I have heard of 'breaking bad' in the context of Southern slang but it has a surprising and older Wall Street reference:
One of the earliest instances of the phrase appearing in the New York
Times backs up the definition (to turn violent unnecessarily) and
history (black, Southern, 1970s) suggested by those lexicographers. In
a 1980 excerpt from John Langston Gwaltney’s Drylongso, a
Self-Portrait of Black America, an oral history of African-American
communities; in describing his view of race relations, a black man
from rural Missouri told the author that “if a white man was to come
over here and ask me anything, I wouldn’t break bad with him.”
But, while that idiom matches the one appearing in many dictionaries,
there’s an even earlier appearance of the expression with a very
different sense to it, suggesting the violence now implied by the
phrase came later. In a 1919 overview of goings-on on Wall Street, the
writer suggested that “the average speculator will not take a position
in the highly speculative industrials for over Sunday, but because he
can’t stay out of the market altogether, gets into the rails at the
end of the week in hope of making a successful turn and with
confidence that if things ‘break bad’ over Sunday rails will feel the
shock less than the industrials.”
That older use of “break bad,” meaning “to go bad,” requires little
knowledge of regional slang, and it makes enough sense that anyone
might come up with or at least understand it. -http://entertainment.time.com/2013/09/23/breaking-bad-what-does-that-phrase-actually-mean/
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