Crooks 2, p.7
Crooks 2, page 7
From the way the references were written I became concerned that Phyllis may have been in some kind of relationship with this man. It would only be a matter of time before someone would point this out in an attempt to discredit her. My suspicions were raised when she became coy after I asked the question and she refused to elaborate. I emphasized that it was important to her credibility to clarify this before it became a problem.
Finally, she revealed the secret. Salvador was Michael Cleary’s secret code for what she described as ‘his physical desire for me’. He also used to sign cards and letters with the number ‘8’ which was the number of letters in the phrase: I love you. All of that went into the book.
Then there was another bizarre postscript that occurred a number of weeks after the Sunday World stories were published and I had begun working on the book. I was contacted by a former nurse who had cared for Cleary when he was being treated for thyroid cancer. The woman, who lived in Coolock in north Dublin, said that at one stage in his treatment, when he thought he was going to die, Michael confessed his relationship with Phyllis. She could provide proof that she had been his nurse and was happy for me to use the information in a story but didn’t want her name mentioned. I spoke to her on the phone and arranged to call to her home the following day.
When I got there she told me that a priest had called to her home unannounced a few hours earlier to tell her that he heard she had been talking to me. In a thinly veiled threat he suggested that if she revealed what Cleary had told her twenty years earlier she could find herself in trouble legally. The priest was due to call back again the following day. The former nurse was concerned that I had told someone about her making contact. I had said nothing and could not work out what was going on.
With the woman’s agreement, we decided to plant a recording device in her home to capture the conversation when the priest returned. I arranged to also have two photographers hidden in the area to snap him when he did. It would provide important evidence that the Church was actively working to undermine the story about their famous priest.
But then I got another call from the woman who was very anxious and scared. The priest had called her on the phone and told her she was a ‘a very naughty woman for helping the Sunday World and that reporter’. It was clear that he knew what we were doing. I later discovered that a private investigator had been hired by someone in the hierarchy to eavesdrop on my mobile phone. At the time it worked on the old analogue system and could be picked up on a scanner.
However, to do that specialist equipment had to be used within a mile radius of my phone which meant that I was being followed from a discreet distance. I had become very security conscious over the previous year or so and would have spotted someone tailing me. It was an astonishing development. I was shocked that the Church was prepared to go to such lengths.
A senior garda source attached to Garda HQ contacted me to confirm they had also somehow learned about the spook operation. I later discovered the identity of the private investigator who had been hired by the Church. I have always known the identity of the priest involved – he is still alive.
It was another important learning curve for me. The PI had obviously picked up on my initial conversation with the woman. I had also phoned a colleague in the newspaper and asked him to bring the bugging equipment to the woman’s home. It was a stupid mistake but also an important lesson. I was much more careful after that. A year later we started using GSM digital mobile phones as technology moved on. They could not be picked up on scanner.
Despite the scare the woman was happy for me to use the information she had given me. She didn’t hear from the priest after that. When I eventually finished the book I recall thinking how I was glad to be returning to the murky world of covering crime. At least I knew what I was dealing with there.
The Cleary investigation put the Sunday World on the map as a serious tabloid. After that it was no longer looked down on by the rest of the industry. In October 1995 we received the vindication and approbation of our peers at the National Media Awards when I became the first tabloid journalist in Ireland to receive the award for Outstanding work in Irish Print Journalism. The judging panel was comprised of the most respected journalists and editors in the business.
The judges’ citation read that the account of the relationship between Cleary and Phyllis:
. . . made compelling reading, revealing a liaison that was at once loving, fraught, sad and indicative of a dilemma for the times. The impact of the series was heightened by the fact that it coincided with the public debate on priestly celibacy.
It was a huge honour. I dedicated it to Phyl and Ross and my Sunday World colleagues who had made it possible.
Veronica Guerin also received an award at the same ceremony in recognition of her being shot and injured in her home earlier that year. The judges created a special award of distinction to commend her ‘courage and tenacity that goes beyond what most journalists would consider reasonable’. A month before the award ceremony, on 14 September, she had called at the home of John Gilligan to seek an interview about the source of his inexplicable wealth.
The diminutive thug viciously attacked the journalist and later made sinister threats to have her murdered and her young son abducted and raped. As a result he was facing serious charges for assault. I remember, over several gin and tonics that day, Veronica describing how she was more traumatized by Gilligan’s attack than the shooting. But she still found time to joke about the award. ‘Imagine getting a fucking award for being shot and not writing a story,’ she laughed. It was the last time that I met Veronica in person. Eight months later she paid the ultimate price when she was murdered by Gilligan and his mob.
The memoir Secret Love: My life with Father Michael Cleary was released in the same month and was an instant bestseller. Significantly Phyl’s first big TV interview to promote the book was with Pat Kenny on his popular Saturday night chat show, Kenny Live. Everyone had decided that it probably wasn’t a fit for Gay Byrne.
I made another small bit of publishing history as a result. For a number of weeks Secret Love and The General swapped positions at the number one and two slots in the non-fiction bestsellers list. I was able to buy my own computer after that.
Around the same time I met one of my heroes, Father Ted star Dermot Morgan. The first episodes of the iconoclastic comedy had started on the UK’s Channel 4 in April 1995. To say that it angered the Catholic Church would be putting it mildly.
I had always been a fan of Dermot who I believe still holds the distinction of being Ireland’s greatest comedian and mimic. He was the driving force behind Scrap Saturday, the weekly Saturday morning satirical, cutting-edge show on RTÉ radio which mercilessly targeted some of the most powerful people in the country, particularly Charles Haughey when he was Taoiseach. It was the most listened to show on Irish radio. The powerful elite got their revenge on Dermot when RTÉ caved in to pressure and dumped the show. After that he was forced to seek work in the UK and landed the iconic role in Father Ted.
I was introduced to Dermot over a few pints in one of his favourite watering holes, Doheny and Nesbitt on Dublin’s Baggot Street. We became friends after that until his untimely death three years later. He often spoke of how he had felt betrayed by RTÉ for dumping his show. I remember him phoning me one day to tell me to keep an eye out for the next series. There was a scene in one of the episodes where Father Ted is seen reading Secret Love. He thought that was great craic.
For most journalists some stories are the equivalent of what old cases are to police detectives – evolving over several years like the stories of the Monk, Christy Kinahan, the General and the five years I spent covering the aftermath of the Guerin murder. I also spent fourteen years covering events in Limerick. Other stories seem to crop up just when you are about to assign them a space in the attic for stories that have reached their finale. The Cleary story falls into the latter category.
Immediately after the story went public in 1995 Peter Lennon initiated the legal challenge to have Ross lawfully recognized as the son of Father Michael Cleary. He fought tooth and nail to obtain a tissue sample belonging to Cleary which he discovered was held in St Vincent’s Hospital. In 1999, after a four-year struggle, the tenacious lawyer finally obtained what Phyl always wanted for her beloved son – the DNA tests confirming Cleary was in fact his father.
Less than a year later in January 2001 Phyllis Hamilton died from cancer. She was just a few weeks away from her fifty-first birthday. Colm MacGinty and I attended the funeral. I hadn’t been in touch with Phyl for a few years and visited her when I discovered that she was ill. She told me:
I don’t mind dying really. All I ever wanted was to have my boy accepted in this life for who he is. I just want to have things right for him. I always knew that I was right. I had the truth and despite everything the truth will win out in the end.
It was an honour to know such a valiant lady and to have been given the privilege of telling her story to the world. But time hasn’t allowed her to be forgotten.
The story resurfaced to bring back vivid memories in 2007 when I took part in the RTÉ documentary, At Home with the Clearys, which was produced by Amy Millar. Amy had lived for a time with Cleary and his secret family in the early 1990s when she was studying to be a film maker. As part of her class exercises she had recorded several hours of footage of the unofficial family although she had no idea of their relationship until the Sunday World broke the story. She later discovered the films in a box in her attic and pieced together a compelling movie.
In the meantime there had been further posthumous controversy around Michael Cleary’s legacy when it was revealed he had been guilty of covering up for Tony Walsh, a notorious paedophile priest. Walsh was a member of Cleary’s All Priests Show and had been assigned to Cleary’s parish in Ballyfermot.
It emerged that as early as 1979 Cleary, who was then the senior curate in the parish, was aware of serious allegations against Walsh who was later exposed as one of the most vicious serial child rapists in the history of the Dublin Archdioceses. His savage assaults on children spanned at least two decades, until he was finally caught. In December 2010 he was sentenced to 123 years in prison for rape and sexual abuse committed against three schoolboys. In 2018 he received an additional three-and-a-half-year sentence for assaulting a teenage boy with a crucifix while under Cleary’s supervision. Then in 2022 Walsh received another four years imprisonment for indecent assaults on three boys during the 1980s. The Michael Cleary story was resurrected again in 2014 when out of the blue Dublin priest Arthur O’Neill launched a scathing attack on the ‘lies’ written about his former colleague twenty years earlier. In the June newsletter for St Brigid’s Parish in Cabinteely, south county Dublin, he exhumed the original revelations and described them as ‘exasperating’, ‘unproven’ and the result of ‘shoddy practice’ by twenty named journalists, including myself.
I remembered O’Neill from the time I first broke the story. When the book was launched I had a major confrontation with him on Joe Duffy’s morning radio show that had partially replaced Gay Byrne’s programme. On that occasion I took O’Neill to task for the patronizing sneering way he referred to Phyllis and her allegations.
Despite all the incontrovertible facts of the case including DNA, Fr O’Neill challenged us to prove that one of the most sensational stories in the Irish Catholic Church’s history was true. He suggested his former clerical colleague had suffered a serious injustice: ‘The burial of a person’s legacy deeper than their body just isn’t fair – if it’s based on a falsehood.’
In a sign of how much the world had moved on since those first explosive revelations two decades earlier, the then Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, strongly dissociated himself from Fr O’Neill’s outspoken comments. His newsletter disappeared after that.
As a consequence of O’Neill’s very public attack Felicia, the daughter who had grown up in Florida contacted the Irish Independent where I was then working. Felicia gave us an extensive interview in which she said she wanted to establish through a DNA test if in fact she was Cleary’s daughter. Phyllis had often told me that she was never 100 per cent sure if her daughter was the product of the rape or was Michael’s. Felicia reached out to Ross, but no DNA test was taken.
Then in 2024 Cleary’s former best friend, Eamonn Casey, was the subject of another RTÉ documentary. In Bishop Casey’s Secrets it was revealed that five women had made allegations that he had sexually abused them as children. One of the victims was his niece, Patricia Donovan. She alleged that she had been raped by Casey when she was five years old and that the abuse had continued for more than a decade.
It also emerged that Casey had been formally removed from public ministry in 2007 by the Vatican after the child sex abuse allegations first became known. The restriction remained in place until his death in 2017 but was never publicly disclosed by the Church. As part of the documentary the famous clips of Casey and Cleary at the Pope’s Mass were aired again to illustrate the subterfuge and hypocrisy. In July 2025, as a consequence of the disclosures, the Catholic Church removed Casey’s remains from the crypt of Galway Cathedral.
When the scandalous story broke about the allegations in 2024 I went back to my old Cleary files and found the material I had about Casey advising his friend and Phyl to have an abortion almost fifty years earlier. It was subsequently published in the Indo.
Around the same time a woman contacted me on the Irish Independent to say that she also believed that she was the daughter of Father Michael Cleary. The charismatic priest had been very close to the woman and her mother until his death. Although it was widely rumoured and talked about in her family circle her mother, who has since died, never admitted that she was Cleary’s lover.
The woman had learned from other close relatives that at the time of the Pope’s Mass her mother travelled to the UK for an abortion. She believed that the child was also Cleary’s. The woman, who is in her fifties and an accomplished professional, didn’t want to go public with the story. She just wanted to know how she could confirm or rule out her paternity. The only way that she could do so was if Ross agreed to provide DNA. I hadn’t seen Ross in twenty years so I couldn’t really help. We left it at that and agreed to talk again sometime in the future. At the time I was in the throes of writing Crooks.
In July 2025 as part of the research for this book I dug out the boxes of old files on the Cleary stories that were gathering dust in my office. I thought it would be a pretty straightforward process of recording for posterity the background to one of the biggest stories I ever worked on. But as I scanned the transcripts and notes I suddenly spotted something that quirked my interest.
There, in the midst of the files, was a reference to the mother of the woman who had contacted me a year earlier. I recalled how Phyl absolutely hated this woman and appeared to be very jealous of her. She said that Cleary had an affair with the woman. Thirty years later I was finally putting two and two together.
I phoned the woman and told her that I thought there was indeed substance to her claims. She has agreed to sit down and be interviewed about her life with Michael Cleary.
Three decades on the Cleary story has sprung back to life again.
CHAPTER THREE
TRACKING DOWN THE PIMPERNEL OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME
In journalism, especially crime journalism, I have learned one important rule: to always expect the unexpected. On the quietest of days throughout my career, when there was nothing dramatic happening to report on (which was rare enough), it was always a source of reassurance that at that moment someone somewhere was doing something illegal which I’d eventually get to hear about it and then give it the investigative scrutiny and front-page treatment it deserved.
Most stories begin life as a tip off or a passing comment casually made by a contact over a few pints. Think of a story in terms of a plant. The tip-off is the seed. It begins the process of germination when it is first brought into the light before undergoing a process of photosynthesis in the form of hard information and corroborative evidence. The published story represents the successful end product of the process.
A garda contact phoned me one day in 1996 and suggested that I should ‘take a closer look’ at an upcoming inquest. He was one of the officers who was involved in providing protection at my home. The inquest was into a horrific car crash which had resulted in the death of a taxi driver.
I had no idea that the tip off ‘seedling’ would synthesize into something completely unexpected. I had effectively stumbled onto one of the most fascinating crime stories I had yet covered.
What started off as a routine hearing in the Coroner’s Court put me on the trail of the drunken driver responsible for the tragedy and opened an unexpected door into the highest echelons of international organized crime. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it would also give me an exclusive inside track on what later became the biggest supergrass trial in the history of Britain’s criminal justice system.
As a result of the inquest, I discovered that the drunken driver was a gangster, who had at least a dozen aliases with matching false passports and was the kingpin of an international criminal empire. He was conservatively estimated to be worth over €400 million in today’s values. By the time I caught up with the secretive mobster he had been living anonymously in Ireland for over two years.
Born in London to Irish immigrants and having obtained Irish citizenship, the most wanted crime boss in Europe was proud of his roots. He also found them extremely advantageous. From a luxury mansion in County Kildare, he had been quietly running his vast narcotics empire organizing multi-tonne shipments of cocaine and hashish into the UK market and several EU countries including Ireland.
In appearance he was unremarkable and didn’t stand out in the crowd. Of medium height, bespectacled with a receding grey hairline and a podgy belly he looked older than his fifty-four years. His cockney accent suggested he came from a working-class background which burnished his backstory of a rags to riches ascent in life. He told people that he made his fortune as a used car salesman which fitted the profile.
