He would tie a man to a chair, strip him and turn a steam iron up to full. Then he would drip water on the metal so his victim could hear it hiss. In 1990s Liverpool, "taxing" meant robbing drug dealers of their money, their drugs and their reputation, and George Bromley was one of the most feared taxmen in the city.
A city up for grabs
Liverpool's underworld in the 1990s was rich and unstable. Raves drove a huge demand for party drugs, and heroin and crack were spreading underneath. The old godfathers were losing their grip on the street gangs that used to do their dirty work, and new security firms were carving up the clubs. One wrong move on a door could start a war.
Bromley was confident in his reputation and in the team around him. He could be a menace in the clubs, beating ordinary punters who upset him and stabbing doormen who crossed him. The former doorman Joey Owens, who knew him and later wrote a book about Liverpool's clubland, describes Bromley's firm bursting into the flat of a doorman from the Royal Court Theatre. The man was stabbed again and again, and his pregnant girlfriend was beaten when she tried to stop it. The old rule that families were off limits was gone.
The Breck
In November 1990 a gunman walked into the Breck pub in Anfield and opened fire. Bromley was shot in the leg and survived. He and the friend shot with him broke the code and named a man to the police, then refused to give evidence, and the case was dropped. Months later Bromley found that man at the Malibu Club on London Road and attacked him with a knife. He was left in a wheelchair.
By 1997 Bromley was a 33-year-old family man who never went out without body armour, a gun and a knife. There were rumours of a £100,000 contract on his life, and the police served him with a formal threat-to-life warning. He talked about moving his family to Portugal.
Dinner in West Derby
Bromley had become friendly with Charlie Seiga, an old-school Liverpool criminal in his mid-50s, and wanted to buy Seiga's house in West Derby, with its open-plan kitchen and heated pool. In late November he went there for a meal.
He sat in the kitchen reading the papers. The headlines were about the murder of the doorman Stephen Cole. The doorbell rang and Seiga went to answer it. In his statement to the police, Seiga said a man with a gun told him to get back, walked past him towards the kitchen, and that he ran out through the patio doors and hid in the bushes. He heard a noise like a firework. When he went back in, Bromley was lying on the kitchen floor. He had been shot in the head.
Not guilty
Bromley's associates blamed Seiga for setting him up. Seiga went to Bromley's widow to give his side and later went looking for the people spreading the story. Armed police arrested him. The case went to trial, and the jury found Charlie Seiga not guilty. He tells his side in his book, Killer.
Nobody has ever been convicted of George Bromley's murder. It is one of Liverpool's many unsolved gangland killings.