Frontline London: Ricky was three when his father threw him off a third-floor balcony...

... he survived but his violent childhood changed him for ever. So he turned to another 'family' - a 100-strong gang. This is the story of his past, his life now and a glimmer of hope
Traumatic past: Ricky, a former member of the PDC gang
25 September 2013

It was 11am when I arrived as arranged at Ricky’s hostel in Camberwell only to find his door closed and no sign of life. I tried the handle and the door swung open to reveal a room shrouded in darkness. A croaky voice said: “Come in, make yourself at home.”

Ricky, 20, a former member of a notorious south London criminal gang, emerged from under his duvet, naked from the waist up, while his girlfriend Ruby, 19, decamped to the bathroom. He lifted the makeshift curtain, a black sheet nailed to the wall, to let the daylight in and began to roll a spliff. “My morning wake up,” he said. “Gets me sorted for the day.”

He took out a butcher’s knife with a six-inch blade and used it to dig out the pips from his spliff kit. “This is my babe,” he said. “It’s like the one I carried before I switched to a sawn-off shotgun.”

Minutes later, Ricky’s “little sister”, Amy, 18, breezed in and, unbidden, began to tidy his room, sweeping up the Rizla papers. Ricky munched on a dry bread roll. Apart from a carton of orange juice, two Tesco “value” bread rolls and a 99p bottle of Cherryade, there was no food in the flat. Between them, they didn’t have £5 to rub together.

Soon the three of them were chatting, bickering and joking as if I wasn’t there. Ricky and Ruby had met when he came out of prison a few months ago and he was “mad about her”, he said, but he had “anger issues” and “jealousy problems” that got him “into bothers” in the past. “When I was 15,” he said, “I beat some Peckham boy almost to death because he moved on my girl. I was done for GBH [grievous bodily harm] and carrying an offensive weapon and sent to an under-16 secure unit, so I got to be careful.”

“What are you guys doing today?” I asked. “Nothing,” said Ricky, pacing the room like a caged lion. “Same like yesterday. Nobody here got nothing to do. I’ll meet mum later to get a little change off her, but I try to sleep late to get rid of the morning so that I don’t get into bothers with the law. That way the day don’t seem so long and I’ve only got half the day to deal with.”

“This [knife] is my babe. It’s like the one I carried before I switched to a sawn-off shotgun”

Usually Ricky wore a cap that concealed a shaved patch on the top of his head, but in his bedroom it was exposed and it looked raw. “Stress,” he explained. “It makes me pull out my hair. I shaved it so it’s too short for me to grab and pull out.”

It was one of several clues to Ricky’s traumatic past and a life that exemplifies the “normalisation of violence” depicted in the alarming University College London study reported in today’s paper. Ricky has spent almost a quarter of his young life behind bars, mostly for burglary and armed robbery, and several of his friends have been murdered.

To the public, he is a feral criminal. Yet in person, he is charming, chaotic, impulsive, and (mostly) easy-going. The deal we had struck was that he would invite us into his life and in return I would try to get him an apprenticeship. Was there a time when he had normal hopes and dreams? What went wrong?

“I have been on my own from age 10 but my problems started before then,” Ricky said matter-of-factly. He pointed to a photo stuck to his wall. “That’s mum and dad with me as a baby.” His mother lived nearby, he added, but he hadn’t seen his father for 15 years. “My father was very violent and tried to kill me when I was three. He threw me off the balcony of our third-floor flat. I survived because I landed in a bush. Apparently they had an argument and he said I wasn’t his child.”

Later in the day, I would meet Ricky’s mother, Irene, 48, who added that Ricky had witnessed his father trying to kill her several times as well. “His father knifed and punched me. Ricky saw everything. Once he dragged me down the road with Ricky holding on to my legs and crying and trying to stop him. Ricky ran to call the fire brigade to save me. He was five years old. Next day, his teacher called to say Ricky had smashed up the classroom. He was never the same after that.”

Ricky was exposed to the kind of sustained violence that the UCL study talks about as having catastrophic consequences for the child. Ricky was no exception.

“The violence in my home caused a kind of pressure in my head and I found it hard to focus at school,” he said. “At six they diagnosed me with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and said I was dyslexic. It helped them to put labels on me but it didn’t help me.”

Ricky’s mother remarried, but her new husband did not take kindly to Ricky’s rages and they fell out. At 10, he ran away and had to scavenge for food. He referred himself to social services, but care was a disaster. “They put me up in a home with two nutters — a girl who was bipolar and a guy who had blackouts.” By 18, because of his ADHD, Ricky had moved home, he said, an estimated 34 times.

But one “family” welcomed him in. They were known as the PDC — the Poverty Driven Children, Pussy Drugs Cash or the Peel Dem Crew — and from age 13 they became his substitute family. “It was a big gang, over 100 people, and I was just a younger. But I became a core member and that got me protection from other gangs on my back and I made easy money, several grand a week. We sold crack, heroin, weed, cocaine. I ain’t gonna lie, it was fun at the time. I felt untouchable and did my first armed robbery at 13.”

Around that time, Ricky was expelled from his high school in Kennington. “It was for smashing the headteacher’s head against the window because he grabbed and twisted my arm because I was being bad in class.”

Ricky never returned to mainstream school, never took his GCSEs, and never learned to read or write properly. By 15, he was in a secure unit, serving the first of five sentences.

At 1pm, it was time to brave the day and head out into Camberwell. First stop was to meet Ricky’s mother, but even that was complicated. It turned out that Ricky had an exclusion order preventing him from visiting his stepfather’s house. “I broke into his house last year because I needed money for drugs, but he came home at the wrong moment and called the police and I did five months inside.”

As we walked, people greeted Ricky on the street. He seemed well liked. Did he feel safe? “I ain’t gonna lie, if I go 10 minutes down the road to Peckham, I fear for my life. I started carrying a knife at 14 after my friend got stabbed up and died in 2006. I was stabbed up twice and I’ve been to four funerals, including my boys Baggy and Jobs. Back then it was about which estate you’re from, what postcode. It’s still like that for youngers, but I left PDC two years ago. I can still call on my boys if I need them.”

I watched as Ricky met his mother on a street corner and she gave him a hug and a tuna sandwich. “I’ve got someone I want you to meet,” she said, walking him to a nearby construction site. Dan, a former PDC gang leader, stood there in a luminous jacket. “Look at me, bruv!” he beamed. “I’ve given up being a bank robber. I’m doing my NVQ in construction and I got a job on this building site.”

His message to Ricky was clear: “Don’t wait as long as I did to sort yourself out. Leave your boys behind, get a job, you can do anything you want.” His mother smiled. “I want Ricky to get a job fast because otherwise he will do crime again. Whoever has a job has hope. I cry every day when he is in jail.”

RICKY kissed his mum and told her he loved her. “Me and my mum get along at certain times and certain times we don’t,” he said. He headed for the charity Kids Company where they serve a hot lunch, but it was already mid-afternoon and lunch was over. He asked to see his Kids Company key worker, but she was with another client. Then he remembered that he was supposed to have visited his probation officer that day, but it was too late to get there.

Nevertheless, despite his disorganisation, things were looking up. He had a mother who cared for him, a new girlfriend, and the support of Kids Company, a charity with a track record of transforming the lives of vulnerable young people like himself. If he could keep his volatility in check, a promising new start beckoned.

The next time I saw Ricky was to keep my end of the bargain three days later and he was upbeat. He had rearranged the meagre possessions of his room, putting the bed against a different wall, and was dressed in a cardigan from Peacocks. “I might be from the hood, but I don’t dress all hooded up,” he said. “I used to go round in a tracksuit, bandana, scarf to cover my face and gloves to leave no prints, and I always had a knife on me. But I’ve changed my attitude. I’ve figured out that if I play my cards right, I got 40 good working years ahead of me.”

We set out for the appointment I had arranged with Mace, builders of The Shard, who hire young apprentices as part of our Ladder for London campaign to tackle youth unemployment. Ricky was hugely excited. “This is my big chance,” he said.

On the walk to the train station, he had a wobble when he spotted Ruby talking to some of her old male friends. “See those boys checking me out. In ‘the days’, I would batter them, but now I say, ‘let it pass’.” He became visibly agitated and lit a cigarette to calm his nerves. “The one thing I never done is be violent to a girl. I am not my dad. I am better than that. If we argue, I walk away.”

Ricky had no money, so he rode the train without buying a ticket and got off at Elephant and Castle because “coppers wait to catch fare dodgers at London Bridge”. What if he got caught? “It’s a £50 fine, but I would do two days’ jail instead. What’s a couple of days of my life?”

Again, I was struck by his rationale and how going to prison was less offensive to him than paying a fine. As we headed for our rendezvous at The Place, sister building of The Shard, he said: “Back in the days I sold drugs, I used to have ten grand stashed in my bedroom. I invested in jewellery. I bought a Cartier watch for £24,000 and gold chains, but they were stolen a few years ago.”

Ricky had another cigarette to calm his nerves. Then we took the lift up The Place to meet the suited Mace directors, Simon Underwood and David Rowbotham, who, truth be told, had no idea what to expect. Ricky was about to make the most important pitch of his life. “I am a 20-year-old ex-offender and it’s time to get my life together, step up my game,” he began. “I like to be active, I’ve worked as a brickie, I can work all day with my hands.” He was open, lucid, animated.

Simon took a shine to him, impressed by his candour and resilience. Moments later, after conferring, he told Ricky: “We are delighted to offer you an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. Come in to register, we’ll get it fast-tracked, you can start next week.”

Ricky was ecstatic. He called his mum, then Ruby. “I’ve got fantastic news! I am at the top of this tall building next to The Shard. The view! It’s beautiful! I got a job! I got a job! I love you!”

But the following week, Mace called: “Ricky never came in,” they said. “We’ve been trying to get hold of him but he appears to have switched off his phone.” I eventually got hold of Ricky via his sister. “Me and Ruby broke up,” he said. He sounded tearful, downhearted, but insisted he was still eager to start at Mace. “I will see them tomorrow,” he said. “Definitely!”

But again he failed to show. The following week, he got into a fist fight with friends of a former girlfriend, missed his appointment with his key worker, and checked out of the hostel. Mace said their offer to Ricky remained open and that they wanted to help.

Over the following month, I tried to reach Ricky: I called his sister, his mum, visited the hostel, met his key worker. But he had disappeared.

Just at the moment Ricky was about to turn the corner, his life was unravelling again. His Kids Company keyworker was not surprised: “The support that complex young people like Ricky need to break the cycle and become independent is massive.

“Often it is one step forward, two back, because although he is highly personable, he has a self-destructive side and sometimes the biggest menace to Ricky is Ricky.

“We have turned around worse cases. We will continue to support him and hope that we win out in the end.”

Most names have been changed.

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