A Hackney Story [View all]

[Celerity]

https://www.the-fence.com/a-hackney-story/

Ten days before he was gunned down after leaving a pool party in Essex in the summer of 2020, Robert Powell posted a photo, most likely from the early 1990s, on his Instagram account, subtitled ‘Once upon a time’. It shows him with another young man, side-by-side, leaning against a convertible car. Under the photo, seemingly ripped down the middle between them and stuck back together, Powell had typed: ‘Once apon a time we where good friends then the snakes got in the way of our friendship and we turned into the worst enemy’s. This is a pic to show you how things where. So if you didn’t know you know now.’

How things were, in reality, was a pivotal time in London’s street gang world, an era in which these two men would rise to become feared underworld figures, looming large over the city during the 1990s and 2000s. It was a time of crack-spliff raves and gun executions; when high-profile gangs vied for cash, dominance and respect; and when a road in the now-gentrified Clapton neighbourhood of Hackney, a borough in north London, was so rife with gunfire it became known as ‘Murder Mile’.

In the photo, with one arm resting on Powell’s shoulder, is Mark Lambie, who was head of the Tottenham Mandem (TMD), a powerful gang from the Broadwater Farm estate just north of Hackney. Aged 14, Lambie was acquitted of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. He was subsequently linked to a string of shootings, drug deals, robberies, torture and kidnappings. He was known on the streets as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ due to his ruthlessness, and was rumoured to possess ‘juju powers’ which rendered him immortal. Lambie’s underworld rise saw his influence reach across north and west London. To the dozens of detectives working on Operation Trident – a police strategy set up at the time to tackle the rise in ‘black-on-black’ gun crime – Lambie was known as ‘Prominent Nominal One’, their top target.

And next to Lambie, bottle of champagne in hand, is Powell. Powell’s reputation, too, was so potent he’d become a near-mythical figure in London’s street crime world. Nicknamed ‘Fox’ due to his elusiveness and cunning, he led Love of Money (LOM), a gang from Hackney which specialised in robbing other dealers for their drugs and cash. They were notorious for kidnapping, torturing and shooting their victims. Because these victims were drug dealers, most of these brutal crimes went unreported.



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