THE BRUTAL GANGLAND INSPIRED CAINE’S CULT
FIFTY YEARS ago this month, on a polluted, coal-smeared beach in the north east of England, a man stumbled across the dark sands at dawn with a shotgun in his hands. Impeccably clad in a dark-blue suit and Aquascutum raincoat, he attempted to throw the shotgun into the dirty, turbulent waters off the coast of Blackhall Colliery near Hartlepool.
Just as the weapon was about to sail into the spume, another gun shot, fired by a sniper hidden in the nearby fields, struck him in the forehand.
Collapsing on to the floor, as the water begins to submerge him, the moment marked the end of the greatest British gangster film in history.
Get Carter, starring a 38-year-old Michael Caine in the most powerful, menacing performance of his career, was not well received upon release in 1971.
George Melly described the viewing experience in one early review as akin to “a bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast”.
The film, slowly, went on to to attain cult classic status.
What isn’t so well known is the true life murder that inspired Doncaster-born author Ted Lewis to pen Jack’s Return Home, the novel that was turned into the movie.
Lewis, a pioneer of the northern-noir school of writing and a huge influence on writers such as David Peace (author of The Damned United and the Red Riding books) was a young author who, like many in the north of England at the time, became transfixed by a 1967 crime that quickly became known as the one-armed bandit murder.
Angus Sibbet was a London gangster who, along with Dennis Stafford and Michael Luvaglio, had decamped to the North in order to work for Luvaglio’s brother Vince Landu who ran a business supplying fruit machines to pubs and clubs.
In January 1967, shortly after rumours began to spread that Sibbet was dipping his own hand into the profits to the tune of £1,000 a week, his body, riddled with bullet holes, was found inside his E-type Jaguar underneath a railway bridge in South Hetton, Co Durham.
Luvaglio and Stafford were promptly charged with Sibbet’s murder by a police force determined to crack down on the burgeoning mob scene growing in the provinces of England.
But huge holes in the case soon emerged. Spotted by an eyewitness in Newcastle’s Birdcage nightclub on the night of the murder, police surmised that both Stafford and Luvaglio had, in a 45 minute period, left the club, driven 16 miles, forced Sibbet’s car off the road and shot him three times before returning to the club.
To have completed this round trip in such a short time frame was unfeasible in the cars of half a century ago but, regardless, Stafford and Luvaglio both served 12 years in prison before being released on licence.
It was a story that was subtly referenced in the subsequent movie; as London gangster Jack Carter (played by Caine) travels to Newcastle to avenge the death of his brother and embarks on a homicidal rampage amid a dank and sinister world of underworld figures, one of whom (played by Bryan Mosley, later to become Alf Roberts in Coronation Street) is himself in charge of a fruit machine racket.
DIRECTOR Mike Hodges even managed to gain access to Landu’s former home, Dryderdale Hall, located just outside Durham, for some of the scenes featuring the local mob supremo Cyril Kinnear (played by Look Back In Anger playwright John Osborne).
With Landu himself having only recently fled to Spain, some of the extras who appear in the party scene held in Kinnear’s mansion were the same people who attended real parties at Dryderdale during Landu’s time there.
The murk, corruption and brutality of the era in Newcastle was far from confined to the fruit machine and local mobster rackets though. Indeed, this was a time when fraud and duplicity filtered through to the highest ranks.
Home Secretary Reginald
Maudling resigned over a scandal involving
Newcastle City councillor T Dan Smith and architect John
Poulson who were both found guilty of bribery, corruption and giving backhanders to MPS and councillors to get dangerous concrete tower blocks and offices built in the city. At the trial, the judge said that the scandal “now couples corruption with the North-east”. The hideous Brutalist architecture of the type that Poulson and Smith built was perfectly captured during filming in August 1970 when Caine throws Mosley from one of the balcony walls to meet an instant death on the roof of a passing car below. Although most of the rotting tenements, dingy pubs and dilapidated tower blocks that provide the bleak early 1970s Geordie landscape of Get Carter have vanished, the struggle that Dennis Stafford and Michael Luvaglio have kept up to clear their names has continued until well into this century. Two appeals were turned down before the duo were freed in 1979.
But it wasn’t until 2002 that the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Stafford had been kept in jail for too long and he was paid £28,000 in compensation.
“The two [Stafford and Luvaglio] men were wrongly convicted and the evidence was incorrect,” said Landu himself in an interview he gave that year.
“If they were tried today they would never have been found guilty. It was a political trial. The Home Office had suffered at the hands of gangs like the Krays and the Richardsons and they stepped in to smash what they thought was an organised crime ring.” With Stafford and Luvaglio now in their 80s, what was possibly their final chance to clear their name passed in 2017 when the High Court rejected their challenge to the murder conviction after the Court of Appeal decided not to rehear the case. Despite