Inside UK’s ‘most notorious’ prison as ex-officer lifts lid on ‘Black Eye Fridays’ & reveals gangsters RAN the wings

A SCREW at one of Britain’s most notorious prisons has lifted the lid on what life is really like inside.

“Black Eye Fridays” and gangsters running the wing were just some of the horrors prison guard Neil Samworth witnessed.

After a decade of pounding the corridors of HMP Strangeways, Neil retired but the shocking memories remain.

He told : “At Strangeways we used to call Fridays “black eye Fridays” because that was the day debts were called in.

“People who owed had to go the canteen and deliver a tray of goodies to the person they owed.

“If you did not pay up you got a black eye.”

The Manchester-based Cat A prison became one of the most notorious in Britain following a series of deadly riots in 1990.

One prisoner perished and a screw died of heart failure in blood-thirsty chaos that erupted between April 1-25 that year.

The devastation wreaked by inmates forced it to be rebuilt at a cost of £80 million, completed in 1994.

Neil says while he worked there he was forced to co-operate with the likes of now-murdered mobster Paul Massey to maintain order on the wing.

He said: “You would just ask them to have a quiet word, and use their clout to settle things down.”

And despite some prisons being filled to the brim with infamous serial killers and rapists – the worst offenders are folk you’ve never heard of.

He explined: “The big gangsters just end up with cleaning jobs.

“You would never know who they were. They want to do easy jail.”

Notable inmates of HMP Strangeways included Nottingham terror attacker Valdo Calocane and Olivia Pratt-Korbel’s killer Thomas Cashman.

Find out more about Neil Samworth .