The animosity between Michael ‘Cazza’ Carroll and Stephen Britton remains, according to gangland sources

06:00, 18 Aug 2025Updated 11:31, 19 Aug 2025

Michael Carroll, Paul Massey and Stephen Britton

For more than a decade, they are alleged to have been the bosses of two notorious criminal groups, warring gangs that brought mayhem and murder to the streets of Salford and beyond.

The rivalry between Stephen Britton and Michael ‘Cazza’ Carroll wasn’t just about business and ‘turf’, though. It was personal.

Now, after the jailing of yet another of Carroll’s associates earlier this week, the Manchester Evening News can reveal the animosity between the pair remains as real now as it was when the two gangs they were alleged to have led were wreaking havoc from late 2014 onwards.

Feud been ongoing for over a decade

Stephen Britton, named as leader of the A Team in successive trials, and Michael ‘Cazza’ Carroll, named as the alleged boss of the splinter group known as the Anti A Team, are said to have been at war since before the 2015 murder of Britton’s mentor, Salford ‘Mr Big’ Paul Massey.

Massey was gunned down by a masked assassin wearing army fatigues Mark ‘The Iceman’ Fellows, outside his suburban home in Clifton, Salford, in July 2015.

Michael Carroll

The feud became so intractable GMP initiated plans to recruit ‘paramilitary mediators’ from Northern Ireland in an attempt to broker a peace between the two warring sides, an employment tribunal brought by a force whistleblower heard in in 2022.

The fatal shooting of the infamous Massey on his own doorstep was the low point of a feud characterised by extreme violence, featuring a series of shootings and stabbings. During the subsequent murder trial at Liverpool Crown Court, jurors were told that Massey’s death was the result of a feud between two gangs, one allegedly led by Carroll, 44, the other by Britton, 37.

It was public confirmation of what police tackling gang warfare in Salford had long suspected: that all roads were leading them to Carroll and Britton.

Following Massey’s murder, Michael Carroll fled to Spain and graffiti appeared all over Salford calling ‘Cazza’ a ‘grass rat snitch police informer’ and urging him to ‘come fight your war’. A hit-squad was dispatched to Spain.

Graffiti appeared all over Salford calling ‘Cazza’ a ‘grass rat snitch police informer’ (Image: M.E.N. )

But any assassination attempt was thwarted following a raid on an apartment in Marbella on February 16, 2016, when Policia Nacional officers, alongside detectives from GMP, found an astonishing haul of weapons including knives and a loaded pistol.

The man said to be the leader of the A Team, Stephen Britton, who regarded Massey as his mentor and with whom he had spent the afternoon before his assassination, was arrested alongside others but released. It is believed Carroll then fled to Thailand and later Dubai.

Carroll is known to have worked as a scaffolder, and grew up in Salford. He moved to the Wigan area following the alleged fall-out with members of the A Team, before moving abroad.

Stephen Britton(Image: Manchester Evening News)

He wasn’t in the dock for any of the three trials connected to the gang warfare of 2015 – but his name was mentioned so frequently he may as well have been. All three juries were told that he was the leader of a rival gang called the Anti A Team.

The tit-for-tat feud between the rival gangs appeared to escalate to extreme violence following one particularly upsetting incident for Carroll, when his ex-girlfriend – and the mother of his child – watched in horror as masked men removed the roof of her VW Golf with a Stihl saw outside their home in January 2015.

The bloodshed that followed formed the basis of a succession of gangland trials, the first concluding in January 2019 when Mark Fellows, an Anti A Team member and an assassin dubbed ‘The Ice Man’, was handed a whole-life term for the murder of Massey and the assassination of Massey’s friend, Merseyside gang enforcer John Kinsella, three years later.

A second trial followed and concluded with the jailing of eight members of the A Team in April 2019 for offences in connection with a shooting at a car wash in Ashton-in-Makerfield in March 2015, and then the shooting of a seven-year-old boy, Christian Hickey, and his mother Jayne, 30, on the doorstep of their home in Eccles in October of that year. Mother and son survived although they were seriously injured. That trial heard that ‘Cazza’ was a close friend of little Christian’s dad.

Dubai incidents show two gang bosses still at war

There have been stories and rumours suggesting the two outfits have settled their differences, although detectives at GMP remain highly sceptical.

The same cannot be said for ‘Cazza’ and Britton who sources have confirmed remain very much at odds.

Mark Fellows (left) murdered Paul Massey(Image: Merseyside Police/M.E.N.)

In 2019, Britton was said to have held peace talks with one key member of the Anti A Team, Jamie Rothwell, who earlier this week was jailed for 43 years for a string of gun and drug offences.

The pair were pictured smiling together over a meal in a bar in Spain.

Just four years earlier, in 2015, Rothwell miraculously survived after he was shot three times at the car wash in in Ashton-in-Makerfield in 2015 by a balaclava-clad gunman, a member of the A Team.

Months later, seven-year-old Christian Hickey Jnr and his mother Jayne were shot and injured at the doorstep of their Salford home, as the tit-for-tat feud between the two sides became ever more violent.

Stephen Britton, in cap, named in court as the leader of Salford’s notorious A-Team organised crime gang, and Jamie Rothwell

The violence made the picture of Britton and Rothwell – all smiles in Spain albeit years later – all the more remarkable.

In 2023 gangland sources told the M.E.N. Britton was involved in a ‘straightener’ with Carroll in Dubai, although the source added that it was possible the encounter was more to do with personal animosity between the pair than any attempt to draw a line under the feud between the two gangs.

“They just don’t like each other,” said the source. Other sources said it wasn’t the first encounter the pair have had in Dubai, and that actually Britton ‘won’ the last one.

Police investigating an alleged plot to murder Michael Carroll in Spain recovered these items(Image: Spanish Police)

The alleged ‘straightener’ has been logged by GMP as intelligence although this on its own is not confirmation that the fight actually happened let alone that Carroll or Britton won it.

A source close to Britton said at the time the rivals had been involved in at least two encounters in Dubai. One was said to have happened at a shopping centre when Britton was said to have ‘knocked out’ Cazza’s ‘Turkey teeth’, a reference to the dental work he is said to have had done in Turkey.

In a later incident, Cazza and some of his associates are alleged to have ‘tried to jump’ Britton. But Britton, it was alleged, disarmed one of the men and turned their weapon on them.

The result, according to the source, was that Carroll had to return to Turkey to have repair work done on his teeth.

A number of sources have told the MEN that Carroll remains in Dubai. The whereabouts of Britton have not been revealed.

A gangland source, spoken to just before the publication of this story, said the two gangs were no longer functioning units, at least not as they once were, with so many of the main protagonists behind bars, abroad or dead.

However, the animosity between Britton and Carroll was and remains real. It is considered very unlikely that Carroll would ever set foot in Salford again, according to the source.