Cass Pennant stepped out of the Albany nightclub in Deptford, South London, and something felt wrong. For two decades he had moved through two of Britain's most violent worlds, football hooliganism and nightclub security, and violence was nothing new to him. That night there were hard stares and smirks from men who seemed to know something he did not. As he walked away from the entrance, a powerfully built man came out of the darkness and fired three shots. This film asks why, and finds the answer in how London's door trade changed in the early 1990s.
The old doors and the new money
For decades a generation of hard men, Lenny McLean among them, had ruled the capital's door scene on intimidation and physical presence. Then acid house arrived, and with it drugs, money and organised crime. Entrepreneurs who had come out of the illegal warehouse parties of the late 1980s were stepping into bigger territory, and established criminal families recognised the opportunity. Ecstasy could be sourced from Amsterdam or made in underground laboratories. The rave scene offered huge crowds, cash everywhere and almost no regulation.
It also brought violence. The film plays Andrew Pritchard, a music entrepreneur of the late 1980s who later became a major drug smuggler, recalling a clash between his Genesis security firm and local Essex doormen in which one man was badly hurt. It went against the vibe of acid house, he says, peace and love.
Kisses, Peckham
In the 1980s Pennant had built his name in the security business in partnership with a respected family from Canning Town. His firm took the venues other crews avoided: rough pubs and violent clubs where trouble was guaranteed. One was Kisses, a reggae club in Peckham, whose door had earlier been run by Gary Mason, later the British heavyweight boxing champion. The film says Pennant's crew fought running battles with some of Peckham's toughest street gangs before establishing themselves in South London.
When the rave years came, the dingy venues London's criminal elite had ignored suddenly became valuable. Ravers did not care about champagne bars; the rougher the venue, the more authentic it felt. Promoters charged entry, owners sold water at absurd markups, and if the doors were in the right hands, the drugs market inside could be tightly managed, with only certain dealers allowed in and rival groups kept out. Across London, the film says, criminal families began aligning themselves with security firms to control those venues.
Operation Full Time
Pennant's own life had been thrown into turmoil in the late 1980s. Police launched Operation Full Time, an undercover investigation into alleged leaders of West Ham United's hooligan firm, the Inter City Firm, following an earlier sting against Chelsea's hooligans called Operation Own Goal. Detectives believed they could dismantle the firms by building conspiracy cases against the men they thought organised the violence. Pennant, who had built a formidable reputation on the terraces through the 1970s and 1980s, was one of the most recognisable names in the ICF.
After a three-month trial costing the taxpayer around £2.5 million, the case collapsed. Operation Own Goal would also eventually collapse in court. But the publicity had done its work. When Pennant returned to security in 1992, he was no longer simply a doorman or a former hooligan. He was infamous.
A different landscape
The trade he came back to had changed. Operators from South, West and North London and the East End were all making moves, and promoters, club owners and criminal figures wanted men who could control doors and intimidate rivals. The younger crews came from hooligan firms, kickboxing gyms and street gangs, and were willing to take violence far beyond the pub fights of the previous decade. Powerful families might cooperate on one venture and fall out bitterly on another. Most did not run security firms themselves, the film says; they used trusted intermediaries and hired crews.
One voice in the film finds that surprising. Gangsters, he says, never set up their own security firms, though they could have had 50 or 100 men on call. Most kept only 15 or 20 around them and called in friends of friends for a job, which is not a good business model.
Deptford
It was in that climate that Pennant was working a rough door again, this time in Deptford. The man who came out of the dark stepped in front of him, raised a revolver and fired three shots at close range. On the street the rumour was that certain figures thought Pennant was overstepping the mark on territory or influence. In his own writing, Pennant later said he never discovered the real reason.
What is certain is that he survived. The fact that he lived to tell the story, the film concludes, says as much about his physical toughness as it does about the unpredictable world he was working in.