The rise and fall of city's 'gangster of gangsters'

How the Noonan empire came crashing down

- DAMON WILKINSON

FLY posters were plastered around the city centre giving details of the arrangements.

Hundreds of people lined the streets of Salford as an 18-piece bagpipe band led the horse-drawn funeral procession.

To an outsider looking in, it might have seemed odd that ‘nightclub bouncer’ Damien Noonan was being laid to rest with all the pomp and ceremony of a mafia don. But those in the know knew who the man really was.

Alongside his brothers Dessie and Dominic, Damien rose from a relatively poor, Irish, working-class upbringing in Whalley Range to become one of Manchester’s most infamous crime bosses – the ‘gangster of gangsters’, as his friend, former bare-knuckle boxer and TV personality Paddy Doherty, would later describe him.

But an empire the brothers had spent years ruthlessly and violently building would come crashing down in the space of just 18 months.

First Damien was killed in a motorbike accident, followed by the murder of Dessie, stabbed to death by a crack dealer in Chorlton.

The Noonan brothers – who grew up in a family of 14 siblings whose first names all began with the letter D – first made their mark in 1980s gangland Manchester by specialising in armed robbery.