‘Oh fuck yeah, that’s loud that. That were loud, that. I’ll remember that fucking sound for ever: it was fucking horrible.’
‘So how were you caught?’ I asked Mick.
‘I did it in me own fucking car. Me own car! No fucking false reg plates on it or nothing. I parked the fucking thing outside,’ said Mick, not quite believing his own foolishness. He was not by any stretch of the imagination a criminal superbrain: he was poor and desperate and he had come to Dominic for help.
‘And you’re coming up for trial shortly? You’ll have to plead guilty, I suppose?’ I said.
‘Can’t fucking deny it really, can I?’
Despite Mick having been caught red-handed, Dominic, who had been there before many times and been acquitted, felt that he could still get away with it. He probed Mick’s defence.
‘What have they charged you with?’
‘Attempted robbery.’
‘Without firearms, though?’
‘Without firearms.’
‘Did they have any CCTV?’
‘No.’
‘They can’t really prove it was you then.’
‘I’ve admitted it now,’ said a crestfallen Mick.
‘You shouldn’t have said anything: no comment,’ advised Dominic.
‘That’s it now. Nowt I can do about it. The only reason that I went in there was through fear. I’ve got to get this fucking money; my time is running out. It’s like, I had to do what I had to do.’
Dominic took this on board and sorted out the debt with the London loan shark. Problem solved, except for Mick’s court case, which would be outside Dominic’s circle of influence, mostly.
* * * * *
But Dominic was famous for exerting influence in the most unlikely of places. On one April Fool’s Day, he organised for superglue to be smuggled into a number of the UK’s biggest prisons. In unison and on command, all the locks in the jails were glued shut. It cost millions to undo the damage. As a result he spent extra time in jail but he felt the laughs were worth it.
On another occasion he arranged an escape on the way to a court hearing. While he was being broken out, he pretended that he was in fact being kidnapped. ‘Don’t let them take me,’ he pleaded with the terrified prison officers. Meanwhile, his brothers, Desi and Damien, let off a round and bundled their brother into the back of a stolen car. In the following three days, they robbed two cash-laden security vans. In true Dominic style, he then presented himself back at the prison as if he had just been released by his kidnappers. The Police were searching all over Britain, because, despite the ruse, they rightly suspected that he had arranged his own escape from custody to go on a spree.
Granada News reported:
Police in Manchester say they’re baffled by the apparent kidnapping of a remand prisoner. They are not sure whether he’s been abducted or whether it was all part of an elaborate escape.
Dominic takes up the story: ‘We had two security vans to rob the same day: one in the morning around about 10 o’clock, and one around 4 o’clock. We was going for the double. No one had ever done a double before. So we just thought we’d have a go.’
My fellow Granada reporter, John Molson, told the ITV viewers:
Two masked men ran up to the car at these lights. One had a hammer, the other a gun. They threatened the police officers and forced them to release Noonan. In the struggle, the gun was fired but no one was hurt. Noonan was bundled into the back of a waiting car. Police say they are now afraid for Noonan’s safety, if he’s been abducted.
I love that last line of the report and have never heard the like of it before or since. But there are few gangsters like Mr Lattlay Fottfoy. I asked Dominic what fear did to the officer with him in the van when they were held up.
‘He admitted in Court that he pissed his pants. He said, “I just pissed my pants in the back of the car.” I could hear him pissing anyway. I remember saying to him, “Don’t let them take me; don’t take the cuffs off!” and he said, “I can’t, I can’t stop them, I can’t stop them,” because he had a gun pressed against him.’
Here is the raw brutality in this man: a matter-of-fact display of sickening terror. And yet it was partly comical in a Keystone Cops kind of way, with the Police and Dominic testing each other’s wits.
* * * * *
Dominic has two children by two different women and has had relationships with strippers by his own account. Initially, he may give the impression of being a ladies’ man, but I had a suspicion that his sexuality might not be what it seemed. The posse of young men following in his wake made me wonder if he was gay. Understandably, I was reticent about raising the subject with him. How could I ask a man, who by his own admission has been implicated in at least six gangland murders, about being gay? Well, the answer is, very carefully. Despite having prepared it in my head, it came out all wrong.
The scene was right out of the movies. This was very appropriate because in Dominic’s case, it was sometimes hard to see where the crime classics he watched ended and his own life began. We were at the Salford Lads Club, a boxing club and community centre that has been sponsored by the Noonans over the years, in fine gangster tradition. It is in fact an old church with thick walls, 1950s flaking paint and the smell of a spit-and-sawdust gym that owes more to Charles Atlas than Duncan Bannatyne.
‘I’ve always thought, I hope you don’t mind me asking you this, that … erm … that there’s a hint of lavender about you, Dominic,’ I said nervously.
‘Lavender? Why’s that? Because I’ve got a bald head?’
‘Put it another way: are you gay?’
‘Yeah, of course I’m gay; everyone knows I’m gay,’ said Dominic with equanimity. After all my anxiety about getting shot for the intrusive question, he didn’t seem one bit bothered.
‘My family knows, brothers and sisters, best mates,’ he told me.
‘How did you first become aware that you were gay?’ I asked him, hoping I wasn’t pushing my luck now.
‘I went to a boarding school just a day after my thirteenth birthday. I was exactly 13 years old and I was sat in the bedroom upstairs in the dorm and when the night-time came, I sat on the bed and just got punched straight in the face. I saw a white flash and that, got told, “Do what we tell you to.” Got told to take my clothes off, start playing with them, sucking them off, and then they raped me, about six of them. It went on all night, went on for weeks. Every night they’d take turns with me, staying in the bed all night: two at a time, they raped me, and then they just went on to the next one, the next one, the next one.’ Dominic was totally frank about what had happened to him and I was shocked by what I was hearing. Suddenly this self-styled Robin Hood with a cruel twist was revealing where some of the cruelty had come from.
In true Noonan style he had tracked down everyone who raped him and gave them it all back and more.
‘It just went on and on and on: laughing and joking and making me do dirty things that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I’ve caught up with every single one of them and I’ve severely hurt them,’ he continued.
About ten years later, he met the main perpetrator in the gay village on Canal Street in Manchester. He didn’t recognise Dominic, but Dominic recognised him.
‘I dealt with him severely: I really, really hurt him. I tortured him proper, the best quality torture we could do. Knocked the fuck out of him. I did things that he wished he never did to me.’ I tried not to imagine the revenge that was exacted.
The Godfather was speaking with an honesty I had never expected. It was an almost solemn moment.
After this conversation, Dominic took his men to church. Despite his criminality, Dominic regularly visits his local Catholic church. In prison it was a place to meet and arrange trouble both inside and outside of the joint, but, on this occasion, it was time for some slightly twisted reflection.
‘Dominic, you’ve done some terrible things. How do you square that with being a Christian and a Catholic?’ I asked him.
‘I get satisfaction from coming to church and asking for forgiveness. I believe I’ve just been forgiven for what I’ve done and I can walk out of here and probably do the same again and just come back here. Obviously you can’t do that in Court: say, “I’m sorry”, and expect to walk away.’ That was Dominic’s very bespoke interpretation of the rite of confession.
‘Do you have any consideration for victims?’ I pushed him.
‘I do, yeah. On quite a few, I look back and think, “Should I have done that? Should I have handled that a different way?” and sometimes I think, “No, they got what they deserved. They did it to someone else and they get back what they’ve done.”’
Hoping the sanctity of the church would protect me, I looked for more confessions. In the background a woman with an apron and brush was sweeping the floor, oblivious to the unholy conversation taking place on the hallowed ground.
‘Did you ever kill a man?’
‘No.’
‘Did you ever order a man to be killed?’
‘I can’t answer questions like that, can I really? You can’t answer questions like that: I’d be arrested. It’s been alleged that I have.’
‘If you allegedly ordered the execution of a man would you allegedly feel guilty about that?’
‘If I was going to do something like that, that person would have to have done something really bad. Not a silly thing, something really, really serious. Then, yeah, I wouldn’t think twice about it,’ he admitted.
‘How do you sleep at night?’
‘Laid out on my bed, straight.’
* * * * *
I had initially planned to spend six months filming the Noonan family, but things just kept happening and I continued filming. I started the project as a single man and ended it married with kids. I remember on our wedding day, during our reception at Slane Castle, Dominic phoned from prison and told my new wife: ‘If he ever gives any trouble, you can always count on me to sort Donal out.’ With friends like that, as they say.
I knew that to know someone’s world you had to live in it and, although this was not undercover, I had become as embedded in the Noonans’ world as much as I had in any undercover operation. I cared for them, was disappointed by them and had hopes for them. But in my filming I had to remain neutral – as neutral as any human can be in this dangerous and cruel cartoon world.
While my time in Dominic’s world may have appeared to be focused on the Godfather himself, in truth it was the children in his life that drew most of my attention and concern. In his motley crew he had a range of lost souls, including Bugsy, his nine-year-old son, red-haired Paul, who was also nine, and Sean the nightclub singer, who was 14.
Sean Noonan was a Frank Sinatra style crooner and sang at ‘funerals, baptisms and acquittals, mostly acquittals’. He was a good kid and a talented boxer. He didn’t really get into trouble and I thought he might escape the fate that had been laid out for him by the rest of his family. He may not have had Sinatra’s looks or cool but he was a decent singer and would keep a good pub crowd on their feet with ease.
Paul, was a nine-year-old smoker to whom Dominic acted as godfather. ‘He got a bad habit. I don’t know, maybe he needs nicotine patches.’ Bugsy, Dominic’s son, seemed to have the heart and face of a choirboy but, according to Dominic, he was a ‘little bastard’. I thought Bugsy was a delightful kid. He had a cherubic face, dark-brown hair and brown, soulful eyes. His mother, Mandy, was like a character out of Shameless, but provided Bugsy with a loving environment despite the crime surrounding them. Already, Bugsy had lost three major role models to crime, and he had seen Dominic for just two years because of all his time in jail.
The question was whether little Bugsy would follow in the steps of his father. I desperately hoped not, but I wondered what chance he had. I found myself offering avuncular support to the young kid, hoping that something from the normal side of my own abnormal upbringing would encourage him down a road less fraught with danger. It was a difficult thing to do: his father was a gangster and his uncle a hitman. I asked him what a gangster was.
‘Well, they go round killing people, but not for no reason, for a reason; there has to be a reason, like you owed them money or something like that.’
I wondered how he felt about his dad’s crimes and all his time in prison.
‘Well, I love him of course, cos he’s my dad, and that’s it, really, cos I love him and that’s it, no matter what he does. I can’t help it, can I? He’s a gangster: that’s it, really.’ This was a terribly sad moment. There was an acquiescence to his circumstances that I felt foretold his future. Dominic was struggling with fatherhood and I feared for the rest of his son’s childhood.
A couple of years later, a similar question was asked of Bugsy, this time by his crooner cousin, Sean, as they were fishing one afternoon.
‘Do you want to be like your dad?’ Sean asked.
‘Me dad? No, because he’s done armed robberies and stuff like that, hasn’t he?’
‘Would you ever go to prison?’ Sean takes over my role and does a very good imitation of Jeremy Paxman.
‘No, cos they spit in your drinks, and how would you know? They could piss in your drink, you wouldn’t know; spit in your food and mix it all up,’ replied Bugsy. It was as good a reason as any to stay on the straight and narrow, and, as his father has spent more than two decades in prison, the point was well made.
‘I bet he’s been eating all sorts,’ he continued innocently.
While this pair, the next generation in the crime dynasty, fished on the banks of the Grand Union Canal, they pondered jail and their own futures.
‘I’d do it to try and get one of my mates out of trouble. I’d go into prison for that, but …’
‘I’d go in prison for my family,’ Bugsy interrupted.
‘Yeah, so would I. But I wouldn’t go and do something off my own bat,’ said Sean, ‘like an armed robbery, for example.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I couldn’t do that. I’d prefer to get other people to do it for me, if you think about it.’
‘I don’t want to die anyway, don’t want to die young.’
‘Neither do I,’ replied Bugsy. They both seemed aware that it was a distinct possibility in their world.
‘No, I’m going to be a singer, become a millionaire with my voice, and then I’m going to buy a pile of pubs and clubs in Manchester. And then I’m going to design my own train, design my own plane, buy a pink Hummer, a Porsche 911, a Range Rover and my very own boat - like Abramovitch with his big fucking Russian yacht!’ Sean was, at least, thinking big.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, I was following Dominic as he bought a London taxi, a red double-decker bus and three ambulances, all for his own amusement and as a macho display of his strength. ‘And if the cops give me any hassle I’m going to buy a tank.’ This was a man who was judge, jury and executioner on his own patch. His fleet of vehicles hinted at his ambition to ‘actually police the law’ – not in some underground sense, but in a very obvious and cheeky way, to put two fingers up to the establishment. It wasn’t like Sean’s ambitious desire for an Abramovich-style yacht: this was about power and making sure people knew you had it.
Dominic had recently set up his own ‘community police station’, with safe deposit boxes, community alarms and its own quasi-police force. It was located in a disused pub that was being completely renovated for the purpose. Each window had metal shutters and the basement was being carved out for security storage facilities. It was an imposing building, enclosed with iron fencing. For the first time the Godfather was making public the community secret that he considered himself to be the law, and not the Greater Manchester Police Force.
Since coming out of prison in 2002 after a ten-year stretch, Dominic had styled himself as a security expert and developed an unhealthy interest in uniforms and security vans.
‘There’s going to be 11 of these [vans] in the next few weeks. We’re going to convert them into cash-car
rying vans. These back doors will be sealed up … One man will remain in the back of the van, one man gets out, lifts up the shutters, drops the money in or out, puts [the shutter] down. We’re offering a cheaper service because I think Securicor and Group 4 are too expensive.’
During this time Dominic was at the height of his powers, but his older brother, Desi the hitman, was on a downward trajectory when I met him on the family’s old stomping ground in North Manchester. A huge bear of a man, he was wearing a balaclava that revealed only the touch of madness in his eyes. He was possibly the scariest man I had ever met: a monster that had brought many lives to a sharp end wearing the same balaclava.
Desmond Noonan was a serious criminal and he was staring me in the eye, holding my gaze with determination. He had a long track record as an armed robber and a reputation as a gangland executioner.
‘My mates asked me to whack you for them,’ he told me matter-of-factly.
‘Did they?’ I replied.
‘Yeah, in front of the camera,’ he revealed. ‘Believe it or not, we’re a nice family. We don’t do everything nice, but, you know, we do look after each other; we look after our friends. We come out at three or four in the morning. We stop all the burglaries, we stop most of the fucking filthy drugs hanging about, you know what I mean?’
This was slightly ironic, because those in the know were aware that, against all family tradition, Desi had been dabbling with crack cocaine. But I decided not to draw his attention to the contradiction at that moment in time.
He slowly rolled his balaclava off his head.
‘You still seem to be very strong in Manchester,’ I said, keen to get on his good side.
‘Yeah, we’re still strong. It’s not just that we’re strong, we’ve got strong people around us … we’ve got lots of strong, loyal people around us. We’ll always have that. If you think you can take just one of us out and it’s over, then you’re really silly people, very silly people.’
When we were all back at his house, with the camera battery crashed, he threatened the Dutch cameraman for no apparent reason. ‘I killed a Dutchman once. Make sure you are not the second,’ Desi warned, before making the tea. During a quiet chat he told us that he had been involved in the INLA, in the Warrington bomb, and that he would never be caught for murder unless he was caught directly at the scene. He had never been convicted of murder but had been charged and arrested for the crime many times, he said.
Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me Page 6
