Sports Illustrated - USA (2021-12)

(Antfer) #1
DECEMBER 2021 73

killing of such a renowned figure
could remain shrouded in mystery,
one must first understand the Salford
code, which can be boiled down to two
words. In the parlance of this world:
Don’t grass.
Massey had considered grasses, or
snitches, to be the lowest of the low.
“If I got nicked and I’ve done some-
thing—I’ll go to prison,” Massey told
the BBC. “I’ll do my jail. If I was to
talk [to police], I’d just hang myself.”
In his world, nothing was more dis-
honorable than spilling to the cops,
especially in Salford, the hardest part
of Great Britain’s hardest, grayest
region—a balkanized place of tough
guys and gangsters, every one with a
chip on his shoulder.
Manchester’s fortune had been cast
during the Industrial Revolution of
the late 1700s and early 1800s, when
the once-sleepy Lancashire township’s
climate and proximity to coal mines
proved perfect for producing cotton
and wool clothing. Soon Manchester
was Cottonopolis, the global epicenter
of textile manufacturing. The world’s
first industrial city, though, suffered
growing pains. As workers streamed
in from the countryside, poverty
reigned. Sanitation was abysmal. In
a textile worker’s home on Silk Street
or Chiffon Way, a dozen people might
sleep in a single room. All the while,
industry hurtled forward. Factories
sought direct access to the Irish Sea, the
Atlantic, the world. In 1894 the 36-mile
Manchester Ship Canal let pass its first
vessel. Even 40 miles inland, the port
was the third-busiest in Great Britain.
Technically, the canal’s terminus
was just west of Greater Manchester’s core, in a dock
city filled with working-class ruffians and roustabouts.
And largely, over the years, Salford has stayed that
way. While the north of England has seen an inf lux of
immigrants in recent decades, Massey’s hometown has
remained, as Simon Harding, a criminology professor at
the University of West London, puts it, “the last bastion
of whiteness in the north of England.”
Salford stands in stark contrast to the Premier League
sheen of Old Trafford, a short walk away. Street gangs
have a celebrated history in England, dating back to the
Dickensian poverty of the Industrial Revolution, and this
is the type of place that gives birth to those gangs: poor
and blighted, with terraced houses and scads of small pubs.

most crucial was the one that tore through Massey’s fifth
rib on his left side, passed through his chest cavity, struck
his heart and lungs, and lodged in his back.
As blood pooled in Massey’s chest and on the ground, the
shooter ran across the street, raced through the graveyard
of the Parish Church of St. Anne, headed toward a wooded
area and hopped on a bicycle.
And then Mr. Big’s assassin pedaled away.

B


RITISH TABLOIDS COULDN’T get enough of the
Massey murder, which seemed plucked straight from
Peaky Blinders or The Sopranos. Yet the case went unsolved,
even a f ter police ident if ied more t ha n 100 people of interest.
To understand how the cold-blooded, broad-daylight

Mr. Big all but foresaw his end:
“IF IT’S MEANT TO HAPPEN,
IT’S MEANT TO HAPPEN,” Massey told
the BBC 20 -odd years before he was
gunned down. “I know the stakes.”
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