THE Shower Gang’s glamourisation of their violent lifestyle on YouTube - highlighted by News Shopper last week - is a far cry from the truth, according to one ex-gang member.

Junior Smart originally planned to go to university and become a doctor, but was sucked into gang activity while in his 20s and struggling to pay the bills.

At the age of 26 he was jailed for 12 years for Class A drug offences but turned his life around in prison.

He says: “Some of my old friends ended up in prison too but a lot ended up dead.”

Junior, now 35, says: “I never actually saw myself as being in a gang - I saw myself as in a group of friends.

“I used to lose my temper. I never really had a boiling point I just used to switch. My friends used to hype that up - they used to love it.”

News Shopper: The Shankers and Gunners branch of Shower

He says gangs operate like businesses with a main boss, supervisors and people on the frontline.

Junior says: “People in the middle and even at the bottom don’t want to take a risk on taking drugs from A to B. So they recruit young people to do it for them.

“People will say they’ll look after you. They’ll say ‘let me buy you those trainers’, and offer you a sense of what it’s like to be in a family.

“But at the end of the day they’ll say ‘I want something from you’. That’s how people get drawn into it.

“If you’ve got a young person who’s from a broken family or lives in a poor estate, they want money, trainers or respect. That’s what this business deals with.

“That’s what we see with gangs like Shower on YouTube - it’s about getting respect.”

Junior is now a team leader and founder of the SOS Gangs project, a group which has worked in Lewisham schools to deglamourise gangs.

He explains: “It’s about involving them in creating solutions for themselves and giving them one-to-one support “They think it’s really difficult to leave a gang but I’ve proven people wrong over and over again. It’s easy.”

For more on the project visit stgilestrust.net-genie.co.uk or their YouTube channel at youtube.com/user/SOSProject News Shopper: Showah members pose with a baseball bat

SHOWER GANG

Members of the Shower, or Showah, gang - are a younger off-shoot of New Cross’s notorious Ghetto Boys.

The Ghetto Boys originated from the Woodpecker Estate, known by members as the Ghetto Estate, the site of a spate of murders in recent years, many of which remain unsolved.

Over the years, in part because of the demolition of all but one of the Woodpecker’s high-rise blocks, these gang members have spread further through the borough to places such as Downham.

Those in the gang often wear a blue scarf signifying allegiance to the ‘blue borough’ of Lewisham, so-called because of the colour of its bins.

Shower members, a reference to ‘showering’ rivals with bullets, are in conflict with another gang who call themselves Anti-Shower and regard areas like Catford as their territory.

That feud led to the death of Johnson Ndjoli on the Woodpecker in 2008 - an innocent student who was wrongly targeted by Shower members and run over, shot and stabbed.

Other murders on the estate include that of Nathan Allen in May, Nathan Williams in 2009, Jason Gayle-Bent in 2006 and both Peter Buahin and Orville Davidson in 2005.