Fly posters were plastered around the city centre giving details of the arrangements. Hundreds of people lined the streets of Salford as an 18-piece bagpipe band led the horse-drawn funeral procession.
To an outsider looking in, it might have seemed odd that 'nightclub bouncer' Damien Noonan was being laid to rest with all the pomp and ceremony of a mafia don. But those in the know knew who the man really was.
Alongside his brothers Dessie and Dominic, Damien rose from a relatively poor, Irish, working-class upbringing in Whalley Range to become one of Manchester's most infamous crime bosses - the 'gangster of gangsters', as his friend former bare-knuckle boxer and TV personality, Paddy Doherty would later describe him.
