Killing Bono

by Neil McCormick

  The insightful reader may be well ahead of me here. Because, in so many ways, from the tiny to the significant, Ivan is the absent party in this tale. He was always around, but he is to be found between the lines, more than in them. I may sketch an acquaintance in a few sharp sentences but what can I really tell you about my brother? I could say he was the most significant person in my life. But just how well did I know him? I respected his musical talent. I enjoyed his fast-firing wit. But I never really had to engage with him as a person, any more than you have to engage with yourself. I took him for granted.

  I have come to think that Ivan, in many respects, was shaped in reaction to me. He was determinedly anti-intellectual, because I was intellectual. He chose to occupy a space that was physical, emotional and instinctive, leaving the reading, philosophizing and reasoning to me. As a child, I was always admired in our family for my artistic ability and my way with words. When Ivan found music, and applied himself to it, he must have felt he was marking out his own special territory. And then, like some jealous child who prefers his sibling’s toys, I invaded that space and made him share it with me.

  But still, it would have been OK (as, indeed, it was for many years) if only it had all added up to something. But we had got nowhere, and had nowhere left to go. And somewhere deep within his psyche (because Ivan would never admit any of this, not even to himself) the child was roaring. “He took my toys. And he broke them!”

  I still find it almost impossible to have this conversation with my brother, more than a decade on. He just shrugs and denies any ill will. But it was there in his behavior, in his cutting comments, impatience, rudeness and general air of disregard and disrespect. Ivan blamed me for our failure to achieve the fame and fortune we both desired. He blamed the complexity of my lyrics. My unwillingness to compromise. My arrogance in dealing with the music business. My stage presence (he always thought he had more stage presence than me). My singing (he rather fancied that he sang better than me, too). He probably thought Rob Dickens was right about my haircut, for that matter. He blamed me and maybe he didn’t even have to have a specific reason why. He just needed to take it out on somebody.

  A large group of us went out for dinner for Gloria’s birthday. Ivan stood up and said he had something to say. We presumed this was going to be a toast to the birthday girl but instead he announced that Ina and he were getting married.

  This was quite a bombshell. Ivan was the last person whom anyone present would have considered the marrying kind. He was considered a bit of a party animal, renowned among our friends for his wild behavior and general sense of impropriety. And he was a womanizer who made my own forays into that area of human endeavor appear insignificant. I think it is fair to say that, over the years, he had treated Ina like shit, two-timing her, spurning her, chasing her away when she was around, then chasing after her when she wasn’t. But here they were, tying the knot. It was hard not to see this as a kind of wounded act, salve for the scars of disappointment and rejection. Ina was spirited and funny and eccentric but they always made for a chalk-and-cheese couple. She liked her material comforts. He liked to bum around. She wanted to settle down. He wanted to travel. And boy, could they argue! Even when they actually got married, later that year, it was one of those occasions when guests were muttering under their breath that it wouldn’t last. And, indeed, it did not. They divorced a few years later, leaving Ina with a badly broken heart.

  So anyway, there we were, at Gloria’s birthday dinner, which quickly turned into an engagement party. Gloria was pissed off because she felt her celebration had been hijacked by Ivan. And I was pissed off because it became clear that Ivan had proposed six months earlier but had chosen not to tell me his plans, even though they had significant impact on my own. Ina confided their intention to travel the world for a year before considering where they might settle down.

  I was looking for a chance to catch Ivan alone, to speak to him away from the chatter of happy-ever-after platitudes. But he kept outmaneuvering me, ensuring there was no possibility of a private word. Until the very end of the evening, when I followed him to the toilet. We stood side by side at the urinal. It was an appropriate setting. It wasn’t just piss that was running down the drain.

  “So,” I said.

  “So,” he replied.

  When you had been together for as long as we had, you can say a lot with just one word. My “so” was laden with hurt and betrayal, full of weary accusation, but shaded with a question, grasping for a last fading glimmer of hope. His “so” had the firmness of confirmation and dismissal. It was cocky and a little bit cruel. And it was final.

  We stood and urinated for a while.

  “That’s it, then?” I said.

  “That’s it,” he confirmed.

  Then we zipped up and went our separate ways.

  And still I could not quite accept that it was done and dusted. I was like a boxer who doesn’t know when he’s beaten. I had taken one hell of a pounding. There was blood all over the ring. The whole crowd was yelling for me to stay down and take the count. But some primitive instinct was still in operation, compelling me to struggle back to my feet. A voice in my head saying, “One punch, that’s all it comes down to. You can still take this guy.”

  Officially, I was considering my position. My guitar playing was improving with practice. I was still writing a lot of songs. Maybe I would be better off on my own.

  One more blow had to land.

  One more straw to break this stubborn camel’s back.

  And it fell, cruelly, one night in bed with Gloria. We lay there in the aftermath of passion and I was talking about the future, imagining all kinds of wild scenarios, when she gave it to me straight.

  “I love you, Neil,” she said. “I love being with you. You make me laugh, you’re always good to me. But I can’t make a life with you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look at yourself!” she said, sweetly, sadly. “You haven’t got a job. You never have any money. You don’t take responsibility for anyone or anything except yourself and barely even that. You live in your head. All the time. Your whole life is dreams about the future. When are you going to wake up? Life is going on right here, right now. I’m trying to get on with my life. And I can’t count on you. ’Cause, let’s face it…”

  “What?” I said, resentfully.

  “Nothing,” she said, thinking better of it.

  “Let’s face what?” I insisted.

  “You’re a loser.”

  I recoiled as if slapped in the face.

  I recoiled in the way you recoil from the truth. From a truth you’ve tried to hide from yourself. From a truth that hurts.

  “I’m not a loser,” I said, as much to myself as her.

  Twenty

  It wasn’t as if I just snapped to attention and went to work. But what Gloria said preyed on my mind. And, over the course of 1989 and 1990, I started to get my act together.

  I guess I had a head start as a journalist. I knew the craft, having made my mistakes in Ireland and eventually finding my voice under the guidance of Niall Stokes and all my Hot Press colleagues. I had some flair for language, a lot of curiosity and a low tolerance for bullshit, all of which served me well, but there was something more besides. I wasn’t some bright-eyed kid coming out of college. I had been living a life, loving and losing and learning hard lessons. I wouldn’t go so far as to describe myself as mature but I had a deep well of experience to draw upon.

  And I had something to prove. I really applied myself to the task in hand. Because if this was going to be my profession, I didn’t just want to get published—I wanted to do great things. I wanted to write articles nobody else could write. I wanted them to rip off the page and grab readers by the scruff of the neck. If I was going to be a journalist, then I would take it as a license to investigate and explore, to gain access to places where ordinary civilians are not always welcome, to find out about people whose stories are rarely told, to go on a voyage
of discovery. My co-conspirator in this regard was my friend Leo, who was driven to achieve something extraordinary with his photo-journalism. It wasn’t kudos he was looking for. It was penetration. We talked up a storm, the pair of us. We (perhaps arrogantly) decided that too much journalism merely skimmed the surface. We wanted to get right inside our stories, to illuminate the dark corners most journalism never even noticed.

  I suppose, to some extent, this was a kind of transfer of ambition. If I couldn’t be a rock star then I would be a press star. But there was something else besides that. A genuine immersion in the task. A commitment to doing something worthwhile. And, with each published article, I slowly rebuilt my shattered dignity and restored my pride in myself.

  I wasn’t writing about rock ’n’ roll, either. Anything but music. I was fascinated by the underbelly of life, where losers like me congregated, seeking out ways to get their own back on the world, and so I went in search of it. And one day, I got lucky.

  I used to read the Irish newspapers, just to keep up on events back home, and had been following the case of Martin Cahill, widely alleged to be the General, the notorious kingpin of Dublin’s crime scene. The focus of the most concentrated operation in Gardai history, he was openly accused in the media, denounced in parliament and (perhaps most damagingly of all) discussed in the pub. Anonymity is usually considered an essential element of a successful life in the underworld, yet Cahill had achieved a status usually reserved for pop stars and actors: he was a household name. Maybe that’s what drew me to him. Here was someone who had fame thrust upon him, unwanted. What made the story easy to sell to the editors of GQ magazine, however, was that fame was a burden borne with considerable humor by Cahill.

  Kept under constant police surveillance, he told reporters outside court that he was moving into the security business, quipping: “Since the Gardai go everywhere we go we can offer an armed Gardai escort for the movements of large amounts of cash.” Cahill was a serial joker, a godfather in Mickey Mouse boxer shorts who would drop his trousers to mock his persecutors. Yet despite all the publicity, he maintained a curious kind of obscurity. While he was appearing in court for a breach of the peace, a succession of Gardai witnesses failed to point Cahill out, though one detective was prepared to have a go, declaring: “He is wearing a wig, a false mustache and glasses and if he took down his hands from his face I could identify him.” Everywhere Cahill appeared in public, he kept his features hidden behind balaclavas and ski masks. He was a villain who somehow reflected the country that spawned him. America had Al Capone, the personification of suave, swaggering, organized violent crime. England had the Krays, brutal and trendy. And Ireland had the General, a gang leader with a sense of humor.

  GQ wanted to know if I could get an interview. And I confidently said, “Why not?” Well, actually, I could think of a good few reasons why not. Law-enforcement officers who had crossed Cahill in the past had been kidnapped, car-bombed and knee-capped. And then there were the oft-repeated rumors of him peeling the skin off an informer’s legs, and nailing a suspected betrayer to the floor. But I was not really sure about the protocols of crime journalism and thought it only reasonable that, if I was writing about the General, I should give him the opportunity to put forward his side of the story.

  It was easy to find out where he lived. Even my parents knew. They were enthusiastic about my occupation, which hinted at a previously unsuspected streak of respectability in their errant son. “I never thought you were cut out for the rock scene,” my dad declared one day, blissfully writing off his own part in my history. “I always thought you’d be better off as a writer!” He drove me over to the lair of Ireland’s most notorious criminal and hung about outside, fearful lest his son’s new career come to a brutal end before it even got started.

  It was hard to miss the General’s redbrick house in Cowper Downs, an affluent suburb of south Dublin. There was a police surveillance team parked outside. I don’t know what they made of me—I doubt I looked like one of the General’s usual visitors. My hair was still worn in long, rock ’n’ roll locks, I was dressed in denim jacket and jeans and I had a notebook and pen tightly clutched in my hands. I was shaking with nerves as I opened the garden gate. I was not encouraged by the sight of a solemnly threatening sign, “Beware the Guard Dog,” featuring an ominous silhouette of a vicious Rottweiler.

  The barking started immediately, loud and agitated. I advanced across the messy garden, silently praying that the dog was safely locked up. I had just about reached the front door when I caught sight of it, hurtling toward me, teeth bared. It couldn’t have stood more than six inches tall, a tiny black puppy that all but rolled over and wet itself at my feet. I took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.

  After what seemed like forever, the door was opened by a spotty, teenage boy. “Is Mr. Cahill in?” I inquired, my mind reeling as I tried to come to terms with the unexpected domesticity of the situation. Where were the henchmen, the thugs that might be expected to be protecting their boss? “Da!” yelled the kid, before disappearing back inside. Whatever next?

  The figure who appeared at the half-open doorway did not conform to any popular image of a major-league criminal. He was short and portly, dressed in well-worn trousers and a stained T-shirt, a few long strands of hair clinging hopelessly to his bald pate. The air of physical disrepair was not helped by his bent, yellowing teeth. He watched me closely as I introduced myself, running through a prepared speech, my voice trembling, the notebook in my hand bobbing up and down. When Cahill smiled his whole face seemed to light up. “Are you nervous?” he asked, softly spoken, his thick Dublin accent shading his words with lilting reassurance. He reached out to tap my arm. “You don’t believe everything you read now, do you?”

  And that’s what I was after. That’s what I wanted to hear. Because everything I knew about the twilight zone we call the underworld I had read in books and newspapers or gleaned from films and TV. I wanted truth. Hard, unvarnished truth. That was what brought me to Cahill’s door.

  I met with Cahill twice, and interviewed him at length. “You don’t want to talk to me about crime, do you?” he asked me, with a gently mocking air. But of course I did. He proved a loquacious conversationalist, although predictably guarded on certain subjects. He developed a curious way of talking about things in the third person, like an expert giving his opinion, but always the answers came wreathed in knowing smiles. “I hate liars,” he’d say, “but sometimes I have to lie. D’y’understand?” A more genial gangster you could not hope to have met. Yet there was no doubt Cahill held the propensity for extreme violence, and that this reputation helped him in his trade. “You want to know if there’s something nasty underneath this smile?” he asked me, when I pressed him on the issue. “Crime is a way of life,” he said. “Sometimes something bad will happen when you do the crime.”

  For me, the essential banality of Cahill’s world was a kind of revelation. Here was the most notorious figure in Ireland, sitting in a messy living room, offering me cups of tea while he discussed acts of criminality as casually as my dad might have chatted about his working day. There were scribbled drawings of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pinned to the wallpaper. Children ran in and out of the rooms, and he greeted them affectionately. Yet he once nailed a man to the floor, an act he would blithely consider part of his job.

  The article caused a minor sensation when it was published and I began to discover what it was to be a wanted man. After years of having doors shut in my face, suddenly they were swinging wide open and I was beckoned through with open arms. Esquire magazine wanted to commission me. When I informed GQ’s editor, Michael VerMeulen, of this development, he just snapped, “You can’t write for Esquire!”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because we’re going to make you an editor!” I’m sure he just decided that on the spot. Michael was an inspirational American, under whose editorship British GQ became the biggest-selling men’s magazine in the country. He rather
took me under his wing, making me first a contributing editor and then editor-at-large, an overblown title for a fantastically attractive position which involved going into the office only two days a week (to participate in editorial discussions and commissioning), leaving me free the rest of the time to pursue my writing.

  I began to write more crime features. I met armed robbers, muggers, burglars, gangsters, fences, drug dealers, conmen and even killers. I had dinner in their homes, drank with them in their pubs and clubs and occasionally, when things hadn’t turned out according to plan, visited them in prison. My encounter with Cahill had made me realize something all too obvious. All these people, regularly demonized in the media, but with no access to it, had stories to tell, and were mostly eager for the chance to have them chronicled. I never offered my approval, and it was never asked for. All they wanted to know was that I would honestly report what they had to say. I was flattered once to find an article I had written on pimps blown up and pinned to a wall in Charing Cross police station. A Vice Squad detective told me that they were amazed that I’d managed to get pimps, normally the most secretive of criminals, to talk about their business so frankly. I went to Bradford and investigated the murder of a prostitute. I interviewed a psychopath who had been boasting that he was Britain’s most prolific killer. I hung out with armed robbers and armed policemen on a quest to find out just how easy it was to buy an illegal gun in the U.K. (it took me three months but I eventually got my hands on an Uzi). I spent a month on the job with a crack dealer, worrying about whether I too was liable to get arrested if the police actually caught him in the act. I put time into these stories, often considerably more time and effort than the financial remuneration justified. But I wanted to get things right.