Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me

by Donal Macintyre

  11

  COMEDY OF TERRORS

  Befriending killers is part of my job. It’s not necessarily something I enjoy, and on occasion it has left me feeling dirty. Over time their company often becomes more palatable and that has caused me to question my own morals and motives. However, if I am to reveal anything of these men, I have to get close to them, and I have to reconcile that with my own conscience, both as a journalist and as a man.

  I first met with Johnny Adair, the notorious UDA leader and convicted killer, in a very expensive hotel in Glasgow in late 2005. He arrived on time but wouldn’t enter the building without first sending in a security detail to clock me and to check for secret cameras.

  This meeting followed lengthy correspondence with Johnny while he was in prison and also contact with his ex-wife, Gina. In fact this was a meeting that had been two years in the preparation.

  The pocket rocket plastered with tattoos greeted me with a firm handshake. The then 42-year-old had a bouncy, Tiggerlike presence that I thought was out of character with his track record. I wanted to film with him over a period of time so that we could capture the real Johnny and get past his PR defences. There would be no money changing hands, but we would be fair and let him have his say, and that’s more than most of his victims had.

  There was one problem: in another guise, as a football hooligan, I had pretended to be a devout follower of Adair and his thugs in order to infiltrate the Chelsea Headhunters. Johnny wasn’t that bothered about it, but Jason Marriner, the hooligan who I had used the ruse against, was not happy. He considered Adair to be a god, and had in turn gained his trust.

  ‘I’ve run it by him [Marriner] and he said I shouldn’t do it. The problem is that he looks after me and he is part of my followers. It’s a problem. He thinks Johnny is a god,’ the former terrorist told me, speaking about himself in the third person, much like the Queen and Margaret Thatcher.

  While I was there, he phoned Jason and put him on loudspeaker. This was the first time I had heard his voice since the court case in Blackfriars when he was sentenced to six years in jail on foot of my evidence. Adair teased him on the phone:

  ‘Jason, what do you think?’

  ‘He is a grass. He is a Fenian c**t.’

  Adair went along with Jason, but roared laughing afterwards. This was as telling a moment about the man as any I filmed with him. He ignored Marriner’s advice and agreed to give me access to all areas.

  At first Adair was nervous, never having allowed more than the occasional news crew to interview him. But once he understood that there were no covert cameras and that there was no hidden agenda, he engaged fully with me and the process. He allowed us witnesss his extraordinary lifestyle and revealed himself as a troubled terrorist leader struggling to come to terms with the loss of his army.

  There is no doubting that the ‘Mad Dog’ moniker was hard earned: we know that detectives in Northern Ireland link Adair and his gang directly to over 40 sectarian murders (a number that he does not disagree with). Adair was born in 1963 into a working class Protestant family, and during the troubled seventies, his childhood was peppered with riots and sectarian clashes. His teens saw him start a Nazi hate-rock band called Offensive Weapon and he was later drafted into the Ulster Defence Association’s (UDA) youth wing. By the early nineties Adair had taken over the leadership of the UDA’s notorious ‘C’ Company, based on the Shankill Road. In 1995 he admitted that he had been a UDA commander and was jailed for 16 years for directing terrorism. In 2002, when he was 39 years old, he was freed from Maghaberry Prison under the Good Friday Agreement. Shortly afterwards, he was briefly returned to jail, but was finally released in 2005.

  Now exiled from his Belfast home after a murderous feud with his own Loyalist paramilitary leaders, only Johnny Adair knows exactly how many bodies lie at his feet. He claims that those days are now behind him, and today he’s living in Britain, looking for a new place to call home. I found him lying low in the Scottish town of Troon, constantly on the look out for excomrades bent on settling old scores. Although he is increasingly irrelevant to the politics of Northern Ireland, Adair is still being monitored by MI5, Strathclyde Police, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Greater Manchester Police and the National Crime Squad.

  These thoughts ran through my mind as I chatted with Johnny in a London pub at the start of the production. I knew a lot about him from books and research, but what I didn’t know was that talking about sex and himself was a favourite pastime of his.

  Mad Dog once showed me a text he’d received from an Irish girl: Thx for making a wee Catholic girl very happy. I suppose we should probably see it as part of the ‘peace dividend’. He has been accused in the past of directing his sexual attentions towards his dogs, his male comrades and a litany of women. When he isn’t sharing the details of his exploits with everyone else, he is busy sharing his sexual expeditions with his son, Jonathan (affectionately called Mad Pup), and is always happy to show you some recorded highlights on his mobile phone.

  Apparently, Adair has recently found love with a glamour model. He has already posed for photographs with the lucky lady and he has declared his love publicly. Naturally, this was done in the third person. ‘Johnny Adair has finally found love,’ he announced recently in the papers. As openly as ever, but thankfully without the video evidence, Adair declared proudly: ‘We have sex all the time: morning, noon and night. Look at the size of her mad puppies!’ He is like a love-struck teenager boasting to the boys behind the bike sheds.

  Adair is both infantile and deadly, like a child in a killer’s body. He is keen to make you laugh, keen to intimidate, keen to befriend, but most of all he is keen to let you know that he is still a king in exile.

  ‘I’m only marking time here. One day myself, my friends and family will return to our homeland. I want to go home to my native Ulster. It may take a month, a year, three years, but I’ll be back,’ he told me.

  ‘Didn’t Arnie patent that line? You can’t have it!’ I said to him, jokingly.

  ‘Who’s going to argue?’ he said.

  Fair point.

  While Johnny plans his triumphant return to Northern Ireland, he is rumoured to be building a new empire under the watchful eye of notorious Glasgow gangster, Mark ‘Scarface’ Morrison.

  ‘So, what do you do all day?’ I asked him.

  ‘Bits and pieces, erm, business interests. I’m kept very busy. Plus I do a wee bit of training.’

  He spends his time in the gym building his biceps and casting admiring glances at his scar-ridden body and that of his son, who is also a body fascist. They have both used steroids to help nature along, and it shows.

  Adair won’t talk about his business interests. He says he survives on benefits and the goodwill of loyal friends. Such friends include major criminal figures in Scotland and the odd Lottery winner.

  He claimed to be broke, but appeared always to have money. He claimed to yearn for his homeland, but also that he had never been happier. He claimed to be helping out a friend, but you couldn’t help thinking he might have been helping only himself, when he travelled to Norfolk to meet Mickey Carroll, Lottery millionaire to the tune of £9.7 million. Their friendship had begun when Carroll wrote to Adair in prison.

  Carroll’s parties were legendary, often costing up to £30,000, and, by his own admission, replete with hookers and cocaine on tap.

  ‘In one I had about 200 blokes and 100 women. Most of them call them orgies. It was unreal,’ Carroll told Adair.

  ‘How much [cash] did you have in one go?’ Adair asked.

  ‘Half a million pounds in cash,’ Mickey replied.

  ‘In one go, at your disposal? What would you be doing with that?’ Johnny wanted to know.

  ‘I just wanted to see it,’ Carroll said.

  At the time Carroll had a collection of antique military hardware, UDA flags and a throne in his attic, where he and Adair’s boys would play when they got together. The fridge was always full of dri
nk and there was always the sense that Adair had struck gold with his friendship with Carroll. Amid the free flowing-booze at the mansion, Adair anointed his adoring friend as the Brigadier of the Norfolk branch of the UDA.

  ‘Any problem with that, Mickey?’

  ‘No,’ said Mickey, delighted.

  I asked Johnny if he would be passing on his expertise to the new brigadier.

  ‘No. Mickey will be passing his money on to the Loyalist prisoners,’ he told me.

  Carroll didn’t come across as the sharpest tool in the box: he is a bit soft and is an easy pushover. The six-footer has a mop of black scruffy hair, an ample beer belly and a solid agricultural frame. Despite his size he clearly needs protection from predators after losing over £1 million to extortionists. In any event, when a man needs protection, he should be worried if it comes in the shape of Johnny Adair.

  I couldn’t help thinking that Mickey might be safer with someone else. I am sure the events are unconnected, but since he has met Adair, his fortune had dwindled to nothing. He has recently declared himself penniless, an extraordinary situation for a man, who until a short time ago had £9 million, to find himself in.

  But there were even more disturbing friends to be found in the Nazi wing of Adair’s fan club. There had been a longstanding invitation for Adair to visit Dresden to meet a curious group of followers who held him in high esteem. Thirty-year-old neo-Nazi, Nick Gregor, was residing at Hammerweg maximum-security prison after being convicted of bomb making. Gregor had a swastika tattooed over his ear, his head was shaved clean and he was lean and muscled like a frontline soldier. When he wasn’t in his cell, he spent his time in the prison gym. He had declared that he and his soldiers were at Johnny’s disposal.

  I was with them when they met and it looked like the reunion of two lovers. It has been suggested that Adair had gay relationships in the Maze prison but he has always denied this, and I wasn’t about to push the point in front of ‘Nazi Nick’ – that would have been asking for trouble.

  The prison authorities seemed unaware that, by allowing Adair and the Nazi to meet, they were bringing very volatile forces together.

  ‘I have all the posters of you in my cell. It looks like the UFF headquarters,’ Nick began. ‘I thought, “We need someone like Johnny over here to lead us,” so we chose you to be our chief. My struggle is to protect you. Should someone shoot Johnny, we will send five guys over. We know where to find these guys [Adair’s enemies]. Our guys are very well experienced in punish[ment] beating[s].’

  Gregor himself is banned from entering the UK – however, his men are not.

  While Nazi Nick languished in prison, Adair spent the night with his supporters, who put on a party for him in a small flat in the centre of Dresden. The guests were all neo-Nazi sympathisers and card-carrying members of the cult of Johnny Adair.

  One fan, Christina, admitted to having a shrine to the fallen Loyalist leader in her home. ‘I like him and his lifestyle. He’s a great man,’ she said. Christina doesn’t stand out of the crowd, with her dowdy black hair and librarian looks that are a clue to her secretarial job. But she is at least extraordinary in her obsession. ‘He smiles all the time and he is so funny,’ she enthuses. As she speaks, candles flicker over photos of Adair in various states of paramilitary dress and undress. He is clearly not shy about showing off his honed pecs. Christina is devoted: ‘The reason I have a shrine to him is to see him every day, to let him know that he has friends who will stand by him. He is simply Johnny and is simply the best.’

  The ‘gangster wrapped in a Union Jack’ as the Police describe him, is still up for action, but nowadays it is mostly sex with prostitutes. After the party, Adair sought out some female c ompany on the streets of Dresden. On another night, he had sex with one of his adoring groupies, although he was a little shy about admitting it at first.

  * * * * *

  Tattoos are the iconography of Adair’s world and I went with him and Jonathan when they were adding another to their collections.

  ‘So, what’s the tattoo you’re getting now, and why?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m getting a UFF ‘C’ Company one. The words in Latin: actions, not words [factum non verbum]. ‘C’ Company was an army – men of actions, not words.’

  Mad Pup looked on and winced his way through his own tattoo. What’s good for the daddy will do for son! It was obvious that he hadn’t inherited his Dad’s apparently high pain threshold. He is no stranger to pain himself, however. As a teenager in Belfast, Mad Pup suffered a painful punishment shooting for antisocial behaviour, widely rumoured at the time to have been ordered by his own father.

  With his dad beside him, I asked Jonathan about his leg wounds.

  ‘What did they do to you?’

  ‘I was took up an alley and told to sit on the ground, kneeling down with my back against the wall. As soon as they put the bullets in the gun, I told them, “Let’s get it over and done with.”’

  ‘You said to get it over quickly?’

  ‘I didn’t want to be waiting about, thinking about it. Get it over and done with as soon as possible. Before I knew it, I was shot,’ Jonathan remembered.

  ‘And where did they shoot you?’

  ‘Both calves. Then they just left me. I tried to get up and walk. I walked a bit, but I ended up falling again. People came out and took me into a house, then took me to hospital.’

  ‘And just to the back of your calves?’

  ‘Just the sides.’

  ‘Any scars?’ I asked.

  Jonathan nodded.

  ‘Yeah? And the same on the other leg?’ I asked.

  ‘Same on the other leg, yeah,’ he said.

  But it wasn’t the mutilation of his leg he was worried about.

  ‘That was through my tattoo, I was a bit raging at that. See it there? To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that bad, it was only my calves. It would be different if it was my kneecaps. That’s getting off lightly, that. That’s only a flesh wound, that one.’

  I asked him a question that didn’t really need to be asked but I was hoping it would bring out some element of the truth:

  ‘Did the Police ask who did it?’

  ‘I just told them to go away, mind their own business,’ Jonathan replied.

  For the first time I saw Johnny get twitchy. He was going to make sure there were no direct admissions, so he intervened and took the reins.

  ‘Well, I think Jonathan was man enough to take his punishment, and he realised that he wasn’t getting any special treatment because I was his father. He was just treated the same as any other teenager in that area would be treated if they crossed the paramilitary.’

  Tragically, despite the old man’s best efforts Jonathan was convicted of drug dealing. The court report noted that 19-yearold Jonathan Adair faced 10 different charges of conspiracy to supply and of supplying class ‘A’ drugs, including heroin and crack cocaine. He was convicted and jailed for five years.

  I asked Daddy Adair if Jonathan had reformed.

  ‘Yes, and he’ll never do it again. Jonathan quite foolishly got involved in drugs in Bolton and, erm, and as a result he received five years in prison. It’s done him the world of good. He’s out now. He’s clear of drugs and he’ll never go down that road again. Neither will his father.’

  ‘You won’t be knee-capping him if he gets involved again, will you?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  The spectre of drugs has always haunted Adair, his family and his organisation, although he has never admitted to having been involved in their supply directly.

  ‘I don’t know if it was the Police or someone in the fucking media who said that I’m a drug dealer. How can someone like Johnny Adair possibly be dealing fucking drugs? How can someone like Johnny Adair possibly be in any way associated with them? Johnny Adair, I have no doubt, is under 24-hour surveillance by the Special Branch, no matter if it’s here in Scotland, in Manchester or back home in Belfast. That is a fact. So it would be
suicide for me to try anything illegal, let alone drugs.’

  The only drugs Johnny Adair would admit to taking are bodybuilding steroids.

  ‘Do I take steroids? Well, does Popeye take spinach?’ he laughed. It was common for prisoners in the Maze to use steroids. They were smuggled in to Adair in the false leg of a visitor, who also brought in other drugs and porn.

  ‘It’s accepted that your organisation was financed to the tune of millions of pounds to fund military operations by racketeering, extortion and drugs. That’s accepted, that’s fact?’ I asked him.

  ‘That is a fact,’ he confirmed.

  Once the king of his own little principality with a loyal army and stocks of munitions, Adair was now in Scotland, apparently broke and on the dole. I suggested to him that there were obvious career opportunities there for him should he chose to go down that route.

  ‘Is the next business going to be drugs for you in Scotland?’ I asked.

  ‘The people just need to look at my background and other so-called Loyalists’ backgrounds and see who has the wealth. Johnny Adair doesn’t have the wealth. Johnny Adair was a soldier, a freedom fighter. Money was never his god,’ he told me.

  ‘That’s true, but nowadays people say you are going to take those big multi-million extortion operations to Scotland.’

  ‘No, because it would be breaking the law,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

  Adair’s buddy in Scotland, Mark ‘Scarface’ Morrison, is not a terrorist. He’s what police call an ODC – an ordinary decent criminal. His multiple convictions include assault, forgery, breach of the peace and fraud. In Scottish gangland circles, Scarface is known as the A-to-Z of the underworld. Morrison prefers to call himself a ‘consultant’. So you do have to wonder exactly what Adair’s new ‘business interests’ are.

  * * * * *

  Johnny Adair is obsessive. His number one obsession is of course himself, but his Alsatian dogs, Shane and Rebel, come a close second. In 1995, when he was sent to prison for 16 years for directing terrorism, he gave his dogs to his friend and paramilitary associate, Desmond. When Desmond, a convicted drug dealer, left Northern Ireland to live in the North of England he took the pets with him. It seems that while Desmond had tired of people, he had fallen in love with the animals and would not return them to Johnny. Once again, one of Johnny’s former associates had become an enemy.