The Berkeley Brothers: Twins rose up the ranks of the Fallowfield Mandem - and terrorised gangland

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

Holding a pistol in his right hand, Marvin Berkeley stares impassively at the camera. He's barely in his 20s, but he's already carved out a formidable reputation on the violent and bloody streets of Manchester's gangland.

Marvin and twin brother Michael had risen from teenage ASBOs, to shot-callers in the Fallowfield Mandem, a splinter group of Moss Side's notorious Gooch Gang.

FMD began life in the early 2000s as a Grime-inspired sound system. Initially they were known more for anti-social behaviour rather than serious criminality. "They were considered more of a neighbourhood nuisance than hardened gangbangers, and no-one outside their turf knew who they were," Ben Black writes in Shooters. READ MORE: How Peter Fury faced down Stockport's 'Mr Big' - then turned his life around in prison READ MORE: Taxis, saris and 'WhatsApp for criminals': How the 'Godfather of Oldham' flooded the North with drugs...

then left his son to face the music But that all changed in January 2003 when 19-year-old Marcus Fullerton was shot dead on Thelwell Street in Fallowfield after an argument. "It should have served as a salutary warning to any local youths," writes Black. "Instead a number of lads who had grown up with Marcus and who called themselves Fallowfield Mandem, patois for 'those Fallowfield men', were drawn, as too often happens, into gang culture in the years following his murder." Front and centre were the Berkeley twins.