The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (36 page)

The day of reckoning finally arrives. David Summer reprises the case. He lays it on with a trowel. He even says that one of the
undercover
detectives was so stressed out by the fear that he might be caught that he had a breakdown during the operation. He also reads some choice extracts from Vincent  George’s “War Games” diary. We all sit there in a row and I’m thinking, who the fuck is this kid Vincent George? I had never met him in my life but his little book of cuttings was helping the police to put us away.

Then it’s Judge Clark’s turn. I’m first up for sentencing. He goes into one about how I have tarnished the good name of English sport and how people like myself, who enjoy Saturday afternoon
recreational
violence, have to be stopped. He says he has no alternative but to impose custodial sentence.

And then he says, “I sentence you to twenty-one months in prison. You are banned from attending a match at any British football ground for a period of ten years.”

Twenty-one months! What a result. After all that. I thought, I’m out in twelve, maximum. My family in court were upset but I was relieved. It had been a traumatic period and now at least I knew what I was getting. I could go to jail and get on with it.

The dock officer takes me down. He says, “We had a bet
downstairs
that you were getting six or seven years.”

They put me in the cage but by now I don’t care. The screws are amazed at the sentence. One says, “I’m not lying, mate, you got a right result there.”

They start to bring the rest of the lads down, one by one. Chris is next.

“Eighteen months,” he says.

Then the others.

“Fifteen months.”

“A year.”

“Six months.”

Twelve of us were done that day. Seven went to jail, one went to a young offenders’ institution and four of the younger lads, including Rodney, Adrian Gunning and Jamie Roberts, got community service.

The cops were praised by the judge and afterwards went round mouthing off all over the media about how marvellous they were. Nineteen people pleading guilty to affray and riot and violent disorder was a success for them. They were the heroes because they had secured convictions while a lot of similar cases were crashing. It made them look great. The main officer who ran the unit, Malcolm George, is now the national police expert on football hooliganism. Shortly afterwards, it was announced that the team that formed the nucleus of the investigations would be going to the World Cup in Italy in 1990 to keep watch on hooligans.

But the way the prison service worked then, you only served half of your sentence. With the time I had served on remand, I would be out on parole in six months. In fact I was out five months later on weekend home leave. If you think of the work that was involved in that case, six months’ intelligence, lots of police expenditure, dawn raids on forty houses, sixteen months waiting to be dealt with, it must have cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. And I got
twenty-one
months. I often wonder if the Old Bill really were as happy with that as they made out.

After the court case, we were taken straight to Walton Prison in Liverpool. The screws were winding us up on the way, giving it loads on the coach, “They’re all Scousers here, mate, they don’t like Mancs. You’d better watch yourselves in the showers.”

Actually the inmates were brilliant with us. We got to reception and could hear them saying, “Are you the Guvnors, are you the Guvnors? The Guvnors are here.” They looked after us well. They knew all about us because the case had been in the national papers and on TV and radio. They gave us all new gear. In those days it was all uniforms, you couldn’t wear your own clothes. We got new T-shirts, two pairs of underpants each, a pair of jeans, a pair of black shoes, socks. If they thought you were nothing, you got the shittiest pair of jeans that were too tight and too small for you, you got shoes with no laces in that didn’t fit, you got socks full of holes. We got well boxed off. The cons dished them out, trustees, all lads who were near the end of their sentence or just model prisoners. I learned that in jail you are all in the same boat and a lot of the Manc versus Scouser stuff goes out of the window. Everyone helps each other out.

We were sent to our cells. Chris was put on a different wing and so I was on my own. I was led to my cell, opened the door and the screw said, “Welcome to your new home.”

He pushed me in and shut the door. There was nothing in the room but porno pictures and a scruffy bed. Here we go. Stuck in this hole. The first thing I intended doing was cleaning the place up.

I was sharing with someone else. There were footsteps outside and I heard one Scouser say to another, “Here y’are mate, there’s a fucking nigger in your cell.”

I looked up and saw someone peering through the window, this kid with long hair. I thought, I’ve got a right cunt here. But he came in the cell and he turned out to be all right. We got on well.

The next day, we had a chance to read the headlines:

There were nice mug shots of me looking a right hood. Later that day, Pat Berry got fifteen months, on top of a twenty-one-month stretch he was already serving, for “leading a group of up to thirty hooligans which roamed the city centre hunting Aston Villa
supporters
after a match at Maine Road”. Dave Goodall received a suspended sentence and a £1,000 fine. Others got community service and everyone was banned from football for various periods. Chapman, who was twenty-seven, got a £500 fine. He had confessed in his witness statement. All the lads done were from Greater Manchester, which shows how tight our firm was. No outsiders. 

Many got community service because the judge said hooliganism was a community offence and so they should pay the public back. Of the whole sentencing, they gave out about twenty years, between twenty of us. I know a lad from Man United who was on a ferry when it kicked off with West  Ham and he got seven years for robbing jewellery off the boat, because it was football related. He wasn’t even a hooligan, he’d just gone for a snatch. That puts it into perspective. One way I did suffer though was when the
Manchester Evening News
revealed that I had worked as a stripper at ladies’ parties, under the name Mickey Hot Rocks. I got ribbed for that something terrible.

It turned out there were a lot of Mancs in Walton, some of whom I knew, like Steve Bryan, who I later went into business with. I had no trouble in there at all, partly because we had a little clique and partly because of me being a big lad and the way I carry myself. If you are weak and you look weak you can get murdered. There weren’t that many smackheads in jail either; they cause a lot of mither inside, always pestering people. I suppose the good news was that the week after we were sent down, City were promoted,
finishing
second in Division Two. Another big day I missed out on.

Jail is not as hard as it could be if you can get the things you want. If you have a strong character and put yourself about you can get pretty much anything in jail. You can get milk, decent meat, all the good stuff. You don’t have to get the shit. You can bag yourself a decent job. It can be harder for your family and friends; they think you are suffering in jail when really you are getting plenty of sleep, using the gym twice a day, reading, having a break. What more do you want? If you like going to the gym and eating, it is the best way to put on weight and get yourself fit. I came out as fit as fuck, like Raging Bull. Of course, it has its downside, you can’t see your family.

I was in Walton for about twelve weeks and then moved to Wymott, a semi-open prison in Leyland, Lancashire, where I shared with Chris until we both got our own cells, next door to each other. It was like going back to school. Each block is a “T” shape, with an A house, B house and C house. I was on B house. It had fourteen cells, you were allowed your own door-key and could have a stereo in your room and your own television which you could watch until 8 p.m. They would just lock the main wing door and we could have all the cells open, twenty-odd men running wild, smuggling in dope for draw parties, everyone saving their biscuits and cakes from visits until Friday night, taking your shirts off, covering the lights to make the room go blue, playing music dead loud and having a rave right there on the wing. It was wild.

One night we were in there and everyone was on the smoke. I got a bit dizzy after a few puffs because I don’t smoke. They knew I’d do anything for a laugh, so one lad took a broomstick and said, “Bet you can’t do this, Mickey. Get the brush, look at the light, walk round it, put it on the floor, jump over it three times and run down the corridor.”

So I get this brush, go round and round, jump over it, lose my bearing totally, hit every fucking wall, smash my head open, pouring blood and collapse on the floor. I pretend I have done myself in proper. I’m lying there and they all rush round me going, “Fuckin’ hell, he’s done in.”

“I think he’s dead.”

Just as they were about to call the screws I went “Yaaarg” and jumped up, and they ran for their lives.

Wymott was full of Mancs. There were a few queers about as well, although the gang rapes that you hear about in America are very rare over here. Some strange things do go on though and I think the officers are aware of it and just let it happen. On that wing, the screws knew that Chris and I were pretty game and if they looked like losing control they would sometimes say to us, “Will you sort it out for us?”

We would get extra privileges for keeping things sweet. If someone was playing up, being a cunt and ruining things for everyone else, they’d say: “If you weigh him in,  Mike, don’t weigh him in too badly. He needs a smacking.”

They can’t do it themselves because they’d get sacked, so what they try to do is manipulate you. You have to be careful you aren’t used. You can’t do everything they say, give someone a slap just because they don’t like him. The thing is, they know what everyone is in for and it always comes out in the end. People who are in for molesting kids and that sort of stuff aren’t put on rule 42, get weighed in and deserve it. Most prisons have their own little groups that run wings but they are hard places to control because once you get your feet too well in, you get moved out very quickly.

Our jailing was not the end of the firm’s woes. Not long after our sentencing, eight lads pleaded guilty at Oldham Crown Court to their involvement in the Battle of Piccadilly in February 1988. They had arrested seventeen altogether, but the charges were dropped against half of them. The court was told that seventy to eighty City boys met in the early evening in the Lower Turks pub in Shudehill, where the landlord overheard them talking about attacking the Manchester United football special train that was due back from Arsenal. Then they went to Nicklebys, near Piccadilly station, avoiding London Road so the police wouldn’t spot them. Eventually they moved on the station and sent in what the prosecutor called a “skirmish party” of between ten and twenty-five lads while the rest waited at the bottom of the approach, under the archway. When the scouts walked on to the platform there were only a few United boys around.

According to the report in the
Oldham Chronicle
:

Duffy was then hit on the head with a hammer, fracturing his skull. He later spent eight months off work. A lad called David Clayton, from Oldham, was sent to a young offenders’ institution for three years for using the hammer.

I
N THIS CHAPTER
written specially for this book, acclaimed writer Scott C. Lomax profiles the life of Luciano Leggio, one of the most ruthless hitmen and enforcers in modern Italian history.

Leggio was born in 1925 in the town of Corleone on the island of Sicily, Italy, and turned to crime in his teens. He saw the inside of his first prison cell when he was just eighteen years old; he was
imprisoned
for six months for stealing corn. Upon release, he murdered the man who had reported him to the police for the theft. In 1945, he was recruited by Mafia boss Michele Navarra as an enforcer and hitman.

Leggio became the leading figure of the Sicilian Mafia and
eventually
became the head of the Corleonesi, the Mafia faction that
originated
in the town of Corleone. Before he was finally imprisoned for life in 1974, Leggio was also infamous for avoiding convictions for a multitude of crimes, including homicide, because very few witnesses were brave enough to testify. At the time of his eventual arrest and capture Leggio was a multi-millionaire and was able to retain most of his fortune as Italian law did not yet allow authorities to confiscate criminals’ illicit fortunes, although this has since changed. For a number of years he was believed to have retained significant influence as head of the Corleonesi from behind bars, but by the end of the 1970s, his lieutenant Salvatore Riina was in control of the Corleonesi clan.

On 16 November 1993 Leggio died in prison from a heart attack, aged sixty-eight.