When two hired guns from Moss Side nervously walked into a packed, notorious pub to carry out a gangland hit, what happened next was so shocking it would send tremors through Manchester’s underworld that are still being felt today.
Carlton Alveranga, 20, and Richard Austin, 19, were the would-be assassins who had been sent – almost forced – into one of Salford’s toughest pubs to shoot dead a young upstart they didn’t even know.
They were lambs sent to their own slaughter.
Moments after they burst into Brass Handles, where regulars were watching Manchester United beating Newcastle on a busy Sunday lunchtime on March 12, 2006, they were disarmed and shot dead with their own guns. It was described at the time as a ‘wild west’ shootout.
Fatally injured, the would-be hitmen staggered out of the pub onto a grass croft beside Fitzwarren Street where they collapsed and died.
In a trademark Salford gangland move following any crime inside a pub, someone ripped out the CCTV system and it’s not difficult to imagine those inside being told in no uncertain terms never to speak about the horrors that had just transpired.
A well-worn gangland trope barely needed repeating, but none-the-less word went out: this is Salford and no-one speaks to the law. No-one inside the Pendleton pub that day – and there were hundreds – would speak to the police.
A few years later, the unremarkable flat roof pub on Edgehill Close in Pendleton – where LS Lowry reportedly would enjoy a quiet pint – was demolished.
No-one has ever been brought to justice for the killing of Alveranga and Austin, who were believed to be in the debt of the Moss Side gang boss who organised the hit.
That man was Ian McLeod, a founder member of the notorious Doddington crew who had sent these two young men to what turned out to be their own deaths. McLeod had parked up close to the pub in his Ford Mondeo. As his hired guns lay mortally wounded his mind was still on the intended target. He was heard to ask: “Are they dead yet?”
He walked onto the grass to check his charges were dead before calmly driving away.
The aftermath of the shootout
At first, detectives thought the shooting was the result of a feud between rival gangs in Salford and Moss Side. Over the weeks and months of the subsequent police investigation, seasoned detectives were shocked when they uncovered the truth: this crime was made in Salford, despite it appearing to be otherwise.
McLeod was then 43 and all-but retired from serious crime – but still regarded as the leader of the Doddington.
He had himself been hired by one of Salford’s most notorious figures – Bobby Speirs, a close friend of the city’s ‘Mr Big’, Paul Massey, who would himself be shot dead years later. Speirs is said to have paid McLeod £10,000 for the hit, not that the young men who were to carry out the dirty work were going to see any of that money.
At the moment Alveranga and Austin were walking into the Brass Handles, Speirs was enjoying a half-time pint in an executive box at Old Trafford where he was watching his beloved United beating Newcastle 2-0.
He must have been thrilled. His team was winning and he had – or at least he thought he had – the perfect alibi.
But the mission failed spectacularly and Speirs fled to Benidorm in Spain, believing he would never be unmasked as the man who had ordered the hit.
The man he wanted dead was Salford hardman David Totton whose burgeoning criminal reputation demanded attention from his rivals.
Speirs wanted Totton dead, but why? Neither man has ever gone public to explain their feud but the M.E.N established at the time that their feud was personal. In the weeks or months before the shooting, Totton was refused entry to a Manchester nightclub and he told the bouncers he was a friend of Bobby Speirs, who was already inside. The doorman fetched the older man to the entrance and, even though he knew perfectly well who Totton was, Speirs feigned ignorance.
SHOT DEAD: Carlton Alveranga
The doormen sent humiliated Totton on his way. It is unclear whether this was meant simply as a laddish joke or something designed to belittle Totton.
Whatever the intention, in the subsequent weeks Totton suddenly started drinking in Speirs’ local – The Brass Handles. Was this designed to spook Bobby Speirs? If that was the case, it worked. Speirs was worried. He quietly set about a plot to assassinate David Totton.
A plan was hatched to send two hired young bucks from Moss Side into a pub in the city of Salford’s heartland to kill Totton as he watched the match.
They were to be helped by a ‘spotter’ inside the pub, convicted gun-runner Connie Howarth. She sent discreet messages from inside the Brass Handles to tell McLeod where Totton was sitting with his mates in the snooker room, information he could pass on to his reluctant hitmen. She was sitting at the bar, mobile phone in hand, and had a view across the bar to the snooker room where Totton was sitting with his mates.
It seems the hired would-be assassins were reluctant – evidence suggested McLeod had to force the two young men from his car so they could complete their mission to carry out a hit in one of Salford’s toughest boozers.
Detectives believed at the time that Austin and Alveranga were only in the car because of a debt they owed McLeod. The young men weren’t believed to be there to make a pile of cash, but simply to get McLeod off their backs.
VICTIM: Richard Austin
When they entered the pub they fired six times into Totton’s chest before Austin’s gun misfired and they were overpowered by other drinkers.
Totton, who was with a group of friends, was seriously hurt, but, incredibly, survived. Another man, not believed to be a target, Aaron Travers, was also hit, jumping up and taking two bullets meant for his friend Totton.
The table at which Totton and his friends had been sitting was upended and used as a shield against the Doddington gang members who had run into the pub and opened fire. Howarth knew what was coming and was in the loo when the gunmen burst in, touching up her lipstick.
Totton and Travers were driven away and dumped outside a hospital, where they were treated and would make full recoveries despite serious injuries. Neither would make a formal statement to the police about being shot and nor would anyone else who was in the pub that afternoon.
This was Salford’s notorious underworld and its omerta at work, the almost impenetrable code of silence which protects the city’s criminals from prosecution.
It means, almost two decades after Austin and Alveranga were shot dead, no-one has ever been charged over their killings, although the case remains open and a £50,000 reward remains unclaimed.
For many outside the Greater Manchester’s criminal fraternity, their loss isn’t mourned – after all, they were about to murder someone in cold blood before they were disarmed and shot dead themselves.
But to their grieving families, of course, it was very different. Austin’s mother Bridget had moved the family to Wythenshawe to help her son to escape the clutches of the gangs, but to no avail. “I worried every time Richard would not come home as he was probably in Moss Side. I had no idea who he was with,” she told police.
Tributes outside the Brass Handles
The last time she saw her son he was asleep on the sofa of her flat after half a bottle of red. She left the house and never saw him again. Alveranga’s mother, Linda Connelly, saw him the day before the shooting, making some lunch for him before he went to a party.
Alveranga had been released from a four-year sentence in 2005 but even before he was out McLeod was trying to visit him to ask about ‘security work’. If he wanted to go straight, McLeod clearly had other ideas.
The shooting, and its main protagonists, have helped to shape the criminal landscape that exists in Greater Manchester even today.
The target of the hit, David Totton, went on to become one of the most feared men in Salford, someone who has had repeated run-ins with the police.
The law did eventually catch up with McLeod and Spiers, no thanks to anyone inside the Brass Handles that day.
The central plank of the prosecution case, which eventually saw them convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, wasn’t any witness – but evidence about their telephone communications before and after the botched hit.
All police had when they arrived at the scene were two dead bodies and two mobile phones on the grass beside them. From this unpromising beginning, a case evolved.
The phones were key. They were pay-as-you-go mobiles, which can frequently lead detectives nowhere, but officers realised one of them had been topped up with the help of a loyalty card with a name on it. From there, police were able to trace other mobile numbers and retrace an incriminating web of communications behind the main players in the plot.
Bobby Speirs, 41, sentenced to life for conspiracy to murder
The following year Howarth was jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years behind bars. She has told police: “I am just a girl. Me, I don’t know anything about guns.” The jury didn’t believe her. She had ties to Glasgow’s criminal underworld and in May 1997 police swooped on her car, following a surveillance operation involving MI5, as she drove from London to Manchester. In the vehicle, inside a box tied with string, were three machine pistols, ammunition, six 25-round magazines, silencers, and four detonators.
McLeod was also handed a life sentence with a minimum of 21 years in jail.
Jailing the pair, Mr Justice Andrew Smith said : “Two men died, they were not innocents, but they were young, their lives were not expendable. In view of the calculating nature of this offence I consider there is every danger you are incorrigibly involved in violent crime. You will always present a danger to the public.”
For this side of the case at least, it was a major coup for Greater Manchester Police, which had routinely struggled to penetrate Salford’s criminal underworld.
GUILTY: Connie Howarth.
Meanwhile Spiers was living the high-life and enjoying the sunshine in Benidorm. He went to watch his beloved United whenever they were playing an away tie in Europe. Police kept an eye on him but could do nothing. For now.
Speirs had been instrumental in planning the operation and kept in touch with McLeod and Howarth on his mobile from his executive box at Old Trafford, communication police would later uncover, unmasking him as the man who had ordered the botched hit.
Finally, he was extradited back to the UK after a European arrest warrant was issued and he was jailed for a minimum of 23 years in 2009.
His close friend Paul Massey, the man regarded as Salford’s ‘Mr Big’ – who was himself shot dead in 2015 – was pictured daubing ‘free Bobby Speirs’ on the walls beside Salford Lads Club in the wake of the sentencing of his pal.
For a period in 2009 police investigating Austin and Alveranga’s deaths were keen to speak to a suspected robber, who had been in the Brass Handles that day before going on the run, but nothing has ever come from that line of inquiry.
David Totton
(Image: Manchester Evening News)
David Totton may have survived the shooting but he has continued to have run-ins with Greater Manchester Police. Police did not believe he was the man who had shot dead Austin and Alveranga but he certainly didn’t tell police who did.
In 2011 he was handed 20 months behind bars after he admitted conspiracy to handle stolen goods. Before that he served a long prison sentence for beating up two car park attendants.
His computer log at GMP has a ‘firearms marker’ on it, by virtue of surviving the Brass Handles shooting. On March 3, 2012, he was in the middle of another shooting – and this time it was the police doing the firing. He was sitting in the front passenger seat of a stolen, red Audi A6 estate, parked in Culcheth in Cheshire, when armed police swooped and shot dead the driver, his friend, Anthony Grainger. Again, Totton survived.
A public inquiry later heard Totton had been gloved and wearing a rolled up balaclava on his head. In the back of the car was Joey Travers, the brother of the man who had taken a couple of bullets for Totton, Aaron Travers. At the subsequent public inquiry into the death of Anthony Grainger earlier, Totton denied he was about to commit a robbery at a nearby supermarket and claimed they were there simply to collect a debt from a man called ‘Fenton’.
He, and many others, were defined by that shootout at the Brass Handles in 2006 and the subsequent police investigation.
“It was a remarkable case and hopefully we won’t go back to those bad times ever again. They were just young lads really. It was such a tragedy,” recalled Andy Tattersall, the now retired detective superintendent who led the original inquiry, in an interview with the Manchester Evening News in 2017.
GUILTY: Ian McLeod.
Today the file remains open on the unsolved murders of Carlton Alveranga and Richard Austin, while Spiers, McLeod and Howarth remain behind bars. Howarth, dubbed the ‘black widow’ failed in an attempt to appeal her sentence in 2020.
Martin Bottomley, head of GMP’s Cold Case Unit said: “As it stands, we have never found those responsible for the murders of Carlton Alveranga and Richard Austin, and the case will remain open until the day we do.
“A £50,000 reward for information leading to arrest and conviction of the killers remains available. Should any new information about historic murders come to light, these will always be followed up appropriately.
“Anyone with any information about the case should call GMP’s Cold Case Unit on 0161 856 5961 or the independent charity Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555111.”