Andrew John was 6 foot 4, a champion martial artist and a hero to young people in Toxteth. He was also feared by Liverpool's underworld. One night he got out of the back of a friend's car to face a man he had been feuding with. He did not see the man's brother coming up behind him.
L8
John and Stephen French trained together under Sensei Ronnie Colwell and grew up like brothers on the L8 side of Liverpool. Many young black men there, children of the Windrush generation, were angry at how the police treated them. In 1981 it exploded in the Toxteth riots, which, according to French, started with a run-in with the police that he and John were part of.
John represented England in martial arts. He also found street money hard to ignore. In 1985 he was jailed for four and a half years for his part in robbing a security guard at Liverpool Polytechnic. He ran with the cash, and a student chased him for a mile across the city centre and cornered him in a taxi outside Moorfields station. The student only found out months later that he had caught a karate champion.
The doors
Out of prison, John and French built a reputation on the streets, and with boxers and fighting men from their area they went after club security contracts. Whoever ran the doors decided who sold what inside. A clash with a powerful Liverpool crime firm ended in a no-holds-barred fight between John and its boss. By French's account no winner was declared, and after another standoff involving guns, a peace deal was struck.
The robbery that started it
By French's own account, he and his associates robbed drug dealers to raise the money to buy into the drugs trade. On one job, he says, his balaclava came off and the dealer, a former friend, recognised him. The dealer kept French's gold chain and, it is alleged, threatened to go to the police unless he was paid.
French was locked up in London at the time. John was angry about the threat and went after the dealer and his brother. Two attacks followed, one with a pickaxe handle and one with a baseball bat.
The trap
After eating out, John got into the back of a friend's car and saw the dealer's younger brother waving him over. He got out to face him. The older brother, Ricardo Gaynor, walked up behind him and shot him twice in the back, then twice more in the chest as he lay in the gutter. It looks as though French was the intended target, and the remand he was serving saved his life.
On Wednesday 20 May 1992 the jury heard that the brothers had been living in fear of John after the two attacks. The younger brother was cleared. Ricardo Gaynor was cleared of murder and convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation, and he got eight years.
"They've killed my hero"
His friend, the world champion Alfie Lewis, told the papers that Andrew John was more local hero than local villain, an intelligent man who could have gone to university. His daughter had been born two months earlier, and he was already planning a good school for her. A young man leaned into Lewis's car after the killing and said, "They've killed my hero," and burst into tears.