Crooks 2, p.3
Crooks 2, page 3
I have not been a stranger to abuse by the faceless digital trolls over the years. But after experiencing so many threats over the decades you become inured to abuse. The social media nuts don’t bother me. But it is something which I try to advise younger journalists about: don’t let the bastards get you down. Nor do I ever take any pleasure seeing awful things being written about people I don’t like. I am aware that some journalists also hide behind anonymous accounts to spew their own venom. I don’t use social media apart from LinkedIn and have long since stopped looking at what is said about me. But it can be quite satisfying at times to know that you have pissed off certain groups. It means that I must have been doing something right.
In Crooks I told the story of how I locked horns with fraudster Giovanni Di Stefano. He came to Ireland posing as a high-powered lawyer who claimed he would win the freedom of some of the country’s most notorious gangsters. He was dubbed the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ having gained international notoriety as he claimed to represent the likes of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and UK serial killers Harold Shipman and Ian Brady.
Before Twitter/X, he used a website to launch ferocious attacks designed to discredit and intimidate journalists who crossed him in the UK. In 2006 he turned his full focus onto me after I exposed him as a fraud who had no legal qualifications and was in fact a convicted criminal. He then embarked on a full-on assault on my character. He accused me of being a cocaine addict, an extortionist, a paedophile, a user of prostitutes, a serial philanderer and a perjurer. He even claimed that I was responsible for murder.
He also posted pictures of my home on his website which gained huge traction in Ireland. The pictures had been taken by members of Marlo Hyland’s gang when they staked out my home for possible attack. As in Ryan’s case, they backed off when they spotted the garda presence there. Di Stefano eventually ended up where he belonged – behind bars.
Back in the early days, before Twitter/X, Ryan and other dissident republican groups used similar means to attack me. In recent years the Monk’s acolytes lambasted me for months on end with every kind of rubbish. I took it as a compliment.
Ignoring it has been one of the many learning curves I experienced during my career. That is why I understand why so many journalists and editors are fearful of a social media backlash. Some outlets censor their own content just to avoid pissing off the digital warriors. As some of my great mentors over the years often reminded me: you are writing for the man in the street, not other journalists. That now includes the faceless social media brigade. There is no point in entering a combat zone if you’re not prepared for a fight. I treat the online attackers the same way I did the ones making physical threats: show the bastards that they won’t beat you down. In many ways I can thank Di Stefano for hardening me up for the many social media assaults I’ve experienced. There have been so many that I’ve lost count.
Shortly after the Kinahan/Hutch feud erupted in 2016 I was a guest on the Late Late Show with Ryan Tubridy and posited a history of the two mobs involved. As part of the appraisal I correctly predicted that the non-jury Special Criminal Court was going to be a vital weapon in taking on the powerful gangs, especially the Kinahan cartel. The mob would do everything in their power to undermine the rule of law with the money and means to corrupt and intimidate juries in other Irish courts. The SCC is our anti-mafia court. Then I exposed the inherent hypocrisy of Sinn Féin’s stance on organized crime, specifically the party’s determination to abolish the Special Criminal Court. There was a general election campaign going on at the time and getting rid of the court was in their manifesto for government.
Sinn Féin’s shadowy bosses in Belfast, who dictate what its elected representatives say and think, hate the SCC because it convicted so many IRA terrorists. I pointed out that the only people who would vote for that part of their manifesto were the crime bosses, the killers, the drug dealers and the kidnappers. As a result I trended on Twitter for days and was subjected to a torrent of vituperative abuse from the supporters of the supposedly democratic party, some of which included physical threats.
RTÉ received 128 formal complaints about the comments mostly from party supporters but only two proceeded to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI), the media regulator – now called Coimisiún na Meán. The BAI later rejected them by a majority vote.
Sinn Féin quietly dropped their demands to abolish the SCC after the election because the public did not agree with their stance. Coincidentally Sinn Féin representatives are responsible for a disproportionate number of SLAPPS or threatened libel suits against the media in recent years – many more than the rest of the political establishment combined.
Another social media attack happened in July 2024, after I appeared with Pat Kenny on Newstalk to discuss anti-immigrant riots in Coolock, west Dublin. Similar riots had erupted in Dublin city centre in November 2023. I made the point that the opening of a migrant centre had provided an opportunity for some recreational mayhem by a group of anti-social thugs, many of whom were involved in crime. Like Alan Ryan they hitched their wagons to a cause – in this case the so-called far right – so that they could attack gardaí and burn things down in the ludicrous claim of defending their communities.
It is not a coincidence that dissident republicans are heavily involved with the far-right mob. The involvement in such causes benefits the participants in their criminal pursuits and gives them more power to intimidate the communities where they live. I suggested that garda chiefs were wrong to order their officers to stand back when they should have used their legitimate powers and baton charged the thugs off the streets.
I pointed out that while this country has a major problem with unregulated immigration that needs to be addressed, it was interesting that the far right never used their power to confront the scourge of home-grown gangs who are terrorizing working-class estates. For a few hours I became the focus of the mob’s ire. Some of them pointed out where I lived and suggested I get a visit which clearly meant that those who did come would not be popping in for tea and a chat.
Proving that the vast majority of it is nothing more than hot air, the herd quickly moved onto its next target. But it illustrates how venomous keyboard warriors try to intimidate journalists and create a chilling effect on the media. I am well experienced in dealing with threats and intimidation, but it takes a huge toll on younger journalists who are simply reporting what is going on. I will continue to remind colleagues that coming under digital attack from these morons gives their work credibility.
In 2024 I marked forty years in journalism. During that time I have chronicled the evolution of organized crime in Ireland as a front seat observer in what was often a white-knuckle ride. Back then it was suggested by my publishing editors and some trusted friends that I should write a sort of semi-autobiographical book covering my personal experiences over that period. Basically they suggested taking my loyal readers on a ride-along behind the scenes of some of more notorious stories I worked on. The end product was the first volume of Crooks. I am deeply grateful to the readers who made it a bestseller.
I wrote about the first major godfathers I encountered, starting with the General and how he fuelled my interest in crime and criminology. It gave me a chance to tell how I witnessed gangland morph into a vast, multi-billion industry built on narcotics. Exhuming old ghosts by revisiting the dark corners of my career was at times an emotional experience. It brought back memories, both good and bad, of triumphs and loss. I relived many of the times that I came close to meeting the grim reaper and found myself admitting publicly for the first time that I suffered a bout of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Writing Crooks was cathartic. It also gave me an opportunity to acknowledge the many brilliant people I had the honour to work with and who helped me in my career. Crooks 2 is a continuation of the story of my personal journey.
Journalists everywhere have covered stories that they never forget the same way cops have cases that always live with them. Some stories have a tendency to pop up many years after they were first told. I have had many stories that I cannot forget as the experience is burnt into my memory banks. My first-hand experiences over a fourteen-year period exposing the mind-boggling violence of Limerick’s Dundon/McCarthy clan, Murder Inc., in the longest, most brutal gang war in Irish criminal history is one of them.
As a journalist I have been nothing more than a conduit of information to the public. I have reported on the evil things bad people do to good people. In Crooks 2 I concentrate on some of the extraordinary people who trusted me to tell their stories: individuals who have encountered adversity in its most extreme form and survived. To me they are all heroes. I am honoured to say that many of them became dear friends.
The memories from my career in journalism are filled with an awesome cast of characters. But not all of them were criminals in the traditional sense. One of the biggest stories I worked on was exposing a different type of scandal, a moral crime if you will, which fascinated the Irish public three decades ago. It involved exposing the secret life of one of Ireland’s most famous and admired priests – Fr Michael Cleary.
CHAPTER TWO
EXPOSING THE CHURCH’S DIRTY SECRETS
On New Year’s Eve 1993 Father Michael Cleary, the celebrity priest and the Catholic Church’s most outspoken moral fundamentalist, died from lung cancer at the relatively young age of sixty. Coverage of the death of one of Ireland’s most famous clerics dominated the news bulletins. A succession of church leaders, former parishioners and famous friends fondly remembered the charismatic man of the cloth in a blizzard of valedictory sound bites and comments.
The TV news showed iconic footage of Cleary and his by then disgraced best friend, Bishop Eamonn Casey, as they entertained 300,000 young people prior to Pope John Paul II’s historic Youth Mass in Galway in 1979. It marked the high point of Cleary’s fame.
All I knew about Michael Cleary on New Year’s Day 1994 was what I had seen, heard or read of him in the media. Little did I know then that I would be the one who would reveal the secrets he had hoped to take with him to the grave.
Cleary’s image was that of a much-loved man of the people and hardline stalwart of Catholic doctrine. He came from a wealthy family and enjoyed a privileged upbringing. Ordained in 1958, he never conformed to the traditional image of the austere, aloof clergyman. In appearance Cleary was unmistakable in a crowd. A tall thin man six feet four inches in height, he wore glasses, a bushy red beard and had wiry thinning hair. The chain-smoking padre always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
As a curate in the 1960s he worked in Dublin’s most deprived parishes where he initiated some of the first outreach youth programmes at a time when the State provided little or no support to the disadvantaged in society. His image was that of a priest whose social work extended to supporting unmarried mothers in a less enlightened, cruel era when such women were incarcerated in notorious mother and baby homes. He also worked for a time in London where he was assigned to the Irish emigrant chaplaincy.
An accomplished raconteur who would sing, tell jokes and yarns for his adoring audiences Cleary was best known as the ‘singing priest’. He co-founded the All Priests Show which staged charity concerts across Ireland over many years. Through his showbiz connections he was a religious mentor to celebrities in the entertainment and media industries.
He enjoyed considerable fame as a TV celebrity and newspaper columnist writing for the Sunday Independent and the Irish Star so that he could reach people at all levels in society. Over the decades he was a regular guest on the country’s most watched TV programme, Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show.
When it was launched by RTÉ in the early 1960s, the Late Late Show was castigated as being dangerous to the nation’s moral well-being by the all-powerful Catholic establishment. Byrne was accused of corrupting the young by confronting issues of morality and sex that had never been discussed in public before. RTÉ came under intense pressure to ban the show. Cleary broke that taboo when he became the first priest ever to appear on it. He counted Ireland’s chat show king as one of his close friends.
From the 1980s Cleary hosted a popular nightly local radio show on Dublin’s 98FM where he freely expressed his conservative opinions and dispensed advice to listeners. The show was particularly popular amongst the inmates of Mountjoy Prison for whom he acted as a broadcast minister answering letters and music requests from his captive audience. He had a reputation for being a friend to both the poor and downtrodden as well as the rich and powerful.
That position made Cleary the poster boy of a church that had dominated every aspect of Irish life since the foundation of the State. Like Bishop Casey, he used his fame and affability to push Catholic doctrine on the Irish public. By appearing to be more down to earth than the average cleric he was one of the first Irish priests to present a more human face of the Church for a still largely devout, deferential population In reality Michael Cleary was one of the frontmen at the time when Ireland was still in the pedagogic, domineering grip of a hegemonic church. He used a blend of humour and jokes to deliver bombastic utterances on sin and morals.
My perception of Cleary was that of a moral boot boy who used his huge media profile to propagate the Church’s strict precepts on divorce, abortion, contraception and homosexuality. He influenced public debate during constitutional referenda on issues such as divorce or abortion, or when topical legislation perceived to conflict with church doctrine on issues of morality and sexuality was brought before parliament.
In 1990 he publicly returned his BA to University College Dublin (UCD), It was a protest against the university’s conferral of an honorary degree on a judge who had been instrumental in ruling abortion legal in the USA.
Cleary was particularly vocal in the run up to the country’s first referendum on abortion in 1992 in the wake of the X case. The amendment had been proposed after the High Court, working from the existing legislation regarding the right to travel for abortion, initially stopped the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) from taking a 14-year-old rape victim to the UK for a termination. The ruling was later overturned by the Supreme Court and the child had the abortion. In the referendum a majority of the electorate voted along church lines in supporting an unequivocal constitutional ban on abortion.
Two other amendments, which permitted people access to information about abortion in other countries and the freedom to travel abroad for terminations were passed despite church opposition. The referendum results epitomized the nation’s moral ambivalence: abortion was illegal but everyone knew countless thousands of Irish women were forced to travel in secret to the UK for terminations like they were criminals. It was kept out of sight and was like a parallel universe. It would take another twenty-six years before the country matured enough to eventually legalize abortion in a referendum in 2018.
I was in my twenties at the time of the first referendum and part of Generation X which was the first generation to begin the slow process of secularization by questioning the relevance and power of the Church. We began to call out the lack of empathy and understanding demonstrated by Cleary and his ilk. It was one of the reasons I wasn’t overwhelmed by the news of his demise.
In Crooks I told how my wife Anne incurred the wrath of the Catholic Church when, as a trainee reporter with the Longford Leader, she wrote a feminist column supporting a woman’s right to choose if she wanted an abortion.
Just over a decade earlier one of Ireland’s greatest writers John McGahern, who lived near my hometown of Ballinamore in County Leitrim, was sacked from his job as a teacher after his second novel, The Dark, was banned by a domineering church, led by the notorious Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. McGahern’s books were among the first I ever read.
Like most of my peers, I rebelled against the Church and was a confirmed agnostic by the time I hit my teens. I remember once being beaten by a teacher in Ballinamore secondary school because I could not recite the ‘Our Father’ in Irish. He succeeded in beating religion and an interest in the Irish language out of me. When I was doing my Leaving Cert in Carrigallen Vocational school in Leitrim in 1983 – after being expelled from two previous secondary schools – I refused to attend religion classes. When the priest running the class ordered me to attend I told him it was a waste of my time and I would be more constructively employed actually studying the subjects for the exams. I’d deal with God in my own way.
The priest, a Father Collins, complained bitterly to the principal Mick Duignan and suggested that I was a bad influence on the other kids. My recalcitrance, he suggested, should be countered with the threat of expulsion which would mean the end of my education. I was delighted when Duignan stood by me which was unusual at the time. Vocational schools were the first second-level State run institutions that were independent of religious orders which was why they played an important and understated role in our social evolution. I also received the backing of his deputy, Eamon Daly, who taught me English and the value of questioning the status quo. Although practising Catholics, my parents also agreed that I was right to stand up for myself. I had won my first battle to break away from the clutches of mother church.
