Mad Dog - They Shot Me in the Head, They Gave Me Cyanide and They Stabbed Me, But I'm Still Standing. Johnny Adair
Mad Dog - They Shot Me in the Head, They Gave Me Cyanide and They Stabbed Me, But I'm Still Standing
crucial problem with the whole thing: there were no weapons or explosives training. How were we going to take on and defeat a well-armed and trained organisation like the IRA? If they had seen what we did instead, they would have pissed themselves laughing. There were guys running about with sticks pretending they were guns and motioning like they were lobbing grenades to simulate an ambush. It was embarrassing, like kids pretending to be soldiers. That would change, though, with a change in the leadership.
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