They were the Merseyside underworld’s enforcers for hire, ready to put the frighteners on hardened gangland criminals for a suitable reward.
If you received a call from one of Tony Downes or Kirk Bradley’s henchmen you were either very unlucky or had seriously upset a gangland rival. They came armed with an Uzi machine pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other.
For two years the “puppet masters” were responsible for an “epidemic of violent lawlessness”, providing the force in gang wars across Liverpool’s suburbs, sucking into the line of fire innocent bystanders as well as major criminals.
Their gang used scrambler bikes for speed and surprise, and favoured Luger Browning semi-automatic and military-issue hand grenades packed with ball bearings and shrapnel. Between January 2009 and January 2011 they were responsible for 16 shootings and four grenade attacks.
A paramedic was shot by mistake in his own home, another man had to have his leg amputated after being blasted in a phone box and another was shot in the stomach outside a wake in a pub in West Derby, Liverpool.
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A grandmother and a young child were forced to flee one grenade assault. A live Army-issue hand grenade was abandoned on the wall of the Southport home of Kenny Dalglish, manager of Liverpool FC, when a raid on the home of a wealthy businessman in the same street had to be aborted.
Downes, 26, of Huyton, and Bradley, 26, of Formby, Merseyside, were each sentenced in their absence yesterday, at Woolwich Crown Court in London, to serve a minimum of 22 years in jail. Three others were also sentenced to substantial sentences.
The two men, who were arrested after a complex surveillance operation by Matrix, the Merseyside Police firearms squad, were convicted of conspiracy to possess firearms and conspiracy to cause damage with intent to endanger life.
Sentencing them, Mr Justice Henriques said: “Any right-thinking member of the public would feel abhorrence and outrage at this merciless campaign.”
Both Downes and Bradley were absent from the dock throughout the trial. Their initial trial in Liverpool was in its eleventh week last July when armed raiders ambushed their prison van in the early morning rush-hour shortly after it left HMP Manchester. The two men escaped abroad.
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Downes, known as “Fat Tony”, was recaptured this month in a quiet holiday village in the Netherlands, close to the border with Belgium, when his car was surrounded by a Dutch Swat team. He could be extradited and returned to the UK to start his sentence in the next few weeks. Bradley, however, remains at large.
The grenade abandoned on Mr Dalglish’s garden wall is believed to have been intended for John Ball, a businessman who was also the target of two shootings. He hired a security guard to keep watch on his property after the attacks in March and June 2009.
The court heard that for two years the two men, who regarded each other as “blood brothers”, ran their network masterminding the shootings and bombings.
Downes was serving a seven-year term for multiple attacks on cash machines but remained, the judge said, the “chief executive controlling and organising events from his prison cell”.
When he was recaptured in Goes, Zeeland, he was armed with a .44 Magnum revolver and had two false passports.
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Mr Justice Henriques said of Bradley: “He is plainly a very dangerous man. There is serious risk to members of the public of serious harm.”
The two men were implicated in the murder in 2005 of Lucy Hargreaves, a young mother of three, over an alleged grudge against her boyfriend. They were each acquitted midway through their trial two years later on the directions of the judge.
Three others admitted possessing firearms and causing criminal damage with intent to endanger life and were jailed for life.
Gary Wilson, 27, of Southport, was sentenced to a minimum of 16 years; Joseph Farrell, 23, to 12 years; and Craig Riley, both of Stockbridge Village, to 14 years.
After the hearing Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Doherty, head of Matrix, said: “You could say this is an end to chapter but this is a long book. We are engaged in a serious struggle with serious criminality on Merseyside.
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“I have referred before to puppet masters, those who send, younger, vulnerable males out to commit crime and give them resources to do it, resulting in serious injury and, on occasion, death.
“We have taken out one hierarchy but this is a constant struggle. We are never going to be complacent about it.”