What happened to the original ASBO kids? As Andy Burnham introduces new form of antisocial behaviour order, a reformed hoodlum who terrorised his estate aged 12 admits: 'It was a badge of honour, I was rewarded for bad behaviour'

Aged just 12, Danny Oakley and his younger brother Ricky appeared on national television. Unfortunately for them it was The Jeremy Kyle Show.Dubbed variously ‘The Brothers Grim’ and ‘The Asbros’, the shaven-haired, feral-looking pair had achieved notoriety for being among the youngest children in the country to be given an Anti-Social Behaviour Order when they were finally brought to book in 2006.Their 70-offence reign of terror in Wolverhampton included throwing knives, starting fires and letting down tyres - making everyone’s life on their council estate an utter misery.Almost exactly 20 years on and today Danny has a unique perspective on how effective these civil orders - introduced with great fanfare by the Labour government of Tony Blair in 1998 and unceremoniously dumped 16 years later - really are.‘I always tell people that if I had been sent to prison as a kid I would have learnt sooner,’ he told the Daily Mail last week.‘Because you don’t know what freedom is like until it has been taken away from you. When you cause anti-social behaviour you are taking away someone else’s freedom: if you intimidate an old lady it means she can’t go out to the shops, her whole life is traumatised and she is suffering.‘So you have to ask, what did I, who was terrorising that old lady, get for it? I got rewarded – for bad behaviour,’ he says.The ‘reward’ he refers to is special treatment. The ASBOs he and 11-year-old Ricky received may have banned them from their normal haunts and threatened them with being sent to a young offenders’ institution, but at the time he saw them as a ‘badge of honour’. Aged just 12, Danny Oakley (pictured) and his younger brother Ricky appeared on national television. Unfortunately for them it was The Jeremy Kyle ShowMoved to a special school, Danny received one-on-one teaching and weekly taxpayer-funded outings to theme parks like Alton Towers - trips his troubled, low-income family never could have afforded.As a result, the 32-year-old says, instead of his misbehaviour being nipped in the bud, he continued offending for the best part of a decade until he was finally jailed for 28 days in 2014, having missed a probation session following a burglary conviction.‘That changed me as a person because I saw what life would be like if I continued the path that I had gone down,’ he said.‘These orders make it look like society is being proactive, that it is doing something. But what’s really needed is tougher action, not just a piece of paper. It is like putting a plaster on a deep cut knowing it needs stitches.’To that background it is perhaps unsurprising that he – and others – fear that the Labour government’s introduction last week of a new version of ASBO-like civil orders are likely to be as unsuccessful as their predecessors.Called Respect Orders, they allow police, councils and other agencies to impose town centre bans and curfews for harassment, intimidating behaviour, drug use, littering and street drinking.They differ from ASBOs in that they can only be imposed on adults, but anyone breaching them can face criminal sanctions, including custodial sentences.‘Unchecked, anti-social behaviour blights our communities,’ said Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary. ‘But it is not inevitable and I won’t accept it. For too long, we have lacked the powers we need to deal with this problem properly. From today, that changes: authorities will be able to take tough action against these offenders.’But critics question how often such action will ever be taken in reality, given the pressures on the police, the courts and the nation’s prisons, given the fact that short-term offenders are currently being released from prison to free up much-needed spaces.John Campion, the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner for West Mercia, described them as a ‘toothless tiger’ because the court system was ‘broken’ and jails full. Almost exactly 20 years on and today Danny (pictured) has a unique perspective on how effective these civil orders - introduced with great fanfare by the Labour government of Tony Blair in 1998 and unceremoniously dumped 16 years later - really are‘There’s a real concern that this doesn’t fix the system and I struggle to see the significant improvement that they will deliver,’ he said.It is a point echoed by Danny, who added: ‘The government is letting people out of prison as there’s not enough room. If I was still of a criminal mindset I would be thinking I could get away with what I want, not worrying about getting a Respect Order.’And the trouble is that there’s a depressingly large bank of evidence to suggest the journey from low-level nuisance to serious criminal is unlikely to be broken by an ASBO, Respect Order, or whatever it’s called.While Danny has managed to keep himself – relatively – trouble-free in the past decade, he is very much in the minority.The stories of what happened to the other ‘ASBO kids’ of the Nineties follow a mostly depressing, but predictable, pattern.Danny hasn’t seen his brother Ricky for more than ten years, but says the last he heard, he was still regularly in trouble with the police.Then there were the McCann boys - a band of five brothers who helped turn Greater Manchester into the ASBO capital of Britain after ‘terrorising’ their local community, in the late Nineties.With many neighbours too terrified to speak out, council bosses resorted to CCTV cameras to gather evidence, filming them throwing bricks and vandalising property.In 1999, aged 14, Joseph McCann and two of his brothers received ASBOs, banning them from Beswick, a favoured stomping ground in the suburbs of the city.While burglaries dropped and takings in the local shopping precinct recovered in the aftermath, the civil order had no impact on McCann’s criminal bent, who only broadened his geographical horizons.In 2008, he was jailed for aggravated burglary after forcing his way into an 85-year-old man’s home in Bedford and threatening him with a knife, serving more than eight years.Following his release he was again arrested for burglary in August 2017 and given a three-and-a-half year jail term.But after 18 months behind bars, he was released early by the authorities in error, allowing him to embark on one of the most horrific crime sprees in British criminal history - a 15-day cocaine and vodka-fuelled rampage of rape, violence and abduction, that saw him target 11 victims aged 11 to 71 in Greater Manchester, Ramsbottom and London.He convinced one woman he met in a bar in Manchester to invite him back to her home, where he tied her up with a hairdryer cord before raping her 17-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son.The family’s four-hour ordeal only came to an end when the girl jumped naked from a first-floor bedroom and ran to her grandmother’s house to raise the alarm.The teenager said in a statement to police: ‘You know when you can see inside someone’s eyes and you know they are pure evil.’McCann received 33 life sentences following his trial at the Old Bailey in 2019. Jailing him, the trial judge described him as a ‘classic psychopath’ and said he should serve a minimum of 40 years in jail.Also on the ASBO roll of dishonour were Tyler Williams and his young brother Shamen who, like the Oakleys and the McCanns, came from a problem family.They were aged 13 and ten in 2003 when they were served with ASBOs and ‘named and shamed’ by police for swearing, abusing and making obscene gestures to people around the seafront in Folkestone, Kent.It was the start of a life of criminality, culminating in 2023 with the pair being jailed for their involvement in two separate attacks in one night involving the use of machetes.Shamen, whose Facebook profile describes him as a ‘full-time scumbag’, and Tyler were both jailed for 13 years.Of course, the reality is that from the moment they were introduced, breaches of ASBOs were commonplace.Of the 24,500 that were issued, more than half were contravened at least once. In some places, the figure was as high as 90 per cent. And when an ASBO was breached, it was done so on average five times. Yet few of these resulted in custodial sentences.Amongst those undeterred by his ASBO, was Anthony Kennedy – better known by the nickname Ratboy.So called after being found hiding from police in a ventilation shaft, he received his first caution at the age of ten for terrorising the Byker Wall estate in Newcastle in the 1990s.Between the ages of 11 and 13 he was arrested 16 times and appeared in court three times for offences including burglary, theft, taking a car without consent and other driving offences.At 14, he admitted burglary and headbutting a policeman in the face during a campaign of terror against elderly women.He was sentenced a further three times for burglary at the ages of 20, 24 and 26. Another burglary followed in 2018, with three more years jail time.He is understood to be back behind bars now, having been jailed for five years in 2024 for two more burglaries. The court heard Kennedy had 100 offences on his record, including 72 for theft or similar.As for Alfie Hodgin, who was a ten-year-old primary school pupil when he received an ASBO in 2014 for terrorising locals in Birkenhead, Merseyside, he went on to become a teenage drug gang boss.Following convictions and prison time for theft, criminal damage, assault and possessing a blade, he started dealing Class A drugs for a county lines gang but then stole the phone they supplied him with, plus the drugs, to set up his own operation.The response was ruthless - four men set about him with machetes, leaving him with 27 wounds. After two weeks in hospital, in 2022 he was locked up for two years after admitting possessing heroin and crack with intent to supply.Then there’s Robert White, the baby-faced yob who terrorised the seaside town of Weston-Super-Mare in Somerset. In 2000 he was stripped of his right to anonymity after continually breaching the ASBO which he was handed at the age of 12.Within three years he had racked up a further 160 alleged offences and went on to be jailed when he was just 15.White then graduated to adult crime and was locked up in 2008 for threatening a shopkeeper with a machete.In total he has been in court 33 times over 75 separate charges – culminating in a six-year sentence in 2016 after he and three fellow thugs stormed a house armed with an axe and a machete, beat up residents and stole a car.Even for those determined to turn over a new leaf after years of law-breaking, staying out of trouble does not come easy.Craig Fletcher was 15 when he became the first youth in Redcar and Cleveland to be slapped with an ASBO in 2001.Three years later he was jailed for asking a ‘naive and vulnerable’ deaf man to give him lift early one morning - before violently robbing him of his car, which was later found burned out. Other violent assaults followed.But in 2017 he told his local newspaper that his criminal career was behind him and he wanted to focus on his young family.‘I’ve changed my ways, and everyone deserves a chance at turning over a new leaf,’ he said.The following year – on Boxing Day - he and an accomplice carried out the brutal murder of 35-year-old Gavin Barnes, who suffered 105 injuries including bone fractures and broken ribs. Footage of the violence, that lasted more than three hours, was recorded on Fletcher’s own phone. He was jailed for life with a minimum term of 25 years.As for Daniel Oakley, even his efforts to keep out of trouble have not been entirely successful.But in April 2023 he pleaded guilty at Dudley Magistrates’ Court to assaulting a police officer after a boozy night out.Danny, who is currently living on benefits, was spared jail and ordered to pay compensation to his victim of £75, and costs of £135.‘What happened was down to my drink being spiked, my behaviour that night was out of character, and I apologised profusely to the court and the officer’, he says of the incident.He has since come out as gay, and blames a lot of his youthful offending on ‘not understanding himself as a person’‘I suffer from anxiety and depression, I have a personality disorder, I am very complex, and at times I hate the world. At those times I have a real problem with authority but I am trying to be a good person, and I am a much better than the terrible kid I once was.’Given his belief that it’s a place he would have reached sooner had he actually been punished for the laws he so regularly broke, it’s a point the authorities would do well to consider as they launch the latest incarnation of the ASBO.