It started with an ITN weekend-reporting shift in London. And it ended with my appearance in a Hollywood movie starring Johnny Depp. In the intervening 25 years, the intriguing story of the IRA’s Marita Ann gunrunning ship took me to Boston on the trail of American mobster and Provo supporter Whitey Bulger, where I met the FBI and the family of one of Bulger’s murder victims as well as undercover cops and lawyers. I also ended up face to face with the IRA leader who led the Irish side of the gunrunning operation and the former Provisional who tipped off the authorities about the Marita Ann.
t was on my birthday in September 1984 that I flew from Belfast to London to work for a couple of days with ITN. But no sooner was I in the door than I was out again, flying back to Ireland with an ITN crew, this time on a private jet that was waiting at Heathrow.
The brief was to get pictures of a fishing boat called the Marita Ann that had been captured by the Irish navy, who had fired tracer bullets before boarding the ship 120 miles off the Kerry coast. We duly spotted the Marita Ann at sea, and award-winning cameraman Sebastian Rich filmed it from the air before we headed off to Cork to edit a report for ITN (after downing a few glasses of champagne to celebrate my birthday).
Later that evening we were at Cobh harbour to record the IRA gunrunners — including well-known Kerry republican Martin Ferris — being frogmarched in handcuffs off the ship. The others who were held were Irishmen Michael Browne, Gavin Mortimer and John McCarthy, and John Crawley, a US citizen and former US marine. The next morning we were given access to the terrifying armoury of weaponry being unloaded from the Marita Ann. It included 160 guns, dozens of rockets and grenades and over seventy thousand bullets — total value: $1m.
Next stop was Dublin for the appearance at the Special Criminal Court of the men who had been arrested. I’d been due back in Belfast the following morning for my day job with UTV but ITN asked me to go with their crew to shoot footage of the arms haul being driven to Garda headquarters from Co Cork.
On our way south we saw a convoy of security forces lorries heading north on the opposite side of a dual carriageway but by the time we were able to turn around we couldn’t see any sign of it. We later discovered that, in an only-in-Ireland moment, the drivers had stopped off for a cup of tea at the Irish Army’s Curragh base — which explained why we’d lost them. When the lorries finally arrived at the Garda Síochána’s headquarters at Phoenix Park in Dublin, we were waiting to film what I imagined was the final part of the Marita Ann jigsaw for me.
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Arms recovered from gun-running ship the Marita Ann
But how wrong I was. Sixteen years later, in 2000, UTV sent me to Boston to make a documentary about the discovery in a shallow grave of the body of murdered Irish-American John McIntyre, who had skippered the Valhalla, the trawler that had taken the arms from Massachusetts and rendezvoused with the Marita Ann for a handover in the Atlantic. It transpired that Whitey Bulger, an infamously fanatical and vicious gangster who sang Irish rebel songs in the IRA bars of Boston, had financed the shipment and, like the Provos in Ireland, was furious when the Marita Ann was intercepted. He wanted to unmask the tout.
Bulger, the ruthless leader of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang, quickly convinced himself that McIntyre was the informer, and his suspicions were reinforced after the British and Irish authorities falsely briefed journalists in Ireland that the information had come from America. The fake steer was to protect the real source of the tip-off — IRA leader and British intelligence agent Sean O’Callaghan.
McIntyre paid with his life, with Bulger — who had ordered his murder — helping his men to do his vile dirty work after their victim had been lured to a house in Boston. Bulger and his henchmen at first tried to strangle McIntyre with rope but they couldn’t finish him off and he begged for a bullet in the head. McIntyre was then shot and Bulger’s gang pulled out his teeth in a bid to make any positive identification of his body almost impossible. But it was established he was indeed John McIntyre.
In 2000, in a neat house in Quincy, just outside Boston, I met McIntyre’s mother Emily and brother Chris. Over tea and fruitcake they cursed Bulger, who had been on the run for years with his partner Catherine Greig. At another meeting during the same trip, the director of the FBI in Boston, Barry Mawn, told me he had no doubt about the mobster’s involvement in the McIntyre slaying. He showed me an FBI chart on the wall that revealed Bulger was second only to Osama Bin Laden on their “most wanted” list.
The next part of my Marita Ann voyage took me to England to interview double agent Sean O’Callaghan for my documentary. In a swish hotel in London, O’Callaghan readily admitted that he gave his handlers in British intelligence chapter and verse about the Marita Ann, which had been due to bring its deadly cargo into Co Kerry, where IRA men were waiting in cars to transport the guns to arms dumps. The British told the Irish authorities and the operation to seize it swung into gear. O’Callaghan said he had been with Martin Ferris right up until the moment he boarded the trawler in Fenit, Co Kerry. He added that McIntyre had nothing to do with the leaking of the information. Over dinner, I told O’Callaghan that McIntyre’s family despised the source of the Marita Ann tip-off just as much as they hated Bulger. He wasn’t surprised, and he wasn’t particularly remorseful.
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Johnny Depp as gangster Whitey Bulger in the movie Black Mass (2015)
A few years later, a bizarre twist of fate found me talking about O’Callaghan with Martin Ferris. Wearing my other hat as an actor, I’d been touring Ireland with a Martin Lynch play, The History of the Troubles (Accordin’ to my Da), which was a black comedy about the impact of the Troubles on one man, played by me, and supported by a series of characters created by Conor Grimes and Alan McKee, who were also involved in the writing of the piece.
We were staging the play in Tralee’s Siamsa Tíre theatre for nearly a week, and one night after the show an Australian lady called Máire and her friends joined us in the bar to discuss the production. Máire invited us to come for drinks after the play the next night at the bar outside Tralee that she ran with her husband, Martin. We never turned our backs on a party and, within minutes of receiving a warm welcome from the locals in the pub, I found myself sitting next to Máire’s husband and instantly recognised him as Martin Ferris, who by that stage had become a Sinn Féin deputy in the Dáil.
I told him I had “met” him once before and went on to explain that in the other half of my double-life I was a journalist who had reported on his “departure” from the Marita Ann 26 years earlier. We talked at length about everything under the political sun but if I was expecting an inside track on the Marita Ann or O’Callaghan I was sorely disappointed.
In 2011, Whitey Bulger and Catherine Greig were arrested in Santa Monica, and Bulger was later given a series of life sentences for 11 murders, including the McIntyre killing.
But a different type of sentence was waiting for Bulger. In 2018, the 89-year-old Mob boss was found dead in his cell in a West Virginia jail after some of his many enemies finally caught up with him and beat him to a pulp. In a gruesome echo of the McIntyre murder, Bulger was left unrecognisable by his assailants.
Three years earlier, a Hollywood film about Bulger called Black Mass had been released. The monster was superbly played by Johnny Depp, who managed to portray his evil savagery with ease. In one scene, in which the practicalities of the gunrunning plot were discussed, Bulger is seen meeting Belfast IRA leader Joe Cahill in a private room in a Boston bar called Triple O’s. The two conspirators break off their negotiations to watch a news report on the television about violent clashes between the security forces and republicans in Derry after an IRA funeral.
By a bizarre coincidence, the reporter’s voice they hear in the ITN report is mine.
‘Reporting the Troubles 2’, compiled by Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, is published by Blackstaff Press
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The Mob, the IRA, Johnny Depp, the double agent and me…
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