Paul Massey
Paul Massey was the man our films call Salford's Mr Big. He and Paul "One Punch" Doyle were once like brothers. It began on the day of Prince Charles's wedding in 1981, at the Druids pub in Salford, when men linked to the Quality Street Gang, Manchester's old criminal royalty, took exception to the young Salford firm. A glass was smashed into the face of one of Massey's friends, and the Salford lads turned on the older men and drove them out. One man was left with permanent damage. Massey went to prison.
By the mid-1980s, with Massey released, the pair moved into stolen credit cards: runs across Europe through hotels, bars and transport terminals, cheques cashed in Belgium, counterfeit currency from Amsterdam. They were caught. Massey got five years and Doyle three years and ten months, and that gap mattered. Doyle came home first and built his own base. By the early 1990s the two friends were on opposite sides of a war over the doors of Salford and Manchester.
Massey made Ordsall his base. Doyle has said the war truly began at a family party there, where words were exchanged and his brother was shot in the leg. Massey answered by arriving at Doyle's pub, the Inn of Good Hope, with a convoy of 15 cars. Behind it all lay money. The rave boom had turned the doors into serious income, and Massey was strengthening his ties with Damian and Desi Noonan. By Doyle's account, Massey later came to the same pub with Damian Noonan and offered Doyle £20,000 to fight him there and then.
The Hacienda was the biggest prize. Our film tells how Massey, out of prison, saw that the Quality Street Gang had no interest in the rave scene, and that young Salford men from across the estates were taking their place. His crowd had controlled the upstairs at Konspiracy before it closed in 1990. He and his friends drove up to the Hacienda and told the London doormen that they, not the door, ran Manchester, and that anyone from Salford was to be let in free. In the end the owners brought in a local Salford security firm, with Damian Noonan as head doorman. From then until the club closed in June 1997, the film says, Massey and the Salford men made thousands of pounds from it and controlled it.
He wanted more doors. One Thursday night a car pulled into the car park of the Inn of Good Hope with Massey, Desi Noonan and a senior man from the Cheetham Hill firm inside. They wanted the door of the Temple, a club in Bolton run by Graeme Boardman. Boardman refused. That weekend close to eleven shots came through the pub's glass doors, and two doormen were hit. Nobody was ever charged, and Massey later swore to Doyle it was nothing to do with him.
In the two decades after the Hacienda closed, Desi Noonan, Damian Noonan and many other figures from the Manchester underworld died. Paul Massey was shot dead outside his home on 26 July 2015. The same year, Paul Doyle was jailed for sixteen years. These are the films about him, and the ones where he turns up in someone else's story.