Donal MacIntyre

UNTAMED MALADY – As part of my investigations into the criminal underworld I met some of Manchester’s feral teen’s. These were among the most dangerous individuals I have ever met. It does not bode well for the future of our inner cities. The following are transcripts of my interviews with them in the Guardian. Patrick Butler, Guardian Society Editor, takes up the story.

Donal MacIntyre seems baffled when I ask him if the teenage gangsters he has interviewed are for real. “I have met dangerous people all around the world,” he says. “I’ve been held at gun point. But these kids scared me more.”

The kids in question are Ryan and Wayne, 19 and 16 respectively – one slightly chubby, baby-faced, with an unnerving habit of sucking his thumb in tight situations, the other cherubic and sharp. As drug dealers, who place great value on the power of violence, they would be immensely proud of this comparison, though, as MacIntyre suspects, they are unlikely to read the Guardian.

MacIntyre has been spending some time with the pair. Not this time for a TV documentary – though he has recently made several films on the criminal underworld – but for an academic work he is preparing on the phenomenon of “feral” children.

Ryan has been in “the game” for about three years, starting as a grafter for other dealers, and working his way up. He now “owns” his own patch of rundown Manchester, on which he appears to do business with relative impunity and which he regulates with startling brutality. Wayne is Ryan’s sidekick. A little bit on Ryan’s coat tails, says MacIntyre. He doesn’t have Ryan’s “capacity for violence”.

I persist with the theory that perhaps Ryan is exaggerating, telling stories, glamorising his petty hoodlum existence with tall tales framed in the discourse of gangster movies and the US rap music he obsesses about.

MacIntyre says he spoke to an older member of Manchester’s gangland fraternity about Ryan. “Be careful,” was the advice, “those guys are dangerous.” The police agree. They told him that the younger generation of criminals are far tougher than their elders: unlike them, they have no codes of honour, however perverse; no sense of “corporate” or family loyalties; no moral compass.

What worries the police is that the youngsters profess not to care about anything except material possessions, that their violence is void of meaning. “I asked Ryan if anyone had taught him right or wrong,” says MacIntyre. “His response was: ‘No one taught me right or wrong, but I can count money.’”

The source of such disfunctionality is the family, MacIntyre suspects. Ryan’s father regularly beat him, and his mother. When his mother fled to a refuge for battered wives, Ryan was cast out on the streets to fend for himself. “By the time he was 15, all hope of a normal existence was extinguished,” MacIntyre says. “And there’s little or no chance of rehabilitation.”

In a moment of sentimentality, the film-maker offered Wayne a job in his TV production company, a chance to redeem himself. Wayne turned him down flat. “Why would I want to do that?” he said without a thought.

MacIntyre believes that youths like Wayne and Ryan – and he says he has spoken to about 50 lads in similar situations – are simply not interested in ordinary work. It is neither exciting nor lucrative enough. But they are not lazy: MacIntyre describes them as “goal-orientated” and tenacious; violent and immoral, certainly, but also ambitious, focused, entrepreneurial.

Prison almost certainly looms for Ryan and Wayne; although they and the police both know, it will change little, may even make things worse. “To them, prison is a holiday,” MacIntyre says. “Nothing the system can do can even come close to the way they were treated by their parents and family.”

I ask he if saw any redeeming features in Ryan or Wayne. MacIntyre pauses. “I liked bits of them. Once you understand where they come from, you can give them a little leeway.”

The policy imperative, he says, is to save the next generation of Ryans and Waynes. He has high hopes for extended schools – “effectively, keeping these children away from their disfunctional parents” – but he fears that societal trends are unstoppable. “Unless we decide to abandon or ghettoise huge swaths of our cities, we have to understand and address this.”

Edited extracts from the transcript of Donal MacIntyre’s talks with the two teenage drug dealers

Work

Donal MacIntyre: How would you describe your job?

Wayne: A and B sales.

Ryan: Supply and demand.

Wayne: Class A and class B.

Economics

Ryan: We’ve tried getting jobs, innit? We get laughed at.

Wayne: I had a couple of jobs. I’ve done building, I’ve done labouring, I’ve done plumbing. It’s all petty money though.

Ryan: We’re just not the sort of people to work. We like the easy money, we like the lifestyle.

Wayne: You don’t get the kind of money we do doing a job. We can sit on our arse all day doing fuck all and make twice as much money as someone working a full week.

Ethics

Ryan: We really don’t care. We’ll rob you or shoot you, anything.

DM: Would you shoot?

Ryan: Yeah.

Wayne: Yeah.

DM: Why don’t you care? Normal people care, I think.

Wayne: You can’t care. If you care, then you can’t get about in life.

Risk

Ryan: The thing you got to worry about is getting stopped and searched by the police. There’s this new thing where you plug it, which means you put it in between your arse cheeks, or you balls it, which means you just put it in between your balls, so when they search your pockets and socks, ‘cos they’re only allowed to search so much, they never find anything. I’ve been searched thousands of times with drugs on me. I got pulled about three weeks ago, running a red light and I had a key of white on me, in my pocket, and I’m sat and I’m talking to the copper and he came over, drug searched, so I picked the knife up here ‘cos I thought he was going to search me, and he just come over and said, ‘I can’t be arsed’. And if that one copper had done his job proper, I’d be locked away now and he’d be dead.

Prison

Ryan: When you used to get locked up, what used to happen is you’d be out of the game, but . . . if I’m locked up, my phone’s still on the street, which means my grafter, who works for me, is still making the money. He just puts it away for me, so by the time I get out, I’m a lot richer than I was ‘cos my money’s still being earned and I’m not spending it, ‘cos the Queen’s been paying for me to stay with her, so we eat free and get out and live happy . . . That’s what they’ve got to realise when they’re letting us out. They think we’ve changed, but we’ve not ‘cos we’ve got a lot more money and we’re a lot [more] sensible ‘cos prison wises you up. ‘Cos you meet people in there that’s been where we’ve been, done what we’ve done, and they’ve learned from it, and now they’re expanding, and then they’ll just say to you, ‘This is what you should do’ and they say, ‘When you get out, they give you [a] number and they say phone, we’ll sort some business out’. And they’re giving us contacts, from Liverpool, Wales, people from other parts of the country. They’re giving us contacts, for where we can find bigger and better ways.

Business

DM: How did you become dealers?

Ryan: I started out as a grafter. I started out working for someone else. Here’s how it was: I was driving, I give him a lift. He said, ‘If you do this for me I’ll give you £30′. So I drove to these four gaffs, whatever, he’s come out, he’s had a wedge of money. I’ve seen it, I’ve liked it, I’ve wanted it, know what I mean. We was thinking of robbing him . . . He said, ‘If you want any more, come and see me.’ We spent the £30, so I phoned him up, and he said, ‘Right, I’ll set you on a wage, £50 a day. You just answer the phone’. So basically, we was just chilling all day. The phone would answer, we’d go round the corner, pass something to someone, go back and we’d have bare dough in our pocket.

Business (2)

Ryan: Then after a couple of weeks I thought, ‘Yeah man, I like this, but I don’t like passing him all the dough’. So I says, ‘Right, I’m not doing it no more.’ Then I met a contact that passes big amounts out and started from scratch. Then he met me, said he was going to do this and do that, so we said, ‘All right, bring it, you want it, come and do it’. Had a scrap with him, bit his face off, end of subject. He just quit. He didn’t want none any more ‘cos he couldn’t handle it. I took over his patch. Then I started meeting different people, new faces. They said to me, ‘Do you want to get partners?’ We said, ‘Yeah’. We started dealing and that. We earnt quite a bit of money, and then I thought, ‘What’s the point in sharing with him?’ And this kid was harder than me so I couldn’t batter him. So I just got my boys together, got a few little weapons, went round, quiet chat, wasn’t it? And that was it. He was out of the game. He didn’t want any more to do with it.

Ambition

DM: Do you want to be the biggest drug dealer in Manchester?

Ryan: Yeah, I want to be the biggest drug dealer in the world.

Wayne: It might not happen but you can always try.

Ryan: We’re going to try. Guaranteed. If I’m still here in six years’ time, guaranteed, we’ll own about a quarter of Manchester . . . It will be ours, which means you will not be able to set foot on, ‘cos it will be ours, and if you want to come and sell on it, you have to pay me.

Skills

Ryan: Basically, any dickhead could come and earn, could come and sell drugs . . . because it’s not a hard game. It is dead easy. You just got to have dedication . . . You’ve got to be mental, ‘cos people come and rob you, people try all sorts.

Wayne: You can’t give a fuck, ‘cos as soon as you start showing that you give a fuck, then someone will turn around and you’ll turn back and everything’s gone, been robbed blind, shot, stabbed, anything. Your eyes have got to be everywhere. You can’t trust no one, not even your mates.

Law

Ryan: If they legalised it, that would stop our money. There’d be no need for us.

Wayne: People won’t have to go and rob for it, have to go and burgle houses to get the money to buy it.

Tools

Ryan: Imagine a young wild kid raging for dough, for money. He’s hungry . . . he doesn’t give a fuck and you know that, and he’s saying, ‘Now listen you, out. You don’t get out, I’m going to shoot you.’ And you think, ‘Ah’, and it hits you. If you haven’t had a gun pointed at you, you won’t know what we’re on about. But people what saw a gun will know. You get a lump in your throat and when you walk away you’re like, you’re not thinking, ‘Oh, I’ve lost this, I’ve lost that’. You’re thinking, ‘Thank God I’ve got my life back. That’s it, I don’t want no more’.

Violence

DM: And when you bit the guy . . . did you feel any remorse?

Ryan: A bad taste. I had to wash me mouth out. The guy should have washed his face, man . . .

DM: Did you [bite him]?

Ryan: Yeah.

Wayne: That was the attempted murder charge, that one.

DM: Did you get convicted?

Ryan: No, charges were dropped.

DM: Why?

Ryan: Witnesses.

Wayne: They just don’t seem to turn up.

Success

Ryan: There’s a kid [we know], and he’s in jail now and he’d probably be laughing if he heard this, but I remember thinking, ‘Yo, I wish I had his dough,’ ‘cos he used to have nice bracelets, nice clothes . . . everyone wanted to go near him ‘cos he had dough. He had top of the range bikes and like. We was always at the back, we was always out the spotlight. Then when we started doing what we’re doing, it’s our time to shine. We’ll be locked up, he’ll be back out, or the next man’ll be out and it will be their time to shine. All we’re saying to you is when it’s your turn to be in the spotlight . . . make as much as you can.

Money

DM: How much money do you think you can make in a day?

Wayne: If it’s drugs, pulling in about two grand a day.

Ryan: If it’s robberies . . .

Wayne: Ten grand to fifty grand.

Success (2)

Ryan: We’re not saying what we did, but we done something and we got 50 grand, and we got all of our mates . . . Filled them up . . . we went to Blackpool and we lived it up.

Wayne: We just wasted money.

Ryan: We did live like gangsters.

Wayne: Wipe your arse with a tenner in the toilet for a joke.

Ryan: People looked at us when we walked in, because we was loud, because we had money, and they didn’t care how insulting we was. We could have stood on the table naked, couldn’t we? And they loved it because we had plenty of dough to put into their pockets.

Wayne: We was paying their wages.

Ryan: When we walked in that restaurant, the manager came over to us, you know. We’re not doing bad for people to take notice of us. To stop what they’re doing and come to some kids who they’d probably (normally) say, ‘Get back to bed or whatever, do your homework’, and say, ‘Be nice to us, take notice, kiss our arse.’

Work (2)

Ryan: We’re just trying to earn a living. We’re running our own business, yeah? We’re just businessmen, end of. It’s just that our ways are different from others.

Ambition (2)

DM: What do you want to be?

Wayne: I want to be remembered, me. I want someone to say, ‘Ah, remember him? Hard little bastard, that cunt.’

Ryan: I just want plenty of dough, happy life, plenty of money.

The film A Very British Gangster has recorded over 100,000 sales by Dvd and is now on sale in the US through Netflix. The US rights were acquired by Anywhere Road and the UK rights by Contender. The film received support from the Irish FIlm Board.

Variety reports that Anywhere Road has acquired North American rights to the doc “A Very British Gangster,” about Dominic Noonan, a notorious leader of a powerful Blighty organized crime family who was openly gay and championed the working class. Noonan legally changed his name to Lattlay Fottfoy, an acronym for the family motto:

“Look after those that look after you, fuck off those that fuck off you.” Directed by Donal MacIntyre, “Gangster” screened at Sundance in 2007. Netflix subsid Red Envelope snapped up DVD rights. Anywhere Road is an indie distrib whose recent releases include “Black Irish” and “Antonia.”

Donal MacIntyre reports on Britain’s underworld for Mail on SUnday
For his cinematic debut, investigative TV reporter Donal MacIntyre spent three years shadowing a Mancunian gangster. He asks how crime lords like Dominic Noonan – armed robber and convict – can operate outside the normal rules of law
The conditions, I’m reliably informed, are perfect for a bank job. The street, with its boarded-up windows and desolate back alleys littered with the residue of drunks and junkies, is still and quiet. The distant sound of a group of kids playing kick-about with a can somehow intensifies the silence. We pull over just before a junction.

Dominic Noonan at his brother’s funeral

Ahead of us, on the corner, is a Barclays bank. As we sit and wait, a dark-blue armoured security van pulls up right outside and a guard in a stab vest gets out. Crammed into the car beside me is Dominic Noonan. He is 5ft 11in tall and 18st, but it is not his physical presence I feel most; more his mental arithmetic. I turn to look at his fat bulldog face and shaven head.

Eyes front, he pulls up his sleeves and starts to talk me through an armed robbery in his heavy Mancunian accent.

“They drop off half a million pounds in that bank,” he says.

“I’d park up there in a van and as the guard comes out of his door I’d just burst out and grab him.”

He pauses, then suddenly switches into character and it’s as if he’s out there, barking instructions, as though I’m an accomplice.

“‘Follow me. Over here. Now! You! Open the ****ing door. Throw the bags out. Start throwing the bags out. Quick!”

In the back of the car a couple of his pasty, shaven-headed young acolytes smile, playing out the scenario as he describes it.

If it sounds unconvincing on the page, you should be here with me.

He’s terrifying.

If you saw him with a gun in his hand you’d do anything. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s done this before. Dominic Noonan and his brothers make up one of Britain’s leading crime families. They have stolen more than £4 million from bank jobs alone.

It’s as much a job of work to them as making films is to me.

Once, Noonan escaped from a prison van on his way to court so he could rob three cash security vans on the same day.

He then handed himself back to HMP Strangeways and claimed he had been kidnapped.

He is believed to have been involved in at least six gangland murders; he has spent more than half his 41 years in jail for multiple crimes ranging from armed robbery to prison escape.

As you read this, he’s back inside again.

Why am I here?

With a record like that, not to praise him.

Rather, to make a point about how a level of British society currently works in every one of our cities.

The truth is that gangs like Noonan’s are rife in them all.

The streets they control are evidence of something the police ignore and politicians just wouldn’t believe.

I also want to meet those being groomed to follow in his footsteps – the lads in the car and the dozens of other young hangers-on.

There are about 5,000 feral teenagers in the area, whose only gratification is to take whatever they can from the streets of Manchester – and take it now.

Can they escape Noonan’s clutches?

His protégé and heir apparent is Aaron Berry, an 18-year-old up-and-coming gangster who is every bit a younger version of the boss.

Noonan smiled as he called him the biggest drug dealer in the area.

“It’s about money, power and drugs,” Berry told me.

“When Dominic started he did it because he was poor.

“We do it for the rush. We can’t read, we can’t write – we can count money though. I would chop you in half, just for reputation.”

Noonan has a spectacular career history that involves assault and intimidation, alleged murders, fraud, prison riots and guns.

When we first met he’d served over 22 years in jail and walked away from many other trials, including a torture case at Preston Crown Court at which eight key prosecution witnesses disappeared and could not be found by the police.

And yet when his gangster brother Desmond was knifed to death the funeral cortège, watched by 5,000 local mourners and made up of 40 limousines, was led by a pipe band of retired policemen and off-duty firemen.

He is more Kray than the Krays themselves.

On the one hand, he has cut off the head of a dog owned by a rival gangster to make a point (he placed the head on the baize of a pool table in the offending party’s local).

On the other, he organises fireworks displays for children, speaks Urdu, amicably settles local disputes and set up a rival “police station” and security and banking service for his local community.

Oh, and he’s gay, just like Ronnie Kray.

In his manor, Dominic Noonan is recognised as judge and jury and, by some accounts, executioner, too.

And I had a ringside seat watching this godfather of the British underworld operate for over three years.

“You’re not very popular. My brother was asked to whack you.” Dominic Noonan’s first words to me were exchanged outside court No 5 at HMP Belmarsh, home to most of the country’s serious terrorist and gangland trials and Britain’s most secure court.

Presumably, he was referring to my undercover investigations into criminal activity for TV.

“He’s not very good then is he?” I replied. He smiled.

On this occasion, Noonan was on trial for orchestrating a £500,000 heroin deal with a major London crime family.

He was charged under his deed poll-acquired name Mr Lattlay Fottfoy; an acronym for his late father’s motto – Look After Those That Look After You; **** Off Those That **** Off You.

Naturally, any judge curious about the derivation of the name was quickly embarrassed when the smiling Noonan enunciated every syllable with pride.

But facing a potential 25-year jail sentence and the possibility of a bullet from a rival crime family, Noonan was now in a uniquely vulnerable position.

Either way his life was teetering on the edge.

While on this precipice he decided to start a conversation with me and my camera.

The immediate threat to his liberty evaporated soon after.

Despite overwhelming evidence – he had been caught on camera red-handed with a consignment of drugs – he was acquitted.

Extraordinarily, the £5 million gangland trial convicted just one defendant out of six – and he had already fled the country.

As Noonan walked free and I walked with him, I knew I was in the company of someone who was dangerous, cruel and charismatic.

From my journalistic background, crime is most often seen in black and white, but here was a character straight out of The Sopranos – a likeable monster who would go on to absorb me into his world.

About the torture case in which eight prosecution witnesses disappeared, he said, with his usual air of controlled aggression, “I don’t know what happened.

“They must have got a package holiday or something. The more that go the cheaper it is, isn’t it?” he added, tongue in cheek.

He told me how impressed he was with his legal team. Of his barrister’s summing up, he said, “He nearly convinced me that I wasn’t there.”

What makes a man like Noonan?

He was one of 14 children who grew up in utter poverty in Manchester’s Moss Side.

Each of the children’s names began with the letter D for Dublin, their father’s home city.

The boys were sent out to steal fences to use as firewood, and as the family grew, his mother burned down their two-bedroom house to try to move up the housing list.

He had been sent away to boarding school, an experience that has clearly affected him.

For many months after meeting him I had the feeling that Dominic was gay.

I had a £20 bet with my producer that he was, but it was almost eight months before I had the courage to bring up the subject.

“!I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ I said, not knowing if even the barest suggestion could get me killed.

“But I’ve always thought there was a hint of lavender about you.”

There was a silence, before he said he had been waiting and waiting for the question.

He then told me about the abuse and the brutal sexual assaults he had suffered as a boy at school, which had just added to his seriously messy upbringing.

“They raped me, about six of them. It went on all night – it went on for weeks. I’ve caught up with every single one of them and I’ve severely hurt them.”

He started his working life as a doorman, and he and his brothers Damian and Desmond first came to public notice as heavies providing security and organising the drug trade for the Hacienda nightclub in Manchester.

Drive-by shootings outside the club took their toll and the club descended into chaos as the Noonans strangled the life out of the venue.

At the height of their game they organised security for 80 per cent of Manchester’s nightclubs and they were earning Premiership salaries from the drug trade.

But their criminal activities were to blame for the Hacienda’s demise, according to the club’s founder and promoter Tony Wilson, who died earlier this year.

When other gangsters tried to take a slice of the action, Noonan responded in dramatic fashion.

“We had one crew from Cheetham Hill who tried to muscle in,” he tells me, deadpan.

“So I went down with a machete and the other guy I was with had a shotgun.

“We went to their pub and I cut off the head of one of their dogs, placed it on the pool table and more or less said, “Don’t come back or next time it will be a human head.” And they never came back.”

Dominic Noonan was jailed for 15 years for his part in a bank robbery, and when he came out in 2002 his influence started to rise within the family.

Damian Noonan died in a motorbike accident the following year, and then two years later “Dessie” Noonan, who had always boasted of his indestructibility, was stabbed to death over a crack cocaine deal.

After the funeral – a horsedrawn hearse carried the coffin the five miles to the graveside; local schools were closed and roads shut to allow the cortège through.

Dominic Noonan was left in charge of the family in a lawless community that goes under the radar of normal society.

His world wasn’t the regular criminality of buying knock-off cigarettes and DVDs.

It was one that used gangsters as an alternative justice system – and relied upon them.

It’s lunchtime and I’m in Noonan’s cramped and chaotic red-brick two-up, two-down terraced house.

In the front room, the pink floor-to-ceiling curtains are closed but it’s bright inside anyway.

As usual, it’s open house – the TV and the radio are on, and a dozen or so young kids are hanging out in parkas and tracksuit tops, sitting on the brown velour sofa, perched on its arms or just standing around.

Some are eating ice cream and there’s the smell of burgers and pizzas in the air.

Occasionally, a hungry dog wanders through to scoff the remains.

The floor is cluttered with several mountain bikes – some upended for repair – a car engine starter and a tyre.

Along one wall is Noonan’s huge fish tank, and the “very, very expensive fish” of which he’s extremely proud.

“They’re not all my kids. They are nephews, godsons and cousins. No one else will have ‘em.

“I love them coming round – it reminds me of the days when I was a young lad. It was mad. We’d all bring our friends round and there would be 40 or 50 people in the house.”

He also takes people off the streets – waifs and strays – and gives them protection.

These young men are like rats to his Pied Piper; nearly all have fallen foul of their own families and see Noonan as the father figure in their lives.

He gets one of his young entourage to throw him a bulletproof vest from a pile of clothes in the corner.

“I wear this when I’m on meetings – or when I go round to my Mum’s for dinner,” he says, smiling.

The Noonans are revered in their community and Dominic is the patriarch and the commander of a one-man parallel justice system with its own due process.

I saw him in action, sharp-suited, travelling round in his white Volvo, which in a previous life had been a police car and still had its markings.

Indeed, he took great delight in goading Greater Manchester Police with his collection of vehicles.

Whenever he was stopped by local officers they would find his car was still registered to the police themselves.

His collection of vehicles also included a red London double-decker bus, two former security vans, three ambulances, which he used as cash-carrying vans, and a black cab.

“And if I get any more trouble from the police I will get a tank and park it on the streets of Moston,” he said.

I witnessed him listen to a man who had been attacked with a hammer (he vowed to “have a word”, and was then rewarded by the man’s wife with a fried breakfast), hand out warnings after a 16-year-old had been threatened, and act as a menacing mediator on the doorstep in a dispute over loud music.

He was also on hand to give advice to a man who had pathetically bungled a robbery on a post office, using a towel wrapped round his forefinger to look like a gun.

“The community come to me to solve their problems.

“They look after me and I look after them. I am a part-time social worker and sheriff on these streets.

“They have no time for the police here.”

The police refused to acknowledge this but it was clear to me that many in the deprived community of Moston saw Dominic as more effective than the boys in blue.

As well as fireworks parties and summer fêtes, Noonan laid on adventure trips for children and provided recreational services one would reasonably expect from the local authorities.

In return, they protected him with silence when the police came knocking.

This parallel justice system reached preposterous proportions when Noonan decided he would open a community police station.

He also announced he would offer banking and “legitimate” security services, promising protection to building sites, home owners and local bus companies.

“We will have 700 safe deposit boxes here,” he said.

“No doubt people will put drugs and guns in them, but it is nothing to do with me.”

This world I was seeing was part pantomime and part horror story.

The Gallaghers of Shameless had nothing on the Noonans.

The fact he spoke Urdu, picked up from his dealings in the community, was just part of it.

At the same time that Greater Manchester Police were still reeling from the discovery of recruits wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods (as revealed in The Secret Policeman, an investigation in which I was involved), now it turned out that their number-one target was way ahead of them and could converse with the largest ethnic minority in the city in their own tongue.

The grim cycle looks set to continue.

Noonan said he believes the next generation is much more out of control than his; then when I spoke to Aaron Berry and other 17- and 18-year-olds, who are scary guys themselves, they said that the 12- and 13-year-olds are already as bad as they are.

Berry was later to be convicted on gun possession and armed robbery. In August, he was sent to jail for three-and-a-half years.

There is some hope, though. Although Noonan is gay, he has two children.

His youngest son Bugsy, now 13, is doing well at special school and showing every indication of surviving his dysfunctional background.

He dreams of being a boxer or footballer, and has a horror of prison life.

“They spit in your drinks and food and mix it all up,” he said.

I keep in contact and feel a responsibility towards him.

I have had him down to my house to meet my family and hope to offer some sort of a positive role model, if I can.

Meanwhile, Noonan’s own luck has run out, for the time being at least.

He is currently back in jail for unlawful possession of arms and ammunition and is not due out for two-and-a-half years.

Needless to say he is already plotting a return to his own principality, with his own bespoke legal system.

No sooner was he inside prison than an appeal was lodged against his conviction – he claimed he was set up by the police.

And I have a nagging feeling that he might just win. ‘A Very British Gangster’, directed by Donal MacIntyre, is released on December 7

Watch out for a new eight part series looking at the people behind our surveilance society – the human face of Big Brother – I have been amazed at their stoires and hope to bring you a new insight with extraordinary footage and exclusive access with CCTV CIties coming to Five in April – watch the site for more information.

My current high priority campaign is for the provision of a trauma centre for miscarriage of justice victims. The following is an article I wrote for The New Statesman which gives the circumstances behind my involvement in this new campaign and my work with MOJO – The Miscarriages of Justice Organisation.

“I spent a lifetime in jail for a murder I never committed`, he said. These were final moments in the short, lost life, of Stuart Gair, 44. A heart monitor pronounced him dead on the worn sitting room carpet where he lay. The noise from the defibrilllator blew the tolerances of the radio transmitter that was recording the last minutes of a man who had died, in truth, many years before his cardiac arrest.Sitting on a thread bare sofa, in a thread bare one bedroom flat, against the bleak surrounding walls – Stuart Gair, gave the impression that he had not left the prison that had been his home for nearly 12years.

Imprisoned for murder in 1989, he spent most of those years mourning the injustice in solitary confinement. It took him 17 years to clear his name and had yet to receive any compensation for one Scotland’s most shameful miscarriages` of justice. In the twenty minutes, I had known him he spoke of little else.
“Stand clear…suitable for shock`, the artificial voice of the defibrillator crackled. Five unholy attempts to re-engage his heart and then – the Lazarus machine pronounced him back among the living, though not as he would wish it.

These events followed a routine 999 request for assistance, one Friday night in Edinburgh. There days later, a consultant from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary phoned to tell me that Stuart’s heart had stopped again and he was now in a coma. There was no hope of recovery. He [1]asked me for permission to turn off his life support machine.

No family or friends could be found and the only connection the hospital had between the dead and the living was a reporter who was on a tour of duty with an Edinburgh Ambulance Service.

These events, that had me struggling for breath myself, as I considered the life and death of a man, I had known for such a short time.
This unfolding drama started out innocuously enough. I was shadowing Paul a 32 year, paramedic on a routine assignment while he worked the front line of life’s traumas in his car response unit. A cameraman sat in the back of the estate car filming while I peppered Paul with questions. We all waited eagerly, adrenalin on standby, for the radio instructions from the emergency control centre.

The first call was a 50 year old man in a gutter outside a pub trying to drink himself to death after the recent death of his wife. Later there were small riot outside tenement schemes which left a grandmother and two young mothers injured on the blood smeared floor. During the night Paul also, tended to an aging punk rocker who had taken an overdose, a drug addled prostitute unconscious on the street and numerous other heavy drinking casualties.

But it was the customary cardiac call outs that made up the bulk of the emergency requests during the eight hour shift. Stuart Gair’s call was one of those. “Nothing out of the ordinary”, Paul assured me en route.

When life support was terminated[2] at 12.50pm on the Tuesday, Paddy Hill, one of the Birmingham Six, was there to say goodbye to a friend, who like him had also suffered a terrible injustice.
In the hours after the doctor contacted me, I managed to track down Paddy from MOJO, The Miscarriages of Justice Organisation, which he founded. Hill and his fellow MOJO campaigner, John McManus had supported Gair’s long battle for justice. They joined psychologist Ian Stephen, another campaigner and the doctors at the bedside for the send off – familiar voices – at least, for his final release – not, of course, that he could hear them.

Stuart’s voice though, in death, is certainly being listened to, as his story becomes the focus of a new campaign to support `life after life` – the creation of support programmes for miscarriage victims to help them cope with the world again.
“The worst thing to happen to Stuart Gair, was to release him from prison”, John Macmanus, told the congregation, at Daldowie Crematorium in the Glasgow’s east end. “He should have been released as an innocent man with the same planning and consideration given to the guilty.”

Stuart Gair, petty thief and likely lad was born in Reading Berkshire. His fathers name does not appear on his birth cert. Gair never knew him. He later moved to Scotland and it was no surprise that his dysfunctional upbringing served up a predictable chaotic and low grade NED (non-educated delinquent), albeit one, who did not kill. He was however, in 1989, convicted was of the stabbing and murder of Peter Smith, a supermarket manager and former soldier who was cruising North Court Lane toilets, city centre Glasgow, for rent boys. The appeal Court finally cleared his name on the 11 July 2006 stating the “non-disclosure of police statements and other information resulted in a miscarriage of justice”.

The truths that sit behind this bland Court utterance, however, are more lurid. The background tells tales of pressurised witnesses, serious allegations of Police corruption, lies and fabrication which leave a terrible stench over the Scottish judicial system and the Strathclyde Police.
At best, his conviction was a mistake borne out of an extraordinary catalogue of failures and errors by the Police and Prosecution. Whatever the truth, the result was that Stuart spent most of his 12 years in solitary confinement. He was further rewarded a heroin habit and Hepatitis A.

His, became the first contemporary case to be referred to appeal by the New Scottish criminal cases review commission in 1999. Although, freed begrudgingly on bail then, his appeal became bogged down in the legal process and it took six more years till his murder conviction was overturned.

Caught halfway between guilt and innocence during that time, he inevitably perhaps, returned to the streets from whence he came.

“He couldn’t cope. Life came at him at thousand miles an hour. And when he struggled – he sought the same escape outside the prison walls that he sought inside – heroin” according to Paddy Hill, who spoke to him just weeks before his heart attack.

Immediately upon his release from prison, Gair, stayed with the prison doctor who highlighted his case. When he was found injecting heroin in the house, he was asked to leave. Other floors and needles later and he found himself arrested three times on drugs charges. He even stole from his disabled mother. He was dealing; and was stored the heroin in her nursing home.

It was hard to know where rock bottom settled for Stuart.
It wasn’t until his final vindication, in the summer of 2006, that he started to rebuild his life. In his last year, he had been clean and had got fit, swimming, doing the gym and generally sorting himself out – but all his roles in life set him up for a sorry end. Fate had it in for Stuart Gair, according to journalist and campaigning friend Neil MacKay[3].

A little boy who never knew his dad, a teenage petty thief fitted up for murder; a jailbird junkie on a mission to self-destruction; and finally a man on the road to happiness with a misfiring heart that he never knew about.

Sally Clark, 42 [4]died of a heart attack too, last year after failing to rebuild her life following her successful appeal against her conviction for the murder her two baby sons.

After her release, she said: “The whole world is so huge. Since my release, things have got worse, not better. In the first few weeks I seemed to be adjusting well. Now I am devastated that I seem to be going backwards. I have to stop what I am doing, over and over. I can’t cope”
She was sentenced to two life sentences in 1999 and spent more than three years in prison.. She was found to have been wrongly convicted in January 2003 after new medical evidence emerged.
Her experience is a common one for miscarriage victims.

The wrongly convicted and their families commonly face psychological difficulties and problems of adjustment that are severe, bewildering, and unexpected. “Typically, for years they had been focused on achieving the goal of release, but once this had been achieved and celebrated there were painful discoveries that they had changed, there were losses that could not be remedied, and the lives they previously had, could not be recovered”, Dr Adrian Gounds,[5] at Cambridge Criminology Department, said.

It was particularly tragic, he said, to hear some admit that the years of imprisonment had been easier to cope with than the years since release. He has interviewed 30 miscarriage cases for a paper shortly to be published and the research, he insists, clearly, indicates a compelling case of need for services of support and help for these complex and longstanding problems.

It not just dealing with people; Paddy Hill forgot how to swim. “I found myself diving in and immediately sunk to the bottom. I couldn’t move, I had to be rescued because I had forgotten what to do.”

Hill and Gair and others like them are thrown out from prison with no treatment or support which would in the case of the guilty would normally be provided to help re-equip them with the skills to reengage with society.

“They have to literally learn to live again,” McManus says. Often the enormity of the personal losses was impossible to face and bear.

They often return to their home towns and build their own segregation units and effectively place themselves in their own solitary confinement with multiple locks on every door and little human contact.
“Because they have refused to admit their guilt in prison they are denied parole and release preparation schemes and their abuse is compounded”, says McManus. He and Hill are leading the MOJO campaign to set up a permanent retreat and a treatment programme for victims of miscarriages of justice.

There has to be preparation, family therapy, support and counseling according to Dr Grounds. He said the attempt by MOJO to secure a retreat would in some small way give back to them a little bit of what society stole from them.

When the Beirut hostage John Mccarthy was released in 1991 the British Government took him and 17 of his family and campaigners away for four months, to RAF Lineham[6] specialist military counselling unit, to be treated for PTSD. The Government provided the same support to Americans` Terry Anderson and Tom Sutherland. In same year Paddy Hill and the Birmingham six were released after nearly 17 years in prison. Paddy Hill has spent three months more outside prison now than inside and he has still received no psychological support.

Attending Gair’s cremation, Paddy Hill’s sunken and sodden eyes, spoke of every lost minute of freedom he personally endured while `held hostage` by the justice system. He seemingly, grieved too, for all the missing hours, days and years that were suffered by those, for whom he now campaigns.

In unseasonable winter sunshine outside the east end crematorium, walking at half mast and sweating hurt, Paddy Hill let the tears go. I found it hard myself not to cry as his family rushed to support him, interlocking arms, and squeezing hands.

Paddy Hill is still fighting for counselling. His local NHS is discussing the financial arrangements for it but Hill feels that the Home Office should pay and not the NHS. “They put me there so make them pay.”

More disturbing, is that Hill and others, have had to pay living expenses out of their compensation for wrongful conviction, following a law Lord ruling last March[7] which said not to deduct such expenses while staying at her majesty’s pleasure would be to over compensate them.

Of course, Jeffery Archer or Lord Brockett didn’t have to pay for their stay in prison. You can understand how faced with this kind of intransigence; People like Stuart Gair find it so hard to readjust.

“We are angrier now that at anytime since our arrest”, Hill tells me. “No one has had to pay for the forced confessions, the perjured witness statements and the lies. We live with this every day,” Gerry Conlon says, gesticulating forcefully.

Conlon was part of the `Guilford Four` who were wrongly convicted of a pub bomb attack in the town. After 15 years in jail they won their appeal and were released. Conlon’s father, Giuseppe, however, died in jail, having been convicted of involvement in the bomb plot also. Gerry Conlon’s autobiography was made into the acclaimed film “In the Name of the Father”, staring Daniel Day Lewis and Emma Thompson. Those triumphs in Court and cinema, barely register now with Conlon or Hill.

“While half a million pounds of taxpayers money has been spent on looking after Maxine Carr,[8] not a penny has been put on the table to support the rehabilitation of the innocent who have left prison, Hill says. “We are not saying the guilty don’t need or deserve this support but before the innocent?”

MOJO are seeking Government funds to finance a retreat and trauma centre to facilitate the recovery of miscarriage victims and to manage their return to their families and communities. Discussions with the Home Office after Stuart’s funeral have been positive. Junior Minister Marie Eagle has put civil servants at the disposal of MOJO to help create a business plan and feasibility study. “We made more progress now in the months since Stuart’s death than we’ve made in the 19 years since his wrongful conviction, but we have to keep the pressure up”, McManus in his inimitable breathless brogue.

Concerns are mounting now, though, for the newly released Kenny Richey[9]who was just an hour from execution after his wrongful conviction for murder in the States. After 21 years in jail, he has now returned to the UK – Not though, into the hands of counsellors, but into the hands of the entrepreneurial, Max Clifford. Now that’s a worrying thought.

After the lights went out on the monitor reporting Gair’s last coma pulse, the bedside team returned to the flat, Stuart and I had departed, the previous Friday night. It gave no hint of the trauma that took place. It remained meticulously uncluttered. His personal artefacts were few.
A book entitled `Buddhism for Sheep` lay on his bedside table. `69` at San Quentin`, one of Johnny Cash’s prison classics was resting there too, Under the sitting room armchair was an `Alabama 3` disc (famous for opening track to the Sopranos). He spoke of them to me before his heart stopped. They had played a gig for MOJO in August. Stuart had been there.

The critical contents, though, his of 44 years were to be found, in his wash bag. Inside was a picture of his mum, who is now dead and a copy of his birth certificate, glaring omission of dad, included. There was another omission – A secret legacy; a 19 year old daughter who never got to know her own father – Stuart.

Some one knew and tipped off the papers and journalists soon made it to her door and reconnected the father and daughter in death. She was not at the funeral. Pregnant and still stunned by the news of her real father and his confused life, she kept a low profile

As Stuart’s daughter contemplated motherhood and her new found heritage, the press hunted her down again to discuss another legacy of Stuart’s – the million pounds in compensation due her for Stuart’s wrongful conviction. As the only relative she entitled to receive it.
That is just the start in life that Stuart would have wanted to give to his grandchild. Perhaps though, his greatest legacy with be a trauma retreat, serving and protecting the brutalised innocent from their own anger and the system’s indifference.

End

[1] Dr Mitchell, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
[2] Stuart Gair, born Berkshire, August 27, 1963; Died 29th October 2007
[3] Extract from MacKay – Sunday Herald 4.11.07 – The tragedy of Stuart Gair & Interview
[4] Further tests are ordered to discover how Sally Clark died – Times Online
[5] Dr Adrian Gounds `The Psychological Consequences of Wrongful Imprisonment` 2003 & `Need for Psychological Support Following Wrongful Conviction` 2008 ( not yet published) – Institute of Criminology Cambridge
[6] Interview TW Sky TV 23rd March 2003
[7] March 15 Law Lords 2007
[8] Girl friend of Ian Huntly guilty of the Soham murders
[9] Jan 6th 2007 after 21 years in Jail