Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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He believes something special. Brad basically told Haddock, you need to get rid of this guy. So that's his belief, whether that's true or not. But whatever happened, he says Haddock came at him, came at him with a knife. He says he managed, he stuck the knife in his neck and managed to thump him. Like I said, Terry was a big lad and an ex-boxer. He managed to deck him. He hit the wall.
I think Haddock hit his head and then sprawled out. Might have been knocked out for a couple of seconds. Came to him, basically ran.
I'm Nicola Tallent and this is Crime World, a podcast about criminals, drugs and the sins of the underworld. If you like this podcast and want to learn more about crime, go to our new website www.crimeworld.com for stories, extras and podcast subscriber specials.
A former UVF man who Mark Hannibal Haddock tried to stab to death has claimed in an interview that he's a former member of the IRA. Terry Fairfield, who now runs a bar in the UK, claims he was in both organisations and is adamant that nobody ever suggested a conflict of interest.
Today I'm talking to Stephen Moore about Fairfield, about his claims and about the spectre of Haddock's return to Balthast. This is Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com.
Stephen, we're going to talk about a guy called Terry Fairfield, who you've interviewed recently. But start by telling us, and probably for some of our listeners in the South who may not know who he is, a little bit of background.
Okay, so Terry Fairfield is a character who was in the UVF during the, I think, late 80s, early 90s. And he was part of a very notorious UVF mob in the Mount Vernon estate in North Belfast, which was led by two very well-known loyalist killers, Mark Haddock and Gary Haggerty. And Fairfield... became known as, his nickname was the mechanic.
He was involved with cars, he sold cars and dealt with cars. He had a scrap yard, breaker's yard on the Antrim Road. Even though he was a Catholic man from the New Lodge. Until recently, all we knew about Fairfield was that he had fled England in the mid-90s when he'd been informing on the UVF, just like half of the Mount Vernon crowd were.
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Chapter 2: What led Terry Fairfield to be involved with both the UVF and IRA?
Because, of course, it is a secret world. Yes. Spies. But I mean, the story that we did at the weekend in Sunday World and on Crime World now is that Fairfield had obviously left, left Good England. He actually says that he was suicidal when he left because he had no life, because his family, because he'd grown up in a nationalist family, in a nationalist area, Ardoyne and then New Lodge.
area of North Belfast. His family just basically disowned him. Disowned him.
So he was grown up in Ardoyne, which is a very Republican and very Catholic place. How does he end up in the UVF?
Well, I think he started off in the Ardoyne. He then moved to the New Lodge or Antrim Road area, which is also a Republican nationalist area. And, you know, way before he joins the UVF in the 90s, he actually joins the IRA, which which is something that we didn't know and I had never heard, I don't think anybody knew about.
But in our interview last week, he casually mentioned that, you know, when he, in the 1970s, he joined the RA, as he called it. And he said, like, everybody his age, you know, boys, you know, young men, late teens, early 20s, which he would have been, everybody joined the IRA. So he was on the fringes of things. He wasn't involved in, you know, shootings and murders and that kind of thing.
He was still a member. He was still a member. He was a member. He was involved in the IRA and he got to know, he was there at a time when a very famous IRA man, Kevin Mulgrew, was in the same unit as him. And Mulgrew, they would go on to become the North Belfast leader of the IRA. Him and Mulgrew hated each other. And he says Mulgrew absolutely hated him and broke his finger on one occasion.
Now Terry's a big lad and he was into boxing. And Terry took a hurl, as he says, a hurling stick and beat this guy Mulgrew with it and thought that was his death warrant. He was going to get shot, but he didn't. He left him alone. Anyway, he fled England. He went to England for a while, came back a few years later. And he says that the IRA left him alone. He didn't want to be involved anymore.
He was done with that. He left. He bought a breaker's yard on the Antrim Road near the waterworks in North Belfast, you know, for cars. He was obsessed with cars. He loved cars, always did. And he dealt, you know, with Selby Cars on and that kind of thing. And so that's how then he ended up, he got to know Mark Haddock and the UVF ones.
One thing, like, I suppose, if you're in media, moving from, for example, the Belfast Telegraph to the Sunday Life or something like that, but moving from the IRA to the UVF, Like, would he have been known, would the UVF have known then that he had been an IRA member?
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Chapter 3: Why did Terry Fairfield flee to England in the 1990s?
Yeah, because he had this garage. He said the car was outside his house. He would buy cars and then send them. He actually was, at that time, was sending them down to Dublin where the engines would be broken up and he would make a few quid.
So this car, the only thing that was valuable about this car, it was a triumphant acclaim, which I don't even know what that is, not being a car person, but it had a Honda engine. He said, but the only thing that made this car valuable was the registration. It had a reg that was worth money.
Yeah.
So he had it sitting outside his garage, but he wasn't in at the time. He had a wee fella who worked with him and he sold, couldn't get hold of Terry, it was days before mobile phones. He thought the car was for sale. He sold it to a guy and he says, sold it to a guy in Rathcool in North Belfast and got 25 quid for it.
Terry says, I think I got, he thinks he got 15 pounds for the sale of this car and that was it. He then gets a call after the Lachan Island attack
and he's from the police saying you own this car you need to come and speak to us and he says what what are you talking about he says oh yeah and as he puts it there are six dead bodies in here and this car was used in the attack you get so Terry says he went straight down to Tennant Street police station and I think it's just off the Shankill and And he spoke to the Phil Dementia.
The car was there. I've never in it. Never. I didn't know at the time. This is the guy who sold it. Phoned the guy who worked with him, who sold it. He came down. Terry says, I left. I was told I could go. And that was the end of it. I was, you know, they have the guy who had the car last. I'm away. I've nothing to do with me.
So he's, he is annoyed that this keeps coming up, that he supplied the car.
And was it shortly after that he went to the UK?
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Chapter 4: How did Terry Fairfield's past affect his relationships in England?
It was very easy for any barrister or half-worth assault to pick holes. Because these guys, while they were committing these crimes, even the guys, the supergrassers, they were obviously half the time on drink or drugs. Their memories, they're not going to be the most reliable witnesses. So it was very easy to beat them. So that's been a complete failure.
The whole supergrass trial system has been very... Going way back has been a complete failure.
But I presume, like certainly the media and PSNI here, be watching the movements of Haddock to see if he does come back.
And if he does, it would be a big... They would really, really... I'm sure, there's no doubt, they would really rather he stayed in England or set up a new life somewhere quietly. Does quiet come into his... I don't know. I don't think so. And like I say, I think he would... There's no doubt he would really want to come home. And it just depends if he can... If he can, can he smooth it over?
I think there's too many people that he would want to, you know, take revenge.
But you can see that Terry Fairfield obviously believes that he is somewhat safe where he is.
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Chapter 5: What claims did Terry Fairfield make about his time in the IRA?
He's laid down his roots. He never wants to come back, no.
No, no, absolutely no chance. No, he's happy enough with what he's done. And I mean, that's the other thing he talked about being, you know, he reads reports and there are stuff online where it says, oh, Terry Fairfield lives in England and was given a new identity. And he's just like, I'm not, I might go by my own name. I have no new identity.
If I was this kind of guy, I could have gone into hiding. But if I had done all these crimes and had all this, you know, opening a bar is not the kind of thing you would do. It's very public. It's very public, yeah. So he says, you know, I'm not hard to find, he says.
Exactly. And that's where he has to be every day, I suppose, if he's owning it and working on it. He doesn't feel he needs to go over his shoulder, so... I don't think so.
He didn't give that view that he felt in any kind of way worried, whether that was bravado or not. I think I'd still be a wee bit worried if I had that kind of beef with Mark Haddock.
Yeah, I think I would be too, yeah. But maybe we're made from different ingredients than Terry Fairfield. Well, Stephen, thanks very much. That was a really interesting story. Thank you very much. Thanks, Nicola. All the best. You've been listening to Crime World, a podcast from crimeworld.com. Edited and presented by me, Nicola Talent. Co-presenter, Niall Donald. Producer, Ian Mullaney.
Senior writer, producer, Jenny Friel. Assistant producers, Nasa Kumalski and Chloe McPolin. Episode editor, Jason Mullaney. If you want to subscribe for exclusive crime content and podcast specials, go to www.crimeworld.com.
If you're a crimeworld.com subscriber, you've probably already binged on our latest exclusive podcast series, The Regency 10 Years On, from the hit that changed gangland forever.
This six-part anniversary special revisits that fateful day when David Byrne was shot dead at the Northside Hotel, igniting a bloody feud between the Kinahan and Hutch gangs, one of the deadliest rivalries in Irish history. Here's a taste of the new series, exclusive to CrimeWorld.com subscribers. So that Friday was one of those really quiet days.
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Chapter 6: How did Terry Fairfield's relationship with Mark Haddock develop?
I remember Everybody's phone was going. People were hearing little bits about it. It was the news was starting to break about it. And of course, we were there sitting in the office with this photo. There is that sort of new sense in you that you want to run this. Yeah. And at the time, we weren't putting stuff up online. This would have been held for the paper on the Sunday.
And this is a Friday afternoon. We had something really special here. But we also, I think, knew the guards were going to be desperate for that picture because they were two gunmen running from a scene of a crime. So it was a very compromised situation and there was a bit of arguments going on. And there was a, you know, voices were raised.
Totally. I mean, because it is complex. I mean, normally the journalism likes to keep itself separate from the Garda investigations. So Garda investigations go on and journalism reports on them. But obviously then you're put in this compromising position because you have guys running out visibly with handguns in their hands. And, you know, they're obviously then disappeared into the eater.
And you have... Certainly you have to have a discussion about what is your civic responsibility in terms of do you help the guards? You don't want these armed gunmen to run down the street and kill another few people. So it was a complex one and people were aware straight away that the guards are going to want these pictures and want to use it for their purposes.
And we also have our purposes, which is to tell what happened and to report on the news. So there was a conflict straight away.
From my memory, as the afternoon went on and, you know, I was talking to contacts and to other people who were involved in crime journalism, etc. It became apparent that there were no guards at the weigh-in. That in actual fact, the guards didn't seem to be there at all. They were called literally by the hotel and had arrived in response to what had already gone on.
Of course, David Byrne had been shot dead in the... In the reception of the hotel we were getting photographs in later in the day which showed a very shocked looking Liam Byrne standing outside the hotel, his hands in his pockets. standing beside his cousin, Liam Rowe, another significant cartel member. There was no sign of Daniel Kinahan.
I was getting calls from people who were telling me that these professional killers had been flown into the country and had already been flown out. There was rumours, there was spin, and also there was the general, I suppose, conversations in regards to, oh my God, what is going to happen next? I mean, all anyone knew for sure was something was going to happen.
David Byrne was a very, very senior lieutenant. He was also from criminal royalty, from the Byrne family. His brother-in-law is Thomas Balmer Kavanagh. You know, his brother is Liam Byrne. And he's very much at the heart of the Kinnahan cartel. We knew from the beginning that this...
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