ONE

From Leyton to Chingford: Welcome to Gangland

Here is melodrama…Here are unvarnished emotions. Here also is a primitive democracy…The gang, in short, is life, often rough and untamed…

Frederic Thrasher, The Gang(1927)

Alex is looking at his feet and fiddling with his gold ring. He doesn’t want to talk about this; doesn’t want to dredge up old ground. But my perception of the events is so wrong that, laughing, he is drawn into a response:

‘Ha, ha, ha! You fucking kidding me? It wasn’t about the lyrics. Maybe at first, but in the end it was about people not respecting their positions. It was an internal beef. All Chingford. OK, so Shaks is an MC: he’s a very talented boy. And Goodz is talented too: he’s just signed to Polydor. Now the thing is he’s got to keep that corporate image up.

‘He’s distanced himself from the gang. So the young guys don’t see no love coming from Goodz. Now you see, I think he was gonna give back – that’s what you got to do when you make it, you give back. It’s just that he was consolidating his position. Anyway, Shaks writes this rhyme, says Goodz is dissing us. Nothing heavy: it’s like…he’s said that – now you’ve got to go on the mike. Take me on.

‘But it don’t work like that. You see, Shaks is a Younger. If you’re a Younger, you don’t do that. So Goodz locks him in his car, and tells him to take back what he said. It’s like…this is music, I understand that, but just show some respect. But Shaks isn’t backing down. And suddenly we’re on to a whole new level. This isn’t about music any more.

‘This is where Richie turns up. He says leave the boy alone; he’s only young. He’s got the crew with him – a load of guys from Piff. And the crew are like…OK, this is outside the music, we’re saying you leave the boy alone, you’re not listening – we’re going to have to pay you a visit.

‘So these threats are escalating. Now these are serious players: maybe he was angry, maybe he was scared. I don’t know. Probably both. But Goodz decides to make a call. He phones Titch and tells him to come down. Titch knows what he’s going up against, and he knows he’s going to need an arsenal.

‘Later they walk around a corner with their guns drawn and they see Richie and some of Piff. He sees them, and just says, “Now you’ve drawn it, you’re going to have to use that.” Worst thing he could have said…

‘Later that day the boys ran up and smashed up Goodz’s house and his car. The family had evacuated earlier. They still want to kill him. Weird shit. They all grew up together.’

From the Guardian, 3 November 2006:

A rapper outraged because his half-brother was ‘disrespected’ in a song lyric was jailed with a confederate for 30 years yesterday after a revenge attack ended in murder. Carl Dobson, 23 – also known as the grime rap star Crazy Titch – killed music producer Richard Holmes last November as a row over the lyrics escalated disastrously, the Old Bailey heard…A handgun was held to the victim’s head before he was shot in the back as he tried to escape. The attackers also shot him in the leg with a Mach 10 machine gun.

The murder of Richard Holmes is a model killing in today’s Gangland. It happened for the same reasons most gang murders take place: it was about respect. To lose respect is to put yourself at risk. As the informant says, once the disrespect moved outside the abstract, impersonal world of lyrics, it moved closer to the final situation – the only way it could be resolved was through violence.

The killing was about the disrespect shown by a teenager – Shaks or Shabah Shah – aged sixteen at the time of the murder. Young men have become the prevalent force in Gangland in the last decade. Perversely, they don’t always have the power, but they are the ones who do many of the killings, and the ones who are killed. They are the ones most likely to show disrespect, because they stand to gain the most by enforcing their reputation.

To understand why these changes have occurred – why young people are dying on our streets every month – we need to understand Gangland, and what has happened to it. Gangland is ultimately a state of mind: thousands of people live within it, go to work, raise their children, and live otherwise unremarkable lives. At the same time, for some it exists as a very clearly defined physical area.

At the junction of Hall Road and Langthorne Road in Leytonstone, east London, the two roads’ street signs sit next to each other. One says ‘Langthorne Road, E11′. The other should say ‘Hall Road, E15′, but the number five has been sprayed over with black spray paint. It reads ‘E11′ as well.

On Hall Road, opposite the street signs, lie the gigantic white concrete slabs that comprise the flats of Blackthorne Court. They are connected by rickety blue metal walkways. The central block of flats is called Gean Court. Its façade gives away little: one sees few windows at the front of the building. At the back of the block is a small car park. The rear is festooned with satellite dishes. At the foot of the wall, in tiny black marker pen, are the words ‘RIP Paule’ (sic).

In April 2007 Paul Erahon, aged fourteen, and his friend, aged fifteen, were assaulted by a group of youths. A teenager demanded Paul ‘come here’, and then threatened: ‘This could get physical. You don’t want me to have to come over there.’ Paul was attacked by the group as the teenager shouted: ‘Go on, Youngers.’ A second group of youths then rushed to the scene and joined in the attack. In total, there were seventeen people attacking Paul and his friend.

The youths were armed with bats and a samurai sword. As the blows rained down upon him, Paul screamed at them not to shank him. They did: they stabbed him through the heart with a seven-inch samurai sword, and stabbed his friend five times. The wounded boys staggered out into Hall Road. One neighbour saw them and thought they were drunk. They made it further down the street, and Paul collapsed, dying a few yards from his home. He murmured, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying’ as his parents raced to his side. He was pronounced dead half an hour later.

Three boys were convicted of murder and two of manslaughter following a three-month trial. It was alleged that they committed the murder to earn their spurs within the Cathall gang.

Paul lived in a small cul-de-sac next to Blackthorne Court. It sits uneasily next to the flats: the close, with its neat two-bedroom houses and smart cars out the front, looks like it has been picked up and transposed from a provincial town. Attached to the railings next to it are lanterns, a teddy bear, roses and cards: ‘RIP forever’; ‘We will miss you’.

A few hundred yards west of Blackthorne Court, Leyton High Road runs through the middle of the borough of Waltham Forest. A little further to the west, you find the area where the old high-rise Oliver Close Estate was. A labyrinthine hotchpotch of newly built red-brick houses and small 1980s blocks of flats, this doesn’t look like gang territory, but it is.

Continue for a mile north up Leyton High Road, past the shops owned by Turks, Albanians and Asians, selling a random selection of cheap goods, past the fried chicken shops, the garages, the tube station, over a bridge which has cars shooting along the A12 below, past more shops, cafes, garages, past an incongruous cricket ground, the remaining tower block on the Beaumont Estate suddenly looms large on the right. It dominates the road; a soaring, rotting column too large to take in at once. The closer you get, the more the decay is defined – rotting windows, peeling paintwork. Around are smaller blocks of neater, newer flats, another hotchpotch, and between the flats are building sites. The shells of torn-down buildings are visible above the wooden boards, the concrete crumbled like meringue, the steel wires that supported them jutting out like the ribs of a decaying carcass. Soon they will all be gone – the Beaumont Estate, like the Oliver Close Estate a few years ago, is undergoing redevelopment.

Continuing up Leyton High Road, past bookmakers, more cheap stores, a scruffy pub, a Cash Converters, you reach the junction with Lea Bridge Road. It’s like coming up for air. The hustle and bustle die down for another half-mile as the road becomes a leafy strip of terraced houses running all the way to Walthamstow station. Continue further, past the station and the common on the right, and the road reverts to how it was – claustrophobic, noisy, cluttered. It runs like this for another mile, before you see the grandiose Town Hall, with vast lawns stretched out in front of it. Half a mile to the west lies Priory Court, its buildings, like most of Gangland, a mix of small red-brick houses and large pastel blocks of flats. A mile north of that is the North Circular, the Chingford Hall Estate, like the others, hunched behind it.

This is Gangland. For the most part, it looks modern and safe. It exists in several incongruous pockets, all of them tucked away off the beaten track, most of them newly built. Life goes on around Gangland; ordinary people with regular day jobs living cheek by jowl with the most disadvantaged and potentially violent members of society.

The modern gang evolved in places like these due to the overwhelming changes in the structure of British crime that have taken place in the last 25 years. Andy’s story may help to explain this transition.

He is immensely stocky: his powerful frame belies his fifty years. His jowls and unimpressed glare give him the appearance of a grouchy bulldog. He addresses his audience, a dozen or so teenage boys, with a gruff, East End accent: ‘Oo d’you fink I am?’ Some mutter ‘cop’; others suggest he’s a careers advisor. Silence. He looks at each of them in turn. He nods. ‘Oh, right. Do you now?’

Andy was an enforcer and robber for a white crime syndicate for thirty years, until the police caught him holding up a bank in south London. While on day release, he was approached by a charity to work with youths in deprived areas. He’s been at this for months now; heading into youth centres and schools to talk to them about gangs and the damage they do. The kids will listen to him – this is a bona fide criminal. But he finds it a struggle. It’s a hard world for him to understand: Andy’s east London is not the same east London inhabited by his audience.

‘Yeah, I was in a gang. We used to play football in the park. Once I was a big boy, I suppose you could say I was in a gang, but all this -’ he mimes pulling a hood up over his head, ‘- nah…it’s something new.’

Andy’s gang made most of their money from hold-ups. ‘I’d get a call, every other month or so. We’d meet and talk through what the job was: post office, bank, lorries – we’d do the lot. Someone above me would have done most of the planning; he’d have done the reconnaissance and all the rest of it. We’d just get told what we were doing, what our cut was, and off we’d go – job done, sit around, wait for the next call. It was a successful freelance role I had, if you will. It was a very happy and prosperous few years for me. Until I got nicked. The bank had tiny CCTV cameras which our man hadn’t spotted. They had footage of me, and I got fifteen years.’

By the early 1990s, improved technology was making it harder and harder for criminals like Andy to ply their trade. At the same time, heroin, cocaine and, most importantly, crack began to flood into London. There was more money to be made, more regularly, in drugs, and provided it was done well dealing posed few of the risks associated with the kind of blags carried out by Andy’s crew.

‘I was working for a small team that had its links, but we were a little group of mates who’d known each other since we were young,’ says Andy, shaking his head. ‘But the kids I’m dealing with…however much they make, there’s always someone above them. It’s a corporation – a criminal corporation.’

His assessment is accurate. Before a user gets hold of any drugs, they have travelled down an elaborate supply chain. Crack is a product in a competitive market: it needs to be marketed, packaged and distributed. The people who sell it need to be protected, and the people who threaten them have to be negated. Until demand is saturated, which it won’t be until everyone is using it, there will be a demand for people to work in the corporation that provides it.

A common misconception is that only those at the very top of a gang stand to make any money: in fact, this is not always the case. At the top end of the drugs chain, a dealer will usually sell the drugs he has bought at double the price. The dealer to whom he has sold it will add an extra 50 per cent to that price when he sells it to a user. Professor John Pitts of the University of Bedfordshire produced a report in 2007 which analysed the gangs of Waltham Forest. In the Oliver Close area he estimated there are around 150 people spending on average £50 per week on drugs. The weekly drug-spend is therefore £7500. This means that someone at the top of the chain will stand to make £130,000 per year, and if he has five dealers working for him, each of those will hypothetically stand to make £26,000: a healthy annual salary. It should be stressed that these numbers are speculative, and that the risks run by those at the bottom of the market usually outweigh the benefits. But the Oliver Close gang is a subsidiary of Piff City, the leaders of which have been at the top of their game for years. They have made more money than Andy’s gang could ever have hoped for.

Some of the crack that reaches the borough is smuggled in from South America by established London criminals and distributed through their networks of dealers. The other source is Jamaica – the crack is processed there and carried by drugs mules, usually women.

Few things are simple in Gangland. Your day-to-day activities, your role, your future, the people with whom you work, the people with whom you fight – all are uncertain, transient. But, paradoxically, most gang members have a clearly defined perception of how the drug market is structured. The best way to understand the way that market works is to imagine the process by which fruit is sold in a supermarket. In this case the producers operate in Jamaica and South America. The international criminals who sell the drug are wholesalers. The top gang members to whom they sell, the Elders and Faces, are the supermarket’s head office. Below them are the Youngers: the branch managers. And working the supermarket’s tills and on the shop floor are the Shotters.

In terms of the drug trade, what we see in the estates around Walthamstow and Leyton is the same structure we see across the nation. Most of the gangs in this book started at roughly the same time, the 1980s, doing the same things: theirs has been a natural evolution into their current state. Eerie though this may seem, the fact they mirror each other shouldn’t surprise us.

It started when Dan was thirteen years old, with his friend Joe. He and Joe walked from their estate to school every day. Joe’s brother, Mike, was sixteen. He’d been excluded from their school a year previously for threatening someone with a knife. Dan knew about Mike, and Joe would always tell him that he was fine; happier than ever. He hung around with the other kids on the estate, apparently, and he was never bored.

Dan rarely hung around with Joe or his brother after school. He knew Joe’s brother was in a crew, but at that point it had not been something they had spoken about at any length. Dan would stay at home, keep to himself. He liked his Playstation; he liked listening to his records. He wanted to be a hip-hop producer. He hadn’t played in the park near the estate since some boys had asked him what he thought he was doing there. He couldn’t stay there: he wasn’t in C Crew. Dan said C Crew didn’t own the park, and one of them had punched him in the face. He’d run home and washed the blood off his nose, scampering past his mother so as not to alert her.

One day, Mike was waiting outside the school for Dan and Joe. He said to Dan: ‘Is that him?’ and pointed to a boy who had been bullying both of them. Dan was surprised that Joe had told Mike about it, but said it was. Mike nodded, and they walked home together. The next day, Joe ran up to Dan at the end of school. Breathless with excitement, he told him to come to the boys’ toilet. Inside were Mike, and two of his friends. They were in a cubicle, shoving the boy’s head in a toilet, and holding a knife to his throat.

‘Do you want to die? Are you fucking stupid? Then don’t ever fuck with my bro again!’

The boy was crying and crying. They all started laughing at him. ‘I think he’s shit himself.’ And with that Mike slammed the toilet lid on his head, and walked out. The boy never so much as looked at Dan again. But Mike kept showing up outside school to walk home with Dan and Joe. They’d talk about music, football and girls. One day Mike asked Dan if he wanted to see his arsenal. Joe told him he should go – it was amazing. They went to a flat belonging to one of Mike’s friends. Dan was nervous, but Joe told him not to worry. Inside were a group of young men playing Playstation in the front room, the air thick with bong smoke. Mike took him to the kitchen at the back, and there on the table was a small pistol. Did Dan want to hold the gun? He did. It felt heavier than he expected. He pointed it around the kitchen, his arm aching under the weight. He put it down. Mike seized Dan by the arm, and told him if he breathed a word of this to his mother, he was dead. He owed Mike.

A little later, Dan ran into Mike in the estate. He told Dan he needed a favour. He needed Dan to take a package to a friend’s for him. Dan didn’t think twice. He wanted respect, protection, the money (£30 for delivering it). Over the months, the money kept coming Dan’s way, and the jobs kept coming too. Most of the time it was simple – take this package to a guy at Walthamstow Central, keep an eye out for the cops when the boys are doing something – and all the while he saw his mother less and less every evening, all the while his school work got worse and worse. Even if Dan had wanted to stop doing this, he couldn’t. Mike knew where he lived, knew his routes home from school. But for now he didn’t want to – he loved having respect from Mike. And anyway, the money was stacking up in a shoebox under his bed. He bought himself brand new trainers and CDs.

Soon Dan began to take a more active role, seeking Mike out for jobs. Every job he did, bigger and bigger, gave him a little bit more to talk about with the guys with the Playstation, the weed, the fancy clothes, the nice car out front. He liked them. There was still aggression from C Crew if he walked across the park – soon the guys told him if he ever needed a piece in order to shoo them off, it was his. One day they saw him on his way home from school, and started shouting and running after him. He got to Mike’s. Mike gave him a gun, unloaded, and told him to see if they wanted to fuck with him. He walked back there, and the minute they saw him, he pulled it out. They sprinted away. It wasn’t their area any more.

The most common errands Dan did involved taking drugs to Shotters, or dealers. He managed the ‘shop floor’, a place that takes many forms in this trade. The Shotter might work just on the street; he will have the protection of the gangsters he has bought the drugs from – or will be a member of that gang – and will sell in that area. The threat posed to Shotters by rival gangs and the police can mean a closed market comes into play: they will take orders by mobile phone or will operate from crack houses. When the police tried to close these down in early 2006, the Shotters switched to moped deliveries. Then the police gave up, and the crack houses reappeared.

Some of the kids from C Crew were at Dan’s school, and they hated Mike’s crew. There were always fights between the two. Dan and Joe were well and truly in with the kids who called themselves members of Mike’s crew, by now; C Crew feared them. One day a mass fight broke out in the playground: one kid pulled a knife on Dan. They wrestled and both were left with slash marks. The teachers broke the fight up, but all those involved in the incident were expelled. Dan was fifteen. His mother was aghast at the expulsion, but not shocked. This had been coming for months; she’d seen it happen to others. She was tired of fighting it, and knew that Dan was sometimes the principal breadwinner in their family. It had reached the point where some evenings he would just walk in and dump money on the table. She got tired of asking him where it came from, of hearing his lies. Soon, it was left unspoken.

With no school, Dan did everything Mike expected of him. He carried drugs to the dealers. He hung around near Mike’s flat, and if there was anyone there who had beef with Mike’s boys, he’d make threats. Once he told a bunch of guys to fuck off, and they drew guns and walked towards him. He was terrified, and he ran back to Mike’s flat. Mike and his friends grabbed their arsenal and started firing out of the windows at them. The guys ran away. Dan got a lot of respect after that. In fact, it was at that very time that he became a fully fledged Younger.

Dan’s looks betray his young years: he is now seventeen. His brown skin is smooth, his eyes bright and intense. At the same time, there is something terribly old and hard about him. His language is infused with violence, informed by the acts he’s seen or heard about on a daily basis. He talks about the ineffectiveness of the police, and says he wants to take an axe to all their heads. It doesn’t sound like an empty threat. Politicians are worse – he’d shoot them, bang bang, all of them, the useless fucks. The speed of his speech is infectious – a nonstop babble of film and television quotes, the only education he’s ever had.

‘You ever watched the last Star Wars film?’ he asks, before sipping his Coke in a fast-food joint near Walthamstow Central Station. ‘You know how Anakin has that choice, between the light and the dark side? That’s all the road is – it’s an illusion. Every time you think you’re making progress, you’re digging yourself in deeper and deeper. You think you’re becoming the big man, and then before you know it you’re in jail. Suddenly there’s no Man Dem behind you – it’s just you and a guy who doesn’t give a shit, because he’s got nothing to lose. The way I’ve told it looks like the road chose me: it didn’t. I chose the road. Ain’t got no one to blame but myself.’

*

Most youths join gangs between the ages of twelve and fourteen – the age where it becomes apparent that if you’re not affiliated you’re susceptible to harassment, theft, violent assault and rape. Professor Pitts’ report highlighted the fact that 40 per cent of these members were either occasional or reluctant affiliates. They were coming to the Youth Offending Team because they were present at the scene of a crime, but were not necessarily the individual who committed the offence. Sometimes they join because they know of the risks to them and their family if they don’t. All the rude boys in Waltham Forest know about the fifteen-year-old boy who was asked to join Beaumont. They told him to do a robbery – he refused. They beat him up and raped his fifteen-year-old sister. To be neutral is to be at the bottom of the pile, and this risk is amplified if someone has left a gang.

In terms of the drug trade, Dan was the Younger to Mike’s Elder. Beyond Mike lay the Faces. The Faces are all adults, and their ages can range from 21 to 50. Gang members use the term to describe all sorts of individuals. The Faces in Waltham Forest have generally lived here since the drugs came, and are either affiliated to or are members of the criminal families that took control of the trade in the 1990s. They control operations on the estates, but rarely live on them. Some have made good money, and own several properties here and abroad, often moving around to avoid detection. Their detachment from the area only serves to emphasize the awe in which they are held when they do appear in it. But it is not enough to single out the Faces as the villains of the piece. The more people you talk to, the more surprising is the picture that emerges.

Richard sips his tea in a cafe in Walthamstow Market. A middle-aged black man, his shades perched on top of his cropped hair, he looks around the cafe. There’s no one in there but us, but still he keeps his voice low. He has lived in Leyton all his life. He watched the Faces rise to the top of the pile, knows some of them on first-name terms and, had he stuck at the gang life, he would have been one himself.

‘When we started, it was all about business. If you want business, you need stability. If you went into another person’s area, you were provoking them into retaliating in some way. And that was bad business. There were no crews. You had people working for you, and you had an agreement with the people who worked in other areas, but that was it. There’d be the odd fight between a bunch of people from here and a bunch of people from Forest Gate, but most of the fights we had were with the National Front.’

It is only when Richard talks about the ancient kingdom of Babylon that he gets excited. He left the gang life and took a job working in church administration, where he became interested in ecclesiastical scripture. He wants to write books about it. ‘I stopped when the fighting began. But you must understand that most Faces are like me. They know what’s good and bad business. There’s no money in fighting.’

Richard tells me about one well-known Face in the area. ‘Many people here see him as a modern-day Robin Hood. He’s like a community worker. He has one aim and one aim only: to sing and rap his boys out of the ghetto. The money that comes from the gang is invested in music – studios, promotion, club nights. If someone makes it to a major label, they give back. That’s the rule. If I had the money to stop the gang problem, he’d be one of the first people who’d get it. Yeah, they still make their money through drugs. That’s how it is here.’

Not all the Faces are philanthropists, but in some cases success, money and respect for the area in which they grew up has made them less threatening as individuals to those who live in Gangland. Elsie is sitting in a church hall. A small, frail woman, she breaks into a broad smile, throws her head back and laughs when I mention the name of a well-known Face in her area. ‘You mean Joel.

Let me tell you something – a few months ago I saw Joel on the estate. First time in ages – I don’t know what he was doing there. And I walked right up to him, and I told him I knew my friend’s son was hanging around with some of his gang. I told him I didn’t want him to be a part of it, and I would tell the police everything I knew about him. He says to me: do you know who I am? And I tell him, of course I know who you are, I’ve lived here longer than you have; I knew your mother. I say, you’ve made your money, you’ve got everyone scared of you, but I’m asking this of you as a mother. And he muttered something, and I knew it would be OK. Everyone here thinks I’m crazy.

‘Let me tell you about another one of these so-called Faces. I knew his mother too. One time he came in with his new trainers, his lip, and he starts back-chatting her. Well, she walks up to him and bang! She butts him right between the eyes. He’s out cold. He comes round, and says, “Momma, how can you do that to me?” And she says, “Don’t think, just because you’re the big man here, I’m not your mother no more. And that I don’t know how to check you when you play up.”‘

Don’t be fooled: these are high-powered criminals who have committed all manner of serious crimes. But in terms of the violence on the street, their current input is often negligible. It happens on their behalf – under the umbrella of a body they may have envisaged and named – but not always at their behest. Richard sees some of the Faces as Don Corleone figures, struggling to maintain control of empires that have lost the rules and respect they once had. ‘No Face I know would ever have recruited a child when they were on the street. They wouldn’t have shot at someone’s house with their family inside. But there’s been an escalation. Everyone’s a gangster now. And if one gang decides it’s acceptable, so it has to be for them too. Usually the precedent isn’t set by a Face – it’s an Elder, trying to make a name for himself.’

*

While the British media often mentions gangs by names, it rarely gets the essence of their make-up. What, if anything, is a gang? It has developed into a catch-all term to describe all sorts of urban groups, but criminologists and community safety professionals have struggled with the term for a long time. Perhaps the best and most simple definition has been offered by Simon Hallsworth and Tara Young of London Metropolitan University: ‘A relatively durable, predominantly street-based group of young people who see themselves (and are seen by others) as a discernable group for whom crime and violence is integral to the group’s identity.’

They place the gang between two extremes: below it the peer group (‘a small, unorganized, transient grouping occupying the same space with a common history. Crime is not integral to their self-definition’), and above it the organized criminal group (‘Members are professionally involved in crime for personal gain operating almost exclusively in the “grey” or illegal marketplace’). For Hallsworth and Young, each tier feeds upward – peer-group members become street gang members, who one day become members of organized criminal groups. However, they would also admit that in practice the distinctions between all three groups are blurred. There are members of peer groups who interact with the organized gangs and every other permutation.

I have drawn my own simple definition of what constitutes a gang for the purposes of this book. All of the gangs covered are groups that have a name and a territory, and are involved in serious drug dealing or violent crime. Even this definition, though broad, must be qualified. The first major point to bear in mind is that not all gang-involved young people are gang members. It is common for a young person to be associated with a crew, yet not regard themselves as a member of that gang. They may identify with the culture, but more often than not it is where they live or who their friends are that leads others to perceive them as gangsters. This is important; as I have mentioned media coverage often draws a line between ‘gang’ and ‘non-gang’, when in fact the line is far more blurred.

This may also appear to contradict the clear drug-dealing structure that we have seen so far. It is a complex issue, which will be dealt with in the first four chapters. The second chapter will mention some of the causes behind today’s gangs. The third chapter will, in the light of this knowledge, explain how they can be both organized and disorganized, and the fourth chapter will show how they have changed in recent years. With this theory in place the book will then look around the country to see how the pattern is mirrored.

For now we shall look at the gangs as individual bodies. In the light of how well ordered the drug trade is, the gangs themselves appear chaotic. There are two large gangs in Waltham Forest: Piff City and Beaumont. Piff City is based around the Chingford Hall Estate and parts of Leyton, while Beaumont is found around the estate of the same name. Both gangs are large and, as such, have elements of the criminal organization at the top, but the less-involved members could be seen as street gangsters, or peer-group members. If asked, they would all say they were members of the gangs, but the level of crime they commit varies a great deal. Some are killers or high-level drug dealers with connections across the country: they might be dotted around the borough, a long way from the estates where the gangs originated, while others are young people who are local to the estate and whose principal criminal activity consists of anti-social behaviour.

This disorganization is also true of the gangs’ relationships. Professor Pitts’ report attempts to detail the endless cycle of alliances and altercations (‘beefs’) within the borough. At the time of the report’s publication in 2007, a simple overview would read thus: the main battle is between the Beaumont Gang and Piff City. Then come the smaller gangs. Drive is based around the centre of the borough: Wood Street, Marlow, Atlee Terrace and Coppermill. It contains around 30 to 40 members. It is aligned with Priory Court , a small gang of about 30 which is allied through family ties to Beaumont, and it is also aligned with Oliver Close, which is part of Piff, thus at war with Beaumont. Priory Court, for its part, also has family links with Cathall, which happens to be part of Piff City. If this is hard for a reader to follow, it gives a good indication of how chaotic the lives of those involved with gangs are. Later chapters will show that, contrary to popular belief, many of these rivalries and alliances have nothing to do with competition for drugs markets. As we shall see, to truly understand the gangs, it helps to dispense with their names altogether.

Bill, a local pastor, and his outreach team (six youths, aged between fifteen and sixteen) are striding through Gangland. They are looking for the Youngers. Once his team finds them, they talk about what’s happening on the street. Sometimes they talk about God. It might not sound hopeful, but Bill and his team receive a good response. Bill’s team all hail from the area, and the fact they talk the language of the street makes them more respected than any social worker. The chatter in the car is of rap music: ‘DMX’s new stuff is the bomb.’ ‘Yeah, but can he do it live? That’s the test.’ It is of football, of another worker who says he’s ill: ‘He’s way too scared to come down these ends.’ As we enter the estate, the chatter dies down. We get out.

The estate, given its reputation, doesn’t seem intimidating. Everything is modern – the buildings are a mixture of new houses and a central courtyard which is flanked by new blocks of flats, freshly painted in bright colours. In another part of the city, it would be positively luxurious. But this is what you notice about Gangland the more time you spend there. These days, the estates are rarely dilapidated. Money has been invested in regeneration: with a few exceptions it is brand new, or in the process of being built. It’s the same all over London – ambitious schemes to rebuild the homes of the poor, in the hope that doing so will rebuild their lives. On the one hand, it has undoubtedly improved living standards. But on the other, the movement of established residents has damaged the sense of community, while in the midst of all this newness, the same problems remain. The brand new buildings do not stop the tenants suffering from low incomes or unemployment. The relocation of residents to low-rise accommodation can make life harder for any families who are involved in the gangs – a flat in a tower block is far harder to shoot at.

The things that threaten you are the things you least suspect. A twenty-something man cycles past on a tiny BMX bicycle. He cuts a preposterous figure, but the outreach workers shrink from his glare as he cycles past. He’s a gang member who’s on a perfect mode of transport from which to ‘gun and run’.

Everything happens so quickly on the street. We take a walk around a block of flats, and when we return to the entrance a heavily muscled man is being held down by several police officers. A crowd of teenagers are shouting at them. When did they get there – the man, the police, the Youngers? The place seemed deserted when we arrived.

In terms of crime, Britain is two very distinct nations. One nation, Gangland, is regularly afflicted by crime of all kinds – the other, rarely. The first nation is so fraught that only the most serious crime makes the headlines; the other so rarely afflicted that any serious crime that happens there is reported in minute detail. Tim Hope, a Professor of Criminology at Keele University, has demonstrated this with his use of the British Crime Survey.

The survey divides neighbourhoods into ten categories on the basis of the intensity of the criminal victimization of their residents. By 1992, the chances of a resident in the lowest crime neighbourhood being assaulted had fallen to a point where it was barely measurable. Residents in the highest crime neighbourhoods, by contrast, risked being assaulted twice a year. They also experienced twice the rate of property crime and four times the rate of personal crime than those in the next worst category. Indeed, by 2003 Hope was arguing that ‘half the country suffers four fifths of the total amount of household property crime.’ The other half suffers the remainder. These findings point to a significant redistribution of victimization towards the poorest and most vulnerable over the intervening ten years. An estate like this lies at the heart of Gangland.

Back with the pastor, we find a bunch of Youngers hanging out on a corner near the main road. ‘Two weeks ago,’ says one of them, ‘they stabbed Billy. He was right here, innit. Three of them, and one of them put a blade in his leg. We found him and fucked him right up, bruv. He’s never going to talk. We’ve done him before as well. He’ll never talk.’

Professor Pitts’ report made the point that crime in an area like this bears several hallmarks: it is committed by and against the young local residents (all of whom are of a similar age, ethnicity and class); and the same people are victimized again and again. Crime in these areas is also embedded – these adolescents will not grow out of it. More importantly, it is under-reported; in an estate like this, no one talks. Crimes become infamous: for instance, the man who threatened to inform on the Beaumont Boys. They kidnapped him, stabbed him seventeen times and sent the video to his mother. Did it happen? There are no official reports of it, but that means little – the 2000 British Crime Survey estimated that the true extent of crime is four and a half times larger than reported: 77 per cent of crime is in what criminologists call ‘the dark figure’. Besides, the point is that everyone thinks it did.

Being in a gang usually means being part of the drug business, and being part of the drug business means involvement in gun-related violence. I look at the Younger who has just finished talking. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says ‘If you see the police – Warn a Brother’, with the Warner Brothers’ ‘WB’ symbol behind it. You see that symbol around – on cars, on the Youngers’ bikes. Some things mark him out as a teenager – he is tall, but gangling rather than imposing. He has a teenager’s downy moustache and acne, yet he talks like a killer. ‘We got heat. You need one with our rep. We all share. Ain’t gonna talk about it no more.’

The gun is intrinsic to the business. Everyone wants one and they are easily accessible: a group of teenagers will club together to buy one, or they can be hired. There were twelve fatal shootings in Waltham Forest between 2005 and 2006, but 493 incidents of gun-enabled crime, which comprises everything from threats with a replica to murder. Fifty-three per cent of perpetrators were aged between eleven and twenty years old, and 19 per cent of the victims were aged between one and ten years old.

‘We need it. There’s beef around here,’ continues another Younger. ‘It’s gonna be like at the King’s Head.’ The reasons for tension can be unexpected. Last year there had been a killing in the borough, and the police were after the wrong man. Word spread they were looking for him and it was assumed a rival gang had grassed him up. It culminated in a shoot-out at a local pub involving youths in bullet-proof vests. Like most shooting incidents, it went unreported.

Life in Gangland is geared around violence. All of the Youngers are wearing gloves. It’s a part of gang wear; a reference to the fact that combat leaves forensic evidence on one’s hands. Violence is a young man’s trade. Their offences will be posted on websites, which shows their fearlessness – they are untouchable. Being mugged is often the prelude to a life of street crime: earn respect, or you’re fair game.

The Younger continues, looking down at his shoes. ‘It’s always over the rocks.’ He stabs an angry finger up the road, towards the Beaumont Estate. ‘Too many of that lot are using what they sell. Bad for business, blood. They’re strung out, and then they come down, then it kicks off over nothing.’

Clive, a pensioner, is tired of the Youngers in his road. He’s seen a bunch of them smashing up every car in the street. He’s seen a gang of fifty attack another gang, leaving one man injured with knife wounds to his head. ‘It scares me so much. They never make a sound, then suddenly all hell breaks loose. I don’t want to open the door. I keep the lights off in the front room. I don’t want anyone to know I’m in – but then I wonder, if they think the house is empty will they try to come in anyway?’ His road shouldn’t have seen all this. It’s a quiet, respectable cul-de-sac in the Chingford area. For some reason a gang decided the young people in it have a relationship with one of their rivals. They don’t. But neutral territory can become gang territory by default.

Next door, his neighbours, a young couple, are scared to let their children play on the lawn outside the house. What if a bullet were to hit them? The weight of terror that young gang members create among their community is almost impossible to quantify. They are simply a constant stress, a threat which can never be confronted for fear of recriminations.

Everything about James screams gang: the thin designer wind-cheater, the black gloves, the spotless trainers, the way his eyes dart around the coffee shop where I meet him. He’s not happy out of his turf. He smokes a cigarette nervously. He doesn’t trust me. He hardly trusts anyone. Like Dan, his language is infused with violence and films. He is a gang Elder.

‘I don’t plan more than six months ahead, bruv. I don’t know what’ll happen to me by then.’

No one thinks about the end point when they join a gang. Those who are most involved are highly likely to end up doing a long prison sentence, descend into drug addiction, or be killed. These people are, whatever the Government says, economically and socially excluded. To be thus, to see no hope for their future, leaves them angry and frustrated. The daily brutalities of their lives mean they occupy a different world to most of us – a world in which they have switched off their emotions.

‘You know what I think? I reckon the reason we don’t get help in the ghetto is because the system needs us.’

You all a bunch of fuckin’ assholes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be? You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin’ fingers and say, ‘That’s the bad guy.’ So…what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you. Come on. Make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through! Better get outta his way!

I lose count of the number of times I hear a gang member deliver a variation of this speech. It’s from Brian De Palma’s 1983 film Scarface. It’s delivered by Tony Montana (played by Al Pacino), the gangster who has worked his way up from nothing, who addresses the patrons of the expensive restaurant he’s in. It’s easy to see why this speech appeals. It emphasizes that the gang’s crimes are not theirs, but a fault of the system. There is a distance from reality here. The option to live off welfare, to train in something – they aren’t considered acceptable in Gangland. You’ll become a victim. ‘I’m trying to get out. The last few months is the first time I’ve been able to feel. I can’t describe it. Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a hit man.’

Another film homage, this time to Goodfellas. James tells me about a gunfight that took place on the Lea Bridge Road, interspersed with language reminiscent from popular gangster movies. Some boys from Hackney had been hassling the Shotters. So he and his crew turned up there, and saw them. They had their vests on, and the other crew didn’t. They shot out of the car window, and hit one of them in the leg. His friends tried to drag him to their car, firing back at James and his crew. He felt the passenger window smash, and a bullet flew past his nose. Both cars whirled away from each other, back to their estates.

I have a friend who lives on that road. She’s a doctor. Didn’t they care who they hit?

‘That’s just the rules of the road. It’s like the Serengeti. If you see something move, you clip it.’

Gang members are emotionally unavailable. The only passion many of them feel is for their area; not for people. In a lifestyle where death is so common, friendship is simply too much of a risk.

The role of the police will be a constant theme, but comments made to me by one former gang member provide an idea of how even they can have a negative impact. He told me about the problems that have occurred since a Face called Razor was sent down for money laundering. It’s the best way for the police to catch people at the top level: the wall of silence on the street means that financial investigations, Al Capone-style, are the best way to catch them. But the effects can be unexpected: ‘Ever since they sent Razor down, it’s been hell. Razor controlled the street. No one fucked with Razor, because if they did they thought he’d hit them twice as hard. But Razor was clever. He knew his Sun Tzu. Very rare that he’d take any action at all. He knew how to instil fear without doing anything. He made sure the Elders didn’t step out of line – didn’t send the Youngers off to fight unless they knew it was necessary, made sure that no one from his crew was stepping out of line. It’d be bad business.

‘But now he’s gone everyone wants to be the new Razor. And these new guys think that power comes from the gun. They don’t get what made him so powerful. You’ve got Youngers throwing their weight around, hoping to scare everyone, you’ve got Elders making them do crazy shit hoping the Faces will let them take his place – it’s fucked up. If they could shoot straight, we’d already have had one bloodbath. And fuck knows how much more shit is going to go down once Razor gets out of jail…’

It is by such issues that everyone’s lives are affected here. There are dozens of Elders in this borough, perhaps 200 Youngers; and hundreds more young people who are affiliated to a gang if not part of the core. When you include the parents and siblings affected by them, the number runs into the thousands. When you include the number of residents in the area affected by the violence and crime that’s a part of gang life, that number of people skyrockets further, to a point where it cannot be quantified. They are not distressed on an irregular basis: if they live in Gangland, it dominates their lives.

Further Education colleges are perceived by the area’s youth as ‘belonging’ to the gangs, subsumed as they are by the wider territorialism. This issue can influence the youths’ decisions on which college they choose to attend, depending on where they live. I met one youth in the area who had changed college due to the fact that he lived in Chingford but was attending an institution primarily seen as Beaumont. This notional affiliation hasn’t led to many serious incidents so far, but there have been two stabbings outside one of them. Youth workers find what they do is shaped by gang territories: they can’t get the youths from an area together to play sport or games, or dance, or do drama – because another gang’s Youngers will intimidate them en route. The most successful projects involve bussing the youths to a destination outside the city. Once there, they usually get on, even if they are from opposing gangs. How much difference does that make when they get back home? It is hard to say, but one youth worker told me in no uncertain terms that she felt the lure of gangsterism was too strong, no matter how often the children were brought together in neutral territory.

When the Hackney crew invaded James’s territory, it was something of an oddity. Previously, the only connection the Waltham Forest boys had with their neighbouring borough was one of business; it was rare for them to head over the Lea to engage with them. One of the good things about Waltham Forest’s Gangland is that it is mostly self-contained. Everyone knows who their aggressors and allies are. But Hackney’s gangs were changing. There were new players on the scene, and they were unafraid to spread their wings.

Copyright © 2008 by John Heale