SUNDAY TIMES ARTICLE ON 'NIGHTMARE'
Sunday, 07-Nov-1999 18:12:00
 

'Nightmare' plots his new football war

by Martin James and Jon Ungoed-Thomas

SPRAWLED in the back of a Mercedes on the M1, one of Britain's most feared football hooligans brandishes his mobile phone to marshal more than 150 young men for a riot. Known to his followers as "Nightmare", Andrew Frain tracks the movements of fellow thugs travelling by coach as he prepares to telephone the leader of a rival gang with the words: "It's the Nightmare calling - are you boys ready?"

He grins as he boasts of an attack in which a policeman was stabbed in the face: "We was laughing at him . . . he said, 'You can't do that - I'm an off-duty policeman'."

An 18-month undercover investigation has exposed the ringleaders of Britain's most notorious gang of football hooligans and uncovered evidence of a resurgence of the widespread thuggery associated with the sport in the 1980s.
It shows how a small circle of thugs is co-ordinating growing attacks on rival fans. With the first of two England-Scotland football matches a week away, senior police officers admit that the sport is facing a renewed threat from hooliganism.
 
Fresh figures from the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) show that arrests for football-related violent disorder have almost doubled
in a year, from 52 in 1997-98 to 100 last season.
Modern hooligans shun scarves and hats in team colours for plain clothes and baseball caps to shield their faces from surveillance cameras.

Many are not only members of the right-wing group Combat 18, but also have Ulster loyalist sympathies. They generally prefer cocaine to lager.

Hidden camera footage of a Chelsea match in Copenhagen last November reveals that Jason Marriner, 32, is an organiser with Frain, 35, of the
notorious hooligan gang, the Chelsea Headhunters. Marriner, who runs a tyre business in Hanworth, southwest London, declares to his
followers in a Danish bar: "We've come here to have a war."

It was the Chelsea Headhunters who organised an ambush of Scottish supporters in Trafalgar Square during the Euro 96 championship. Forty people were injured and an ambulance was damaged in clashes. Police arrested 72 people. NCIS fears a repeat of the violence during the
England-Scotland games.

Marriner unsuspectingly reveals the fascist affiliations of Chelsea thugs, explaining how he and Frain - a member of the Ku Klux Klan - visited
Auschwitz and mocked visitors with Nazi salutes: "I quickly took the photo [of Frain doing a Nazi salute] and a Polish geezer starts crying. I think I
put the final nail in the coffin when I tried to get into the oven."

Marriner, who avoids detection by football intelligence units by never travelling directly to international matches, is later shown on the football terraces in Copenhagen making a Nazi salute and clutching a banner scrawled with obscenities about the striker Brian Laudrup.

Ken Bates, the Chelsea football club chairman, pledged to ban the "scum" who held the banner in Copenhagen. Marriner, however, still attends matches and was even able to renew his season ticket for the Upper East stand last May.

It took reporter Donal MacIntyre months to be accepted into the inner councils of the Headhunters gang.

In an effort to ingratiate himself,
MacIntyre, 32, had a Chelsea emblem tattooed on his arm and moved in next to Marriner.

In a documentary to be broadcast on BBC1 on Wednesday, Marriner admits organising "troops" for carefully planned attacks on other gangs of hooligans.

There is also a high level of communication between rival gangs to arrange the venue for fights.

MacIntyre and members of the production team are being given personal protection by the BBC. The police are to be sent a copy of the programme

9 Nov 1999
http://ultrasworld.com/news9.htm