Percival was supplying the local community with drugs, Alvin and Malcolm Walsh continued to break into businesses and strip them of their hard-earned assets. Rather than invest the fruits of their criminality into material things, as Percival was doing, Alvin and Walsh preferred to spend them on regular suicidal drinking binges.
Staggering home from a particularly heavy drinking session one night, Malcolm encountered a gang of feral youths hanging around a street corner. ‘Are you all right, mate?’ one of them asked.
As Malcolm turned to face the gang, the thick gold chain that he was wearing could clearly be seen hanging outside his T-shirt. ‘What the fuck has it got to do with you,’ he snarled, before lurching through the door of a fast-food restaurant.
Not knowing Malcolm and assuming, rather unwisely, that he would offer little or no resistance, the gang decided to mug him as he walked out of the restaurant. Five minutes later, clutching a kebab in one hand and a bottle of soft drink in the other, Malcolm stumbled out of the shop.
When the first punch landed on the right side of his face, Malcolm instinctively looked down at his kebab to see if it had been knocked from his grasp. As the second, third and fourth blows hit Malcolm, he realised that these people were not going to allow him to dine in peace. Malcolm grabbed the nearest man to him by the hair and butted him full in the face. More annoyed about having to abandon his kebab than being assaulted by fools, he began tossing his assailants around the street like rag dolls. Those who failed to run at the earliest opportunity were left lying amongst the remains of Malcolm’s late-night meal in the gutter.
Outraged by the audacity of his attackers, Malcolm spent the following day trying to identify them. One name that continually cropped up during Malcolm’s enquiries was that of Russell Jones. In the Southend area, Jones was considered to be a hard man who feared nobody.
Although Jones was not personally involved in the attack, Malcolm soon established that it had been members of his gang who were. Having punished his attackers on the night, Malcolm reasoned – in his own unreasonable way – that he would teach Jones, the man this gang looked up to, a lesson in manners that they and others would all learn from.
Malcolm let it be known that he was looking for Jones and that he was not a happy man. When news of Malcolm’s threats reached Jones, he laughed them off and said that he was looking forward to meeting Malcolm. Soon everybody in the pubs and clubs around Southend were talking about the likely outcome of what undoubtedly would be a bloody encounter. Associates of Malcolm vowed to stand by him and Jones’s gang swore to damage anybody who dared to take them or ‘their man’ on. It was only a matter of time before the threats would end and the blood would begin to flow.
Late one afternoon, a friend of Malcolm’s at the time was attending the offices of the Inland Revenue in Southend. He didn’t notice anything untoward when he entered the building, but two hours later, as he stepped outside, he saw one of the men who had attacked Malcolm standing in front of him. Before he had a chance to speak, he felt a heavy blow to the back of his head, and fell to the ground. As he looked up, he saw the man bearing down on him with a sock that appeared to contain two or three snooker balls. Raising his arm to protect himself, he was struck a further two or three times before he managed to get to his feet. As soon as he did so, his attacker and an accomplice turned and ran.
When Malcolm heard about the liberty that Jones’s gang had taken, he was livid. Rampaging around Southend, Malcolm apprehended one or two members of Jones’s gang and beat them mercilessly. But the man Malcolm really wanted to punish – Russell Jones – was off the scene. He was embroiled in bigger problems of his own.
It had started as a fairly straightforward get-rich-quick
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