Paul Massey v Paul Doyle, the friends who went to war over Salford's doors

Paul Doyle's brother threw the first punch, and seconds later somebody at the party had a gun.

Bradley Doyle was shot in the leg. Somehow the two brothers got out of the house alive. Police cars flooded the estate. The party was in Ordsall, in Salford, on Paul Massey's home ground, and Massey was the man who had invited them.

Paul Doyle had known Massey since they were young men fighting older villains for a name. He had gone to the party as a friend. In his account, he came away from it at war.

like walking into the wolf's lair with a leg of lamb strapped to your back

Paul Doyle, on the Ordsall party, in his own account

Paul Massey was born in Ordsall in January 1960, one of six children. He was arrested for criminal damage at twelve and sent to an approved school. Paul Doyle came from Lower Broughton, across the river from the city. In the early 1980s the two of them ran together.

Doyle dates the start of their name to the day of Prince Charles's wedding in July 1981. At the Druids pub in Salford, by his account, men linked to Manchester's older crime firms took against the young Salford lads. A glass went into the face of one of Massey's friends. The Salford lads turned on them and drove them out. One man was kicked in the head and left with permanent damage. Massey went to prison. Doyle did not.

By the middle of the decade they were travelling together. Doyle describes runs across Europe with stolen credit cards, cheques cashed in Belgium and counterfeit money from Amsterdam. Then they were caught. Massey got five years. Doyle got three years and ten months.

The gap mattered. Doyle came home first.

Back in Salford, Doyle made Lower Broughton his base. He moved into drugs, he says, and when a Salford gang tried to sell protection to the pubs on his patch, he raised a crew from his Manchester United hooligan contacts and ran them off. In that world a reputation was not a personality. It was a deterrent.

By the late 1980s he was working security. The Inn of Good Hope brought him in to calm the place down, because young Salford lads were wrecking it. It was there that he met Graeme Boardman, from Irlam, a well-spoken martial artist. Doyle said Boardman had a switch in him, calm one second and explosive the next. The two of them started to build their own firm on the doors.

Then Massey came out of prison, hungry. The acid house boom had turned the doors of Manchester into serious money. Whoever stood on a door controlled who got in, and who sold what once they were inside. Massey was growing close to the Noonan brothers, Damian and Desmond, whose family was said by the late 1980s to run most of the nightclub security in Manchester. Doyle and Boardman had their own doors and their own ambitions. Two firms were growing, and they were growing towards each other.

That was the background when the invitation came. A family party, in Ordsall, at Massey's end of the city. Ordsall and Broughton already had old estate grudges, and the Ordsall lads hated Doyle.

He went anyway, with Bradley. It was either reckless, he says, or a set-up. The moment they walked in, he could feel the room turn. It was, in his words, "like walking into the wolf's lair with a leg of lamb strapped to your back." Words were exchanged. Bradley threw a punch. Then came the gun, and the shot in the leg, and the run for the door.

Doyle later said that night was the true beginning of the Salford door wars.

Massey answered in his own way. He arrived at the Inn of Good Hope with a convoy, fifteen cars, and some of the most feared names in Salford and Manchester got out behind him. Doyle stood on one side with Boardman beside him. Massey stood on the other. Nobody threw a punch that night. The message was that Doyle did not decide which pubs Massey's people drank in.

The violence came at another of Doyle's doors, a venue called Rockworld. A member of Massey's firm had turned up there, caused trouble, and been warned. He carried on, and Doyle knocked him out cold. In that world it was not discipline. It was a humiliation.

A convoy came back from Salford. By Doyle's account he was swarmed at the door, punched, grabbed and dragged, and chased down the street by a mob. He said he only just got away with his life.

What followed, he says, was organised. He, his brothers and Boardman went hunting. There were visits to houses in the early hours, doors kicked in, men dragged out, cars chased across the estates, and shots fired. Truces were tried, and handshakes forced, and none of them held.

Then Massey turned up at the Inn of Good Hope with Damian Noonan, and the old friends' war came down to one fight between Doyle and the big man from Manchester. Nobody agrees on who won it. Not long after, shots were fired into the Inn of Good Hope from a passing car. Doyle and Boardman were not hit. Two of their doormen were.

In time, by his own account, Doyle stepped back from the doors and into drug importation, a business with different rules. In 1997 Graeme Boardman vanished. There was no body and no funeral, and he has never been found.

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In 1999 Paul Massey was jailed for fourteen years for stabbing a man in the groin outside a club in Manchester. He was released from Frankland in 2007. In 2012 he stood as an independent for mayor of Salford and came seventh of ten. By then the papers called him Salford's Mr Big.

At about half past seven on the evening of 26 July 2015, Massey parked his BMW outside his home on Manchester Road, in Clifton, and walked up the drive. A gunman in military-style clothes was lying in wait. He fired a burst from an Uzi sub-machine gun and fled. Paul Massey died at the scene. He was fifty-five.

For nearly three years nobody was charged. Then, in May 2018, Massey's close friend John Kinsella was shot dead near St Helens while out walking with his pregnant partner. Detectives investigating that killing seized a Garmin Forerunner fitness watch belonging to a man called Mark Fellows. Its GPS showed that a few months before Massey's murder, Fellows had made what the prosecution called a "reconnaissance run" to the ground behind a church where the killer lay in wait.

In January 2019, at Liverpool Crown Court, Fellows was convicted of both murders, and Mr Justice William Davis gave him a whole life order. A second man, Steven Boyle, was cleared of Massey's murder and convicted of Kinsella's. Fellows lost his appeal later that year. In 2026, still a whole lifer, he was convicted of a third murder, in a cell at HMP Wakefield.

Paul Doyle was in prison too. In 2015 he was jailed for sixteen years for plotting to flood the north with heroin, cocaine and cannabis. He finished his life story at Thorn Cross open prison, and it came out in 2021 as Surviving the Madness. Most of what is known about his war with Paul Massey comes from it. Massey is not here to tell his side.

The two men started out on the same side of a pub fight in 1981. The full story is in our film on Gangland.