How 'Yardie' Williams set out to be the Gooch gang's 'next boss' - but dramatically grassed himself up

'Do you know who this is?' So began the phone call that would seal the fate of Narada 'Yardie' Williams.

Behind bars facing murder charges, Williams, a leading player in Manchester's notorious Gooch gang, was getting desperate. "Help me," he said over a contraband mobile phone he'd smuggled into his cell at HMP Altcourse. "I can't take prison... say you never see me with drugs, say you never see me with guns, please, I'm begging you."

Somehow Williams had gotten hold of the supposedly secret phone number of a protected witness in the biggest gang trial Manchester had even seen. But the problem, for Williams at least, was that every word he said was being recorded - he'd grassed himself up.

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Williams got his nickname because he had moved from 'Yard' - Clarendon, Jamaica - to Manchester when he was a small boy. "Narada still retained a whisper of the accent behind heavy Mancunian tones," writes Ben Black in Shooters, a history of Manchester's gangs in the 21st Century

"Solidly built, with a goatee beard and the bearing of jocular pugnacity he bore a passing resemblance to legendary boxer Roberto 'Hands of Stone' Duran."

As a teenager he had, alongside his younger brother Ricardo, been part of a small, Gooch-affiliated crew called the Longsight Street Soldiers, who had been involved in shootings and drug dealing. But when Narada was 22 and Ricardo was 20, they were jailed for conspiracy to supply class A drugs.

On their release from prison the brothers met up with Gooch head honchos Colin 'Piggy' Joyce and Lee 'Cabbo' Amos. It proved to be their entry into the big leagues of gangland Manchester.

The brothers became the Gooch's