"This was a place removed from the rest of the world - in short, the Gees and their associates created a ghetto." In the early 2000s, two brothers - Darren and Daniel Gee - turned Everton's Grizedale estate, where they had grown up, into a 24-hour open air drug market. The through their lack of education and lack of opportunities.
has been associated with criminality for decades due to its accessibility to the wharfs and warehouses of the dockland coupled with high levels of deprivation. But at the start of the millennium, . With that price difference representing pure profit, young men took advantage of gaps in a criminal landscape.
But in a saturated market, guns and knives were used to give crime groups an advantage. The Gees, who both had poor experiences in the education system and left school without qualifications, began dabbling in burglary and other petty crime. However, the pair soon gravitated towards serious crime, .
Ordinary families, who lived in smart, terraced houses with carefully cultivated front gardens, were forced to look the other way as the Gees and their associates turned the estate into an enclave exempt from law and order. The brothers were the kingpins of the area, with a crown court prosecutor later observing A former police officer, who was a member of a task force set up to tackle the brothers, said at their height the Gees were earning around £20,000 a week "running a 24-hour class A drugs business" on the estate. Speaking to in 2019, the offic.
