DECEMBER 2021 79W
HEN PAUL MASSEY was at the height of his
powers—Mr. Big, the king of Salford—he spoke
to the BBC about where he drew his moral line. “I’m
not interested in killing people,” said the gangster who
would later be jailed for stabbing a man. “I’ve seen what
devastation it causes to the family that you leave behind.
Them families are never going to get over it.”
Massey’s family has not gotten over it.
Louise Lydiate never moved back into that red-brick
home; the memories of her partner’s murder were too
heavy. She took a job managing a small, run-down pub
in Salford, where she lived upstairs. She knew the regu-
lars. It felt like family, and like therapy. But she tended
to stay up until the last drinker was out the door, then
woke early to clean, and it wore her down. She drank
too much. Customers noticed. “I can’t do [that] to my
family and my kids,” Lydiate says. “They been through
enough already.”
She quit the pub job and moved into a small two-
bedroom apartment in the heart of Salford with her
two chihuahuas, Pippa and Rolo. Six years later, she still
thinks about Massey’s murder constantly. She’s taking
anxiety meds for the first time in her life. She says she
suffers panic attacks and
nightmares and has been
diagnosed with PTSD. Her
initial anger has given way
to an all-consuming sad-
ness. She has spent untold
hours wondering why her
partner was gunned down
not at age 30, when he was
in the thick of the gang
wars, but at 55, when that
life seemed behind him.
In Lydiate’s living room
hangs the last photo taken
of her and Massey, at a
restaurant in Wales, a
couple of days before he was killed. Every night, she
talks to the picture. She’ll ask what Massey thinks about
her life now. What would Paul want me doing? She doesn’t
know what he would think of her living alone. Sometimes
she can almost hear his voice. Get over it, she hears him
say. Get on with your life.
Ghosts are complicated. They still hold secrets. But,
stripped of ego, out of the race, they can see themselves
and their adversaries in full. They can be honest.
So, what would the ghost of Paul Massey have to say
about the man who murdered him? He’d want vengeance,
certainly. Would he also, perhaps, hold a grudging respect?
For the efficiency. For the discretion. For the adherence
to a code. Even after he was arrested, Fellows didn’t
talk to the police. On trial for his life, he never testified.
He stuck to that refracted sense of morality that def ines
a Salford lad.T
HE JOINT TRIAL for the murders of Paul Massey and
John Kinsella had as intense a security presence as
any case that its prosecutors had ever witnessed. Liverpool
Crown Court banned the jury from being photographed
and forbade mobile phones.
Inside, over the course of six weeks, the prosecution
argued that Fellows had been paid to carry out both hits,
and that Boyle had assisted each time. Fellows’s lawyer
did not call any witnesses, but the defense for the Iceman’s
alleged spotter called Boyle himself, and here Boyle again
did the unthinkable. On the stand, he claimed that he’d
played no part in the Massey murder. In Kinsella’s case,
however, he said he was along for what he believed to be a
drug deal—then Fellows killed Kinsella and handed him a
revolver, tucked in a sock inside a backpack. Boyle testified:
“I was like, ‘How can you do that to [me]?’ ” He said he
hoped that Fellows, ultimately, would confess and admitted
that he now feared for his own friends and family.
The prosecution scoffed at Boyle’s defense. The jury, at
the very least, didn’t buy it. After 31 hours of deliberation,
the 12-person panel found Boyle guilty in Kinsella’s murder.
(He was cleared in Massey’s homicide, for lack of evidence.)
His life sentence allowed, potentially, for parole after 33 years,
in 2052. Fellows, guilty on
both counts, got the same,
without the possibility of
parole—an exceedingly
rare penalty in Great Britain
that ensured he would die
in prison—as well as the
judge’s stiff rebuke: “I have
never had to deal with
a contract killer of your
kind before.”
Fellows smirked while
the sentences were being
read. As guards led him
from the dock he report-
edly made a throat-slashing
gesture and spoke directly to his codefendant, telling Boyle:
“It’s your f------ fault, you f------ grass.”
The court had done its part, but street justice still had to
be meted out. Barely a month after his conviction, Fellows
was at Whitemoor maximum-security prison, 150 miles
southeast of Salford, when a Liverpool gang member
slashed him with a wooden block that had been tightly
packed with five razor blades. The Iceman was airlifted
to a hospital and left with severe facial injuries.
Less than two years later he was charged in two more
attacks on A Team members, each predating Massey’s
murder: the shooting of the man inside the Mercedes, for
which he was eventually cleared; and the machete incident,
for which he was found guilty, based partly on CCTV foot-
age that captured him conferring shortly before the attack
with Carroll (who is rumored to have f led to Dubai). For the
latter conviction, Fellows received yet another life sentence.P
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