I knew I was beginning to accept my new life when I had my first family visit. I felt I had aged fifty years by the time Leigh-Ann brought Lucy to see me. She was nearly two. I last saw her baby face when she was just nine months old, but now she was a blonde toddler, wriggling in my arms. I wanted Lucy to look at me and recognise me as her daddy but I realised she couldn’t possibly know who I was. She hadn’t seen me before and was just a baby when I was last in her life. I knew I had to give up my plans to escape and return to war. If I did get out I was condemned to a life on the run. I knew that Lucy, and her brother Daryl, had been through enough. They had already lost their father, first to the paramilitaries and then to prison. I might not be at home with them but I was going to be around. Even though I was a prisoner, serving a life term, I could still be a part of their lives.
The second turning point was when I started to take an interest in the wing and prison structure. I knew it was essential that we governed ourselves. I had travelled the prison. I had been accommodated in all the Loyalist wings and knew exactly what was going on. I started by writing letters to my family. In these I complained that the place was in a timewarp, the lads were starving and the prison was stuck in 1971. I knew the letters were being monitored and watched by the prison authorities and it was my way of getting the message across that things had to change.
Shortly after my sentence began I got the recognition I deserved when the UDA finally claimed me. I didn’t get a personal apology and no one from the UDA leadership came to see me. The acknowledgement came via the front cover of the UDA’s internal magazine, Ulster, although a network of messages unofficially confirmed that I had been claimed by the UDA. On the front of the magazine there was a photograph of me in action at Milltown and the headline ‘OUR MAN FLINT’. I was relieved. The tide was turning. The UDA’s old guard was disintegrating. The UDA that denied me in 1988 and told the press I was too extreme to be a member was starting to fall apart. It was a shot of optimism in an otherwise boring existence.
A new, younger breed of politically and militarily astute volunteers were beginning to make themselves known. The days of the old career Loyalists, the Jim Craigs and Tucker Lyttles, were numbered. I knew I was going to be in the Maze for a very long time. I couldn’t change where I was, but the structures that governed us could be changed. There was a new breed outside. Now there would be a new breed on the inside.
Brother John and Beastly Bill were always on hand to offer support. They both took me aside and offered the benefit of their wisdom, although they had completely different theories on surviving prison life. Beastly Bill said, ‘It is the short-termers and the “year men” who can’t do their time. They are the ones who run risks. They are impatient and unsettled; they see their release in the distance and can’t wait for the time to come. The lifers are different. They are more settled because they have no date to look forward to.’
Meanwhile Brother John said it was the opposite: ‘It’s the lifers who are the most dangerous. They have nothing on their emotional horizon and they are desperately searching for credit. They will do anything and sacrifice anyone to collect points. They are grasping at straws.’ It was up to me to steer a path somewhere between the two. The prison authorities would dangle carrots in front of the noses of lifers. After their first big review, at ten years, the authorities would offer them the chance of moving to Maghaberry and becoming a conforming prisoner. They tempted them by saying the food was better, there was better parole and a chance to go back to school. In 1989 eleven lifers moved to Maghaberry. The prison authorities told them, Michael Stone is coming to the Maze and he will wreck the place. These lifers were scared and chose to move to Maghaberry rather than run the risk of blotting their copybook.
In my second year in the Maze I was called to see the Governor. He was new to the job and called every prisoner individually in to see him. He introduced himself as Governor Hazelly and asked me how I was doing. I knew the man. He lived near me on the Braniel estate when I was growing up. His name was Brian Hazelly. Governor Hazelly was at Lisnasharragh Secondary at the same time as me, but he stayed on and then went to university. I took great pleasure in telling him that I remembered him from school. I was delighted to ask about his brother, who I knew very well, and good-looking sister, Margaret. He didn’t answer. He looked at me, slammed my red book shut and ordered the screws to take me back to my cell. I glanced back. His face was the colour of the red book that marked my ‘top risk’ status. Governor Hazelly took a new job in England shortly afterwards.
Within five years I was beginning to settle into my routine. As I entered my seventh year I knew I was becoming institutionalised, but I fought it.
Loyalist and Republican prisoners hated one another. It was nothing personal. It was war. On my wing there were two brothers called Lambe. Every time they walked the wing to the circle, Republicans would hang out of their cells and sing ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. It was funny but it was also subtle intimidation and an unspoken threat. Then a new Republican prisoner arrived. He was a dwarf, caught red-handed with an AK47. Apparently his little legs didn’t even reach the car floor. Like the Lambe brothers, this guy had to walk past the cells to get to the circle, and as he did the sounds of singing could be heard from the Loyalist side. To the tune from the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they sang: ‘Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work he goes.’ Poor bastard. The whole wing erupted in howls of laughter. Even his Republican comrades laughed.
A meeting was called between the OC of the Red Hand Commando and the OC of the IRA. Our OC read out the resulting statement in the wing canteen. It said: ‘Agreement has been reached. Republicans will leave our lambs alone if we leave their dwarf alone.’ The laughter lasted for hours. For a very short time, it united Republicans and Loyalists. We did get the last laugh with the dwarf. We had a cutting from a magazine about a dwarf-throwing competition in America. The article was left on the bus that took Republican prisoners to the visiting block.
Life went on. It was mostly harmonious, but in April 1997 the shit hit the fan. The Prison Service implemented a number of changes in the daily running of the Maze. The changes were decided after a screw found a tunnel being built by IRA prisoners. Loyalists expected the authorities to crack down on Republican inmates, but no, they clamped down on everyone. The Northern Ireland Office announced that new rules would apply across the board. The UFF, UVF and Red Hand Commando, who had always agreed a no-escape policy with the authorities, were to be punished with the IRA. We tried to discuss these changes with the prison regime but were told they were not up for discussion. We contacted the Ulster Democratic Party, the political wing of the UDA/UFF, and asked them to use their influence to try to bring about a change of heart. The request fell on deaf ears. That left just one option: a rooftop protest.
When the prison staff tried to implement the changes, they were told, politely but firmly, that Loyalist prisoners would not be complying. All visits and paroles were immediately stopped. The command structure tried to negotiate but didn’t succeed. Commanders in H1 and H2 ordered their volunteers to take control of their compounds. From a tactical point of view, it was decided that the men would scale the blocks and take position on the roof. Prisoners wore masks and carried makeshift weapons. They were divided into groups tasked with dismantling the razor wire, transferring bedding and building a kitchen. The last men sealed off the blocks to keep the Ninjas back. Once everyone was assembled, sleeping quarters and a cooking area were built. Another team of men demolished a boiler room and stored the bricks to use as weapons. Finally, we soaked the edges of the roof with washing-up liquid, to make it slippery, and used the razor wire as a first line of defence.
Meanwhile, a heavily armed riot-control team had surrounded the H-Blocks and were taking up position. We threw bricks at them and they beat a retreat to a safer position. The 11pm news read out a prepared UFF statement that also said there would be retaliatory strikes against the Northern Ireland Office and th
e Prison Service. Within the hour the Ninjas were moved back. By morning there was a request from the authorities for talks. They shouted their request across the yard. A hole was cut in the perimeter fence and a phone was passed through so that the talks could take place. Eventually a deal was struck and the rooftop protest was called off. The authorities now knew they had a formidable group of men on their hands and we couldn’t and wouldn’t be bullied.
The screws had a drinking club within the Maze compound they called the Yippee Ya Yea Club. I am convinced the screws were mad. Every weekend they dressed as Confederate soldiers and carried .45 replicas. Their women wore belle-of-the-ball dresses. They would dance and drink all night to bluegrass music. We could hear their rowdy behaviour from our cells.
The one thing that bothered me most about my sentence was that there was no chance of parole or compassionate leave. My mother had several heart attacks during my years in the Maze and many times I thought she had died. The news would come from the jail’s prisoner welfare officer and not from my family. He would be clinical and to the point, saying, ‘Your mother is in hospital and has suffered a serious heart attack.’ That’s all. I would go into my cell, close the door and cry. I wanted to go and see her but I couldn’t. I wasn’t a free man any more. I was a lifer and red-booked, with no chance of compassionate leave.
21
AGONY AUNT
‘AUNTY’ WAS MY MAZE MONIKER. I WAS NICKNAMED THIS BECAUSE I WAS THE LOYALIST PRISON POPULATION’S UNOFFICIAL AGONY AUNT. The prisoners needed someone to talk to and turned to me in their droves. It was mostly about wives and girlfriends and dealing with the loneliness and isolation prison life brings, but sometimes it was how they found it difficult to cope with their past.
The women problems I found easier to counsel them on. I’d had two failed marriages and could share my experience. Indeed, my divorce from Leigh-Ann went through when I was in the Maze. I was taken from prison to the High Court in Belfast for the divorce hearing, and the judge even asked me if it was not possible, even at that late stage, and even though I was a prisoner, to make the marriage work!
Some of the young men blew emotional fuses because their girl had dumped them or was seeing someone else. I tried to make them see sense that it was very difficult for our women. I told them they were good men, and they should understand life goes on.
Parolees would come back with sexually transmitted diseases. Out for the weekend and desperate for sex, they pick up a girl. It would be the prisoner responsible for the wing laundry who complained to me about these young lads. He was terrified of catching something and it fell on my shoulders to talk to the offenders. I told them they had a responsibility to their wing mates. I ordered them to see the prison doctor. Beetroot-red and shamed to hell, they would get treatment. Some learnt. Others didn’t and had to make repeat trips to the prison doctor. They listened to me, but they never learnt.
Prisoners would have good days and bad days. Some coped very well and others didn’t. Some acknowledged their past and others were in denial. Every man copes differently, and for every man doing time it was a daily effort to stay focused and on top of things, and that included me. It was my cell door many of them knocked when they were upset or angry. Every one of us went through a whole range of emotions, including rage, anger and self-pity. They came to me because they respected me. They knew they could tell me things and it wouldn’t go any further.
Some of the younger prisoners, especially the teenagers, would call me ‘Da’. I did reverse psychology on some of them. If they were in for five or ten years, I would tell them I wished that was all I had to worry about. I told them I had a sentence totalling almost 850 years. They would smile at me and say, ‘I thought I had problems, Stoner’, and they would go back to their cell feeling better about themselves. They confided in me.
Over time my role as Aunty evolved. I became a secret-keeper. I heard ‘stories’ that I later found out to be true. These proved that Loyalist volunteers were not backstreet killers and thugs with no instinct for the subtleties of war. They showed there were many Loyalists who felt like me and wanted to strike at the Republican leadership and that Ireland and her people were also a target. What I heard was proof that Loyalists were active in the Irish Republic and had been for years.
There were two main types of prisoners who came to speak to me. The ‘screamers’ had nightmares and swore they saw the ghosts of men they killed. Then there were the men who talked non-stop about every operation they were involved in. Some of the screamers were big, macho men haunted by the faces of their targets. One, a former member of the security forces, told me he was glad he had been arrested because he finally had peace of mind. His imprisonment meant he wouldn’t be able to shoot his wife and kid. He sat on my bed and told me that if he had not been scooped by the police he would have ended up killing both his wife and daughter. He was haunted by the face of one of his targets and swore he could see the man’s ghost sitting on the stairs of his home, night after night.
One evening the man’s wife and young daughter were in bed. As he climbed the stairs the face was staring straight back at him. He grabbed his legal firearm and riddled the stairs and hall with bullets until the magazine was empty. The sound of gunfire woke his wife, who ran on to the landing to find out what was going on. Had he not run out of bullets his wife would be dead. He sat in my cell and told me the man’s face still haunted him and the ghost now peered through the bars of his cell.
Another Loyalist prisoner said that when he was on active service for the UVF he shot dead a Republican. He was doing time for a lesser offence, and was never convicted or even questioned over the death of the Republican, but he was haunted by the man’s last minutes. He said he smashed in the door with a sledgehammer. The target, who was sitting on the settee, looked up in surprise to see the two-man unit in his living room, grabbed his rosary beads and shoved them into the face of the gunman. The Republican knew what was coming next. He knew he was about to die and tried to protect himself with the beads. The gunman shot him twice in the face. The UVF man said the rosary beads freaked him out. He thought he was cursed. Many of these men were driven to revisit the scene of the crime and sit where it happened. I thought this behaviour very strange.
As Aunty I was regularly given detail on countless scenarios: killings, attempted murder and conspiracy. I was well known because of Milltown and because of it men came to me with stories of brave deeds of their own. There was no shortage of spoofers and Walter Mittys who could talk a good war but that was it. Then there were the others. I knew these men had lived and breathed the operation.
Ken T was a fellow UDA man, doing time for possession of weapons and caught on a technicality. Later I made discreet enquiries among my network of associates outside and found every word of what Ken told me was true. He took an hour to recount his story. After he finished talking, tears welled up in his eyes. Ken had masterminded a plan to assassinate the Irish Prime Minister, Charles Haughey. It was all worked out to the finest detail, but at the last minute he was forced to abort the operation. I stopped Ken in his tracks, telling him I didn’t want to know any more. He told me he needed to tell the story so that I understood there were others like me who wanted to assassinate the Republican leadership and other big targets.
He told me Tucker Lyttle had bad-mouthed me all over Belfast after my arrest for Milltown. Then he said, ‘Lyttle was the reason my operation did not go ahead. Tucker was afraid of his life, of the consequences of killing the Irish Prime Minister, and the whole operation was compromised.’ Ken hardly took a breath as he recalled his master plan. I was stunned. The plan was to kill Haughey on Ulster soil. It was the late 1980s. The Anglo-Irish Agreement, the political process that pushed Loyalists and Unionists to the brink, was already in place. Officials from London and Dublin were performing this gruesome dance signifying the end of Ulster’s Britishness with the hated Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conferences, and there was speculation that Haughey would make a g
uest appearance at Castle Buildings and meet the Secretary of State. Ken said the visit was wrong. He said he did not welcome a foreign politician interfering in the affairs of his country.
His plan took shape. He would shoot down the Wessex helicopter carrying Haughey and his team as it approached the landing pad at the front of Castle Buildings. Once it hit the ground, he was going to open fire with automatic weapons. The on-board bodyguards wouldn’t stand a chance if they survived the impact. Ken told me how he harnessed all his contacts to gather intelligence for this operation. He had military contacts at RAF Aldergrove. One supplied the flight plan the Wessex would follow as it made its approach over Belfast. Within a week Ken was handed a map with a clear overlay showing a variety of multicoloured routes. He was shown one marked ‘green’ and told this was the route the Wessex would take. The colour was symbolic: green for Ireland and green for ‘all systems go’.
The Wessex, Ken’s contact told him, would make a convoluted journey. It would fly over Orangefield playing fields and Shandon golf course, both greenfield sites which provided a safe passage for the craft. It would do a horseshoe over the Castlereagh Hills and fly between two block of flats, Ardcarn and Tullycarnet. It would continue over the civil service playing fields and hover at the front of Castle Buildings before coming in to land. Ken was told that the Wessex would fly at thirty to fifty metres, and he knew he could strike the plane at that height.
Ken chose his weapons. He had an automatic rifle and several thousand rounds of ammunition, but he needed a machine gun with a high rate of fire to have any chance of bringing the chopper down. Ken was given a box of one thousand .762 belt clips. All he needed was a GIMPY, a general-purpose machine gun. He knew the Woodvale Defence Association had one and south-east Antrim had two Bren .303 guns.
None Shall Divide Us Page 22
