Paul had never been a member of Combat 18. Even they wouldn't have let him join. And, as far as I know, he had nothing to do with any violence at the Euro '96 championships. I think he was just talking a bit of nonsense to a reporter for a few free beers. Beyond the expression of extreme views, Paul had little understanding of politics. For instance, he also expressed support for the IRA, partly because he saw northern Catholics as an oppressed minority. Politically, British Nazis line up with the Loyalist paramilitaries. It's not really possible to be a British Nazi and an IRA supporter at the same time. Unless you're Paul.
Later that year, he got sent back to Belmarsh Prison for bashing a shopkeeper who didn't serve him fast enough. I visited him. He told me the screws had appointed him as a 'counsellor' for prisoners in danger of committing suicide. I tried not to laugh. I didn't think Paul ought to have been allowed near people thinking of topping themselves. I could only imagine him giving prisoners tips about successful exit strategies whilst eyeing their wallets. Perhaps he'd show them photos. I assumed his appointment represented a devious unofficial plan to ease prison overcrowding.
During his stay in prison, Paul met a Palestinian man. My brother had felt strongly about the Palestinian struggle for years, even though his understanding of the conflict was hardly sophisticated. Whenever anything appeared on television about Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas, he'd start ranting, really ranting: 'Look at those Jew cunts. Grown men hiding behind tanks firing bullets at small children with stones. No wonder Hitler hated the fuckers.' His support for the Palestinians, like his support for the Provos, sprang from his sympathy for a perceived 'underdog'. No doubt his immersion over the years in Nazi anti-Jew rhetoric also played its part.
Paul's new friend asked him if he could contact Palestinian prisoners on his behalf when he got out. The friend said he couldn't do so himself, because the Special Branch had him under surveillance. After his release, Paul began writing to Samar Alami, who'd been jailed for 20 years for terrorist offences. To avoid the prison censors, he tried to pass on letters to her through her celebrity lawyer Gareth Peirce, who over the years has represented countless prisoners accused of terrorist offences. His war effort ended up being reported in the Mirror on 25 February 1997. Paul was again using a false name. This time, he called himself 'Tom Halloran':
A vile neo-Nazi is attempting to recruit Britain's leading lawyers to carry out his dirty work.
Repulsive Tom Halloran targets lawyers to gain access to convicted terrorists who he believes will be sympathetic to his own sickening causes.
He tricked crusading solicitor Gareth Peirce into thinking he was a well-wisher of her female client, Samar Alami, jailed for 20 years for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish charity.
His motives, however, are far more sinister. Halloran is a far-right extremist who has said, 'Adolf Hitler was too soft for our way of thinking. I'm against anyone who doesn't agree with my views.'
Halloran, an IRA sympathiser, is intent on building contacts with terrorist organisations to further his fascist and racist causes.
Following this article, the police arrested Paul under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. They took apart his flat, searching for incriminating material. I don't know what they made of his video collection. In the end, they released him because - unusually for him - he hadn't committed any offence. However, Paul soon returned to prison for other offences. His regular stays in jail had the side effect of bringing phases of stability to his life. But every time he came out, he seemed just a little bit madder.
Paul wasn't the only lunatic I had on my mind. Over the years, I'd often wondered what had happened to my father. No one had seen him, or heard anything of him, since he left the house in August 1976. Sometimes I fantasised about tracking him down. I suppose I'd have liked to ask him why he'd treated us so brutally. I suppose, too, on occasion, I'd have liked a chance to kick his head in.
But most of the time I tried to forget him and to pretend I didn't care what had become of him. However, my mother, who wanted some sort of closure on his disappearance, kept prodding me to try to find out. Every now and again over the years, I'd contact the police's Missing Persons' Bureau and the Salvation Army, always without success. Then on a whim in 2001 - the 25th anniversary of his disappearance - I asked my journalist friend Gary Jones to see if he could find him. I stayed on the line as Jones tapped my father's details into his computer. Within five minutes, as I waited on the phone, Jones said he'd found him. My father was dead. He'd died four years earlier of natural causes. Jones gave his last address as a tower block opposite the cricket ground in Edgbaston, Birmingham.
I was in a pub in London's King's Cross when Jones told me, for which I was grateful, because I needed a drink. My father was dead. And all along he'd been living just down the road from the home he'd left. I abandoned my other plans and headed instead to Birmingham. I had an irrepressible urge to see where my father had spent his last years. On the journey, I experienced a whole spectrum of feelings, including sadness, but mostly shock and rage. I felt cheated. I could never now fulfil that fantasy of confronting him.
It was strange, and a little spooky, to stand outside my father's last front door. It stood on the tenth floor of a municipal block of flats. I knocked, but no one answered. So I went next door. An elderly West Indian man, wearing an Old-Man-River trilby hat, opened his door cautiously
I introduced myself and asked if he'd known my father. He said he had. They'd even been mates. He said my father had lived for years in an attic flat above a shop round the corner. The flat in the tower block had belonged to the old woman who'd owned the shop. She'd become ill, and my father, who'd become good friends with her, moved into her flat to keep her company. It wasn't a romantic relationship. They were merely companions. She'd then died and my father had stayed on in the flat, living alone.
He and the West Indian man used to go for a drink on Sundays to a pub round the corner. One Sunday, they had their lunch-time drink and headed home. My father, a heavy smoker, coughed most of the way along the street. They said goodbye at their doors. The man said he used to see my father, or hear him coughing, most days, so when he'd neither seen nor heard him by Tuesday, he called the police. They broke down the door and found my father dead in bed. His grave lay in a council cemetery a few miles away.
I asked if my father had ever spoken about his family. He said he had. Apparently, he'd occasionally mentioned he'd been married and had children, although he hadn't gone into details. I thanked the man for his time and left. That night, I found myself standing outside the cemetery with my brother Michael. The gates had been locked for the night. Earlier that day, I'd rung the council and had been given my father's plot number. Michael and I clambered over the big iron railings. In a few minutes, we stood in front of my father's last resting place. Neither flowers, nor headstone, nor name decorated the plot. Only a number. I broke down and cried. So did Michael. We both felt devastated.
In the past, I'd genuinely hated my father, but as I stood there over his grave, I realised I actually felt sorry for him. I'd spent so much time hating him I hadn't realised his own hatred and anger had stemmed from the fact that he'd never had much love or affection in his tormented life. He'd been buried in a pauper's grave, which an Irish-Catholic charity had supplied and paid for.
The next day, I broke the news to my mother. She took it very badly. Over the following days, we spoke together about my father in a way that brought me a bit closer to him and made me understand better why he'd become such a vicious bastard. My mother told me things she'd never told me before. She said in Ireland during the 1930s my father's unmarried mother had become pregnant after sleeping with a married man. After abuse from locals, she became so ashamed and scared she went to the 'county home' to give birth.
She abandoned my father there - and disappeared. She was never seen or heard of again. My father was at first brought up in the county home, where some staff subjected him to extreme
cruelty and violence. His health and state of mind suffered badly. Eventually, his grandmother took him out and reared him herself. He worshipped his grandmother, but grew to hate 'normal' people, because he'd been deprived of the most basic normality (that is, the affection, care and protection of a mother and father).
My mother said he'd been a good singer, so much so that he was known in pubs and clubs as 'Danny Boy' after his favourite song of the same name. The song in its original form had been an Irish republican anthem. He'd especially enjoyed singing it at the Royal British Legion Club in Codsall. He'd laugh to himself, because he knew the clapping audience hadn't understood the significance of the song's words.
When my mother lay desperately ill in hospital after the birth of Michael, she'd confided in a consultant about my father's violence. The consultant suggested that in my father's mind he wasn't beating us, he was beating his own mother. He thought my father hated the fact that we had a mother who loved us. This conversation sounded a bit like the final scene from Hitchcock's classic film Psycho, where the psychiatrist gives an explanation of why the now straitjacketed lunatic of the tide murdered all those people and kept his mother's mummified body in the cellar.
Paul travelled to Birmingham when I told him about our father. I drove him and my mother to the cemetery, but he refused to get out of the car. He told my mother he wouldn't stand over my father's grave unless pissing on it.
I phoned my oldest brother Jerry on the other side of the world to break the news. He didn't say much. He lives in Brazil, still working on oil rigs. He puts most of his earnings towards a home for Rio's street children. He's lived all over the world. I think he's tried to get as far away from everything that returns him to, or reminds him of, our dismal past. He doesn't really have much to do with us. He no longer speaks to Paul or Michael, and he only speaks to me if I happen to call at my mother's when he's there on one of his flying visits. He takes what happened to us very hard, but he keeps his feelings to himself. He's been married four times. He never seems happy within himself.
A few months after our phone call, he came to England. I took him to the cemetery, but, like Paul, he didn't want to get out of the car. Eventually, I persuaded him to come with me. We walked together towards the grave, but he stopped about ten yards away and refused to go any further. I could feel his anger.
Afterwards, we went for a drink in a pub near the huge Rover car plant. Neither of us said much. Jerry's eyes welled up with tears. I started to cry, went to the toilet, composed myself and went back to sit with him. That was it. We didn't mention our father again. We talked about work, our mother's health and the weather. Then, two hours after we'd met, he was gone.
Some years earlier, I'd stolen a blank headstone, which I'd stored in my garage. I'd intended it for use on my own grave. Living the life I've led, a stolen headstone over my grave struck me as fitting and amusing. Headstones are ridiculously expensive, and I'd also been hoping to save my loved ones a few bob when the time came. I decided to use this headstone for my father's grave. I had it engraved with his dates and the words 'Patrick "Danny Boy" O'Mahoney. Rest in Peace.'
Dealing with the dead was a lot easier than dealing with the living who happened to have a death wish. After yet another violent incident, my brother Paul was sectioned under the Mental Health Act.
He was released some months later, on medication, but was now a registered lunatic, with card, T-shirt and free travel on the tube. He'd been a violent madman since his teens. Now it was official.
He took to wearing army fatigues and cycling shorts. I'd see him very irregularly, but when we met he'd talk as if we'd only seen each other ten minutes earlier. Then he'd say something like, 'I can't hang around,' and he'd be off. He believed he'd successfully outwitted the doctors by pretending to be mad in order to get free travel on public transport and lighter sentences in court.
I couldn't help but laugh whenever I met Paul. He told me he'd started stalking one of his carers. He'd say to me, 'Followed that fucking cunt again. Thinks I'm mad.'
Until a few years ago, if you didn't know him, he could still give an impression of lucidity. He continued to form friendships with nutters from all over the world - former hangmen, South African mercenaries, ex-prisoners - cranks and weirdos just like himself. But, in the end, no one remained in contact with him for long. Stranded alone in a desert, he'd fall out with himself.
Paul's couldn't-care-less attitude did bring him into contact with countless dubious individuals, some of whom worked for newspapers. I suppose to a stranger he could appear as a useful, though brainless, thug. But Paul has never been brainless. He used to exploit and use anyone he encountered, regardless of how untouchable they thought they might be. He got involved with a Russian mafia scam to find British husbands for eastern European 'dancers' and call girls. He 'married' one 'dancer' himself, for which he was paid three thousand pounds.
Then, to make some more money, he went to the News of the World and gave the story to their legendary undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood. Mazher specialises in dressing up as an Arab sheikh to get famous people to do drug deals or betray secrets. His most famous scoop came when he fooled the Countess of Wessex into talking indiscreetly about the Royal Family. On 3 March 2002, with information supplied by Paul, Mazher exposed the 'mafia bosses' behind the marriage scam. However, for some reason, Paul felt misused by the one-time 'Reporter of the Year' and decided to get his own back.
His chance came when Mazher asked him for help in exposing a story about two racist policemen. The officers worked at a station in London's West End. Apparently, they would arrest black people, then take bets on who'd be the first to get the prisoners to call them 'master' and beg for food. Mazher wanted Paul to wear a special denim jacket fitted with a hidden camera and voice recorder, so he could tape the officers boasting of their deeds. Paul agreed.
Mazher met up with Paul in a cafe. He gave him the jacket to try on. Mazher boasted it was state of the art and worth about £30,000. Paul put it on - then ran off down the road with it.
Mazher got my number and rang me. He sounded desperate. He begged me to help him get the jacket back. He said he'd have to go to the police if Paul didn't return it. I rang Paul, who said, 'I'm not giving that cunt anything. He ripped me off.'
I said Mazher would have to go to the police. Paul said he didn't give a fuck. He'd already sold the jacket for five hundred pounds to some West Indians.
I asked Paul if Mazher might be able to buy it back. Paul agreed to take him to the shop in Hackney where he'd fenced the jacket. Sadly, the trip wasn't successful. Mazher ended up being set upon by the West Indians. Paul was arrested for theft. He told the police that Mazher had been trying to expose two of their colleagues. He said he hadn't been prepared to help, because he felt the police did a wonderful job. Paul wasn't prosecuted and, so far as I know, Mazher never got his jacket back.
I'd been worried for years by Paul's mental health. I'd also become worried by our mutual friend Ray's physical health. Over the years, he'd destroyed himself by drinking vast amounts of alcohol with Paul. When I saw him at the beginning of 2002, he looked horribly skinny He'd been fitted with a colostomy bag because of kidney trouble. Only a decade earlier, Ray had been a healthy, happy hooligan for his beloved Millwall. Now he looked desperately ill, like a man twice his age.
In the spring of2002,1 flew to New York with my partner Emma and my son Vinney. On the flight home, I found myself overcome with a crushing sense of doom. I'd never before experienced anything like it. I told Emma and Vinney I thought something terrible had happened. I felt sure someone had died - either Paul or Ray. I'm not a believer in the supernatural, so I felt a bit uncomfortable in my new role as the reincarnation of Doris Stokes. However, as soon as we landed, I switched on my mobile to discover lots of messages. Adolf's was the first. He just told me to ring him urgently.
I rang him straightaway without listening to the other messages. He said, 'Ray's dead.' Adolf had spoken to Ray's fa
ther, with whom Ray had been staying. On his last night, Ray had stretched out on the sofa to watch the football on telly. His father went to bed. In the morning, he got up to find Ray still on the sofa with the telly on. He realised his son was dead.
I'd once been very close to Ray. His loss at such an early age - he was only 37 - hit me hard. I contacted Paul, whom I hadn't seen since the previous year when he'd refused to visit my father's grave. We arranged to go to Ray's funeral together with my brother Michael, who'd also known and liked Ray.
I met Paul at King's Cross. His appearance shocked me. It wasn't just his cream trousers, which I suggested were unsuitable for a funeral. He was thin and gaunt and looked ten years older. Mentally, too, he was just shot to pieces. It was hard to get a coherent word out of him. Emma took a photo of us three brothers together. When I showed it later to my mother, she cried because she thought Paul looked so frail.
I offered to buy Paul some black trousers, but he declined. We took a taxi to Dulwich, where Ray had been living with his partner Lorna and their children. I had to laugh at the name of the road - Marcus Garvey Mews, named after a black nationalist leader.
The whole gang turned out for the funeral. Seeing them standing there together made Ray's death real for the first time. I couldn't speak. I tried talking to Ray's dad, but no words came out. He, too, was speechless. The poor man looked totally destroyed, totally. I felt for him throughout the day.
It was strangely comforting when the hearse carrying Ray pulled up outside the house. He was back among the boys and his family. The Catholic church was already packed by the time we arrived. At the front near the altar stood four black women. Adolf asked if they were 'Martha Reeves and the Vandellas'. But no one was in the mood for humour.
The service started. It was led by an Irish priest. Adolf didn't like the cut of his jib. He whispered to me that he looked like 'a red'. He began muttering about 'conspirators' in the ranks, but no one paid any attention.
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