![[ CRACKTOWN ]](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ETCSVDAp_cw/TfSlJiIZX9I/AAAAAAAABQc/LVSSR1j6rj8/s660/00%2B-%2BBanner.jpg)
'We The Dogs'As you may have seen from the front pages of the last six editions of Quicklime News, gang-related intimidation and incidents of general yobbery in the area are ever-present. Old Lynn does indeed have its fair share of anti-social troubles, like most other large towns of course, but I personally wanted to delve deeper into recent local tragedies; to pull together some seemingly unrelated incidents of criminal behaviour recently reported in Cracktown; to try to make some coherent sense of the whole bloody mess.
In December 2011 there were four incidents of shootings (three fatal), one stabbing, and two strangulations in the town. Which, of course, is a slight improvement on previous months, but a terrible statistic nonetheless.
Shortly after beginning my research into the above incidents I quickly became aware of the doomed domino effect that had Cracktown in its grip over the festive period last year. It all started back when the Old Lynn Mall was open for its first late-night Christmas shopping stint in the first week of December.
A gang of five males were clearly seen on CCTV loitering near the mall entrance at around 8.15pm. The young hoodie I met up with last Tuesday, Dave X, was there – and recounts the incident exclusively for Quicklime News;
“Well, we were all gathered there to compare our Christmas present wish-lists, minding our own business, when this strange nutter violently rams into Tariq’s heels with his trolley. Maybe this geezer was a pensioner, but we couldn’t be having that. When someone runs into you with a shopping trolley – well, that is a clear sign of disrespect. So we shot him. Only once, and only in his leg, mind. We’re very fair lads, really. Then we forced him to take us to his house in Ashes Wicked. His daughter greeted us with more disrespect, so we had to strangle her with their phoneline. Then we abused her in very colourful ways. If they had been cool about us from the get-go, none of that had to happen. At the end of the day they brought it all on themselves.”
I caught up with a fellow member of this notorious Cracktown streetgang (the Biggins Posse) yesterday, Mr. Anon E. Mus, who added; “The bloke’s daughter took a while to stop breathing. But, as soon as we heard the death rattle, our trousers came down and we had a giggle with her. Some of your readers may think that was fairly heavy going, but living on the streets is tough, man. You have to survive somehow, my friend. Anyway, after our bit of fun, we stopped her father from watching our session by head-butting the bastard as hard as each of us could. Although we all waited in line to give the geezer a butt, I can tell you it definitely hurt us more than it did him. I remember Damon’s eyes were watering after that last cracking head-butt, and I don’t think it was from the laughter that came from his mouth. We swiftly walked away from their flame-engulfed bungalow an hour later, I swear.”
But that’s when things really got confused. The Biggins Posse ran into NLP, a vicious teen gang from Cracktown North. Anon E. Mus continues;
“Yeah. We were supposed to be legging it from the scene of our bungalow burglary when we ran into the NLP gang on the street outside. A small scuffle started. That quickly stopped when we realised that, because we all dressed the same, sounded the same, and had similar names, we were confused as to who we were hitting. Gaz in NLP was constantly being confused with Gazza in the Biggins Posse, for instance. Both gangs wore their beige hoods up and Nike socks on over their trainers. Both said their trademark Jamaican-esque “innit” at the end of each sentence. Well, we swiftly got to the point where we didn’t know who we were thumping.”
After the Mall shooting, and the two strangulations in the Bungalow (all committed by the Biggins Posse), it was the NLP who performed the next grave physical misdemeanour. To find out what that was, I arranged to see the leader of the NLP to ask him for his version of events on that terrible night. Here’s the transcript of our meeting in Carroll Prison cellblock Z540 earlier this week;
PB: “Hello. You must be Dingle Dongle Esq.?...”
DD: “That’s me, aiiiight.”
PB: “Oh. Hi. My name is Polly. I’m from Quicklime News. Is it convenient….”
DD: “Pull up a pew, me biatch. Wot you wanna know?”
PB: “First of all, your name is ‘Dingle Dongle esq.’, originally from Cape Town right? That is correct?”
DD: “Aiiiight.”
PB: “Well, I sincerely apologise. My dossier on you is obviously wrong. My notes say your name is Sebastian Barrington, an Eton-educated Caucasian from Pluckley, Kent. An heir to the soap-on-a-rope industry in fact.”
DD: “My patience is runnin’ out, la. Whatcha wanna know, like?”
PB: “What was that??? You sounded Liverpudlian then. Something wrong with your vocal chords?”
DD: “…”
PB: “Tell me about your encounter with the Biggins Posse in the first week of December.”
DD: "Well, nothin’s been the same after that run-in. We did literally bump into each other in that street. That proved fatal to us – not because of any puny physical threat on their behalf, you understand. Its just that, when both gangs intermingled, there was a mix up – and there has been ever since, if I can be brutally honest.”
DD: “What kind of ‘mix-up’?”
PB: “Well, we looked quite similar to each other, for starters. The NLP has gang members Gaz, Tariq, Baz, Damien, and myself. The Biggins gang has Gazza, Bariq, Daz (Dave X), Damon, and Anon E. Mus. Because of our identical clothing, our same street phrasing, our graffiti names similar, our bling matching, and our acne mirror-riddled, we got mixed up. Gazza was punching Gaz, Tariq was holding Dariq while Damien kicked him in the pancreas. Anon E. Mus was hitting himself in a frenzied attack with a broken baseball bat for some reason, and I just didn’t know where to turn. It was then that a fellow member of our team, I honestly forget who, produced a Gurkha knife and killed….well, it was either Gaz or Gazza.”
PB: “It was Gaz who died, as you should know. He was in your gang.”
DD: “Really? [counts fingers on his right hand and whispers indecipherably to himself] So it was! I’m Sorry. Everything is so up in the air at the moment. What with Baz’s funeral tomorrow…Well…when I say ‘Baz’, I mean Tariq.”
PB: “You mean, of course, Damien; the boy who was recently shot in the neck as he urinated in the street.”
DD: “THAT’S the chap!”
PB: “So, what happened next?”
DD: “Well, after the grisly incident on the street, we held a team meeting (later that night, I think it was). Anyway, we quickly realised that something was wrong. We were a gang of five, down to four after the stabbing of Gaz, but there were seven of us at the meeting - crammed into our team shed like sardines in hoods. A miscalculation had clearly taken place. It took us six hours to work out who should have been there and who were, in fact, members of our rival gang. Things got quite heated, I can tell you.”
PB: “How did it all finally get resolved?”
DD: “we just pulled out our pistols and shot in the general direction of each other, and whoever came up smiling stayed in the shed until dawn.”
PB: “Some say chavdom, and gang culture in the UK in general, is nothing but an Americanised thus bastardised regression to childhood, with self-repressed alpha males as primates exercising denial of their sexual inadequacy by gorging on violence towards fellow apes and innocent members of the public alike. Would that be a fair judgement of the small series of unlikely events that started in Cracktown from that week onwards?”
DD: “No.”
And there we have it. A catalyst for what was to come before Christmas Day. After the NLP lost gang members Gaz and Damien in ludicrously haphazard acts of street warfare, there was to be a final, fatal series of events on Christmas Eve. In retaliation for the perceived disrespect dished out by the Biggins Posse, even though the NLP had murdered two of their own gang members by mistake, a large platter of payback was to be served up. Cold.
The NLP, led by Dingle Dongle Esq., gathered and loitered near the town centre grotto at 7.01pm. The CCTV footage clearly shows Dongle, Baz and Tariq all dressed up as Father Christmas; their wispy-white beards and furry white collars worn in a clear effort to prevent another perilous mistaken identity crisis. What they didn’t count on was the fact that the Consortium of Santa Impersonators (C.S.I.) was holding a street march that very night to celebrate the festive season. Lady Luck does not look upon the NLP with fondness, it seems.
With their girlfriends in tow, the Biggins Posse turned up with a swagger and were soon chased by the small band of St. Nick’s and eventually surrounded near Paradise Lane. In all fairness to the Biggins Posse, they had no clue as to what the hell was going on. Anon E. Mus later reported in court that his gang members all thought the end of the world was upon them; “All these nutter Santas coming up to us and Ho Ho Ho-ing our asses. We didn’t know what was going down, man. We thought there had been some kind of chemical spillage or sumink. Mental images of flying fake beards and torn blood-red suits. I couldn’t sleep for two days after that confrontation, like.”
In fact, it was more than a confrontation. It was a bloodbath. Two NLP gang members, Baz and Tariq were shot down mercilessly, allegedly by Dongle himself in some kind of confused and unstoppable red-mist pistol rage. It was 7.31pm when a group of 50 tanked-up Father Christmases descended on the scene. This particular group of sozzled Santas saw the shootings from a distance when their CSI Festive March turned down Norfolk Street, and immediately rushed to help what was seemingly a bearded comrade in grave danger.
One grinning onlooker said at the time; “There was this massive surging and violent pulling of beards, buckled belts and red cloth. It was like some kind of unruly Socialist swingers party.”
Never in the history of Cracktown has there been such a bizarre display of supreme violence. By the end of the mass brawl of misunderstanding (some two hours later), the tally of the victims of this unholy festival of street fighting was clear; the death toll of Baz Tweedy and Tariq Andre was added to by a whole variety of horrific injuries suffered by all involved (gouged eyes, ripped cheeks, severe blood loss, etc.), though most were thankfully not life-threatening.
Add to that terrible tally the damaged psyches of 23 children who witnessed the Xtreme Xmas carnage and, like the children themselves must now think, our Christmases may never be quite the same again.
In December 2011 there were four incidents of shootings (three fatal), one stabbing, and two strangulations in the town. Which, of course, is a slight improvement on previous months, but a terrible statistic nonetheless.
Shortly after beginning my research into the above incidents I quickly became aware of the doomed domino effect that had Cracktown in its grip over the festive period last year. It all started back when the Old Lynn Mall was open for its first late-night Christmas shopping stint in the first week of December.
A gang of five males were clearly seen on CCTV loitering near the mall entrance at around 8.15pm. The young hoodie I met up with last Tuesday, Dave X, was there – and recounts the incident exclusively for Quicklime News;
“Well, we were all gathered there to compare our Christmas present wish-lists, minding our own business, when this strange nutter violently rams into Tariq’s heels with his trolley. Maybe this geezer was a pensioner, but we couldn’t be having that. When someone runs into you with a shopping trolley – well, that is a clear sign of disrespect. So we shot him. Only once, and only in his leg, mind. We’re very fair lads, really. Then we forced him to take us to his house in Ashes Wicked. His daughter greeted us with more disrespect, so we had to strangle her with their phoneline. Then we abused her in very colourful ways. If they had been cool about us from the get-go, none of that had to happen. At the end of the day they brought it all on themselves.”
I caught up with a fellow member of this notorious Cracktown streetgang (the Biggins Posse) yesterday, Mr. Anon E. Mus, who added; “The bloke’s daughter took a while to stop breathing. But, as soon as we heard the death rattle, our trousers came down and we had a giggle with her. Some of your readers may think that was fairly heavy going, but living on the streets is tough, man. You have to survive somehow, my friend. Anyway, after our bit of fun, we stopped her father from watching our session by head-butting the bastard as hard as each of us could. Although we all waited in line to give the geezer a butt, I can tell you it definitely hurt us more than it did him. I remember Damon’s eyes were watering after that last cracking head-butt, and I don’t think it was from the laughter that came from his mouth. We swiftly walked away from their flame-engulfed bungalow an hour later, I swear.”
But that’s when things really got confused. The Biggins Posse ran into NLP, a vicious teen gang from Cracktown North. Anon E. Mus continues;
“Yeah. We were supposed to be legging it from the scene of our bungalow burglary when we ran into the NLP gang on the street outside. A small scuffle started. That quickly stopped when we realised that, because we all dressed the same, sounded the same, and had similar names, we were confused as to who we were hitting. Gaz in NLP was constantly being confused with Gazza in the Biggins Posse, for instance. Both gangs wore their beige hoods up and Nike socks on over their trainers. Both said their trademark Jamaican-esque “innit” at the end of each sentence. Well, we swiftly got to the point where we didn’t know who we were thumping.”
After the Mall shooting, and the two strangulations in the Bungalow (all committed by the Biggins Posse), it was the NLP who performed the next grave physical misdemeanour. To find out what that was, I arranged to see the leader of the NLP to ask him for his version of events on that terrible night. Here’s the transcript of our meeting in Carroll Prison cellblock Z540 earlier this week;
PB: “Hello. You must be Dingle Dongle Esq.?...”
DD: “That’s me, aiiiight.”
PB: “Oh. Hi. My name is Polly. I’m from Quicklime News. Is it convenient….”
DD: “Pull up a pew, me biatch. Wot you wanna know?”
PB: “First of all, your name is ‘Dingle Dongle esq.’, originally from Cape Town right? That is correct?”
DD: “Aiiiight.”
PB: “Well, I sincerely apologise. My dossier on you is obviously wrong. My notes say your name is Sebastian Barrington, an Eton-educated Caucasian from Pluckley, Kent. An heir to the soap-on-a-rope industry in fact.”
DD: “My patience is runnin’ out, la. Whatcha wanna know, like?”
PB: “What was that??? You sounded Liverpudlian then. Something wrong with your vocal chords?”
DD: “…”
PB: “Tell me about your encounter with the Biggins Posse in the first week of December.”
DD: "Well, nothin’s been the same after that run-in. We did literally bump into each other in that street. That proved fatal to us – not because of any puny physical threat on their behalf, you understand. Its just that, when both gangs intermingled, there was a mix up – and there has been ever since, if I can be brutally honest.”
DD: “What kind of ‘mix-up’?”
PB: “Well, we looked quite similar to each other, for starters. The NLP has gang members Gaz, Tariq, Baz, Damien, and myself. The Biggins gang has Gazza, Bariq, Daz (Dave X), Damon, and Anon E. Mus. Because of our identical clothing, our same street phrasing, our graffiti names similar, our bling matching, and our acne mirror-riddled, we got mixed up. Gazza was punching Gaz, Tariq was holding Dariq while Damien kicked him in the pancreas. Anon E. Mus was hitting himself in a frenzied attack with a broken baseball bat for some reason, and I just didn’t know where to turn. It was then that a fellow member of our team, I honestly forget who, produced a Gurkha knife and killed….well, it was either Gaz or Gazza.”
PB: “It was Gaz who died, as you should know. He was in your gang.”
DD: “Really? [counts fingers on his right hand and whispers indecipherably to himself] So it was! I’m Sorry. Everything is so up in the air at the moment. What with Baz’s funeral tomorrow…Well…when I say ‘Baz’, I mean Tariq.”
PB: “You mean, of course, Damien; the boy who was recently shot in the neck as he urinated in the street.”
DD: “THAT’S the chap!”
PB: “So, what happened next?”
DD: “Well, after the grisly incident on the street, we held a team meeting (later that night, I think it was). Anyway, we quickly realised that something was wrong. We were a gang of five, down to four after the stabbing of Gaz, but there were seven of us at the meeting - crammed into our team shed like sardines in hoods. A miscalculation had clearly taken place. It took us six hours to work out who should have been there and who were, in fact, members of our rival gang. Things got quite heated, I can tell you.”
PB: “How did it all finally get resolved?”
DD: “we just pulled out our pistols and shot in the general direction of each other, and whoever came up smiling stayed in the shed until dawn.”
PB: “Some say chavdom, and gang culture in the UK in general, is nothing but an Americanised thus bastardised regression to childhood, with self-repressed alpha males as primates exercising denial of their sexual inadequacy by gorging on violence towards fellow apes and innocent members of the public alike. Would that be a fair judgement of the small series of unlikely events that started in Cracktown from that week onwards?”
DD: “No.”
And there we have it. A catalyst for what was to come before Christmas Day. After the NLP lost gang members Gaz and Damien in ludicrously haphazard acts of street warfare, there was to be a final, fatal series of events on Christmas Eve. In retaliation for the perceived disrespect dished out by the Biggins Posse, even though the NLP had murdered two of their own gang members by mistake, a large platter of payback was to be served up. Cold.
The NLP, led by Dingle Dongle Esq., gathered and loitered near the town centre grotto at 7.01pm. The CCTV footage clearly shows Dongle, Baz and Tariq all dressed up as Father Christmas; their wispy-white beards and furry white collars worn in a clear effort to prevent another perilous mistaken identity crisis. What they didn’t count on was the fact that the Consortium of Santa Impersonators (C.S.I.) was holding a street march that very night to celebrate the festive season. Lady Luck does not look upon the NLP with fondness, it seems.
With their girlfriends in tow, the Biggins Posse turned up with a swagger and were soon chased by the small band of St. Nick’s and eventually surrounded near Paradise Lane. In all fairness to the Biggins Posse, they had no clue as to what the hell was going on. Anon E. Mus later reported in court that his gang members all thought the end of the world was upon them; “All these nutter Santas coming up to us and Ho Ho Ho-ing our asses. We didn’t know what was going down, man. We thought there had been some kind of chemical spillage or sumink. Mental images of flying fake beards and torn blood-red suits. I couldn’t sleep for two days after that confrontation, like.”
In fact, it was more than a confrontation. It was a bloodbath. Two NLP gang members, Baz and Tariq were shot down mercilessly, allegedly by Dongle himself in some kind of confused and unstoppable red-mist pistol rage. It was 7.31pm when a group of 50 tanked-up Father Christmases descended on the scene. This particular group of sozzled Santas saw the shootings from a distance when their CSI Festive March turned down Norfolk Street, and immediately rushed to help what was seemingly a bearded comrade in grave danger.
One grinning onlooker said at the time; “There was this massive surging and violent pulling of beards, buckled belts and red cloth. It was like some kind of unruly Socialist swingers party.”
Never in the history of Cracktown has there been such a bizarre display of supreme violence. By the end of the mass brawl of misunderstanding (some two hours later), the tally of the victims of this unholy festival of street fighting was clear; the death toll of Baz Tweedy and Tariq Andre was added to by a whole variety of horrific injuries suffered by all involved (gouged eyes, ripped cheeks, severe blood loss, etc.), though most were thankfully not life-threatening.
Add to that terrible tally the damaged psyches of 23 children who witnessed the Xtreme Xmas carnage and, like the children themselves must now think, our Christmases may never be quite the same again.
Polly
[office]
[For more information about the rampant Cracktown gang culture and how it affects us all, please see next Tuesday’s Quicklime News pull-out “Tales From A Cracked Town”. Why not order a subscription of your favourite local paper today, and make sure you never miss the important issues affecting YOU.]
[office]
[For more information about the rampant Cracktown gang culture and how it affects us all, please see next Tuesday’s Quicklime News pull-out “Tales From A Cracked Town”. Why not order a subscription of your favourite local paper today, and make sure you never miss the important issues affecting YOU.]
