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Snuggstown had not been well planned. Now this may sound contradictory, but considerthis: the new town of Snuggstown was twenty-five years old. There was no cinema in Snuggstown. There was no park in Snuggstown. There was no rail service to Snuggstown. There were only three children’s playgrounds in Snuggstown. There was one police station in Snuggstown, and at any given time there were just twelve officers on duty. This meant one officer to approximately nine thousand people. So it was that Snuggstown was impossible to police. The police had, in fact, long ago become spectators to the goings-on in the place. The gangster community of Chicago, New York and the other major cities of America had learned in the 1920s that to make crime a sensitive political issue was not a good thing, so they split the cities into specific areas over which individual gangs or families had reign. This stopped inter-gang squabbling, kept crime out of the newspapers and thus off of the politicians’ table. Since then most American crime has been organised like this – hence ‘organised crime’.
    In Snuggstown, organised crime meant Simple Simon Williams. Simon was now lord of anything illicit that moved in Snuggstown – be it drugs, protection, prostitution and the fencing of all major transactions. Simon Williams was Lord of the Manor. There were of course other drug dealers in Snuggstown, and Simon tolerated them – but only because their wholesale supply came from him. As he had predicted fifteen years previously, Simon Williams owned Snuggstown. The two henchmen who had started with him, Teddy and Bubbles Morgan, were now his lieutenants. They did Williams’s running and fetching, and in return he paid them well and ignored their own little scams, such as the mickey-mouse shop protection racket they ran. It gavethem a few bob, he thought, and it made them feel important.
    Mind you, nothing could ever make them look important. At that moment Bubbles Morgan looked decidedly unimportant. The thirty-three-year-old man stood in a newsagent’s shop reading a children’s comic. He laughed aloud. His brother Teddy, standing just fifteen feet away from Bubbles at the newsagent’s counter, was not laughing, and neither was the newsagent Teddy was talking to.
    ‘Listen, Mr McArthur, it’s community insurance. You pay the insurance and me and Mr Williams will make sure you don’t have any trouble from the community, okay?’ Teddy had a scowl on his face as he outlined the deal.
    ‘I’ve had to close early every night this week. My wife has been sick, you see …’ the newsagent pleaded.
    ‘Tell me, Mr McArthur, do I look like a fuckin’ doctor?’ Teddy extended his hand.
    Without further comment or argument the newsagent opened the drawer of the till, picked out some notes and put them into Teddy’s hand. Before he had even closed the till Teddy had put the notes in his pocket and turned his back. As he walked past his brother on the way out he had to stop and retrace his steps. He tapped Bubbles on the shoulder and signalled him to come on. Bubbles first went to put the comic down and then changed his mind. He rolled it up, stuffed it in his inside pocket, smiled at the newsagent and they both left.
St Thomas’s Boxing Club, 1.00pm
    St Thomas’s Boxing Club had been turning young Northside Dubliners into boxers since its foundation in nineteen sixty-one. In its thirty-five-year history it had turned out six Olympic boxers. These Olympians were commemorated in the club building itself with life-size portraits down the south wall of the building. Well, actually, five life-size portraits and one larger-than-life portrait of their greatest hero, Sparrow McCabe. Over that period, of course, trainers came and trainers went. Committees changed, but unfortunately, through the usual lack of funding, very little of the decor had, though the equipment over the years had been updated.
    If ever proof were needed that old boxers never die, one