HITMEN, GANGSTERS,
CANNIBALS AND ME
DONAL MACINTYRE
First published in 2010 by Y Books
Lucan, Co. Dublin
Ireland
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Text © 2010 Donal MacIntyre
Editing, design and layout © 2010 Y Books
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-908023-00-1
Ebook - Mobi format ISBN: 978-1-908023-01-8
Ebook - epub format ISBN: 978-1-908023-02-5
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Typeset by Y Books
Cover design by Graham Thew Design
Front cover image courtesy of Peter Evers Photography
Back cover images courtesy of Five TV, BBC and David Wootton Photography
Printed and bound by CPI MacKays, Britain
To Allegra,
my princess – for her sparkly turquoise heart.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who have worked with me on the hundreds of hours of television and radio, and on the acres of newsprint to which I have contributed over the years. Thank you for your tolerance and forgiveness of my many limitations.
Grateful thanks to the Tanner and Binns families, who hosted the Insect Tribe when we travelled outside London. Thanks to Tigress Productions, Five, the Discovery Channel, Sky and the BBC for their support of my work. Also to Bravo, National Geographic, ITN, Granada and ITV for our ongoing work together. Prof. David Wilson, Prof. Howard Tumber and Peter Salmon have been important guiding figures in my career, as have my former colleagues at World In Action and the Irish Press.
Thanks to Gerry Easter, Ms Nydiger, Shane Timlin, Susan Feldstein, Robert Doran, my editor, and Chenile Keogh, my publisher at Y Books, for all your patience. Thanks to photographers Dave Wootton and Robin Culley. Thanks to all at Dare Films and True North Productions. Thanks to Vincent Browne, the late Michael Hand, Mick O’Hare, father and son, and to ‘Braveheart’, Michael Mendelsohn.
It goes without saying that I owe a great debt to those who have protected me and my family over the years. Mitch, Clive Driscoll, Gerry Hamilton, Eddie Halling, Ginger, Tony Gilbert and Gemma Smith and the Metropolitan Police – it’s your fault I am still alive. For my sanity (what’s left of it), thanks must go to my assistant, Lloyd Page. Thanks to Nick Armstrong, my lawyer, for keeping me out of jail and to my colleagues, Steve Cooper, Michael Simkins, Paul Samuri, Martin Hickman, not forgetting my creative wingmen, Mike Turnbull and Nick Manley. I could not let the chance pass without saluting all at Guilford Spectrum – Andy, Melissa, Ruth and Stewart, my ice angels.
Special thanks to my family: Darragh, Deirdre, Tadhg, Desmond and of course my mom, Peggy, for being unstinting in their support. My mom is a most remarkable woman, and I could not wish for a better mother.
Finally, my love and gratitude to my wife, Ameera, who encouraged and cajoled the best out of me and gave me my reasons for living – my beautiful princesses, baby Tiger and Allegra, my proudest and greatest accomplishments.
There are so many more I could mention, and I apologise for not being able to thank all of you. But you know who you are, and I hope you know that your support and efforts are what have made the adventures on these pages possible. I remain eternally grateful.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter one Lying for a Living
Chapter two My Life as a Headhunter
Chapter three MacIntyre of Arabia
Chapter four The Dog’s Head
Chapter five Diet Till You Drop
Chapter six Dead Men Walking
Chapter seven Dying Ain’t Much of a Living
Chapter eight Suffer the Little Children
Chapter nine The Iceman Cometh
Chapter ten Gorilla Warfare
Chapter eleven Comedy of Terrors
Chapter twelve Madame Mac
Chapter thirteen How to Get Mugged – In One Easy Lesson
Chapter fourteen Calpol and Kidnapping
Chapter fifteen Best of Enemies
Chapter sixteen Tribe Swap
Chapter seventeen Miami Ice
Chapter eighteen And Finally …
INTRODUCTION
THE ACCIDENTAL JOURNALIST
Our standard-issue Bakelite phone rang. ‘Hello, is that Darragh?’ asked the man with a Belfast accent at the end of the line. It was 1984, and my journalist brother, Darragh, had gone to the US to work for the New York Daily News.
He had previously been a regular sports freelancer for the nationals, and, unaware that he had left the country for pastures new, editors were still calling the house, looking for him to cover stories. This was long before people were in the habit of announcing their whereabouts and state of mind to the world via Facebook and Twitter!
‘I’m afraid he isn’t here. Is there anything I can help you with?’ I asked.
‘Could you let him know that we need him to cover the Kildare match in Athy this weekend? Four pars and results, please,’ said the man from the Irish News.
‘He’s in the States, but I’ll do it for you,’ I said, trying to sound older than my 17 years.
There was a sharp intake of breath.
‘No, that wouldn’t do, sorry.’
I insisted that I was the man for the job, but he said: ‘I appreciate your offer, but we’ll get someone else.’
I got the feeling that my interlocutor wanted to commission someone who didn’t have to finish his homework before going to cover the story. I had no intention of doing my homework anyway, so I persisted, and he eventually relented somewhat and said he would check with his boss and call me back.
And, to my surprise, he did. He had been mysteriously unable to find anyone else to cover a Kildare hurling match (if you had seen Kildare play hurling in those days, you would understand why), and offered me the princely sum of IR£4.50 to turn in four paragraphs, the team sheets and the results by early evening on Sunday.
After attending the match, I phoned the news desk and proudly read them my copy, eager to see my words in print for the first time. And that was it: I was suddenly a journalist!
What follows are some of the highlights in the career of an accidental journalist and the adventures of a boy who covered a Kildare match and never looked back.
1
LYING FOR A LIVING
My career as a ‘professional liar’ began at the age of seven when I made my first confession at St Brigid’s Primary School in Celbridge, Co. Kildare. In preparation for this momentous event, we were given a list of indiscretions to rattle off to the priest, so as not to leave him underemployed. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession but I have remained without sin since my virgin birth,’ was not likely to go down well with the nuns, or indeed the priest.
So our teacher wrote a selection of ‘Tesco own brand’ sins on the board, so that we could repeat them verbatim to our holy confessor, the local priest, Fr Eugene Kennedy. For weeks, we practised and practised. ‘I have been disobedient to my parents and mean to my brothers and sisters,’ was one that could be safely assumed to apply to all of us. Now this convenient mantra meant that some of my classmates were confessing to quite a caseload of the Devil’s works. Some had 15 siblings (contraception was still an alien concept in 1970s Ireland), and I feared that their first confessions would open the gates of hell after years of disobedience, pinching and kicking. It seemed entirely possible that the heavenly accountants would do a quick tot and send them directly from the confession box to eternal damnation.
I had three brothers and a sister, so I certainly had a few sins to confess myself, but I was left more confused than most in the class of 45 pupils. Seeking forgiveness for sinning against my Dad was problematic because he wasn’t around. My father had left the family home when I was four, and although I did see him in the following years, there was little real opportunity to sin against him. However, because it was written on the board, I was required to accept the sin as my own, on the teacher’s orders.
The issue of an absent father didn’t weigh too heavily on my mind apart from the odd occasion when an older kid called me ‘a little bastard’. Of course there were plenty of times when I was a little bastard, but even at the age of seven I knew when it was meant literally. A broken family was not something that the church wanted to engage with in those days and I was not going to be indulged with a bespoke set of sins tailored to my domestic circumstances.
When the priest came to check on our progress as pious young Catholics, we tried to impress with our clasped hands and bowed heads. My Act of Contrition was word perfect and I could reel off my sins like my 10 times tables.
On the big day we were divided into two queues, the boys in one line and the girls in the other. This military configuration did nothing to encourage military discipline and the excitement of being out of the classroom meant that I was soon adding to my list off sins.
‘MacIntyre!’ came the hushed admonishment from one of the nuns – even she wasn’t allowed to shout in God’s house. I protested that I hadn’t done anything and maintain to this day that I was innocent. ‘But you were thinking about it,’ she shot back, and in that she was probably right. I had my knuckles slapped with a ruler and was placed in the girls’ line, which was the ultimate humiliation for a seven-year-old boy.
My first confession was heard by the aforementioned Fr Eugene Kennedy, a handsome priest who always seemed out of place in our village parish. A more sophisticated city congregation would have been better suited to his debonair manner. If James Bond had found God, Eugene would have been called up for audition.
It seemed a terrifying experience, or at least it did back then. We were under the impression that unless we were suitably contrite for our sins (by ‘our sins’ I mean the ones we had learned off by heart), the Devil would be rubbing his hands with glee, ready to take our souls to hell. Remember that at the time we were still donating our pennies to pay for the ‘little black babies’’ souls to be lifted out of purgatory. There was a recession on then, too.
The time came to meet my confessor and I recounted my sins verbatim to the priest. He nodded sagely.
‘Are you sorry?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I am,’ I replied.
‘Will you do it again?’
‘No, never,’ said I, lying before I was even out the door of the confession box.
An Act of Contrition and three Hail Marys later I was freed of my sins and back in the boys’ line. It always niggled at me slightly that maybe I had compounded the sins I had forgotten by telling the invented sins that the teacher had remembered for me. But the joy of Catholicism is that you can return the following week and be absolved all over again. I think it was this facility that turned us all into repeat offenders.
In my teenage years, some of my church-going pals became bolder and turned confession into a dark comedic art. They would compete to see who could construct the most elaborate confession, daring the priest to refuse them absolution. The winner invented an epic of three parts that required separate visits to the confession box on consecutive days. On the first he revealed that he was having an affair with a teacher. The next day he admitted that this was a lie he had told to cover up the fact that he was gay, and on the third day he came clean and confessed that it was all lies. Of course, the confession was interspersed with lurid stories of fantasy sexual encounters, which may have encouraged the priest to indulge the young sinner – or perhaps he was just concerned for the poor lad’s soul.
My favourite sin was not even mine. It had occurred in Economics class, days after the Irish budget in 1982. The teacher was a bright nun, always immaculately dressed and sharp enough to control a 40-strong mob of students who were less than eager to learn the finer points of macro-economic policy. We were asked to offer our opinions on the Minister of Finance’s fine deliberations, but when the Sister asked my twin, Des, for his tuppence ha’penny worth she didn’t know what she was letting herself in for. Deadpan, he told her that the new budget had made some provisions that could help to bolster the finances of the convent.
‘How so?’ she enthusiastically enquired.
‘Well, with all the new childcare benefits and allowances, I have calculated that if each of the nuns had a child, you would all be substantially better off. And let’s face it, in the line of business you’re in, you could just pass it off as immaculate conceptions.’
His suggestion did not go down well at all. Funnily enough, Des has ended up working as an economist and I’m sure the school is delighted that his early promise has been realised, even if it didn’t meet with their approval on its first outing.
Another thing that would meet with the nuns’ disapproval and that would have come as something of a surprise to them would have been the news of my consistently outstanding grades throughout my secondary education. I was an average student, as my official school records will testify, but that’s not what my mother was led to believe. On the first day of school I stumbled across a box of blank report cards in the schoolyard. They had fallen off a pallet of stationery on the way to the principal’s office and I, naturally, couldn’t pass up an opportunity like that.
Deft handling of the post meant that my mother didn’t receive a single genuine report card from the school for me in the five years I was there (sorry, Mum!). I usually gave myself A’s across the board, but occasionally added that ‘Donal could try harder’. The oddly juvenile handwriting might have been something of a giveaway, but my mother never said anything.
She might have turned a blind eye to my forged report cards – bringing up five kids by herself meant that she had other, more pressing priorities – but if she had found out about another one of my porkies there would have been all hell to pay. Being the products of a broken home, we were something of an anomaly in the holy Catholic Ireland of the seventies and eighties. Divorce was illegal and separations were still frowned upon. But I was a shameless opportunist and was determined to turn the social stigma to my advantage. My lesser sins involved refusing to wear the school uniform and blaming our domestic circumstances for my inappropriate attire. Politely, the school authorities didn’t want to intrude, and, more often than not, let it go, while I lorded it over my classmates in my jeans and trainers.
But our Christmas whopper was my most shameful lie. Every December without fail, Des and I would take the month off school to go turkey plucking. We would tell the school that we had to go to work because we couldn’t afford Christmas otherwise. Well, if my mother had found out, she would have plucked the hair out of our heads. While she went out to work as a schoolteacher in Walkinstown every morning, we left the house, schoolbags on our backs by way of camouflage, and went off to the turkey farm a couple of miles down the road to make our fortunes at
the rate of 80p for a cock and 60p for a hen.
‘Can any of you feckers pluck a turkey?’ Barney, the chief turkey plucker, asked the bunch of ragamuffin truants in front of him. We nodded an emphatic yes, before being let loose to mutilate the dead birds. ‘You are plucking the birds – not performing an autopsy, Macker,’ he would shout at me when I tore the skin and made it clear that I had no idea how to go about the job. ‘For feck’s sake Macker, you’ve ripped another one,’ he’d say, the colour rising in his cheeks so that they clashed with his bright-red hair. Shaking his head, he would reach into his pocket and pull out a needle and thread to begin the reconstructive surgery necessitated by my handiwork. For most of the year, Barney was something of a character around Celbridge. He had never attended medical school to my knowledge, but every December he was ‘The Surgeon’ whose skill saved us all from the wrath of the local shopkeepers.
During the summer holidays, instead of plucking turkeys I plucked wild oats. The oats grew over the crop in the cornfields and contaminated the yield, so they had to be picked out before harvest. At the age of 15, while my contemporaries were sowing them, I was picking wild oats for IR£5 an hour at Farmer Huddleston’s, near Barberstown Cross. This was great money at the time, and the job was made even more attractive by the fact that lunch was thrown into the bargain. Obviously, the offer to feed us was made before they had seen us eat. After a week of plundering the farmhouse larder, we were offered an extra pound an hour if we would bring a packed lunch. We must have been like locusts in the kitchen for that to make economic sense.
On the back of my stellar performance as a wild oat picker, Farmer Huddleston offered me a promotion.
‘Can ya drive a tractor?’ he asked me.
‘Of course I can,’ I lied, gleefully stretching my hand out for the keys.
In a portent of things to come, I gave the distinct impression that I knew what I was doing. For any 15-year-old who has grown up on a farm, driving a tractor is second nature, but I grew up around farms and not on one, so my confidence in my ability was a little misplaced. After snatching the keys and proudly jumping into the driver’s seat, I turned the engine over, waved smugly to the other farmhands and accelerated straight into the ditch. After he pulled his shiny new Massey Ferguson out of the flood drain, Farmer Huddleston sent me back to the fields in shame.
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