Outside HM Strangeways Prison, the air was like a new lover. The breath of a new lease of life. One changed forever.
Kane Mousah was freed to live again, to fight again, six years ago, and it was a moment he will never forget. Gone was the dingy, disinfected cell; a world of possibilities opened up.
Tonight, seven years on from his emancipation after four and a years inside, the 33-year-old lightweight from Manchester flicks the switch in a combat arena again, this time at Bellator MMA here, to write another chapter as a fighter, a father, a reformed man. Above all, as an example.
“I went to prison for possession of a fire arm with the intention to endanger life. It was a 9 millimetre with nine-round clip and silencer. At the time I was fully engulfed in gang activity. I was 21,” explained the man whose eloquence defies the existence that once really did define him.
A decade ago, Mousah’s life was locked behind bars, the impending, and inevitable fallout from six years embedded in Moss Side’s brutal, vicious and de-stabilising gang warfare. Dozens of young men living in a secret society impervious to the world around them, cocooned in drug dealing, a climate of fear and ultimately jail – or death. Live by the sword, die by the gun.
“I was 21 (when I got caught) and I think it was September 2009. I pleaded not guilty at the time,” explained this animated, engaging character who at a double-take shares a similar facial look, and stature, to Floyd Mayweather Jr.
“I had just become a professional fighter. This is three days after I won my debut. I had just won and beat a tough opponent. I wasn’t aware I was under surveillance at the time. They (the undercover team) might have come to the fight. I got to a point in my life where I wanted to transition away from gangs, but I’d been in gangs my entire life, and properly since I was 15.”
“I had had no dad around. All the older gang members were like my dads, they were my family. That’s how it was. Those wars are done now. The intensity has dropped down to nothing. That firearm was a parting gift to my friends because I wanted to pursue a fight career.”
“We got caught by armed police buying the gun. They smashed the windows and dragged us out. It wasn’t my first time buying a gun. I had lots passed onto me. When you’re 21 you’re considered an older member. I was buying the gun for the younger guys and it was protection for them. I was always a protector. I only got into gangs because I was protecting my friend at the start. He got attacked and I wanted to protect him.”
It was in prison where he matured. Where he had to, where he had to redesign the course of his life. “There had been a number of shootouts in my life. Two of my friends were shot dead, they’re tattooed on my arm.”
He shows me, twisting his forearm. “Marcus was like an older brother to me, he was 19 when he was shot. I looked up to him. He was the big brother I never had. He died when I was 16. When I grew up I took on his role in the gang. Louis (the other name tatted there) was a little brother to me. He came up under me. He was murdered when he was 16. I felt responsible for his death.”
“He was influenced and inspired by myself. I gave him my bullet proof vest when the war was on and there were shootings everyday. I told him to wear it. It was so big and it had a shotgun plate in the middle. The shotgun plate made it obvious and he didn’t like walking round in it. He didn’t wear it. The day he got shot, he got shot just below where the armoured plate would have been, if he had had it on.”
Life has changed so much, and he is now the loving father, fighting for the cause of three baby sons, and definition in his life as a professional fighter and mixed martial artist.
“I was a totally different person then. When I say that, I’ve never been a horrible person. I always felt I was more like Robin Hood rather than a bad guy. I was protecting my family and my brothers. Men have been killing each for centuries. We’ve always been murdering each other. That doesn’t make it right, I know,” he is at pains to point out, between explaining the clothing range – BADR – he started with an investor two years ago. It stands for ‘Be A Dangerous Rival’.
He has studied war, tried to understand the meaning in his DNA, find a justification for the mad world he inhabited. “We had the vikings come over, the Romans came before that and the Celts before. I was somebody fighting from an invasion. That was my mind then. There was a fearlessness of youth. I didn’t think about it. I was still the guy who would open the door for an old lady.”
“In prison I was the same. You’d have small guys holding drugs for gangsters in there who had been caught and weren’t built for it. I had their back. I didn’t have any trouble in there. My method was to be me, who was polite, but I’d always show off my skills in the gym too. I’d be shadow boxing. When you’re in a gym full of alpha males, that’s prison for you. It’s a different culture in there. I had a few fights in there, but they were mainly revenge. Members of other gangs who landed in prison.”
He explained: “There was an incident where I thought someone was responsible for the death of my friend. I arranged a situation where we got him. That was me avenging my friend.” Brutal, belligerent, frighteningly honest. And it really is another life. And one to which he will never return.
There is no time to waste, at 33. Too many nights, too many memories with just a small window with bars, watching the stars and the sky. Tomorrow night here in Milan, Mousah must erase those ghosts of the past once more, in a legal fight, in a cage, with a heavy-handed bruiser from Brazil called Rafael who will be coming to take off his head.
Just as unforgiving as many aspects of his life, but one which will keep him on the right side of the tracks, for all the right reasons.