Detectives investigating the gangland murder of John Kinsella, an underworld enforcer, have charged a man with his murder.
Mark Fellows, 37, has been charged with the murders of Kinsella and another underworld figure John Massey following a joint operation in Manchester and Liverpool.
Kinsella, 53, was shot dead while walking his dog on the St Helens Linkway near the M62 in Merseyside on 5 May.
He was a close friend of the prominent Salford gangster Paul Massey, who was killed after being shot four times in the chest with a submachine gun in 2015.
Fellows is due to appear before South Sefton magistrates court on Saturday charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
Police arrested five other people as part of the investigation this week who have all been released under investigation.
Known as Salford’s “Mr Big” despite being scarcely 5ft tall, Massey’s fearsome reputation grew during the drug-fuelled Manchester rave scene of the 1990s. His family insist he had tried to turn his life around in the years before his death.
On 26 July 2015, the 55-year-old was shot four times in the chest as he stepped out of his silver BMW outside his family home in Salford.
Massey and Kinsella are thought to have been longstanding friends and Kinsella was a pallbearer at the former’s funeral. A trial at Liverpool crown court heard how in 2001 Kinsella intervened to stop a gangster from threatening the former England footballer Steven Gerrard.
A Home Office postmortem examination found Kinsella had died as the result of multiple gunshot wounds.
DCI Mark Baker, of Merseyside police’s investigations team, said: “Detectives from Merseyside have been carrying out extensive inquiries since the murder of John Kinsella just three weeks ago and have established a number of positive leads.
“We have been working together with both GMP and Cheshire police and as a result of our inquiries were able to carry out this joint operation today.”
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