Essex Boys, The New Generation (7 page)

The Aylesbury estate, known locally as ‘the Bronx’, is made up in the main of high-rise flats and is often used by politicians as a typical example of urban decline. A contradiction of style and sorrow, it is considered to be an area of extreme social disadvantage. Alvin, a Jack-the-Lad Essex Boy, didn’t quite command the same level of respect on the estate as he had enjoyed in sleepy Leigh-on-Sea.

His wafer-thin hopes of starting a new trouble-free life also failed him. Travelling home through the Rotherhithe tunnel one evening, with his brother Darren at the wheel, Alvin’s car was stopped by police, who suspected that it might have been stolen. When the officers searched the vehicle, they found a stun gun in Alvin’s sports bag. When asked what he was doing in possession of a prohibited weapon, Alvin said that it was not for his personal use and that he had merely purchased it for his partner, Barbara, because they lived in the Bronx.

With the very real possibility of a return to prison hanging over his head, Alvin abandoned his quest for salvation and returned to Essex. When Alvin appeared in court, he was given a conditional discharge and the weapon was confiscated. The news that welcomed Alvin upon his return to Essex did not please him. Malcolm, the man he idolised, was having an affair with his ex-girlfriend, Clair.

Those who knew Alvin at that time say that he tried to put on a brave face and laugh about it, but deep down he was a cauldron of boiling anger and jealousy.

By all accounts, Barbara is a thoroughly decent woman, who did all she could to make things work with him. Unfortunately, her hopes for happiness were dashed by Alvin’s overwhelming desire to become a ‘somebody’. The life he chose to lead brought the same sort of trouble to her door as Clair had endured. Trouble had also arrived at Malcolm’s door when his long-suffering wife, Bernadette, found out about his extra-marital affair with Clair and she kicked him out of her home. Due to circumstance rather than choice, Malcolm moved into a flat and was soon joined by his mistress. When Alvin learned that Malcolm and Clair had become an item, he resigned himself to the fact that he had lost his teenage sweetheart and did his sorry best to make his relationship with Barbara work.

His habitual offending, however, continued to be a constant source of disagreement between the couple. Barbara realised that it would only be a matter of time before Alvin was imprisoned, but, despite her protests, he didn’t seem to care.

Aged 20, Alvin was convicted of burglary, having robbed a clothes shop, and aged 24, he was charged with burglary at an MOT station. Like Barbara, the judge sentencing him realised that the threat of prison held no fear for Alvin and so he decided that a reminder of what life inside was like might help him to see the error of his ways. Alvin was sentenced to a term of nine months’ imprisonment.

Prison, as has been proved time and time again, is looked upon as an occupational hazard rather than a deterrent to young men like Alvin. As soon as he was released, he was back committing crime with his mentor Malcolm Walsh.

Like Alvin, Ricky Percival had been forging a contrasting but equally criminal lifestyle for himself. He had tried to follow in his brother’s footsteps, training hard at the gym, but his desire to look and feel good about himself was hampered by his lack of finances. The menial jobs his dyslexia attracted were never going to pay for the lifestyle he craved and so, like many foolish adolescents, he began to sell drugs to boost his income. Unlike Alvin, Percival’s warm and friendly personality made him easy to deal with and he had no shortage of customers who were prepared to buy from him. In the gyms where nightclub bouncers and their ilk go to train, Percival soon met and befriended many ‘useful’ individuals in the drug world. These people, who had extremely valuable contacts in the pubs and clubs where drugs were sold around Southend, soon helped Percival’s illegal business to prosper. Before he was 20 years of age, the boy who teachers had said would never do well for himself was wearing designer clothes, enjoying foreign holidays and driving top-of-the-range cars.

Whilst 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 scheme and ended with a handsome 28-year-old man being grotesquely disfigured and partially blinded. Darren Kerr, a characteristic Essex wide boy, was approached by a London-based fraudster named Michael Boparan, who wanted to know if he would be interested in getting involved with a bank scam, which he said was set to rake in millions.

Kerr contacted his friend, Russell Jones, and asked if he could help set the swindle up in return for a percentage of the profits. Jones agreed and had soon recruited friends who worked at a Southend bank to copy screen prints of credit cards. Once done, the screen-print copies were given to Kerr, who, in turn, passed them on to Boparan for use in cloning credit cards belonging to victims living as far away as New York City. Kerr was paid a percentage of the value of the credit cards, which was estimated by police to be as much as £100,000. It wasn’t long before the fraud began to reward Boparan and Kerr handsomely, but not all the money Kerr received was, in fact, his.

The agreement had been that Kerr would pay Jones out of any monies that he received. The whole operation was simple, ingenious even, but it relied upon trust – a rare commodity amongst the criminal fraternity in Essex.

The fraud was discovered by accident when a police constable noticed an untaxed car outside Boparan’s Regent’s Park flat in London. Upon closer scrutiny, a large quantity of incriminating material could be seen inside the vehicle and items were subsequently found in Boparan’s flat, including a credit-card imprinter, a number of blank plastic cards and confidential bank print-outs.

The police raids that followed terminated the operation before Jones had been paid a single penny. Pissed off might be an understatement when describing how Jones must have felt. His mood deteriorated even further when he read in a local newspaper that the bank claimed to have lost £200,000 in the fraud. When he asked about this figure, Kerr claimed that it was rubbish and said that he had not been paid any money either. In truth, Kerr had actually done very well out of the scam. The cash he had received had helped finance a new Range Rover and a top-of-the-range stereo.

As the police investigation gathered momentum, Jones was arrested and held on remand in Brixton prison. There, fate played a hand. Jones met Boparan, who revealed that he had, in fact, paid Kerr a total of £8,000. Jones contacted Kerr and gave him ample opportunity to pay what was due, but every request made was met with a denial. Jones decided that he wasn’t going to beg or plead for his money; instead, he would discuss the matter personally with Kerr as soon as he was released. Jones’s first port of call when that day arrived was the home of Kerr’s girlfriend. Her father answered the door to Jones’s insistent knocking and was told to tell Kerr that he had four days to pay up – or else.

Determined not to share his ill-gotten gains, Kerr ignored the numerous telephone calls he received and did all he could to avoid meeting Jones. This blatant snub infuriated Jones. He told everybody who associated with Kerr that if he didn’t pay him what was due he was either going to cut him up or grass him to the police for the bank fraud.

One Monday morning, Kerr was on his way to London when he decided to make a call from a public telephone near the Circus Tavern in Purfleet, Essex. As Kerr walked from his car to the kiosk, he had no inkling of the horror that was about to visit him. It was broad daylight and the phone box was adjacent to a busy main road, so Kerr thought nothing of the Mercedes containing two men that pulled up alongside him.

Suddenly, the telephone-box door was flung open and, as Kerr turned, he was sprayed in the face with acid. Dropping the handset, he raised his hands to his face and began to scream in agony, as the corrosive fluid burned through his skin and eyes and filled his lungs with noxious fumes. Moments later, his attackers – Russell Jones and friend Tommy Watkins – manhandled Kerr to their car and sped away from the scene.

Kerr pleaded with his kidnappers to let him wash his melting face with water, but they refused. They told Kerr that they intended to drive him around until the acid had eaten deep into his flesh. As Kerr screamed in fear and agony, the men demanded payment of £10,000, which they claimed was owed to Jones for the bank scam. Kerr repeatedly denied owing Jones anything, which only infuriated the men further. ‘Tommy has got a gun on you,’ Jones hissed, ‘and you’re fucking lucky you haven’t been shot.’

Terrified for his life and in excruciating pain, Kerr managed to open the rear door of the car as it pulled up at a set of traffic lights and throw himself out onto the road. As other motorists went to Kerr’s aid, the Mercedes sped away. The vehicle was later found abandoned, having been stolen earlier that day.

Kerr remained on the ground for several minutes, writhing in agony, before being led to a nearby garage where his face was doused with water. An ambulance was called and Kerr was rushed to Billericay hospital, which is equipped with a specialist burns unit.

Describing the attack, Kerr said, ‘Even amongst the criminal fraternity there are certain rules. What happened to me broke every one of them. Throwing acid into my face was a horrible, evil thing to do. Every time I look in the mirror, there is a reminder of what was done to me. How can I forget or forgive? I would never have believed that the body could feel so much pain. And then there is the mental pain as well. My face has been marked, and so has my life.’

One side of Kerr’s face was reduced to a mass of angry red scars. He was blinded in his left eye and doctors explained that he faced years of painful surgery to reconstruct his features. Despite the severity of the attack, Kerr refused to assist the police because he feared that Jones would seek even more violent retribution if he did so.

‘I want to survive,’ he said. ‘I want to retain my dignity. What happened was awful. But I am still alive.’