North West

For several decades Liverpool gangsters have made huge fortunes from crime - some have been jailed, others were killed, and a few have become reformed characters.

It's a terrifying tale of murder, torture, money, and fear.

Inside Out charts the history of gangland violence on Merseyside in a special investigation.

Gangs of New York... and Liverpool

Smuggling contraband is nothing new to Liverpool. It's been going on since the city was the world's greatest seaport and the gateway to the New World.

A newspaper report in The New York Times of May 1890 talks of suspected smuggling by the stewards and petty officers of the various steamers which ran between Liverpool and New York.

Liverpool academic and author of "The Gangs of Liverpool", Mick Macilwee, has been studying the gangs who terrorised the streets of the Victorian city.

From Liverpool to New York - crime trade

The docks, which handled 40 per cent of the world's trade, provided rich pickings.

"This was like a seven mile treasure trove of goods to pilfer for poor people," says Macilwee.

He says it all began with the mass immigration of destitute Irish into Liverpool during the potato famine.

As different immigrant communities arrived in Liverpool, drugs came in with them.

For example the Chinese opium trade was centered around the docks, and later on - in the 1940's after the war - cannabis was starting to come in with Jamaican seamen.

'Killer'

One of the most famous 1960's criminals was a boy who grew up in Huyton - and became a man with a nickname - 'Killer'.

He was an old school armed robber - a safe blower and a wages snatcher. His name is Charlie Seiga and today he's nearly 70 and says he's a reformed character.

His life of crime in Liverpool stretched over half a century.

Charlie Siega - reformed character.

Another gangster was once executed in Charlie's kitchen - shot to death at point blank range.

Charlie was charged with his murder but acquitted.

Despite the violence, he says that old school villains had a code of honour to stick to.

"When you think of the crime in them days... no old woman got hurt and no old man got mugged or nothing we just wanted money and we got money," says Charlie.

"We were ruthless... Very very seldom was there guns. Guns were taken just as a frightener, not to kill anybody, not to shoot anybody."

Life of crime

Robbery was also the trademark of one of Charlie's contemporaries - Tommy Commerford, known to his mates as 'Tacker'.

He's dead now, but his legacy lives on. He's credited by police with being Liverpool's first drugs baron.

Tommy made his money from bank robbery - and one detective who knew him well is Albert Kirby.

He's the former head of Merseyside Serious Crime Squad but back in the mid 60's he was a young detective and remembers one of Commerford's audacious jobs.

Kirby recalls the old style criminals.

"He was quite a unique character was Tommy because he was a larger than life character.

"You couldn't possibly fall out with him. He knew that we were aware what his criminal activity was and he used to use us as a game really. But he was very successful in his own way."

He used his money to move into the drugs world dealing with bigger and larger quantities of drugs, and ended up doing substantial terms of imprisonment for it.

Commerford had been running his international empire from his council flat in Liverpool - while claiming the dole.

When Merseyside detectives arrested him he was about to do a deal with South American drug cartels.

Ghettoes and gangs

At the start of the 1980s, a handful of families controlled Liverpool's drugs trade from homes in the south of the city.

The place to get cannabis was Toxteth.

Liverpool 8 was known then as a ghetto - and the life of the area's mainly black population of 20,000 centered around Granby Street.

Then in 1980 things changed forever. Years of neglect and racial harassment led to nine days of violence and riots in Toxteth.

Stephen French, a former gangster, remembers it well:

Gun crime - a growing problem.

"The main thing that we were lacking back then was opportunity, direction and purpose... If you've no purpose you're living a meaningless existence - if you're leading a meaningless existence... there's only one thing that will fill that void and it usually involves violence. Crime and violence."

Stephen recalls that he was one of the most scary guys that you could ever wish to meet, "They whispered my name, people wouldn't look me directly in the face such was my reputation, such was my ferocity..."

He was known as 'The Taxman' - a gangster who used to rob drug dealers - a highly dangerous enterprise in an extremely violent world.

Today Stephen says he's left all that behind - and is now a legitimate businessman and anti gun campaigner who's recalled his life in a book.

"I wasn't a drug dealer, I didn't sell drugs," he says.

"I actually taxed drug dealers not for the drugs - for the money. I always sought cash, always looked for cash. But in saying that it only led me to a life of desperation, despair and no hope...

"Money was made, money was spent. It was a fast, frivolous time and the money was spent fast and frivolously."

The old days

Julian Linskill is a leading crime lawyer in Liverpool. Over 30 years he's defended in 70 murder cases - many involving gangsters.

"I think the days of the old skilled blagger, or the 'Peterman', the man who would blow up a safe or someone who would break into a bonded warehouse or counterfeit a pass in order to get away with the ill gotten goods are long gone.

"I mean I don't see any of that going through the courts here on Merseyside... I think there was a small number of families whom one might attach the name gang to, who converted from the ordinary work into drugs, very successfully as it happens."

By the mid 80's, Liverpool's drugs squad was trying to clean up what had become known as 'Smack City'.

Class A narcotics had spread to the housing estates, and they were also infiltrating the nightclubs and discos where doormen controlled which dealers were allowed in.

When he wasn't in jail, Bob Croxton worked as a drug dealer in Liverpool. Now he helps kids and prisoners - counselling them about the horrific nature of crack and smack:

"I dealt drugs, I dealt death - there's no two ways about it. The worst thing I ever got involved in was heroin. It's something I've looked back at in disgust at some of the things that I did."

Gang mentality

Stephen French is now an anti-gun campaigner: "Firearms terrify me because firearms in the hands of wrong people end lives, destroy lives, end communities.

"My own personal history with firearms... my son Stephen was shot twice in a year, the second time almost fatally - his girlfriend was with him. My nephew Anthony Decan was shot in the head with a 9 mm pistol - survived - but lost the use of his left eye.

"My close blood brother Andrew John was shot dead in the street like a dog..."

Stephen French - anti-gun campaigner.

Andrew's brother, Carl John remembers, "It wasn't drug related, but it was related to to the gang mentality that was taking over a lot of major cities and urban inner city dwellings, like Liverpool ghetto areas."

As the drugs gangs expanded so did the violence - and a new phrase entered the gangland culture - contract killing.

These cold bloodied assassinations resulted from criminals sorting out their differences.

Police promised to meet force with force as violence flared amongst gangs - and for the first time in Britain, officers routinely and openly carried firearms.

Over the next ten years 43 people would die in gun killings in Merseyside.

Drugs empire

The heat was too much for some criminals who fled to Holland to build up their drugs empire in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam was one of the central strands in a spider's web of supply chains which stretch from Liverpool to Bogata to Kabul.

Britain's gang busters - SOCA, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, still believe the immense scale of drug trafficking is posing the biggest single threat to the UK.

Big profits lead to larger consignments and the ability to fund other crimes.

SOCA believes that half of the heroin and cocaine seized in Britain has passed through the Netherlands. And the Dutch police have the Liverpool gangs as one of their top targets.

Tom Driessen is Director of the Dutch National Crime Squad and says it's not an easy task: "The profile of those criminals from Liverpool is that they learned not only to do illegal activities but they learned to survive, and violence is part of their life from their youth...

"We can't name names. I can't say anything about the investigations but Liverpool criminals are still an interest in our investigations."

Drugs and crime

Today drugs are still very much part of Liverpool's crime scene.

We met Virginia - a prostitute, crack addict and mother to four children she rarely sees.

She's 34-years-old and has been a junkie for nearly half her life.

"I should have had a big house, big mansion - at least a couple of cars... but no I've given it all to the drug dealer.

"I could not get off drugs in this city because I'd be back on them the next day. I hate it, having to get up in the morning and having to depend on something...

"If I knew then what I was going to be like I'd have stayed away from it and that's the truth, I'd have stayed away."

She's the human face of the drug trade.

'Lost Generation'

With the drugs has come guns for protection - and enforcement.

In Toxteth, Inside Out met two former gang members who told us how easy it is for to get guns:

"You can get an 8mm Luger for 350 bills or something. These days if police catch you with a gun it's an automatic five years anyway just for the gun. And if you actually have bullets, it's an extra year for every bullet."

They say that there's little else for kids to do but hang out together.

Stephen French says that action is need now: "There's seven and eight year olds at home now - that are going to hit the streets in 10 years time.

Rhys Jones - victim of gun crime.

"And if we as elders of the villages and communities don't have something to keep their interests and channel their energies, it doesn't bear thinking about.

"Because these young men, these young children they have fathers that are murderers, uncles that have been killed, cousins who are doing life and they are becoming desensitised to human feeling.

"And if we don't teach them the human feeling, the human emotion and the human contact and that the human spirit must come together... when they hit the street, I'll be staying indoors."

His fear is that the 'lost generation' of today are about to become tomorrow's gangsters... and the cycle of crime is about to turn again.