Gangsters' Wives (10 page)

By the end, it wasn’t hard to give up that lifestyle though. The only thing I miss is my lovely trips to New York. Now if I travel, I’ve got to sit in economy. Of course I’d rather go first class, but I’d never go back to the life I had. I did live the high life but in the end the lows overtake the highs. There are no mediums. You’re either up there, or down here.

That’s not to say I regret it. It was a real learning experience. If I hadn’t gone through all of that, I wouldn’t be who I am. In many ways it has made me a lot more mature. I listen to some of the kids at college talking about what drugs they had at the weekend, where they got them from. And I’m thinking: yep, I know that guy. I feel worlds apart from any of them.

It makes me laugh when I see films or read books glamorising the kind of life I used to have. Girls get sucked into this idea that it’s so exciting – shopping all day, buying stuff. But do you know what? I had no conversation by the end. I had all the flashy clothes in the world, but all I did was stay in and talk about work, or
EastEnders
.

I’ve got a good friend who’s dying to get her hands on a millionaire. She thinks it’s all about staying at the Savoy and wearing fantastic clothes. I say to her, ‘Listen, it’s not all it appears. You’re being bought, and it’s really not worth it.‘ But she won’t listen.

Walking around Marbella and Puerto Banus, I see women in the position I used to be in, and they’ve got these flash clothes and they’re driving around in these flash cars, and I think: been there, done that. Not impressed. I’m so glad I’m finished with all that.

It’s almost as if I’ve lived my life backwards. People usually wait all their lives to accumulate a few lovely things. I’ve got all the lovely things I want, and now I’m happy to go back to the basics. I’ve done so much more than most people do in their whole lives. In some ways I’m glad I did it all. I’ve done that now. I know what it’s like. Now I can get on with my life.

Now I just want to work for a few years and earn my own money. Before I started college, I used to love getting my wage slip at the end of the month, knowing it was money I’d worked for. In a weird way, I even love having the stress of having no money because I feel normal.

I love not being able to go out and eat all the time. I love going home and cooking a dinner and sharing a bottle of wine. I love the normality of it all. I love making sure everything is turned off so we don’t use too much electricity. I find it fun because I had so many years of not caring about all that, which actually just made me isolated and cut off from how most people were living their lives.

When my current boyfriend apologises because he can’t buy me a flash present for my birthday, I tell him not to be sorry. I’m glad he doesn’t have money because it means we’re both working towards something together. Because I’ve had the alternative and it got me nothing in the end – just a Gucci bag, some Manolo shoes and a lot of heartache.

I’d really like other women to know the truth about the real lives behind these men. You see films and television glamorising criminals and it’s so not glamorous. It’s the opposite. Yeah, there’s the bags and the shoes. But all the bags and shoes in the world can’t make up for living a life where you can’t have friends and you’re stuck together day in, day out with someone you’re sick of, and you lose sight of who you are.

I spent years being depressed, and floundering around trying to remember the person I’d once been. There I’d be in my seven-bedroomed house with my swimming pool and my gym and my dressing room full of clothes. But I’d lost who I was. Only now am I finally starting to rediscover myself again.

Should terrorists be classed as gangsters? Clearly that’s debatable. But Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, former skinhead and one-time loyalist commander, was linked to so many other criminal activities – drug dealing, extortion, as well as murder – that he warrants inclusion. Johnny Adair started out a loyalist hero. When he was jailed for sixteen years in 1994 for directing terrorism, he achieved cult status, but his bloodthirstiness and greed for power when he was released five years later under the Good Friday agreement, led to him becoming Enemy Number One among Protestants and Catholics alike. He was returned to jail in 2002 to serve the rest of his sentence, and fled to England and then Scotland for his own safety following his eventual release in 2005
.

Although Johnny was married to wife Gina, he had a very public eight-year affair with Jackie ‘Legs’ Robinson (so called because of her penchant for short skirts which showed off her long legs). Jackie fell in love with him almost against
her own better judgement, and stuck by him despite the killings, the excessive drug taking, and the stress of finding herself involved in a three-way tug-of-love that she was never going to win
.

Now fifty-two, Jackie still lives in Belfast, although the city is very different to how it was at the height of the Troubles, when Johnny ruled the roost. Nowadays, she tries to keep a low profile and distance herself from her disgraced former lover, although as she says, people have long memories there. Clearly still conflicted about her feelings for him, she talks almost in the same breath both of closing the door on the past and of the possibility of seeing him again one day. But she knows any reunion would take a lot of setting up as Johnny now lives in exile in Scotland, having made too many enemies ever to set foot back in Northern Ireland
.

I never even looked at Johnny Adair at first. I thought he was a little wee fat thing. I was embarrassed by him, in fact. We were in the Taughmonagh Social Club when I first set eyes on him and he said to my friend: ‘Tell her I want her.’ Well, I thought he was a laughing stock.

The truth was I’d only just moved back to Belfast from England when I first met Johnny Adair. I’d had a bit of a transformation physically since the breakdown of my marriage. Within the space of a few months I’d gone from looking drab to bloody good, and everyone was after me.

I’m quite shy and I didn’t respond to Johnny. Women usually threw themselves at his feet because of his status and power so he was intrigued by me, I think. The fact was, I didn’t know who he was, although I later heard he was a loyalist commander.

The girls he’d been with before would want to be looked after. I’m a strong-minded person. I can look after myself. I think he recognised that from the beginning and liked it.

After that first meeting I kept seeing him around and he kind of grew on me. A few weeks down the line, I went home and couldn’t get him out of my head. Earlier that night he’d rapped on my car window while I was in the club’s car park. It was the first time I’d really seen him up close and I felt I’d seen the person he really was beneath the façade. Normally, as I found out, he never let his guard down, but it was as if he had done that with me and I’d seen something no one else could see.

I had an instinct inside me about him. I started to look forward to seeing him and gradually we got together. One week he brought a drink to the table I was sitting at, set it down and then left again. The next week he came back and we started chatting.

He’s not the hard person people think. There’s a softer side to him that other people don’t see. That’s the side I was attracted to.

I started to fall in love with him. We started to go to parties together. One night, we’d gone to a party and we were sat on the stairs when this absolutely stunning girl came up to us. He’d been going out with her before and he dropped her for me. She bent over and whispered in his ear and I thought he’d go off with her, but instead he looked at me sheepishly, and then we started to kiss and it went from there. We quickly became as much of an item as he was with his girlfriend Gina, who was the mother of his four children.

Johnny says himself that I brought out something inside him – that softer side. He didn’t like the women that threw themselves at him. That’s not what he wanted. It was him I fell in love with, not the status of who he was.

Sometimes we’d be out and I’d go off to the bar or the toilet and when I came back there’d be one or two women fawning over him, but as soon as he saw me, he’d tell them where to go. I did have some power over him in that way.

It was always a complex three-way affaire because of Gina. The two of them had a very tempestuous relationship and each saw other people. I always accepted that Gina was part of the equation, that he wanted both of us, but I wouldn’t accept him seeing anyone else. It was always quite twisted. By the end of the time I was with him, I realised that he needed me so that he’d have something to bounce his relationship with Gina against.

I stood firm with Gina and she knew I wasn’t going to take anything from her. It may sound like a strange set-up, but during the Troubles, normal rules didn’t really apply. The men lived for the moment at that time. They didn’t know if they would be coming home the next day. In actual fact they were often more afraid of their wives than of the Republicans.

The wives used their power to get new furniture and they turned a blind eye to what their men were doing. Most women involved with these men just went along with it and stood by them no matter what. It was just how things were in Northern Ireland.

I had a vague idea what Johnny did at the beginning but it wasn’t until a serious attempt was made on his life by the IRA that it sank in what a big fish he was, but by that stage I was already too involved with him to back away.

It probably sounds naive but I never worried about me or my own kids or my home being a target, even though he and his friends were coming and going all the time and we had lots of parties at my house. I didn’t realise how dangerous it was for my kids and me. We’d make a joke of checking under the car before driving off.

And I believe he was in love with me. The first time I realised how he felt was when I walked into a bar and he was standing with a group of mates and he said, ‘See her, fellas. I fucking love her.’

There’s mental disability in Johnny’s family. He can’t grow up in any way. He’s every bit the clown, and plays to an audience. But when he was with me he was a different person. If we were out and he belittled people, I’d make him apologise. I’m not into all that. When he started to intimidate people, I’d make him say sorry. If he ordered someone to get a beating, I’d make him back off. I was the only one who could get him to apologise.

Where Johnny, when he was on show, was all showing off and bravado, I’m not like that. I’m caring and loving and in return I found a loving Johnny who needed to be needed and loved.

I know people find it difficult to understand how anyone could fall in love with someone like Johnny Adair, but he was so different with me. He was addicted to the attention he got from others. When we were out people would fall over themselves to shake his hand, and he got off on it, he was this bullying person; but when we were on our own he completely changed. When he came through my door, he was a different character. He had a very big heart. If he knew someone was in prison for Christmas, he’d make sure that person’s wife got money to buy the kids’ presents.

I never questioned where the money came from, but I noticed he began carrying big wads of cash. It was obvious to me that there were deals going on – extortion rackets, drug dealing – but we never discussed financial matters.

Because of the situation, I was able to shut off from what he did. Don’t forget, as far as any of us were concerned, there was a war going on. You’d see Republicans shooting at innocent people and you’d think it was justified at the time, what Johnny and the others were doing.

But that’s not to say I didn’t have a tussle of con-science. Just because I went out with a terrorist doesn’t mean I don’t have a conscience.

I was involved. I used to do things for the UDA like gun-running, but then we were fighting a war. After the Shankill bombing I was so angry I would have planted a bomb if I’d been asked. But because of my association with Johnny I was considered too highprofile at the time.

Johnny is a natural born leader. If it hadn’t been the Troubles, something else would have come along to make him into a leader. But at the end of the day, he started as a housebreaker. He was pulled in by the UDA and they threatened to break his legs if he didn’t join the youth wing. He started his own unit – C Company – and put the old company out and took charge.

I got on well with the members of C Company. I never judge anybody – I don’t feel I have the right to do that. They were fun-loving and we had a good time together. When you’re in the thick of it, you just can’t believe that the people you’re socialising with are malicious enough to pull a trigger or hack someone to death.

I think Johnny assumed that I knew about his antics, but I didn’t. I only knew what I was told second-hand. Most women in my position didn’t see their men as being responsible for the shootings, bombings and beatings we saw on the television news. You switch off. How else would you realistically cope?

There were a lot of drugs around at that time and I got into it by accident. My drink was spiked at a party. They gave me white powder which I thought would settle a bad stomach, but it was Ecstasy. It gave me a buzz and after that I did a lot of drugs.

It was very damaging to me at the time, but you know I don’t regret a thing. I don’t regret my past. It’s made me who I am.

Johnny really cared about my opinion. When we were both being interrogated in Castlereagh, in the wake of reprisals over the October 1993 Shankill Road bombings, he was more worried about what the police were telling me about him than anything else. He kept asking: ‘Did it make you think worse of me?’

Those five days of interrogation in Castlereagh were a nightmare but I kept denying I even knew Johnny and eventually they let me go. But my children were very affected by the whole thing and I felt incredibly guilty about what I’d put them through.

Johnny was arrested again in 1994 on charges of directing terrorism. At first he was held in the notorious Crum prison – until they staged a riot. One day I was feeling really down thinking about him when a friend rang to tell me to turn on the news, and there was Johnny jumping up and down on the roof of the Crum. I thought it was hilarious.