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

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I remember watching it all unfold and thinking it was like Northern Ireland in the bad old days," writes Doyle. "There was an air of excruciating tension unlike anything I'd ever witnessed in the police before." The suspected gumnan was one-eyed drug dealer Dale Cregan. He fled to Thailand, but was arrested at Manchester Airport on his return. Armed police pictured during the search for Dale Cregan 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. How were you able to keep your nerve with dangerous and unpredictable characters while you worked undercover in the Omega unit? Doyle was medically discharged from the police in 2020 suffering from PTSD. Now in his 40s, he feels he has paid a heavy price for his career. "I sacrificed my mental health for it," he said in an interview with the Daily Express.

The biggest case of his career began just after midnight on May 25, 2012 when Mark Short was shot dead as he played pool in the Cotton Tree pub in Droylsden.This is a fantastic read, I read it from start to finish in 5 hours.....I hadn't intended to but it was that gripping. After a stellar career undercover Doyle moves on to finish his police career after adding several major ,and dangerous,investigations to his CV. And the plan worked. Over the course of a year Doyle became known around Moss Side and Hulme and became a regular drinker in the area. 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.

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. The final part of Doyle's book tells of the ramifications of the stresses and things he saw as a policeman and his struggles with his mental health are as "edge of the seat" as his adventures in the force Before joining Greater Manchester Police he had served seven years in the Army, and knew how to handle firearms and explosives, and execute a plan with military precision.Not the inflated prices you hear about on the news, but what they were actually worth, on the street-level criminal market," he points out.

In the astonishing book he has written about his covert career, Doyle explains that while surveillance is the art of seeing and not being seen, undercover work - especially cold, long-term infiltration - is the art of "being seen and using it to your advantage". This time he wasn't getting up. Neither were the two young women he'd just murdered. The two unarmed young police officers he cut down in a hail of 32 bullets and the fragments of a grenade, ending their promising lives so savagely, so senselessly. I felt empty. Cold. How had it come to this?' Shay Doyle 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. Some of the practices adopted by those infiltrating the world of activism I find absolutely disgraceful," he says. "It's a different world to that of organised crime."

Raised on the streets of a 'tough Manchester council estate' Shay Doyle could easily have turned to a life of crime. Instead, he ended up playing the part of a gangster and helped bring down some of Manchester's most feared underworld figures. An explosive first-hand account of Level 1 undercover police work, from the cop who infiltrated and dismantled some of the UK's toughest gangs and high-profile gangsters, including Salford's 'Mr Big' and cop killer Dale Cregan. For fans of Running with the Firm, Good Cop Bad War and Soldier Spy I’d spent my life at the sharp end, chasing gangsters. Feeling the adrenaline of going through the door, the rush of a big arrest. All that was gone.” His DNA and fingerprints were erased from the national database, and he was assigned a new passport, birth certificate, credit cards, and driving licence. 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."