by V E Rooney
Don’t I fucking know it, sunshine, sat before you with no choice but to listen to your spiel and indulge you in your little Godfather act here.
“A few weeks back, I start hearing some very troubling shit. My lads have been selling to the same potheads and dealers for years with no bother. Now, it may not bring in as much cash as more, erm, lucrative enterprises, shall we say, but it’s handy for pin money, know what I mean? So a few weeks back, one of my lads is moaning at me, saying that this pothead prick who’s been coming to him for weed for years, and I mean years, all of a sudden goes off the radar. He’s not getting in touch with my lad to place orders like he used to, so after a bit my lad rocks up to his place and asks whether if he’s stopped smoking. No, Pothead turns his nose up at him, saying that he’s found a better supplier. A better supplier,” he says, emphasising the last bit slowly.
“So Pothead brings out his stash, lets my lad sample it, and according to my lad it’s the dog’s bollocks. So my lad is like, which fucking cheeky bastard is selling on my patch, I’m gonna find them and fuck them over. Only his not-so-loyal customer, Pothead, tells him, after some persuasion, mind you, that he’s been going up to Kirkby of all places to get this stuff. Fucking Kirkby!” His gorillas start chuckling again.
“Now, there’s two interesting things here. First off, my lad is fuming because some cunt’s replaced him as the go-to man, and the second thing, this stuff is so much the dog’s bollocks that Pothead, this always monged arsewipe who my lad’s been dealing to for years, is prepared to haul his lazy arse out of bed and trek all the way to Kirkby to get hold of it,” Sean says, his voice leaping about with a definite streak of disbelief.
Well, in my own small perverse way, that fills me with pride, before I remember where I am and what’s happening to me.
“So my lad starts making enquiries about this new cunt. He gets Pothead to make arrangements to get more stuff and follows him up to Kirkby, where he eye-spies your lad here,” Sean says, pointing to John who is still under the grip of one of Sean’s gorillas, “doing the business with him.”
Sean takes another drag on his ciggie. “So then after their little deal is concluded, my lad eye-spies your lad and tracks him all the way back here.”
Fuck. And I thought I was being so fucking careful. I didn’t even notice anyone keeping tabs on the place – with all the industrial estate traffic, visitors and workers coming in and out, it would’ve been dead easy for someone to keep an eye on us at a fair distance.
“So I get dead curious and send some of my lads to keep tabs on what’s going on, who’s coming and going, building up a picture of movements, if you like. At the same time, I make enquiries of my own and all of a sudden I’m hearing about potheads in other parts of town who are banging on and on about this new stuff that is getting sold out of Kirkby, but it’s getting sold by different fellas,” Sean says, cocking his head at Ste, Brian and David.
“But at this point, I don’t know who’s in charge of the operation, see. Could be him, him or him. But then, my lads tell me that they’ve clocked this young bird who’s never far from the action. She’s knocking round with these lads, my lads think she might be someone’s bird, because they’ve also clocked her coming in and out of this little unit here. So they start eye-spying on you. My lads tell me you’re backwards and forwards between this place and your flat in the town centre like a blue-arsed fly. But, my lads also say that they never clock you getting involved with the customers. So I start putting things together and I’m thinking, who the fuck is this bitch who’s been running this operation right on my doorstep? Now of course, if you’ve got any brains whatsoever, girl, you’d have other people doing the selling for you, which is exactly what you did. That’s clever. Staying in the shadows. But seriously, girl, I laughed like a fucking drain when I realised you’re the one at the heart of all this. I mean, talk about having fucking bollocks. Got to take my hat off to you, girl, there aren’t many birds with the bottle to do this.”
Sean repeats his flick-ciggie-and-grind move and leans back in his chair, arms crossed against his chest. He exhales slowly. He stands up and walks slowly round the table, bending over to examine the various wraps and paraphernalia scattered around.
“So you’ve been at this for what, a couple of years?” He picks up a wrap, opens it and sniffs. “Gotta admit you’ve got a quality product here. No doubt about that, girl.”
He places the wrap back on the table and looks at me. “Question is what to do with you now. I reckon that’s a lot of money you’ve taken out of my pockets, girl. And I do not like that. Not one little bit.”
He walks to where Ste is lying on the table and crouches down, lifts up Ste’s head and looks at him. “Even got your own little security team in place. What’s she like as a boss, mate?” Sean says, cocking his head over at me. Ste’s eyes strain in my direction.
“Not bad,” Ste mumbles. Bless him. Sean laughs, stands up and walks over to me. He stands right in front of me and bends down so that our faces are level.
“See, thing is, girl,” he says quietly, “I don’t take kindly to little cunts like you taking away my customers. Don’t get me wrong, girl, there’s always gonna be competition for customers, it comes with the game. But nobody, and I mean nobody, competes with me. Not in my own fucking city.”
He walks back over to his chair and sits down, running his hand over his head. “Oh, I’ve had little people like you try it on. They think, nah, he won’t notice us, long as we’re sneaky about it, like, let’s not ruffle any big feathers and all that. But I do. I always notice. And then I do something about it. And those people aren’t competition any more. Know what I mean?”
Unlike Kirkby new town, Toxteth is one of the oldest parts of the shire, it’s where generation after generation of Africans, West Indians, Chinese and fuck knows what else have settled over the years thanks to its proximity to the docks. Kerrigan knows the streets of Toxteth like they are embedded in his DNA. He knows every stretch of pavement, every corner, every shop, every alleyway, every patch of wasteland. Most importantly, as a kid, he knew who was who. Knowing who was weak and who was strong, who he could fuck up and who he should stay away from. Knowing your opponent and how to beat him was especially important given that the players kept changing during the game. But he would often say to me in his more reflective moments that he sometimes wondered whether his toughest opponent was himself.
Since he was a small child, he had known the importance of picking his battles carefully. His Jamaican dad came to Liverpool in the 1940s during World War II as part of the merchant navy, met a local girl and settled down in Toxteth, the favoured area for wave after wave of immigrants from all over the world.
By the time Sean arrived in 1963, the youngest of three children (he had an older sister and brother), the decline of Toxteth was palpable, in tandem with the waning traffic at the docks as shipping gave way to road and rail haulage. Racism was never far away, even within Toxteth’s melting pot of ethnicities from all corners of the globe. Cliques emerged – the Jamaicans, the Trinidadians, the Nigerians, the Somalians, the Chinese – and rivalries were established amid the battle for control of the drugs trade in the area.
Social services got involved with Sean’s family when Sean began playing truant from secondary school, preferring to explore the streets of Toxteth with his friends. His permanent expulsion from school aged 13, after battering a classmate over some stolen trainers, gave him free rein to explore Toxteth at his leisure and to plot his own course through adolescence. To him it felt like a permanent summer holiday.
But freedom quickly turned into boredom and soon he grew tired of nicking the odd packet of crisps or chocolate bar from the corner shop. He got much more of a buzz by getting one of his mates to create a distraction at the front of the shop, which would see the shopkeeper rush from behind the counter to confront the young miscreant, leaving Sean to rifle through the till. Sometimes he would wander through the streets and spot a car
with a decent-looking cassette player in it. A brick through the window and a stolen bike enabled him to grab the item and flee the scene in seconds. He would then sell the cassette player to a local fence who specialised in flogging stolen car parts. It was this fence who taught Sean how to hotwire a car, and who had taught Sean how to drive, all before Sean had turned fourteen. Not long after Sean’s fourteenth birthday, the fence had been killed when his stolen BMW crashed into a wall as he was being chased by the Police, leaving a gap for Sean to fill.
Other thieves began to turn to him as the go-to man to dispose of car parts and other items. He knew who would be interested in buying what and where he could find them.
Aged fourteen, Sean was already 5ft 9in, and still growing, and he had no difficulty in going into the pubs dotted along Catherine Street and Faulkner Street and finding willing punters. It was a source of pride for Sean that he knew he was making more money than the adults who were buying from him, even if that was only the case because most of them were on the dole. Some of the faces he came into contact with put him in touch with other faces and as Sean cemented new connections, he began to branch out into more lucrative sidelines.
One of Sean’s new mates dealt mostly in hash but occasionally he would get hold of speed or heroin which he would sell around the area for a cut of the profit. He soon enlisted Sean as his cohort and within weeks they were making more money than they knew what to do with. They lost their respective virginities to two prostitutes who frequented the town end of Percy Street, just behind the Anglican cathedral, and when Sean realised that they were working without pimps, he spotted another lucrative opportunity.
He offered them protection and a half-habitable flat to work from in return for a cut of their proceeds which they readily agreed to. He had little trouble renting a flat for cash from one of his adult friends on the premise that they needed somewhere to store their gear, and put the girls to work. The arrangement worked well for the most part; if the neighbours knew they were keeping quiet about it. And the girls were happy not to have to ply their trade on the dank urine-sodden unlit backstreets at the mercy of punters who could turn out to be psychopaths and rapists. They were especially happy that Sean kept them supplied with heroin, something which made their work all the more bearable.
But this arrangement came to an abrupt end when Sean had just turned sixteen. The girls had brought back to the flat a punter who availed himself of their services but had refused to pay. As one of the girls remonstrated with him, the other one had telephoned Sean who was at the flat within two minutes, and he proceeded to beat the punter to a bloody pulp. The girls had made themselves scarce as the punter’s screams alerted one of the neighbours who had then called the Police. Although Sean had fled by the time they arrived, the punter was able to give a description, and Sean was arrested later. And so at sixteen, his criminal career was accorded official status by the courts. He was sentenced to four years (out in two with good behaviour) in a youth detention centre near Runcorn.
If the Toxteth riots were Sean’s baptism of fire into the criminal world, Runcorn Detention Centre was the furnace where his criminal inclinations were hammered into shape, honed and refined. Instead of cavorting with small-time boys like himself from the same streets, Sean now found himself bunkered up with serious youths who were in for assault, GBH, theft, burglary, fraud, prostitution, extortion, blackmail, dangerous driving, the lot.
Of course, it was also a hotbed for dealers. Sean learned more about drugs during his two years there than he had done in his previous sixteen. He now had a network of contacts, each of them in turn connected to some serious players – not just in Liverpool but across the country. It wouldn’t be long before he was working with them directly. Upon his release, he got to work straight away, starting off as an errand boy, then gradually moving up to organising distribution and shipments, and ultimately becoming a serious player himself. And I mean fucking serious.
Even all these years later, the mythology about what happened that first night of the riots in Toxteth can rival any fucking Viking saga. I’ve heard so many different versions about who did what and to whom but the one thing that everyone can agree on is that Sean Kerrigan played an instrumental role in it. And now everyone knows who Sean Kerrigan is.
***
Looking back through newspaper reports and official documents pertaining to the Toxteth riots, I begin to get a picture of Kerrigan’s childhood environment. As I read through Kerrigan’s history, I begin to understand the similarities with Reynolds’ own story, and how they may have found in each other the ideal accomplice – their perfect partner in crime.
The summer of 1981 was one of the hottest on record and was a fitting backdrop for the events that erupted up and down the country in the months of June and July. It’s by no means a stretch to say that disparate waves of incendiary forces that had simmered under the veneer of society boiled over and produced a summer that was memorable, not just for the weather, but also for the ugly boils that had begun to appear across the whole of the UK.
The Conservative government had come to power less than two years previously, victorious for promising an end to the rampant unemployment, skyrocketing inflation and industrial unrest that had characterised the last days of Callaghan’s Labour government. But in Bristol, Brixton and Toxteth, all places united by the diversity of their inhabitants, these promises echoed hollow to the youth who had no jobs waiting for them.
It didn’t matter who was in power; the problems of Police brutality, the disappearance of the traditional manufacturing industries, rising poverty and the ever-present undercurrent of racism continued to plague the inner city estates and terraces, only reinforcing the sense of hopelessness. Lofty promises from Westminster were treated with scorn, particularly in Toxteth, always a Labour heartland. If Labour couldn’t balm the growing sores that ate away at social cohesion, there was no chance the Tories could.
In the Toxteth area, tensions between the local community and the Police were strained enough as it was, fuelled by endemic racism on the part of the Police and distrust on both sides. New ‘stop and search’ powers, or ‘sus’ powers as they were termed by the locals, had been given to the Police by Thatcher in the months preceding the summer of 1981, and these powers were readily deployed by the Police in Toxteth, overwhelmingly against its young black male inhabitants.
Urban whispers soon made their way around the area, with tales of boys and men being deliberately targeted by the Police, who had no hesitation in mistreating them. Other whispers related to how sus targets had been called ‘black bastards’ and ‘fucking niggers’ by the officers searching them. Any protests were dismissed by the Police. ‘Like anyone’s gonna believe you, you fucking coon,’ said one riot veteran relating his own encounter with the Police.
As that blazing summer went on, stories made their way through the pubs, clubs, betting shops and gyms of Toxteth that young men were getting their heads cracked by baton-wielding Policemen and being arrested for the most spurious of allegations such as ‘playing reggae music above legal noise limits’, and most infamously, ‘sucking teeth in an aggressive manner at a Police officer’.
But on this July 4 evening, a line had been crossed, and the Police were about to feel the full force of Toxteth’s rage. A few hours previously, a young black man on a motorbike had been ‘sussed’ by the Police. A group of black youths had witnessed the incident and went to remonstrate with the Police, only for some of them to be arrested for public disorder and bundled away themselves. As the news spread, the evening already had a feel of horrible inevitability about it. As word travelled around Toxteth, hordes of angry residents - mostly black youths, but soon joined by other residents of all ages and ethnicities - emerged from their flats and houses, a mass of barely-controlled fury making its way to the flashpoint of the trouble.
The Police, already aware that they had badly mishandled the situation, had sent for reinforcements. Within minutes of the motorbike incident,
youths were sprinting down streets and alleyways, across wasteground and parks, shouting calls of defiance which rose in volume as more and more of Toxteth’s inhabitants joined the throngs already making their way towards the flashpoints to confront the Police.
Reynolds gives me an account of Kerrigan’s role in the riots, as he told it to her.
“I’m stood at the top of Parliament Street, I’m looking down, and there’s kids, young lads, old lads, even some birds all over the place. And not just the Toccy people – there are cars and taxis full of lads from Allerton, Speke, Huyton, coming in from all over the place because they want some action as well. They’ve all got footie scarves and balaclavas over their gobs because the air was fucking filthy, girl, because we’re chucking Molotovs at the busies so there’s smoke everywhere, cars are getting turned over and set on fire, tyres are getting chucked into the road and set on fire, I could barely see in front of me, my throat’s burning up and my ears are fucking killing me because there’s all these chants and shouts and whistles and roars and Police sirens coming from all over the place.”
Beyond the rioters, a hundred yards away down the gentle incline of the ironically-named Parliament Street, stood a line of Police in riot gear, their shields held in front of them. Bricks, stones and bottles flew overhead, crashing to the ground with increasing ferocity. Small fires were dotted along the street where petrol bombs had landed, and black choking smoke rose into the air.
Not many needed encouragement to pick up weapons - bottles, metal and wooden bars, bricks, bats and knives - and settle their own score with the Police. Others simply wanted to join in for the fun of it, carried away by their own surging adrenaline, connecting with the energy of others.
In years to come, riot participants and bystanders would allude to an unseen force that gathered momentum, almost like an electric current that touched everyone and bound them together against a common enemy. But the overwhelming force driving the night’s events was young, black and male, and they wanted to take revenge against the old, white and privileged.
