The land has been flogged. The coffers are dry. And now the UK's scariest debt collector has shown up

Last Friday, at 5.30pm, around 70 people gathered inside the Church of Our Lady Reconciliation on Eldon Street, a stone’s throw from the Eldonian Village. Nervously taking a seat on each of the church’s pews, those inside the hall clutched small pieces of paper, awaiting their turn to post their slip into a box positioned on a pop-up table.

Outside: a far more dramatic scene. Around 15 police officers all in uniform lined the road. The blue lights of police cars lit up the beige bricks of the church. “It was like coming out of an Everton match,” one resident who was in attendance tells me. 

Also present outside the church, sitting in a beaten-up Audi: Anthony McGann Jr. McGann Jr is the son of the village’s founder, the late Tony McGann Sr, as well as the focus of much of our reporting on the Eldonian Village over the past three years. 

But McGann Jr wasn’t alone. Sitting in the parked car with him were two men. One we haven’t been able to identify, but the other, somewhat bizarrely, was the celebrity debt collector turned Netflix star Shaun Smith. Smith first became famous in 2014 when he starred in a Vice documentary which currently has 33 million views on YouTube entitled: ‘UK's Scariest Debt Collector’. Known to have “sprayed up houses with machine guns [and] tortured people” while acting as part of a notorious Liverpool gang, the documentary follows his attempts to leave his old life of crime behind. The documentary was such a hit he got a deal with Netflix and ended up writing a book: The Debt Collector.