Increasingly the families of criminals are also finding themselves the target of kidnap gangs. In July 2002 the wife and son of drug-smuggler Robert Garlick were abducted after visiting him at Manchester prison. Denise Garlick and her son David were thrown into the back of a Transit van and taken to an address in the Cheetham Hill district of the city, where they were handcuffed and blindfolded. Members of the kidnap gang then arranged for Denise to call her husband and tell him to arrange to pay a ransom of £250,000 if he wanted to see them alive again.
Garlick informed the police who arranged for part of the ransom to be paid in order to be able to track those responsible. After more than a week in captivity, Denise and David were released unharmed. The gang, led by Andre Burke and Tunde Adiodun, were watched by a surveillance team as they spent more than £10,000 before they were arrested.
By the time of the Garlick incident Greater Manchester Police were well versed in the art of dealing with kidnaps. But just three short years earlier, the force had never dealt with a single case of the crime. Then, over the course of one fateful weekend in May 1999, following a pattern usually seen with buses and bad luck, three came along at once.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ten minutes into the second half, the crowd watching the big-screen coverage of Manchester United v. Leeds at the Ship public house in Salford suddenly fell silent. A lone voice had cut through the boozy cheers and asked for Stephen Lydiate, one of the pub’s regulars, who was sitting at the bar with his teenage son. The thirty-two-year-old demolition worker turned towards the door just in time to see a masked man in combat gear fire a volley of shots from a submachine-gun. At least eight bullets found their target and Lydiate fell to the floor in a mass of blood and mangled flesh.
‘I was at home getting ready to go out when the phone went,’ Lydiate’s sister, Louise, recalls. ‘It was a mate of mine at the Ship. She was in a complete state, yelling down the phone again and again, “Stephen’s been shot, Stephen’s been shot.” I got there as fast as I could. There was blood everywhere, total chaos, horrible. People had been hit by ricochets – I had to step over their bodies to get to him. Right away I was sick, physically sick, then I passed out three times. Stephen was a mess, he looked dead, he honestly did. I couldn’t believe he was still alive. I kept running outside, looking up and down the road. “Where’s the fucking ambulance, where’s the fucking ambulance?” But there was nothing. The police wouldn’t let the paramedics anywhere near him until they got an armed team over there. It took more than half an hour.’
Lydiate had been hit in the chest, abdomen, left arm, elbow and upper thigh. One bullet had torn through a kidney, almost ripping it in half, while others had broken several of his ribs. As the doctors fought desperately to save his life they noticed that his heart and lungs were curiously unscathed – the bullets had only penetrated the outer edges of his body. Lydiate, they concluded, had been wearing a bullet-proof jacket, though someone in the pub had seen fit to remove it long before help arrived. Despite this, his injuries were so severe that he was not expected to survive, and on each of the six nights that followed his family were told that he would not last until the morning. That he finally made it off the critical list was seen as no less than miraculous.
The moment Lydiate regained consciousness the police were at his bedside eager to hear the full story. They suspected Lydiate of running a drugs gang and that the attempt on his life had been made by a rival firm. Lydiate stunned the officers by refusing to make a statement, file a complaint or assist them in any way. On Thursday 6 May 1999, less than two weeks after he was shot, barely able to walk, in constant pain and with one bullet still lodged in his groin, Lydiate discharged himself and went home.
The streets of Salford have long been associated with violence, a legacy of the seventy-five thousand dockers who worked there during the heyday of the Manchester Ship Canal. Once the very heart of commerce in the North-west, the city has spent the last fifty years fighting rising unemployment and the ravages of industrial decline. When the last of the docks finally closed down, the densely built, poor-quality housing that once fuelled Salford’s rapid expansion provided the perfect breeding-ground for a generation that excelled at little other than petty crime and drunken brawling.
In the summer of 1992, following a week-long orgy of rioting, robbery and arson attacks, which included two incidents of shots being fired at the police, a local councillor declared that organised crime in Salford was being run by one man, Paul Massey. Describing himself as a ‘security consultant’, Massey allegedly controlled protection rackets for contracts for nightclub doormen worth millions. He also commanded so much respect that virtually nothing moved in the city without his approval.
‘People used to look up to him, listen to what he had to say,’ says Lydiate’s sister Louise, who also happens to be Paul Massey’s wife. ‘They called him a Mr Big but it wasn’t like that, he was never a criminal. When he was around, people felt safe. Nowadays, the old folk round here won’t even come out of their homes, that’s how bad it is.’
Massey was fiercely anti-drugs, and while he was around the amount of heroin and cocaine sold in Salford was kept to a minimum, often to the chagrin of others on the underworld scene. But then Massey was jailed for fourteen years after a man was stabbed at a stag party, and suddenly it was open season.
Within weeks dozens of drug-dealers and couriers had been kneecapped, stabbed and bludgeoned as rival factions fought for control of the trade. There were attacks with samurai swords and machetes; one man was shot in the leg and had to have it amputated, another’s hand was almost completely severed. ‘The first we would hear about it was when we got a call from the hospital,’ says Detective Superintendent Dave Brown, the man in charge of the Salford patch. ‘By the time Stephen Lydiate was shot the situation was rapidly getting out of hand. Some of the attacks were very nasty but no one was willing to say anything. The climate of fear running through the city was like nothing we had ever known. And just when we thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse, they did.’
It was in the early hours of Saturday morning, little more than a week after Lydiate had come out of hospital, that petty criminal James Kent, who had fallen asleep on the sofa in his living room, woke to find himself surrounded. There were four armed men, all wearing Balaclavas, dark camouflage trousers and bullet-proof jackets with ‘POLICE’ printed in large white letters on one side. The man nearest him was carrying two handguns, both fitted with silencers.
Kent made a dash for a nearby open window but was grabbed from behind and hit on the back of the head with the butt of a machine-gun. Again Kent tried to get away and the man with the two pistols lined one up and shot Kent through his left leg. Reeling in pain and with blood spurting from the wound, Kent fought on, desperate to reach the window. He was then shot in the other leg and collapsed to the ground.
At that point his girlfriend, who had been asleep upstairs, appeared bleary-eyed on the landing. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ she asked.
‘Armed police,’ came the reply. ‘Get back in your room right now.’
Kent knew they were lying. From their voices he recognised two of the men as Norman Shawcross and Jason Gregson, both associates of Stephen Lydiate. Once more he attempted to fight off his captors. The man with the two pistols then leant forward and hissed in Kent’s ear, one hand pointing up the stairs, ‘If you don’t stop fucking about, I’ll put the next one in her.’ Kent ceased struggling, a pair of police-issue handcuffs was snapped on his wrists and, clad only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, he was dragged outside to a waiting van.
Detective Superintendent Brown hadn’t been due to work that weekend but had agreed to cover for a colleague. He arrived shortly before nine a.m. and began looking through the overnight incident logs. At four a.m. a burnt-out bloodstained van had been found in the Lowton area; at eight a.m. a call had come through from a woman claiming her boyfriend had been shot and driven away in a van at three thirty a.m. It was while Detective Superintendent Brown was at the scene that police were first told Kent’s abduction was directly linked to the shooting of Lydiate. The information came from a reliable underworld source but it made little sense: Kent and Lydiate barely knew each other and were not thought to have fallen out. Brown spent all day and most of the following night searching for Kent’s body – it seemed a good bet that he had been killed – but made little progress. ‘To be honest, we didn’t really know what was going on, we were at a bit of a loss.’
In fact Kent was still alive, but only just. He had been taken to Hickey Farm, an isolated area of land close to Wigan, shown a hole in the ground and told that it was where he would be buried, then thrown into a nearby cabin. Gregson and Shawcross wrapped him in a plastic sheet ‘to prevent any evidence being left behind’, then put the barrels of their guns into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Kent shut his eyes and prepared to die. When the empty guns clicked harmlessly, Gregson and Shawcross burst out laughing.
It wasn’t until midday that Kent finally found out the reason he was being held – Shawcross explained that they wanted him to provide the whereabouts of the Jamma gang, the men behind the shooting of Lydiate. When Kent told them he did not know, the torture began in earnest. Another member of the gang, Michael Boyle, appeared and hit Kent over the head with a machete telling him, ‘You’d better start talking.’
A man in a Balaclava appeared. ‘You see this man?’ Shawcross said. ‘He’s going to rape you. He’s going to fuck you up the arse unless you talk.’ The masked man moved forward but as he got closer he declined: Kent’s legs were bleeding too much, it was putting him off.
Instead Gregson left the cabin and returned with the branch of a tree. As Shawcross and Boyle held Kent’s legs together, Gregson forced the end of the branch three or four inches into the bullet wound, first in Kent’s left leg and then in the right leg. Kent screamed in agony as fresh blood spurted out. Shawcross began pistol-whipping him once more, telling him to shut up. Gregson reached for a nearby packet of salt and poured the contents over Kent’s open wounds. His screams became louder and more frantic. At that point Shawcross reached for a mobile phone, dialled a number and held it out so the person at the other end could hear Kent screaming.
As the ordeal continued throughout the day, Kent still refused to give the gang the information they wanted, but only because he did not have it. Crazed by the power they had over their captive, Gregson and Shawcross decided to make some money on the side. They made Kent call his brother and ask him to pay a ransom of £50,000 to ensure his safe release. It wasn’t until Sunday morning that Kent’s brother called the police. Incredibly, although Greater Manchester Police is one of Britain’s largest forces, it had never had to deal with a single case of kidnap. Every force in the country has a set procedure for dealing with the crime, based on a blueprint first devised by the Metropolitan Police. Once the news that Kent had been kidnapped came through, Detective Superintendent Brown pulled his dusty procedure manuals from the shelf and began to read. Soon, calls to Kent’s brother were being redirected to police headquarters and specialist surveillance equipment had been brought in to attempt to track down the kidnappers. The family had managed to collect £10,000 and a drop was arranged for early Monday morning. With any luck, detectives hoped, the outbreak of Manchester’s newest crime could be nipped in the bud.
Just after midnight, another of Salford’s petty criminals, Anthony Shenton, was woken by the sound of his front door being blown off its hinges by two 12-bore shotguns. He was still half asleep when five men, led by Shawcross and Gregson, burst into his bedroom. A brief struggle ended when Shenton was shot in the leg. He was then dragged into a waiting car and driven away at high speed. He was taken to a former council house in the Lower Kersal district of the city. Placed in a room upstairs, he was held briefly with James Kent, who had been moved from the farm. Kent noticed that Shenton was losing a huge amount of blood from his leg – the bullet had ripped open an artery – and implored him to tell the gang the whereabouts of the Jammas. ‘Just tell them where they are, they don’t want us, just tell them,’ he pleaded. Gregson decided further encouragement was needed. He told Shenton that his wife and son had been kidnapped and that his wife would be raped unless he helped them. He then poured salt into Shenton’s wounds, forcing him to bite down on a pair of handcuffs to prevent him crying out.
News of Shenton’s abduction came through to police headquarters just as the team were hoping to pounce on Kent’s captives. ‘No one knew what the hell was going on,’ says Detective Superintendent Brown. ‘One minute we’d never had a kidnapping before, the next minute we have two at the same time. But was it the work of one gang or did we have two rival gangs battling each other? No one had a clue.’
The only lead was Kent’s brother and the money drop. At three twenty a.m., the kidnappers called and gave an address for the drop. Kent’s brother returned a little later without the money and without his brother. The trail had gone cold again.
By eleven fifteen on Monday morning, Detective Superintendent Brown had been working more than twenty-six hours without a break but was still no closer to finding Kent or Shenton. For all he knew either or both could have been dead. It was at this time that Michael Davidson, another Salford ‘face’, who was in his BMW with his girlfriend, Joanne, and their two young children, popped into a shop to get some cigarettes. Seconds later he ran back to the car, panic etched into his face.
‘Drive, just fucking drive,’ he gasped. Joanne put her foot down and sped off. A red Rover loomed large in her rear-view mirror and several shots whistled past the car. The Rover overtook the BMW and skidded across its bonnet, forcing it to stop. As the gunshots echoed around her, Joanne fought with the gearstick and put the car into reverse, leaving a trail of smouldering rubber behind her. Once more the Rover overtook and blocked the BMW and more shots were fired. Desperate to save his family, Davidson jumped out of the car and rushed towards his attackers, dropping to the ground in agony as a bullet tore through his body. By then police sirens were wailing in the background and the occupants of the Rover made good their escape.