It was a botched gangland shooting that shocked the nation - an innocent boy of seven gunned down on the doorstep of his Salford home.
Now a gang of men have been convicted of involvement in it in a Manchester Crown Court trial.
Carne Thomasson, 28, Aldaire Warmington, 32, and Christopher Hall, 49, all of no fixed address, have all been found guilty of conspiracy to cause GBH and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in their attempts to dump the getaway car. All three were cleared of conspiracy to commit murder.
Lincoln Warmington, 32, of Summerville Road, Salford; Dominic Walton, 26, of no fixed address; and James Coward, 26, of no fixed address, have all been found guilty of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in their attempts to dump the getaway car.
John Thomasson, 50, of Wakefield Crescent, Stockport, was cleared of conspiracy to murder; conspiracy to cause GBH with intent; and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
An eighth man, John Kent, 54, of Culverwell Drive, Salford has been found guilty of conspiracy to cause GBH with intent in connection with an earlier shooting, targeting a man called Jamie Rothwell, and of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.
A ninth man, Jacob Harrison, 26, of Sumberland House, Salford, admitted conspiracy to cause GBH with intent to Jamie Rothwell.
Here, M.E.N. crime reporter John Scheerhout shines a light on the gang blamed for both shootings - Salford's A Team...
The gang's reputation was fearsome - and they saw themselves as underworld Salford's glamour boys.
Members of the 'A Team' were a familiar sight in Manchester’s most trendy bars and restaurants - like San Carlo and Neighbourhood - as well as Puerto Banus on Spain’s Costa Del Sol, where they spent their ill-gotten gains on clubbing and cocktails.
They were bonded by violence. Members were made to stab one another to prove their loyalty in an initiation ritual.
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But they ended up humiliated and all-but defeated by the 'Anti-A Team' - a smaller, smarter group of rivals who had once been friends, before ending up in the dock charged with a string of offences.
Their undoing came after a terrible act of violence - the shooting of little Christian Hickey, an innocent boy of seven, and his mother Jayne.
It was the nadir of a tit-for-tat conflict that revealed just how out of control Salford's gangland had become.
By the time police had disrupted both gangs with a string of arrests, the feud had not only changed Christian and Jayne's lives forever, but it had left two men - Paul Massey and his pal John Kinsella - dead. Others were lucky to escape with their lives.
Formed by at least 2012, the 'A Team' is believed to have controlled much of the cocaine and cannabis coming into Manchester.
With Paul Massey, the man known as Salford's 'Mr Big', as their godfather, they were made up of some of the most infamous young villains in Greater Manchester's underworld.
They were said to be led by Stephen Britton, who emerged from a jail sentence for a hit and run killing to form the gang, and looked to Massey as a mentor in life - and in crime.
The Warmington twins were said to be high-ranking members of the gang, charming and charismatic playboys who partied with celebrities and were suspected, but never convicted, of being professional gem thieves.
Handy with their fists, the pair made a fortune selling cocaine and cannabis - and posed as one another to give police the runaround.
Another alleged gang member, the Hickey trial heard, was Aaron Williams, who staged his own kidnap to escape from a prison van back in March 2009 before committing an armed robbery, 85 miles from Salford, while on the run.
Now, the A Team's reputation is in tatters.
First, a petty respect row dragged them into a tit-for-tat conflict in which their rivals had the upper hand, and then the investigation triggered by that conflict led to a trial which made them look like a bunch of bungling amateurs.
Worst of all, they found themselves accused of involvement in a crime - the shooting of a mother and child - which all but the lowest of the criminal fraternity would baulk at.
'Dad, I've been shot': How a boy of seven fell victim to Salford's gang war
Just how was it that that gang war came to the doorstep of a suburban home?
When little Christian Hickey heard a knock at the door of his home in Winton, Eccles, he left the literacy and maths homework he had been doing and ran into the hall.
This was what the seven-year-old always did whenever he thought his big sister was coming home.
She would press her face against the glass of the front door and Christian would excitedly shout to his mum and dad that she was back.
It was a ritual families up and down the land will recognise.
But on the evening of October 12, 2015, the knock at the door hadn’t come from his sister, who had yet to return from swimming lessons with her grandfather.
The boy peered through the glass into the darkness outside and shouted to his mother: "Mum, mum, there's a postman stood at the end of the drive."
It wasn’t a postman little Christian could see at the end of the drive. It was 9.25pm - far too late for a delivery.
Christian’s mother Jayne, a 31-year-old bank worker, opened the door to see a man wearing a cap, leaning casually against her VW Golf which was parked in the street. He asked if her husband was in.
‘One sec’, Jayne said, turning to call her partner. In that instant, a second man emerged, with a Heckler and Koch P7 semi-automatic pistol, and fired at least three shots, blasting the mother-of-two in the legs.
One bullet passed through both her legs before hitting Christian, smashing the thigh bone in his left leg.
“Dad, I’ve been shot,” Christian said as blood drenched the hallway.
The 'shady' friendship that brought gunmen to the suburbs
Neither mother or son were the intended target, it's believed - the gunmen had been sent there to get little Christian’s father, Christian senior.
At the time his wife and son went to the door, Hickey Snr was enjoying a beer in the living room while watching England beating Lithuania on the TV in qualifier for the European Championships.
It was Christian Jnr's misfortune that his dad had what prosecutors described as a ‘shady’ relationship with Michael 'Cazza' Carroll, who was the leader of the 'Anti-A Team'.
Three months before the shooting at the Hickey home, an Anti-A Team gunman had murdered Paul Massey. This meant Massey's friends in the A Team were out for revenge.
Carroll has spent the last few years avoiding police - and gangland rivals - on the Costa del Sol and Thailand.
He had been an A Team member, before leaving to form the Anti-A Team.
By the petty standards of gangland feuding, that split came after a 'respect' row, which began when a girl threw a drink over an A Team member in a nightclub.
By late 2014, there were two clearly-defined factions - the A Team, lined up behind Stephen Britton, and the breakaway faction, lined up behind Michael Carroll.
When one of the A Team used a chainsaw to cut the roof of a VW which belonged to Cazza’s ex, the mother of his daughter, threatening to cut her head off as she watched terrified from an upstairs window with her child, the conflict escalated into lethal violence.
When this violence claimed the life of Paul Massey in July 2015, the A Team couldn't lay a glove on the absent 'Cazza' so instead they went for another target - someone as close to Carroll as Paul Massey had been to members of the A Team.
And Christian Hickey Snr was that man. Carroll was his old school friend, had been his best man, and was godfather to his son, Christian Jnr.
Hickey Snr had a past. He was jailed for manslaughter in 2005 for involvement in the killing of Philip Marsh, 22. His cousin, Philip Hickey-Jones, was jailed for murder.
On his release, Hickey Snr worked in the building trade with interests in property, but he also drove around in expensive Mercs and Audis he had borrowed from his mate and sometime business associate, Michael Carroll, the trial heard.
Even after his family had been moved out of Salford in the wake of the shooting, Hickey Snr jetted out to Dubai on his own to celebrate Carroll’s birthday, and partied with him in Thailand.
Carroll would have been devastated if anything had happened to him. But, like a lot of missions launched by the A Team, it failed.
Instead of shooting Carroll’s old school mate, the gunmen had shot a boy of seven and his mother on the doorstep of their own home.
Just before his accomplice appeared and opened fire, Mrs Hickey heard the man standing beside her car say ‘nah, nah’.
Was he trying to call off the shooting?
Mother and son underwent surgery and spent weeks in hospital. When they came out, they were moved out of Salford and were given new lives and identities because of the continuing threat to their lives.
Instead of avenging Massey's murder, the 50-strong A-Team had made themselves look weak. An unkind interpretation was that they had stooped to shooting a mother and child.
A generous one was that they were so inept they had done so by mistake.
How the A-Team appeared to lose Salford's gang war
Carroll's faction - the Anti-A Team - were one step ahead from the beginning.
They frequently placed tracking devices on their targets’ cars, employing blocking devices to make sure the same wasn’t being done to them, while using encrypted phones to keep one step ahead of the police.
Their first major strike on the A Team came in February 2015, when Abdul Rahman Khan, who court heard was a senior member of the bigger, older gang, was shot as he sat in his Mercedes in Irlams O’ Th’ Height in February 2015. In hospital he dismissed it as a DIY drilling accident. A tracker was found under his car.
Then, another A Teamer, Aaron Williams, was lucky to escape with his life when he was attacked with a machete on Agecroft Road in Swinton. His head was almost severed but he miraculously survived. A tracker was found on his VW Scirocco.
The next incident saw a grenade thrown at the home of brothers Ryan and James Coward, both said in the trial to be A Team members. Ryan wasn’t home - he was serving a jail sentence - but his brother James and their parents were. No-one was hurt - but as a show of what the Anti-A Team were capable of, it was significant.
Whenever the A Team tried to strike back they appeared to be more reckless and less effective.
Within hours of the grenade attack, the A Team sought revenge.
Michael Carroll’s right-hand man Jamie Rothwell was shot at Express car wash in Ashton-in-Makerfield after getting out of a Landrover Discovery. He was peppered with bullets from a gunman who stepped out of a Seat Ibiza on false plates.
Rothwell, who refused to co-operate with police, survived and was well enough to pose, grinning broadly, for a picture in his hospital bed the following day.
Now it was the turn of Carroll's mob - the Anti-A Team - to seek revenge, and a plan was hatched to strike at the heart of the A Team by taking out their mentor and the most totemic figure in Salford's underworld - Paul Massey.
Soon, one of Carroll’s associates, Mark Fellows, was carrying out reconnaissance on his push-bike for what would the hit on Massey - by the summer he had murdered him with an Uzi sub-machine gun.
Fellows, known as The Iceman, followed this up by murdering one of Massey’s best friends, gangland fixer ‘Scouse’ John Kinsella, another serious criminal and long-time friend of the A Team, as he walked his dogs near the village of Rainhill, Merseyside, in May 2018.
Now, two major A Team figures were dead and Michael Carroll, who had fled the country, appeared to be giving the A Team the runaround from afar.
In the sick arithmetic of Salford's gangland, it was Anti-Team two, A Team nil.
Exposed: The life and crimes of Salford's most wanted
During the trial of the men convicted of the shootings of the Hickeys and Jamie Rothwell, the jurors heard a list of names of people ‘perceived to be’ associated with the A Team, a purported who’s who of Salford gangland.
The names jurors heard were: Stephen Britton, Christopher Zammitt, Paul Massey, Aldaire Warmington, Lincoln Warmington, Carne Thomasson, Ryan Coward, James Coward, Jacob Harrison, Abdul Rahman Khan, Aaron Williams, Christopher Hall, Dylan Whitehead, Declan Gorman, Gareth Edwards and Marc Murray.
None of them has, publicly at least, declared they are fully paid-up members. In fact, some of them denied they were part of the gang or sought to distance themselves from it.
Their leader, who wasn't in the dock, was said to be Stephen Britton, a diminutive but fearsome man just like his mentor Paul Massey. He was reputedly nicknamed 'Dad' by other gang members.
Pictures from his youth show him dripping in gold. He liked to do things on his own terms, even serving jail time. He was jailed for five years for killing 18-year-old Adam Jama in a hit-and-run in 2009.
He handed himself in to police and said: “I did it… I am sorry to him and all his family. I'll go to jail for what I've done."
Britton appeared to be revered by his peers. Police have an audio recording in which they can be heard singing that he was ‘our leader’.
Pictures seized from his phone showed knives arranged to form the letter A. He was with his mentor Paul Massey on the day he was murdered.
But he wasn’t amongst the most recognisable faces in the gang, even though he is believed to to be its leader.
While Paul Massey was its figure-head, Aldaire Warmington and his twin brother Lincoln were the gang’s poster boys.
Good-looking, well-dressed and regarded as tough but respectful, the brothers were a regular feature in Manchester’s clubland.
Aldaire Warmington portrayed himself as a gentleman drug dealer during his remarkable evidence, admitting he earned hundreds of thousands of pounds dealing cannabis and cocaine, but flatly denying he was a member of the A Team.
He was polite, respectful and stayed out of Salford’s gangland troubles, he told the jurors, not entirely convincingly.
Aldaire was already serving a six-year jail term for possessing the gun used to shoot the Hickeys when he stood trial.
Two months after the shooting, he was involved in transporting the Heckler and Koch P7 pistol from Little Hulton to Mobberley in Cheshire, where it was destined for another gang.
While one of his lackeys was in a taxi with the pistol, and a Baikal handgun, Aldaire was careful to distance himself, travelling in a separate taxi. But mobile phone evidence nailed him.
He has always insisted he wasn't in the taxi, had given his phone to someone else, and thought he was involved in a drugs delivery.
Aldaire Warmington has history with the police and convictions for violence. He and his twin were jailed after a mass brawl in Lush nightclub, in 2009, when bricks and bottles were thrown and a man was stabbed.
In his most recent trial, Aldaire casually admitted he earned a fortune as a big-time drug dealer.
“I’m a nice guy,” he said, claiming he treated people the same - 'whether I've got five pence or five million'.
Although he would reluctantly get involved in moving ‘tings’, gang code for guns, Aldaire insisted he was ‘not the person who shoots someone and pulls the trigger’.
He denied organising the Hickey shooting from Boothstown and insisted he was with his poorly aunt at the time the Hickeys were gunned down.
But police believed he was a key gang member, and instrumental in a lot of crime.
His brother Lincoln rubbed shoulders with celebs in Marbella and clubs in Manchester, Liverpool and London, and has featured as a 'bad boy' heart-throb in tabloid gossip columns.
Alongside his twin Aldaire, he was suspected of involvement in a £1m gem raid at an Edinburgh jewellers, but charges were dropped against both.
He was involved in the disposal of the Audi S3 getaway car used in the shooting of the Hickeys.
Another gang member, Carne Thomasson, admits he made a fortune supplying drugs. Nicknamed Tuna, the drug dealer from the film Blow, the jury heard he earned up to £1m-a-year.
His mother owned Round The Corner cafe in Irlams o’ th’ Height - the scene of a violent gang bust-up in 2014 at the beginning of the feud.
He was one of the first gang members in Greater Manchester to be handed a so-called gangbo injunction - although it had virtually no effect on him.
A regular on A Team nights out, he claimed he was watching football at his mother’s house at the time of the shooting of the Hickeys.
He went to Spain the following year, he said, to start a new life with his partner and daughter, claiming to be working as a handyman.
But when Spanish police arrested him, on February 4, 2016, he gave them a false identity - as did the two other A Teamers he was with, Declan Gorman and Jacob Harrison.
Thomasson and Gorman were armed with knives. Harrison was returned to the UK but the others were allowed to remain.
Harrison admitted he played a role in the shooting of Jamie Rothwell, driving the gunman to the car wash where he was gunned down.
Ten days later, Policia Nacional officers, in company with colleagues from GMP, carried out a dramatic raid at an apartment at Cala Califa in Marbella.
There, they arrested Thomasson and Gorman a second time - as well as the A Team’s alleged leader Stephen Britton.
They found a loaded Browning self-loading pistol, ammunition, a baseball bat and a weighted vest. Police suspected they had foiled a plot to capture, torture and shoot Michael Carroll, before dumping his body at the bottom of the Med.
“He owes us his life,” said one detective.
‘A load of s**t’, Thomasson told his trial when asked about the alleged plot to kill Cazza in Spain.
Quite why the prosecution mounted in Spain against those arrested was discontinued has never been explained. But jurors in the trial that followed the Hickey and Rothwell shootings were told the details.
Convicted cannabis dealer, Ryan Coward, and his brother James, are also said to be A Team members.
While James Coward was standing trial over the shooting of the Hickeys, his brother Ryan, 27, was blasted three times in the legs while he was sitting in front of the TV at a house on Duchy Road in Salford.
The gunman walked into the house and opened fire. He has been shot before: he was blasted in the chest during the same incident when Abdul Rahman Khan was shot.
Later that year Ryan Coward was jailed after being found with £20,000 of cannabis in Edinburgh.
Leevon Birchall, with his white veneers and tinted eye-brows, was another name that cropped up in the trial, someone who it was said was ‘perceived to be involved in the activities of the A Team', although he wasn't charged with any offences.
Birchall was among the first in Greater Manchester to be handed a ‘gangbo’ civil injunction and he survived an horrific attack when he was stabbed 24 times in 2016.
He has been jailed for drug dealing and violence in the past. A phone attributed to Birchall was plotted moving to Scotland on the same day the car used in the Hickey shooting was being moved to Edinburgh to be disposed of.
Birchall and his friends thought they were untouchable.
But now - exposed, humiliated and seemingly beaten - Salford's notorious A Team now looks like underworld history.
