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| Mad Dog and Irish men |
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Notorious loyalist paramilitary Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair defied death threats from former comrades to return to Belfast for a television documentary being screened tomorrow night. Acclaimed investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre spent six months filming Adair in Scotland, Germany and on a clandestine return to his former Lower Shankill heartland. He talks to Laurence White about why he made the film - part of the Underworld series for Five - and what life is like now for the former leader of the UDA's C Company, which was responsible for a reputed 40 murders Why did you decide to make a programme on Adair? I think he is an interesting character and an important character. Anyone doing work on the recent history of Northern Ireland has to mention Johnny Adair, not just as a footnote but as a paragraph or two. Of course, he was responsible for some very despicable crimes, but our job was to get inside his world and paint it as it is. We made no moral judgement. What was his reaction to being asked to be a part of the series? We talked to him for about three years on and off. He is not shy of press publicity but has never taken part in an access documentary. It took a lot of persuasion and trust. People like Johnny Adair and the others featured in the series never know when they may get a bullet in the head or a 25-year jail sentence and so like to leave their mark in video format. Did he put any bans on your filming? No. Was he paid for participating? No, and he didn't ask to be paid. How long did you spend with him and what did you think of him? I spent a lot of time with him over the last year, with an especially concentrated period of about six months. As regards the man himself, no one is all good or all bad. Sometimes he is charismatic and funny, but you can never forget the horrendous crimes he was involved with. However, he can be amusing and charming. I have to stress that we, as programme makers, are neutral on our subjects. We don't make a moral judgement. It is up to the audience to decide how they regard him from our portrayal. At one stage you film him in Germany with a group of neo-Nazis. One is a girl who has a shrine to him, another a man in jail who says he will take revenge if anyone harms Adair. It all seemed surreal. Were they hamming it up for the cameras? The guy who says he will protect Adair was deported from South Africa for an attempted coup against the ANC and jailed for attacking immigrants and making pipe bombs in Germany. If Adair wanted a European army, I have no doubt he could have one. But he seems to have left his cause and his war behind. What does life hold for him at present? He cannot get a job and he is going to be on the dole. The men who know him in Scotland seem quite happy to buy him drink and the women seem quite happy to sleep with him. He is, in a way, reliving his youth without the pressure he had in Belfast. He has a new-found adolescence and he is enjoying it. He doesn't have an expensive lifestyle. Some people have made the suggestion that he will get £100,000 for a book about him and that he got a huge advance from the publishers. That is preposterous. It ain't going to happen. He will be lucky if he makes £3,000. He seems to surround himself with undesirable types like Scottish gangster Mark 'Scarface' Morrison and lottery lout Michael Carroll. Does it appear he is likely to get involved in crime? If he wants to be a major crime figure in Britain, I am sure that he could make lots of money that way. I don't know what direction he will take. Will he import his former gangster and racketeering skills? I don't know. In our programme, he admitted openly - for the first time - that he was involved in drug dealing, prostitution and racketeering "for the cause". On his return to Belfast, he describes the new UDA leadership in the Lower Shankill, describing them as "drug dealers, rapists, house-breakers and petty criminals". He doesn't seem to realise the irony of those being some of the allegations laid against him and his former associates ? We don't make judgements. We just paint a picture, a broad palette. He obviously lives in a bizarre world. Interestingly, previous programmes made by us about the criminal world are now used in educational criminology programmes. You can view the programmes in many ways, strip away the layers and see the links between poverty and violence. The paramilitary type of justice that was dispensed in Northern Ireland, such as punishment beatings, is also used by notorious gangster figures in Britain. They run their communities in a similar way to that which Adair used to run the Lower Shankill. Has he changed? I would think that the Adair of old was much more dangerous. He is very street smart and ran rings round some of the most sophisticated surveillance and covert intelligence-gathering operations in western Europe for many years. However, now I think his appetite for violence has gone. I don't think he is very interested in 'war' any more and seems happy with the way peace in Northern Ireland is now constituted. He feels he is a legend and is living his own legend. The neo-Nazis and others feed on that. He showed me a text message about sleeping with a young Catholic girl. I suppose when he now talks of "banging" Catholics, [it is] in a sexual sense rather than shooting them. It is an unusual peace dividend. What reaction do you expect to get to the programme? At one stage you call him a terrorist pin-up. There will be those, especially in the media, who will criticise us for giving him celebrity status. But those very same people all want his telephone number so that they can make their own programmes or write their own articles about him. This programme is not about exposing Johnny Adair but revealing him. It shows how he is living his life now. It is up to the audience to make their own judgements. What was the return to Belfast like? Adair travelled to Wales, then over to Dublin and finally across the border to return to the Lower Shankill. I wasn't that nervous. We went into the Lower Shankill at 8.30am on December 29 last, when most people were still asleep or groggy from the festive celebrations. Adair was sensibly nervous. He is not a coward, but he doesn't want to be killed. When we were in Dublin standing outside the GPO, I reminded him there were 2,000 'retired' IRA men in the city. He naturally wanted to get out of Dublin as quickly as possible. He got through Irish customs by using the Irish version of his name. I thought he wouldn't be too keen on that but he didn't seem to mind. In Belfast, we were stopped by two rookie policemen who didn't recognise Adair in the back seat of the car. He was with his son Jonathan. Maybe Johnny Adair's time has passed when the cops don't recognise him any more. One of the most dramatic moments in the programme is when he comes face-to-face in Manchester with Jonty Brown, the detective who put him behind bars for directing terrorism. What was that meeting like? I brought in security because I thought it was sensible. We had no idea what would happen. Jonty has seen the film and he thinks it is fair on both of them. He accused Adair of ordering the bombing of his home, but Adair denied it and said police had raided his home on many occasions. Our aim in making this film was to make a fair film and to give people an insight into characters like Adair. The series features a number of dangerous gangsters. Why did you decide to do the series? This is dangerous television about dangerous men. We are pushing back the creative boundaries. These men are contemporary gangsters. We realise there are ethical questions about putting their lives before the camera but we have a very experienced crew who have worked in current affairs and documentaries. We have to be robust and not intimidated. Johnny Adair as we know him was not made in the womb. It was the society he lived in which created him. He is responsible for his politics and his actions but everyone in Northern Ireland has a responsibility for the creation of the circumstances which led to emergence of people like Adair. The politics of Northern Ireland created people like Adair. Mad Dog, part of the MacIntyre's Underworld series, Five, tomorrow, 11pm 27 November 2006 |