Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [195]
Lenny Murphy was released from prison on 16 July 1982. There was a party for him that night in the Rumsford Street Loyalist Club. Shortly before midnight a bedraggled vagrant, Alexander Maxwell, drifted in with a view to cadging drinks before hitting his slumbers in a Salvation Army hostel. When Murphy ordered him out, Maxwell made the mistake of giving him too much ‘lip’. Murphy took him outside and proceeded to punch and kick him. Maxwell fell unconscious to the ground. Murphy then went inside to fetch some car keys and drove a car back and forth over the vagrant until the man was dead. Within six weeks of his release, Murphy had formed a new gang and was living well from the proceeds of extortion. He drove a smart yellow Rover car. So as to avoid paying the agreed price for this vehicle, he first tried to poison the former owner, and then shot him eight times in a drive-by motorbike shooting. Inevitably, the actions of this maniac eventually caught up with him. He tried to muscle in on a racket related to gambling machines in bars and clubs, while his counter-kidnapping and killing of a Catholic hostage after the PIRA had abducted a UDR soldier aggravated his own side. He seems to have crossed an ex-boxer called Jim Craig, when he tried to get into the same line of work extorting money from construction sites. Craig was UDA commander in west Belfast. While in the Maze he had explained to a PIRA leader he sat with on the Camp Council his idea of disciplining his own men: ‘I’ve got this big fucking hammer and I’ve told them that if anybody gives me trouble, I’ll break their fucking fingers.’ It seems that Craig had also come to an arrangement when in jail with senior members of PIRA as to relative boundaries for their respective extortion rackets, and had quite possibly reached a agreement to murder each other’s enemies like the strangers on a train in the Hitchcock movie.
On the evening of 16 November 1982, Lenny Murphy parked his Rover at the rear of his girlfriend’s home on a Protestant estate. His wife and children had long ago left him. He had not noticed a blue van in his rear mirrors, nor that it had backed up so as to face his car. The back doors opened as Murphy prepared to get out; he was hit by twenty-six bullets to the head and body, fired by two men in overalls who were spirited away in stolen cars. At Murphy’s funeral, six masked UVF gunmen fired a salvo over his coffin which was draped with an orange and purple flag. A piper played ‘Abide with Me’ as the cortège progressed along the Shankill Road. Murphy had just turned thirty; his mother averred that ‘Lenny would not hurt a fly.’ His friend ‘Basher’ Bates, who had got God in prison, was shot dead in 1997, in a UDA revenge killing for Bates’s murder twenty years before of dark-complexioned James ‘Nigger’ Moorehead in the lavatory of a Belfast bar. The vengeful memories were like those in a medieval Icelandic saga. Jim Craig was shot dead by the UFF in a bar in 1988 after his dealings with the PIRA came to their attention.27
III DELIVERING CHAOS
If all Irish terrorists were psychopathic criminals like Murphy, there would be no demonstrable ebb and flow to the violence, or shifts in how it was used vis-a-vis other forms of political activity. In fact, many people joined terrorist organisations because they had direct personal experience of injustice or were witnesses to it. Eamon Collins came from a farming family in Crossmaglen, a republican stronghold on the North-South border. His politically pragmatic father raised and traded cattle and bloodstock. His mother was the pious Catholic, responsible for planting in Collins’s heart the tear-jerking myths of Irish republican history, and a tension between rebel violence and Christian turning of the other cheek. He had low-level contacts with the IRA, took part in civil rights riots, sold republican papers, and, after odd jobs in the