The Burger Bar Boys. The Cash or Slash Money Crew. The Bang Bang Gang. These names sound straight out of a dime-store novel, but they’re real-life Birmingham gangs some of the underground armies that spearheaded England’s worst riots in a generation. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
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As Britain comes to grips with the causes of the past week’s descent into anarchy, Prime Minister David Cameron has identified the growth of gangs as a key factor and is recruiting high-profile American anti-gang experts to help bring them to heel.
While senior British police officers openly resent that move, analysts of gang culture say it seems logical to seek American assistance, because today’s British gangs consciously ape American gang ambitions and style, from the bling to the lingo.
They talk in a street patois shaped by U.S. rap lyrics, use noms de guerre lifted straight from American gangster films and crime dramas, and choose such icons as Don Corleone, Al Pacino’s Scarface or Baltimore ganglord Stringer Bell of “The Wire” TV series as their avatars on social-networking sites.
“These teenage gangsters are creating their own criminal worlds, and in their minds it’s very much an Americanized world. When they talk about the police, it’s `the Feds,’ or `The 5-0,’ as in Hawaii 5-0,” said Carl Fellstrom, an expert on England’s gangs and author of a recent book on the topic, “Hoods.”
British law enforcement authorities admit that, until only a few years ago, they sought to minimize the scale and violent potential of their homegrown gangs. They promoted their preferred label of “delinquent youth groups” and billed full-blooded street gangs as an American phenomenon.
In the wake of the August riots – when gangs used text-messaging to deploy break-in artists to breach steel-shuttered shops – politicians now use the “G” word pointedly.
“Territorial, hierarchical and incredibly violent, the gangs are mostly composed of young boys, mainly from dysfunctional homes,” Cameron told the House of Commons in an emergency debate on the riots. “They earn money through crime, particularly drugs, and are bound together by an imposed loyalty to an authoritarian gang leader. They have blighted life on their estates, with gang-on-gang murders and unprovoked attacks on police.”
In Birmingham, a reporter took a drive through the contested turf of its working-class west side, a hodgepodge of cramped red-brick rowhouses and gray-concrete 1960s tower blocks where rival Caribbean and Indo-Pakistani gangs long have been at odds. Their feuds have sparked at least four riots since the 1980s.
The police were there too, raiding the home of a gang member believed to be storing loot from the week’s gang raids on convenience stores and hi-fi shops.
At one corner, a teenage boy in hooded jacket and green bandanna – color of a predominantly Caribbean gang called BMW, short for Birmingham’s Most Wanted – was keeping an eye on “the Feds” as they pounded in the front door of that house and charged in by the dozen in search of stolen electronics and fashion-label clothes.
Such raids have become common sights in gang power bases since rioting subsided Wednesday. The BMW foot soldier texted his gang leader the police’s location, using heavily abbreviated code that the “5-0” was raiding the house of an enemy “cru.”
The boy, initially hostile to a reporter’s questions, warmed up when asked about the cost of a black-market plasma TV.
“It’s sale of the century down that end. Everything must go,” he said, pointing to a nearby residential cul-de-sac in the opposite direction of the police raid.
The gang’s pilfered TVs, he said, were going for one-tenth of their sticker price, and locals were paying in cash in back alleys beyond the reach of Birmingham’s network of CCTV cameras. He added with a cheeky smile: “We don’t take Visa, but we do home delivery.”
English gangs often defend their turf down to the curbstone. Many even attach the postal codes of their district to gang names. They also mark territory with wavy-lettered graffiti of tribal identity that would look at home on a Los Angeles highway underpass.
Virtually every spot on the English map that suffered riots is home turf to one or multiple gangs, according to an interactive online map called London Street Gangs and related gang-mapping efforts by the Metropolitan Police and University of Bedfordshire youth-crime expert John Pitts.
One riot spot, Enfield in north London where a Sony distribution center was ransacked, hosts a half-dozen active gangs including Dem Africans, Red Brick Crew and Gun Man Down. The south London borough of Croydon, scene of the worst arson attacks and the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old man, is the power base for the Don’t Say Nothin gang.
While the wide-open shops in London inspired citizens from all walks of life to loot, police say gangs formed the theft-savvy vanguard. CCTV footage of certain riot zones clearly shows groups carting off goods with their faces hidden by gang-branded bandanas, baseball caps and jacket hoods.
The north London borough of Tottenham, where the fatal police shooting of alleged gang member Mark Duggan on Aug. 4 triggered the first riot two days later, has at least a dozen gangs rooted in the vicinity.
Duggan was a reputed member of The Stars gang in Tottenham and a relative of a major crime family in Manchester, northwest England. Police say Duggan, 29, was transporting a loaded Italian handgun hidden in a sock at the time of the police ambush. His last recorded words were a text to his pregnant girlfriend: “The Feds are following me.”
Roy Gisby, who helps manage a London-wide charity called In-volve that tries to steer youths away from drugs and gangs, said how the violence spread from Tottenham demonstrated the hallmarks of gang direction. The lead rioters in attacks on shops brought cars for both getaways and carrying heavy loads, and deployed members using preset gang text lists to tie down police, he said.
“It’s gang-led, no doubt about that,” said Gisby, 59. “Look at what happened in Tottenham. The youngsters were kept in the streets there to riot, while the older ones went north to rob Enfield. It might’ve looked like chaos, but there was an order to it.”
In Nottingham, the city of Robin Hood fame, gang members wearing the red bandanna of one of the city’s biggest gangs, St. Ann’s Posse, tossed gasoline bombs at a police station before ransacking a sportswear store. The following night, the city’s other major gang, the Radford Boys, showed up in their black bandanas to lob Molotov cocktails at their turf’s own police station, too.
