Fifty Dead Men Walking

by McGartland, Martin

  At the same time we heard police sirens and could see a number of police cars, their blue lights flashing, bearing down on us.

  ‘Joe,’ I shouted, ‘let’s go.’

  He gave one of the troublemakers two more hefty punches and shouted, ‘Right, Marty, run for it.’

  We took off, and after running a few hundred yards, another police car came round the corner, saw us running and stopped. The occupants leapt out of their car and took up the chase. Joe and I ran down a side road and into a cul-de-sac. Ahead of us was a ten-foot brick wall. Joe, short, strong and athletic, leapt to the top of the wall, but I didn’t make it. I jumped but couldn’t reach the top.

  ‘Jump again, Marty, jump,’ Joe shouted. I looked behind and saw two police officers only yards away. I gave one final leap and, as I did so, Joe leaned down from the top of the wall, grabbed my shoulder and heaved me on to the top of the wall. For a few moments, one officer was hanging on to my foot, trying to pull me down, while Joe was trying to heave me over the wall. I lashed out at the officer with my other foot and he released his grip. Joe heaved me over and we dropped down the other side and ran like hell. From that moment, I knew Joe to be a genuine friend and anything he asked me to do I would happily agree to.

  Erecting fences was tough work but good fun. I would fetch the pallets of fencing and bring them to Joe who would nail them into place. The work lasted us about seven months, but the Housing Executive had reckoned that the contract would take us eighteen months to complete. They were amazed, believing we had employed others to help. But we hadn’t, as Joe needed the money.

  A few days before the job was finished, one of the officers came down to inspect the work.

  ‘Do you want another job?’ he said.

  ‘Depends,’ replied Joe.

  ‘Now you’ve put the fences up so quickly, do you want the contract to paint them?’

  ‘Depends on the money,’ said Joe.

  Minutes later they had agreed a price. When the officer left, Joe looked at me and winked, ‘I would have done it for half the money,’ he laughed, ‘we’ve got a great deal.’

  ‘So you’ve done it again, have you, Golden Balls?’ I said

  ‘What do you mean, you cheeky bastard?’ he asked.

  ‘Every time you do something, Joe, you end up getting a good deal.’

  Joe looked at me. ‘It’s not luck, Marty, it’s hard work,’ he said. And I knew he was giving me some sound advice.

  Angie would occasionally come and visit me while I was fencing. I would stop to chat to her but Joe would soon put an end to that. ‘Angela,’ he would shout, ‘can you not leave this lad alone; you’ll see him tonight. I need him to do some work here, you know, he’s not on holiday.’ And he would laugh.

  ‘OK, slave driver,’ Angie would say, and she would quickly kiss me and leave. I liked Angie popping round to see me at work. It made me feel good, gave me a lift and made me feel I was a lucky man to have such a lovely, beautiful girl in love with me.

  Dean and Coco, however, were not happy that I had taken a job erecting fencing. They preferred me to be out selling stolen goods, moving about the area, using my eyes and ears, providing useful intelligence, rather than staying in one spot putting up fencing day in, day out.

  ‘Do you ever visit republican clubs?’ Dean asked me during one of our weekly chats.

  ‘No, never,’ I replied honestly.

  ‘Have you ever been inside any of them?’

  ‘No, never,’ I said. ‘Remember, I don’t drink.’

  ‘It might be an idea if you started to pop into one or two,’ Dean explained. ‘Many of the people we have given you to ID spend their time in those clubs. That’s where the IRA recruits many of its members.’

  ‘I understand,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you think you could face going into some of these clubs, letting us know some of the people that frequent them?’

  ‘I suppose I could,’ I replied but, privately, I didn’t relish the prospect of bumping into people I had known for years, suspecting they were all IRA men.

  ‘Good,’ Dean said.

  He didn’t actually put me under any pressure, nor did he order me to frequent the clubs looking for suspects. Yet the way he asked me to start visiting the clubs left me with little scope but to go along with his plan. I could not forget the fact that, in many respects, he was my boss, the man who paid me £400 a month.

  Near the Whiterock shops, where I would go to buy food for my mother, a group of young men would laze around day and night as king people for money. In particular, they would try to ‘tap’ pensioners and single mothers as they came out of the Post Office with their weekly allowance. Their victims complained to the local Sinn Fein office and the IRA decided to move them on.

  One day I noticed a local man I knew as Micky, a stocky man in his 30s, with dark hair and a moustache, telling the lads to move away from the area or face the consequences. I decided to strike up a relationship with him, figuring that he had to know loads of IRA people in the area.

  Some weeks later, after many conversations with him, Micky asked me to accompany him to a new building site in Moyard Crescent where the Northern Ireland Housing Executive planned to build a dozen new homes.

  ‘Are you Jim?’ Micky said as he approached a tall, slim man in his 50s.

  ‘Aye,’ he replied.

  Micky took the man by the arm a few yards away from me so I couldn’t overhear the conversation. A few minutes later they returned to me and Micky said, ‘This is Marty; he’s your new security guard.’

  Until that moment I had no idea that I was to be the security guard for the building site. Micky had mentioned nothing whatsoever to me about the job.

  The man said, ‘How much do you want?’

  Before I could reply, he continued, ‘You won’t have to do too much. Just keep an eye on the place and tell your people if you see anyone suspicious hanging around.’

  Before I could answer, Micky butted in, ‘One hundred pounds a week, OK?’

  ‘No problem,’ the man replied. Turning to me, he said, ‘I’ll come and pay you cash every week, alright?’

  ‘Aye,’ I replied, flabbergasted at the prospect of my new job.

  As I walked back with Micky I realised that I was now working on behalf of the IRA, employed as a member of the IRA’s protection racket. I was also employed by the Special Branch as a British agent. I was 18 years old.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘BRILLIANT, FUCKING BRILLIANT!’ Dean shouted and punched the air with sheer delight when I told him that I had just been taken on as a security officer with an IRA protection racket.

  ‘How the fuck did you do it?’ he asked. ‘Tell me, tell me everything, Marty. I want to hear every word of what happened.’

  I told Dean exactly what had happened and he seemed surprised that a member of the IRA had taken me on as a security officer when I was not, in fact, a member of the organisation.

  ‘Do you think that’s suspicious?’ I asked Dean.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘I don’t think so, not from what you’ve told us about Micky. He probably did it off his own bat, without thinking. He probably thought he was just doing a good turn for an unemployed lad from the estate.’

  Every day I would walk down to the building site about 200 yards from my home shortly after five o’clock in the evening, just as the workers were knocking off for the day. I would walk around the site, nodding to a few of the workers who would give me odd looks, suspicious of me, not knowing exactly who I was or what job I did. But they were also respectful because they knew that the IRA would have demanded protection money for permitting the firm to build in the heart of such a strong republican housing estate.

  And every Friday at about five o’clock my man would arrive in his brand new Audi saloon and hand me the promised £100.

  ‘Everything alright?’ he would ask each week.

  ‘Aye,’ I would reply, ‘everything’s fine.’

  ‘Any trouble?’<
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  ‘No, of course not. What did you think?’ I would tell him.

  ‘That’s good,’ he would say and, having looked briefly around the site, he would climb back into his car and drive away.

  One night just before midnight, I returned to check on the building site and noticed a hole had been cut in the perimeter fencing. I looked around and realised that about 20 bags of cement had been stolen. I quickly looked around the immediate vicinity but could see no sign of the missing bags. I wondered what the boss and Micky would say about the missing cement as it was my responsibility to keep a check on the site.

  At that moment, a young teenager on his bike came up to me. ‘Hey, Mister,’ he said, ‘are you looking for cement?’

  ‘Aye, I am,’ I said. ‘Did you see it go?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I’ll show you,’ and I followed him to a house not more than 100 yards from the site. There, in the back garden under some plastic sheeting, were the missing bags. I gave the lad a pound and breathed a sigh of relief.

  That night I searched everywhere for Micky but to no avail. Finally, I left a message with his mother asking him to come immediately to the building site as something had been stolen. Then I returned to the site and stayed there till the workers arrived some time after 7.00am.

  An hour later, Micky arrived with a young man I had never seen before. I told him everything that had happened and took him to where the cement had been hidden.

  ‘Leave this to us,’ he said to me and as I walked away I heard them banging on the front door of the house. Ten minutes later I saw two men walking towards the site with bags of cement on their shoulders. For the next forty minutes, the two went back and forth until every single bag had been safely returned.

  ‘You’ll get no more trouble,’ Micky said later. ‘They didn’t know the IRA were looking after this site. Now they know they’ll be no further trouble.’

  After that I hardly ever guarded the site, for now that it was public knowledge that the IRA were ‘protecting’ the building site, no one dared steal anything. I would simply open up the gates in the morning and be there at five o’clock to shut them. And each week I received my £100.

  In the evening, I would often go and find Micky in one of the republican clubs and buy him a couple of pints of lager while I kept to my Diet Coke. We would chat for a while and he would introduce me to everyone who came up to speak to him. Over the four months I guarded the building site, I got to know many IRA members and would report back to Dean each and every week. Many of the names I gave them were people they had been targeting for months.

  But many of the friends with whom I had grown up were surprised to hear that I had joined the IRA. I had attended school with them, played truant with them, mucked around with them. They were trying to lead decent, straightforward lives, working at honest jobs or, more usually, looking for jobs, and having nothing whatsoever to do with the IRA. They knew that in my youth I had been wild, had challenged the RUC, thrown paint at their vehicles and fought with the Army in the streets, but they had no idea that I had become such a staunch republican, prepared to carry out operations on behalf of the IRA.

  One afternoon, however, not far from home, it became obvious to everyone in the area that I had become committed to the IRA. I was walking home helping a neighbour, carrying her little girl on my shoulders, when a British soldier on foot patrol made a remark as I passed by.

  ‘What did you say?’ I asked pleasantly.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied, and I walked on.

  Seconds later I felt a pain shoot through my body and realised that the soldier had taken a flying kick at me, hitting me with his boot in the small of the back. The force of the kick nearly knocked me over and I struggled to hold on to the child, fearing I might drop her in the road which was full of traffic. Somehow, I managed to stay on my feet.

  I saw red. I handed the little girl to her mother who was walking next to me and turned on the soldier, who was standing with his rifle aimed at me about six feet away. I lunged at him and smashed him with my fist as hard as I could on the side of his face. He went down on his back and as he tried to struggle to his feet I threw myself on top of him, determined to smash his face to a pulp. I must have thrown 20 punches, hitting him in the face and on the chest with all the strength I could muster.

  As I heard army Land Rovers screech to a halt nearby I jumped up, leaving the soldier to struggle to his feet, my anger assuaged by the beating I had given him. He knew he had been wrong to kick me, because after he had struggled to his feet he made no attempt to apprehend or attack me but, instead, moved away, kicking his eye on me in case I attacked again. Two officers approached the soldier and two others came over to me. I stood my ground, still pumped with adrenalin. Fortunately, the young mother whose baby I had been holding and who had witnessed the entire fracas, told the NCO in charge exactly what had happened.

  Within minutes, two RUC vehicles and another army Land Rover arrived and again the woman explained what had happened, her voice trembling with anger and emotion at the actions of the soldier. I, too, told the police exactly what had happened, but I was still a very angry man, angry that a soldier should have risked injuring an innocent kid by kicking me so hard in the back, and for no reason whatsoever.

  After listening to my story, the RUC man went over to the soldier. One side of the soldier’s face had blown up into a large bruise and his entire face was battered, bruised and bloodied, as though he had been in a fight with a dozen men.

  ‘Did he do that to you?’ the officer asked the soldier, pointing over to me. The soldier nodded.

  The RUC man returned to me. ‘We are arresting you for assaulting a member of the armed forces,’ he said. ‘Come with us’.

  At that moment my mother, who was in a shop across the road, appeared on the scene. Someone had told her that her son had been fighting with the Army. As she tan across the road, the woman told her exactly what had happened.

  ‘What are you doing with that boy?’ she shouted at the RUC men.

  ‘Who are you?’ the officer in charge asked her.

  ‘I’m his fucking mother!’ she yelled at him, ‘And this soldier kicked him and the baby.’

  ‘Please, Mrs McGartland,’, said the officer, ‘he has assaulted a soldier. We will have to take him down to the station, take evidence from some witnesses and then see what’s going to happen. Have you seen the soldier?’

  ‘Serves the bastard right,’ she said, ‘for what he did to the baby.’

  I was taken in the back of the Land Rover to Grosvenor Road Police Station, put in a cell and made to wait for more than an hour before being taken to a room to be interviewed. Sometime later, an officer came into the cell and said, ‘Marty, you’re free to go.’

  When I walked into the house, my mother’s first words to me were, ‘What the fuck did you do that for?’

  I tried to explain what had happened, but she would hear none of it. ‘I know what happened, I’ve been told,’ she said. ‘But if you go on fucking about like that you’ll end up in jail, or something worse. If you’re not careful they’ll get you one dark night and give you a fucking good hiding. Have you no sense in your head?’

  I knew there was no point in arguing with my mother for she would win every argument she ever started, flown into one of the worst rages of my life for, in the instant before I hit him, I imagined what might have happened to the child if I had fallen into the road.

  I knew that my mother had been right to warn me against picking fights with the Army, but I also knew in my heart that on this occasion I had every right to thump the bastard who had kicked me. But I had felt good, a certain satisfaction in thumping the soldier and getting away with it. For months I had been saving hard because I wanted to buy a second-hand car. Ever since I was a young kid, I had looked forward to the time when I would be old enough to drive and take my test. Now, because of my involvement with Angie, I was keener than ever to buy a car so that we could go out together where
ver and whenever we wanted.

  My first car was a four-year-old, red Vauxhall Cavalier hatchback with 50,000 miles on the clock. I told Dean one day that I had saved up the money, £1,600, and was going to buy the car the following week.

  ‘Don’t waste your money,’ he said. ‘We always promised you we would arrange a driving licence for you but you’ve gone and passed the test without our help, so we’ll buy you the car instead.’

  ‘Fuck me, will you really?’ I asked, somewhat taken aback.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s a deal. You’ll have the money next week.’

  And the next week he handed over the £1,600 in £20 notes. I went immediately to the man who was selling the car and handed over the cash. That night, I took Angie for a drive in my new car, to a lonely spot at Craigavon and we made love in the back while the radio blared sweet music. As we drove back home later, I felt great.

  I became so keen on driving that I decided to jack in my job as a security guard at the building site and drive taxis instead. I told Micky I no longer wanted the job because I was going to drive full-time. He understood.

  I went to the first taxi firm in Ballymurphy and asked if they needed drivers.

  ‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘Have you got a car?’ I nodded. ‘The depot money is £35 a week. £30 goes to the owner and £5 pounds to the IRA.’

  I decided to take a day shift, working as a ‘private driver’. That meant I was not officially licensed and, if stopped by police, the people in my taxi would say that I was a relative giving them a lift. Probably half the taxi drivers in Belfast worked the same routine. But I enjoyed my new life, driving around the city all day and taking home around £150 a week, tax free.

  Dean was also happy with my new job for it would give me a greater chance to watch people and move around the city without anyone suspecting I was working with the Special Branch.