Jonathan Matondo was in the playground, eating Hula Hoops, when the shooting started. His friends shouted at him to run but Matondo, a teenage gang member who rejoiced in the nickname Venomous, refused. “I'm not running for no one,” he said, full of the invincible bravado of youth. “No one is tryin' to bust shots at us.” They were his last words. At that moment, a bullet hit Matondo in the back of the neck, penetrated his skull and lodged in his brain. He fell backwards over a low wall, on to a grass bank and died. He was only 16 when boyhood and manhood collided - when the child with his hand in a bag of crisps was cut down by a bullet fired by a street gangster of the kind he aspired to be.
The shooting, around 7.30pm on October 17 last year, had been the second attempt on Matondo's life that day. In the afternoon, hooded gunmen had chased him, firing several shots. Three of the guns fired at him, including the one that killed him, were Baikal pistols. The use of that gun - made in Russia to fire teargas, converted by Lithuanian gangs to shoot live ammunition, smuggled into Britain and sold to criminals for up to £2,500 - links the sporadic violence of street thugs such as Matondo with serious organised crime. Over the past three years, 16 Baikals have been recovered by police in Sheffield.
Matondo's murder was the culmination of a two-year feud between gangs in the Pitsmoor and Burngreave districts. The gangs identified themselves by their postcodes: Matondo was in the S3 gang from Pitsmoor, while the suspects were the S4s from Burngreave. Negus Nelson, 19, an alleged member of S4, was acquitted of Matondo's murder at Sheffield Crown Court last week.
Between December 2005, when there was a dispute over a drugs deal, and Matondo's death police recorded 45 occasions on which the gangs opened fire on each other. There were probably more incidents but no one, victim or witness, was prepared to talk.
Matondo was a key player in this fight. According to police intelligence and court records, he was a feared gunman and dealer, and someone who struck fear into other teenagers. Sheffield's Youth Offending Service had him on its highest level of supervision, trying to get him off the streets and into a job, but to little avail. On the night he was shot, a youth worker was sitting with Matondo's mother in his home hoping that, just for once, he might keep his appointment.
But in the aftermath of his murder, Sheffield ignored these hard realities and, by doing so, lost the chance to clamp down on gang violence. Instead, the police, churches and council slapped a glossy pretence on the teenager's death. Whether for political reasons or out of deference to his mother's grief, Matondo was presented as a church-going boy, whose family had brought him to England from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo when he was 6 and who wanted to become a priest.
At the murder scene, a senior police officer told reporters there was no gang culture in the city. “We have heard rumours regarding gangs operating in the area,” he said. “However, gangs are not prevalent in Sheffield.” Privately, South Yorkshire Police officers admit that the statement lost them credibility. If people had been frightened to speak to the police before, they just laughed now. The police, it seemed, could not see what was going on, so why should people risk their lives to help them? Burngreave and Pitsmoor are on a steep rise north of the centre of Sheffield. At the bottom of the hill, the city's political bosses seemed content for the problem to remain at a distance and, despite the best efforts of the local newspaper, almost unspoken.
Sheffield promotes itself as “the safest city” in England and does not want that image tarnished. Both its universities use the catchline in their efforts to attract the sons and daughters of respectable families. Strenuous efforts have been made to attract new investors and businesses to the city - including firms such as Boeing and Rolls-Royce.
Despite the recession, there remains a sense of affluence about the city centre. Construction sites bristle with cranes, grand municipal buildings have been refurbished and decorative water features adorn the pavements. Whatever was going on up the hill in Burngreave, the city that the outside world is supposed to see is the one that gave us the Arctic Monkeys and Jarvis Cocker, and was represented by high-profile national MPs such as Nick Clegg and David Blunkett.
So the city pretended nothing was happening and the gangs proliferated. They boasted of their drug wealth, brandished their weapons and taunted each other on Bebo and YouTube. Matondo features in several grainy mobile phone videos, including one of him rapping on the steps of the local magistrates' court. His death spawned a rash of online tributes to a “fallen souljah”.
The gangs splintered, fought and killed. One police officer said: “You could map out the hierarchy today and by 5pm tomorrow it would have changed.” The S3s split into at least two factions and a prominent member, Brett Blake, 23, was stabbed to death on the dancefloor of the Uniq nightclub in June. A former associate has been charged with his murder. The following month Tarek Chaiboub, 17, known as Terror Kid and also an S3 gang member, was shot dead on a summer afternoon outside a barber's shop. A week before Chaiboub had been “webbed” (stabbed several times) in a warning attack.
Police on the scene found a gun, another Baikal, by his body. It was assumed to be the murder weapon until it became evident that the gaping wound in Chaiboub's back could not have been inflicted by a handgun. “Our first thought was why did the killer drop the gun?” said one detective. “Then we realised that Chaiboub had dropped his own gun when he was shot.” The murder weapon had been a pump-action shotgun, fired from close range and the investigation is focusing on members of the Broomhall Crew, a local Somali-dominated gang.
The murder - the third gangland killing in ten months - was the point at which police publicly admitted that there was probably a “gang element” and the dead boy's father said that he had lost his son to “a different world”.
Superintendent Peter Norman, the tall, quietly spoken but determined officer responsible for policing inner-city Sheffield, says Chaiboub's murder meant that the city's gang problem could no longer be ignored. “We're at a tipping point,” he says, sitting in his office in West Bar police station, an ugly 1960s building on the edge of the city centre. “We've got an emerging problem with teenage violence and gangs, I see it happening week by week, month by month. There is no point pretending that it isn't there.
“If people in other areas think that it doesn't matter, then they need to hear about what's going on. I don't want a Rhys Jones situation here; I don't want someone getting killed in the crossfire in the city centre. We need to get the guns out of circulation, we need to stop the attraction of gang culture and think about how we restore the bonds of school and family.” Norman began Operation Kindred in September. He sent his officers out to start kicking in doors, seizing drugs and searching for guns. In the first fortnight, they found drugs worth £630,000, recovered three firearms and made 25 arrests for gang and drug-related offences.
On the front line, rattling around in a battered, unmarked car, are Detective Constables Pat Whaley and John Pashley, with 46 years' service between them. They take me to the places where Chaiboub and Matondo died, point out a well-known crack haunt, the homes of the family that leads the S4 gang, the tower block in Broomhall where Somali gangs have dropped petrol bombs on police cars, and the grave of Brett Blake, with his black S3 bandanna draped over a wooden cross.
And they recall the moment that it all made sense, as they quizzed one gang member about the letters ABM tattooed on his back. “We couldn't work out what they stood for,” says Pashley. “Then he says ‘Are you lot thick? All Bout Money'.” ABM is the core of the gang culture. It's not about race or postcodes; it's about making money from drugs and protecting businesses with guns.
With their sergeant, Jo Wade, who polices in a Brunettes Have More Fun T-shirt, the Kindred team later raid a cannabis farm in Burngreave only to discover that local gang members have been there before them, scared off the Vietnamese “gardener” and stolen the huge crop. “That explains why there's so much weed on sale,” mutters an officer.
A radio diverts the team to Gleadless, where another raid uncovers what appears to be a drug supplier's crash pad. A tip-off has led to a new-build house in a quiet cul-de-sac. The door has been forced and inside is a treasure trove - a bag of amphetamine powder, 250g of cocaine, cannabis plants growing under lights in the spare bedroom, a stun gun and a stab vest. Later, in a car belonging to a suspect - who has rented the house under a false name and bought himself a huge plasma TV and a handsome boxer dog - a firearm is recovered.
The find is topped off by the discovery of a laptop and a handwritten “dealer list” on which the suspect has recorded who he owes money to and who is in his debt. To Whaley, however, it's the tip of the iceberg. “Fact is,” he grumbles, “we could do a couple of these every day - we've got a box of warrants but not enough resources.” The police know, however, that executing more warrants will not provide a lasting solution.
“I take my job very seriously but I know the limitations,” says Norman. “A lot more people need to be involved, children's services, education, housing.” Andy Peaden, head of the city's Youth Offending Team, is signed up to that way of thinking. “But any approach that is preventive has to be long-term. There is no overnight solution,” he cautions.
Those at the sharp end are concerned that not all the city's political leadership is on board. My attempts to speak to city officials involved in youth justice were blocked and press officers said that they were “under orders” not to grant interviews. Paul Scriven, the Liberal Democrat council leader and parliamentary candidate for Sheffield Central, took two weeks to respond to calls and e-mails but insisted that the gang problem was being taken seriously. “There is an issue but Sheffield's gang problem is not as big as in other UK cities,” he says. “We are trying to step up the game now before it expands.”
Yet there are still important voices in Sheffield claiming that the problem is minor. There are only six gang members, says one leading light in the city; it's only kids mucking about, another claims, and everyone maintains that crime is falling. The slogan on the back of the buses says everyone is pulling together to “Keep Sheffield Safe”.
It's partly true. The gang problem is nowhere near as severe as in Liverpool and Manchester. But up on the Rec, a year after Matondo died, crack dealers are openly plying their trade as little boys whizz around on bicycles. An eight-year-old asks why we've come to “this scaggy park”. One of Matondo's friends, sipping from a Lucozade Sport bottle, his S3 bandanna around his neck, mumbles about how the dead boy was “always good to his friends”.
Sheltering from the rain, we come across the only visible sign of the council's response to the gang problem. Casper Carr, a £35-an-hour graffiti artist, is applying the finishing touches to a mural commemorating murdered young men, including Matondo, Blake and Chaiboub. It's not glorification, he insists, but the kids watching him already know the nicknames and the stories of how they died. Venn Dogg, as Matondo has been immortalised in Day-Glo paint, is seen as something of a hero. The struggle for Sheffield - and cities across Britain - is how to convince the seven and eight-year-olds that a childhood that ends with a bullet in the head at the age of 16 is not a glorious life but a wasted one.
