‘On the specified day, the four cars travelled through unapproved roads to the border and were met by Nairac at a pre-agreed location. Nairac primed each bomb, one after the other, and waved us on our way. I drove one of the bombs destined for Dublin city centre.’
I asked him was he not nervous driving a car with a bomb due to go off after a certain time had elapsed. What would he do if the car broke down, or he got stuck in traffic, and did it enter his head that Nairac might be setting the whole lot of them up? All he said was: ‘Nairac was a soldier. I trusted him.’
Thirty-three people died in the four blasts. An entire family was lost.
The lifer had concluded this part of his story. At first I found it incredulous that the security forces were involved in an attack on their nearest neighbour. After he went to the kitchen and came back with a mug of coffee he recalled other operations where he worked with Nairac. In one, they travelled together to Dublin’s Mansion House. It was the night before a Sinn Fein Ard Fheis and they planted a device disguised in a fire extinguisher. It was the exact replica of the one that sat on the wings of the stage. The device contained 15lbs of high explosives timed to go off during the meeting. The lifer told me the bomb never exploded. He believes it was discovered and defused by the Irish Army.
There was silence between the two of us. There was nothing I could say. There was nothing more that he could add.
Labour MP Ken Livingstone was also a Loyalist target, according to M. He was a hate figure because he was over-sympathetic to Republicans. Loyalists dubbed him Green Ken, rather than Red Ken, because of his overtly nationalistic politics and opinions. A volunteer was sent to London to meet up with two members of the National Front. They weren’t the ‘bovver boots’ and shaved-head brigade but respectable businessmen. They were organised by the Red Hand to provide transport and accommodation for the volunteer. Livingstone was a political target and would be executed as he left his place of work. The death of the Labour MP would send shock waves to the very heart of Downing Street and the security agencies.
The volunteer worked alone. He dressed as a jogger to carry out the assassination. He looked at the GLC building, on the Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament. There was no security, and every evening at five-thirty Livingstone would leave his office and walk the short distance to the Underground station. The volunteer followed him on to the train, got off when Ken did and tailed him to his home. He was surprised that Livingstone lived in a modest house. The front door opened out, an indication that there was extra security. Livingstone wasn’t assassinated because Loyalists called a halt on the hit. The Inner Council had too much time to think about it and decided a Loyalist group killing a British politician was a no-no.
I recall these conversations to prove that Loyalists weren’t backstreet killers. We weren’t thugs. These conversations prove Loyalists sought political targets and big targets.
Other stories were important to me. A UDA man came to see me and thanked me for Dermot Hackett. I said nothing. He sat on my bed and said, ‘I shot him. I want to thank you for closing the book on him. I continued to operate after Hackett’s death. Did you know about me?’
‘I had heard of you. Why did you shoot through the letter “O” in Mother’s Pride?’
‘To centre my weapon. Why did you say you killed Hackett?’
‘I wanted to get Deary off, but it didn’t work.’
‘It was said you confessed to Hackett for the glory, to paint yourself as a mass murderer.’
‘You and I know differently and after Milltown I didn’t need any credibility.’
Another year man, Mad Jack, was haunted by his past and an attempted murder that went badly wrong. He turned gothic. He wore dark clothes and refused to interact with other inmates. Then he freaked the men out by walking around naked, chanting and reciting incantations. He made things worse by putting curses and spells under cell doors. When he went on a visit I had a look in his cell. Painted on the floor was a pentangle. He had dried feathers and even a starling’s skull on a shelf in his cell.
‘What’s all that about?’ I asked him.
‘I have had peace of mind since converting.’
‘To what?’
‘Satan.’
‘Satan?’
‘Satan. The Dark Prince.’
‘There is only one Satan around here, your OC.’
I told him to clear away the skull and feathers, to start wearing clothes, to quit the spells and to paint his cell floor. He calmed down for a while. Then it started again. This time the spells were appearing under prisoners’ pillows. He was also ‘mixing’, stirring up trouble. The wing was at breaking point. Someone was going to be killed. The guys were even getting tooled up with makeshift weapons. The gothic had to be disciplined. He was adjudicated and asked whether he had anything to say in his defence. He said that it ‘helped him get his day in’. Mad Jack was marched to his punishment. A provost marshal was detailed to discipline him and I warned the provost marshal, ‘Don’t kick him in the head and don’t break any bones. You break one of his bones, I will break one of yours.’ I told Mad Jack, ‘Take your punishment. If you fight back, I will finish you off.’ I knew he was on medication but I didn’t know what for. Within three weeks he was moved to Maghaberry. His medical notes, shown to me by one of the wing screws, said he was schizophrenic and had been for years.
Another young prisoner, Davy, was doing time for his part in a UVF murder. The police officers who questioned him showed him the crime-scene photographs and these literally drove him mad. The graphic images pushed in front of his face were to haunt him day and night until he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Davy was an intelligent man who was studying at university when he was arrested. It was his first job as a UVF volunteer. The man who was killed was also a Loyalist and it was part of an internal feud. The gun jammed and the target fought back. Stuck with a gun that didn’t work, the men beat the target until there was nothing left of his head and they finished him off by slitting his throat to the spine. His body was dumped in a field and lay there for weeks.
Davy cried in the middle of the night. Sometimes he howled like an animal in pain. Then the crying stopped and he developed the thousand-yard stare. He was looking through and beyond me. I had seen that look before, both times in the PSU: when Tommy McGrath was taken to a psychiatric ward, and on Philip Laffan, who committed suicide. I tried to get Davy to talk to me. I asked him about girls and he said he never had a girlfriend and was unlikely to have one now he was banged up in the Maze.
One morning Davy was running up and down the wing, banging on cell doors. His eyes were on stalks and his hair stood on end. He was shouting, ‘Let me out, let me out.’ I discovered that someone spiked his tea with four LSD tabs. He was a country lad, and the city men saw him as a ‘culchie’, a yokel, and thought they could have fun with him. It backfired. Davy wasn’t the same after that. The prison doctors had him shifted to Maghaberry, then the psychiatric ward, but within in a month he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and taken to Broadmoor. His OC never displayed any concern about the young man and was more interested in finding out what Davy and I discussed. I told him it was girls and the Battle of Milltown. I was allowed to take a look in Davy’s cell. It was a shrine to rock stars and actors who had died, such as Jimi Hendrix, Phil Lynott and Janis Joplin.
Two years after he was sent to Broadmoor, I got a letter from Davy. It was a single sheet of lined paper and all it said was: ‘DEAR MIC.’ That was it, two words scrawled in massive, childlike letters across the page. Over the months he improved, writing things like: ‘I AM GOOD’ and ‘EVERYTHING HAS ROUND EDGES’, but his handwriting never improved. Other letters made reference to inmates such as Ronnie Kray – ‘not a bad lad’ – and said he wanted to ‘beat the shit out of Ian Brady’.
Eventually Davy made good progress, was released from Broadmoor and sent back to the Maze to finish his time. I didn’t know he was back until I saw him queuing for a vis
it, but he didn’t recognise me. Davy was released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and immediately moved to England to start a new life. I heard he was doing well until he got into a dispute with his girlfriend’s brother. He chased the man down a street with a knife, was arrested and sent back to Broadmoor. Davy had a record of killing with a knife. The authorities were taking no chances and had him locked up.
22
MAD DOG, DAFT DOG, WEE JOHNNY, MR SHOWBIZ
I HAVE LEARNT THAT THERE IS A JOHNNY ADAIR FOR EVERY OCCASION. HE HAS MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES AND I HAVE SEEN MOST OF THEM. There is ‘Mr Showbiz’, the Johnny who loves the infamy of being a high-profile Loyalist paramilitary. He will be delighted I have given him a chapter all to himself. There is ‘Mad Dog’, the Johnny the media prefer because he’s mad and bad. There is ‘Daft Dog’, the Johnny that doesn’t have an ounce of street sense or a political thought in his head, and there is ‘Wee Johnny’, the Johnny that is childlike and innocent. That’s the real Johnny Adair. That’s the Johnny Adair I know and the only part of his complex and deeply insecure personality that I liked.
It was 1989. I had no idea who the skinny kid was who kept shouting, ‘Rambo, Rambo’ from the public gallery of Court Number One after my sentence was announced. I had never seen him before in my life.
He introduced himself a year later when he was at the Maze to visit a Shankill Road life man. I had a visitor of my own and Adair bounced up to my cubicle, shook my hand and said, ‘’Bout ya, Rambo.’ Throughout the visit he kept smiling at me and giving me the thumbs up. At the time he was a private in C Company of the UFF. When the visits were over he bounced back up again and asked could he visit me. I refused. He said he wanted to talk ‘to the hero of the Battle of Milltown’. I told him to fuck off, that Milltown was gone, I was caught, was doing life and was no Ulster hero. He pleaded and I told him one visit, one visit only. He then asked for a photograph as a keepsake of ‘a special day’ and I agreed. He framed the visitor’s pass and kept the photograph in his car.
Within a couple of years Adair enjoyed a meteoric rise through the UFF command structure. He now had rank and I, an unranked volunteer, was obliged to take his visits. The Wee Johnny was disappearing and another personality was forming, Daft Dog. He constantly pumped me for information and wanted to know every detail of Milltown and other operations. Adair had a grand plan. I asked him about the other brigadiers and what he thought of them. He said, ‘They are old women who sit around all day talking about football, going to the bookie’s and eating triangle sandwiches. I hate triangle sandwiches.’
He was right. The new school was clearing the decks and getting rid of the dead wood. Adair was part of this radical overhaul that saw fresh blood being injected into the UDA command structure. It was a good thing because the days of the Tuckers and Craigs were gone.
Adair held the position of Commander of the UFF, the military arm of the UDA, a title once held by my old friend and comrade John McMichael. Within days of the Shankill bombing, Adair was in the visitors’ wing of the Maze. He asked me what I thought of the no-warning blast and I told him it was terrible, an act of war. He just looked at me, smiling. I got the distinct impression there was no regret on his part at the loss of civilians, the deaths of mothers and their children, or the fact that the very heart of his community had been bombed to kingdom come. I knew the deaths of the nine were a badge of honour rather than an unspeakable human tragedy when he said to me: ‘I’m very important, Mikey. Those people lost their lives because the Provies wanted me.’ When I asked him how he felt about all those civilian deaths he just shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘But, Mikey, they didn’t get me, did they?’ and in the next breath, ‘Fuck it, we’ll hit back.’ I told him I wasn’t interested and didn’t want to know what was planned but he couldn’t help himself. He then said Catholics would pay dearly for the Shankill bombing but his big-body-count plan had to be aborted. Adair had planned to send out men to do a simultaneous attack on five or six Roman Catholic chapels in the greater Belfast area at eleven o’clock mass on a particular Sunday morning. His exact words were that they were to go into the places of worship and ‘spray the fucking place with AKs, kill them all and let God sort them out’. But the security forces were tipped off by someone on the Inner Council and banks of Land Rovers and cops were stationed on the given Sunday at the chosen chapels.
Adair didn’t get to spray the places of worship but he did get retaliation, in the attack on Greysteele. He organised the weapons, transport and volunteers for the assault on the Rising Star bar in which five people, both Protestants and Roman Catholics, were killed. Much later, from his prison cell, he bragged to me that in Greysteele, the UFF ‘evened up the score’ and whooped at the top of his voice: ‘Yeh-ha!’
Milltown was always top of Adair’s talk list and he wouldn’t stop harping on about it. I constantly told him Milltown was a disaster militarily. He said, ‘Men queued to join the UFF because we kicked the Provies’ asses in their own backyard. You are a Loyalist hero because you didn’t break or betray your comrades.’ It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
Within a year he was calling me Mikey. His constant mantra was: ‘Mikey, what we need is one good man to run the UDA. One good man to take overall control.’ I tried to tell him that ‘one man’ doesn’t work. I told him that it was easy to corrupt, turn or kill one man but he would refuse to listen and storm off. Mad Dog was starting to rear its head, but occasionally Wee Johnny could still be seen. During one prison visit he showed me an old photograph. He was on stage, in a band. He was a skinhead with bovver boots, braces and jeans to his knees. There was a Mickey Mouse tattoo on his forearm. He told me he ‘always fancied being a pop star’. Another Johnny Adair personality had surfaced: Mr Showbiz. He knew he would never make it as a pop star, so he turned his paramilitary career into the showbiz fix he craved.
Then the visits suddenly stopped. There was a double-page spread in the Guardian with a headline that dubbed him ‘Mad Dog’. He had taken a journalist on a tour of West Belfast. He did the driving and in his car was the photograph of him and me that that he had taken on his first visit. He called it the ‘prized photo of me and my mate Mikey Stone, a real Ulster hero’. Adair did start to visit me again. ‘All right, Mikey?’ ‘All right, Mad Dog.’ He squirmed in his seat and said, ‘Don’t call me that. That bastard Dominic McGlinchey is called “Mad Dog”. I’m not a mad dog.’ But secretly he was thrilled. The name stuck and Wee Johnny had a new identity.
Years later Adair was remanded to the Maze on a newly introduced charge, directing terrorism. He was housed in H1, the remand block. I was on H2. The minute he moved in, all discipline went out the window. He held weekend rave parties. There were drugs. Adair would pour bags of ecstasy tabs over the wing’s pool table and tell prisoners to help themselves. Some UDA remand prisoners freaked out. They weren’t interested in the parties and drugs. They couldn’t sleep and they feared the authorities would tar them with the same brush as Johnny Adair and his cronies. I moved those men on to my wing. I doubled and tripled prisoners in cells in order to accommodate the remand men.
Adair’s mantra was: ‘We’re not sentenced, you can’t touch us’, and it was true. I tried to appeal to his human side. I brought him on to H2 and showed him the clean and tidy cells and the kitchen. I told him that we are all Loyalist POWs. I told him we weren’t criminals or scumbags and he should behave. He just said, ‘Fuck ya, Mikey.’ Johnny Adair had become a law unto himself. I advised him to fight the directing terrorism charge, not because I liked the man but because it set a new legal precedent. Adair didn’t fight it. There was too much evidence, taped conversations he’d had with the RUC bragging about operations, and he couldn’t fight it.
Adair would plead with his Special Branch pals: ‘Ah, lads, don’t do this to me, you’re supposed to be my friend.’ This evidence came to light on a local current affairs show. Johnny was already sentenced and every Loyalist on the wings couldn’t wait to see the dam
ning programme – except Adair. There was silence in the Big Cell, which doubled as a telly room. No one spoke, made tea or went to the bathroom for the entire show. The sound of jaws hitting the ground could be heard all over the block. Adair was bragging to the Branch and pleading with them. It was obvious he was on first-name terms. After the show, Adair couldn’t face any of us. He knew he would be ridiculed. It took him almost four weeks to surface and face any of us. He knew everyone would see him for what he was – a tout.
The ironic thing is, Adair has never cut the mustard as an operator. He was more interested in the fame game than being a true Loyalist. He was more interested in the profile his fame would give him than the Loyalist cause.
Adair changed three months into his sixteen-year sentence. He was the first person to go down for directing terrorism. The change in his physical shape happened after he trailed me, like a lost puppy, to the gym. I trained for two hours every day. Adair would follow me in and stand and watch. Then he started to work out, but his stringy arms couldn’t lift the weights. He started on the steroids and began to change shape. He bulked up. His body was swollen and he had boils on his back.
I was called to see the Governor. He wanted me to use my influence to have a word with Johnny. I told him it wasn’t my problem, Johnny was a grown man. The Governor told me Johnny had been smuggling in steroids. Tests were run by the authorities which showed the substance was lethal. It was used to fatten cattle and banned in the EU. The Governor told me that prisoners could die if they continued to use the substance. I knew Johnny was using it. He was taking it three ways, in tablet and liquid form and by injecting. I went to the library and read up about steroids. I took the book with me and went to have a word with Adair.
None Shall Divide Us Page 24
