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By Root 1010 0

ammunition and explosives, as well as a variety of parts of weapons and replacement pieces they needed for guns already over there, were passed from person to person. A lot of the stuff had been bought from gun stores and warehouses all over the country and sent to different addresses in Boston. It took around an hour until all the stuff was loaded onto the ship. It would take longer to stash it all away on the ship, but once the transfer was completed and the empty vans left, our job providing security was done. So Jimmy and I called it a night and drove away.

I’d actually been at the Gloucester dock a few days earlier to see how the operation was going. That day, Joe Murray happened to introduce me to McIntyre, who also worked as a mechanic on the ship. Things had seemed to be moving along on schedule, but Joe, Jimmy, and I were not the only ones involved in this operation. Much of the money for the weapons had come from different sources all over the country, from a lot of other people supporting the cause. Jimmy’s and my role was to make sure all the weapons and ammunition got on the Valhalla without any problems.

Not that this was my first involvement with the IRA. Jimmy and I had shipped other guns in the past, but nothing as big as this load. During the past couple of years, we’d put the guns together and someone else had shipped them over. We’d also sent guns by other methods to Ireland, once inside a van with a secret hide built into it, other times in hides constructed in pieces of furniture. Jimmy and I had never done it to make money. We did it because we believed in the cause.

After the Valhalla had left Gloucester the day after everything had been loaded on it, we didn’t know about any trouble until we heard on the news that the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force had seized a ship off the coast of Ireland. Naturally, Jimmy and I were very upset and waited to hear exactly what had happened. It wasn’t until months later that we learned how it had actually gone down. Apparently, as expected, the Valhalla had met the Marita Ann in Irish waters, and the weapons and ammunition had been successfully transferred to the second ship. However, during the transfer, as the ships sat side by side, the Royal Air Force had been buzzing around, circling both ships. As the Marita Ann was heading back to port in Ireland, the Royal Navy had intercepted the ship. Obviously, they had been tipped off.

We also found out that the Marita Ann had been in dry dock for six or seven years on the southern coast of Ireland. It hadn’t been used during those years, but suddenly there had been a spurt of activity getting the ship ready to go back to sea. The IRA operates different cells to keep information separate, so not everybody knows what is going on. However, we were able to learn that Sean O’Callaghan, an Irish nationalist and an informant for the British against the IRA, had gotten involved in the cells. It was he who had given up the Marita Ann.

When the Valhalla finally came back, having sustained a lot of damage in a big storm—all its windows had been blown out—it docked in South Boston, not Gloucester. It got back to us that two fellows who had been on the boat had gone down to inspect it, and when they were coming off, they had been stopped by U.S. Customs Agents Defago and Grady. The FBI, through John Connolly, told Jimmy that someone who had been grabbed that day coming off the Valhalla was cooperating with the law enforcement. This person was giving us up, telling about his own involvement with the Valhalla, including Jimmy, Stevie, myself, and a few other people involved with that ship. A short time later, we also learned that John McIntyre, one of those two fellows stopped by the customs agents, had been grabbed for domestic violence. As a result, he had immediately started cooperating with the authorities.

All we knew at first, however, was that one of those two people who had originally been stopped by the customs agents, McIntyre or Anderson, the captain of the ship, was cooperating. It was quickly determined that