Surviving Brick Lane

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Lucky escape: Enam

Enam can feel the blood rushing in his ears, his sprinting footfalls keeping time with the pounding of his heart. Samurai sword in hand, each step thrusts him closer to the boy in his sights, a scrawny teenager from the wrong side of the tracks, the wrong gang too.

Despite the adrenaline pumping through his body, Enam notes with satisfaction that the Drummond Street Boys are running scared, scrabbling to get away. Some in a hired van, some on foot, they flee north through the streets of London, from Tower Hamlets back to Camden, and the turf they call their own.

"We were running because of anger, they were running because they were scared," recalls the 21-year-old, who has been a leading member of the Brick Lane Massive, a loosely associated gang of around 50 youths living in a well-defined area surrounding east London's Brick Lane. " Drummond Street were getting beaten up. They wanted to get away. When a knife is behind you, you run like Linford Christie."

Such is the thrill of the chase that in a previous fight Enam barely felt the heavy machete in his hand, nor noticed the resistance as he swung it through the air. By mistake, the machete made contact. He heard a scream and saw someone's bloody finger drop to the ground. "When you're in a fight you do the worst things that you can," he says. "You don't think about what you're doing, you can see the blood but you don't think of it as blood, you just swing out as hard and fast as you can."

A jagged scar dividing Enam's left eyebrow into two, bears testament to his violent life. No one is better qualified to describe the bloody gang wars sweeping through London's young, male south Asian community, than him. By the age of 12, he had held a teenage uncle's hand and watched him slip away in a pool of blood and lamplight on a dirty street. By 17, another close friend and mentor had also died, hammered to death with such ferocity that his face was unrecognisable and his family could not identify the body.

When a second uncle was killed at the hands of a mob of 17 Bangladeshi youths, he lost so much blood before he died that the police thought he was white and trawled the missing persons reports for an Irishman. "It took three days for his wife to find out he was dead," Enam says without a tremor in his voice.

This week Scotland Yard warned Asian gangs of a new offensive against their activities. Police will put their men undercover, start infiltrating the gangs to get intelligence on heroin dealing, prostitution rings and protection rackets. Crime among Asian communities, just like the one that Enam has grown up in, is suddenly at the top of the political agenda. And not before time.

Enam is a Bangladeshi Briton. Until a few weeks ago he stood shoulder to shoulder with the Brick Lane Massive, which controls a territory known to outsiders as the curry mile. The area has a heady aroma of simmering chillies, popping cardamon pods and roasted cumin, but this masks a meaner smell of inner city deprivation, alienation and spilt blood.

Nearby, at a tidy terraced house, he relates his story. It is owned by his father Abdul, a tailor in Brick Lane, who arrived in this country as a toddler in the Sixties, one of the first Bangladeshi settlers in London. He later returned to Bangladesh to marry Enam's mother Rubeya, bringing his pretty teenage bride back here.

The walls of their home are adorned with Muslim pictures and the quiet Rubeya, who even after 40 years in this country speaks little English, humbly serves us biscuits and apple juice as we talk. Rubeya and her husband say they know little of their son's gang activity - or turn a blind eye - yet they turn up to collect him if, as has happened on occasions, he ends up at the police station over a street skirmish. His life, their life, must be so far removed from their Bangladeshi roots, a society which while destitute is based on a rulebook and respect.

Enam's gang was formed in the Seventies when Bangladeshi youths hung around in packs to protect themselves from the vicious racist skinheads of the National Front. Other groups, such as the Cannon Street Posse, the Stepney Green Posse and the Shadwell Crew are also a hangover from those early days.

They were made up of secondgeneration immigrants, the children of parents who arrived in this country in the Fifties and Sixties. They had come in their thousands, enticed by the plethora of jobs left by an absent generation of British men who had died in the Second World War. Bangladesh - known then as East Pakistan - is one of the poorest regions of south Asia and the immigrants were prepared to take work the whites of Britain would not: in the docks of east London, the factories of the Midlands and the mills of the North. But the Bangladeshi forebears of boys such as Enam quickly found that life here was not easy.

Cultural barriers meant their access to education and healthcare was poor. In addition, Right-wing nationalism was on the rise and racist attacks frequent. Slowly the gangs were formed in self-defence. Today, the threat of the National Front has all but waned and the police - another force against whom Bangladeshi gangs once felt the need to protect themselves - have democratised and liberalised.

While this can only be a good thing, it remains a fact that Bangladeshi youths still feel poor and disenfranchised. Bolshy and proud, they refuse the humdrum jobs their newly arrived grandfathers gratefully seized. Yet there is little else to take their place for Enam, educated at an east London comprehensive with three GCSE grade Cs to his name. Like his 18-year-old sister Sima, he is currently unemployed. A job at an east London Pizza Hut lasted eight months, then a motorbike accident laid him up. His body has healed now, but his future remains unsure.

A recent GLA report found that the Bangladeshi community was bottom of the social deprivation pile. In Tower Hamlets enormous extended families are crushed into twobedroom council flats. Youngsters often take to the streets to get some space. But with the absence of skinheadsto fight, their hostility has no external outlet. Instead it has turned in on itself. They are destroying their own, one stab wound at a time.

During the summer months barely a day goes by without a gang-related street battle. Enam's fight with the Drummond Street Boys, shocking in its scale, was the result of long-term antagonism. "They had been coming down here kidnapping Brick Lane boys," Enam recalls. "They would grab them in the street, take them back to Camden and beat them up.

So Brick Lane had been going up there most nights stabbing them, hammering them, whatever they could do. It came to a point where Drummond Street were shown that we had a gun. We were going to put a full stop to it."

A "full stop" is street slang for a bullet - a chilling bastardisation of the English language by youngsters, many of whom can barely read. While the presence of a firearm might bring some groups up short, it only served to enrage the Drummond Street Boys further. So, one mild night last year shortly before 1am, 30 of them piled into a hired white van and headed south.

"We knew there was a war going on so everyone was out on the streets," he recalls. "We had hidden all our weapons in the broom cupboards on the estates." The weapons found later by the police comprised a stunning arsenal, including samurai swords, baseball bats, machetes, hammers, homemade cocktail bombs that explode on impact, spikes and knives.

When the Drummond Street Boys realised they were expected, they turned heel and fled. The chase, involving more than 50 youths, ranged up Brick Lane, along Bethnal Green Road and Shoreditch High Street and into Great Eastern Street, terrorising residents and prompting more than 20 999 calls to police. Once in Great Eastern Street, the white van was forced off the road by a car driven by members of the Brick Lane Massive and a full-scale street fight got under way.

When the police arrived there were arrests and several were taken to hospital. Those who remained, Enam among them, dumped their weapons and scattered. Miraculously the gun was never pulled.

But everyone involved, from gang members like Enam to opinion formers, youth workers and the police, warn of worse to come. Up until now, while Bangladeshi gangs have had their criminal elements - from lowlevel drug use to credit card fraud - they have never been criminal gangs per se. Youths used to hit the age of 20 and grow out of the gangs. They would get married, be forced into the low-paid jobs they hated, and settle down.

But these days, as gang members mature, many move on to more severe criminality. Increasing numbers of Bangladeshi youths are trying the balm of narcotics. "The old gangs that used to fight over territory and girls now fight over drugs," said Kumar Murshid, a GLA adviser on Asian affairs and a Tower Hamlets councillor. "Drugs, money and the violence that it spawns are what it's all about."

Frighteningly there is another new trend: big time gangsters find and groom new recruits as gobetweens. "The drug dealer hears about a 12-year-old in a gang doing things that Charles Manson would be scared of. So he keeps an eye on that boy. He gives him presents, looks out for him. Then he offers him a deal, like you take this heroin to this place for me and I'll give you money or drugs."

The extent of this was revealed in a court case last year that saw five men jailed for running a lucrative "dial-adrug" service which employed up to 20 teenage footsoldiers. The gang, all Bangladeshis, used their headquarters in Hackney Road as a base for receiving telephone orders and distributed the drugs to the delivery boys. They carried the drugs in wraps in their mouths and were told to always have a bottle of water on hand to help swallow them if they were challenged by police.

The boy runners were paid wages and even allowed to claim expenses on production of a receipt. It doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to see how seductive a lucrative drug-running lifestyle would be to a youngster who has grown up in an overcrowded home where there was never enough money or attention to go around.

But with the increase in drug dealing comes an influx of guns. Last November, while walking home from a late-night trip to the 24-hour shop, Enam was accosted by two hooded Bangladeshis toting a gun. After a short struggle the bullet grazed the back of his neck and the shadowy pair fled, leaving Enam terrified, lying on the street.

"My ears were ringing and there was buzzing in my head," he said. "I couldn't hear anything and I was confused because I was going into shock. It took a few minutes to realise I was alright." Incredibly, and in a damning indictment of Enam's past, he did not know who had made an attempt on his life. "It could have been the Drummond Street Boys but it could have been someone else," he shrugs. "I've had so many arguments and fights.

"It's different now though - everybody's got guns. All you do is get a replica and you get one of the boys who does design technology at school to put it in a vice and drill it. There you go - you've got a gun, all thanks to a government school," he grins.

Enam himself says things are getting "a bit too messed up". He has recently moved, with his parents and younger brother, away from the central hub of Brick Lane. It's a start. While he still mixes with the gang members, and they are his friends, he tries to stay away from any trouble.

He says: "I never got to stay on at school and learn because I was only interested in the gang. My little brother Imran is 14 and I don't want him turning out the way I have. I messed up and now I hope he has a better run at life than me."

 

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