Читать книгу Mad Dog - They Shot Me in the Head, They Gave Me Cyanide and They Stabbed Me, But I'm Still Standing - Johnny Adair - Страница 14

In February 1985, I received a hammer blow when my close friend Mark Rosborough was murdered. We had known each other since we were kids and for a time he had even managed our skinhead band.

The brutal way in which he died haunts me to this day. Mark, who was 21 at the time, had been out drinking at the Cavern Street Social Club and was invited back to a card game on the Lower Shankill Road. Hours later, his badly battered body was found by chance at Ballygomartin rubbish dump. At the card game was Noel McCausland, who blamed Mark for an attack on his brother in 1979 that had left him with brain damage. Mark was charged with the attack, but the charges were dropped. That made no difference to them, and that night six years later it was time for revenge.

Mark was blasted several times in the back of the head from close range, but when the gang inspected his body he was still breathing. To finish him off, they choked him with a belt, which snapped, and then a length of wire.

Even after all that, he refused to die. He only gave up when they placed a mat on his head and stood on it for a quarter of an hour. In order to cover their tracks, the body was taken to the rubbish tip, where they hoped it would be buried. It was only luck that someone spotted it. Mark was so badly disfigured that he could only be identified by his tattoos. The judge at the trial described the murder as ‘subhuman’ and McCausland was given a life sentence for his role in the killing. It left me numb, for Mark was a good friend and what had happened was terrible, whoever the victim.

But worse was to come for me when, a few months later, I was responsible for the death of another friend in a car crash. Along with Maurice Drumgoole and a couple of others, I spent an afternoon watching an Orange flute band play before going for a couple of drinks in a pub called the Meeting of the Waters. After that we decided to head out to a nightclub at Templepatrick in County Antrim. I’d had a few drinks but insisted that I was OK to drive. I jumped behind the wheel of the VW Beetle, with Maurice behind me and the other two piled in as well.

Everything was fine. It was raining a bit, but not too hard, as I drove up Crumlin Road, heading out towards the country and following the Horseshoe bend in the north of the city. All I can remember is losing control of the car as I took one of the tight curves. It rolled twice before ending up on the roof. As soon as it came to a stop, I looked round to see how everybody was. At a glance everything seemed to be OK. There was no blood and the car had somehow managed to escape serious damage. I remember the three of us talking, checking how we were as we clambered out of the wreck, which was still upside down. There wasn’t a mark or a scrape on any of us. But Maurice was still in the back of the car. He hadn’t moved. His neck was broken and he died at the scene.

The police appeared and took us to Antrim police station, where I had to tell them what had happened. I was badly shaken and was in shock for weeks afterwards. Maurice was one of my best friends and I’d been driving when he died. On 19 November 1986, I appeared at Antrim Magistrates’ Court and was convicted of reckless driving while under the influence of alcohol and without insurance or a licence. It was a terrible period of my life and it was difficult to come to terms with what had happened. Maurice and I had been like brothers, and every Sunday without fail I spent an hour at his grave.

At his funeral, Maurice’s family were great to me, accepting that it had been an accident and that any one of the four of us could have died. Despite this, I still felt that it was my fault. If I hadn’t been at the wheel, Maurice would still be here. I was jailed for six months, banned from driving for three years and fined £150. I was bailed until my appeal hearing could be heard.

Things went from bad to worse. Sometime after the trial, I was left fighting for my life when Sam and I were attacked by a gang of Catholics at the back of my house. To be honest, we were caught off guard because the last thing we expected was to be set upon in our own territory. It was a big risk for a gang of Republicans to come into our patch and start trouble. If they had been caught, they might well not have made it back across the peace line.

The brawl didn’t last long. The gang were in and out very quickly. Although I was only stabbed once in the back, my injuries were the most serious. The blade punctured my bladder, sliced through the lung and ripped the spleen. The assault left me in hospital for weeks and the medics put my chances of pulling through at no better than 40 per cent. My family were called to the hospital and told to expect the worst. It was particularly tough for Gina, who was expecting our second child, Natalie.

Sam was very lucky and spent just one night in hospital. When a blade entered his chest, his ribs stopped it from piercing his heart. If it had gone in at a different angle, I doubt he would have made it.

Not long afterwards, I lost my appeal and was banged up in Crumlin Road. When I got out in the middle of 1987, I turned my back on work and became a full-time UDA man.

Two years earlier, Margaret Thatcher and Garret Fitzgerald, the Irish Prime Minister, had signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle outside Belfast. For the first time Dublin had a direct say in the running of Northern Ireland. Since then the fear that all-out war with the Provos was just around the corner had been getting worse and worse. People flocked to become members of the UDA and membership almost doubled. For me the biggest influence was Winkie Dodds, who was now running C Company. He was the man who asked me if I had the bottle to take on military operations. Up to that point I’d paid my dues and kept a low profile. I knew Winkie when I was a young kid, but it was only when he was released from prison for robbing a post office that we became close.

It wasn’t long after Winkie was released that he was picked up for the shooting of Sinn Fein member Harry Fitzsimmons. That impressed me. If the cops were right, he was in among it straight away, and that proved how much he believed in the cause.

Winkie made it through the seven days of interrogation at Castlereagh. The police knew that the intelligence for the operation had come from their mole Brian Nelson. It wasn’t hard for them to join up the dots, but Winkie still walked.

C Company was split into 24 teams and there were about a thousand of us in total. I was still just a rank-and-file member when, at the usual Friday-night meeting, I was called into the back room by Winkie and asked if I was prepared to get my hands dirty. He did the same with Sammy that night, the idea being that the two of us would operate together. I’d never done anything like it before, but as far as I was concerned it had reached the stage where somebody had to.

I didn’t need a lot of persuasion, as I felt I could put my faith in Winkie. He wanted the same thing for the UDA as I did, to turn it into a fighting force capable of taking on the IRA. We got on and would talk about what direction we thought the UDA should be moving in. He gave me hope that the crowd that were currently at the top could be swept away.

As military commander, Winkie’s job was to pick men and targets. At this stage, Brian Nelson was the UDA’s overall intelligence officer and he was securing the information on targets with the help of the FRU.

The first step was for Winkie to say that something was being planned at headquarters, then he would come to your house and run through what was to be done. Next came surveillance, preferably carried out first thing in the morning, to make sure that you had your bearings right. I knew that Winkie was a hardliner, and I trusted him.

At that stage, I had no idea why people were being picked out as targets, as that decision was being taken much higher up the tree than I was.

It was only after I stopped working at the timber yard that I was entrusted with bigger jobs for the UDA. Before that it was only minor stuff, like moving materials about.

At the yard I was picking up £90 a week, and £20 extra if I did overtime, which I thought was good money. But then I started getting involved in criminal activity with the UDA and this brought in a lot more cash. The lure of easy money carrying out armed robberies meant that I couldn’t see the point in going back to the grind of manual labour. I was working 50 hours a week for a wage that was nothing compared with what I could make with the UDA. Three or four of us were going out on a job and ending up with £1,000 each. I realised very quickly that crime paid, and paid well. The UDA got their slice, although not always, and even if they did there was still plenty to go around.

It was like a job: we would get up in the morning, jump into a car, drive about and target a place to rob. It was simple work and I enjoyed it. I was making a lot of money without hurting anybody. By comparison, being trapped in a big shed all day making roof trusses had felt like a prison sentence.

One job we pulled was nearly ruined by one of my Alsatians. The gang turned up at my house to pick me up to carry out a robbery, and as we pulled away the dog chased us down the road. The rest of the guys were panicking, but I told them that there was nothing to worry about as it would give up after a couple of hundred yards and go back home.

We got to the place we were going to turn over, which wasn’t far from where I lived. Everything went without a hitch. But, as I came back out to get into the getaway vehicle, the daft dog appeared, jumped up on top of me and put its paws on my shoulders.

That dog was crazy. If you left him on his own for too long, he would go for you, even if he knew you. I decided to use this to my advantage. Everywhere I went I would get stopped by the police and searched. At one stage I was getting hauled over to the side of the road almost 20 times a day, and I’d had enough.

One day I deliberately stopped at a roadblock to let the cops have a look about the car. They took my licence and then asked me to open the boot. I let the catch off, which opened it slightly, and as one officer went to lift the boot the dog sprang out. Thinking it was a gunman, the copper just about managed to cock his rifle, but the shock nearly gave him a heart attack.

By now the security services were getting wind of the fact that C Company was on the rise and began keeping close tabs on us. The first time I was pulled in for a murder was after the killing of Patrick Hamill. He was an English Catholic, originally from Leicester, who was gunned down by two Loyalist hitmen in September 1987. He had lived just off Springfield Road for five years after marrying a local woman. An inquest heard that the killers entered Hamill’s house dressed in boiler suits and shot him in the head and chest. He died the next day in hospital.

The cops came and arrested me because the commander of B Company fingered me for it. He was a tout for Special Branch and needed to keep his handlers happy. He was more than happy to sacrifice any of us to keep the pressure off himself. When they got me to Castlereagh, the detectives told me they had a witness who could put me at the scene, but they were just trying to pile the pressure on me.

Brian Nelson had supplied the intelligence for the hit, but Hamill was a mistake. During questioning, the police told me that a top Provo had lived in the house before him. I was held for two days and then released.

The same gun that had been used to kill Hamill was also used in the shooting of Francisco Notarantonio in west Belfast in October 1987. I wasn’t pulled in for it but it was a very significant and controversial hit by Loyalist gunmen.

As with most of the operations carried out by C Company at this stage, the intelligence was supplied by the FRU’s agent Brian Nelson. It emerged later on that on this occasion, Nelson slipped up and handed over the details of the security services’ best Republican mole, codenamed Stakeknife, who lived a few doors from Notarantonio in Ballymurphy.

At the last minute, the target was changed from Stakeknife to the 66-year-old retired taxi driver and former IRA man. Gunmen broke into Notarantonio’s home early in the morning and shot him dead in his bed. It’s said that Stakeknife was later spotted at his funeral. Gerry Adams complained that he was amazed that a Loyalist hit squad was able to get in and out of the area without being picked up, despite the fact that the area was crawling with army personnel.

Successes like this were down to Nelson and his handlers. Whenever he was involved, C Company gunmen got a clear run in and out of Republican areas. His handlers knew that Loyalist gunmen had balls, but not the information that they needed. The Provisionals were causing mayhem but there was little that the people at the top were able to do, so they looked elsewhere. The FRU probably knew who Nelson was giving the intelligence to, but they had no intention of stopping it.