A Christmas morning road trip turns awry after Justice Moloko and some members of his family rescue a strange looking farm labourer on a quiet stretch of road in the Free State. Shortly thereafter, they come under attack from mysterious gunmen. Months later, Justice and his uncle are coerced to come back to that lonely stretch of road to help in an unsolved murder. An ageing Zimbabwean businessman overhears two prostitutes talking about selling sperm to South African buyers. The conversati...

What does a football hooligan firm do outside football? In the case of Mark Chester and the infamous Stoke City Naughty Forty, the answer was: live off their wits and burn the candle at both ends. Chester left Stoke in the mid-Eighties in search of something more than the buzz of terrace violence. He lived in North Africa with a pickpocket gang called The Hawks and dealt hash and coke in the Spanish coastal resorts, fighting off rival Moroccan dealers. After returning to London as a down-a...

What sort of man spends his Saturday afternoons with people named Bonehead, Paraffin Pete and Steamin' Sammy? Bill Buford's acclaimed Among the Thugs is a book about the experience, and the attractions, of crowd violence.

In 1985 forty hooligan followers of Stoke City FC experienced a riotous trip to Portsmouth - and the Naughty Forty was born. It became one of the most notorious soccer gangs in Britain.Mark Chester was a founder member of the N40. Already a hardened fighter he had been expelled from school after an unsettled childhood and joined the Staffordshire Regiment only to be discharged for misconduct. Stoke City's emerging 'casual' mob became his family. 'Right or wrong I was ready to be a committe...

Andy Nicholls is known to every football intelligence officer in Britain. For twenty-five years, he was one of the most active hooligans in the country, a leading figure among the violent followers of Everton FCClassified as a Category C thug, the worst kind, he amassed more than twenty arrests and has been deported from Belgium, Iceland and Sweden. His terrace fanzine was closed down by the authorities and he was banned from every ground in the UK.Revealing the truth behin...

From the author of Harry's Game - A Sunday Times '100 best crime novels and thrillers since 1945' pickJeez Curwen, a British undercover agent in South Africa reporting on the African National Congress, has received the death penalty for his part in a job in which he should never have been involved. He is incarcerated in the maximum security jail outside Pretoria, awaiting execution.By the time his son Jack, abandoned by Je...

Faultless - Football365As EURO 2000 approached, attention once again focused on the potential threat posed by the activities of football hooligans. Not just those from England, but also from Holland, Belgium, Germany,Italy, France and even Turkey.Yet as this last year has proven, whilst the hooligans in other nations cause as much, if not more, trouble than their English counterparts, it is the activities of the fans from this country which always seems to attract the great...

Growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s, Peter Godwin inhabited a magical and frightening world of leopard-hunting, lepers, witch doctors, snakes and forest fires. As an adolescent, a conscript caught in the middle of a vicious civil war, and then as an adult who returned to Zimbabwe as a journalist to cover the bloody transition to majority rule, he discovered a land stalked by death and danger.

John Massey's story is unique. Part of a notorious duo that the Flying Squad dubbed 'Laurel and Hardy', his criminal activities included hijacking a police car after robbing a bank of £25,000 and relieving the Sunday Mirror of £50,000 – and all before he was arrested for murder, aged 27.But that was just the beginning. Given a life sentence, with a minimum term of twenty years, Massey would find himself incarcerated for forty-three years, give or take a pr...

First-hand accounts of football violence, from infamous Millwall to Man U. Once dubbed 'the English disease', British match-day thuggery has spread right across Europe and beyond. Here is the inside story of that phenomenon from those that were there, taking part in the mayhem. 'Yob Laureate' Dougie Brimson and his brother Eddy offer a compelling description of match-day madness; Colin Ward goes steaming in, while other pieces detail the irresistible aggro of the local Derby, the tragedy i...

Speaking Volumes Christian Book of the Year 2016In 1992, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow was enjoying a pint with his brother when he got an idea that would change his life – and radically change the lives of others.After watching a news bulletin about war-torn Bosnia, the two brothers agreed to take a week’s hiatus from work to help.What neither of them expected is that what began as a one-time road trip in a beaten-up Landrover rapidly grew to become Magnus’s life’s work...

The Zulu Army of Birimigham City occupies a unique place in the annals of terrace violence: Britain's biggest multi-racial football firm.BBC Journalist Caroline Gall was granted unprecedented access to the gang and spent a year interviewing Zulu leaders and footsoldiers. She traces how they emerged from a shadowy group called the Apex on the St Andrew's terraces to become one of the "top five" mobs in the country, uncovers their role in some of the worst football-related riots of m...