Media Use Photos And Mark Lambie To Bury Mark Duggan In Tales Of Torture And Lies
MARK Duggan has been killed by the police by Tottenham Hale Tube Station in London? Was it legal? We do not know. The police say he was shot in the process of his arrest. Reports suggest the bullet that lodged in a policeman’s radio was police issue. Did a policeman fire it? Is police ammo in the hands of the villains? We do not know. But the press have been keen to take sides and trigger a debate.
The Daily Mail does this with photos. The paper was quick to label Duggan a “gangster“. This term served to buy into the glamour of the gangsters – so much better than a mere drugs dealer or villain – and also create an impression that Duggan was involved in heavy organised crime. If he was, was he any good at it? He lived on the Broadwater Farm Estate. Is that where top villains live – on a shabby estate in North London? You can keep your big house in the country and villas in the sun.
The Mail’s reporting suggests that gangsters deserve to die more than men in mini cabs. As far as Anorak knows, the debate on capital punishment has not been resolved and summary executions – even of gangsters – have not been passed into law.
As we say, the Mail uses photos of back up its case. Each time Duggan is mentioned the paper uses the by now familiar shot of him holding two finger up to his nose. He is either:
a) Ordering two sodas
b) Smelling his fingers
c) Showing off a new ring
d) Trying to look cool
e) Playing cops and robber with an imaginary gun made from his fingers
f) We have no idea
Those sympathetic to Duggan use the picture of him and Semone Wilson, his long-term lover, by the grave of a child of theirs who died. In this photo Duggan looks loving, sensitive and – get this – something more than the cartoon character portrayed by the Mail.
The Mail’s Paul Bracci actually produces a piece entitled:
Violence, drugs, a fatal stabbing and a most unlikely martyr
Is he unlikely because he is..black? Even in this ostensibly sympathetic piece, the paper uses the photos of Duggan and his lethal fingers:
Semone Wilson has not yet told her children that their father is dead. ‘How do I explain to them that their daddy is gone?’ she says. Such a task would be traumatic enough for any mother, but especially so for Miss Wilson. Her fiance, Mark Duggan, was travelling in a minicab in North London on Thursday evening when it was stopped by officers from Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident, who specialise in fighting black-on-black gun crime. The officers were armed with Heckler & Koch submachine guns and there was an apparent ‘exchange’ of fire. Moments later Duggan was dead.
He and Miss Wilson, both 29, had been together since they were 17. They had two sons aged ten and seven, and a baby daughter. ‘Mark was a good dad,’ says Miss Wilson, a student at Middlesex University. ‘He loved his kids dearly. He idolised them.’
Bracchi hears these and tells us:
Maybe he was. Perhaps he did.
See how he feels for Simone Wilson who has the dread job of telling her children that daddy is dead. See how he uses her words in his piece. See how he then doubts them. Touching stuff, eh, readers.
His family and friends claim he was unarmed and have demanded ‘Justice for Mark’. But the man whose violent death triggered the Tottenham riots at the weekend makes an unlikely martyr.
Does he. A black man from a poor part of London shot dead by police makes forms a pretty typical totem of outrage for those estranged from power and who hate the self-serving police.
Says Bracchi:
On the streets of the Broadwater Farm estate, where Mark Duggan grew up, he was also known by another name: ‘Starrish Mark’. It sounds like an innocent nickname; it was anything but. In fact, the word ‘Starrish’ denoted his membership of a notorious ‘crew’ called The Star Gang who strut the streets of London’s N17. The stock-in-trade of such ‘postcode’ gangs is violence, intimidation and, more often than not, drugs. Duggan himself, according to some residents, was a crack cocaine dealer who routinely carried a gun.
What residents? What gun? Was it an imitation firearm, like the one he was rumoured to have been carrying when shot dead? Semone Wilson says she was shocked to heard that he carried a gun. Says Bracchi:
It was an argument over a woman and drugs, they say, that resulted in the death of his cousin Kelvin Easton, 23, who was stabbed through the heart with a broken champagne bottle at the Boheme nightclub in Bow, east London, in March this year. ‘Duggan was paranoid about what happened to his cousin,’ said one local. ‘He had a gun to protect himself because of what happened to Kelvin.’ So much for Mark Duggan being a ‘well respected member of his community’, as he is described on a memorial website.
That respect was underpinned by fear.
Do you respect the police? Why? Because you fear them? Who feared Mark Duggan? They can now speak out. He’s dead.
Bracchi then talks about Mark Lambie, a member of Tottenham’s Man Dem gang:
The leader was one Mark Lambie, who police suspected was implicated in the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, hacked to death by a mob during the infamous riot on Broadwater Farm in 1985. Lambie was just 14 at the time.
He was cleared of murdering Pc Blakelock in 1985. Mail readers are not told this.
He was eventually jailed for 12 years in 2002 for other gang-related crimes (which involved torturing two rivals with a hammer and an electric iron, and pouring boiling water over their genitals). The Star Gang is understood to have been formed after Lambie was locked up.
And then this massive leap into the unknown:
Can there be any doubt that Mark Duggan, the loving father and ‘respected’ member of the community, was involved in this chilling sub-culture? Not really.
To paraphrase Bracchi: maybe there is.
Lambie was tracked by Operation Trident – the same police unit seeking out black-on-black crime that targeted Duggan. Lambie was brought to book because the two men he tortured – Gregory Smith and Twaine Morris – told all to the police.
Should you trust the police? Well, as Lambie wallowed in jail, the police went to work:
As gang members were hunted, the victims were placed in police protection. But Morris later left and was shot within 24-hours. He was hit three times and was lucky to escape death as were two passers-by hurt by flying bullets.
As for Duggan… Well, Semone Wilson tells media:
“Mark was known to police but he had never been sent down for anything before. He has been on remand. I can’t remember what for, but it was about nine years ago. I believe that if he had a firearm [on the evening he died] and if he saw police he would run rather than shoot. When he was remanded last time, he said he hated jail and never wanted to go back there. I can’t see why he would have a gun on him at all.”
The Mail’s Paul Bracchi knows. From a desk in room in South Kensington, he know everything about Mark Duggan’s life…
Posted: 8th, August 2011 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comments (3) | TrackBack | Permalink
