Ten days before he was gunned down after leaving a pool party in Essex in the summer of 2020, Robert Powell posted a photo, most likely from the early 1990s, on his Instagram account, subtitled ‘Once upon a time’. It shows him with another young man, side-by-side, leaning against a convertible car. Under the photo, seemingly ripped down the middle between them and stuck back together, Powell had typed: ‘Once apon a time we where good friends then the snakes got in the way of our friendship and we turned into the worst enemy’s. This is a pic to show you how things where. So if you didn’t know you know now.’
How things were, in reality, was a pivotal time in London’s street gang world, an era in which these two men would rise to become feared underworld figures, looming large over the city during the 1990s and 2000s. It was a time of crack-spliff raves and gun executions; when high-profile gangs vied for cash, dominance and respect; and when a road in the now-gentrified Clapton neighbourhood of Hackney, a borough in north London, was so rife with gunfire it became known as ‘Murder Mile’.
In the photo, with one arm resting on Powell’s shoulder, is Mark Lambie, who was head of the Tottenham Mandem (TMD), a powerful gang from the Broadwater Farm estate just north of Hackney. Aged 14, Lambie was acquitted of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots. He was subsequently linked to a string of shootings, drug deals, robberies, torture and kidnappings. He was known on the streets as the ‘Prince of Darkness’ due to his ruthlessness, and was rumoured to possess ‘juju powers’ which rendered him immortal. Lambie’s underworld rise saw his influence reach across north and west London. To the dozens of detectives working on Operation Trident – a police strategy set up at the time to tackle the rise in ‘black-on-black’ gun crime – Lambie was known as ‘Prominent Nominal One’, their top target.
And next to Lambie, bottle of champagne in hand, is Powell. Powell’s reputation, too, was so potent he’d become a near-mythical figure in London’s street crime world. Nicknamed ‘Fox’ due to his elusiveness and cunning, he led Love of Money (LOM), a gang from Hackney which specialised in robbing other dealers for their drugs and cash. They were notorious for kidnapping, torturing and shooting their victims. Because these victims were drug dealers, most of these brutal crimes went unreported.
Powell’s still-active Instagram account, @fox2up2down, offers up snapshots of this time. Alongside the photo of him and Lambie, there are pictures of Powell hanging with his gang at parties, posing in front of cars, and snapshots of his family. One photo, labelled ‘L.O.M.’ and subtitled ‘the three Amigos’, shows Powell standing ahead of two lieutenants, dressed in baggy 1990s suits, in front of a white convertible sports car. Powell’s posts are littered with comments about ‘Hackney legends’ and ‘OGs’, but also with ‘RIP’s.
Little is known about why Powell and Lambie became enemies. Their feud is rumoured to have sparked several killings, including the murder of one of Powell’s most treasured associates, Kenny Rowe, aged 27, while parked up in a BMW in Clapton in 1997. A few days later, Clifford Angol, who shot Rowe, was himself executed while sitting in Lambie’s BMW parked outside the Warwick Castle pub on Portobello Road. Whatever the initial cause of their separation, neither Powell or Lambie was willing, or able, to harm the other.
It was a trigger-happy time which sparked record numbers of gun homicides, not just in London but across England and Wales. A new breed of street gang, centering around Hackney, Tottenham, Harlesden and Brixton, sought to maximise profits from Britain’s rocketing crack cocaine trade, using familial connections with Jamaican Yardies to import and sell drugs to a rapidly expanding market of crack and heroin users in cities such as London, Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham. They were joined by others, including rival Turkish and Kurdish gangs, also based in north London, who vied for control of the heroin trade. Reputation and respect were at a premium, and firearms quickly became the weapon of choice. For Yardies operating in Jamaica, guns were a regular way of doing business, so domestic gangs, mindful of being outgunned, followed suit. Home Office data shows gun murders recorded by the Metropolitan Police spiked from an average of 20 a year at the start of the 1990s to a peak of 43 between April 2001-March 2002, before falling to an average of around 12 a year in the 2020s.
‘If you played with us we would shoot you,’ remembers Gwenton Sloley, a former LOM member who ran for Hackney mayor in 2022. We meet at a Caffè Nero in Croydon, a part of London favoured by former gangsters wanting to disentangle themselves from their old turf. These days Sloley is a co-founder of the London Gang Exit programme, which helps young people avoid gang life. But 20 years ago he was deep in it himself.
