The Twist Prologue

In the coming weeks and months I will be publishing 24 short articles that I wrote following my conversations with the man who was also my literary editor and publisher who became caught up with the investigation into, what was then, the biggest bank robbery ever to have taken place in Ireland or Britain. The conversations were long and extensive therefore it has been necessary for me to edit the contents of our talks while doing my best to lay out the facts as they were given to me.

The Twist Article 1

The raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast in December 2004 made headlines around the world because of its sheer audacity and the amount of money stolen (more than £26.5 million). Having an interest in what happens in the north of Ireland I followed the story more avidly than most but nothing was to prepare me for the news that broke in the following February when Irish police who were investigating the heist raided a number of houses in Cork in the Republic of Ireland, one of them belonging to my friend, literary collaborator and publisher of four of my books Don Blaney. During the raid on his house 220 rounds for an AK47 were discovered.

I have known Don since I was 14 years old, which is, scarily, nearing half a century. Don’s politics are of the left and when he was a young man he joined the Labour Party in Wolverhampton and he also became a member of Amnesty International. Back then he was an activist and an admirer of the philosophy of Saul Alinsky’s 13 rules for radicals, an unpaid worker with a homeless shelter, a fund-raiser for the Voluntary Service Overseas (for which his brother and his sister-in-law worked for three years in Bhutan) and an anti-racism campaigner who helped set up a youth charity that worked in some of the most deprived areas in the city.

 When a riot was about to ensue following the death of a young black man at the hands of police officers in a city centre store, Don travelled to prevent several young men who attended his group from getting involved in the violence that was to follow. His activities did not go unnoticed by either the local press (who took a photo of him remonstrating with a group of youths); and members of the far-right who subsequently threatened his life at least twice, one of which used a photocopy of that very photo which was decorated with Nazi swastikas and pushed through his letterbox. But it would be a mistake to categorize Don as a stereotypical do-gooder. The main reason he could step in front of a group of very angry young black guys without getting hurt was because during his time as a youth worker he had shown several of them he was a lot better puncher than they were. 

Like the rest of us, Don has his faults and as a young man there was an uncompromising, sometimes harsh, side to him, which probably comes from his moving to the roughest estate in the town when he was five years old and the Blaney family immediately becoming the sole ethnic minority family in the street for many years. His father was from County Down in the north and his mother from County Cork in the south of Ireland and in the 1960s and 70s parts of Wolverhampton could be a hostile place if you were black, brown or Irish.