Armed police are patrolling the streets of Birmingham due to fears of an explosion in black gang-related knife and gun attacks during the bank holiday. West Midlands police called together the owners of twenty-six of Birmingham’s biggest clubs earlier this week and asked them to observe a 4:00 a.m. curfew over the bank holiday weekend.
Fearing violent reprisals after the recent spate of gang-related shootings and stabbings across the city, police warned club bosses that they did not feel capable of controlling the streets if nightspots stayed open for their regular hours.
In the latest incident, Dimitri Foskin was fatally shot in the chest outside a house in the Newtown area, which has been blighted by a wave of gun crime in the past year.
Foskin is the third person to have been fatally shot in Newtown in less than a year. On March 18, Nehemiah Bryce, 27, was shot dead in Rodway Close, just a few hundred yards from Hockley Close.
On December 23 last year, Assar Joseph Mohammed Tomlinson was killed during a row outside a pub in Hospital Street. In another incident, on April 1, a teenager and another man were injured when they were shot inside a shop in Great Hampton Row.
Last weekend’s violence follows two drive-by shootings in Ladywood and Handsworth earlier this month, which have been linked to rising tensions between the Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys.
The Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew both grew out of earlier gangs, the Handsworth Nigga Squad and the Inch High Crew, and bizarrely took their names from two cafes in Handsworth where black youths congregated in the late 80s and early 90s. Legend has it that both gangs were friends and that they fell out over a bet on who won a game of "Streetfighter" on the Playstation. By the late 90s, these computer games had moved off the screen and out on to the streets.
The site of Thursday’s shooting is locally known as “Checkpoint Charlie”—if you cross it at the wrong time you may end up dead. On one side of Birchfield Road is Johnson Crew territory, which encompasses Aston, Nechells and surrounding areas.
Their adversaries are the notorious Burger Bar Boys, whose domains include Handsworth, Lozells (the scene of the 1985 riots between blacks and Asians), and Perry Barr.
Delroy Corinaldo, 28, from Lozells, a former Burger Bar Boy, who goes by the streetname Topper, explained it this way, “The Johnson Crew were our rivals from day one and that rivalry has just escalated and escalated. As crack cocaine came on the scene the firearms became more and more openly available so the levels of violence increased. Both gangs rule with the threat of extreme violence and people who talk to the police are dealt with severely. If a man gets shot in a packed dancehall then 99 percent of the people will tell the police they were in the toilet at the time.”
Gang members are very close-knit, often having lived on the same street for years and attended the same school. Over the years, as many members were expelled from school because of their increasingly criminal behaviour, they progressed into fully-fledged gangsters with a growing interest and influence in the city’s burgeoning drug market. The gangs shoot for what are sometimes referred to as the three Rs: revenge, revenue, and respect.
In 1997 several high ranking members of the Johnson Crew were jailed at Leicester Crown Court after a black DJ, Jason Wharton, was shot to death in his car in Handsworth. Witnesses gave evidence behind bullet-proof screens and in disguise leading to several gangsters being jailed for terms ranging from life to five years.
But they continued their reign of terror from inside their cells and the gang actually gained momentum during this period as it became more organised as a result of the high profile convictions.
Johnson is the more organised, having made loose affiliations with local Asian heroin gangs in Aston as well as with the Jamaican-born Yardie gangsters who have become increasingly marginalised as the two Birmingham gangs--collectively known as the Homeboys—have taken over the city.
The Burger Bar Boys main money-earner is crack cocaine and many of its members are users. Attacks often take place while members are high on drugs.
Both gangs have links with black gangs in London and Manchester, often exchanging arms and drugs. Birmingham is also home to several smaller crews with names like Champagne Crew, Rally Close Crew or the Badder Bar Boys—a younger version of the Burger Bar Boys who pride themselves on being more violent than their mentors.
Over the last three years gun crime in Birmingham—and particularly Handsworth and Aston—has risen dramatically as the feuding gangs fight for territory. The escalation led to one senior West Midlands detective comparing the city to the "Wild Wild West" as firearms incidents rose to at least one a week.
Fearing violent reprisals after the recent spate of gang-related shootings and stabbings across the city, police warned club bosses that they did not feel capable of controlling the streets if nightspots stayed open for their regular hours.
In the latest incident, Dimitri Foskin was fatally shot in the chest outside a house in the Newtown area, which has been blighted by a wave of gun crime in the past year.
Foskin is the third person to have been fatally shot in Newtown in less than a year. On March 18, Nehemiah Bryce, 27, was shot dead in Rodway Close, just a few hundred yards from Hockley Close.
On December 23 last year, Assar Joseph Mohammed Tomlinson was killed during a row outside a pub in Hospital Street. In another incident, on April 1, a teenager and another man were injured when they were shot inside a shop in Great Hampton Row.
Last weekend’s violence follows two drive-by shootings in Ladywood and Handsworth earlier this month, which have been linked to rising tensions between the Johnson Crew and the Burger Bar Boys.
The Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew both grew out of earlier gangs, the Handsworth Nigga Squad and the Inch High Crew, and bizarrely took their names from two cafes in Handsworth where black youths congregated in the late 80s and early 90s. Legend has it that both gangs were friends and that they fell out over a bet on who won a game of "Streetfighter" on the Playstation. By the late 90s, these computer games had moved off the screen and out on to the streets.
The site of Thursday’s shooting is locally known as “Checkpoint Charlie”—if you cross it at the wrong time you may end up dead. On one side of Birchfield Road is Johnson Crew territory, which encompasses Aston, Nechells and surrounding areas.
Their adversaries are the notorious Burger Bar Boys, whose domains include Handsworth, Lozells (the scene of the 1985 riots between blacks and Asians), and Perry Barr.
Delroy Corinaldo, 28, from Lozells, a former Burger Bar Boy, who goes by the streetname Topper, explained it this way, “The Johnson Crew were our rivals from day one and that rivalry has just escalated and escalated. As crack cocaine came on the scene the firearms became more and more openly available so the levels of violence increased. Both gangs rule with the threat of extreme violence and people who talk to the police are dealt with severely. If a man gets shot in a packed dancehall then 99 percent of the people will tell the police they were in the toilet at the time.”
Gang members are very close-knit, often having lived on the same street for years and attended the same school. Over the years, as many members were expelled from school because of their increasingly criminal behaviour, they progressed into fully-fledged gangsters with a growing interest and influence in the city’s burgeoning drug market. The gangs shoot for what are sometimes referred to as the three Rs: revenge, revenue, and respect.
In 1997 several high ranking members of the Johnson Crew were jailed at Leicester Crown Court after a black DJ, Jason Wharton, was shot to death in his car in Handsworth. Witnesses gave evidence behind bullet-proof screens and in disguise leading to several gangsters being jailed for terms ranging from life to five years.
But they continued their reign of terror from inside their cells and the gang actually gained momentum during this period as it became more organised as a result of the high profile convictions.
Johnson is the more organised, having made loose affiliations with local Asian heroin gangs in Aston as well as with the Jamaican-born Yardie gangsters who have become increasingly marginalised as the two Birmingham gangs--collectively known as the Homeboys—have taken over the city.
The Burger Bar Boys main money-earner is crack cocaine and many of its members are users. Attacks often take place while members are high on drugs.
Both gangs have links with black gangs in London and Manchester, often exchanging arms and drugs. Birmingham is also home to several smaller crews with names like Champagne Crew, Rally Close Crew or the Badder Bar Boys—a younger version of the Burger Bar Boys who pride themselves on being more violent than their mentors.
Over the last three years gun crime in Birmingham—and particularly Handsworth and Aston—has risen dramatically as the feuding gangs fight for territory. The escalation led to one senior West Midlands detective comparing the city to the "Wild Wild West" as firearms incidents rose to at least one a week.
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