A former gang leader who trained children in OCG in the Northwest and “flooded the streets with guns” now seeks to use his past for good and keep young people away from crime. Sicarius McGrath was once described as a “monumental risk to the public,” but has now changed his life.
The 41-year-old was involved in gang violence from a very young age, from the mid-1990s until 2016, and was sent to prison several times, including for intimidation, violence and in 2003 was imprisoned by the its role in creating an illegal weapon. factory. In 2016, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for conspiracy to blackmail, control prostitution and possession of cocaine and a CS gas container found in his home at the time of his arrest.
It was while sitting in his cell for these crimes in 2017 that his criminal lifestyle came home. “I was sitting in my cell and watching a show covering the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, Little Boy Blue,” he said.
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“It made me cry. I felt partly responsible as I had put hundreds of guns on the streets. I immediately wrote to the charity her parents had set up.
“From that moment on I had a passion to change myself as a person and use my experience to help others and reduce the number of children involved in crimes with knives, firearms, county lines, violence youth and antisocial behavior “. Since his release from prison, Sicarius, who now lives in Middleton, has worked with charities across the UK and has been in contact with various agencies to create his own group, OCG Solutions.
Sicarius recruited young people in gangs for many years (Image: Manchester Evening News)
This has included attending youth groups to see how they work and testing their own methods of keeping children out of violence. Sicarius is very sincere about his life before our chat, openly discussing the fact that Al Qaeda is throwing him in jail and how he would use the same methods they used with him to recruit children from the Northwest to his gangs. .
“I was good at recruiting kids in bands, it was a good skill for me,” he says. “We ran a good business, it was very sophisticated.
“We used to flood the streets with weapons and drugs, I was doing very well. I remember the first time I shot someone in the leg in Liverpool I shit, nobody really wants to kill anyone else, but it happens when you’re so deep into this world.
“And now the kids are carrying knives, they’re afraid the others will do it, so do it [carry knives] themselves. But they’re not going to kill each other, it’s the last thing they want to do, but when the kids are arrogant it can happen. “
Sicarius decided to change after seeing how the weapons he put on the streets could have been used in violent crime (Image: Manchester Evening News)
Sicarius is determined to use what he believes to be his unorthodox methods to keep children away from crime. He says it’s very different from how psychologists have traditionally tried to help children, but he is confident it will be a success, and says the people he has spoken to in the police are interested in seeing if it works.
“I want to use the same methods I used to get kids into gangs to keep them out. You have to be real with them and speak their language, if you try to be smart with them, they won’t listen to you and they’ll just think you’re a *** h ***. Kind of manipulating them to stay out of violence instead of getting into it.
“I went to youth clubs where there were very violent children and I became a monster again to scare them. It has made me realize that I can still be like that monster I was, but use it to scare children away from violence. I’m gone and they don’t want anything to do with me, but in the end I have them by my side.
Sicarius wants to teach children to use bleeding kits, which could save lives after a violent incident (Image: Manchester Evening News)
“It’s about relating to them. If they see a horrible bitch like me and tell them what happened to me, it means so much more than talking to a normal youth worker. But I can tell you that you can spend your life living in a cell or change and do something right.
“I hope to get some videos with horrible prison criminals talking about their experiences. They won’t necessarily say ‘keep out of gangs’, but it will show that that’s where you end up if you continue as you are, with violence and gangs.
“I want the children to talk to the parents of the victims of gang violence to see that this is the result. Either you end up in a cell or on the ground, you almost have to scare them.”
Sicarius is currently raising funds for vans to bring out groups on activity days and establish relationships with them. His goal is to work with parents to show the progress of how children who participate over time with him change. Education is also key to her ideas, and she’s proud to show me a bleeding kit she has from a collaborating charity that wants to teach kids how to use it.
These are the first days for Sicarius’ ideas, and there is still a long way to go before the group sessions begin. “I’m putting it all in, I just know it will work, and there are a lot of high-level people interested in seeing if it does, because it’s very different from anything that’s been tested before,” he adds. “Too many young people have lost their lives because of the violence, and it has gotten a lot worse recently. Something different needs to be done to stop it, and I can do it.”
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