Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me

by Donal Macintyre

  Then it was time for the action shots. They loaded a camera onto the front of my canoe and instructed me to paddle over the weir at full-tilt. I went over the weir with a mighty crash and disappeared under the water. The boat had become trapped in a stopper at the bottom of the weir. A wave had flipped me over, which shouldn’t have been a problem, but the weight of the camera meant that I couldn’t right myself. I don’t remember fighting to escape but it was all caught on camera.

  Tadhg saw me get into difficulty and threw his paddle to me as I was washed around and around. But I missed the catch and now we were both up shit creek without a paddle. The camera was still rolling as I was drowning. It wasn’t a terribly unpleasant experience: something like gradually falling asleep. Then, as I lost consciousness, my body relaxed and I slipped out of the boat. I was dragged to the bank, where I spluttered back to life, a little disoriented, but alive.

  When they asked me to do it all over again 10 minutes later, I did as I was told. This time I managed it without capsizing and they called it a wrap before there were any more near-death experiences. That was my first foray into the world of television and perhaps I should have taken the money and run at that point. If I nearly got myself killed canoeing down the Liffey, what chance did I stand with gangsters and drug dealers?

  Well, I would soon find out…

  * * * * *

  Badger was a Liverpool drug dealer and one of the first to put crack cocaine on the streets of Europe after it had swept through the ghettoes of the America’s inner cities. We were on a simple research trip to meet him at his tiny two up, two down terraced house in the shadow of Anfield Stadium. There were no cameras, no wires and no disguises – just old-fashioned pen and paper and one unstable crack addict. Badger had the look of a lithe rock climber, without the healthy complexion. He had been on a crack cocaine bender for three days straight and there was a wildness in his eyes that should have forewarned me that this was an unpredictable situation.

  We had come looking for information on another major gangland figure. Badger knew everything about everyone on the Liverpool scene, and was a tried and trusted informant for crime journalists.

  We entered his sparse living room, where I was directed towards an armchair in the corner and my colleague, Michael, was told to sit on the sofa with his back to the window facing the street. Michael is the father of three kids, and is very-laid back. He has worked in warzones and nothing fazes him. He is exactly the type of person you want by your side when you are meeting strung-out drug dealers.

  Like the Police, journalists need informers – tipsters who will give us the low-down on their criminal colleagues in return for a few drinks or a couple of hours of feeling self-important. We were doing a story about a supergrass who had shopped his own son to the Police, along with one of the UK’s biggest gangsters, John Hasse.

  Badger knew all about Hasse and the drug trade in Liverpool and had volunteered to give us a briefing on the underworld landscape there. Michael was leading this investigation and I had come along for the ride.

  There was a constant flow of smokers through the house. They would come in, light up crack pipes and then leave, promising to pay later. The air was heavy with smoke and Badger’s kids came in and out of the room, oblivious to the business that was taking place in their home.

  Badger was telling us about the early days of crack on the streets of the UK and had started to ramble a little. I was doing my very best to appear interested and respectful, but, much as I tried to hide it, my distaste for him and the environment he provided for his kids must have permeated my façade. We had been there for about an hour and the smoke was already giving me a headache; I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to the kids. Badger’s behaviour disgusted me and, even through his threeday crack haze, he knew it.

  ‘You don’t like me,’ he said, out of the blue. He stared at me with his piercing blue eyes, his pupils scarily dilated. His forehead was scrunched up as though he was trying to work out a complex maths equation. He was prison-hardened and feared nothing – not jail, not the Police and certainly not me.

  ‘You don’t respect me,’ he said, raising his voice.

  ‘I do, mate. I do,’ I said, desperately trying to placate him.

  ‘This is my house and you’re fucking disrespecting me,’ he said, this time more coldly and more slowly than before.

  Abruptly, he stood up and left the room. I looked at Michael.

  ‘There could be trouble ahead,’ said Michael.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be fine,’ I said, ever the optimist.

  We heard a rush of footsteps going up the stairs, the sound of doors and cupboards being opened and shut, and then footsteps racing back down the stairs. Badger burst back into the room and headed straight for me. He leapt onto my chair and wrapped his thighs around my hips and his arm around my neck. Sitting tall above me now, I saw his hand rise in an arc and then swing back down with force against my neck. I felt metal against my jugular and it was only then that I realised he had a gun in his hand.

  ‘Whoa! Badger, take it easy – easy,’ said Michael

  ‘You c**t! You don’t respect me. Eh? In my house? You motherfucker!’

  He increased the pressure, drilling the gun into my neck.

  ‘Respect! Respect!’ I shouted.

  ‘I’m going to fucking kill you, you c**t.’

  ‘There, there, Badger. If we’re not careful, someone will get hurt,’ said Michael calmly. He could have been talking to his four-year-old child. For two minutes Badger ranted, Michael cajoled and I pleaded, as he buried the gun into my neck, drawing blood. It took a lot of convincing, but Badger finally got off me and took the pistol away from my neck. I held my sweating palms up and out and retreated into the cushions of the armchair.

  He sneered at me, cocked open the gun and let a bullet fall to the floor, as if to show me he hadn’t been joking. I watched the bullet as if it was in slow motion. I heard it hit the floor and bounce. He then sat down on the sofa, threw the gun behind him and continued his story, as if the previous three minutes had never happened.

  Few words were exchanged as Michael and I drove back to the hotel. I went to my room and ordered a bottle of wine to calm my nerves. In between gulps I cried like a baby.

  The following morning we went back to Badger for clarification on a number of points. This time he was the epitome of the good host. The events of the previous day were never mentioned, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the first to bring them up.

  * * * * *

  My favourite near-death experience was the Semtex incident. We had been investigating the proliferation of weaponry on the black market after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. We had travelled all over the former Yugoslavia and eventually to the Kosovo-Montenegro border, where we were conducting business in the immediate aftermath of a bloody civil war. The UN had come into Kosovo to impose law and order, forcing Serbs out of the country in line with the wishes of the Albanian ‘ethnic majority’.

  In the messy aftermath of the war, there were all sorts of things for sale. I managed to buy over one hundred sticks of Semtex from a wheeler-dealer in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. We were staying at the Grand Hotel, off Mother Teresa Road, in the heart of the rundown city. The hotel was full of UN officers, spies, drug dealers and arms merchants. It was the kind of place where lives and fortunes were lost in the blink of an eye, and I was there posing as a representative of a fictitious Irish Republican splinter group. I was acting as a sort of quartermaster, supposedly looking to replenish munitions for this terrorist organisation. We had made contact with ‘Sinbad’, who was a middleman for anything you wanted here. The whole place had a hint of Cold War Berlin about it and even the most mundane of people and places had an air of intrigue and mystery about them. I met Sinbad in the hotel garden. The lush fake lawn and white plastic garden furniture provided a grand backdrop to an illicit arms deal.

  ‘There are spies everywhere,’ Sinbad told me. His contact
in the Kosovon Liberation Army, Hugli, had agreed to do a deal, initially for a haul of Semtex, and much more if all went well and I proved to be a reliable customer.

  I had never met Hugli, but I had seen a photograph of him holding aloft the severed heads of two of his Serb enemies, so he was clearly a man not to be messed with. But I couldn’t help myself. He knew that I was Irish, and I had arranged for him to receive an appropriate gift to sweeten the deal. Knowing him to be a huge fan of U2, I had sent him a signed copy of their album, The Joshua Tree. The inscription read: To Hugli – I hope you find what you are looking for – Bono. Bono’s handwriting bore an uncanny resemblance to my own, but nobody remarked on this and the gift seemed to do the trick. Sinbad asked me to pass on Hugli’s thanks for the touching gesture and I promised I would do so the next time I met Bono and the lads for a pint.

  And so the deal for the Semtex went ahead. One hundred sticks of plastic explosive is enough to cause wholesale devastation, and, as a general rule, Irishmen abroad should not get caught with it in their possession. I had been posing as a dissident Republican, so, if we were discovered with the goods, it would take some explaining. We hatched a plan to hide it for a couple of days while we got the Channel Five lawyers to contact the UN and arrange a handover.

  On the advice of my producer, the aforementioned Michael, we buried the Semtex in an empty field well out of harms way about 20 km outside Pristina. We painted an arrow pointing towards the hole on a nearby rock and marked the spot with an ‘X’. We figured there was little chance that we were being watched and that it would be safe there.

  Well, we were right in that respect, but we were clearly not well-informed about the area. A couple of days later, when we met in the UN explosives unit to hand over the Semtex, the Finnish officer said: ‘Thank you. We’ll make arrangements to take your statements and consider the evidence against the arms dealers. Just one thing, though. Why did you bury it in a minefield?’

  The road to Semtex is paved with good intentions, it seems. In the end the UN managed to convict our middleman, Sinbad, with illegal arms dealing and he received three years in jail.

  * * * * *

  These risks were all taken with some degree of calculation, and I always felt as though I had some control over the situations. They were self-inflicted moments of danger, I confess, but it was in a Wimbledon hospital bed where a cancer scare left me feeling at my most vulnerable.

  For about six months I had had reason to believe that all was not well, and that is why I found myself in a room affectionately nicknamed the ‘Colon Suite’. I knew that, of the group of people on the ward, some would get good news and some would get bad. I hoped that I would be one of the lucky ones, but knowing that I could do nothing to change the outcome made this one of the most difficult situations of my life.

  The concerned consultant put a latex-covered finger up my bum and as he withdrew it with an unfortunate sound effect, he said, ‘My kids loved you on Dancing on Ice.’ He then scheduled an emergency colonoscopy and more probing procedures for the next day.

  As the moment drew close and I was reaching my lowest ebb, a nurse came in and raised my spirits:

  ‘Today, Mr MacIntyre, we are putting cameras up places where not even you have placed them,’ she said, deadpan.

  ‘Touché!’ I laughed.

  The natural justice of it was not lost on me but the revenge of the covert camera stopped there, and I was given a clean bill of health. It was another escape from fate’s worst offerings, and the only conclusion I can draw from all this is that it is always better to be lucky than to be right.

  8

  SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

  The dormitory held about 30 beds, packed in so close together that there was hardly a hair’s breadth between the bare metal frames. Apart from a few religious icons and pictures of ‘Our Blessed Mother’, the white walls were bare. The torch swept across the faces of children sleeping, screaming, laughing and sobbing, and finally rested on the hunched figure of a boy in a white vest. He was obviously distressed, and rocked back and forth, his ankle tethered to his cot like a goat in a farmyard. This scene was reminiscent of the worst of the Romanian orphanages that caused international outrage in the 1990s. But this wasn’t Romania and the ‘Great Mother’ was not Elena Ceausescu – this was India and the ‘Great Mother’ was Blessed Mother Teresa.

  Mother Teresa was educated at the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham in Dublin, and is still held in extraordinary devotion in Ireland and around the world. The last thing I thought I would be doing is investigating this much-lauded woman. Critics of mine have been known to say, ‘Next thing he’ll be undercover with Mother Teresa.’ And funnily enough, that’s what came to pass.

  I had received a tip-off from workers who had spent time with the Missionaries of Charity at several of their care homes in India.

  The volunteers felt very uncomfortable with much of what they had witnessed there. According to them, the local workers and the nuns were often cruel or indifferent to the children in their care. Children were tied to beds or abandoned in soiled clothes for hours on end. One volunteer reported that at another of the charity’s homes, she had seen a mentally ill female patient shackled to a tree.

  Such treatment of the most vulnerable was beyond my comprehension and while the aura that surrounded Mother Teresa had deterred other reporters, I felt that this was information that needed to be acted upon. The issues surrounding care homes have been close to my heart for many years. Where I grew up, in Celbridge, Co. Kildare, the St John of God religious order run a home for learning-disabled adults where they take care of over one hundred residents. I remember the whole community being involved in the care culture and, even in the seventies, the home was decades ahead in terms of the treatment and management of mental health issues. Everyone considered the residents to be part of the community and they were included in every aspect of village life. Many worked in the pubs and the shops, and every Sunday one of the guys would come to our house for lunch – we all had our regulars. This wasn’t seen as some kind of charitable duty: it was just the way things were done, and we were all richer for it. Looking back, I feel it represented the best of Ireland in the seventies.

  Over the years I had built my reputation on – and nearly lost it to this cause – My first major investigation in this area was in 1999 at the Brompton Care Home in Kent. I went undercover there and reported on the disgraceful conditions that the most vulnerable in society were expected to live in. I witnessed physical assaults and humiliations of all sorts. On one occasion I saw a worker pull a resident to the floor by the hair and then kick her in the head. Her colleagues looked on and did nothing. Residents were marched naked down corridors at the end of a mop, as if they were cattle on the way to milking. This was normal behaviour at the home.

  When the investigation was broadcast, the BBC helpline received the largest number of calls in the history of the broadcasting corporation. Judging by the response, such abuse was clearly being repeated in other care homes across the UK. There is little glory in uncovering this kind of story, but there was at least some satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that we had protected the 30 or so residents of the home and that we had put the issue of abuse in care homes on the government’s agenda.

  This story proved to be one of the most challenging of my career and nearly broke me both personally and professionally. About six months after the documentary was broadcast, the Kent Police said in a report that we had made up some of the claims and had exaggerated others. They leaked the report to the Sunday Telegraph, which ran the story of our ‘alleged deception’ on the front page for two weeks running. I was accused of lying about victims of abuse to advance my career. My professional integrity was called into question and it was suggested that I was morally bankrupt. It was a dark time for me and my career was in jeopardy.

  The allegations were so serious that they went right to the top of the BBC management. Greg Dyke, the flamboyant former BBC Chair
man, initiated an investigation and insisted on seeing the raw footage. He backed me one hundred per cent and I went on to sue the Kent Police for libel.

  The Police had confused care in custody suites with that of care homes and would suffer the consequences. They were forced to apologise unreservedly and it cost them £750,000 in legal costs and damages, which I donated to five charities for the learning disabled. It was the first successful libel suit against the UK Police Force in its near 200-year history. Subsequently, I became an ambassador for Mencap, a charity that works with people who have learning difficulties, and Action Against Elder Abuse, and I made a further three documentaries exposing abuse in care homes.

  So by the time I got the tip-off about the Missionaries of Charity care homes, I had enough experience in the area to recognise it as credible. We get lots of tip-offs, but this one had the ring of truth about it and I was easily persuaded to take a closer look.

  I first learned of the plight of the Kolkata children in 2004 from two Irish international aid workers, both qualified nurses and committed Catholics. They were very well-meaning and genuine in their desire to help. They had worked as volunteers for the Missionaries of Charity in their Daya Dan home the previous Christmas and had been appalled at the conditions.

  ‘I was shocked. I could only work there for three days. It was simply too distressing …. We had seen the same things in Romania but couldn’t believe it was happening in a Mother Teresa home,’ one of the nurses told me. In January, she and her colleague had written to Sr Nirmala, the newly-appointed Mother Superior, to voice their concerns. They wrote to her out of ‘compassion and not complaint’ they said, but received no response. Like me, they had been educated in Catholic schools and taught to believe that Mother Teresa was the holiest of women, second only to the Virgin Mary in sanctity. This belief was unwavering and was shared by the media and Church alike. This is what allowed the practices of the Order to go unquestioned for over 50 years. Even when the sister in charge of the Missionaries of Charity’s Mahatma Gandhi Welfare Centre in Kolkata was found guilty of burning a seven-year-old girl with a hot knife in 2000 as punishment, criticism remained muted.