Essex Boys, The New Generation (6 page)

‘He wasn’t charged with anything, but his relationship with the police deteriorated further because of this and younger people started talking about Ricky as if he was some sort of gangster. Years later, when he was charged with murdering Dean Boshell, this ridiculous, unwelcome and undeserved reputation that he had been given over the shootings helped to get him convicted. I have honestly never met, seen or spoken to Dean Boshell, so I fail to see how he could have been any sort of real friend of Ricky’s.

‘I felt sad, like everybody else did around here, when his body was found just down the road on the allotments. I never suspected for one moment that my son could have been involved; he certainly never spoke or seemed concerned about the murder in the weeks and months after it had happened. Mothers know if something is troubling their children and I know that around that time Ricky was not acting out of the ordinary or in any other way suspicious. To this day, I refuse to believe that my son took that boy’s life and if I did find out that he had I would not stand by him. I couldn’t.

‘This may sound callous, but when the police first asked Ricky and everybody else who knew Dean Boshell to make a statement about their knowledge of him, Ricky didn’t seem one bit bothered. If he had been involved in the murder, I know that he would have been sick with worry. What human being wouldn’t be?

‘The morning the police came to arrest Ricky for the murder was one of the worst of my life. Both my husband and I had guns put to our heads. Danny, who hadn’t been home long after a work’s party in London, was dragged from his bed naked. Five officers armed with machine guns stood outside the front of the house; thirty officers conducted a fingertip search of our garden and neighbours’ gardens and another twenty officers searched the house. They even drilled holes in our floorboards and put remote-controlled cameras down them, so they could see what was underneath. It really was ridiculous, considering Ricky wasn’t even home and the murder had taken place years earlier.

‘The general behaviour of the police that day was so over the top that one of our neighbours wrote to police headquarters and complained. They did not complain about Ricky or anybody else in our family; they were annoyed about the way the police had conducted themselves. The people in our street won’t have a bad word said about Ricky; they know that he has been wrongfully convicted of these crimes.

‘When Ricky heard that the police were looking for him, he didn’t run away because he had nothing to hide. He telephoned the police station and asked for a convenient time for the officers involved in the case to meet him. When an appointment had been arranged, he walked into the police station with his brother Danny and was promptly arrested.

‘I think that storming our home like that was both pointless and vindictive. After Ricky’s former friend, Damon Alvin, blamed him for the murder that he had been initially charged with, I sat through the trial that followed in total disbelief. The man the prosecution were talking about was not my son. It was lie after lie after lie: the facts were twisted and countless stories were invented to paint the required picture. At one of the first hearings, the facts became so distorted that a member of the defence team got to her feet, threw her hands in the air in despair and asked out loud if she was in a court of law. That isn’t a common event and so I know that it wasn’t just me wondering what the hell was going on. I won’t deny there were things I heard about my son that I didn’t like and wasn’t happy about, but there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever produced to link my son to the murder of Dean Boshell and the other matters he was charged with. Everything hinged on the word of Damon, who had been given access to all of the case papers and who had a year in which to come up with his story. Damon is an intelligent man and so I’m sure it wasn’t hard for him to think up a plausible case against Ricky that fitted the available evidence. I wasn’t in court to hear the verdict. I couldn’t go: the very thought of Ricky going to prison for life was breaking my heart.

‘It was Kevin Walsh’s sister, Michelle, who telephoned me and gave me the news. Don’t ask me what I said or what I did when she said Ricky’s been found guilty because the weeks that followed are a fog of tears and uncontrollable grief. I fell apart. I can’t describe it any other way. So much evidence had been “lost” or proven to be false or non-existent in court that I was convinced that there was no way on earth that Ricky could be convicted of anything. I think the total lack of evidence makes it that much harder to deal with. How could the jury not see what everybody else in that room could see and hear? There was something just not right about the whole process.

‘Looking back on the case, even if somebody else had admitted that they had committed the crimes I don’t think Ricky could have been found not guilty. Even after Ricky was convicted things appeared to have been rehearsed. There was no adjournment to consider what sentence he would be given; it was just read out there and then. People in court said it seemed as if the judge was reading from a prepared statement, but that would mean that he knew the verdict before the jury had given it. I’m sure there’s absolutely no way that could happen in this country.

‘Going to visit Ricky in prison is soul destroying. We try to put on a brave face for each other, but neither of us can hide our pain when it’s time to say goodbye. Going home isn’t even like going home any more, if that makes sense. The police had listened in to our private phone calls for months before Ricky was arrested; I still think that our home is bugged now. I loved this house, but, after what the police have done here, it doesn’t feel like ours any more.

‘My thoughts about our future are moulded by our past. We have decided that we are going to move and start anew when Ricky comes home.

‘I have used those words again: “the past”. They are the two words that dominate my day, my thoughts and my dreams. The past is all I long for. It’s a time when this nightmare didn’t exist and I was surrounded by my family. Dare I think about the future?

‘I will when Ricky’s appeal is granted and the vast amount of new evidence that has been uncovered is presented to the court to secure his release. Because of the fresh evidence that this book has unearthed that day might not be too far away, and that thought alone gives me hope and the strength to keep going.

‘The police held a press conference after the trial and said that they were pleased the case was over. I want everybody involved in wrongly convicting my son to know that this case is far from over: in fact, it’s just beginning. This case will only be closed when the truth about the matters my son has been convicted of have been laid bare, and Ricky walks back through my front door.’

3

  CLOWNS AND ACID TRIPS  

Southend seafront’s neon-lit landscape is somewhere
between hell and a down-at-heel Las Vegas. Like its vastly superior and more glamorous American equivalent, Southend has for many years been the haunt of delinquents, the deranged and anybody else trying to make a name for themselves in the thriving Essex underworld, where life is all about the paper chase. That is: hard cash.

During the 1980s and 1990s, gangs led by men such as Tony Tucker, Mickey Roman and Malcolm Walsh would spend their ill-gotten gains in the numerous bars and nightclubs that litter the area that once adjoined Southend Pier. Tucker and Walsh have since been murdered, Roman blew his own brains out with a handgun, and Southend Pier, once the world’s largest, sank beneath the waves after being destroyed by fire in October 2005. These days the gangs, mainly Burberry-clad chavs, loiter with intent around the Adventure Island theme park, revelling in the fact that their town, their county, is considered by many to be the baddest of Britain’s most notorious badlands. If you dare to ask these snarling morons what it’s like to be an Essex boy, they will proudly boast that, according to legend, Essex is such a magnificent place to be born it was originally chosen by God to be the birthplace of Jesus. Unfortunately, due to its lack of virgins and wise men, God was forced to abandon his dream of bestowing such a coveted title upon his only son and ended up making last-minute arrangements for his debut appearance in Bethlehem. Into this make-believe environment, where visions of grandiose and false hope are the norm, emerged the ultimate wannabe: Damon Alvin.

At the tender age of ten, he was already out of control and had been arrested by the police for arson. Aged 14, he had put away his matches and progressed to committing commercial burglaries, a trade he excelled in. When Alvin left school at the age of 15, he also left home, because he ‘was bored’. The sparkle that lit up his dreary life of crime came in the form of a man several years his senior named Malcolm Walsh.

Alvin had got to know Walsh through Malcolm’s younger brother, Kevin. They both attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School on Manchester Drive, Leigh-on-Sea. Alvin would often visit Kevin’s home after school and it was during these visits that Alvin met and became acquainted with Malcolm. Despite the fact that Alvin was just eleven years of age and Malcolm was seven years his senior, members of the Walsh family have described the pair as inseparable.

Having left school with no job and few prospects, Alvin moved into Malcolm and his wife Bernadette’s flat in Southend. The product of Irish parents, Malcolm was by no means perfect; he was well known to the police and rumoured to be one of Southend’s major drug barons. For many years, Malcolm had been involved in committing burglaries, and during the hours of darkness he taught Alvin everything he knew about his unscrupulous trade.

One night Alvin and Walsh broke into a chemist’s shop on Hamlet Court Road, Westcliff-on-Sea. They gained entry to the premises by climbing the fire-exit stairs to the roof and hacking through a fire door with an axe. Once inside, they began to fill two large rubbish bags with Walkman CD players, perfume and anything else they thought they might be able to sell. Whilst they were in the process of filling the bags, a police car pulled up outside and two officers got out. Walsh and Alvin, fearing they would be apprehended, ran towards the rear of the premises and up the stairs.

Walsh went back out onto the roof, but Alvin dived straight through a ten-foot-wide plate-glass window. When he hit the ground, he saw that he had landed in an alleyway. Shaking shards of glass and debris from his clothing, he looked up to see a very bewildered police officer standing over him.

‘You’re under arrest, son,’ the officer said, as he bent down to grab Alvin.

‘Not unless you can catch me,’ Alvin replied, before jumping to his feet and fleeing. The officer gave chase, but he had no chance of catching the terrified teenager.

Once Alvin was satisfied that the policeman had stopped pursuing him, he walked to the nearby car park where he and Walsh had left their getaway car. The lights on the battered old Capri had been left on and the engine was still running.

‘There were a number of officers in the car park when I got into the vehicle,’ Alvin later recalled. ‘They came rushing towards me when they saw me jump into the car, but I accelerated away before they could reach me. I drove out onto the main road, but they had blocked my escape route with a police car. Fortunately, the officer sitting in the vehicle must have thought I was an innocent member of the public because he reversed out of my way. He obviously hadn’t been contacted by his colleagues to look out for me or the Capri.’

Walsh, meanwhile, remained trapped on the roof. Rather than face arrest, he brandished the axe he had used to breach the door and charged the police. Immediately recognising the difference between stupidity and bravery, the officers stepped aside and watched as Walsh disappeared into the night, waving the axe above his head and howling.

The following day Walsh and Alvin scoured the local paper for news of their near capture and were surprised to read that the police were claiming that a ‘number of bottles of perfume’ had been stolen.

‘We didn’t have any perfume,’ Alvin said. ‘I suppose somebody could have just been walking through the car park, accidentally climbed the fire escape and found the two bags of perfume, but it’s unlikely. I’m certainly not saying the police would have taken the perfume for themselves. There’s no way they’d do that, is there?’

When Alvin wasn’t sleeping, drinking, fornicating or thieving, he was terrorising those who displeased him in the area where he lived. On one occasion, Alvin, Kevin Walsh and another man were walking down London Road in Leigh-on-Sea when a taxi slowed down alongside them in traffic. Alvin was wearing a West Ham United hat and scarf and when the four men in the taxi noticed this they began shouting out obscenities and making offensive hand gestures at him. Having supported a mediocre football team for most of his life, Alvin should have been accustomed to this kind of reaction from strangers, but for reasons known only to himself he got annoyed. Gesticulating with his hands and issuing threats, Alvin approached the taxi, but, before he could reach it, the traffic eased and it continued on its journey. After just a few yards, the taxi suddenly slewed across the road and its four passengers leapt out. Realising that a confrontation was inevitable, the man with Walsh and Alvin ran away. The men who had got out of the taxi began shouting abuse again and threatening Walsh and Alvin, who, although outnumbered, responded in kind. Both sides advanced towards each other, and when Alvin was within striking range one of the men punched him hard in the face. Dazed, but remaining on his feet, Alvin began trading punches with his assailant. Walsh, too, began to fight, and for a while it looked as if he and Alvin were going to be overwhelmed. The man who had punched Alvin had got in close enough to grip him in a headlock and had begun to rain blows down into his face and head.

Alvin claimed that as he was ducking down to protect his face from the onslaught, he ‘noticed that there was a knife on the ground’. When discussing this incident with police many years later, Alvin said, ‘It seemed like a miracle, to be honest.’ Alvin being assisted in a brawl by an act of God may have been believed by Essex police, but I remain rather sceptical about the alleged divine intervention. Perhaps the endless prayers Alvin would undoubtedly have been made to recite at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School were finally being answered.

Regardless of its origins, the knife, which happened to be a mere eleven-inches long, was plunged into the top of Alvin’s opponent’s leg – not once, not twice, but three times.

‘I think he fell, because he let go of me, and I backed away from him,’ Alvin said. ‘I don’t remember him saying anything; it sort of went silent after that.’

That silence was broken not by a heavenly choir singing ‘Hallelujah’ but by the injured man’s friends shouting for help. As they carried their wounded comrade to a nearby taxi rank, Alvin disposed of the knife over a garden wall and ran from the scene with Walsh. The police arrived shortly afterwards and began patrolling the area, looking for the pair. Taxi drivers at a nearby rank were so incensed by Alvin’s cowardly act that they assisted the police in their search.

Fearing capture, Alvin and Walsh made their way home using the network of alleyways that link the roads in that area. The following morning Walsh, Alvin and their friend met up to discuss the incident. Alvin had a black eye and fat lips, and his face was swollen. Still feeling sorry for himself and trying to justify his despicable behaviour, he later recalled, ‘I wasn’t laughing and joking about it, I was hurting. I don’t go around stabbing everyone I meet in the leg.’

After the three had finished discussing the incident, Alvin returned to the garden to retrieve the knife. A cynic might take the view that he was depriving future combatants of miraculously finding an 11-inch-long knife midway through a fight, but Alvin was no doubt acting with only good intentions. The extent of the stabbed man’s injuries is not known.

As he grew older, Alvin’s violent response to anybody who insulted, upset or generally displeased him became part and parcel of his everyday persona.

Living on the same street as Alvin was the Percival family. Alvin and Danny Percival had become firm friends; they were the same age and mixed with the same crowd. Danny’s younger brother, Ricky, had his own circle of friends. For reasons known only to Alvin, he would often try to intimidate or bully this younger group of boys and in particular Ricky. Alvin would twist his arm, push or shove him for no apparent reason and on one occasion he used a set of handcuffs to tether Ricky to a bridge. Danny confronted Alvin after this incident, and when he too was threatened he floored Alvin with a head-butt to ensure he was in no doubt that his bullying would not be tolerated.

Nobody who knew Alvin would suggest that he was some sort of violent Neanderthal man, who dragged his knuckles around the streets of Southend, beating everybody who had the misfortune to cross his path. On the contrary, Alvin was known to be a very shrewd and cunning individual. He selected weak or defenceless people to use violence against simply because he wanted others to think that he was a force to be reckoned with. Alvin was sitting in a café with his friends, reading a copy of my best-selling book,
Essex Boys,
when a friend of mine, Gavin Spicer, first met him.

‘This O’Mahoney is a fucking mug,’ Alvin said to Gavin, whilst prodding the cover of the book with his finger.

‘That fucking mug is my mate,’ Gavin replied. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

Unlike Gavin, Alvin was all mouth and no genuine muscle, so he laughed off his own comment as a joke and buried his head back into the book.

This incident highlights the sad truth about Alvin: despite being a very violent and dangerous individual to some, behind the facade he was no more than a coward.

One evening, Alvin was perched on an elderly man’s garden wall, having an argument with his then girlfriend, Clair Sanders, who many years later would become his wife. Clair handed Alvin a letter, which he screwed up without reading and threw into the well-kept garden. Upon seeing this, the owner of the house came out and complained bitterly about the litter that had been deposited in his garden. He asked Alvin to get off his wall and leave, but he refused to do so.

Irate, and perhaps rather foolishly, the elderly man tried to physically remove Alvin, who responded by giving him a mouthful of abuse before walking off. Later that night, Alvin returned to the house with another man. He knocked on the door and when the unsuspecting occupant opened it, Alvin struck him hard in the face. The force of the blow threw the man back into his doorway. He staggered forward in an effort to regain his balance and fell head first into the garden.

Feeling satisfied with his handiwork, Alvin bowled down the street with his friend, leaving his victim dazed. The man suffered a broken ankle and told police that Alvin had assaulted him with a pickaxe handle, but unsurprisingly, when Alvin was arrested, he denied using any weapon.

Regardless of how the man sustained his injury, Alvin was charged with grievous bodily harm and remanded in custody to await trial. This was his first experience of prison life and he promised the judge, whom he eventually appeared in front of for sentencing, that it would be his last. Believing Alvin would never wish to return to prison after his experience on remand, the judge sentenced him to a two-year period of probation.

The following year Alvin and four others were arrested after two men were found, one having been punched, kicked and beaten with sticks as he lay on the ground and the other stabbed. Alvin was charged with violent disorder and inflicting grievous bodily harm, but the case was discharged after the witnesses and victims failed to appear at court. It’s unclear why the victims changed their minds about testifying against Alvin as they have refused to answer any questions about the matter since. Perhaps they had a genuine change of heart, or God once more intervened on Alvin’s behalf. Whatever the reason, Alvin was freed. One person Alvin couldn’t convince to come round to his way of thinking was Clair Sanders. She had grown tired of Alvin’s constant brushes with the law and, after failing to honour numerous promises to mend his ways, ended their relationship. Distraught and disillusioned, 18-year-old Alvin left Essex in the hope of turning his life around. He washed up on the Aylesbury estate in Walworth, south-east London, where he set up home with Barbara Russell, who was several years his senior.