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Massey seemed to be getting arrested every other month,
but he usually got off—the top boy typically keeps clean
hands. In 1994 he helped broker a truce between two
gangs, crystallizing his power. His security firm grew
large enough and gained enough seeming legitimacy that
it won contracts with the local government.
All good things, though, must come to an end. Especially
when gangs and drugs and money are involved. In
June 1997, the Haçienda closed its doors. “The gangsters
had gone so f------ mad, you couldn’t guarantee people
safety,” says Hook. “We had to give up.”
Now everything was coming apart. On the evening of
July 4, 1998, Massey and his crew, at peak audaciousness,
were showing off for BBC cameras, bouncing from club to
club, swigging champagne from the bottle, when things
went south at a Salford bar called Beat’n Track. A man was
stabbed and nearly died. Mr. Big, the main suspect, was
on the run to Amsterdam. Then extradited. And, just like
that, it was over. Massey was just shy of 40 when he landed
his stiffest prison sentence: 14 years, for “wounding with
intent to do grievous bodily harm.” Right in his prime.T
HE MIDDLE-AGED HOOLIGAN who passed through
the exit at Frankland prison in northeast England
in 2007 presented himself as a changed man. He was by
then a grandfather, and he said he wanted to give back to
Salford. He spoke of opening a youth club. His security
business, he claimed, was finally above board. The Salford
Lads had been displaced by a new gang, the A Team. All
that and, within a few years, he was a mayoral candidate.
“I don’t want to be known as Mr. Big,” Massey told the
Manchester Evening News as he submitted paperwork to run
for Salford’s top office. “My campaign will be for everyone,
regardless of class.”
Massey ran as a man of the people, a Robin Hood figure
in a place that had no love for the establishment—but
in the end he more closely resembled the old image of
the unchangeable gangster. Just when I thought I was
out...Mid-campaign, he was arrested for money launder-
ing. When he finished seventh out of 10 candidates, he
blamed the investigation, the same coppers who’d dogged
him since childhood.
So as he aged into his mid-50s, Massey stayed close to
the game. He became less of a street operator and more of
an adviser, which is the role he was serving in July 2015,
on holiday in North Wales, when he found himself medi-
ating an increasingly violent gang war. On one side: the
A Team, led by a Massey protégé, Stephen Britton, who
had made the drive out to Winkups to talk about a spat
that had started mundanely—a fight over a drink thrown
at a nightclub, or over a fake watch; no one seemed to be
sure—and then spiraled out of control. On the other side:
the not-so-creatively named Anti-A Team, whose members
had abandoned Britton for a young scaffolder named
Michael “Cazza” Carroll. By the time Massey was pulled
in, things had reached a boiling point. Masked men, pre-sumably from the A Team, used a chainsaw to remove the
roof of Carroll’s ex-girlfriend’s car. One A Team member
was shot at close range while sitting inside his Mercedes.
Another had his throat slit in a near-fatal machete attack.
In the old days, even after Massey ruled in a way that ap-
peared sympathetic to one side, his word would have been
gospel. But the Anti-A Team showed him no deference.
“This wasn’t his generation anymore,” says Walsh. “There
was a new generation, and they had their own rules.”
So there was Massey, walking up to his house with the
Bacardi and Cokes, when shots rang out in his driveway.A
MONTH AFTER HIS death, Paul Massey’s white
casket—draped in Manchester United f lags and
cannabis-leaf-shaped wreaths—traveled to Agecroft
Cemetery in a carriage pulled by six white horses, behind
eight bagpipers, in a procession past thousands of admir-
ers. Massey, reportedly dressed in his United reds and
entombed with a stash of club memorabilia, was eventu-
ally lowered into the ground, at which point mourners
tossed a handful of dirt on top, released 55 white doves
a nd, f ina lly, da nced to one of Massey ’s favor ite songs f romBut gang wars don’t break to mourn. As attendees at
the wake ordered their first drinks, they learned that an
Anti-A Team member had been beaten at the cemetery
with the wooden poles used to lower the coffin, and acid
had been thrown in his face. One of Massey’s pallbear-
ers, an A Team enforcer and old Salford Lads lieutenant
named John Kinsella—or “Scouse,” for his Liverpudlian
accent—was a suspect in the attack, according to the press.
The schism that cost Massey his life would continue.
Carroll, the Anti-A Team leader, f led the country. Graffiti
appeared throughout Salford, goading him to come fight
your war. One Anti-A Team member took a bullet in
the butt. A wedding was interrupted by a smoke grenade.
Amid all this, authorities offered a £50,000 reward for
information leading to the arrest and conviction of Mr. Big’s
killer. Fat chance. The code still ruled Salford. Police had
linked 112 people to the murder, and none would talk.P
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