The discovery of a teen shout by a sawn-off shotgun saw the gang feud shoved into the spotlight
20:13, 26 Feb 2026Updated 20:24, 26 Feb 2026
Colin Joyce and Lee Amos would go on to lead the Gooch Gang in a deadly turf war against their rivals
A gang war that came under the lime light appeared to have started when a 19-year-old was found slumped in an alley by a passing driver having been blasted close-range by a sawn-off shotgun. The gang feud, which lasted decades, was also found to have strong criminal connections to the drug trade of Liverpool.
In the paper hours after the shooting, the front page headline read: “Bedside vigil for shot victim.”
“He was wounded in the leg after being shot at close range during a dispute between rival groups of youths who gathered on spare land near the Whalley Hotel at the junction of Moss Lane West and Withington Road,” the paper reported, as it detailed how medics at Withington Hospital were removing pellets from his leg while police stood guard on the ward.
“It is believed that [he] may have been a victim of continuing skirmishing between rival gangs from the Cheetham and Moss Side areas.”
The date was Tuesday, September 26, 1985. It was the day the gang war that would go on to claim dozens of lives, leave hundreds injured and blight the city for the next 20 years first came to the wider public’s attention.
While the police’s top officers were finally persuaded Manchester had a new gang problem, the rise of both the Moss Side and Cheetham Hill gangs had began in the early 1980s.
Journalist and author Peter Walsh puts their emergence down to two factors – the success of a huge clampdown on the armed robbery gangs who up to that point ruled the roost in underworld Manchester and the police’s “obsession” with the notorious and much-mythologised Quality Street Gang.
A Skorpian sub-machine gun seized by police from the Gooch Gang
That, Walsh writes in Gang War his comprehensive history of gangland Manchester, “not only hobbled the old order but also made room for the new”. Like their predecessors, the new mobs from Cheetham Hill and Moss Side initially made their names through armed robbery.
This alone draws parallels to the crime wave in Merseyside, with criminals and crooks of Liverpool associated with armed robberies before the boom of the drugs trade in the city. Soon after the skyrocketing of cannabis sales in the city came heroin.
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The rise in the heroin trade was even felt in Manchester amid the gang war, the Manchester Evening News reports.
And at first relationships between the young, up-and-coming criminals in Manchester were said to be cordial. Friendships and family ties in Manchester’s Afro-Caribbean communities meant many on the two opposing sides were familiar to each other.
It was even said that at first the Moss Side armed robbers struck a deal with their peers in Cheetham Hill, known as the Hillbillies, to each confine their crimes to specified territories. But the peace was never going to last.
The truce was broken when one of the gangs carried out a robbery on the other’s turf, said to have taken place on a security van near the BBC building on Oxford Road. A series of running skirmishes, stand-offs and knife fights followed.
On September 19, 1985, the Cheetham Hill gang were said to have gathered in the car park of a pub in Rusholme, armed with baseball bats and sticks, before heading to Don’s, a well-known Moss Side shebeen, where their rivals were known to hang out.
A running fight broke, but police were called before anyone was seriously injured. A few days later a 60-strong mob gathered at Alexandra Park on the border of Moss Side and Whalley Range.
Again police were called, and after several parked cars were searched at the scene, a stash of baseball bats, bricks and knives was found. Then, on September 26, came the shooting that changed everything.
At the time, gunshots were still relatively rare in Manchester. A major police investigation lasting several months was launched.
More than a dozen homes were raided as detectives hunted for the Whalley Range shooter. A stolen car traced to the wanted man was chased in Leeds, but the suspect escaped after the vehicle was abandoned. A few days later the man was spotted again in the Fitton Hill area of Oldham.
After ramming an unmarked CID car, his vehicle overturned and he was finally arrested. The scale of the operation made clear how seriously the matter was being taken.
Up until that point the higher echelons of Greater Manchester Police were thought to have been fairly sceptical about the emergence of a new order of gangsters. Now they were finally convinced the threat was real.
The city was about to witness a gangland conflict unlike any it had seen before. But these were just the opening skirmishes. Then came the drugs which took the violence to a whole new level.
In May 1986, three-quarters of a kilo of brown heroin, worth around £100,000, was found by cops in a car on the Alexandra Park estate. Detectives traced the source back to Toxteth.
How the M.E.N. reported the May 1986 heroin seizure that was at the time the biggest in the city’s history
At the time it was the largest amount of the drug seized in Manchester. The arrival of heroin, and to a lesser extent crack, sent shockwaves through the estates of Manchester and its surrounding towns and suburbs.
The shockwaves it sent came as Liverpool earnt itself the reputation as “smack city” due to the influx of cheap, brown heroin. Then-Toxteth drug lord Michael Showers, who pivoted from armed robberies to drug trafficking, is believed to be the man who brought the class A drug to the city.
Despite his convictions for having heroin shipped into the city, he has long denied being involved in the heroin trade.
FULL INTERVIEW: One of the first gangsters to bring heroin to Liverpool was called ‘The Godfather’ and drove a white Rolls-Royce to send a message
Michael Showers pictured at home in Liverpool(Image: Iain Watts)
By the late 80s Moss Side, and the Alexandra Park estate in particular, had emerged as a highly lucrative drugs market. But some of the Hillbillies took exception to this and, wanting a slice of the profits for themselves, began “taxing” local dealers at gun and knifepoint.
The fall-out paved the way for a series of deadly splits and bloody feuds among the original groups of Moss Side and Cheetham Hill that would define gangland Manchester for the next two decades.
“A group of young toughs known as the Pepperhill Mob, named after a pub on the Alexandra Park estate, fought back,” writes Ben Black in Shooters, his history of 20th Century gangland Manchester. “As the two sides went to war, others on the same estate continued to do business with the Hillbillies.
“In a street on the west side of the estate, Gooch Close, the gang whose name would become so emblematic of gang violence in Manchester sprang up. The Gooch lads, one of whom was related to a Cheetham Hill leader, continued to associate with the Hillbillies and so directly defied Pepperhill.
“Now the Pepperhill and the Gooch fought their own ‘war’ for supremacy, a conflict fought out largely on the claustrophobic streets of the estate. At the height of the trouble, the Pepperhill pub was pulled down.
“The gang which had taken its name re-grouped at nearby Doddington Close and got a new, slightly misspelt name. A triangular conflict between the Hillbillies, the Doddington and the Gooch endured for years and set a template for gang warfare in the city.”
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