His name has loomed large across three major gangland trials - Michael 'Cazza' Carroll.
Said to be the leader of a sophisticated crime gang that waged war with and then defeated Salford's notorious 'A Team' outfit, it is believed he has watched on from his bolt-hole in Dubai while friends and foes alike have been tried, convicted and jailed in his absence.
He may be out of the country, but now the net appears to be closing on him.
Although police at the time played it down, 2015 saw an uber-violent conflict spiral out of control and Cazza was said to be at the centre of the trouble.
There were dozens of incidents, culminating in the murder of A Team figurehead Paul Massey, the diminutive but fearsome crime boss dubbed Salford’s ‘Mr Big’.
Massey was gunned down by a masked assassin wearing army fatigues dubbed The Iceman, Mark Fellows, outside his suburban home in Clifton, Salford, in July 2015.
Following Massey’s murder, Michael Carroll fled to Spain and graffiti appeared all over Salford calling ‘Cazza’ a ‘grass rat snitch police informer’ and urging him to ‘come fight your war’.
A hit-squad was dispatched to Spain.
But any assassination attempt was thwarted following a raid on an apartment in Marbella on February 16, 2016, when Policia Nacional officers, alongside detectives from GMP, found an astonishing haul of weapons including knives and a loaded pistol.
Detectives believed the hit squad intended to capture, torture and murder Carroll before dumping his body in the Mediterranean. A weighted body vest was among the items seized.
The man said to be the leader of the A Team, Stephen Britton, who regarded Paul Massey as his mentor and with whom he had spent the afternoon before his assassination, was arrested alongside others but released.
It is believed Carroll then fled to Thailand.
Carroll, the M.E.N. has learned, was also an associate of Peter Andrew Williamson, 39, aka Snaggle, who died when he was shot five times as he parked his Audi outside his villa in Fuengirola on Spain's Costa Del Sol on November 21 last year.
Pictures have emerged of Carroll together with Snaggle and former bouncer Christopher Zammit, who was jailed for five years for the 2004 manslaughter of innocent businessman Frank Buckley, 47, who was kicked and stamped on outside a Swinton bar during a family night out. In 2014, Zammit was given a nine year and four month sentence after his drugs gang was busted by a covert GMP operation.
Carroll, 38, is known to have worked as a scaffolder, and grew up in Salford. He moved to the Wigan area following the alleged fall-out with members of the A Team, before fleeing abroad.
He wasn’t in the dock for any of the three trials connected to the gang warfare of 2015 - but his name was mentioned so frequently he may as well have been.
All three juries were told that he was the leader of a rival gang called the Anti A Team.
The Iceman, Mark Fellows, was said to be one of Cazza’s trusted foot-soldiers.
The tit-for-tat feud between the rival gangs appeared to escalate to extreme violence following one particularly upsetting incident for Carroll, when his ex-girlfriend (and the mother of his child) watched in horror as masked men removed the roof of her VW Golf with a Stihl saw outside their home in January 2015.
The bloodshed that followed formed the basis of a succession of gangland trials, the first concluding in January last year when Fellows was handed a whole life term for the murder of Massey and the assassination of Massey’s friend, Merseyside gang enforcer John Kinsella, three years later.
A second trial followed and concluded with the jailing of eight members of the A Team in April last year for offences in connection with the shooting of Jamie Rothwell at a car wash in Ashton-in-Makerfield in March 2015, and then the shooting of a seven-year-old boy, Christian Hickey, and his mother Jayne, 30, on the doorstep of their home in Eccles in October of that year. Mother and son survived although they were seriously injured.
That trial heard that Cazza was a close friend of little Christian’s dad and an associate of Rothwell.
The battle lines, and the combatants, were clear.
Rothwell somehow survived the car-wash shooting but he was in the dock, alongside convicted double-murder Fellows and three others during the latest trial, which concluded today (Thursday) and shed more light on the feud and the relationship between Cazza and Fellows.
The jurors were told Fellows was a convicted double murderer but not that he was already serving a whole life term and so his sentence could not be increased.
Fellows denied any involvement in two shocking incidents early in the 2015 war, claiming if he had been involved in those, the A Team targets would be dead. It was an interesting defence.
In the first of those two incidents Abdul Rahman Khan, an A Team member known as ‘Ray’, was blasted at close range as he was sitting in his Mercedes C class in Irlams O’ Th’ Heights around midnight on February 18, 2015. He managed to get himself to hospital where he claimed he had merely been the victim of a DIY drilling accident. In fact, he was lucky he was still alive as were two other A Teamers in the car who managed to run away, Declan Gorman and Ryan Coward.
Detectives would later uncover CCTV footage from the home of Aaron Parkin, one of the defendants in the latest trial, which showed Cazza, Fellows (carrying a baseball bat) and Rothwell together. The prosecution described this as a ‘council of war’ ahead of the shooting of Khan.
The second attack was a brutal almost fatal machete attack on another A Team associate, Aaron Williams, on Brattice Drive in Salford on March 21, 2015. His jugular was almost severed but his life was saved by a passing nurse.
Witnesses spotted a Vauxhall Zafira at the scene and police established it was very similar to a Zafira being used by Fellows.
Detectives discovered that Carroll had been caught speeding on Broad Street in Salford in Fellows’ Zafira. But when the fixed penalty notice landed, it wasn’t Carroll who did the speed awareness course.
The jury was told that Fellows was dispatched to complete the speed awareness course instead.
The hierarchy was obvious.
The prosecution’s case was that Carroll was ‘giving the orders’ for the attack on Williams.
Michael Carroll was named on the indictment along with those in the dock for both attacks.
This legal jargon means, although he wasn’t in the dock, prosecutors believe he was a part of both plots to maim two A Team rivals. On Thursday a jury convicted Fellows of conspiracy to cause GBH to Williams but cleared him and others in connection with the attack on Khan. Jamie Rothwell was also cleared in connection with both attacks.
Fellows and Parkin, the latter having admitted GBH with intent in connection with both attacks before the trial began, will be sentenced on tomorrow (Friday).
If Manchester detectives ever lay their hands on him, Michael Carroll will find himself in the dock.
Stephen Britton was arrested in Spain after the alleged foiled plot to murder Carroll and released.
Unlike Cazza, he is not thought to be abroad. In fact, the M.E.N. understands he was arrested at Manchester Airport when he arrived back in the UK and interviewed in July 2017.
Although he has been named as the leader of the A Team gang in three trials, he has not been charged with any of the offences considered by any of the juries.
