Graeme Boardman flew to Spain in the summer of 1997 and never came home. He was a Salford doorman who stood five foot eleven and sixteen stone, spoke in perfect Queen's English and, people said quite seriously, looked like Roger Moore. His best friend called him a psychopath, and meant it as the highest praise in their world. This is his whole story: the charm and the violence, the door wars of Salford and Bolton, the drugs, and the three stories of how he died.
Irlam
Graeme grew up in Irlam, on the western edge of Salford, by the Manchester Ship Canal. He was a gifted athlete and a footballer. Everyone who knew him as a boy remembers the same thing: he had a switch. His violence was cold and controlled, with no warning, no shouting and no bravado. He trained every day, ate half a dozen eggs for breakfast, and could shake hands with a solicitor in a meeting and put a man's head through a wall an hour later.
In the Manchester of the late 1980s there was only one trade for a man like that.
The doors
Acid house had made Manchester the rave capital of Britain, and whoever ran a club's door decided who sold pills inside it. Graeme met Paul Doyle, a Lower Broughton brawler called One Punch, and by 1993 their security firm held doors across Greater Manchester. With club owners, Graeme did the talking. With gangsters, they swapped. At the door he greeted Salford's roughest crowds with a little bow. In his fist he palmed the solid steel head of a hammer.
One midweek night he turned away eight lads at a high-class Manchester club. He went through all eight, and kept going until every one of them was unconscious. When a girl from the group agreed to pick him out at an identity parade, the men standing either side of him in the line were her own next-door neighbours. She did not pick him out.
The Inn of Good Hope
Salford's biggest name was Paul Massey. Across the city sat the Noonans, led by Dessie Noonan. One Thursday night a car pulled into the car park of the Inn of Good Hope, Graeme and Doyle's base on Eccles Old Road, with Massey, Noonan and a senior man from the Cheetham Hill firm inside. They wanted the door of the Temple, a club in Bolton. Graeme refused. "Graeme, nobody knows what lies around the corner," Noonan told him. "Is that a threat?" said Graeme. "Get out the car if you want to threaten me."
That weekend, close to eleven shots came through the pub's glass doors. Two doormen were hit and survived. Graeme lifted a woman off her feet and held her in front of him as a shield. Nobody was ever charged, and Massey later swore to Doyle it was nothing to do with him. Within days the police shut the firm down.
Amsterdam, Bolton and the Temple
The doors were never the real money. The pair were buying cannabis and amphetamine in Amsterdam, and their first big deal, according to Doyle, was 700 kilos in 1992. In Bolton, Graeme ran the front of house at the Temple, a converted foundry with a waterfall inside, billed as the biggest club in the north, and at a basement club called Kiss. When the firm of Bolton's drug boss Billy Webb came to Kiss mob-handed, the hospital list read four fractured skulls, two broken arms and a broken leg. Webb was later found shot dead in his bed in Wigan.
In 1995 Graeme was arrested over the murder of the doorman Terry Farrimond, shot dead in Clifton on Good Friday. He was released without charge, and another man was convicted. In the summer of 1997, after a fight outside the Temple, he was bailed. He had no intention of going back inside.
William
A drugs load had gone missing, and a British crime lord at the heart of the Dutch drug world, the man Doyle only calls William, blamed Graeme and Doyle. Graeme fled to Puerto Banús on the Costa del Crime.
On 3 September 1997 the Manchester Evening News reported that the manager of the Temple had vanished in Spain, believed murdered on the orders of a drug baron. No body was ever found. No one was ever charged. There was no funeral.
There are three stories of how he died. Doyle believes William had him drugged at his villa, taken away in chains and tortured for two days. William has never been charged with anything. The police were told the order came from a drug lord much closer to home. The third story points to Yugoslavian gangsters. None of it has ever been tested in a court.
Dessie Noonan was stabbed to death in 2005. Paul Massey was shot dead outside his home in 2015. That same year Paul Doyle was jailed for sixteen years. Somewhere, nearly thirty years on, there are people who know what happened to Graeme Boardman. They have never said a word.