenties I was a regular on the scene and it was then I discovered just how dangerous Glasgow was. It wasn’t just the neighbourhood gangs or the football mobs; there was also the Troubles in Northern Ireland to consider. There is no doubt in my mind that what was happening across the water during the mid-to-late Eighties made things infinitely more tense, and therefore more dangerous, in Glasgow.

A good example of how gang, football and sectarian violence seemed to blend into one came at a Scheme concert in, I think, 1987.
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Despite his Irish Catholic-sounding name Joe Bradley was an ICF boy who also happened to be in the Possilpark gang and had gone to see Scheme at the Pavilion theatre. A fight broke out with a gang from Barmulloch and Joe was stabbed to death by one of the Barmulloch team, who also happened to be a prominent member of the Celtic Soccer Crew. No one knows why it happened. Was it gang-related, a football thing, or religious? Or, Glasgow being Glasgow, a lethal cocktail made up of all three ingredients? The next day the ICF played the Rangers Soccer Babes at football. Quite understandably, we mourned Joe’s loss but it also brought home to us just how dangerous the city had become. We knew that we were targets for a whole network of gangs and, of course, for the CSC and that we could be attacked anytime, anywhere. There was another emotion: a hatred for Celtic that had become even more intense, if that was possible.

As I said the Celtic mob was pretty good in those days and I remember many battles with them. I would only have been twelve at the time but one of the most-talked about incidents came before an Old Firm match at Ibrox in 1985. We had arranged to meet the CSC at Kinning Park industrial estate, which is not far from the ground. We had a mob of about two hundred and I will always remember the sense of anticipation as we walked down Paisley Road West. As we approached the narrow footbridge over the M8 motorway it became clear that Celtic were as keen to get it on
as we were. As they headed for the bridge both sides picked up pace and within seconds we were going hell for leather. A cry went up.

‘ICF, ICF. Let’s get into these Fenian bastards.’

The police – worried that someone would be thrown off the bridge – did their best to head us off but seventy of us managed to evade them and met Celtic head on. It was chaos on the bridge, where there was room only for three boys on each side. But despite the crush we quickly swamped them and pushed them back to the other side of the motorway.

Most of them managed to scurry back to safety. One wasn’t so lucky.

Amongst all the confusion I heard a thud and looked down to see a Celtic boy called Joey Laird lying on a patch of grass. I suppose he was lucky. If he had landed on the concrete he would have been dead, but as it was he suffered brain damage. It was no accident; it wasn’t because of the crush. Two Rangers boys had lifted him up and deliberately thrown him off.

As you might imagine the cops were outraged by the Laird incident and it was all hands to the pump to find out who did it – or, the Glasgow polis being the Glasgow polis, to stitch some poor cunt up for it. And that’s exactly what they did. After rounding up dozens of ICF and taking us for interview at the procurator fiscal’s office it became clear that they were intent on putting Barry Johnstone in the frame. Not because he did it – it was nothing to do with him – but because he was our top man and probably the most feared hooligan in Scotland. We stood firm. Every single one of us stonewalled them and no one was ever prosecuted.

How did we feel about Joey Laird? To be perfectly honest most of the boys were buzzing. They felt it was a right result. Me? I knew Joey and had mixed feelings about what happened to him.

While that was an interesting day out I had been too young to make a real contribution. Two years later, however, after another Old Firm encounter, again at Ibrox – older, bigger and stronger – I really came of age, not least in the eyes of the more experienced ICF boys. It was January 1987, which would make me fourteen. After the game, we met the CSC behind Ibrox primary school and a vicious battle broke out. There were no cops around to break things up so you had to choose whether to get into the fight or to cower on the sidelines. It was one of those situations that define you as a hooligan.

We had some Chelsea boys with us; members, it was said, of Britain’s toughest mob. Don’t make me fucking laugh. They stood and watched, paralysed with fear, as it went off. Those ‘hard men’ from London took
one look at the reality of Old Firm violence and stayed in their front-row seats. That was their choice. That was how they would be defined.
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Meanwhile the teenage Sandy Chugg got wired in. That was my choice. That was how I would be defined. It helped cement my reputation and afterwards our older boys were full of admiration for the ‘game wee cunt’ who had gone toe-to-toe with Celtic.

*

As the 1990s dawned there was no let-up in the war between us and Celtic. One night we would be looking for revenge for an attack on our boys, on other nights they would come looking for us. It was a deadly game of tit-for-tat, one that could easily end in tragedy. That is the way Glasgow was in those years. It may sound melodramatic to say that it was like a war zone but for many guys of my age, on both sides of the fence, that’s exactly how it felt. Trouble came out of nowhere. It could happen anytime, anywhere. You had to be on your guard at all times. There was no alternative.

It was 1990. We still frequented different nightclubs; Celtic used Tin Pan Alley in Mitchell Lane, while we favoured the Hacienda, which is close to Glasgow Sheriff Court. This Friday night, no doubt enraged by another doing at the football, they came looking for us. We weren’t there that night but some of our associates were. It kicked off and the CSC got the worst of it, forcing them to butt out, chased by our pals. One of the Celtic boys, Gary McGuire, was cornered on the steps of the Sheriff Court. He had no chance. He was stabbed and left to die.

The murder of Gary McGuire had nothing to do with the ICF. I even printed a newsletter explaining that we weren’t anywhere near the Hacienda that night. Later a boy nicknamed Wee Semi was convicted of the murder and given a life sentence and he was certainly never a member of the Rangers mob. None of that cut any ice with the CSC. They blamed the ICF for what happened to Gary and after that they were hell bent on taking revenge on us. There were skirmishes almost every night, with boys on both sides getting badly beaten up. Glasgow’s streets were as dangerous as they had ever been.

As time went on however we began to get the upper hand on Celtic and by the end of the Nineties we were completely dominant, with our
success mirroring what was happening on the field of play.
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In fact the CSC deteriorated to such an extent that it rarely if ever turned out, even for games at Celtic Park. We didn’t have a mob to fight so there was only one alternative open to us: attack their scarfers. That was the period when we really turned the screw on the ordinary Celtic fan. We hounded them mercilessly, especially when we went to the Piggery. I will never forget those days of glory, when we left Celtic Park with a mob of four hundred, belting out ‘The Sash’ as we celebrated yet another victory. Soon our thoughts turned to FV and we went through our full repertoire of war chants and songs:

Or my favourite, which we sang to the tune of ‘Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way (My Old Man)’:

We walked proudly along London Road, went through Bridgeton Cross, past the back of the Barras and down to the Gallowgate, where all the Celtic pubs are. I have lost count of the number of times we smashed the windows in with volleys of bricks, traffic cones and metal poles. One time an undercover cop tried to stop us and was laid out by a single punch from one of our leading boys. With the windows tanned we did our level best to force our way into the boozers to get at the Great Unwashed who were lurking inside. It was always chaotic, with patrons and police coming together in an attempt to repel us.

Before some games at Parkhead we would even mingle with the Celtic scarfers, using every tool at our disposal to provoke them. One afternoon, after a drink in the Bristol, fifteen of us marched up Millerston Street, where there would be thousands of them on their way to the game. We didn’t give a fuck about being outnumbered and gave them several choruses of ‘Rule Britannia’ to announce our presence.

‘Fuck off you Orange bastards,’ they retorted, which set off several little skirmishes. A Celtic fan threw a bottle at us, which one of our boys caught on his knee and proceeded to play keepy-uppy with. That made them even angrier and as we got closer to the ground it became more and more dangerous for us. By now, in that swelling ocean of green and white, they could see how few of us there were, which I always thought was the equivalent of feeding them ‘game pills’. The police knew a bloodbath was a distinct possibility and one of their vans, a ‘heavy eight’, hove into view. The cops got out and after a great deal of pushing and shoving, managed to form a cordon around our little group. Then they herded us inside the van and took us to Parkhead Forge, which is on the route to Celtic Park traditionally used by Rangers fans.

The hatred we felt for all things green and white led us down some dark alleys of the soul. One such alley was a slashing contest between two of our main and iconic lads after an Old Firm game. The rules of the game were simple: whoever slashed the most Celtic fans would be declared the winner and inducted into the ICF hall of fame. To make sure we didn’t get detected by the coppers we took an alternative route through Duke Street and along High Street, one that would give us exposure to the maximum number of Celtic fans. The two contestants weren’t satisfied with an ordinary, common or garden knife. They attached Stanley blades to ice-lolly sticks to give then a tramline. It meant that when you were slashed it would be much harder for the doctor to stitch. Who won? It was honours even. They got ten each and we declared it a draw.