The Top G World Cup

Dear readers — Bear with us.

Here at The Post, we pride ourselves on watching things so you don’t have to: interminable council debates; city region press announcements; episodes four and five of The Cage. And we also keep an eye on all the influencer trends plaguing our fair city. 

One that’s risen to prominence recently is that of “the G.” Once standing for “gangster”, the “G” is anyone who’s adopted a vaguely Tony Montana aesthetic, affected (or earned) a “hard man” persona, and can project these traits towards social media stardom — either on their own platforms or each others’ “true crime” podcasts. 

We’ll admit, it was a discussion on Reddit that piqued our interest in this recently — though it’s something we’ve covered before. And so, with everything getting a bit serious of late, we decided we’d spend a Wednesday afternoon pitting all of the city’s social media tough guys up against each other.

Not all are actual criminals, we ought to keenly stress. But we had to find out: who is Liverpool’s top G? In honour of the actual World Cup, read on to find out our favourite tough guy personalities, the ones we have to thank for Liverpool’s undue rep as an eccentric crime-ridden dystopia. 

A quick campaign note: While today’s piece is clearly silly nonsense, we do sometimes do our jobs properly. Our campaign to pay off our final legal bill accrued from defeating Lawrence Westgaph in court has just edged over the halfway stage.

In less than a week more than 150 people have backed us — roughly half of those joining as new members (welcome!) and another half upgrading their membership (thank you!). 

The total amount we spent fighting Westgaph was £75,000, and if you’d like to know more about what happened you can click here. That’s put a huge dent in our operations, so if we can get 300 people to back us in two weeks it would help no end.

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Without further ado, brace for the Top G World Cup....

Quarter finals

Darren Gee vs Sam Walker 

For reputation alone, Darren Gee has to be one of the tournament favourites. Twenty years ago, he and his brother Daniel turned the Grizedale estate into something resembling the Hamsterdam open-air drug market from The Wire. Now, he’s a regular feature on YouTube, bringing clicks to channels like “Scouse SitOff” and Weston “Bad News” Hughes. 

One of his main rivals is Liverpool Echo favourite Sam Walker. Sam first hit the headlines in 2018 after fleeing to Sierra Leone to escape, and then mock, Merseyside Police. With over 130 offences, Walker certainly has the street cred, and has leveraged it into a successful TikTok operation with 140k followers.

These two were actually meant to meet up for a straightener last year, but the in-person barney never materialised. (Sam was recently detained in Vietnam for unknown reasons.) In our virtual tournament opener, Sam impresses early on with his wily use of TikTok, but he’s a little too polished for our criteria. Darren’s record — someone Merseyside Police set up an entire task force to deal with back in the day — carries him through. 

Winner: Darren Gee with a controlled substance performance.

Billy Moore vs Sicarius McGrath

Billy Moore, who Laurence profiled and upset a few months back (see Moore’s unseemly Facebook rant below), is a self-styled citizen journalist who now spends his days travelling to Dunkirk to film migrants in the channel, having originally built a successful podcast on the back of his time in a Thai jail. Sicarius McGrath, as well as having the better name, is also the harder of the two, as evidenced by an Echo headline in 2016, describing him as a violent “Silent Assassin” pimp who kept wads of dirty £20 notes with his pet snake. No, Moore can’t boast a track record that exciting (not even the time he missed his own film premiere because he was busy being locked up for burgling his neighbour) but where he really comes into his own is with his online status. Put simply, Moore has simply better leveraged his persona into appearances in Reach PLC headlines and getting other hardmen to appear on his podcast. 

It was after a spate of tragic killings a few years ago that McGrath became most prominent, bemoaning the lost “moral code” of the ganglands. But he has since faded in the background, failing to appear in an Echo headline since 2024 (‘Scouse gangster wanted to carry out deadly terror attack - but one thing stopped him’). Moore, meanwhile, goes from strength to strength, with 400k subscribers, recent Youtube hits like ‘GLASGOW: This bloodythirsty scum came at me from behind’, and the most recent Echo appearance just a few weeks back, when he was filmed scrapping with Jamie Carragher’s brother in a David Lloyd gym. He breezes into the semis.

Winner: Billy Moore at a canter

Shaun Smith vs Badboy Beaman

A close contest. Here at The Post we’ve had our own run-ins with Shaun Smith, who once starred in Vice’s extraordinarily popular documentary, ‘The UK’s scariest debt collector’, but who now goes around pestering journalists on behalf of friend-of-The-Post Anthony McGann Jr (of Eldonian Village fame, of course).

It has to be said, Smith is a greatly diminished figure, his book deals and Netflix appearances well behind him, but then at least he doesn’t prefix his name with ‘Badboy’. While Smith now spends his time doing battle with small charities in the courts, Beaman is usually found “urban exploring”, and although he does have some “hard man” cred in the boxing ring, that’s about the extent of it. A car crash of a contest, but Smith edges it.

Winner: Shaun Smith

Lawrence Kenwright vs Stephen French 

Some may question our inclusion of Liverpool property mogul Lawrence Kenwright on this list. He’s not a convicted criminal like some of his opponents, but a quick scroll on his Instagram and you’ll soon see that his well-honed aesthetic makes him fit right in. As the founder of property firm Signature Living, over the past two decades Kenwright has enjoyed the high life — regularly posting pictures of himself on flashy holidays, in boxing gyms and next to fighters like Jack McGann (and even Billy Moore). He fell from grace in 2007 but built his way back up with his tasteful hotel interiors and architectural prowess. He also shares with Moore, Gee and Walker a strange (not necessarily exploitative) preoccupation with the poor and homeless. 

Despite it all, Kenwright would struggle to score against this round’s ring-mate: Stephen French. A former gangster colloquially known as ‘The Devil’, French spent much of the 80s and 90s violently extorting drug dealers across the city, building a reported fortune of over £20mn. Alas, that career came to a close in the 2000s, with French parting ways with his ‘Devil’ moniker and becoming a Christian preacher. Regardless of this change of heart, he’d still take the trophy from Kenwright.

Winner: Stephen French steals the glory

Semi finals

Darren Gee vs Billy Moore 

An intriguing clash, as the two men did come face to face very recently, at last month’s Britain First rally in Birmingham. Moore looked seriously rattled as Gee asked why he’d “failed to meet” him after he’d made such a request, responding weakly to inquire of Gee what his “beef” is. But once again, Moore’s breezy command of his Facebook page puts him at an advantage.

Had these men met in Grizedale way back when, Moore’s house would probably be getting firebombed, but Gee is shakier online (Echo premium readers will know this from the recent piece: ‘Darren Gee called a ‘bacon’ by killer as he’s hauled before judge for TikTok videos’). And so it proved, despite flapping around like an inflatable man outside a car dealership during the Gee confrontation, Moore reclaimed the narrative by posting a long video of his day out in Birmingham, entitled: “Darren Gee wants a straightener”. Some 300k people watched it, many telling Moore he’d handled the situation well in the comments section.

Winner: Moore makes the final

Shaun Smith vs Stephen French

Perhaps the toughest tie in the whole competition, if it came down to media appearances then Smith’s Vice documentary would edge it, even over French’s turn on Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men. But of course, today’s tournament is about much more than that. 

Despite three decades passing since his heyday, The Devil has pushed through irrelevance and emerged at the other end with a decent social media following, most of whom seem willing to endure his long, winding Facebook rants and appearances on reformed criminals’ podcasts. Just this week, Frenchy shared his 3,000 word magnum opus — telling his haters he puts bullies “to sleep”; “I’d make you shit your pants”; and “I am no pussy I am no informer boy”. Despite clarifying that, as a preacher, he does not resort to swear words, he also recently threatened to take a racist’s weapon from him, “shove it up you [sic] arse and turn you into a vanilla ice lolly.” Not one to end on a bad note, The Devil also proudly shared his latest accomplishment on Tuesday: “I also achieved a personal milestone this week by winning my first ever golf game”. Go get ‘em, Frenchy. 

Winner: The Devil goes through. His rambling Facebook posts place Smith into a coma.

Final

Billy Moore vs Stephen French 

We at The Post are cheering on Billy here after he boosted our own ‘content’ with his angry replies and shares when we profiled him a few months ago. But Frenchy has the heart of the people. Between his Thai boxing, book authorship and podcasting, Billy’s no slouch, but Frenchy’s polymathic knowledge of shotokan karate, AI-generated memes and high-level theology make him the most intriguing personality. 

Even after all these years, he's still Liverpool's toppest Top G.