It started with a pub. Cheers, on Egerton Road, was the local for David Ungi, a well-liked boxer from the Dingle and a former Golden Gloves champion, and for his friends and family. Then Johnny Phillips of Toxteth, a powerful man and a friend of Curtis Warren, took an interest in it. His mother-in-law wanted to buy it, and Ungi and his friends were told they were no longer welcome.
The answer was a straightener: a fair fight on Byles Street, with armed men on both sides to make sure it stayed fair. By most accounts Ungi's boxing beat Phillips's strength. Phillips walked away bloodied, telling anyone who would listen that Ungi had used knuckledusters.
Morton Street
The next day, as Ungi drove through Toxteth, a Nissan with four men in balaclavas followed him. On Morton Street it overtook him and blocked the road. Ungi got out to face them, saw a gun and ran for his mother's house, zigzagging as the shots went past his head. He got there unhurt. They had tried to kill him over a punch-up.
People who knew the family, including the veteran villain Charlie Seiga, say David Ungi was a businessman and a family man who could have a fight, not a big gangster. The city was still raw from the 1981 Toxteth riots, and many saw the feud as something bigger than two men and a pub. People started choosing sides.
North Hill Street
A little over a month later, on a warm May evening in 1995, the 36-year-old was driving his VW Passat along North Hill Street to meet two friends. A black VW Golf GTI cut in front of him. A man got out with an automatic weapon and opened fire. The father of three was hit twice, and one bullet cut a main artery. David Ungi died in a quiet street of play parks and family homes.
A city at war
Cheers went up in flames. Shots were fired outside the Black George pub in Toxteth. Eight days after the killing, two hooded men opened fire with automatic weapons, one of them an Uzi, in a gym in Kensington. Two of David Ungi's brothers were charged with that shooting. The trial was moved to Preston, and they were cleared.
Through 1995 the shootings came every few days: in Netherley, in Toxteth, in Anfield, in Huyton. Parents were afraid to walk their children to school. By December five people had been shot in a single month, one of them fatally, and the police were flooding the streets with armed patrols.
Phillips was arrested at Manchester Airport in June, for the attempt on Ungi's life on Morton Street, not for his murder. The case rested on a single witness who kept missing identity parades. The witness backed out and the charge was dropped. Three weeks later a black Mondeo sprayed Phillips's car and house with gunfire.
On his 35th birthday, as he opened his car door in Toxteth, an unmasked gunman walked up and shot Phillips four times. He threw his young daughter into the car to shield her. He survived. Months later he died suddenly. The police ruled it natural causes. His family never believed it.
His funeral had horse-drawn carriages, and the procession went past Cheers, the pub where it all began.