72 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
AT 7:23 P.M. on July 26, 2015, Paul Massey parked his
silver BMW 5 Series at a Bargain Booze on the outskirts
of Manchester, England. Inside, he asked for his usual:
a bottle of Bacardi and two liters of Coke. He tipped the
cashier with the change and was gone within a minute.
Seventeen seconds behind him, a stranger followed.
It had already been a long day for a man used to long
days. At 55, Massey was one of Europe’s most prominent
gang leaders. He had spent half his adult life behind bars,
for everything from a gasoline scam to a near-fatal stabbing.
On the streets of Salford—a rough-and-tumble dock town of
100,000, nestled inside a meander of the River Irwell, just
across the water from Manchester United’s Old Trafford
stadium—he was known as Mr. Big.
Massey had first established himself as someone not
to cross as a soccer hooligan in United’s Red Army, then
as the head of his own crew. His Salford Lads weren’t a
stringently hierarchical organization, like the Italian mafia,
but a loose alliance of young criminals who in the 1990s
supplanted the once-powerful Quality Street Gang. Locals
knew Massey as someone who lived by a code. Sure, he
had trafficked party drugs for years, but he drew the line at
heroin. His men plastered stickers on lampposts threatening
sell smack, get smacked. And yes, he was the man to
see if you wanted a washing machine that had fallen off
the back of a lorry, but he would also find money for the
old lady whose flat had been broken into and cleaned out.
When rival gangs feuded, it was often Massey, never the
cops, who brokered peace. He befriended gangland figures
in prison and didn’t forget them on the outside: He would
send Christmas cards with £50 included.
On that summer evening in 2015, Massey had just
returned from Winkups Holiday Camp, on the Irish Sea
in North Wales. The escape wasn’t as relaxing as he had
hoped—one of his daughters, Kelly, called while he was
away and remembers him being “a little distant, drained and
stressed.” Massey carried two mobile phones that buzzedconstantly with people asking for
favors. Back in Salford, a gang
war was unfolding, and a few
associates made the drive out to
Winkups to confer with Massey.
Says Louise Lydiate, his partner
of three decades and the mother
of two of his five children: “The
crown was heavy in Salford.”
The day he returned from
holiday, Massey spent the after-
noon with two gang associates,
visited a bookie, bought the
Bacardi and Cokes, drove the half mile home and pulled
up to the wrought-iron gates outside his spacious red-brick
colonial, set back from a busy road.
Nearby, an assailant, alerted by the stranger who’d tailed
Massey, lay in wait.
At 7:27, as Massey stepped out of his car, a tall, athletic
man—wearing a fake beard and dressed in combat gear,
a witness later said, which made him look like a soldier
in Call of Duty—hurried across the road, pulled out an
Uzi and opened fire. It was the start of a scene for which
Mr. Big had long been braced. “If it’s meant to happen,
it’s meant to happen,” he told BBC documentarians back
in the late 1990s. “I know the stakes.”
In the driveway, Massey’s left shin exploded. Bone frag-
ments showered the gravel. He dropped the Bacardi, which
shattered. A bullet struck three fingers in his right hand,
tearing one digit clear off. Still, he was able to scramble
behind some trash bins, take cover and dial 999 (the U.K.
equivalent of 911), shouting, “I’ve been shot! Hurry up!”
“O.K., stay on the line for me,” the dispatcher replied.
“Hurry up,” Massey pleaded again, “he’s shot at—.” His
phone cut out.
The gunman strode up to the bins and continued firing.
Of the 18 bullets that f lashed out of his muzzle, perhaps