Tim Pritchard - Street Boys - 7 Kids. 1 Estate. No Way Out. The True Story of a Lost Childhood

TIM PRITCHARD

7 kids. 1 estate. No way out. The true story of a lost childhood

Everyone was out there and there were gunshots. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Young kids crying, everyone was scattering. It was hectic. Someone had been shot. I didn’t know the guy. We were all young. There was blood everywhere, man. The guy’d been shot in the face .

Inch

This is the story of JaJa, Phat Si, Inch, Birdie, Ribz, Bloods and Tempman. They are members of the PDC, one of the most feared and notorious street gangs in London. To some they are glamorous, gun-toting ‘gangstas’, with a bling-bling lifestyle. To others they are a group of criminal thugs who pose a danger to civilized society. This may turn you on, or it might put you off. But stay with it. Things may not be what they seem.

Tim Pritchard

by Elijah Kerr (aka JaJa)

This book is the voice of the streets. An unheard voice.

This is what happens when you leave those voices unheard, when you leave kids out there with no help and no support, and no choices or nothing.

This is what happens.

Your kids could be me. Your kids could go through the same things that I went through. I want you to understand what is out there, what young people like me are going through and why we are doing it.

It’s a big cry for help, now.

Title Page Preface Foreword Seven Kids Chapter One: The Raid Chapter Two: Elijah Chapter Three: Simon Chapter Four: Nathan & Michael Chapter Five: Fat Si In ‘the Jungle’ Chapter Six: Guns And Yardies Chapter Seven: The 28s Chapter Eight: The Younger 28s Chapter Nine: Back In ‘the Jungle’ Chapter Ten: Ribz Chapter Eleven: A New Coldness Chapter Twelve: Steaming Chapter Thirteen: Birdie Chapter Fourteen: Feltham Chapter Fifteen: Bloods Chapter Sixteen: The Return Of Fat Si Chapter Seventeen: Customer Service Chapter Eighteen: The Shooting Chapter Nineteen: Inch And Ribz Chapter Twenty: Hats, Nikes And Guns Chapter Twenty-One: Inch Does Time Chapter Twenty-Two: Wanted Chapter Twenty-Three: Angell Delight Chapter Twenty-Four: Guns And Ammunition Chapter Twenty-Five: Rapping, Robbing And Shooting Chapter Twenty-Six: The Pdc Come Together Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Raid On The Block Chapter Twenty-Eight: On The Run Chapter Twenty-Nine: Life Inside Chapter Thirty: Inch In Brixton Chapter Thirty-One: Islam Chapter Thirty-Two: Murder Chapter Thirty-Three: Tempman Chapter Thirty-Four: The New Angell Town Chapter Thirty-Five: Pray Days Change Chapter Thirty-Six: The Shootout Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Shooting Of Blacker Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Business Chapter Thirty-Nine: Murder, Murder, Murder. Death, Death, Death. Chapter Forty: Shot In The Head Chapter Forty-One: Police Chapter Forty-Two: True Stories Chapter Forty-Three: Return To Angell Town Chapter Forty-Four: Goodbye To Angell Town Epilogue Afterword About the Author Copyright About the Publisher

JaJa,real name: Elijah Kerr Born in Birmingham and arrives in Angell Town at the age of ten

Phat Si,real name: Simon Maitland Born on the Stockwell Park Estate, across the road from Angell Town

BloodsBorn in Kingston, Jamaica, and arrives in Angell Town at the age of six

Inch,real name: Nathan Cross Born in Angell Town

Birdie,real name: Michael Deans Born in Angell Town

Ribz,real name: Byron Cole Born in Stockwell, down the road from Angell Town. Moves to Angell Town at the age of nine

Tempman,real name: Darren Samuels Born in Tulse Hill, just up the road from Angell Town

Chapter One

Could I have gone through a different door? If I’d been told to be a plumber and could have made money, maybe I would have gone down that route. Or if I’d met a fireman first or been shown some other life maybe I wouldn’t be here now. But no one in the ’hood does those types of things. The people I met in Angell Town were drug dealers and burglars. That’s what I knew first. There’s not really no choice .

JaJa

It was Naja who first noticed that something was up. He saw a white police van reverse into the estate and then quickly drive out again. He didn’t quite know why but something told him that it might be a police dog unit. He looked around nervously at the others.

‘Something dodgy is going on.’

The others hadn’t seen it. Ribz, who had already been there for an hour, was smoking weed and ‘coching’, Angell Town speak for chilling.

‘Relax, Naj. It’s cool.’

Naja wasn’t so sure.

There were only five of them on the Marston House walkway that day. On any other day there would be eight or nine of them, but JaJa, Naja’s older brother, had gone off to Wandsworth prison to visit Blacker who was serving time, Birdie had taken off a couple of hours earlier and Phat Si was on Brixton Road buying some takeaway jerk chicken. That left Naja, Ribz, Inch, Sykes and Skippy pacing the council block’s second-floor corridor armed with small plastic bags of weed and heroin. They were waiting for the first ‘cats’, or punters, to arrive.

It was Tuesday 17 December 2002 at about 3 p.m. and it was bitterly cold.

None of them had any real reason to be alarmed. From their position on the second-floor walkway of Marston House they had a clear view over the whole estate. They would have plenty of warning if the ‘feds’ came. That’s what they called the police, a name taken from all the American gangster shows they’d watched on TV. And anyway, they were sure that most of the residents would tip them off if there were any signs of police activity. Even though what they were doing was illegal, they were still surrounded by friends and neighbours. All of the gang had grown up in Angell Town. Ever since they were tiny kids, they’d ridden their bikes, kicked a ball about and run around in the streets and concrete playground at the heart of Angell Town. JaJa and his younger brother Naja had even grown up in one of the flats in Marston House, just along the corridor from where they were now standing.

When it was built in the 1970s, Marston House was designed as a model of urban planning. Now the ugly, squat, concrete council block with its urine-stained and graffitied stairwells was mostly empty and derelict, earmarked for demolition as part of Lambeth Council’s scheme to regenerate the area. It was still the centre of their world, though. ‘The block’ was their fiefdom. Here they ruled the roost as the most feared or, depending on your allegiance, the most respected gang in the area. Their name, the PDC, the Peel Dem Crew, was taken from ‘peel dem’, Jamaican street slang for ‘rip them off’, ‘steal from them’.

And they had done plenty of that. They had all served time in young offenders’ institutions and prisons for muggings, armed robberies, gun crimes and ‘steaming’. It had been all the craze a couple of years earlier. A bunch of them would charge into a shop, such as a newsagent’s, a supermarket, or even a bank or building society, and just go for the till and take whatever they could. Often the shopkeepers or bank clerks had no time to react. Or if they did, the gang would just run them over and knock them to the ground. They’d have raided the till before anyone could raise the alarm.

From below came the sound of shouting. Something is about to go down . This time Naja kept the thought to himself. He stamped his feet to keep warm.