Intelligence

The downfall of Mad Dog Adair

The Observer | Magazine | The downfall of Mad Dog Adair: "The downfall of Mad Dog Adair

At the height of his power, loyalist warlord Johnny Adair was responsible for a murder spree that resulted in the deaths of 40 Ulster Catholics. But it was only when he turned the guns on his own people that his reign of terror ended. David Lister and Hugh Jordan recount the demise of the Shankill Godfather "

Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer

On 15 May 2002, after 21 months in Maghaberry Prison in County Antrim, Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair was released from jail for a second time. As he jumped out of a white prison van, he punched the air in celebration and shouted the only Latin words he had ever known: 'Quis separabit'. Over the next eight months the UDA's slogan, meaning, 'Who will come between us?', would become a bad joke, but for now there was unbridled euphoria as up to 300 supporters cheered and let off fireworks. Before returning to a triumphant reception outside his home in Boundary Way, West Belfast, he was welcomed by his fellow brigadiers.
The media captured the show of unity as the South Belfast UDA leader Jackie McDonald and his colleagues gathered round to shake his hand. What reporters did not know, however, was that most had been reluctant to go. Looking back, Billy 'The Mexican' McFarland of north Antrim and Derry explained: 'I regret going to meet him. In the end the five brigadiers went and out of those five no one wanted to shake hands with him. There had been stories in the papers about splits in the UDA and John White argued that this would show unity.'

Within weeks, Adair and his spokesman White were contriving to persuade the world that the Shankill loyalist was a changed man. He took up a £16,500 post as a prisoners' welfare co-ordinator, a position funded by the British taxpayer. When the news broke, the Northern Ireland Office faced a storm of protest and insisted Adair had only been employed for five weeks. Adair was defiant.

'For years people were complaining, asking what I did to earn money and now they can see that I'm legitimately employed and pay taxes just like everyone else. People complain no matter what I do.' Throughout the summer he continued to pretend his interests now lay in community and political work. Although the majority of the political initiatives came from White, all the evidence suggests Adair knew exactly what he was getting into.'They needed each other,' said one senior police officer. 'Adair needed White to give him some semblance of credibility, precisely because White was the softer face of loyalist terrorism. White needed Adair because he was Johnny Adair. He had power.'

On 2 July, a snappily dressed Adair was part of a loyalist delegation that met John Reid, Tony Blair's third appointment as Northern Ireland Secretary. 'Has the man from the UDA become the Man at C&A?' asked a Sunday newspaper as it pored over his costume. In fact, Adair was considerably more up-market. As he stepped into the East Belfast Mission Hall for the meeting, he was wearing a pinstripe Hugo Boss suit, a yellow tie with a fashionably large knot and a baby-blue shirt. He looked every inch the stylish Mafia boss.

It was the second time Adair had met a serving secretary of state. But just like the previous occasion, when he had met Mo Mowlam inside the Maze, he never opened his mouth. Jackie McDonald, who was among those at the meeting, recalled, 'Johnny didn't say anything, not one word. After it was all over John Reid pointed outside and said, "I'll go out and talk to the reporters now - there's about 40 cameramen out there, but if you want to go for a cup of tea, go in that way. The cameras are that way." So myself and others headed for the tea, but, of course, Johnny headed for the cameras.'

Sectarian tensions had been high since June 2001, when Protestant residents in north Belfast began a 12-week picket of Catholic schoolgirls and their parents as they walked up the Ardoyne Road to the Holy Cross primary school. Although both his brother, Archie, and his friend, Gary 'Smickers' Smith, were sent to jail over the trouble at Holy Cross, Adair did not support the protest and saw it as a public relations disaster for loyalism.

By now, Adair was so obsessed by the media he was starting to irritate even his friends. There was nothing he loved more than being on TV. Maureen Dodds, Winkie's wife, recalls, 'Any time he was on TV no one was allowed to speak. He used to record all his TV appearances and just sit on the edge of the table playing the video over and over again.'

Although the seeds of Adair's downfall were already visible by the time he went to jail in August 2000, the real turning point came on 10 June 2002. Adair, who had just returned from a holiday in Benidorm, was sitting in his living room with the LVF's Jackie Mahood when he heard about the death in jail of Mark 'Swinger' Fulton. His friend and fellow drug dealer, who was on remand in Maghaberry, had been found in his cell with a leather belt around his neck. The fact that he was lying on his bed when he died led to lurid speculation that he had been engaged in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation. Whatever the cause of death, Fulton was genuinely suicidal. He had never fully recovered from the murder in 1997 of Billy Wright, his LVF commander and close friend, and he was also convinced he was dying of stomach cancer.

While Adair was upset at his friend's death, he also saw it as an opportunity. According to one close associate, 'I was talking to Swinger four months before he died and that was the first time I realised what Johnny was up to with the LVF. Johnny was running up and down to Portadown and he would have gone to all these different dos. So my reckoning was that he was definitely working deals with them on the drugs. And I think when Swinger died, Johnny saw that as his move to take over the whole patch.'

The strength of Adair's relationship with the LVF was confirmed on 21 July 2002, when Gerard Lawlor, a 19-year-old Catholic, was shot dead. The murder followed the shooting of Mark 'Mousey' Blaney, a 19-year-old Protestant, earlier that evening. Although Blaney was not killed, the fact that he was shot in broad daylight across the Ardoyne peaceline was seen as a deliberate republican provocation.

Within two hours, teams from C Coy and the UDA in north Belfast were dispatched to kill a random Catholic, shooting and injuring a man in Oldpark and opening fire without success on the Ligoniel Road. Shortly after midnight, Gerard Lawlor was walking home from a pub on the Antrim Road when a motorbike pulled alongside him and a gunman shot him twice in the back with a .38 revolver. Summoning its favourite choice of words, the UFF said the killing was a 'measured military response' and warned of 'further military action'.

By the summer it wasn't just the behaviour of Adair Snr that was attracting attention, but also Adair Jnr. To his father's growing anger, Jonathan Adair was rapidly gaining a reputation as a thug and a troublemaker. In June, his father's men beat him with baseball bats and iron bars after he broke into the home of an 84-year-old woman and stole her purse. In August, Adair had little choice but to consent to a more severe punishment after Jonathan hit a female shop assistant in a filling station on the Crumlin Road. Shortly before midnight on 7 August, Fat Jackie Thompson, who as C Coy's 'Provost Marshal' was in charge of kneecappings, dragged the 17-year-old into the middle of Florence Square in the lower Shankill and shot him in each leg with a 9mm pistol. As punishment-shooting victims go, Adair Jnr was lucky. By shooting the teenager through the calves, Thompson ensured there would be no permanent damage.

'Johnny had no choice other than to give his blessing,' said one of Adair's friends. 'There was a whole catalogue of things. He [Adair Snr] knew it was only a matter of time before he was going to get shot.' Although the shooting surprised few on the Shankill, to the outside world the idea of a father authorising a gun attack on his own son was savage. As Jonathan recovered the following day, Adair was indignant at suggestions that he had sanctioned the shooting or even pulled the trigger himself.

'What man in his own mind would do a thing like that to his own son?' he said. 'Had I known prior to this, I would have had my son on a ferry away from here as fast as possible.' Maintaining he had 'no idea' why the shooting took place, he added, 'He's a quiet boy. He never smoked, never drank, he loved his wee push-bike. Every day he was down the job centre looking for work, he was always doing the old age pensioners' gardens for nothing.'

Adair was fast becoming a caricature of the terrorist godfather, a cult figure whose face was rarely out of the newspapers. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before his thirst for power and celebrity drove him into open confrontation with his fellow loyalists.

In September 2002 it became clear he was trying to promote a far closer alliance between C Coy and the LVF than the rest of the UDA had realised. On his release from jail, the LVF had presented him with a commemorative mirror bearing the message, 'UFF-LVF Brothers In Arms', but it was now obvious the links went far beyond personal friendship. To its astonishment, the UDA learnt that Adair viewed the mid-Ulster LVF as an extension of his paramilitary empire and claimed to have up to 70 men under his control there.

Jackie McDonald could hardly believe his ears when one of his commanders told him the LVF in Lurgan, County Armagh, had asked to borrow some camouflage equipment on the basis that they were 'all part of the same organisation now'. McDonald, whose south Belfast brigade stretches into mid-Ulster, was determined to confront Adair. He drew up a list of LVF figures in mid-Ulster and went straight to the Shankill to ask Adair about their relationship with C Coy. 'Myself and another fella challenged him about these people who now said they were part of the west Belfast UDA, although they were in the south Belfast area,' he recalled. 'We said this can't be, and he said he had 70 men up there. We said, "You can't have," and he said, "No disrespect to you Jackie, but they want me as their brigadier." I said, "If they want you as their brigadier they should go and live on the Shankill Road."'

The row with McDonald marked the beginning of a sharp deterioration in Adair's relations with his fellow brigadiers. McDonald, a convicted extortionist, was an old-style UDA boss in his early fifties whose views about running the organisation were dramatically different from Adair's. While Adair believed it needed a single charismatic leader, McDonald was convinced the UDA's strength came from the fact that each brigade area was autonomous. Adair despised McDonald because he'd been in prison during the early 1990s and had never taken part in the 'war'. In a rant from his prison cell, he described McDonald as a 'nothing and a nobody' who had 'never once been on the battlefield'. He said: 'He's into fake clothes and fake perfumes and contraband cigarettes.'

But it wasn't just McDonald whom Adair secretly loathed - it was all his fellow brigadiers with the exception of Andre Shoukri. He saw Billy McFarland, of north Antrim and Derry, as a hillbilly, and John 'Grug' Gregg, of southeast Antrim, as a waster who had contributed nothing since shooting and failing to kill Gerry Adams 18 years earlier. Last, but not least, was Jim Gray of east Belfast, for whom Adair reserved special contempt. Gray was a part-owner of the Avenue One Bar on the staunchly loyalist Newtownards Road. A flash dresser, he enjoyed the high life, eating and drinking in the best restaurants and bars, and rubbing shoulders with Glasgow Rangers footballers during regular trips to Ibrox Park. His detractors dubbed Gray and his cohorts 'the Spice Boys', while at every opportunity Adair referred to him mockingly as 'Doris Day', because of his bleach-blond hair.

The spark that set in motion Adair's showdown with his fellow commanders came on Friday 13 September, when Stephen Warnock, a senior LVF drug dealer, was shot dead. He was killed as he sat in his BMW in Newtownards, County Down, with his three-year-old daughter. According to police sources, he was murdered because he had borrowed £10,000 from a local drug-dealing cartel and had refused to pay it back.

A friend of Adair's from jail, the two had become increasingly close following the death of Mark 'Swinger' Fulton, triggering speculation that the Shankill godfather intended to install Warnock as his leader in east Belfast in a new loyalist terror group. The LVF was stunned by Warnock's murder, and Adair was immediately convinced it had been carried out by the UDA on the orders of Jim Gray.

Although press reports suggested the killing was the work of the UVF-linked Red Hand Commando, Adair's suspicions appeared to be confirmed when a man was abducted and questioned by the LVF. He told his interrogators that Gray was directly responsible for Warnock's murder. As far as Adair was concerned, it was all he needed to hear.

Three days after the shooting, Gray called at the home of one of Warnock's brothers in east Belfast to pay his respects to the murdered 35-year-old. He was leaving and about to get into his BMW when he heard a voice say, 'This is for Stephen.' As he turned to see who was speaking, a bullet pierced his cheek, shattering his jawbone and teeth before exiting the other side.

Gray recoiled in agony, but he knew that had he not turned his head he would have been dead. The would-be assassin then turned his gun on Gray's UDA colleague, who was about to get into the passenger seat. He leant across the roof of the car and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed and Gray's friend took to his heels. Despite his injuries, Gray also fled. After finally clearing his weapon, the gunman fired several more shots at the fleeing UDA men before disappearing into the night. With blood streaming from his face, Gray staggered to the nearby police training depot at Garnerville, where he received first aid from officers before being whisked away to the Ulster Hospital at Dundonald. He was lucky to survive the assassination bid, although he now faces an £11,000 dental bill to have his mouth rebuilt.

Gray's fellow UDA brigadiers were livid at the attempt on his life. But it was nothing compared to the anger they felt when they discovered that Adair, John White and Andre Shoukri planned to attend Warnock's funeral. McDonald thought it was a sick joke: 'I heard from a mate that Jim Gray was shot. So I phoned John White and said, "What's happening?" He didn't sound at all surprised, and he said, "We have a funeral to go to tomorrow," and I said, "How the fuck can you? Whoever shot Jim Gray will be at that funeral."

This was on the phone about midnight the night Jim was shot. I came over to east Belfast the next morning and they were on the phone to John White saying, "You can't go to the funeral." White was told Jim Gray specifically asked from his hospital bed that they didn't go. He said, "Well, we're going, do you want to have a meeting afterwards?" I said, "If you go to the funeral, there will be no meeting at all."'

Gray's colleagues were sure he had not been involved in Warnock's death. As they pieced together the events leading up to his attempted murder, they uncovered a disturbing piece of information. Adair had been attending Warnock's wake shortly before Gray's arrival and had been moved to a neighbouring house, where he was able to watch the shooting from a window. They believed Adair had deliberately encouraged the attack.

To the consternation of McDonald and the other brigadiers, Adair, White and Shoukri went ahead with their plan to attend Warnock's funeral. On 20 September, Adair was summoned to explain himself at an emergency meeting of the UDA's inner council in a community centre in south Belfast.

The day of reckoning had at last arrived. In a gesture of defiance, Adair gave the go-ahead that morning for a joint UFF/LVF mural bearing the message, 'Brothers in Arms'. As he paced up and down the front room of his offices in Boundary Way, he was determined not to back down. He was furious that a group of middle-aged men who had done next to nothing during the early 1990s was about to sit in judgment over him. He could barely believe it had come to this: Johnny Adair, the loyalist hero who had brought the war to the IRA's front door, who had survived countless assassination attempts and a long stint in jail, was being ordered to explain his actions to the leadership of the Ulster Defence Association. As he became increasingly agitated, his mind churned through a range of possible scenarios, but began to settle on one in particular. There was only one course of action, it seemed, that could salvage his authority and teach McDonald and his cronies a lesson.

As he prepared to travel across Belfast to the meeting in Sandy Row, a police listening device picked up the basic outline of Adair's plan. 'Adair had this idea to walk in and shoot them all,' said one Special Branch officer. 'Special Branch heard him discussing it. He was saying, "I'll just walk in there and shoot all those fuckers. I'll pull a gun on them and shoot them all."' This version of events is confirmed by one of Adair's closest advisers, who was in the office that morning: 'Everything blew up that day. He was so berserk he punched a hole in the door. Johnny was saying, "I'm going to stiff every one, I'm going to stiff that big girl McDonald. I'm going to kill them before they kill me."'

As Adair arrived in a jeep with blacked-out windows, several dozen men from the UDA's other brigade areas were already waiting on nearby street corners. The police were also there in numbers, though they deliberately kept their distance. As Adair walked into the building he was accompanied by Fat Jackie Thompson and James 'Sham' Millar, both of whom were armed. In the gents' toilet, Thompson pulled a 9mm chrome Ruger from under his jacket and handed it to Adair, who tucked it under his waistband and covered it with his fleece. He then walked into the meeting, making it painfully obvious that he had a gun.

Seeing this, McDonald deliberately sat next to Adair, believing he could overpower him if he produced his weapon. But as the meeting wore on, Adair realised that there were other guns in the room and that it would be madness to chance his arm. This was not the time or the place, and he knew there would soon be other opportunities to kill his old comrades. But the meeting, which lasted two hours, became increasingly heated as Adair continued to justify his allegations against Gray. According to McDonald: 'Johnny had this thing about east Belfast. So right away, when Warnock got shot, Johnny assumed they had something to do with it. He saw that as an opportunity. But the evidence produced against the east Belfast UDA was totally ridiculous. McDonald recalls that the meeting broke up abruptly after Adair received a call. 'He was speaking to an LVF man and then he said, "I'll have to go." All the brigadiers headed off, fearing they'd be ambushed by Adair and his men if they hung around.'

As Adair and his C Coy minders drove away from Sandy Row it was clear he intended to make his old colleagues pay for challenging him. Within minutes of leaving the meeting he was kicking up a second storm. He went straight to Ballysillan, where he told senior members of the LVF what had just happened. Unbeknown to Adair, however, he was being monitored by a team from the mainstream UDA. 'We knew everything that happened,' said Billy 'The Mexican' McFarland, who believed Adair's terrorist career was now finished. 'He walked straight into the LVF meeting and told them, "I've just met the puppets."'

Johnny Adair didn't know it at the time, but 25 September 2002 was to be his last day as a member of the UDA. Another emergency brigadiers' meeting was called, but this time Adair and White were not invited. Although still badly wounded, Jim Gray signed himself out of hospital to attend the meeting, at a bar in east Belfast.
Jackie McDonald says it was probably the most important, though shortest, inner council meeting in the organisation's history. There was only one item on the agenda: the dismissal of Johnny Adair as brigadier in west Belfast. In two minutes he was found guilty of treason. McDonald recalled, 'There was no other option for us but to dismiss him. He was involved in the attempted murder of two members. The reality is, Johnny Adair dismissed himself from the UDA.' A short time later, the UDA issued a statement to the press. 'As a result of ongoing investigations, the present brigadier in west Belfast is no longer acceptable in our organisation.'

Ripping up the dismissal notice in front of TV cameras, Adair told reporters, 'It's not worth the paper it's written on, but you'd better ask the UDA what it's all about.' Twelve years after he had seized control of C Coy in a coup, everybody but Adair could see that the game was up. 'It didn't seem to sink in,' said Sham Millar. 'Johnny didn't seem to know the importance of what was happening. He was out, but he didn't accept it. He just sort of went, "Fuck them 'uns."' Adair's only hope was that A and B companies would stick with him and that the UDA in west Belfast would remain defiant.

Shortly before midnight on 4 October, Geoffrey 'The Greyhound' Gray, a 41-year-old LVF member, was blasted to death with a shotgun as he made his way home from a local pub. The killing, on Ravenhill Avenue in east Belfast, was the UFF's retaliation for the shooting of Jim Gray. Three days later, the LVF shot 22-year-old Alex McKinley, a Protestant with links to the UDA in east Belfast. He died of his wounds on 13 October. The following day the LVF held out the white flag, saying that it wanted to 'mediate a settlement' and 'get the UDA leadership to the table to talk'.

Following intervention by Protestant clergymen, senior members of the LVF and UDA met on 18 October in a bid to reconcile their differences. After a flurry of meetings in early November, both sides agreed a truce. In a thinly veiled swipe at Adair, the LVF issued a statement admitting it had been wrong to blame Jim Gray for the murder of Stephen Warnock.

'It has now become obvious that erroneous/false information was furnished to both organisations, which resulted in this unfortunate conflict,' it said. It had cost three murders and seven attempted murders, but the feud with the LVF was over.

The stage was now set for the final confrontation, an all-out war between Adair and his old colleagues. On 1 November, in the first sign of the coming storm, Davy Mahood, one of Adair's political advisers, who had tried to keep himself right with both camps, was shot in the legs behind a community centre in Ballysillan. In a statement read by Sammy Duddy, who replaced Mahood as the group's spokesman in north Belfast, the UDA said the attack followed a four-month investigation into Mahood's activities. It blamed him for staging an attempt on his own life, which Mahood had claimed was carried out by republicans. Duddy, a former drag queen once known as 'Samantha', said, 'Mahood's life was spared, largely because of the intervention of the new regime.'

On 8 November, the UDA said eight families had been attacked over the past two weeks and blamed Adair for the incidents. Calling on rank-and-file members in west Belfast to walk away from their leader, it said: 'The loyalist people of west Belfast do not want this. The west Belfast UDA must take action to distance themselves from these individuals. They have caused enough suffering.' Not to be cowed into submission, Adair and White insisted that their support was as strong as ever and claimed 2,000 west Belfast UDA men had turned out for the 2nd Battalion's Remembrance Sunday parade. They even claimed that they had formed three new units - one in north County Down, one in mid-Ulster and another in Scotland.

The build-up to a new feud began steadily over the next few weeks with a series of threats and attacks, including the shooting of Sammy Duddy's pet chihuahua, Bambi. On the lower Shankill, Adair started to scent treachery everywhere. He turned on some of his oldest friends, including Alan McClean, his welfare officer and head of C9, who was driven off the Shankill. But the clearest sign that Adair was losing the plot came when he fell out with his old friend and ally, Winkie Dodds.

After learning that one of the Dodds family was still dealing drugs with the Shoukris, Adair ordered him to pay a fine of £10,000 or leave Northern Ireland. The family scraped together £7,000 and offered the payment to Adair, but he refused to accept and the relative fled the country. After the parade on Remembrance Sunday, Winkie's brother, Milton 'Doddsy' Dodds, was standing next to some of Adair's colleagues at the bar when he asked them why they were giving his brother such a hard time. Donald Hodgen responded by hitting him, while later that night Fat Jackie Thompson led a C Coy punishment squad to Milton's house where they broke down the front door and beat him with baseball bats. For Winkie and his wife it was the final straw.

On 21 November, after living on the Shankill all their lives, they moved to the loyalist White City estate on the outskirts of north Belfast, where they were given protection by the UDA's southeast Antrim brigade.

The defection of Winkie Dodds - a living legend in the eyes of many loyalists - should have been a wake-up call for Adair. But it only hardened his belief that he was doing the right thing.

On 6 December, an incendiary device was found outside John White's luxury £300,000 home at Carrickfergus on the outskirts of Belfast. Two days later, a sophisticated booby-trap bomb was discovered under the car of John 'Grug' Gregg, the UDA's southeast Antrim brigadier. It was a revenge attack by C Coy, but with an extra twist: the device was said to have been made by the same LVF bombmaker responsible for the booby trap that killed Catholic solicitor Rosemary Nelson in 1999.

As far as the UDA was concerned, it was a declaration of war. Five nights later, 17 shots were fired at the Ballysillan home of C9's Ian Truesdale and his wife's barber shop on the Crumlin Road was destroyed by arsonists. Truesdale, whose wife had refused to pay £25 per week in protection money to the north Belfast UDA, immediately moved to the lower Shankill, where Adair gave him £4,500 to help decorate his new home.

Just a week before Christmas the stakes rose again. Adair himself was the intended target of two gunmen, who had planned to kill him as he dropped his eight-year-old daughter at school.

By the middle of December, the UDA had launched a concerted propaganda campaign against Adair. It seized on the fact that he had briefly abandoned his beloved C Coy to spend a weekend with his wife, Gina 'Mad Bitch' Adair, in Lapland, a trip that did not go down well with ordinary volunteers in west Belfast. It also encouraged speculation that there was a £10,000 bounty on his head, to be doubled if he was killed by Christmas.

Adair remained defiant. Wearing a black Diesel sweatshirt and surrounded by cheering young men in designer tracksuits, he told The Observer, 'The Adair family will have a normal family Christmas. I'm not going anywhere.' Exaggerating as always about the number of murder attempts he had survived, he went on, 'The IRA and INLA tried to kill me. I survived 15 murder bids and I have bullet fragments in my head and side, so I'm hardly worried about a couple of bully boys who sat on their hands and did nothing when loyalists from the west Belfast brigade were taking the war to the IRA.' In a direct reference to Gregg, he added caustically, 'If I was to wait for these people to do anything, I would die of old age.' It was the clearest indication to date that Adair saw the feud as a personal battle between himself and the 45-year-old southeast Antrim brigadier.

Despite two pipe-bomb attacks on Gregg's house and a gun attack on the home of his friend, the loyalist councillor Tommy Kirkham, Christmas came and went without serious violence. All that changed at 7.30am on 27 December. Jonathan Stewart was standing chatting to a friend at a house party in Manor Street when a hooded gunman strode into the kitchen and shot him several times in the head and body. The 22-year-old was killed for the simple reason that he was a nephew of Alan McClean, who had sided with the mainstream UDA since being thrown off the Shankill. But in a cruel example of how paramilitary feuds could divide families, he was also the boyfriend of Ian Truesdale's 19-year-old daughter, Natalie. Her father almost certainly knew his killers.

It was not long before the UDA retaliated. Three days after Christmas, a decision was taken to execute Roy Green, a drug dealer and the UDA's former military commander in the Donegal Road area of south Belfast. A close friend of Adair, Green believed he was playing a clever game, pretending to set him up while in reality keeping him briefed about the UDA's plans to kill him. He even agreed to lure Adair to the Village district of south Belfast and to murder him personally. He was lying through his teeth.

As the UDA watched his movements, it became apparent that Green was keeping Adair informed of Jackie McDonald's whereabouts. He was also suspected of helping to set up Jonathan Stewart. Shortly before 7pm on 2 January 2003, the 32-year-old was shot dead as he left the Kimberley Bar off the Ormeau Road. In a statement, the UDA apologised to the Green family for the execution, but said that he had been a 'double agent'. Among his 'acts of betrayal', it said that Green had tipped off Adair about an intended attempt on his life. 'Green may as well have pulled the trigger himself,' it concluded.

On the morning of 8 January, a blast bomb exploded in the back yard of Johnny Adair's home, though it was not even loud enough to wake him. Branding his former cohorts 'criminals', Adair said, 'If they have something against me, bring it to me. I'll face them as individuals one on one, these five brigadiers, at a place of their choice. What they are doing is cowardice.'

Two days later, Paul Murphy, the new Northern Ireland Secretary, decided that enough was enough. In a dossier broadly identical to the one presented to Peter Mandelson two-and-a -half years earlier, he was shown police intelligence accusing Adair of continuing to direct acts of terrorism, involvement in drugs and extortion, membership of a banned organisation, and acquiring and distributing weapons. This time it had taken Adair a mere eight months to land himself back behind bars. Shortly after 5pm on 10 January, he was arrested on Murphy's instructions at his home.

With Adair back in jail, the security forces hoped that the worst of the feud was over. They were badly mistaken. At 10.10pm on 1 February, John 'Grug' Gregg was sitting in a red Toyota taxi at traffic lights near Belfast docks after returning from a Rangers match in Glasgow. He was talking to his 18-year-old son, Stuart, who was also in the car, when it was suddenly rammed by another vehicle. The sound of crashing metal and automatic gunfire filled the night air as two gunmen concentrated a stream of bullets on the cab. Gregg died instantly. Killed alongside him was Robert 'Rab' Carson, a 33-year-old UDA colleague. The taxi driver was seriously injured. Gregg's son was unhurt.

By any standards it was a spectacular gangland 'hit', and Adair was delighted. Although the gunmen were two young volunteers in their early twenties, the planning had been done by the old dream team of the early 1990s. It was the work of Fat Jackie Thompson, who had taken over as brigadier, and Sam 'Skelly' McCrory, who had returned from Scotland to visit Adair in jail the previous day.

The plan had been meticulously prepared. C Coy had intended to kill Gregg as he returned from a Rangers-Celtic match a few weeks earlier, but on that occasion he had felt too unsafe to go. This time, however, he had been confident about his safety. On the same day that Skelly was visiting Adair inside Maghaberry, Gregg discussed a non-aggression pact with Mervyn Gibson, the Presbyterian minister who chaired the Loyalist Commission. The clergyman was hopeful that both sides were moving towards a truce. It was only when Gregg was in Scotland that C Coy withdrew its support for a deal. While the UDA warned the feud was about to 'go nuclear', it also started to receive signals that several leading UDA figures in west Belfast were unhappy.

Although they had been reluctant to put their heads above the parapet, the murder of a brigadier put this in an entirely different perspective. Gregg was the most senior UDA figure to be murdered since John McMichael in 1987, but this time the killers were not republicans but loyalists from his own organisation. The cracks were starting to appear. Adair had believed his power base to be indestructible, but this time he had gone too far. By Tuesday, A and B companies, who had never supported him in the feud with the UVF, had defected. The UDA warned C Coy members that they had just 48 hours to follow suit. Setting a time limit of midnight on the day of Gregg's funeral, it warned: 'After this deadline, if they have not decided to move to A or B company, they will be identified as Red Hand Defenders and treated the same as the enemies of Ulster.' The same day the UDA stepped up the pressure by briefing reporters that it planned to mobilise up to 15,000 men for a march on the Shankill at the weekend.

By the evening of 5 February, Adair's empire was starting to fall apart. An eerie atmosphere settled over the Shankill as commanders from A and B companies met at the UDA's club in Heather Street to consider their position. They were joined by members of D Coy, former Shankill men who had moved to north Down but remained in close contact with Adair. As they were debating what to do, a steady trickle of volunteers from C Coy arrived at the club to turn themselves over.

As the evening progressed, the trickle turned into a deluge. Although they had initially gathered to discuss whether people wanted to move from the Shankill, the atmosphere suddenly changed. A television appearance by John White, in which he said he was 'indifferent' to Gregg's murder, tipped them over the edge. 'The plan was originally for up to 1,000 men to come into Johnny's area after Gregg's funeral, but what with the adrenaline and the drama, the defectors took it into their own hands,' said one UDA veteran.

Sensing that something was afoot, Fat Jackie Thompson and Sham Millar slipped out of the lower Shankill estate and called to see William 'Woodsie' Woods, who lived in nearby Manor Street. His wife explained he had already cut his losses and left. They then contacted Ian Truesdale and John White, only to discover that they too had bolted. In an instant, Thompson and Millar realised it was time to run. They telephoned home to say they were going to Scotland. Thompson told his wife to book furniture removal vans for the following day and said he'd meet her coming off the boat. In a series of phone calls, they arranged to meet some of their colleagues on the road to Larne, where they would catch a ferry to the mainland.

In the end, Adair's fiefdom collapsed with barely a shot fired in defence. Shortly after midnight, more than 100 men piled out of the Heather Street bar and drove straight to Boundary Way, where they started smashing windows and kicking in doors. Although most of his friends had already fled, a young C Coy volunteer involved in Gregg's murder was seized and badly beaten. He was about to be shoved into the boot of a car when a phalanx of police and Army Land Rovers arrived. Within minutes, a convoy of seven cars carrying around 20 people, including Gina Adair and her four children, left the Shankill for the last time.

They fled so quickly that Adair's Alsatians, Rebel and Shane, were abandoned in the street. Under police escort they headed to the ferry terminal at Larne, where they met up with White, Fat Jackie and the others. As around 7,000 UDA supporters descended on the Rathcoole estate for Gregg's funeral the next day, the exiles were adjusting to a harsh new life outside Belfast. After arriving in the port of Cairnryan, Fat Jackie and White were questioned by Special Branch officers. The police had found £69,000 in cash in one of the cars, but although it belonged to Gina Adair, White claimed it. The money, in separate envelopes containing £1,000 each, had been stuffed into a shoebox. Police also discovered that Fat Jackie was carrying £7,000 in cash, the takings of a sandwich shop he and Sham Millar had opened. While Thompson and White were quizzed, the others set off up the coast towards Ayr.

Following their release later that afternoon, White and Thompson joined their colleagues and the group reviewed its position. But without maps and with little money, Scotland was a confusing place. Said Millar: 'We were talking about going to Newcastle. Truesdale was leading the attack, but he got us lost. Everybody was just a bit pissed off, and we said, "Fuck it." The nearest place to where we were was Carlisle, so we went to Carlisle for a couple of nights, because we had more families from Belfast wanting to come over and join us.'

While Adair contemplated the ruins of his empire from his cell, his old comrades faced the reality of life on the road. After spending a few days in Carlisle, a collective decision was taken to head further south, this time to the more densely populated town of Bolton. The 120-mile journey down the M6 would take them a few hours at most, but the exiles again found themselves heading in the wrong direction. In a foreign country, the remnants of Johnny Adair's elite C Coy were truly lost.

Adair's old cohorts in England - the 'Bolton Wanderers' as they have been dubbed - appear resigned to the fact that they are not coming home. For Gina in particular, who is used to living in style and making others pay, it has been a humiliating comedown. She has even had to go to court to beg for a council house. Up to 50 former members of C Coy and their families are now living in the Bolton area, while several others are in Manchester. Like Gina, they are all pleading poverty, claiming to have sold their cars and pawned their jewellery in an attempt to survive. A handful of them are genuinely broke, but for Gina, Fat Jackie and Sham Millar (who are brothers-in-law), the claim is a little far-fetched. They are probably not as wealthy as newspapers in Belfast have speculated, but the cash is almost certainly there, stashed away and waiting for them to lay their hands on it. The police are convinced Adair still has money.

The real reason Gina and her fellow exiles have yet to access it is because they know they are being monitored by a new government agency with the power to confiscate the illegal assets of Northern Ireland's paramilitaries. John White, who has severed his links with Adair and become a born-again Christian in the north of England, is also being watched.

If or when the exiles try to return to Belfast, there will be more blood spilt. The only cause for hope is that none of Adair's old friends has the energy to carry out further acts of violence for a man who is already busy betraying them. Adair's most prolific hitman, Stevie 'Top Gun' McKeag, is in the grave. The rest are getting old. Fat Jackie Thompson will be 40 in November, Sham Millar is 37 and his brother Herbie 38. Ian Truesdale is 42.

Donald Hodgen, who turned 40 in May, has had virtually no contact with Adair since his old friend returned to prison. All he wants is to stay out of the way. Even Sam 'Skelly' McCrory, Adair's closest friend, appears to have gone to ground. Nobody knows where he is. Since the early 1990s he has been flitting between the west coast of Scotland and Northern Ireland. He was 38 in March.

As for Adair himself, he has experienced bouts of depression since returning to jail. He will be 40 in October. As he approaches middle age he cannot comprehend how his reputation and empire have fallen apart. Even C Coy itself, for so long synonymous with Adair, has been disbanded as a UDA unit. 'See, republicans have their heroes and they stay heroes, but loyalists build you up and then they knock you down,' he said in a telephone conversation from jail.

Enough violence has already emanated from the small maze of streets at the bottom of the Shankill Road. As a director of terrorism, Johnny Adair controlled a dangerous clique and ordered around 40 murders by C Coy and the west Belfast UFF. He was the UFF's most influential figure throughout the early 90s, when it claimed the lives of nearly 90 people.

When he is finally released from jail, probably in January 2005, Adair will face a stark choice. Does he go back to the Shankill and try one last throw of the dice? Or does he settle quietly away from Belfast, hoping he can avoid assassination and live in peace with his family? OM

Mad dog: who's who

Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair
Also known as 'Pitbull', 'the Wee Man' and 'Red Adair'

Gina 'Mad Bitch' Adair
Also known as 'Orange Bitch'. Maiden name Crossan

Sam 'Skelly' McCrory
Adair's close friend and a C Coy gunman. Skelly is gay, which has led to speculation about Adair's sexuality

Donald 'Big Donald' Hodgen
One of Adair's oldest friends and a senior C Coy figure

Jackie 'Fat Jackie' Thompson
A C Coy gunman in the early 1990s and, like Hodgen, formerly one of Adair's closest associates

James 'Sham' Millar
Also known as 'Boss Hogg' after the money-grabbing villain in The Dukes of Hazzard. A former C Coy driver and gunman and a major drug dealer

William 'Winkie' Dodds
A veteran C Company gunman and for years one of Adair's closest allies

Gary 'Smickers' Smith
Also known as 'Chiefo'. After 1993, Smith became C Coy's leading gunman. Known for his loyalty to Adair

Billy 'King Rat' Wright
The founder of the LVF. Shot dead inside the Maze Prison in December 1997. Loathed Adair with a passion

Mark 'Swinger' Fulton
Wright's successor as head of the LVF and a friend of Adair. Found dead in his cell in Maghaberry Prison in June 2002

Billy 'The Mexican' McFarland
The UDA's brigadier for County Derry and north Antrim

Jim 'Doris Day' Gray
The UDA's brigadier in east Belfast. The derogatory nickname comes from his bleach-blond hair. His men, recognised by their chunky gold jewellery and extravagant lifestyles, are known as 'the Spice Boys'

John 'Grug' Gregg
The UDA's former brigadier in southeast Antrim. Shot dead in February

Andre Shoukri
Son of Egyptian father and Northern Irish mother, who at 25 became the UDA's youngest brigadier. Became friendly with Adair in jail, dealing drugs on his behalf

John White
Adair's former spokesman

Jackie McDonald
Currently, he is the most powerful figure on the UDA's ruling inner council

The lexicon of loyalism

A Company, or A Coy
The upper Shankill 'company' of the west Belfast UDA

B Company, or B Coy
The mid-Shankill 'company' of the west Belfast UDA

Brigadier
The title given to the head of each of the UDA's six 'brigade' areas

C Company, or C Coy
One of three 'companies' in the west Belfast UDA. At the peak of its violent campaign under Johnny Adair, C Coy stretched from the bottom of the Shankill Road to Tennent Street, half a mile up the road

C8
Johnny Adair's old C Coy 'team'. One of around 18 teams of up to 60 men, which together made up C Coy

LVF
Loyalist Volunteer Force. Volatile loyalist terrorist group founded by the loyalist icon Billy Wright in 1996, after he was forced out of the UVF

Quis Separabit
The UDA's Latin motto, meaning 'Who will come between us?'

RHC
Red Hand Commando. A small loyalist terrorist group closely linked to the LVF

RHD
Red Hand Defenders. A flag of convenience used by both the UDA and LVF

Second Battalion
The west Belfast UDA

UDA
Ulster Defence Association. The largest loyalist paramilitary group. Formed in 1971 as an umbrella group to replace vigilante organisations which sprang up in Protestant areas in reaction to IRA violence. At its peak it claimed to have a membership of over 40,000. Its small but ruthless military wing is known as the Ulster Freedom Fighters, and has been responsible for some of the most despicable murders of the Troubles. Only a small minority of UDA members are active in the UFF

UVF
Ulster Volunteer Force. The oldest loyalist terrorist group. Took its name from the organisation that was set up to oppose home rule in 1912. It was reformed in 1966 under Augustus 'Gusty' Spence

WDA
Woodvale Defence Association, also known as B Company

· Extracted from Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and 'C' Company by David Lister and Hugh Jordan. Readers can order Mad Dog for £12.99 plus p&p (rrp £14.99) by calling the Observer Book Service on 0870

October 9, 2003 at 09:58 PM in Ireland | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home