The Jennifer Ellison gang war: Star’s experience in a scary drug clan battle in Liverpool

At the height of her fame Jennifer Ellison seemed destined to make the quantum leap from soap star to Hollywood princess.

Initially captivating audiences with her role as the girl next door in Brookside, the glamorous scouser later got the chance to showcase her talent alongside renowned actors Gerard Butler and Patrick Wilson in Phantom of the Opera.

But her big break in the 2004 Joel Schumacher movie was threatened when a gunman shot up her house in the suburbs of Liverpool with an AK47.

In a second attack the actress was involved in a terrifying chase in her home city when a gang of heavies armed with machetes pursued her car. 

At one point the talented actress was forced to bounce over the central reservation to escape.

Jennifer found herself under scrutiny due to her association with Liverpool gangster Tony Richardson, who often joined her at high-profile red carpet events, sporting a perplexed expression.

The truth was that Richardson was a key player in a violent gang war which raged across Liverpool in the early 2000s.

Homes were sprayed with machine gun fire, woman assaulted and men stabbed and slashed.

A former underworld figure with knowledge of the 2004 gun attack on Jennifer’s home told MailOnline: ‘The gunman was taken to the house in a taxi with an AK under his jacket.

‘When he opened up [fired] bits of the house started coming away. 

‘I think one of the neighbour’s lights came on so he decided to get off.’

Speaking to podcaster James English Jennifer admitted that her ex-partner Tony belonged to a Liverpool gang. 

On the AK-47 attack, she said: ‘He was involved in something that I could not even comprehend. 

‘Just gangland in Liverpool which I had nothing to do with. But they[other gangs] did not see it like that.

‘I was on TV and so famous, I was a target. These are horrible people who don’t care.

‘They will walk into pubs and machete people up. They didn’t care but I had nothing to do with it.’

The former model, who claimed to turn down the chance to model for Playboy for £500k, described her relationship with Richardson as being part of a double life.

She told English: ‘One day I drove out of my hose, A well known family in Liverpool were chasing me in the car. 

He was shouting at me and I had to slam on, and then I went over a central embankment and car was lifted of its feet. 

‘This sounds so mad but one of the lads has got hold of his (Tony’s) ankle and is battering the car with the machete.

‘That happened at the height of my fame. Just two parallel worlds.’

Tony Richardson’s crew grew up in the Stanley Park area of the city, within the shadow of Liverpool FC’s Anfield.

Tony and his brother Mark belonged to a new wave of criminals that emerged in north Liverpool during the late 90s and early 2000s.

The loose association included the feared Gee brothers from Everton, James ‘Pancake’ Taylor, David Hibbs Turner, Carlos Escoffee and Richard Caswell. 

Higher up the chain were the Farley brothers – Ian and Alan – and Thomas Gildea.

The Gee brothers turned the notorious Grizedale estate into a 24-hour drug market, with schoolboys patrolling the pavements on mountainbikes.

However, tensions were simmering between the new generation of younger criminals, flush with drug money, and an old guard of hardmen who ran some of Liverpool’s top nightclubs.

The truth was that the club owners and their doormen did not click with the new wave of gangsters who were throwing their weight – and cash – around the city.

After a leading member of the younger mob were refused entry to a nightclub, there was a stand-off in the city centre.

Tensions exploded when the crew drove a car into boxer Tony Bellew’s father, Tony senior, who was a well respected doorman in Liverpool at the time.

A source said: ‘After they did Tonker (Bellew snr) it was game on.’

The nightclub owners decided to create their own rogue unit of super bouncers, charged with taking the fight back to the young gangsters and their families. 

Dangerous nightclub doormen Michael Brown and Gary Hampton were on the front line of this war.

While bouncers were expected to defend the club’s door, this new gang war changed the rules of engagement.

Brown and Hampton went out at night hunting for the Richardson brothers and their mates. They burst into homes and pubs, slashed and smashing anyone they suspected of being linked to the enemy.

Carlos Escoffe was stabbed after the mob burst into a Liverpool pub, and one occasion an innocent member of the public was caught up in the violence.

Michael Brown and Gary Hampton were convinced they had spotted one of the Richardson brothers in a Bootle nightclub.

The two bouncers gave chase and caught up with their prey behind a back-street pub, where they stabbed him to death. Tragically it emerged the victim was not a Richardson gang member but innocent clubber Colin McGinty. Brown and Hampton were later jailed for life.

However, the war escalated even further when the younger mob launched a car bombing campaign – striking terror among senior figures at Merseyside Police.

The cars were loaded up with a cocktail of industrial fireworks and petrol cans, and parked up outside clubs, homes and police stations.

There were car chases and shoot-outs, as a mob run by James ‘Pancake’ Taylor tried to kill one of the veteran bouncers who had been kicking down doors and smashing faces.

Police launched Operation Thornapple to stop the car bombs which had caused so much distress in the city with heavy sentences dished out.

However, it was suspected that the brains behind the bombings were never identified. 

Eventually several of the protagonists in the gang war ended up inside the prison system.

Mark Richardson and David Hibbs Turner were jailed for life in 2009 for their part in the ‘ruthless, deliberate, cold-blooded murder’ of a father-of-three.

This led to a new conflict behind bars, with rival members paying money to target each other on the wings.

Pancake Taylor was later involved in a fall-out with rival drug thug Lee Siner, who knocked him out in the reception area of a prison.

Taylor later caught up with Siner, a former boxer, in a Mediterranean restaurant near the city’s university.

Taylor and Tony Richardson were both jailed for the attack, which showed diners trying to flee as the gang members hacked at Siner with a Samurai sword.

Jennifer’s relationship with Richardson ended when the News of the World ran a story which questioned his fidelity.

She told English: ‘I was terrified to leave but he was caught cheating on the front of the News of the World.

‘It was my get out of jail card. It meant I was not going to get my face slashed like he always used to say.’

‘When we were in a group he would always get really paranoid, like I was after his mate or something.

We went out to a nightclub and he had been really funny all day.

He started drinking and we started having this argument in the middle of the club and as I turned away I went like that [throwing motion] with my drink.

‘So he went bang on the back of my head with a Budweiser bottle.

‘I remember they put a blanked over my head and put me into the ambulance.

‘It was all over the news.

The hospital said “your extension saved your life. You were literally that far from a jugular vein.” I had to have ten staples in my head.’

‘I was terrified for my family. He was always saying that he would so stuff to my mum and stuff like that. I thought his mates or family would get my mum or do something to my mum’s house.

‘Thank god the News of the World were on him for three days. They had recordings of him.’

Jennifer later met Merseyside boxer Robert Tickle and fell in love. 

The proud mum now runs a successful dance studio and has moved on with her life.