Desmond Noonan

Desmond Noonan was last seen on the night of 18 March 2005 drinking in the Park public house in Northern Moor, Wythenshawe, at around 11:30 pm. Early on Saturday morning, Sandra Noonan received a phone call from her husband, Noonan, telling her that he had been stabbed. He asked her to pick him up in the suburb of Chorlton. By the time she arrived, Noonan was lying unconscious in Merseybank Avenue. Sandra Noonan called for an ambulance, but Noonan died of his wounds before arriving at Manchester Royal Infirmary.

His funeral was held in south Manchester on 22 April 2005. It was reportedly attended by hundreds of local residents with a kilted pipe band playing as his coffin arrived in a horse-drawn hearse at St Aidan's R.C. Church, Northern Moor.

Noonan was released from prison in 2002 and became head of the Noonan crime family after Damian's death in 2003. Damian Noonan had died in a motorbike accident while on holiday in the Dominican Republic.

Control of organised crime in the city fell to Desmond and his brothers following the 1991 gangland murder of rival leader of the Cheetham Hill Gang, Anthony "White Tony" Johnson. Noonan was charged with Johnson's murder but later acquitted. Over the next several years, he faced a number of convictions in connection to witness intimidation and jury tampering resulting in key witnesses refusing to testify against him and other members of the Noonan family.

Mainly because of the very dangerous contacts Desmond Noonan had made during his reign as "Britain's number one Gangster", his family was at the end of the 1990s known as "one of the most notorious crime families in British history".

By the mid-1990s Desmond Noonan was known as an enforcer, a very dangerous and violent man who had links with a wide swathe of Britain's underworld. In 1995, Desmond was convicted of violently attacking twin brothers, during which he was reportedly described by the court as psychotic, and sentenced to 33 months imprisonment.

By the end of the 1990s the Noonan family had been linked to 25 gangland murders and dozens of robberies and had a stranglehold on most of the nightclub security in many of England's major cities; they had also made over £8 million from bank robberies and security alone.

Born in Whalley Range, Manchester into an Irish family, Noonan emerged from poverty and into the criminal scene with his brothers Damian and Dominic Noonan. His criminal career began as a doorman in the early 1980s; his reputation as a fighter and his overall appearance gave him credibility on the club doors of Manchester.

Noonan then started to put his own men on the doors. By the late 1980s, 80% of the Manchester nightlife security was said to be controlled by Desmond Noonan and his family. Around this time Dominic Noonan was jailed for 15 years for his part in an armed robbery at a bank in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. During his imprisonment, still in control of the crime family, Damian and Desmond Noonan were forging links with other notable Manchester gangs including the Cheetham Hill and Salford gangs.

Desmond Noonan was a lifelong Irish Republican socialist and anti-fascist. He was active with the anti-National Front 'Squads' of the early 1980s and then with Anti-Fascist Action, which was formed in 1985. In 1993, Noonan was present at a meeting in the Seymour pub, Whalley Range, between AFA and an individual who had recently set up a South Manchester British National Party branch. Noonan told the individual: "There's one thing that not many people know about me ... and that's the fact that I'm anti-fascist to the core. Now tell these lads what they want to know, because I don't want to come back here and see you again." He was involved with AFA right through the 1990s. His last-known anti-fascist work was 'canvassing' the BNP when they stood in Newton Heath in 2002.

Desmond Patrick "Dessy" Noonan (8 August 1959 – 19 March 2005) was an English organised crime figure from Manchester, who acted as a political fixer for the Noonan crime family. He and his younger brother, Dominic Noonan, were suspected by police to be responsible for at least 25 unsolved murders during their 20-year reign over Manchester's underworld.