The Narco-paramilitaries of Northern Ireland
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January 3rd, 2020, in the coastal Irish town of Carrickfergus. 47-year-old Glen Quinn is standing at the front door of his apartment. He's just moved in only a few weeks earlier, but he's not much in the Christmas or New Year's Eve spirit, having just been diagnosed with a terminal blood condition and given a maximum of 18 months to live. Just as he opens the door to come home, three men with a dog force their way in behind him. They put him on the ground and start brutally beating on him with bats and metal bars.

They leave him broken and bleeding on the floor, but not before telling him that the dog shat all over his bed and that he's going to be staying on the floor tonight. Then they leave. After Glenn recovers for a minute, he calls his brother and tells him what happened, that he's just been brutally attacked. He tells his brother it's the Ulster Defense Association that's done it. When his brother tells him to call an ambulance, he refuses. It's not a smart call. His ribs and collarbone are broken and he's just bloody and just kind of broken all over.

By the time help eventually gets there, he's already dead. Later, when his sister sees the body, she collapses at the sight of him. The attackers are members of the Southeast Antrim Brigade of the Ulster Defense Association, the UDA, a powerful narco-pyro-military operating on Ireland's northeast coast. All Glenn had done to earn the beating is some perceived slight against one of the members a few weeks earlier.

See, Carrickfergus is one of their strongholds, and its sprawling estates sport giant murals of armed and masked men, Union Jacks, Red Hands, and the letters UDA or UVF.

Though the murals once stood as a sign of allegiance during the region's 30-year ethnic conflict, they now serve as an imposing reminder to residents of who controls the area. Addiction and poverty are rife in these areas, and it's not just Carrickfergus. Change the acronym or the symbols, and this could be any one of hundreds of estates across Ulster. And these groups have power. At Glenn's funeral, the police are out in full force just to protect the mourners.

The murder makes headlines all over Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom due to the brutality of it. But Glenn is just the latest victim of drug-fueled paramilitaries controlling large pieces of territory in the north of Ireland. Just this year, as Glenn's family and friends are gathering to mark the date of his murder, the same group kneecaps a man in East Belfast. That's when they shoot out your kneecaps. These groups who once were motivated by political ideology and fighting in Ireland's brutally dragged-out civil war

are now mostly focused on organized crime and drug trafficking. This is the Underworld Podcast. Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, where two journalists who have reported all over the world and regret most of their life choices take you through stories of global organized crime and all the fun that comes with it.

I am your host, Danny Golds. I am usually joined by Sean Williams, but he is out today because he's taking an improv class at the University of Michigan.

And I'm actually joined today by Adam Doyle, who you might have seen some of his work with Popular Front. He's a badass Irish journalist. And he came to me and said, I've got this story on narco power militaries. And also, I'm going to do all the work for it. So, of course, I said, yes, Adam, introduce yourself. Tell people where they can find you. Yeah, what's the crack? Thank you for having me. Yeah, you can find my work. I've done a bit of work with Popular Front. I'm launching a new podcast.

sort of like Irish news focused thing called Council. So I don't know, I'll give you that and you can share it or something after the episode is out. Yeah, happy to be here. Great to have you, man. And thanks. This story is pretty crazy. Just want to remind everyone to...

uh, bonus episodes and to support us, patreon.com slash underworld podcast, where you get bonus content, small donations, scripts, all that good stuff. You can also do that on iTunes with one click and underworld pod.com slash merch. We have merch up now, the t-shirts don't Instagram, your crimes, all that sort of stuff. And you can always email us at the underworld podcast at gmail.com. Uh,

Yeah, Adam, tell me about Carrick Fergus, because to my ignorant American ears, I hear that name and it sounds funny, but the situation there is actually really, really heavy. Yeah, so Carrick Fergus is a Far Cry from Guadalajara, and to properly understand how a sleepy Ulster town spawned a paramilitary drug cartel, we have to take a step back. So to give some background to the situation, and I'm sure a lot of people already know a lot about the conflict in Ireland, but it's important to explain for anyone who doesn't know.

In 1921, following a war of independence and a very divisive peace treaty between Irish rebels and the UK, the island was partitioned. This was done with the help of a boundary commission, which essentially decided the new border between the South, which was majority Catholic, and the North, which was majority Protestant, and home to the kind of loyalist pro-British community. So the boundary was drawn in part to

to enforce the Protestant majority. So some parts that were majority Catholic were left out. This created a new British territory at the top of Ireland known as Northern Ireland. This then sparked a civil war in the south and there were still tons of Catholic Irish people who supported the revolution now trapped behind a border. This is still a huge source of tension in both jurisdictions but if you've heard anything about the recent conflict in Ireland i.e. the Troubles

That mostly took place in Northern Ireland. So in Northern Ireland, you have two groups, one mostly Protestant and Loyalist, normally claiming a British identity, and one nationalist and mostly Catholic, claiming an Irish identity. These groups had been much more integrated prior to the Troubles. Catholics and Protestants lived together in the streets and suburbs of Belfast and other large towns.

But in the 1960s, things began to change in a way that they would never go back from. It was around this time that the civil rights movement in America was picking up steam and the people from the Catholic minority saw that and then began doing the same stuff, so protests and marches and so on. This caused the Northern Irish government to react extremely violently and essentially ignited the 30-year conflict that most people are familiar with.

At this point, I'd like to note that it wasn't a religious conflict. Catholic and Protestants are more of an indicator of political or like an ethnic identity. It's not like a hard, fast religious conflict. There's a good few Protestant nationalists and probably some Catholic unionists, especially nowadays. So the tension from the civil rights march was boiled over in 1969 in Derry. Marchers were attacked by police and loyalist marching bands. Marching bands are a big part of loyalism.

and are a lot more intense than what you probably think of when you think of a marching band. But long story short, this caused a wave of violence across the region and a lot of Catholics were burnt out of their homes and communities began to self-segregate. It's around this time that you start to see the first paramilitaries on the Loyalist side, the UVF, or Ulster Volunteer Force, and the Red Hand Commando, both still relatively active to this day, at least in terms of prime.

Later, British soldiers who were actually initially welcomed as protectors, fired upon a civil rights march in Derry that killed 14 people. This became known as Bloody Sunday and the entire situation more or less devolved into chaos. Republican paramilitaries like the Provisional IRA stepping in as a kind of protection from both Loyalists and the Army.

The stage is now more or less set for the various paramilitaries to battle for control of their areas in a region that's descending into hell. Young men and boys who will become the vicious gangsters of the post-C-Spy era cut their teeth on the out-of-control street violence and sectarian killings of the 1970s. So yeah, we're not going to go through the whole thing of the troubles and the history. I think that's

Pretty solid rundown right there of everything that happened. But if you guys want to learn more, obviously, like, pick up. There's dozens of books and documentaries and whatnot to really get into the nitty-gritty of the troubles and the groups that rose out of it. You know, we're here more to talk about the crime stuff and the drug gangs and the situation right now. But I think...

Adam did a really solid job of just summarizing that stuff right now. But yeah, what's going on now with all these groups and what's happened since the ceasefire? So obviously during the conflicts, both sides resorted to crime, extortion and robbery and collaboration with criminals by both sides. They provided a lot of their funding for their respective campaigns. While this crime was netting them a profit, the idea was that the money could go towards their military campaigns. Both sides were implicated.

involved in protection rackets, usually with like pubs, construction, taxis, stuff like that, and often taxing criminals and business owners. Drugs weren't a major factor for these groups until at least the late 1980s. I feel like I've heard a lot of stories. I mean, it's been a while since I've really read up on it, on the conflict, but weren't they usually like pretty vicious in dealing with drug dealers? Like I remember hearing stories or...

I don't know, both groups kind of targeting them, threatening them, just violence and all that, trying to keep them out of the communities? Yeah, like Republican groups like the IRA were more rigidly against drugs. That didn't stop them from taxing drug dealers, but as part of their ethos,

Drugs were pretty frowned upon, at least on paper, and kind of more so for members or at least members of their own community. The anti-drug stance of the IRA didn't stop them working with groups like the Ndrangheda when importing weapons from Lebanon or forming alliances with southern criminals like the Hoche Mob in Dublin. Drugs and alcohol were also generally frowned upon for rank and file, and executing members perceived to be operating outside of interest of the cause wasn't uncommon. Cross-border smuggling was a big part of Republican funding, and they were...

Still a big player in organised crime in the South. But that said, Republican groups tended to handle narcotics at a distance. So kneecapping drug dealers, which is kind of often associated with these groups, became a big part of propaganda that various paramilitaries used to enforce their image as kind of a community police. But in reality, it was more about control of a neighbourhood than just being anti-drugs.

Loyalist groups, and it's important to note that these groups are only really present in Northern Ireland, were generally a bit looser about drugs. Groups like UVF were not as rigidly organised as the IRA and had a harder time controlling the activities of their members. Even later on, we see Loyalist paramilitaries cultivate this kind of mafioso image and kind of really embracing the whole thing.

drug kingpin lifestyle. Loyola's paramilitaries definitely have more of a history in the narcotics trade as well, bringing in shipments of heroin and other drugs from Liverpool and Scotland and taking control of the drug market in their neighbourhoods.

R.T. Thompson in Glasgow was a big supplier to the UDA during the conflict as well. If you guys haven't heard that one, Sean did an episode on the Glasgow ice cream truck wars between drug dealers who operate out of ice cream trucks. And it was just, yeah, I mean, it was brutal. The ice cream wars are not as fun as they sound. Yeah. So while all this is going on and paramilitaries are starting to dip their toe into the drugs market,

there still is this increasingly out of control conflict raging in Northern Ireland. And it gets so bad that these groups start to lose popular support. Eventually a ceasefire is brokered in 1997, known as the Good Friday Agreement. And it's this ceasefire that kind of introduced the real shift towards organized crime. So in this time period, like what we're talking about, the drug sort of shifting, this doesn't really start until like the late 90s and the early 2000s. That period when...

the ceasefire was coming in and these groups are starting to lose support, a lot of individuals start looking towards the drug market as a way to kind of increase their power or just individuals that were already involved in it start to take more precedence over the more kind of military aspects of what was going on before. So when the treaty was signed, the Good Friday Agreement, we start to see hundreds of paramilitary prisoners released back into society. Republican and Loyalist commanders are allowed to return to their neighbourhoods.

The Provisional IRA is disbanded. It's political wing Sinn Féin, currently the largest party in the North and the most popular party in the South, opting for a political solution. And we also see a bunch of small splinter groups breaking off from the IRA to continue the fight. From here on as well, paramilitaries mainly murder people from their own side. We don't really see much back and forth violence between the groups. It's mainly targeting political

each other, rivals, civilians, that kind of thing. Except for Republican groups, distant Republican groups in particular, attacking security service personnel occasionally. It's estimated that around this time, Loyalist paramilitaries controlled 60% of Northern Ireland's drug market. But these Loyalist groups have begun to fracture as well. The UVF, arguably the oldest Loyalist group, faced a big internal feud with a splinter group called the LVF. This feud was...

started over a ceasefire that the LVF disagreed to but in reality it was probably mostly over drugs with the LVF becoming a big player in the drugs trade. What does LVF stand for? Yeah so UVF is Ulster Volunteer Force so that's a group that's been around at least the name has been around since the first like war of independence thing in the 1920s and the LVF split off from them

around 1994, I think. And that's Loyalist Volunteer Force. So it was changing the word unionist to Loyalist. Yeah, breaking off. There's a lot of these acronyms as we go forward as well. There's a ton of them. Yeah, it's like Kurdish political parties and various militant groups. It was hard to keep track. Alphabet soup.

Yeah. Yeah. So one group, the UDA, or Ulster Defence Association, which is another loyalist paramilitary, also became heavily involved in the drug trade around this time. So during the conflict, UDA higher-ups would have seen drugs as more of a hippie thing. But in the early 90s, members were supplying drugs to addicts and to Northern Ireland's growing rave scene as a source of quick cash.

The 90s were a bit of a wild time, particularly for loyalist groups. The flamboyant gangster image I mentioned earlier starts to phase out this kind of quasi-military look that they had in the 70s and 80s. Bling and steroids and a party lifestyle begin to define the paramilitary look. And it's in this sort of wild, drug-filled 90s landscape that we meet our first character, who will become synonymous with this shift away from politics and into crime.

Is there any similarity here to like something like FARC in Colombia and I guess, you know, the AUC and these right wing groups, too, like they start off with political ideals and then became kind of cartels. You know, they start raising the doing cocaine trafficking or taxing to sort of support the cause and then end up just caring about getting money and all that. You know, there's a thing now, too, like in Colombia where there are decommissioned fighters there.

And you have all these people used to being bandits, fighters, all that, who have nothing to fight for anymore. So it's like, well, what do we do now? And some obviously put that skill set they've developed into crime. And thinking on that now, like we've covered this in a lot of places, I think.

The Balkans as well, you know, you had Albanian groups and Serbian groups who went from sort of paramilitary gangsters to just gangsters. Yeah, like that's pretty much exactly what happened here. I think after the Good Friday Agreement, the ceasefire, the political side of things completely moved into normal parliamentary politics. And if you're just getting out of prison for political crimes like terrorism or whatever they had you in there for, you don't have a cause anymore to fight for. So now it's more or less you have this skill set, which could be

bomb making, smuggling, just being a hitman, whatever, these kind of skills. Yeah, you have a choice between settling down, getting a normal job, or kind of continuing what you're doing. And a lot of these guys obviously opt for just continuing the mayhem, even if it's not really for any sort of political end anymore. Yeah, yeah. And they keep the name as well. These groups, they're all pretty proud of their participation in the conflict and stuff like that, so...

you know, they hang on to all the labels and all that stuff. So tell me about this guy, Johnny Adair. Am I saying that right? Yeah, so Johnny Adair was a guy that would kind of change the UDA forever. When people think of UDA godfathers, Adair kind of has pride of place. He was a member of a skinhead street gang as a youth and joined the UDA in 1984. He was assigned to C Company in West Belfast. So that's C Company of the UDA. All of these guys

groups kind of have some sort of military type lingo but during his time there Adair oversaw the murders of dozens of Catholics in the 1980s and early 1990s gaining a reputation as a psychopathic sectarian killer. Adair had a very tough reputation as well survived a gunshot wound to the head at the UB40 concert allegedly by a drug dealer while on release from prison and

Adair also avoided an IRA bomb attack at a chip shop that killed nine Protestant civilians in 1993, which was likely meant for him. Jesus. I mean, this is very serious, and I don't want to make light of it, but getting shot in the head by a drug dealer at a UB40 concert is kind of... You know, I'm trying to think of a joke involving Only Fools Rush In or something, but really coming up short. But still, I mean, that's pretty brutal, killing those civilians when they're trying to target him. I mean, that is...

That's a lot of collateral damage. Yeah, I think that's why in the 90s as well, these groups started to really lose favour. People had kind of given up on that whole putting up with that stuff, you know what I mean? You had stuff like that, and then you had the Alma bombing, which was carried out just after the ceasefire, which killed tons more civilians, and I think around that time, everyone was just kind of fed up with all the stuff. Anyway, in 1993, Adair had become the brigadier of C Company. So, same

essentially the boss of that faction of the UDA.

and he was jailed in '95 on a 26-year sentence for directing terrorism. But in prison, Adair sold drugs to his fellow Loyalist inmates and created a tidy profit for himself. And by this time, the UDA and other Loyalist paramilitaries were highly fractured and had taken to kind of bickering over money or territory amongst themselves. So upon his release, Adair returned to C Company on the Shankill Road, which is kind of synonymous with the

The Shankly Road is synonymous with the loyalist area of Belfast, or the most loyalist area, or at least the most widely known one. Then from his release, Adair oversaw the breakdown of any semblance of military structure within the UDA. While Adair was away, C Company had become rich through the ecstasy trade, with groups in the UK supplying the drug along the kind of arms trafficking routes that would have previously been used. And this new breed of paramilitary drug dealer

sort of caused alarm with the more old school members. And it's important to remember here with all these groups, they have a lot of scope to kind of do this stuff because when it comes to the troubles and the conflict that happened here, there's always an aspect of collusion. There was always some level of police infiltration, cooperation with the UDA and all the other groups. Like police in West Belfast admitted to running 27 separate informants within the UDA at one time. So they were heavily linked

but sometimes crime was kind of overlooked in favour of cooperation. In prison, Johnny Adair had formed a close relationship with Billy Wright, the leader of the LVF, Loyalist Volunteer Force, mentioned earlier. The splinter faction feuding with the UVF

Wright had been murdered in prison by the INLA in 1997, but his organisation had continued on. Adair had decided to throw his weight behind the LVF and become a major force in drug dealing. But this was in conflict with other UDA commanders who were staying clear of the feud.

between the LVF and the UVF. Yeah, we're really dipping into like Curtis Milliton territory here with the amount of acronym groups and parties and splits here. But were these all the INLA, the LVF, the UDA, the LVF? Did they all come out of...

loyalist force originally? Well... Or something... Were they all considered basically on the loyalist side? Well, the UDA, LVF, the UVF, yeah, they're loyalists. The INLA is actually the Irish National Liberation Army and they... Okay. They're a Republican group and when Billy Wright was in prison, they orchestrated his assassination by smuggling in guns and killing him while he was being transferred in a van out of his block and...

And that was in retaliation for murders he was conducting against nationalist civilians. But yeah, all of the loyalist groups, I guess, they would have been part of one coherent sort of paramilitary opposition, but they wouldn't have been super connected. They were still murdering each other even as far back as the 70s. But at least during the war, they would have had some sort of common front, but that didn't mean little feuds and stuff didn't arise between them because...

With any of these groups, they're not the best people in the world. So there's going to be friction on that kind of murder, criminal, organized crime aspect to it, always. So it's also important to note that these guys all live in the same areas. One estate could be UVF and the other could be UDA. Fights could break out anywhere, in a pub, but bookies are just in the middle of the street. So...

Maybe a good comparison would be how gangs in L.A., like the Crips, control large areas, what different sets with internal rivalries might hold, like different subsections of those areas. Yeah, you were saying that before, I think, before we started recording. I think it makes a lot of sense. You know, you have a lot of crews that are under this sort of, you know, umbrella. In New York, it's a big thing, too, this umbrella of like the bludge of the Crips.

But they're different neighborhoods, different leaders, and a lot of them end up killing each other. You know, I think the sort of superficial level view of these groups is that they're all united, but they're not. Like a lot of gang beefs and crew beefs and

are between different subsets of the Bloods or the Crips. And it's kind of like you said, you know, these aren't the most organized or united or like disciplined people that are involved and they're going to clash even if they're ostensibly on the same side. Yeah, exactly. Like the, all the use of like the words like company and brigade and brigadier and all this stuff, it's kind of like sort of like dressing up this whole thing, whereas in reality, they kind of are more like sets or individual groups.

groups, like individually operating gangs or whatever. So during a UDA march down the Shankill Road, so this is a march organized by the kind of umbrella leadership of the UDA. There's the company unfurled an LVF banner. So that would be like, you know, literally like a banner with LVF symbols and stuff on it. But they did it outside the Rex bar on the lower Shankill.

Adair had been ordered not to bring anything like that, anything that might start a fight. Because you've got to remember that the UVF, who were also living on the street with these guys, doesn't like the LVF. And he's been told not to do this. And he's decided, I'm going to do it anyway. And he's turned up with the LVF symbol. And he's done it outside a bar. So in this bar, there's a bunch of UVF men drinking. As soon as they see the banner, they immediately begin fist fighting with the UDA and the bandsmen.

The fight saw 11 shots fired into the pub, leaving one man in critical condition and the fighting spilled out into the street. And many of the 10,000 marchers, including women and children, started running for cover. The C Company men then rampaged through the UVF area, attacking their houses, holding people at gunpoint and burning stuff. C Company then did a drive-by shooting on the Rex Bar again later that night.

The next day, the UVF retaliated and two of Adair's associates were shot dead. The UVF also shot up the offices of the UDA political wing and then the UDA responded in kind by burning down the UVF's office. Again, all these guys also have offices because it's supposed to be like a political thing still. This was Johnny's attempt at starting a war between the UVF and the UDA. Although cooler heads eventually prevailed and a ceasefire was signed by

By the end of the mayhem, seven people were dead and Johnny Adair was returned to prison for violating his bail. In 2002, he was released from jail. Again, to cheering crowds of supporters, the UDA still had some outward appearance of a unified command.

with the six Brigadiers of the Inner Council waiting to shake his hand and welcome him back. Internally though, the other Brigadiers were aware of Adair's ambitions and had not forgotten the situation that he caused in 2000. A few months after Adair's release in 2002, an LVF drug dealer was shot dead at the wheel of his BMW in front of his three-year-old child. At the LVF man's wake, Jim Doris Day Gray, the flashy, openly gay commander of the East Belfast UDA, was shot in the face as he exited his car outside the house.

Ray ran to a nearby police training camp where he was given first aid and survived. Can I ask you? I don't want to go on on stereotypical reputation, but the idea of a flashy, openly gay commander in East Belfast. Like I said, I'm not wholly informed on this conflict, especially in the later years with the drug gangs, but that's

That's a pretty wild character. I mean... Yeah, it's... It would surprise you because obviously these groups probably wouldn't be the most tolerant people in the world. But that period, like around the late 90s, early 2000s, there was kind of an acceptance or something of that. Like there was certainly a lot of very kind of homoerotic carry-on and like photographs and stuff. Even from guys like Johnny Adair. Don't know...

why but there was a couple of guys in the in the in the UDA that were openly gay for a while well that's always nice when you know when a paramilitary narco jar gang is tolerant in some ways you know

Yeah, UDA, LGBT. Yeah, good for them. Good for them. Progress. But yeah, after the shooting, UDA men were forbidden from attending the LVF funeral, which would be held a few days later. This order will be ignored by Adair and his associates. And at this point, the council had...

had enough of this and expelled C Company from the UDA. The paramilitary structure and any sense of unity had really begun to deteriorate by this time, and the different commanders began to point fingers at each other for betraying the cause while nearly all of the organizations began slicing themselves off a piece of the drug market. What do loyalist civilians make of this stuff at this point or a little before? Or political leaders? Are they just kind of like...

washing their hands of it at this point? Are they just like, that's not at all what... Because I guess these groups originally formed with support, I would assume, from some civilians and ostensibly to protect them. And then you kind of have what it's deteriorated into. I mean, do they even talk about it at all? Or is it just like a completely separate situation? I think in some ways you can see...

they've kind of created like a golem or whatever that is, you know, where they've put a lot of, you know... It's a great comparison. Yeah, they've put a lot of importance on these guys before as like, you know, a kind of muscle or like protectors or whatever, this kind of thing. But now, since the peace process, it's become more and more of an issue where...

They've fed them funding and money and they've put them out on early release from prison, given them all these concessions and at this point now

I think it's embarrassing, but I think they can't really get rid of it from the communities, I think. There's obviously some very, very hardline fringe politicians on the loyalist side and on the Republican side that still support paramilitaries, but they'd be very much in the minority. And then I feel like loyalist sort of political leaders are playing a kind of tightrope game where, you know, if these paramilitaries go and do something fucked up, then they have a choice between either condemning it or sticking by it. And I think...

in the last, say, 10 years or whatever, they've kind of gone more towards condemning it. But I think they still like to have the excuse or the, you know, the threat of violence there

because they can act as a mediator or they can present themselves as a mediator. You can see that a lot currently with the seaboard or stuff that has gone, the whole Brexit thing created a seaboard there. I won't get into all that, but you can see that a lot recently where the threat of violence or the pressure from paramilitary groups is kind of utilised by their politicians, by politicians from that side to say, look,

you know, these guys are going to kick off. We want a solution. So they're happy to have them there for that. But then I think in every other vector, they're extremely embarrassing. Yeah, makes sense. Golan was a great metaphor for comparison. So in 2003, John Gregg, the brigadier of the UDA's Southeast Antrim Brigade, was a legendary figure within the organization. He

He was famous for his murder attempt on Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams. When he was interviewed about that in prison and asked, did he have any regrets? He said his only regret is that he didn't succeed, which is pretty intense. Greg was a loyalist. He was a Glasgow Rangers fan. He was a flute band player. And Greg looked down on the steroid taking drug kingpin lifestyle in favour of a more traditional appearance.

Greg controlled the Newtown Abbey area of Belfast with an iron fist, sending bombs to local politicians who challenged his control of the area. On Saturday 1 February 2003, a taxi carrying John Greg and his son stopped at traffic lights near the Belfast docks. The men were returning from Glasgow after going to see a Rangers match. And while stopped at the lights, two men ambushed the car, shooting and killing Greg and another man, and wounding the taxi driver.

The attack was instantly traced back to Adair's C Company and the South Belfast Brigade stepped in and stormed Adair's Shankill Road fortress and forced him to flee to Scotland on the overnight ferry and his supporters were eventually driven out as well. So maybe with the fortress aspect there as well, like these guys at this point they all lived in houses that were pretty much bunkers. They had like ring

reinforced concrete, they had like drop shutters, they had bulletproof glass, CCTV, all this kind of stuff. So they were really like embedded in these neighbourhoods. It would have been quite an effort to get into them if you wanted to. They were kind of living this very paranoid lifestyle. It was around this time that law enforcement began to treat violence as serious organised crime.

And they even drafted in Professor Ronald Goldstock, who had been involved in taking down the Mafia in New York for kind of consultation on how to deal with these groups. And Adair might have been out of the picture, but the damage he caused to the organization was already done. And the old guard began to drop like flies.

Jim Gray, the guy who was shot in the face at the wake mentioned earlier, was expelled from the UDA leadership in 2005 after being accused of being a police informant. A couple months later, Gray was shot five times in the back in East Belfast while unloading weightlifting equipment from his car. Locals took photos of the dead commander as he lay on the ground. Unlike most brigadiers, he wasn't given a paramilitary funeral with the usual volleys of gunfire over the coffin. It was kind of a private affair attended by only 14 mourners. So,

So, I don't know. Maybe they weren't so accepting of him after all, but as a further sign of his unpopularity among loyalists, Street Disco was held in East Belfast to celebrate his death. And an effigy with a curtain ring representing his trademark single gold earring was thrown onto a bonfire. And instead of the traditional murals dedicated to his memory, there was only graffiti scrawled on a East Belfast wall which read, Jim Gray, RIP, rest in pink. The

The following year, André Choucry, the Buckey's Brigadier of the North Belfast UDA, was expelled from the UDA for criminal activity. With that, the last of the old school were gone, soon to be replaced with young commanders who were only children or growing up when the conflict was at its peak. So here we can tie it back into the murder of Glen Quinn from the beginning and talk a bit about the Southeast Antrim UDA and what they're up to.

After his murder in 2003, John Greig, commander of the South East Antrim Brigade was succeeded by Gary Fisher. Under Fisher, the brigade moved closer to the expelled Shoe Cree brothers, giving the men protection under the South East Antrim UDA and letting them attend meetings of the group's leadership. This caused outrage in what was left of the UDA inner council and rather than fall in line, Fisher withdrew the South East Antrim UDA from the wider organisation.

With this move, the road to fully-fledged drug cartel was now open. No longer constrained by the petty internal politics or keeping up appearances politically,

Fisher's new organization could focus on profit. A couple of questions on this front. It's like, I mean, at this point, basically, they're just the name, right? There's no political ideology whatsoever. All these guys were barely alive when the conflict was ending. So it's just drugs and money. That's what I assume. But what drugs are we talking about here? Like heroin, cocaine, hash? Kind of standard, I guess. I think the most common drug, obviously, in the North is cannabis. And then after that, it's cocaine, alcohol.

cocaine is hugely popular in Ireland, North and South. Interestingly as well, in the North they have a problem with pregabalin or Lyrica, which is

I don't even know what that is. Yeah, it's weird. I'm not going to... Don't quote me on this, but I think it's really over-prescribed up there, and it's essentially like an anti-seizure medication. It stops irregular electrical activity in your brain. I don't know. I'm not a chemist, but... Sounds like... What's the one? Ativan? Maybe something like that? Like an anti... Ativan might be anti-psychotic, but I know people that take it to... Or people used to take it to... Anyway, I'll look it up. What's it called again? It's called trigabalin or Lyrica.

They call it buds up there, or budwizers, because it's red and white. But yeah, they have a big problem with that up there as well. But yeah, it's just kind of standard stuff. Yeah, heroin as well, all that kind of stuff. You can even see, like, if you go on, like, Telegram and stuff like that, you know, where they have those groups that, like, sell drugs and stuff. Like, you'll find, like, groups that are, you know, using, like, loyalist paramilitary symbols on those group chats, and then it's just, like, you know, the normal...

stuff you find like fucking weed vapes and cocaine and stuff like that you know what I mean in 2009 the South East Antrim was alleged to have decommissioned their weapons though how much this actually happened was called into question the commitment to peace was short lived however and in 2014 the Irish Independent confirmed

Fisher as Brigadier and suggested that the group was rearming. Over the next few years, the brigade would be involved in local attacks and rampages of up to 100 men, bringing their communities firmly under the boot. Those who fell afoul of the group could expect to be burnt out of their home or worse. In 2017, a former boss within the organisation, Geordie Gilmore, was shot in the neck after a dispute over drug money in Carrickfergus.

The 50-year-old died the following day, having already survived a crossbow attack the previous year. Attendance at Gilmore's funeral carried the threat of expulsion, similar to some of the funerals we've heard about earlier.

And later that year, Gilmore's friend Colin Horner would be shot dead outside a shopping centre in Bangor in front of his three-year-old son. In 2018, the group was alleged to have been involved in purchasing handguns off the dark net for use within an internal feud. Two years later, in 2020, PS9 would warn of imminent attacks against Sunday Life and Sunday World journalists and even a booby trap, and even a warning of a booby trap on one of the journalist's cars. Doug Beattie, leader of a unionist political party,

spoke out against the threats and was subsequently served with two police warnings himself. In 2021, Beatty told the BBC that the South East Antrim UDA had threatened to kill him twice. According to the Irish Times, there are suspicions that the threats are in response to coverage of the Glen Quinn murder in Carrickfergus in January 2020. As it stands today, the group has well and truly metamorphosed into a narcotics-based organisation. Sunday Life newspaper revealed that the group is importing drugs

with Dublin-based gangs and other southern suppliers who are bringing it in from the Netherlands. According to a recent MI5 police intelligence report, the South East and from UDA has access to arms and is heavily involved in drug supply, community coercion and intimidation and other criminality. The group is also estimated to have over 2,000 members.

Jesus, so they're not playing around. Yeah, the UDA aren't alone in this transformation. Groups on both sides have become hybrid or fully-fledged drug organizations. The EncroChat hack and SkyEEC encrypted phone networks that were being used by drug traffickers all over Europe. When they were hacked, that reveals a high degree of cooperation between all the major players. So stuff like politics no longer plays that much of a role when there's money to be made.

Yeah. So, I mean, for our listeners who don't know, the endocrat, endocrat hack, yeah, it was basically like, you know, an encrypted phone messaging service that I think a lot of gangsters in Ireland were using, right? And then they cracked it and they got all those messages. Well, that was a couple of years ago, I think now, right? Yeah.

2020, maybe? So, interestingly, the GARDI, the police force in Ireland, decided not to do anything with the information. They haven't made any arrests based off the EncroChat hack. But in the north, the NCA, the National Crime Agency in the UK, worked with the PSNI to sort of, which is the police force up there, to arrest some of these guys. And what they found was that there was a high degree of cooperation between, like, you'd have groups that were, like, formally

die hard, like loyalist groups working with like Republican groups, you know, to traffic droves. I mean, that's a uniting factor right there. I think we talked about it too in our early episodes on, you know, our Canada and basically the organized crime groups during the war in the Balkans, the wars in the Balkans. They basically, you know, they would preach this hatred and sort of against the other, but they were all working in conjunction to get around sanctions, to move drugs, to move guns and all that.

They were all basically, they had these nationalist sides that they were on, but they all worked together to make money. And it sounds like a similar situation here. Yes, it's an ironic enough situation because you have groups like the UDA, which on paper are

you know, like they'll go to port facilities and like threaten workers and stuff because of the new like Brexit, like trade negotiations and stuff. And they're coming down really hard on this whole kind of like trade issue that we're having in Ireland at the moment because of Brexit. But at the same time, they're

They're making all their money out of trade with the South, which is, you know, something that outwardly or at least, you know, on the face of it, they're very against. So it's, yeah, it's kind of hypocritical, I guess. But again, not the most amazing people in the world. Yeah. So like in February 2022, a three million pound consignment of drugs destined for the East Belfast UVF was seized at Belfast docks.

And this shipment is thought to have come from the Cainahan cartel. Yeah, we've done a few episodes on them. I think the last Sean did with Nicola Talens is an amazing Irish crime journalist. 20 years on from the conflict that claims thousands of lives and the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to the island and drug dealers have put aside their differences to create an all-island drug establishment.

The border mentioned at the start is now open with no checkpoints. So shipments from Dublin or anywhere else can just drive up to their customers in the north. Probably important to mention here just for listeners elsewhere, Ireland is really, really small. Dublin is two hours away from Belfast. It's not far. These guys don't have far to go.

like everything in Ireland is relatively close together. So it's all going to be interlinked. A small population too. Yeah. What is it like seven, eight million, something like that? Maybe less? I think there's about five million or maybe four point something million in the south. And then there's another 1.5 in the north or something like that. When you grew up in the New York area, you assume that Ireland has like 90 million people in it. But no, not the case. You find that a lot with when American tourists come over.

A lot of the hotels in Ireland are listed as close to Dublin. It'll be within driving distance of Dublin. You're looking at it, you're like, that's not looking anywhere near Dublin. But if you're coming from the US, it is. To them, they're like, oh, great. It's only that far away. Only an hour away. Yeah, why not? Yeah. So many of the organizations, like the LVF mentioned earlier, have splintered into groups like the firm in Lurgan, which they don't even pretend to be paramilitary in nature anymore.

They're like fully into organized crime and dissident Republican groups have sort of struck a balance between drug dealing and politically motivated terrorism. Paramilitary groups are so embedded in some communities that they serve as a separate legal system for that area. Kneecapping, again, is probably the most widely known example of this.

paramilitaries act as police in their neighbourhoods and the actual police are not widely liked across the board. Nationalists see them as no different than the RUC, which is the now disbanded majority Protestant police force of the Troubles, while loyalists see the PSNI, the new police force, as being infiltrated by nationalist sentiment. 60% of young people from both sides of the divide actually believe the police was biased against their group.

The communities of paramilitaries control are typically very disadvantaged and politicians rely on sectarianism to kind of garner a vote.

And this leaves communities sort of trapped in this cycle of fear, being bullied by paramilitaries, flooded with drugs and constantly in fear of the other ethnic group. These groups take advantage of young people in their areas as well, encouraging rioting, something we've seen a lot in the last few years, and then act as community representatives to gather up government funding and stop the unrest. And this happens with both sides as well. It's common enough.

Law enforcement efforts and community awareness have led to a steady decline in paramilitary attacks and punishment shootings. So the groups in these areas exert power through intimidation, violence, or just through addiction via heroin or tablets. They engage in loan sharking, extortion, and even take people's benefit books to ensure a steady stream of repayments.

While groups still occasionally engage in bomb threats and shootings, the general trend is towards a new type of organisation solely based around drug dealing. The arrival of other groups, such as Balkan crime gangs, means that the criminal environment in the north is totally unrecognisable from what it was in the 80s. The 30s have been slow to act on this. If it was any other part of the UK or Ireland, they'd come down on these groups like a tonne of bricks. But the connection to politics and the recent conflict means these groups can run

organized crime in their territory with less interference. Damn, I mean, that's a wild one, man. And it's also like, even from talking to you while we were doing this, it was kind of just like, it's crazy out there. Yeah, these guys don't really give a fuck. As always, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast for bonus stuff or on iTunes or underworldpod.com for merch and other stuff.

Adam, tell people where they can find you. Probably don't give a location. I mean like Instagram or Twitter or whatever else if you want people to go check that out. So I'm launching a new sort of Irish media platform called Council. So you can find that. I think it should be up and running by the time this goes live. So that's councilmag.ie. If you want to look at that, we'll have the YouTube channel, some documentaries and stuff like that as well. And then if you want to follow my Instagram, it's spicebag.exe.

And so, yeah. Anyway, thank you very much for having me. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much for doing this, man. I really appreciate it.