Real-life 'Reservoir Dogs' that altered Liverpool's crime scene forever
The armed robbery gang were behind a series of crimes
When Liverpool thug Tom Smith saw a man with a large scythe running toward him, he realised his Post Office raid was not what he had expected. Smith belonged to one of the city's most notorious robbery crews who had been suspected of being behind a wave of armed robberies across the Midlands.
But on a Sunday evening in January 1980, armed police waited as the gang stormed a sorting office in Sansome Walk, Worcester. In an account of that night written by Tom Smith in a book he self-published nine years ago, the gang jumped from a skylight into the sorting office, armed with a handgun and pick axe handles.
Smith said he wrestled a postal worker to the floor before he managed to set off the alarm. He wrote: "I'm going to take you to your mates and tie you up. Nobody will get hurt. We're just going to take the cash, okay."
But then a postal worker armed with a scythe suddenly appeared. Although Smith managed to wrestle the man to the ground, he started to realise that something was very wrong. He then noticed his pal Billy being surrounded, and then armed police opened fire.
The first shot shattered the bones in Smith's left arm, and the second nearly killed him as a bullet passed through his chest into his lung. As Smith lay on the floor covered in blood, he suspected that the 'Mr Big' behind the raid had 'sold them out.'
While police rounded up the rest of the gang, Smith was rushed to hospital.
As part of a weekly series looking back at Merseyside's criminal history, the ECHO has taken a closer look at one of the region's most audacious gangs.
Smith and his four co-accused appeared at Worcester Crown court in February 1981. The court was surrounded by a ring of steel as police feared an escape plot. The case was later moved to Birmingham Crown Court.
During the sentencing it emerged that a post office engineer had spotted one of the sorting office windows had been tampered with.
The window was near a safe that contained £10,000 cash. Police were informed and began planning an ambush.
Smith, from the Huyton area, later recovered from his injuries and was jailed for 12 years along with the rest of the co-accused. The men all pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary.
When he returned to Liverpool seven years later, the city had changed. A new generation of drug dealers had now filled the place once occupied by hardened robbery crews. A man who knew Tommy Smith and the rest of the gang told the ECHO: "This crew used to pull off Reservoir Dogs type raids."
He added: "But that day in Worcester they walked into an ambush. Armed police were waiting and Tommy was shot and nearly killed.
"Other crooks started to realise that armed robbery was a risky business. The police could shoot you and then a judge would hand you a massive jail sentence."
In the 1980s Liverpool's ambitious young criminals began to shift away from robbery. The man said: "John Haase was in a feared robbery crew and even he packed it in. And the same was true for Curtis Warren.
"I was locked up with Curtis Warren in the 80s and told him to forget the robbery lark. There was only one game to be in and it was called drugs."
John Haase and Curtis Warren were two of Liverpool's most notorious criminals during the 1990s.
The man added: "When Tommy and his mates returned to Liverpool things had changed. There was no real place for them anymore. They ended up just hanging around in nightclubs talking about the good old days."
Some of the material used in this story was first published in a book called Anatomy of a Crime by Tom Smith, which was self-published online in 2016.