John Sweetman

But nowadays, like I mean, every week there'd be a call out or two, might turn out to be nothing.

But then we went into the whole area of the, you know, the Limerick feuds down there and then the feuds up here in Dublin where all the gangland stuff.

So, you know, you could have...

you could have nothing for weeks and then all of a sudden boom boom boom like there's a few of them john you don't look like a copper thanks be to god yeah yeah yeah i often get told that and what does a cop i look like you look at him and i say what's his profession tattoo artist yeah for the record no disrespect john you look like someone who does being phil by my guess

yeah yeah well i say over the years i started like i mean when i started obviously like when i started in the guards you couldn't have tattoos well you couldn't have them visible if you had tattoos in your arms you had to have long sleeve short like you couldn't have anything other if you wanted to grow any whiskers it could only be a mustache it couldn't extend further than the corners of your mouth

Your locks had to be halfway down your ear.

All this stuff, two fingers above the collar for the back of your neck for the hair.

This is when you were in Tampa more like, but you got inspected every week, like up and down the rank to be inspecting it.

And then like, you know, when you're in uniform, the rules were still there.

But then when I got into the bureau, I was straight away wearing plain clothes, which meant most of the time, shirt and tie and whatnot.

Over the years, I kind of relaxed a little bit and I started getting the odd tattoo, usually under my shoulder or something like that, and then maybe small ones here and there.

And I just kept pushing it, you know.

And even up until late enough in the game, you still weren't allowed to have beards or anything like that.

You are now.

Obviously, you can't turn up looking like something that was dragged out of a ditch backwards.

But, you know, you couldn't even have a beard unless you had a medical reason for having one.

And like, because I remember I was... A medical reason.

A medical reason.

You know, say if you had some horrible fucking birthmark or scar or a turd eye or something in your chin.

Like, I remember when I started in the document section and I had, I only had a goatee at the time.