The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

In Glasgow in the 1920s there were dozens of gangs with names like the Norman Conquerors (from Norman Street), the Briggate Boys, the Beehive Gang and the South Side Stickers. Norman Lucas has argued in his book Britain’s Gangland that Peter Williamson, the leader of the Beehive Gang, was Britain’s first true gangleader. He enlisted various criminals, such as burglars and safebreakers, and ran a profitable business. Since guns are difficult to obtain in Britain, the Glasgow gangs used razors and broken bottles. Violence was casual and instantaneous. A newspaper reporter, Arthur Helliwell, told a story of a young man who saw someone being attacked in the street, and intervened; he was knocked unconscious with a bottle. He woke up to find a kindly-looking man asking anxiously: ‘Are you all right, son?’ When he nodded, the man said: ‘Well, next time, mind your own business,’ and slashed his cheek to the bone with a razor.

Even in the 1920s, football hooliganism was common in Glasgow. When a footballer named William Fullarton scored a winning goal in a match between two local Glasgow teams, he was afterwards battered unconscious with a hammer. He was so enraged that he formed his own gang – called ‘The Billy Boys’ – which took violent reprisals against the rival supporters. Fullarton’s natural leadership qualities made his gang one of the most formidable in the Gorbals, and he provoked some spectacular street battles with rival gangs. Fullarton was a Protestant, and he often marched through Catholic territory with a band playing Orange marches. He was arrested in 1934 after he led his gang into battle when drunk, clutching a baby girl in his arms. The danger to the child led the police to arrest him – with many broken heads – and he was sentenced to a year in prison. He fought in the Second World War and, when he came back, found that he had outgrown the need for violence. For the remainder of his life, he worked in a Clydebank shipyard. But when he died in 1962, vast crowds followed his coffin, and the floral tributes and brass band were reminiscent of a Chicago funeral of the 1920s; the inhabitants of Bridgeton – his old territory – remembered his days as a gangleader with affection.

The case is interesting because it is clear that, in less aggressive surroundings, Fullarton would have expressed his ‘dominance’ by becoming a well-known footballer; the beating turned him into a gangster.

Even more instructive is the more recent case of Jimmy Boyle, another gangster from the Gorbals. Boyle spent his first period in a remand home at the age of thirteen; by his late teens, he had become a Glasgow character, a ‘man of respect’ (to use the Mafia term) who made a more-than-adequate living out of the ‘protection’ racket. When a fellow gangster called Boyle an obscene name, Boyle slashed him with a razor; the man died, and Boyle was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He became known as one of the most difficult prisoners ever held in a Scottish jail, a ‘mad dog’ – like Carl Panzram – who would attack a guard even when he knew it meant being beaten unconscious and spending months in solitary confinement. He ate with his fingers and smeared the walls of his cell with excrement. When news of his exploits reached the Glasgow public, there was a general feeling that he ought to have been ‘put down’ like a mad dog. After years of defiance, Boyle was finally transferred to the Barlinnie Experimental Special Unit, where prisoners were allowed an unusual degree of freedom. Boyle found it a shattering experience when a guard casually handed him a knife to cut the string of a parcel. He began to express himself through sculpture and writing. His autobiography, A Sense of Freedom, was an immediate success. Now released from prison – and working actively for prisoners’ welfare – it is clear that Boyle has also outgrown his violence. The dominance that once found its expression in violence has been re-routed into creativity. Unlike Panzram, Boyle was able to turn back before he had gone too far.

It seems clear that the gangster mentality is usually created by slum conditions in which ‘territory’ becomes a matter for dispute. Without subscribing to the view that criminals are unfortunate victims of an unfair society, we can nevertheless recognise that men like Joey Gallo and Jimmy Boyle would never have become gangsters if they had been born into a middle-class environment and attended high school and university. Then why, since Britain has as many slums as America, have the gangs never succeeded in infiltrating British society in the way that the Mafia has infiltrated America? The answer seems to lie in the British ‘genius for compromise’. The temperance movement in Britain was as powerful as in America in the early twentieth century; but it would have been inconceivable for the British Parliament to vote for Prohibition. In America, Cosa Nostra derives a huge part of its income from drugs. In Britain, a drug addict can get his drugs on the National Health, provided he agrees to treatment; so the opportunities for a British drugs syndicate are circumscribed.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, it looked for a while as if Mafia-style gangsterism had come to England. With the end of the First World War, England turned its back decisively on Victorianism. There was a new sexual freedom, and a determination to have a good time. Race meetings became more popular than ever before; and since vast sums of money changed hands, one inevitable result was the formation of race gangs. The bookmakers were expected to pay ‘protection’, and to purchase various other services and amenities – stools, race cards, even chalk – from the gangs. A Birmingham gang, known as the Brummagem Boys and led by a man named Bill Kimber, dominated most of the Midlands and much of the north. But when they attempted to move south, they encountered a rival gang from London’s Italian quarter, the Sabini Boys, led by Charles, Harry and Joseph Sabini. These were reported to be connected with the Sicilian Mafia. Throughout the 1930s, there were violent clashes between the Brummagem Boys and the Sabini gang. One battle in London’s Mornington Crescent ended with the arrest of Joseph Sabini and five of his men; the police also collected a number of revolvers and other dangerous weapons. At the trial at the Old Bailey, witnesses failed to appear, or had suffered lapses of memory. A member of the Brummagem gang was found shot in the street near the flat of Charles Sabini, but claimed he had no idea who fired the gun. It began to look as if there was nothing to stop the Sabini Mafia from becoming as powerful as its counterpart in New York – particularly after a tremendous battle at Bath race course, which ended with the permanent retreat of the Brummagem Boys back to the Midlands. A rival gang from Hoxton began to invade the Sabini territory, and their battles at various race tracks so inflamed public opinion that the police decided on tough action. When sixteen members of the Hoxton gang were arrested after a battle at Lewes race course, all were given stiff jail sentences. And by the beginning of the Second World War, when the Sabini brothers were interned as enemy aliens, the race gangs had ceased to enjoy immunity, and dozens of their members were in jail for long periods. There was no national Syndicate to ensure ‘business as usual’ while the gang bosses were in jail.

Prostitution, unlike racing, continued to flourish during the war – particularly in London, which was full of sex-starved servicemen – and ensured the continued prosperity of another family of Italian gangsters, the Messina brothers. Their father, Giuseppe Messina, had left Sicily in the mid-1890s to become an assistant brothel keeper in Valetta, Malta. In ten years he had enough money to move to Alexandria, and to set up a chain of brothels all over the Mediterranean. Five sons were born between 1898 and 1915. In 1932, the family was expelled from Egypt, and – since Giuseppe Messina could claim British citizenship from his long residence in Malta – they were able to move to London. There they found the vice scene old fashioned and inefficient, with drab-looking females soliciting on street corners. The brothers imported glamorous-looking girls from the Continent, and made them British citizens by marrying them to down-and-outs who were willing to go through a registry office ceremony for a few pounds; these girls were installed in flats, and paid the brothers ninety per cent of their takings – which, during the war years, amounted often to £100 a night.

The brothers recognised that ‘non-professionals’ – the kind of girls who would not normally drift into prostitution – are more desirable to the male than the usual tired-looking streetwalker, and developed their own efficient methods of recruiting a higher class of girl. She would be courted by one of the brothers, seduced, and installed in an expensive flat. When she realised that her lover was getting tired of her, and that the life of luxury was about to end, she was usually in the right frame of mind to agree to receive a few selected male guests. Within weeks she was a full-time prostitute.