Deep Cover: How I took down Britain’s most dangerous gangsters

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Shay grew up on a tough Manchester council estate where drugs and gangs were rife. A life of crime would have been an easy path to take. So it went against everything that was expected of him when he joined the police.

Soon he was headhunted by GMP's specialist undercover unit and tasked with infiltrating the city's underworld. All of his old life was removed and he was given a new identity - that of Belfast-raised 'grafter' and armed robber Mikey O'Brien. An excellent book. A well written story of an undercover cop diving deep into the underbelly of society to root out the dangerous criminals that threaten the fabric of society. A cliche I know, but I couldn’t put this book down and read it in a couple of days, mainly because the story really resonated with me. His description of how the pitiful upper ranks in the Police treat the the genuine hard working foot soldiers with arrogance and contempt are bang on. Most senior officers are inept, egotistical, useless pen pushers interested in only one thing…….promotion, power and money. It’s a boys club where people shoved up through the ranks engage in daily, cringeworthy ass kissing and creeping to further their power with scant regard to the cops out on the streets doing a really difficult job day in day out, taking years off their lifespans because of the shift work and stress they deal with. It wouldn't be long before Shay's prodigious talent caught the attention of the top. Then came the call that changed his an offer to join the secret Level 1 undercover unit known as Omega. And it was easy to see why they wanted him; he wouldn't have to stray too far from what he already knew. He had all the attributes of a professional criminal - the athletic physique of a cage fighter, the talk, the walk. Streetwise and fearless, he'd be a match for the most hardened villain. He was given a new identity, his DNA and fingerprints were removed from the national database, and so began the life of Mikey O'Brien. From there he slowly worked his way in, doing the odd drug deal, and building valuable acquaintances with some of the main players in south Manchester. He was put to work to gather info on criminals taking over from the feared Gooch Gang, many of whom were jailed in 2009. Ringleader Colin Joyce was caged for 39 years and Les Amos was given 35 years for a catalogue of crimes, including murder. All the while, Doyle was working out doggedly and training himself to become an expert on criminal commodities, learning the going rate for everything from a kilo of cocaine to a MAC-10 machine gun.After a stellar career undercover Doyle moves on to finish his police career after adding several major ,and dangerous,investigations to his CV. The rise and fall of Dominic Noonan, the paedophile gangster who once ruled Manchester's underworld I was discharged from the police force due to mental health issues. I was still relatively young, but I was struggling with PTSD. Based on intelligence he’d gathered, police arrested four gangland figures and found a fully loaded MAC-10-style machine gun and a couple of kilos of skunk in a car. He added: “We’ll never know who those bullets were meant for, but this crew didn’t carry guns for show. I'm proud of the work I did that kept people safe, that stopped them from being shot dead, that removed guns from the streets. That's what I signed up to do.

All the years he had spent learning the ways of the street: how to talk, what to say, how to conduct himself in the company of criminals proved to be gold dust. "Most cops speak in cop language, even when they are off duty - any decent criminal can spot them a mile off," he says.

Lee Amos was put away for 35 years for a catalogue of crimes - including murder (Image: PA) Read More Related Articles My calm facade belied the rage erupting inside. For 42 days he'd been at large, 42 days that ended in an act of unimaginable horror. I can still see his face. It still haunts me." He describes it as a game of "high-stakes chess", which required hypervigilance at all times. "My expertise was starting from scratch," he says of his life in the shadows. As someone so utilised, he was used against some major criminals, though most of his assignments seem to have been against wider criminal fraternities. So, for example, he worked undercover in the Moss Side in Manchester, building a picture of the criminal landscape there, and again later in Cambridge. What he never seems to have done is been deployed against a major criminal or crime family, such as the Adams crime family in London, or the Noonan crime family in Manchester. So, he never seems to have been deployed to infiltrate such an OCG and “bring them down”. This isn’t a criticism of Shay, or even the police. As a layperson, I don’t know. Perhaps that’s not how it’s done, or such an operation would be too risky.