On 22 March 2009, a foot attached to a left leg was found in a green holdall dumped in bushes behind a lay-by on the A507 near the village of Cottered in Hertfordshire. The leg had been severed at the hip. One week later a left forearm popped up on a grass verge on Nomansland Common, near Wheathampstead. The arm had been dismembered at the elbow and wrist.
Two days after that, in a cattle pen in Asfordby, near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, a farm worker chanced upon a head, partly decomposed, minus two upper front teeth. The eyes, ears and tongue had been cut away. On 7 April a right leg surfaced in a lay-by on the A10 near Puckeridge, Hertfordshire. A headless, handless torso turned up in a ditch in Gore Lane, Standon, Herts four days later. The torso was found in an olive-green Gullivers suitcase, the same make and design as the holdall containing the left leg. This case involved not only missing body parts but matching luggage. The police put two and two together, as it were, and discovered that four of the parts – left leg, head, right leg, and torso complete with right arm and stump of left arm – belonged to the same unfortunate person. He was dubbed ‘Jigsaw Man’. (That leaves a left forearm out there somewhere.)
No hands, no fingerprints, see. But the killer was, as well as being completely psycho, a bit thick. In the modern age, DNA technology means that the police can trace corpses in a way they could never do two decades ago. For the moment, they knew he was white or Asian, between 5ft 6in and 5ft 10in, his shoe size between seven and nine, aged between his mid-40s and early 60s, heavy – between 16 and 17 stone – suffered from eczema, had thick, discoloured little toenails and had broken his lower left leg when he’d been a teenager. He had no tattoos or scars from surgery. And – almost certainly the cause of death – he’d been stabbed in the back.
Literally.
So what’s the gruesome consequence of a psychopathic killer’s handiwork littered across the Home Counties in matching luggage got to do with Wayne’s world?
Wait and see.
A few weeks after his seventeenth birthday in December 2002, Young Rooney won a Blue Peter badge. You don’t generally give Blue Peter badges to grown-ups. In that regard, he was still a child. At exactly the same time, he was also an adult goldmine, an investment target that the Big Money in Football could not resist.
The previous summer one man in particular had eyed up Everton’s great talent, and wanted a slice of the Roo action. British football’s super-agent, Paul Stretford, has dark hair turned shock white, is a bit podgy, boasts a friendly smile and a good manner with people.
In the spring of 2002 he was interviewed by Alex Hayes of the Independent on Sunday, and set his stall out on the moral high ground. The man who started business as a football agent from a cellar in his family home in 1987 took time out with Hayes to moan about some of his fellow agents:
While I think we are sometimes an easy target, I do also believe that some agents leave themselves open to attack and criticism. True, there are going to be times when it is a little difficult because you’re on a different side of the table to the managers, but I believe there is always a middle ground. I’ve managed to be successful because I’ve made sure all parties are satisfied.
Stretford banged the drum for better standards: ‘I’m really worried about the lack of professionalism and I am frankly appalled at the behaviour of some of the so-called agents that certain players have signed with.’
The über-agent argued that sloppy standards resulted from the attempt to clean up agents in the wake of the Rune Hauge bungs affair. Hauge, a Norwegian wheeler-dealer, represented John Jensen and Pål Lydersen during their transfers to Arsenal in the early 1990s. Allegations were made that the then Arsenal manager George Graham had been paid a £425,000 ‘bung’ to sign the players. Graham was later found guilty by the Football Association after admitting receiving an unsolicited gift and was suspended for a year. Hauge was banned for life from operating as an agent by FIFA (the international governing body of football) in 1995, but this was cut back to two years’ suspension.
This mess required the authorities to tighten up – and that’s what provoked Stretford’s scorn.
These rules and regulations are a nonsense. FIFA overreacted to something they thought was prevalent, although it was in fact anything but. What they have done is create an industry. And what that has done is create problems. As a result, any Tom, Dick or Harry can now easily become an agent. To stop this onslaught, I would like to see our organisation, IAFA [the International Association of Football Agents], totally restructured. That’s why I have signed a petition calling for a specific charter of conduct within our business. Travel agents have it, so why shouldn’t we?
If Stretford’s reforms were put in place, he said, ‘the game would be a lot cleaner’.
It’s worth remembering Stretford’s pieties about purifying the game as the Rooney drama unfolds.
As time went by, a second man came to covet Everton’s youthful star – Sir Alex Ferguson, the brilliantly competitive, bleakly aggressive and comically bad-tempered manager of Manchester United. Ferguson’s habit of swearing his head off at players, at anyone in earshot and, some say, at passing aircraft has earned him the nickname ‘The Hairdryer’.
The flinty Scot may well be the most successful manager in British footballing history, but he was once sacked by St Mirren for ‘unpardonable swearing at a lady on club premises’. For his part, Ferguson believes that he was unfairly treated by the Paisley club. The definitive work on the great man is The Boss: The Many Sides of Alex Ferguson by Michael Crick, who makes the point that ‘Ferguson swears all the time, by the way, at most people’.
He is a ferocious disciplinarian of the swaggering stars on the pitch and there is no doubt, given his astonishing record of success at Old Trafford, that somewhere inside Ferguson’s brain chemistry is a deep, intuitive understanding of how to get eleven men to kick a ball in the right direction more often than not.
Stretford and Ferguson live in roughly the same posh bits of Cheshire’s suburban sprawl, just to the south of Manchester, which, some say, ooze ‘nouveau riche’ vulgarity, all fur coat and no knickers.
To understand a little more about how Stretford hoovers up football’s talent we must call on ‘The Most Hated Man In England’ (for a few days): Stan Collymore, former striker for Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, sex beast, dogger and the man who infamously beat up his then girlfriend, TV weathergirl Ulrika Jonsson.
In the early 1990s Collymore was a rising twenty-year-old star at Southend with a golden future when Stretford came knocking at the door. Collymore, in his book Stan, describes the approach. Could this have been a pointer to Team Stretford’s recruitment methods deployed for Wayne at the beginning of the next decade?
Collymore recalls:
Stretford’s pitch was based around the ethos that he would be totally devoted to me. He didn’t have many clients so that allowed him to work like a slave for his chosen few. His attitude was very much that it didn’t matter what time of the day or night it was, he would always be available if I had a problem and I needed to call him. If I allowed him to represent me, he said, all I would have to worry about was my football. He would take care of the rest. He was hungry and ambitious and I liked that. So I went for it. I signed with him. He came to watch me regularly that season. He was always there for me.
And then, as time went by, the passion cooled and there were times when, much to Collymore’s frustration, Stretford wouldn’t return his calls immediately, and he wasn’t always there for Stan.
Collymore complains, in particular, of the time when he was bored with Nottingham Forest in the mid-1990s. His goal-scoring record was so good that he was a contender for the top flight, and he harboured a dream of playing for Manchester United. He claims in his autobiography that there was some interest from Ferguson, so he was ‘gutted’ – footballers are never disappointed – when he learnt that Andy Cole was in the process of being snapped up by Man United instead of him. Cole was another client of Stretford’s.
Doing a fair impression of a Moaning Minnie, Collymore says in his book:
I tried four or five times to phone Stretford on his mobile and he was very curt with me. He kept telling me that he couldn’t talk. That went on for four or five days although it seemed like an eternity … The fact was that Stretford had shoehorned his other client into Manchester United at my expense. There was nothing I could do about Fergie’s opinion, but the fact that my own agent didn’t even have the bollocks to call me was infuriating. Eventually, he returned one of my calls. He was embarrassed.
Stretford, according to Collymore, smoothed him down with the possibility of going to Liverpool.
Some time later, when Rooney left Everton and signed for Manchester United, Paul Stretford’s then agency, Proactive, got from the Reds deal £½ million up front, £½ million guaranteed over a relatively short period and £½ million if Wayne stayed with Manchester United for a given time – a prospective £1½ million in all if everything worked out. Some time after that, in 2004, three men were tried for blackmailing Stretford – demanding money with menaces. At the blackmail trial defence barrister Lord Carlile raised the possibility of a conflict of interest for the agent and suggested that Stretford’s aim was ‘to milk the cow from both ends’ – a charge Stretford pooh-poohs. Still, everyone knew that being Rooney’s agent was a bit like having a key to a goldmine.
In late June 2002 Wayne Rooney Senior wrote a strangely worded letter to the star’s first agent, Peter McIntosh – nicknamed ‘Peter Mac’. It began ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, which was odd because Wayne Senior knows that Peter Mac is a man, not a lady. Two years on at the blackmail trial Carlile correctly deduced that the letter had been written by someone at Proactive, the agency which Stretford then ran. It was a kiss-off letter so brutal they couldn’t be bothered to establish the gender of the addressee. The letter spelt out that when Rooney’s contract with Peter Mac ended in December that year, he would be moving on. Paul Stretford had snapped him up.
Was this a simple business switch? No.
To understand how the beautiful game really works, you have to know something of the background to one of the principal characters in the dark side of Roo’s story.
The Spitfire, the Dyson vacuum cleaner and the two-on-a-bike hit are all great British inventions. But whereas the Second World War fighter is defunct, the Germans now our gallant European allies and great hosts for World Cup 2006, and the eponymous cleaner manufactured in the Far East, the two-on-a-bike assassination is a still-active ‘Made in Britain’ success story. The motorbike roars up, engine racing, the hitman on the pillion unloads his weapon into the head and torso of the hapless victim, and then the driver flicks his wrist and they’re gone. And the only ID is of two men in helmets in a blur.
Rule Britannia, etc.
The firm credited with the invention of the two-on-a-bike wetjob is the Adams family, specifically a gang of three brothers from north London, not to be confused with the much less scary Addams Family. Uncle Fester, Morticia and Itt don’t kill real people. The Adams family gang are cold-blooded psychos, er, correction, highly respected London ‘faces’ who have made a fortune rumoured to be as high as £100 million from protection rackets, drugs and prostitution, enforced by up to twenty assassinations, or poppings or toppings in the argot. (All journalists go over the top. Gangsters don’t, in the ordinary way, employ PR men or lobbyists to set the record straight. Gangsters don’t sue for libel. So it’s wholly possible that the two numbers about the Adams gang, £100 million fortune and twenty murders, are absurd exaggerations. But it is fair and accurate to report that the Adams gang have a bob or two, they are tough and they frighten the living daylights out of people who don’t, as I do, go behind the couch the moment the Cybermen pop up out of the drains in Doctor Who.)
Until very recently, the gang was led by three brothers, Patrick, Terry and Tommy, who has the stylish good looks and understated charm of a well-made axe handle. The Adams gang were and are not stupid. Not for them gala displays of over-the-top ostentation. Tommy owns a £500,000 three-storey town house in King’s Cross, not far from his mum and dad’s place. Older brother Pat spends most of his year in his villa in Fuengirola on Spain’s ‘Costa del Crime’, living the quiet life. Terry has lately been a guest at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Belmarsh prison, having done a deal with the Crown Prosecution Service, copping a guilty plea in return for one specimen charge of money-laundering a million pounds. He’s due out in June 2010.
Back in the 1980s, word of the family’s easy relationship with violence hit the streets. People who crossed them ended up looking good in funeral parlours. The Adams gang were so feared that, according to one copper, they got the credit for hits that were nothing to do with them. A series of bit players – accountants, minor runners, a Hatton Garden jeweller – whispered to have got involved with the gang and then been tempted to turn Queen’s evidence turned up very dead.
In the early 1990s The Observer asked me to do a story about the mounting pile of victims of hitmen. The corpses included the Great Train Robber Charlie ‘the Silent Man’ Wilson, gunned down by a pale-faced assassin on a yellow mountain bike in April 1990 at his mock-Moroccan home in Malaga, Spain. The hitman shot Wilson’s dog, too. Wilson was, some say, running drugs.
Six months later another alleged drug trafficker, Roy Adkins, was shot five times in the head as he sat in a hotel bar in Amsterdam. Although both killings took place outside British jurisdiction, police suspected British fingers pulling the triggers. Brendan Carey was killed in the Prince of Wales pub on the Caledonian Road, London, also in 1990. The next year saw the end of Billy Fisher, a known associate of the Great Train Robber and cocaine trafficker Tommy Wisbey. In April 1991, David Norris was shot dead in Bexleyheath. In February 1992, ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser was wounded outside Turnmills wine bar in Clerkenwell Road. In March, Roger ‘the Growler’ Wilson, a south London off-licence owner, and David Wilson, a Lancashire accountant, were killed in two separate incidents. In May, Graeme Woodhatch was killed inside the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. In January 1993, multimillionaire Donald Urquhart was killed. On 2 June, Jimmy Moodie, on the run since a breakout from prison thirteen years before, was killed while he was standing drinking in the Royal Hotel pub in Lauriston Road, Hackney. A few days later, cocaine junkie and drug rip-off merchant Tommy Roche was gunned down as he was working on a bus stop lay-by opposite a McDonald’s near Heathrow.
And then people would just disappear. One was an enforcer for the Adams gang known as Gilbert Wynter. He vanished in 1998 after there’d been gossip that he might have been double-crossing them by skimming off drug profits. His bits and bobs are thought to be buried underneath the Millennium Dome – now the O2 arena. Another vanisher was a hoodlum known only as Manchester John.
Time and again, I would go for a pint with a copper – most often a detective sergeant – and ask him who was behind this slaughter. The copper would look left and right, mock nervously, but with a hint of trepidation, and say: ‘The word on the street is that he’ – fill in name of stiff – ‘crossed the family.’
What family? I would ask.
‘The Adams family,’ the copper would say, meaning brothers Pat, Tommy and Terry, and ask for another pint.
It is wholly possible that these policemen were just getting free beer for spreading old gossip. What could be more fun than winding up some lah-di-dah nancy boy from a posh paper by telling him a load of rubbish. But was all of it tosh?
London has its fair share of gangsters. The Krays are simply the best known, and the easiest to write about because they went to prison for a long time and are dead. The Arifs are a gang of south London toughs it does not pay to cross. North London is full of Turkish-Kurdish heroin gangs. The Albanians and the Russian mafia are doing very nicely. But the one London family everyone seems to agree you really don’t want to mess with is the Adams gang.
To repeat, there is no compelling evidence proving a connection between the Adams gang and any of the killings listed above. Some of the killers have been charged, some convicted, and the courts heard not a sausage about any involvement from any member of the Adams gang. But – how can I put it succinctly? – the Adams gang don’t inhabit the same moral universe as, say, the lady behind the till in the Oxfam shop.
The family was targeted by a secretive police unit, part of the National Crime Squad, set up in a semi-rural police station in Hertfordshire. That’s odd, you might think, because the family were based in the Barnsbury council estate in Islington. Why didn’t the Met go after them? The gossip was that the Adams gang had bought some policemen in the Met, which, as they don’t say on Crimewatch, is considered by some critics a little bit bent. What happened was that, time and again, good Met officers were poised to strike when the family suddenly appeared to be tipped off and were somewhere else on the day. The Adams gang appeared to be untouchable. They were also rumoured to have their hooks into a Tory MP, although that was probably just showing off.
The coppers in the National Crime Squad unit who went against the Adams gang were hand picked; the whisper was that the whole team had been checked out by MI5. The joke was that they all chewed bits of straw, drove tractors and had funny rural accents – like the Wurzels – and came from places like Devizes, Knitting Sodbury and Middle Wallop-on-the-Poke, because policemen in the sticks are less bent than their colleagues from the metropolis.
In the mid-1990s the Wurzels managed to pick up a lead on the Adams gang which was, for once, not blown by a bent copper. They were moving huge amounts of cannabis, not quite enough to keep north London stoned off its head for the rest of time, but tons and tons of it. Tommy had a simple wheeze to keep everything secure. He ran his business from the back of London black taxis, using two former school chums from Islington, Michael Papamichael and Ed Wilkinson, as his runners. It was all done by word of mouth with people he had known since England last won the World Cup. An impregnable set-up. Or so it seemed.
The straw-chewing Wurzels went one better. In the middle of the night, they nicked the target taxis, pushing them by hand from where they were parked so that their engines didn’t start, and swapped them with replacement lookalike taxis, fitted with the same registration numbers, while they drilled micro-bugs into the back of Tommy’s vehicles, and then switched back the now-doctored originals. The take was spectacular. The Adams gang were moving shipments of high-powered cannabis, of up to three tons at a time. They were also into cocaine in a big way. And, the cherry on the Bakewell tart, Ed Wilkinson let slip that he hid his Magnum .45 in his mother’s flowerpot.
Doesn’t everyone?
The police arrested the gang and the case came to court in 1998. The cops were expecting a trial lasting months but suddenly all three defendants coughed. Tommy Adams got seven and a half years and was ordered to pay £1 million in a confiscation order. Wilkinson got nine years, Papamichael six.
As Tommy was led downstairs to do his time, he burst into laughter.
The word on the street – as they say – is that the Adams gang have gone into respectable retirement. Maybe. Maybe not. In 2000, evidence emerged of an astonishingly cunning fishing expedition. Organised criminals had sought out those who might betray them, the grasses on the payroll of the cops. Somehow Mark Herbert fell into their lap. A not-quite-as-boring-as-he-looked civil servant, he worked as a clerk in the Crown Prosecution Service and had access to pure gold, the real names of thirty-three underworld informers. For a mere thousand quid, he flogged the files to the organised crime group, and that meant he risked making thirty-three dead men walking. The cops were on to it, and Herbert got banged up for six years for selling top-secret police intelligence. And the name of the organised criminals that corrupted Herbert? The whisper is the not-so-very retired Adams gang. Whatever they’re up to, it’s not exactly Saga Holidays.
So what’s all this London gangster stuff got to do with Roo? Well, on 13 November 2002, a strange meeting took place in the bleak soullessness of Heathrow’s Le Meridien Hotel. Among those present were John Hyland, Dave Lockwood of X8, which had transmogrified into something called IMRA Consultants Ltd., Peter McIntosh of Proform, former Everton player John Ebbrell, Liverpool legend Kenny Dalglish – who had two million shares in Proactive – Rooney’s new agent Stretford, chief executive of Proactive, and one Tommy Adams, newly released from prison.
He’d got time off for good behaviour.
And Jigsaw Man? What’s he got to do with Wayne Rooney’s circle?
Oh, it turned out the dismembered corpse known as Jigsaw Man was one Jeffrey Howe, a blameless kitchen salesman. He’d been murdered and butchered in his ensuite bathroom and his body parts dumped around various counties by his lodger, psychopath Stephen Marshall, thirty-eight, with the assistance of his lover, prostitute Sarah Bush. Marshall had told police that he had chopped up Howe but he hadn’t murdered him, and was sent to trial.
But Bush had told another hooker, Sophie Franklin, that Marshall ‘killed Jeff. He stabbed him in the back.’ Sophie said that Bush had ‘rambled about the bathroom being covered in blood, how they poured bleach over him and drained his blood down the plughole. She talked about a dismembered foot, wrapping body parts in plastic and Marshall going for a drive in the country.’
Halfway through the murder case, Marshall confessed to murdering Howe and was sentenced to thirty-six years. But after the trial ended it emerged that Marshall is now the prime suspect and/or the prime witness for four more gangland mystery murders, including those of Gilbert Wynter and ‘Manchester John’, which date back for more than a decade from his time as an enforcer for the Adams gang. Body-builder par excellence, Marshall, who boasts a 52-inch chest, had become handy with a meat cleaver, knives and, when occasion demanded, a chainsaw. Based at Belugas nightclub in North London, Marshall would chop up bodies and then others would ensure the body parts would vanish. Marshall’s mistake was to use his old meat cleaver technique on poor old Jigsaw Man but to forget to do the smart thing with the back end of the operation. You can’t just dump body parts in lay-bys.
In the good old days, before Paul Stretford had run into Tommy Adams, Psycho Marshall had called Adams ‘Uncle Tommy’ – exactly the kind of man you’d want your sports agent to hang out with.
Not.