As Ted Cunningham tells it, it all began almost 15 years ago. He got a phone call to say there was a red van in the car park of Farran Church across the road from his home. Cunningham was told to go the van and collect several bags from the back of it. The bags were heavy because they were filled with bundle upon bundle of sterling notes. 

Did you ask the driver his name? 

“I didn’t get talking to him. I just went to the van and said ‘I am Ted.’ He jumped out and gave me two holdalls.” 

Did the van driver count the money with you or ask for a receipt? 

“They had counted it already. We counted it when we got it.” 

So, the driver just gave you the money and left? 

“Yes. There were five or six holdalls delivered over a period of time.” 

Cunningham said he expected £5 million in sterling notes to be delivered to him in this unorthodox fashion. The money he said was from a group of Bulgarian businessmen who wanted to invest in Ireland. Cunningham had only received about £3 million when the Gardai came knocking. 

They didn’t buy his Bulgarian story. 

Instead, they accused Cunningham of being at the heart of one of the the largest bank robberies in European history. 

From obscurity, the Cork businessman was about to become globally famous. 

At times strange, at times curious, this is his story.  

*****

Ted Cunningham is sitting in the bright glass conservatory of his home in Farran in west Cork. The 71-year-old has lived in the village, twelve miles from Cork city, since 1970. His home is centered around the kitchen with a long hallway trailing off with bedrooms either side. It is homely and lived in. An opera gold disc on the wall, reflecting Cunningham’s passion for singing, adds a touch of glamour. Through the window, you can see the local church, while on the other side of his home is the local school. 

It is a nice but ordinary home for a man accused of being a criminal money laundering mastermind who helped the IRA hide £26 million stolen after a spectacular raid on the Northern Bank in Belfast.

At the end of the hall off the kitchen is a study filled with Irish history books and biographies. It is in this room where Cunningham works and corresponds tirelessly. He is in touch via email with all sorts of people from Dean Strang, the American lawyer behind Netflix series Making a Murderer, who is considering making a movie about Cunningham, to families up and down the country forming part of a campaign group called Justice for All, who feel they have been mistreated by the Irish criminal justice system. 

About 18 months ago, Cunningham asked me to meet him for a coffee in the Ashling Hotel near Heuston Station in Dublin. He told me he had read an article I had written about the late Jim Mansfield Sr, the owner of the Citywest hotel group. 

After his death, Mansfield Sr had been accused in the newspapers of laundering money for the IRA and international drug dealers. 

My article had looked at the origins of Mansfield Sr’s wealth, how he had sold machinery and equipment post the Falklands War. 

The family supplied photographs of Mansfield Sr in the Falklands with his brother Joe. 

Aerial photographs showed fields of equipment and machinery that their father acquired in bulk at a cut-price £10 million before selling it all on for £100 million. This was what the Mansfield family said was the real source of Jim Mansfield’s wealth – and not the rumours, which they said were completely untrue. 

Cunningham related to the Mansfield article, he said, because he claimed he too had been wrongfully accused of being a criminal mastermind who had laundered millions for the IRA. 

I was sceptical when Cunningham first approached me. I had read the press cuttings and told Cunningham that he had pleaded guilty, so what was there to complain about? 

“It wasn’t that simple,” Cunningham countered. 

He said while his first conviction had been very high profile, he had later challenged how the case was taken against him and ultimately he had only pleaded guilty to much lesser offences in order to get out of prison. Cunningham said he felt he had to plead guilty, as his health was declining in prison, and he could not risk going back inside. 

“The money I had wasn’t from the Northern Bank,” Cunningham added. “I only pled guilty to being reckless.”

The sums involved in his guilty pleas were, he said, tiny – just £100,400 and £175,360, versus the £26 million that was stolen and never recovered.

“Where did the money go, Tom? I never had it; I can tell you that much.”

For over a year, Cunningham has been working with the Belfast law firm KRW Law to clear his name. KRW Law has developed an expertise taking on difficult cases and has represented individuals and families on both sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Cunningham told me he had appointed KRW Law to try and force the state to acknowledge his claim that none of the money taken from him was from the Northern Bank.

I asked him where was it from, then?

“Well, that’s a long story…” he replied. “Look, if I was a criminal mastermind why don’t I have any of the millions that were never recovered today?” Cunningham asks. “If I was in an IRA gang why didn’t they look after me and my family when I went to prison?” he continued. “Why was I the only one who was ever convicted?”

These questions, Cunningham said, had obsessed him since he was first arrested in 2005.

In the years following his arrest, I reported, on and off, about the various legal actions Cunningham had going against the state.

At times, he made progress. Often, he lost. Gradually, his story became more and more interesting.

When we met, I agreed to listen with an open mind.

“That’s all I am asking, Tom,” Cunningham said. I said, ok, let’s meet in Cork and go through things from the beginning.

*****

No matter what happened, Cunningham has kept going, kept protesting his innocence. Until now, he has never told the full story from his point of view. His account raises many questions.

About fifty yards away from where we are speaking is Cunningham’s first home. It was in this first home that the Gardai discovered millions of pounds sterling in a lock-up in the cellar when they raided the building at ten minutes to midnight on February 17, 2005. His story starts there.

*****

Origins

Ted Cunningham was born in 1948 into a family of tailors who lived in Macroom, Co Cork. His grandfather, Patrick ‘Padna’ Cunningham, was a judge in the Republican courts during the War of Independence. Charles Stewart Parnell, the political leader and land reform agitator, was an occasional guest at the Cunningham family home. Cunningham’s father, Timothy, fought in Ireland’s bloody War of Independence.

“My dad would have done two hunger strikes on the Republican side going back. He was interned in Cork prison and also above in the Curragh (Co Kildare). He would have been in the old IRA going back in the 1920s.”

Cunningham’s aunt Molly Cunningham was President of Cumman na mBan in Macroom from 1916 to 1921 and she along with her sisters Nora and Eileen were involved in the fight for independence along with his uncles Jack, Paddy and Joe.

Cunningham is a history buff and, as a result, enjoyed attending republican commemorations and events marking the events of the 1920s.

Born Timothy, Cunningham became known as Ted, to distinguish him growing up from his father.

As he recounts his family history, Cunningham has retreated to the study of his home. It is made up of a work desk and bookshelves primarily about Irish history. “I am proud of who I was and where I came from,” Cunningham said.

He said his father never spoke of the violence of the 1920s that ravaged Ireland, but that his aunts would. Cunningham grew up the youngest in a family of three boys and two girls. On Friday nights there would be sessions in his family home.

“I grew up listening to history. I was indoctrinated into what happened when the British were here and during the civil war,” he said. He had a happy and normal childhood growing up in 1950s Ireland, he said.

Cunningham’s first job was as an apprentice fitter-welder with a Dutch ship-building company in Cobh, one of the world’s finest natural harbours. He was sixteen and the company he worked for allowed him to study engineering classes at night. This led to a maintenance job in 1975 with Schering-Plough in Cork.

He then got a job as an account manager with a project engineering firm.

This led to Cunningham getting experience in the flour milling and bakery trade work with companies like Rank Hovis and Boland’s Bakery, which was part of Irish Biscuits.

“I decided then to start my own engineering business called MID Engineering,” Cunningham said.

The business specialised in working with bakers. Eventually, he employed 40 people and was making a good living. “I was going to the UK and buying up redundant bakeries in the UK and bringing them in and installing them here,” Cunningham said.

Neville Brothers Bakery started to provide Dunnes Stores with own-brand cheap bread, leading to a lot of bakeries shutting down as they were wiped out on price.

Cunningham snapped up the glut of bakery equipment that suddenly became available in towns up and down Ireland. He sold them around the world via trade magazines. “I sold bakeries to New Zealand, Australia, India, Afghanistan… there was even one that went to St Lucia,” Cunningham said. He crisscrossed the world installing bakeries. “I went to Afghanistan in 1986 or 1987,” Cunningham said. It was the middle of the Soviet-Aghan war but Cunningham said he only visited its capital Kabul, which was relatively safe.

I ask Cunningham for more detail on Kabul, but he moves the conversation on, to business closer to home.

His engineering firm, he said, also worked with Greencore, then primarily a sugar company. This brought him into contact with D4-based businessmen of the 1980s. Some of the geographies Cunningham said he was doing business in were exotic. Shipping equipment long distances, as he said he did, and sending money back and forth to such locations must have involved dealing with all sorts of people.

In the 1990s, however, Cunningham’s engineering firm began to run out of work.

The great bakery industry consolidation was over. There was less work going around. Ted Cunningham was about to embark on a second career: a campaigner against the banks.

Fighting the banks

Ted Cunningham’s battle with the banks was triggered by personal experience. He owed AIB about £12,000 from his faltering engineering firm. He owned a small business park which he planned to sell and repay AIB, but this would take time and he was already in default. “They (AIB) sent someone out to my house across the road and they forced the door in there,” Cunningham said. Cunningham’s daughter was the only person in the house and she was upset by the experience, he said. Cunningham felt he was being bullied.  He decided to take a counterclaim against the bank for wrongfully entering his home.

No solicitor would act for him, so he ended up representing himself. Acting for AIB was Barry Galvin & Sons, a respected Cork law firm, which was founded in 1889. One of the firm’s partners was Barry Galvin who was at that time state solicitor for Cork.

From 1996 until 2003, Galvin was legal officer of the Criminal Assets Bureau which was set up after the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin. Later, he would be among the team that investigated Chesterton and Cunningham himself. There is nothing unusual in this; Irish business circles are small.

Cunningham became a thorn in AIB’s side. He started to show up along with other disgruntled borrowers at the bank’s annual general meeting. He and others would grill the bank’s then chairman Peter Sutherland, a former attorney general, about their alleged mistreatment by the bank. “We would have a couple of filibusters and would hold up the AGM,” Cunningham recalled. At one point, Cunningham threatened to subpoena Sutherland – who had left AIB in 1997 to concentrate on being chairman of oil giant British Petroleum – to give evidence in his litigation against the bank.

“When I learned of all the injustice being done to so many people, I got engrossed in it,” Cunningham recalled. “One thing led to another thing.”

The case, however, was settled before it went to trial. “I got £120,000 or something,” Cunningham said. “I did owe them money but it was the way they went about collecting it. That was wrong.” AIB admitted no wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

The payment Cunningham says he received seems large, but over 20 years on, it is impossible to verify.

From battling AIB personally, Cunningham had become involved in a group called the Irish Farm Family Therapy Group.

Almost forgotten now, the Irish Farm Family Therapy Group was very active in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “When I learned of all the injustice being done to so many people, I got engrossed in it,” Cunningham recalled. “One thing led to another thing.”

Cunningham was involved in picketing and protesting alleged banking misdeeds. In 1994, Cork publican Con Murphy went on hunger strike when he was jailed for contempt of court in relation to his banking debts. Others followed and eventually the Bishop of Cork Michael Murphy intervened to broker settlements between the hunger strikers and the banks.

Through these protests, Cunningham got to know the media. He was one of a number of protestors asked onto the Late Late Show in 1995 by its then presenter Gay Byrne.

Through these protests, Cunningham also got to know a rising young journalist called Veronica Guerin, who was then with the now-defunct Sunday Tribune. The protests were serious stuff. In the early 1990s one man felt compelled to set himself on fire in protest at attempts by the banks to take his home. Cunningham says he helped sneak Guerin into Cork University Hospital to interview this man and take photographs for The Sunday Tribune. “Over time we became friends,” he said.

Cunningham also saw a gap in the market in what was going on. Banks were conservative and inflexible. Someone who could lend quickly, even at a high-interest rate, would be in demand.

“I was still nibbling away in the bakery business, but I was barely surviving,” he explained. “The experience that I had with businesspeople and farmers who couldn’t pay the banks gave me an idea. I started a company as a financial broker and that led to more.”

Moving into finance

Ted Cunningham got involved in financial services in 1990 as a broker for Ron Weisz, an American who ran a business that offered high-interest, short-term loans to people with poor credit ratings. He had come to Ireland in 1984 and started winning business by lending to people who the traditional established banks wouldn’t touch. The Wise Mortgage Company offered loans with an annual interest rate of up to 19 per cent. It was subprime lending before the term was coined. Farmers and small business people turned to Weisz at a time when banks were both conservative and slow to lend. 

Cunningham describes the type of loans he began brokering for Weisz as “bridging finance” designed to get people over short-term cash shortages. Gregarious and friendly Cunningham ended up loaning out a couple of million at a time in the Munster region for Weisz.

He could see how much the American was making back in Dublin off his salesmanship and decided to try and figure out how to set up on his own.

Cunningham realised that there was a loophole that would let him obtain a banking licence if a minimum of 51 per cent of all loans were for residential mortgages.

“We insisted that people who came to us had assets, but we had to see that there was a way out for them because we didn’t want to be repossessing homes,” Cunningham said.

“With the bit of money I had, I registered Chesterton Finance Ltd. This was around 1993 or 1994,” Cunningham said.

He picked the name Chesterton after researching banks in England that had names that sounded posh.

He asked his neighbour, Irene Johnstone, to become a co-director of the fledgling business. Cunningham raised seed capital to lend from various investors and soon was up and trading. After that, he says he was granted a banking licence by the financial regulator. He was one of the last to get such a banking licence, he says, as soon afterwards the rules were tightened up. (After Chesterton went into liquidation, there was some dispute around what was the regulatory status of Chesterton and what activities were within its remit.)

In any event, Chesterton was taking in money and lending it out at higher interest rates than traditional banks.

“We were very professional in the way we lent money,” Cunningham said. “We were very expensive. We were charging 2 per cent – a month.”

This type of interest could quickly add up to large sums if left outstanding for too long. “We insisted that people who came to us had assets, but we had to see that there was a way out for them because we didn’t want to be repossessing homes,” Cunningham said.

He maintains that from 1995 to 2012, Chesterton had only two bad debts after building up a loan book of about €9 million. (A source with knowledge of Chesterton’s finances said its loan book was certainly €7 million and could possibly have been more. Paperwork after the business was liquidated was not always available.)

“We were very particular about who we gave money to,” Cunningham said. With money coming in, Cunningham began to dabble in property himself.

Cunningham bought a nursing home and nine-hole golf course in the village of Rahan, Co Offaly. He acquired some sites in county Clare. At the same time, Cunningham bought a sand and gravel pit in Shinrone, Co Offaly with three business partners: David O’Sullivan, an engineering contractor from Passage West, Co Cork; Gerard Murphy, an accountant from Middleton; and Irene Johnstone, his business partner in Chesterton.

“Everything was lucrative, and we were doing very well,” Cunningham said.

He was even introduced to Peter O’Toole, the actor best known for starring in Lawrence of Arabia. O’Toole had a holiday home in Clifden. Cunningham and the famously hard-drinking actor hit it off. They began to plot making a movie about Wolfe Tone along with Welsh actor and filmmaker Kenneth Griffith. Griffith was steeped in Irish history after making documentaries in the 1970s about veterans of the 1916 Easter Rising, as well Michael Collins.

The documentaries – while celebrated artistically – were not popular among the establishment. It was a time when IRA activity was escalating in the North and documentaries that were sympathetic to the rebels of 1916 were not welcome.

Cunningham set up a company called Wolfe Tone Holdings in 2004 to raise finance for a movie on Wolfe Tone. “We had a script and all that,” Cunningham recalled.

I asked if he still had it? “I’ll try and dig it out. But it never went anywhere after the raid!”

A few days later Cunningham sent me a 14-page script outline, dated June 2 2004, called The Irish Terrorist: The Life of Wolfe Tone.

The script treatment, while mainly focused on historic incident, is intended for a modern audience.

It concludes: “Oh! And Mr Blair – at this time the British Prime Minister – please take your 13 and a half thousand British soldiers and their guns, at long last, out of Ireland – and never, ever come back – except on holidays, etcetera.”

The Veronica Guerin connection

Ted Cunningham pauses from telling me his life story to show me a picture of a smiling younger version of himself with the late investigative journalist Veronica Guerin. Cunningham is already bald in the picture, but he is strongly built. He smiles alongside Guerin who is jokingly pointing at him. Cunningham says the photograph was taken at an event in Blackrock Castle in Cork. The two, he says, got to know each other after Guerin starting reporting about Cunningham’s battles against the banks. He would tip her off about stories and introduce her to people facing eviction or the loss of their businesses.

By this stage, Cunningham was modestly wealthy from his lending business. In 1993, he says Guerin drove down to Cork to ask him for money.

“That was the type of person she was. It wasn’t the glory of seeing her name in the paper, it was just if there’s wrong you know… she wanted to expose it.”

She was working with The Sunday Tribune at the time and had been tipped off that Bishop Eamonn Casey was hiding out in Ecuador, where he had retreated to after it emerged he had fathered a son with Annie Murphy.

Guerin, according to Cunningham, wanted to fly out immediately without waiting for her newspaper to stump up the money to get there. She asked him for a loan to tide her over.

“I gave her the money. She gave me the money back – don’t get me wrong – once she got it back later,” Cunningham said. “I remember she gave me a call when she got back with the scoop [an interview with Casey] and she said your investment has grown!

“That was the type of person she was. It wasn’t the glory of seeing her name in the paper it was just if there’s wrong you know… she wanted to expose it.”

“She mixed with different people and the information she was gathering was upsetting the people she was exposing.”

After Cunningham told me this story, I discussed it with Vincent Browne, who was Guerin’s editor in The Sunday Tribune. He says he isn’t sure when The Tribune paid for one of the trips Guerin made to see Casey, but said it was possible his paper had only paid for it after the event.

He couldn’t confirm Cunningham’s recollection, but equally, nor could he challenge it.  I ask several other journalists who worked with Guerin whether they ever recalled her mentioning Cunningham as a source. They said she hadn’t, but this is not surprising as she was not a journalist who discussed her sources with others.

Was Cunningham, as Guerin herself did to get stories, also mixing with people who might have been on the wrong side of the law for business reasons? “No. No. No. I was never involved with any criminality. My time was taken up so much with people. You had no idea the people who would drive from Cork, from all over the country looking for help from me.”

Post the Casey exclusive interview, Guerin’s focus became more and more focused on Ireland’s criminal underworld, which was booming and creating a new breed of ruthless millionaire gangsters.

“Do you remember that time Veronica was shot in the leg?” Cunningham said. “I used to meet her maybe once a fortnight around that time.”

On the night of January 30, 1995, Veronica Guerin had been shot in the leg by a masked gunman in what was seen at the time as an attempt by criminal gangs to intimidate her into no longer reporting on them.

After she was shot, Guerin rang Cunningham to tell him she was in hospital recovering. “I immediately jumped into the car and went to her, but of course I wasn’t allowed in, so it was the next day when I saw her,” Cunningham recalled.

A couple of weeks later he says they arranged to meet in the Brazen Head pub on Lower Bridge Street in the Liberties, Dublin 8. 

“I had a fucking ferocious row with her over what she was doing,” Cunningham said. “I told her she was going to be shot and killed. She used to brief me on an awful lot of the stuff she was doing.”

Guerin, a brave and determined journalist, ignored him, he said. Despite the row, Cunningham said they remained friends.

After that, he said one day Guerin met him in Dublin driving a sports car.

“She says I have a shed of stuff in the back of the car, will you mind them for me?” Cunningham said. He said Guerin knew that he had a safe in his office in Ballincollig, Cork. She asked him to put her files there for safekeeping.

“There was seven files. I brought them down to Cork and I put them in a locked filing cabinet in my office.”

On June 26, 1996, Guerin was fatally shot by an assassin hired by a drug dealer while stopped at a traffic light. “The next thing she was murdered, and I still had the files,” Cunningham said.

“I thought, what will I do with the files, and then just time drifted and the files were still there. I never moved them,” he said.

Cunningham said he did not think to give the files either to Guerin’s family or to the Gardai investigating her murder. “At the time she had told me there was a lot of sensitive information in relation to senior members of the Gardai in the files,” Cunningham said. 

“I remember telling her in Dublin it isn’t the criminals that are going to kill you, it is the people in authority. To me, it was as clear as day that the information she had gathered in relation to senior gardai – they weren’t going to let her publish this,” Cunningham said.

While there are conspiracy theories on the outer fringes of the internet about Guerin’s death, in reality there’s no evidence to support any conclusion other than she was killed by criminals.

Cunningham says he did not read Guerin’s files. It seems incredible that Cunningham did not think to give the files to the Gardai or the Guerin family once she was murdered – or at the very least take a peek at them to satisfy his own curiosity. But he said he didn’t.

Cunningham does not say he believes the rumours, but merely says he was worried at the time about the sensitivity of some of the stories she was investigating.    

The Guerin files, Cunninhgam said, were later taken from him by the Gardai after his office was raided as part of the Northern Bank investigation.

He said he had sought the return of all of his business files but had got almost nothing back in the intervening decade, including these files.

Listening to Cunningham, it raises many questions.

Why did Guerin give Cunningham files?

Why, if she had files that were so important, would she have entrusted them to him rather than, for example, solicitors?

Could Cunningham be making the story up?

It is impossible at this remove to know.

Cunningham says he did not read Guerin’s files. It seems incredible that Cunningham did not think to give the files to the Gardai or the Guerin family once she was murdered – or at the very least take a peek at them to satisfy his own curiosity. But he said he didn’t.

Like so much else in Cunningham’s story, it is an intriguing strand that doesn’t fully make sense.

Black economy

Before the introduction of the euro, the black and cash economy in Ireland was enormous; the state would periodically introduce amnesties to encourage people and businesses with cash to disclose their hidden fortunes. Between 1988 and 2001 the Revenue Commissioners brought in £1 billion under various special schemes and amnesties.

The 1988 tax amnesty brought in by Charles Haughey’s government was the biggest, bringing in £500 million.

The 1993 tax amnesty, brought in by the Reynolds Fianna Fáil-Labour coalition, brought in £260 million. People were able to settle outstanding taxes, which could stretch back decades, without interest or penalties. In 1998, the Public Accounts Committee was asked to investigate what was happening in Ireland’s major banks in relation to their Deposit Interest Retention Tax liabilities. This ultimately led to a massive investigation by the Revenue Commissioners, which collected almost €860 million in taxes in the wake of the scandal, with €225 million coming from banks and €634 million from depositors.

AIB, one of the banks at the centre of the scandal, was listed on the stock exchange and considered blue-chip.

This was the context for Irish banking twenty years ago, when Chesterton was in business.

*****

When Ireland introduced the euro in January 2002, another issue arose. Many people and businesses dealt in cash punts, and now they needed to change this money into euros. In some cases, people had large sums in cash built up over many years.

Getting swathes of the economy to move punts into euro was a challenge for the state, and an opportunity for various businesses including Chesterton.

“When the change over from the punt to the euro came in, we took in millions,” Cunningham recalled. “People would have had money buried. Farmers. Publicans. Jewellers. You name it.”

And they trusted you to collect the money and sort out their issues with the Revenue? “Yes. But I never took a penny illegally. You came to me – Tom Lyons – and you had two hundred grand stashed for the last ten years. I needed your PRSI number and tax clearance to put you on the books. If you couldn’t give that, then what I would say to you is that I’ll go to the Revenue and do a settlement for you.”

And you would store their money for safekeeping in the meantime? “Yes, that is what I was doing.”

“There was one particular family that had £4.8 million stashed in shoe boxes for over 30 years,” Cunningham recalled.

Who were they? “They were a business family. I got two counting machines from a man I knew in Bank of Ireland and I went up to this family’s home.”

Cunningham arrived at 7am in the morning with two others and spent the entire day counting cash. “It was all in shoe boxes. They would have, say, one box marked ‘1970’ and it would contain £5,000 in five pound notes and so on,” he recalled. The money was everywhere, packed inside an old safe and hidden under various beds.

“I put all of that into the boot of my car and drove to Cork,” Cunningham said. He said one of Ireland’s biggest banks opened its doors extra early to take in all the cash. Cunningham said once he had the cash somewhere safe, he then negotiated a settlement between the business family and the Revenue.

“These people came to me through their accountants or solicitors. These were coming through official people.”

Was Cunningham not worried that he could get caught up in something? “I was naive a bit that I had four and a half million in the boot of my car,” he admitted.

I ask Cunningham about reports that the safe was hidden when his home was raided? Cunningham replies that his son was doing renovations in the house and as a result the lock-up was hidden behind large sheets of plywood.

Was it not also dangerous? “In one sense I was stupid to be up and down the road like that, but having said that, everyone had cash. There were two brothers who were farmers and they had £800,000 in punts in a milk churn above inside in the milking parlour in the Midlands.”

This sounds like a lot of money to fit in a milk churn? “There was a few of them.”

“I went up and met them. I told them what I could do. They were in their 70s and ultimately weren’t interested. I would say that money is probably still there.”

“Every publican, every jeweller, every butcher they all had stashes.”

Was Chesterton always sure that the money was not coming from criminals? “Chesterton Finance was run impeccably. It was completely transparent. If you had tax clearance I would invest your money. If it wasn’t cleared, we would store it until we got a settlement for you.” This would appear an incredible way to do business today. However, at least one of the stories is supported by a second source who dealt with a former Cunningham client who told him a similar story of how Cunningham had taken and managed their cash. This source knew nothing of a later Revenue settlement.

Chesterton’s office in Ballincollig had a safe. In his then home in Farran, Cunningham also had a locked-up type structure in the basement. Investigators would later claim that some of the Northern Bank money ended up in this home.

I ask Cunningham about reports that the safe was hidden when his home was raided? Cunningham replies that his son was doing renovations in the house and as a result, the lock-up was hidden behind large sheets of plywood. “We weren’t hiding anything,” he said. “Lots of people knew I had a safe because of the business I was in.”

Builders, Bulgaria and Phil Flynn

Two of the richest business people Ted Cunningham says he ever dealt with ran a large house-building company. Run by two brothers, the company asked Cunningham for advice in relation to their tax affairs, he said. He met them, he recalls, initially in Kenmare, Co Kerry where they brought various paperwork before meeting them again in North Dublin.

“I was just advising what to do and what not to do. There was a settlement done with the Revenue eventually,” Cunningham said. The settlement was large.

“They were two countrymen who had made it big in the building. They weren’t professionally organised,” Cunningham recalled.

“I was introduced to them to them by Phil Flynn at the time,” he said. (Flynn denies he made this introduction.)

Flynn was chairman of Bank of Scotland (Ireland) at the time, which was one of the most active lenders in the Celtic Tiger. Flynn had an unusual past for someone operating at the top levels of Irish business. He was a Republican activist from the age of 15 and a former vice president of Sinn Féin. In 1975, at the age of 25, he acted as a mediator in the IRA kidnap siege of Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema. He had been tried in the Special Criminal Court for IRA membership but acquitted. Later he was president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and a prominent industrial relations consultant.

Flynn, an astute and personable man, was, many decades later, operating at the highest levels of Irish corporate and political life. Many reputable businesspeople knew and dealt with him.

The builders, according to Cunningham, were happy with the tax advice he gave them. “I said to them, one day when everything is done and you get tax clearance certs and everything, throw one million into my place – and they put in €1.2 million.”

This investment was unrelated to any alleged later wrongdoing by Chesterton.

Company filings show an investment in Chesterton being made of the order described by Cunningham in 2003. Who or what is making this investment is not clear, however.

Stafford Friel, a respected accountancy firm later appointed to liquidate Chesterton, said it could not comment on the company. Nor would it comment on why its liquidation of Chesterton has not been completed to this day.

“I had a meeting with Phil (Flynn) and I said to him we have enough business that we could do €20 million in lending. Phil said there were other people who would invest rather than pay the high interest rates to the banks.”

Phone calls to the builders named by Cunningham were not responded to. Cunningham said that details in relation to the builders’ involvement in his old business were in the files taken from him by investigators.

He has no paperwork to support this claim as a result, he says. Did the builders ever come looking for their money after Chesterton got into trouble? “No. They never did. They were very supportive and said they didn’t want it back.”

New investment from the builders and others allowed Chesterton to scale up its lending business,but it still needed more.

“I had a meeting with Phil (Flynn) and I said to him we have enough business that we could do €20 million in lending. Phil said there were other people who would invest rather than pay the high interest rates to the banks.”

“We agreed he would come aboard, and we gave him 10pc of the business. And he did bring in other investors.”

Company filings show Flynn did take this shareholding. His investment was significant but not large.

Chesterton’s accounts also show the business lending more and more in the timeframe outlined by Cunningham. An accountancy source denies that Cunningham advised the builder brothers in relation to their dealings with the Revenue in any official capacity. But he said one of the brothers did mention he had put about €1 million into Chesterton. The source said this person did ask for his money back, but later accepted it was gone. There were bigger things to worry about once the financial crisis took hold.

A trip to Bulgaria

According to Ted Cunningham, it was Phil Flynn who introduced him to a woman named Kathryn Nelson. Nelson was from Newbridge originally. She had been a teacher in Libya. She had then worked as a “diplomatic liaison officer” helping investors in Ireland and Britain. In the 1990s she had met Flynn who had asked her from his position as chairman of the Industrial Credit Corporation to look at a potential investment in North Africa. Later, she had developed contacts in Bulgarian business and politics. Bulgaria was a frontier economy thirty years ago, but so were a lot of places.

Flynn asked Nelson to help him organise a trip to Bulgaria for a group of potential Irish investors in January 2005. Cunningham was one of this group. Cunningham says he was already in touch with Bulgarians interested in investing in Ireland. “Most meetings took place October to December 2004 and also some meetings took place in Ireland. Then in Bulgaria in January 2005 with various ministers. We hired staff and rented offices, opened a bank account and applied for a banking licence etc,” he said.

For Nelson, her role organising this January 2005 business trip would lead to serious negative publicity. There is zero evidence of any wrongdoing by her, but in the fevered atmosphere of the time, there was wild misinformation.

Nelson was arrested and questioned about the trip to Bulgaria leading to a sensational, and entirely untruthful, article that appeared about her in The Sunday World.

Years later she would receive an apology and substantial settlement from the paper.

In an interview in 2012, Nelson recalled the publicity: “When I saw the first page, the front page, honestly I thought that I was going to die, and I did die a little and ever since that I have died a little more.”

There is no suggestion that Nelson was involved in any wrongdoing. She was an innocent victim caught up in a sensational story at an incredibly sensitive period in Irish history. 

Cunningham says the trip to Bulgaria went well from his perspective. He met high-level politicians and a series of business people interested in investing in Ireland.

 “They (Bulgarian business people) were looking for a Chesterton finance type of a setup,” Cunningham said. Cunningham said an application was made to the Irish embassy to allow the Bulgarians visit Ireland to look at various investments.

After the trip, a meeting was held with the Bulgarians in the former Great Southern Hotel in Dublin Airport. The Bulgarians expressed interest in acquiring assets held by Cunningham. It was a disparate bunch: a sand and gravel pit, a golf club and a nursing home. The Bulgarians said they wanted to use Chesterton as the mechanism to invest in Ireland.

I ask why didn’t Phil Flynn use Bank of Scotland (Ireland) where he was chairman or say Bank of Ireland to deal with the Bulgarians rather than a small firm like Chesterton?

“What happened was they invited us to Sofia in Bulgaria,” Cunningham replied. “We went over and we met with the minister for finance. I can’t think of his name. Then we met the minister for industry and commerce. They asked us would we set up a Chesterton-like finance company in Bulgaria. They had their own banks but they thought the concept of what we were doing here with the bridging finance would work over there.”

Cunningham said he registered a company there as a result and put €1,000 into a bank account for it.

“Two of the Bulgarians were businesspeople. They told us that they had a load of cash and that they were very interested in Ireland,” Cunningham said. “These were builder type people if you know what I mean? They were interested in the sand and gravel pit.”

Cunningham’s wife Cathy picks up the story. “When they came back to Ireland again, we met them in Dublin in another hotel near the airport. Then we went for a meal with them in the Old Schoolhouse in Swords. I remember asking them when they were on about the cash if that wasn’t very dangerous? And is that not what are banks are for? And they said ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t trust the banks as they were owned by the mafia [in Bulgaria]. Bulgaria was coming into the EU and they said it would be good for them to have something set up in an EU country. I remember having that conversation with them.”

Were you not concerned that they might have been in the mafia or somehow dodgy?

“No. We had met them with the minister for finance and the minister for commerce in their departments,” Cunningham replied. “We were in government buildings.”

“One man owned a garage and he was a building contractor. The other guy was an engineer or an architect and he owned a load of properties over there. We were entertained. It was like going up to Dail Eireann. We weren’t meeting in some backstreet cafe. Phil Flynn was with me. We were entertained at a high level. We were meeting in government buildings. They were all in their offices,” Cunningham recalled. He said the Bulgarians asked him for advice about setting up an IFSC type operation in Bulgaria as was in Dublin. “We said we’d be ahead of the posse if we did that.”

How did the money get here? “It came in a truck and I stored it in the basement (of our home).”

What were the names of the people you were dealing with?

“Oh, Jesus now,” Cunningham replied.

“I don’t know if I have the right names or spelling of them. One fella was called Slavsko,” Cathy Cunningham interjected. “The other fellow well it sounded like ‘Imal’.”

“I remember when I gave my statement (to the Gardai) I said I could only give them what they sounded like because I wasn’t involved in this transaction. Then there was Georgi who was the son of Slavko.”

Did you get a copy of their passports or other ID? “Oh yeah, Cunningham replied. “They were in the files that were taken (by the Gardai during the raids).”

“All the documentation everything was there in the files,” he explained.

How did the cash get from Bulgaria to Ireland? “They arranged to meet us in London and they had the cash in London.”

How did they have it… in a suitcase? A bank account? “They had it in a storage place in London. We just seen it,” Cunningham said.

Some sort of private safe? “Yes and they transported it here.”

How did the money get here? “It came in a truck and I stored it in the basement (of our home).”

So the truck just pulled up outside? “No. The truck parked outside in the church. We were informed of what day it was coming and all of that. This was in October, November 2004.”

So before the Northern Bank robbery happened? “Oh yeah.”

Cunningham said the money arrived in two lots. “When I say trucks they weren’t big articulates.”

He said on December 10, 2004, Georgi, one of the investors’ sons, turned up in Ireland. He was picked up at the airport and stayed in a hotel in Blarney, Co Cork. “He brought in another £200,000 himself,” Cunningham said.

So how much was in the vans or small trucks? “There was £3 million in the vans and he brought in another £200,000.”

Cathy Cunningham said that documentation supporting the Bulgarians came in a diplomatic pouch. “They had all the credentials explaining where their money was from,” she said.

Were you not afraid that this was a lot of cash? And you didn’t really know who they were?

“I had no fear because we had even hired a girl to run the office over there. (Sofia) They were getting involved with us as minor partners over there. The fact was that I had been so used to physically having money around me. The money meant nothing to me. Money was just the tools of what I was doing,” Cunningham said.

“Whether I had money below in the office or here (Farran)…” Cunningham said he often had large amounts of cash from dealing with various tax amnesties and the changeover to the euro.

Were you not naive to work with the Bulgarians? “They could have been the mafia, yes, but the fact was that they came through Phil Flynn,” Cunningham said.

Why didn’t you, say, lodge the money in a Bulgarian bank and then transfer it to Ireland? “They didn’t want to declare it over there,” Cunningham replied. “Why we were so confident and upbeat about this was because we weren’t dealing with any Joe Soaps.”

Cathy Cunningham said that documentation supporting the Bulgarians came in a diplomatic pouch. “They had all the credentials explaining where their money was from,” she said.

She said this diplomatic pouch had never been returned to the Cunninghams. It is impossible to know as a result whether it was genuine or credible enough to be convincing.

The Yazovs

Ted Cunningham comes back to me after our meeting in Cork with more information. He is apologetic that he does not have access to most of his files which were taken in the raid, but he says he does have some emails and documents showing interactions with Bulgarians.

The first document is from a Bulgarian law firm called Bazlynakov, Stanoev and Tashev (BST) dated February 14, 2005. The email is requesting the payment of fees to a Bulgarian bank account in the Commercial Bank Biochim in Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria. A total of €4,860 in fees is asked for along with a schedule of work done. This includes hosting a meeting between Cunningham and Flynn on January 24 2005.

Discussions, the emails show, are taking place about acquiring the leasehold of a property from the Bench Mark Group.

The next document is an email to Chesterton and Flynn from a Miro Yazov. “I am sending you our offer for the project in Plovdiv, please give it your early and prompt attention,” Yazov said.

Next there is a bill from a company called Yazov Ltd, which sets out the price of building a large development in Plovdiv called Complex Bratska Mogila. The underground part of this development will cost €2 million to build and a complex of stores and restaurants will cost €9 million more to construct. An office block will cost €3.3 million, and residential premises will cost €5.096 million, with €170,000 needed to build roads and fences to secure the site. Adding in the price of acquiring the site of €2.4 million, the total required to build this development is €22.3 million. Yazov Ltd states that it believes when completed the development will be worth €31.7 million, and it can make a profit of €9 million by selling it on.

In total, Yazov asked Chesterton to lend it €15.6 million, or 70 per cent of the total required, to construct the development. A Miroslav Yazov and Dimitar Yazov are given as the contact points for the proposed deal with Chesterton.

On February 8, 2005, the law firm BST emails Chesterton to follow up. “Dear Ted, I shall inform you when the funds arrive,” the email begins. There are then a series of legal and banking queries in relation to how a transaction could be completed between Ireland and Bulgaria. This next email is from a Boyan Stanoev. I ask Cunningham are the Yazovs the “builder type people,” he had referred to in our previous interview. He says they are.

Chesterton, in financing significant construction in Bulgaria, was moving someway from its traditional business of lending in Ireland. This was, however, the Celtic Tiger, when Irish investors were popping up all over Central and Eastern Europe, looking to do deals. What appears very risky today, it could be argued, was how a lot of business was done back then.

Yazov Ltd is a real business. In 2008, Dimitar Yazov gave an interview to a local publication, predicting it would make profits of almost €3.7 million in 2010. Yazov said his business was founded in 1991 and operating in Bulgaria and Israel, but looking at western Europe. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the Yazovs by Cunningham today nor has there ever been any such suggestion.

Chesterton never did any business in Bulgaria. Within a short time of these various emails, Cunningham would have much more to worry about.

“It was sterling, but there was never a Northern Bank note. It was ordinary sterling. Bank of Ireland sterling. Bank of Scotland sterling. But there was never a Northern Bank note in there.”

Getting involved in Bulgarian property does seem risky, but Cunningham said this was how he did business at that time. “I wasn’t a shopkeeper. I know the ordinary person on the street might say this was surreal… But look, I was getting phone calls from solicitors and accountants and they were saying ‘I have a publican with £300,000, can you sort it out for us?’ I would meet them and say ‘My fees will be X, and I will go to the Revenue, and if I can settle, I will. Not one wrong penny went into our company.”

“This was the biggest deal that ever came to me,” Cunningham acknowledges. “I can understand (why you might not believe me). If you were to fly into say Uganda today and ok you were to meet a load of fellas in a hotel, you would be dog wary. But if you went into government buildings out there and you got all the trappings maybe you wouldn’t be.”

Cunningham repeats his position that the money he said came from Bulgaria was not from the Northern Bank.

“It was sterling, but there was never a Northern banknote. It was ordinary sterling. Bank of Ireland sterling. Bank of Scotland sterling. But there was never a Northern Bank note in there.”

This is a subject to which we return later.

The raid

It was ten to midnight when the knock came on the door of the Cunningham household. The authorities asked to see Timothy Cunningham. Cathy Cunningham, then his partner, now his wife, answered the door. She feared there had been an accident. Ted was in Dublin on his way to England at the time.

“I was on my way to Manchester to pick up a bank draft for 15 million sterling to invest in Chesterton from a jeweller,” Ted Cunningham tells me.

What was the name of this jeweller? “It was a jeweller in Manchester who I was onto back and forth. He had agreed to put 15 million in [to Chesterton] as an investor. I was staying at the hotel at Dublin airport and I was flying out at 6.30 am the following morning.” (To me, it seems, the 15 million investment is a huge sum of money. Cunningham gives little detail about it.)

Regardless of where he was going, the Guards were in Farran and they were asking where he was.

“I said which Timothy?” Cathy Cunningham said. “They said ‘There is two?’ I said ‘Yes there is Timothy senior and junior. They backed out the door and the next thing I could hear them on the phone. Then they are back and say the one that owns Chesterton Finance. And I said he is not here; he is in Dublin.”

Looking back now, Cathy Cunningham said she is surprised that the Guards did not know where her husband was. Given the importance of the raid, she suggests that he should have been under surveillance.

Cathy Cunningham said she asked to see a warrant but was told that her name was not on it, and, as such, she had no right to review it.

“They came in. There were two armed policemen outside the door. I said ‘Jesus’. I said: ‘Will you please show me your ID?’ They went around the house. They went downstairs to the basement.”

The authorities identified a small press in the basement and asked for a key. Cathy Cunningham said she did not have it.

In total there was now about a dozen Gardai on the premises. She was being pressed, she says, for a key to the locked press. Cathy Cunningham again said she did not have it.

“I rang Ted and he said I will come straight down. He could have fecked off to England if he was guilty,” she tells me.

At 4.30am, Ted Cunningham arrived back in Cork. “They said to Ted about the press. He said ‘Oh yes, there is money in there from a client and with the nerves and being tired, we couldn’t find the key,” Cathy said.

“I don’t think we could ever find it. So, they yanked the door of the hinges. They said: “Is that money  from the Northern Bank robbery?” And Ted said: ‘No it is not.’ We said to them there is a diplomatic pouch with this to explain it.”

I ask if the supposed diplomatic pouch ever featured as evidence in Ted Cunningham’s trial? “No. We kept asking for it. We have asked for a list of everything that was taken but never got it,” Cathy Cunningham said.

Could you not just go to the Bulgarian Embassy and get them to confirm things? “No sure what with all the publicity…” Ted Cunningham replied.

He said that he gave the Gardai the name of the Bulgarians he was dealing with. But that he does not believe enough effort was made to bring them to Ireland to give evidence.

The Bulgarians, Cathy Cunningham said, were not prepared to come to Ireland to give evidence. We later return to this issue when we get to discuss the detail of Ted Cunningham’s trial.  

I ask another question – what about getting Phil Flynn to give evidence?

“We asked for Phil Flynn to be put down on the list of witnesses but he wasn’t.”

Why did they not make sure he was? “We were living in a cycle of fear [about the case],” Ted Cunningham said.

Could you not have just rung Phil Flynn? “I had rung him,” he replied. “But he was shit scared himself.”

Phil Flynn

In its own way, the roof had come crashing down on Phil Flynn in the wake of the Northern Bank heist. In February 2005, he had been questioned by the Criminal Assets Bureau about his investment in Chesterton. On February 17, a search of his offices by CAB and the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation had discovered a pen-gun on Flynn’s desk. The pen-gun was 70 years old. Flynn was then charged with unlawful possession of the weapon, which was found with five cartridges, three of which were blank and two of which were tear gas.

When the matter came to trial, a weapons expert for Flynn’s defence would later say the gun was incapable of firing a bullet. Its barrel was too weak, and the only person in danger from it was whoever pulled the trigger, Flynn’s expert concluded.

Flynn’s team said he had the gun “essentially as a curiosity which he kept in his office for the better part of 30 years”. Flynn was told to pay €5,000 to the poor box in December 2005 and given section 1.1 of the Probation Act, leaving him without a conviction. Flynn had resigned from various positions too, as a director of Harcourt Developments, state insurance company, the VHI, and as chairman of the government committee on decentralisation. He had also resigned as chairman of Bank of Scotland (Ireland). Flynn was always adamant however that he was involved in no criminality.

“If you look at the media at the time. They said Ted was a member of the IRA!”

Cathy Cunningham

The publicity around the pen-gun and the loss of various directorships was not, however, the same as the challenges facing Cunningham.

*****

“If you look at the media at the time. They said Ted was a member of the IRA,” Cathy Cunningham said.

“That I had laundered money up and down the country and that I had laundered money from cigarettes, contraband,” Ted Cunningham interjected. 

Flynn, for his part, denied wrongdoing. On February 24, 2005, he told The Irish Examiner that he was “100 per cent innocent and had nothing to hide on the matter.”

Charged

As he awaited his trial to begin, Ted Cunningham said that the Gardai had asked him extensively about Phil Flynn and whether the businessman was involved in the Northern Bank robbery.

“I said I believed he had no hand act or part in it,” Ted Cunningham said. Flynn said both publicly and privately at the time he had nothing to do with the robbery. 

As the months passed before his trial, the questions kept coming for Cunningham, “They wanted to know was I buddies with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness and all of that.” 

Cunningham said he was not friends with the Sinn Féin leaders nor was he ever in the IRA nor did he mix in such circles. “I’ve met Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness,” he admits. “I’d say hello, but we weren’t friends.”

He said met Adams at the unveiling of a monument to 1916 rebel Thomas Kent at Kent Railway station in Cork in September 2015, but he says also he might have met him prior to his arrest.

“We went to a function one time in Citywest – and I said hello in passing to them (Adams and McGuinness.)” Cunningham claims this was a passing encounter and he is unsure of the date, but thinks it was before the robbery.

Cunningham says he was friendly with Joe Cahill, a founder of the provisional IRA in 1969 who lived in Donegal until his death in 2004.

“Fianna Fail was my republicanism. That was the party I was closest to”

Ted Cunningham

Cunningham said he got to know Cahill after he was involved in arranging for families to holiday in Cork in order to get away from The Troubles.

“They would just be families recommended. I wouldn’t have a clue who they were,” he says. The family of Kevin Winters, the founder of Cunningham’s legal firm KRW Law, was among those he helped arrange holidays for.

Who recommended the families? “I got to know people in Carlingford [Co Louth]. Not political people. This was just pure humanitarian. It was maybe a dozen families in the whole lot. I knew people with mobile homes and families would come down from the North in summer to Cork.”

Later it would emerge the Gardai had noted in their files Cunningham sent Cahill a Christmas card. Cunningham said he made no attempt to keep his friendship with Cahill secret, as he had nothing to hide. He says he did not use his friendship with Cahill to give himself credibility with the IRA or anyone else. Cunningham said he was not even a supporter of Sinn Fein.

“Fianna Fail was my republicanism. That was the party I was closest to,” he said.

A political issue

In an interview on February 17, 2005 in Madrid, where he was promoting one of his books, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams discussed the Northern Bank raid. It was making global headlines as it threatened the peace process. “The IRA has said it was not them. I believe them,” Adams told a Spanish radio station.

He then added: “But maybe I am wrong…What I can say categorically is that Sinn Féin was not involved.”

Adams words were seized upon, a narrative was created that Adams was not ruling out IRA involvement in the raid.

Adams quickly moved to clarify his remarks saying: “I made it clear that the IRA has said it was not involved and that I believed its disclaimer. Any other interpretation of my remarks is malicious and misleading.”

Not everybody believed Adams. Bertie Ahern, the then taoiseach, told the Dáil on February 2, 2005 of a meeting with police chiefs from the North and the Republic. “They believe that a number of operations which took place during 2004, not just the Northern Bank robbery, were the work of the Provisional IRA and would have had the sanction of the army council and be known to the political leadership,” Ahern said.

In December 2010, The Guardian published confidential US diplomatic cables obtained by Wikileaks. The cables state that Bertie Ahern believed that Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness knew in advance of the bank robbery even as they negotiated the peace process.

A cable dated February 4, 2005, two months after the robbery, from the US ambassador to Dublin James Kenny, quotes an unnamed senior Irish government official as saying “no other group would have the discipline, this many weeks after the robbery, not to try to use a bank note, or provide information on the van or any other aspect of the robbery”.

“[The official] said that the GOI (government of Ireland) does have ‘rock-solid evidence’ that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are members of the IRA military command and for that reason, the Taoiseach is certain they would have known in advance of the robbery,” a cable claims.

Another cable dated June 1, 2005 states: “The taoiseach … believes Sinn Féin leaders were aware of plans to rob the Northern Bank even as they negotiated with him last Fall. Publicly, he has been unprecedentedly critical of Sinn Féin and, until recently, greatly reduced private contacts as well.”

In response to the cables Sinn Féin said: “There is not a shred of evidence that has ever linked the IRA to the Northern Bank robbery. The theories put forward by the British at the time regarding republican involvement were disproved in court. No link has ever been made, other than by opponents of Sinn Féin, that the IRA was involved. All the republicans arrested in connection with the Northern Bank robbery were released without charge.”

Hunting for money

The hunt for the Northern Bank money was now intense. On March 13, 2005 a warning was issued by Felix McKenna, chief of Dublin’s Criminal Assets Bureau, to watch out for Northern Bank money being laundered in Britain.

“What better place to launder dirty money than the races? Cheltenham is an ideal venue to put £500 or £1,000 of cash on a horse to clean it up. They will be there in their dozens. I would like to warn the bookies that there will be Northern Irishmen at Cheltenham bringing large amounts of cash and putting it down as bets,” McKenna said. McKenna said he believed that: “The best place to launder English money is where it is the common currency.”

On March 29, 2005 the Irish Times reported that the IRA had quickly broken up the £26.5 million into “five or six parcels” in the days after the December 20 raid. It quoted a “senior Irish political source” as saying one chunk of money was used to buy distressed properties in Britain with the aid of frontmen.

About £1.5 million or more, it was claimed, was laundered over the four days of Chelthenham, which had taken place only a week earlier.

The paper said that the Gardai were also investigating whether various businesses around the country had been used to launder money. It would emerge that Chesterton was one of the businesses in its sights. Ultimately it was the only company that came under intense scrutiny despite tens of thousands of hours of investigations.

*****

“Unpleasant for our country”

Allegations linking Bulgaria to the Northern Bank robbery was big news locally. It led both the local newspapers and television programmes at a delicate time for Bulgaria, which was hoping to gain entry to the European Union in 2007. Bulgaria had no desire to be linked with reports of money laundering just two years out from such a crucial economic development, particularly for a country with a reputation for having a significant black economy. 

In February 26, 2005 the Minister for the Interior in Bulgaria, Professor Georgi Petkanov, said that he wished to get to the bottom of Cunningham and Flynn’s visit “in an undoubted way”.

He described the controversy as “unpleasant for our country”.

Confusingly, a spokesperson for the Minister for the Interior said that Cunningham et al “came to Bulgaria as representatives of a financial institution registered in Amsterdam with capital of roughly €14 million”.

In response, Flynn said at that time: “I’ve no idea what they’re referring to.”

Today, Cunningham is similarly baffled at this comment. It gained no further traction, and it is unclear what the Bulgarian minister was referring to.

Elements of Cunningham’s story were, however, confirmed by the Bulgarians. A spokesperson for Bulgarian deputy finance minister, Ilya Lingorski, confirmed the minister did meet with Flynn, Cunningham and others on the trip in a restaurant in Sofia called the Pri Orlite.

This restaurant, which is known in English as ‘At the Eagles,’ is on the 18th floor of a tower in Sofia that houses the Ministry of Transport.

This again confirms Cunningham’s recollection of dining at a restaurant inside a tall government building.

The meeting was a “working lunch”, a Bulgarian government spokesperson said.

The Bulgarians insisted to both local and Irish media that they were prepared to cooperate fully with Irish law enforcement.

Despite this promise, nobody from Bulgaria from either its government or its business sector appeared as witnesses in Cunningham’s later trial.

In September 2005, Kevin Toolis, a journalist and an award-winning documentary maker, broadcast Dispatches: The Big Heist. The documentary detailed the precision which had been used to carry out the robbery, which was described by former RUC chief, Johnson Brown as having “all the hallmarks of the IRA”.

The raiders had clinically held the family of one of the bank’s two keyholders at gunpoint, and abducted the wife of the other. They knew how to avoid forensic detection, using bleach to wipe down surfaces, and urinate in their own bottles.

“The Provisionals have taking over houses and holding families down to a fine art,” Brown said.

Toolis also interviewed people who suggested that Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness must have known what was happening, despite their denials. “Gerry Adams is god in terms of the IRA movement,” former Sinn Féin activist John Kelly is quoted as saying. “And not a sparrow falls from the sky…”

Then minister for justice Michael McDowell, said the stolen money was to be used to “subvert the democratic process in Ireland” and “buy votes” for Sinn Fein.

Cunningham said he was worried after the documentary was broadcast. While it was careful about it what it said about him, the context was damning.

He knew he was bang in the middle not just of a major crime story, but also one with significant political ramifications.

*****

On February 13, 2006 The Irish Times reported that Phil Flynn was not going to be included in the Garda file into the alleged laundering of the proceeds of the Northern Bank raid which was going to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) later that week. On being informed of this news Flynn said: “I don’t have anything to say, I couldn’t possibly comment on speculation.” Senior Garda sources said instead however their investigations were into the discovery of “the money” in Cork, and smaller amounts elsewhere in the Republic. Flynn, it was concluded, had no questions to answer.

*****

Charges and burning money

Ted Cunningham said he met some of his legal team properly only a few weeks before his trial began. This is not unusual, but Cunningham felt it put him at a disadvantage, as his was a complicated story.

“It was three years after what had happened. We were living in fear,” Cathy Cunningham said.

She claims that Gardai came at all times of the day and night to their home with information related to their case.

Her husband, she said, was trying to keep Chesterton going. A nephew died suddenly in his bed, she said. A friend of her son died, she added.

Cunningham felt he was constantly being watched, and his business was in big trouble.

“We were toxic with all the publicity,” he recalled.

I asked Cunningham why didn’t he get his contacts in the Revenue to vouch for him, and support his claim that he often held large sums of cash. It could have certainly helped him, I suggested?

“In a situation like this, and let’s be honest, if you are working in the Revenue and you know me would you want your face up there.” Cunningham said he could not, even today, say who he had dealt with in the Revenue over the years before the raid.

On March 20, 2008 Ted Cunningham had been charged at Cork District Court with having £3.5 million worth of sterling and euro notes linked to the Northern Bank robbery. In total, he was facing ten money laundering charges and Cunningham was accused of trying to launder the money through friends and associates. It was over three years after Cunningham’s first arrest under project Phoenix, the Garda hunt for the Northern Bank money.

The 10 charges Cunningham faced include possession of £3.01 million from the Northern Bank robbery; the possession of a €56,000 cheque allegedly from the heist, which he gave to his son, Timothy Junior, and two cheques worth €144,000, also allegedly from the robbery, which he lodged to a bank account in Co Wicklow. The court also heard he gave two cars, allegedly acquired with Northern Bank money, to a Sinn Fein election candidate called Tom Hanlon and another to the financial consultant Catherine Nelson. Both Hanlon and Nelson denied any wrongdoing. Cunningham was told to put up a €400,000 bail bond including the deeds of his home and he was ordered to sign on at his local garda station three times a week.

On the same morning Cunningham was charged, another man called Don Blaney was charged with the possession of 220 rounds of ammunition found inside a lunchbox. Blaney, of Old Church Road, Passage West, Co Cork, was bailed on firearms charges linked to the Northern Bank robbery. Gardaí had raided Blaney’s home in February 2005 after they got a tip-off. In Blaney’s 2009 trial, the court heard that Gardaí began searches in the locality of Passage West after children discovered partially burned Northern Ireland sterling bank notes lying on the ground in February 2005.

Who had burnt the bank notes remains yet another strand of what actually happened that remains unclear. There does not appear to be any connection between this strange incident and Cunningham.

The children had given the notes to their parents who alerted the Gardai. Blaney had lit a fire that day the Gardai heard locally prompting them to seek a warrant to search his home, which found no Northern Bank notes, but did discover bullets in a lunchbox in the attic cupboard of his house. During his trial, Blaney denied any knowledge of the bullets, which were capable of being fired from an assault rifle. “I cannot speculate on who may have put them there. I am not prepared to go into a guessing game — I really do not know,” Blaney said. Blaney was jailed for two years for possession of the bullets.

Who had burnt the bank notes remains yet another strand of what actually happened that remains unclear. There does not appear to be any connection between this strange incident and Cunningham.

Getting close

As the case got closer, Ted Cunningham and Cathy started to worry more. In the months after the raid they had gotten married in Dromoland Castle, a five-star luxury hotel.

“I remember watching an old movie with Ted and saying you are going down,” Cathy recalled. “Mammy, God rest her, used to say you are just a fall guy Ted for these people.”

Officials from the Revenue and CAB spent six weeks going through Chesterton’s files. “They went through everything with a fine-tooth comb,” Cathy Cunningham said.

Ted Cunningham said that despite everything being looked at, none of his bank accounts were frozen. Other than the alleged Northern Bank money, he said no other transaction was ever an issue. He said despite all the problems facing him, he was eventually allowed to sell the gravel pit, which was at the centre of his explanation of why he was holding so much money.

“In 2007, when we sold the pit, that money was never frozen. They have registered a charge against two sites that were in my name above in county Offaly, but my part of the money for the pit, I kept.”

The state, he said, also had a charge on two sites he owned in Roscrea. If what Cunningham says is true, it seems strange to me that not everything was locked down.

The trial (part 1)

As he awaited trial Ted Cunningham said he was met regularly with different Gardai. He said some of these contacts took place in formal settings, but others were in car parks or done entirely by phone.

“I was offered a deal,” Cunningham claims. “It was ‘I will sort out the Revenue’ sort of thing, become an informer, tell me who in the IRA did this’.”

Cunningham claims he was given a phone number to ring code-named Tadgh if he wanted to contact the Gardai to give them information. Cunningham said he didn’t say anything because he didn’t know anything. He felt he was being hassled and intimidated.

This is Cunningham’s opinion, however, and there has never been any evidence suggesting things went beyond standard Garda practice.

Given the seriousness of the crime, it is not unexpected that Gardai would have been in regular contact with Cunningham.

It would have been obvious to them that Cunningham was, assuming he was guilty, only a bit-player in a crime that required a team of experienced people to execute.

*****

Unsurprisingly, Cunningham was under intense pressure. 

Cunningham said he was asked in 2015 for formal questioning over a number of days in a Dublin Garda station. “On each morning I was threatened to cooperate with the guards,” Cunningham said.

It is normal for Gardai to ask suspects to cooperate, and to remind them of the seriousness of their situation.

“I was telling them to F-off I was not in the IRA,” Cunningham recalled. He said he felt under strain, and this was not helped by his poor health.

Cunningham later claimed in court that at one point he was told by the Gardai they had a photograph of him and Phil Flynn with senior figures in the IRA on a farm at Ravensdale in Co Louth.

Cunningham says this picture doesn’t exist. But equally, other than Cunningham, nobody has ever made the claim in public that it does.

In his later trial the alleged photograph never featured. It is impossible to know all these years on was this ever said, or not said. It is possible too he got wires crossed after hours being questioned.  

*****

At some point days into the questioning, Cunningham made an off-camera confession.

“I was under total duress over five days,” Cunningham said. “I was told I don’t know how many times I was getting 10 years.”

“The amount of pressure we were under day to day. I still had the finance company. I had investors roaring to get their money back, staff wages to pay.”

Being questioned by the Gardai about a major robbery is undoubtedly an unpleasant experience for anyone.

It is not supposed to be a cake-walk, and there is no evidence proving that it was anything more than professional robust questioning.

The jury did not accept Cunningham’s claim of coercion. It accepted his off-camera confession in which he admitted receiving deliveries of funds in the millions.

In his trial, Cunningham said he was coerced by Gardaí into making an off-camera confession naming Flynn “as the boss behind everything” and that he was forced to admit the money was from the Northern Bank raid.

The jury did not accept Cunningham’s claim of coercion. It accepted his off-camera confession in which he admitted receiving deliveries of funds in the millions.

An Irish Times report of the trial said: “Cunningham told detectives off camera that he had agreed to take up to £10 million but when he discovered that £1.5 million of what he had received was new traceable Northern Bank notes, he refused to take any more and tried to dispose of what he had.”

Cunningham’s trial also got an insight into the professionalism of the Northern Bank robbery.

On its third day, Kevin McMullen, an assistant manager at the Northern Bank, described to the jury how a man posing as a policeman called to his house on the evening of December 19th, 2004. This man informed him his sister had been killed in a car crash and he was needed to identify her body.

McMullen went back into his house, and the man followed him along with an armed gang. The gang said they would kill his wife if he did not help them rob the Northern Bank Cash Centre in Donegall Square West in Belfast.

“A gun was put to the back of my head, also to my wife’s head. We were both tied up with plastic ties around our hands. A man pulled a hat down over my wife’s face and tape around her head at eye level. They then led her away from the house,” McMullen said.

“Two men stayed in the house with me. They went through a plan to be followed out the next day at work. If I didn’t comply fully or if anything went wrong, my wife would be killed. They repeated that threat throughout the night.

“I had no choice because of the threat made against my wife. I feared these men would carry out the threat – if anything went wrong with the robbery, my wife would be killed. They said, ‘We’ll shoot her in the head, we will damage her beyond repair’, and that I would be killed.”

At 11.30am on December 20th, 2004, McMullen sent staff home early to facilitate the robbery. Along with another employee Chris Ward, he then brought the money out of the bank’s vaults to the gang. In total some £17,650,000 in new Northern Bank notes and some £8,850,000 in mixed used notes from several different banks was taken in the raid.

I ask Cunningham why didn’t he get the Bulgarians to fly over and stand up for him? “Nobody ever looked for them, they didn’t want to look,” Cunningham said.

I said that while that maybe so, why didn’t he take it on himself? “We tried but we couldn’t make them,” he said. “On the third last day of the trial there was a letter from them.”

“We had been trying to get them to send a letter to do anything to show that they’re real,” Cathy Cunningham interjects. She said when they finally got the letter it was deemed insufficient to be admissible as evidence. Do you have a copy? “No. it was handed into the court,” Cathy Cunningham said. Who handed it in?

“They didn’t look at it note by note and prove it came from the Northern Bank”

Ted Cunningham

“We had asked a friend of ours in England to see could he contact those people in order to get something in writing from them?” she replied. “The letter was along the lines that they themselves had a Revenue issue and that they had given money to Ted in the first week of December. They handed it in but it wasn’t allowed in (as evidence) no matter what we said.”

Ted Cunningham also complained that in his view the money taken from his home had not been examined properly during the trial. “They didn’t look at it note by note and prove it came from the Northern Bank,” he said.

I suggest that maybe they felt they had enough evidence? “The money was never challenged. Serial numbers checked and so on,” Cunningham replied. He said this was later one of his big regrets when reflecting on what might have been done differently.

In any event, the jury went away to decide. They had heard horrific evidence of the mechanics of the actual robbery carried out by professionals. They had heard of a confession, and counterclaims of coercion. They had heard about Bulgaria. They had heard that Cunningham denied everything. Following a 45 day trial, Cunningham was found guilty by a jury on majority verdicts of all 10 charges.

The following month, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail after his conviction of 10 counts of money laundering over £3 million stolen in the Northern Bank robbery in Belfast in December 2004.

When imposing sentence, Judge Con Murphy at Cork Circuit Criminal Court said: “There is no doubt but that there was premeditation and planning involved and during the trial itself, he persisted right to the end with a concocted alibi that the Bulgarians were buying a pit in Shinrone (Co Offaly). It was a reasonably well constructed alibi and its genesis may have been before the Northern Bank raid took place.”

The Judge noted that Cunningham had persisted with claims he was coerced by gardaí into making admissions. He noted that Cunningham had said in an off-camera interview memo that he admitted knowing the money was from the Northern Bank.

“He persisted right to the end of his trial that these various admissions were as a result of illness, lack of sleep, threats or inducements – it was found by the jury, as it was by me during the voir dire, that these admissions were made freely and voluntarily,” the Judge concluded.

While the focus was on Ted Cunningham, relatively unnoticed, his son Timothy John Cunningham had pled guilty three weeks into the trial to a single count of money laundering over £3 million at Farran. His role, the Judge accepted, was “minor” as all he had done was to help his father sort and store cash.

It appeared game over. Finally someone had been nailed for an audacious crime. Surely, it was only a matter of time until more followed?

“He was merely a pawn, facilitating his father by counting, sorting and making some deliveries – he was under the influence of his father at the time and that was why he had any involvement and he was in no way the originator of the crime,” Judge Murphy concluded.

He said it took “courage to plead guilty, which he did, in defiance of his father” and he noted that he had returned from the United States to face prosecution. 

Today, mention of his son’s guilty plea, is a painful moment for Cunningham. “He was under his own pressures,” he remarks sadly. “It is not something I want to talk about.”

It appeared game over. Finally someone had been nailed for an audacious crime. Surely, it was only a matter of time until more followed?

*****

Ted Cunningham did not have an easy time in prison. He suffered from a rare condition called Hereditary Haemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HTT) which could cause him to bleed uncontrollably. He also had high blood pressure and diabetes. According to his Cork prison medical records, supplied by Cunningham, he was treated regularly by Dr Con Murphy for HHT.

“On a number of occasions I visited Mr Cunningham in his cell early in the morning and found him covered in blood, unconscious, and cell covered in blood and blood vomit,” the note read. Dr Murphy said Cunningham’s health was getting worse the longer he remained in such circumstances. While he was in prison, Cunningham had to go to hospital on 16 separate occasions.

Cunningham said in prison he received no special treatment, and that he was not protected by any IRA linked prisoners nor did his family receive any aid. “We didn’t get a penny,” Cathy Cunningham said. “It was really hard. If we were part of something like the IRA, why didn’t they help us? They didn’t help because we had absolutely nothing to do with them. I had lost Ted, and was constantly worried about him and his health when he was in prison.”

*****

Getting out

Cathy Cunningham did not give up on her husband Ted. She started to research the law looking for a way to get him out. In February 2012, Morroccan-born Ali Damache, who was prosecuted for allegedly making threatening phone calls in relation to international terrorism, won a Supreme Court challenge that ruled that a section 29 warrant issued to search his home by a senior garda was unconstitutional.

Cathy Cunningham realised that this was the type of warrant used in the raid on her home. She convinced Ted Cunningham to go to the Court of Criminal Appeal on similar grounds. Ted Cunningham managed to convince the court to set aside his 2009 conviction and a retrial was ordered on nine counts. The court also ruled he could not be retried on the 10th charge of laundering £2.3 million as the cash and interviews he gave after his arrest stemmed from a defective warrant.

Ted Cunningham was now in with a second chance. He was facing a new trial, which perhaps he could win, but equally it was possible this could lead to an even longer sentence. In a coffee shop outside the court lawyers for the state and Cunningham met discreetly to talk, and see if a deal could be reached.

It was then Cunningham said he met his lawyers and his wife to discuss pleading guilty. “I said if Ted pleads guilty to a lesser charge of recklessness would that be a runner? We were petrified that if we went into the second week of the trial he would get ten years,” Cathy Cunningham said.

Cunningham’s lawyers went back out to talk to the state.

“It was agreed all charges were to be dropped but there were two charges of recklessness to which I’d have to plead guilty. I said only if it was a non-custodial sentence. They came back and said all agreed.”

Cunningham pled guilty. In February 2014, he was given a five-year suspended jail sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of money laundering follow a four-day trial.

He pled guilty to money laundering £100,040 on January 15th, 2005 by transferring it to John Douglas, a jeweller in Tullamore, Co Offaly and in doing so being reckless to it being the proceeds of the Northern Bank robbery.

On a second count he pled guilty to money laundering £175,360 on February 7th, 2005 by transferring it to John Sheehan in Ballincollig, Co Cork and receiving three cheques totalling €200,000. Again, in so doing, Cunningham pled guilty to being reckless as to it being the proceeds of the Northern Bank robbery.

After Cunningham’s conviction, Inspector Colm Noonan said the Northern Bank robbery was undoubtedly carried out by the IRA. “It was an extremely sophisticated operation involving the use of firearms, a large number of personnel over a 24-hour period and it is the view of those investigating the robbery that it was carried out by the IRA,” he said.

He said that within weeks of the robbery the Gardai began watching criminal elements in the Cork area.

Cunningham’s counsel asked the court not to impose a custodial sentence given his age, health, guilty plea and decision to resign from Chesterton.

Inspector Noonan said that Cunningham may not have been aware of the identity of those behind the Northern Bank raid, but he displayed a recklessness with regard to the origin of the money that he gave to unsuspecting businesspeople. Noonan accepted that Cunningham was not in the IRA.

Cunningham’s counsel asked the court not to impose a custodial sentence given his age, health, guilty plea and decision to resign from Chesterton.

Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin said the Northern Bank robbery was undoubtedly carried out by an experienced criminal organisation. He noted that Douglas had been reassured by Cunningham that the money he was storing was not from the Northern Bank. He paid tribute to the Gardai investigation and concluded that Cunningham’s guilty plea meant he was finally facing up to his money laundering.

“It puts his involvement beyond all doubt and all from out of his own mouth – there are no appeals, there is no doubt anymore,” the Judge concluded. He also ordered the forfeiture to the state of a total £2.985 million and €45,000 which gardaí seized from Cunningham and others during the course of their investigation.

*****

I ask Cunningham about the charges he did plead guilty to.

For example, who was John Douglas? Cunningham says that he knew John Douglas’ parents for many years. “John ran a jewellery business in Tullamore for over 30 years, I was introduced to the family by an accountant in Tullamore in the 90s.” Cunningham said that Douglas had a safe because of his jewellery business and that over the years he had asked him hold cash for clients of Chesterton from that part of the country.

They walked up to the old Jurys Hotel in Cork city to get their car before driving to Mayo for a few days until the media died down. After that they went home.

“In early December 2004 I asked them to hold sterling for me which they did, there was nothing unusual about this at the time,” Cunningham claims.

What about John Sheehan? “John was our landlord of the building that housed Chesterton Finance Co Ltd in Ballincollig Co. Cork, I would have done a number of diverse financial transactions with him over different periods of time.”

“On this occasion John was looking for UK sterling which I was in a position to give to him, and he in turn gave me the equivalent in a euro cheque.”

 “There was nothing irregular [in these type of transactions],” Cathy Cunningham interjects. “Ted used to go up and down the country. He would often throw money into a safe or into a wardrobe or under a bed if his own safe was full.”

This is what Cunningham insists occurred in relation to the two men.

So what happened after your guilty plea?

“The cops said get on with your life,” he says. Cunningham recalls being stunned as he walked out of court to freedom after the case with his wife.

They walked up to the old Jurys Hotel in Cork city to get their car before driving to Mayo for a few days until the media died down. After that they went home.

Aftermath

Ted Cunningham was now out of prison. He was facing the world with a criminal conviction and the loss of his business.

“When Ted came out of prison for the first three months he was impossible to live with,” Cathy Cunningham said. “He wanted to do everything at a million miles an hour. He had all the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“He was still in his mind back in January 2005. He thought he could go back into business. Then the penny dropped people wouldn’t deal with him.”

Gradually Cunningham realised his days as a lender were over. He sold his Mercedes. His wife got a new job. In 2007, Cunningham said he sold the gravel pit for €2.5 million yielding a windfall for himself and his business partners.

“We got about €600,000. We cleared the mortgage and car debts. We put €100,000 into Chesterton to pay small investors,” Cunningham said. He said neither the CAB nor anybody else tried to take this money from him.

“We had properties. I was fierce well off. I was back and forth to Dubai and Qatar. The contacts I had were unbelievable then all this happened but I lost everything.”

Ted Cunningham

I ask Cunningham what’s next? He has pled guilty, but maintains he is innocent. Should he move on?

“First of all, I have a conviction hanging over me, I want that cleared. I want an apology to Cathy for being arrested for being a member of IRA. I want the money back and I want compensation but the biggest thing I want is an apology from the state.

“I was 71 recently,” Cunningham reflects. “Deep down I know I have been wronged. Cathy has been wronged. There is no woman who would stand by any man through something like this only she knows who I am.”

“I have no intention of giving up this fight. I would love to be out there buying and selling properties. I am back and forth to England . I am negotiating this and that but we are living on an old age pension. We are trying to help other people in the same boat.”

If, as you say, you didn’t have the money, where do you think it is?  “Where is the money? If I had all that money I would be directing operations from Spain or somewhere,” Cunningham replies.

“We have lost so much because of this. We had properties. I was fierce well off. I was back and forth to Dubai and Qatar. The contacts I had were unbelievable then all this happened but I lost everything. Only for Cathy I would probably be dead.”

Our interview is coming to a close. Cunningham is undoubtedly personable Throughout our meetings, it’s clear that he and Cathy are very close.  Their story is at times obviously true, and at others…

Cunningham turns to me. “Do you believe me?”

“Well, I believe that a lot of this doesn’t add up,” I reply.

“I keep thinking where did all the money go? At worst, it would appear, that you could only have had a small part of it, at best you didn’t have any of it. I guess in the end of the day, the reader will make his or her mind up.”

‘An enemy of the state’

It is early December when I ring Phil Flynn to hear his side of the story. Flynn is eighty-years of age, but he remains sharp as a tack. He has not spoken about the Northern Robbery Bank publicly in over a decade. Flynn says he is aware that Cunningham accused him of being the mastermind behind the robbery, but he says this is simply untrue.

“I know that when Ted was interviewed by the police he told them different things,” Flynn said. “I am absolutely convinced that he felt he had some sort of a deal with the Gardai.” Flynn said that while he was an investor in Chesterton he had little involvement with the business until after the robbery. He had stepped in then and become a director of the business in order to try and stabilise it and protect what money was left in it, he said.

Flynn said he had heard the rumour about a well-known developer being involved in the business, but he said that was for the developer or Cunningham to comment on. He said he had never been asked to be a witness at Cunningham’s trial. “I was watching the trial and I was monitoring it, of course,” Flynn said.

“I had difficulty understanding how a lot of that sterling he had predated the robbery. Why was that not a bigger part of the story?” he wondered.

Flynn admitted he had, for a time, made world headlines because of allegations at the time that he was somehow linked to the Northern Bank robbery.

“I had a colourful life and that’s just one chapter of it.”

Phil Flynn

“That’s the media. The media likes headlines. It likes people who are prominent,” he reflected. “If I had a case to answer I would have been charged. I wasn’t charged because I had nothing to answer.”

“I am 80 years of age now. When I was 17 or 18 I saw things first hand. I was arrested for republican activities. It didn’t bother me,” he said. Flynn said that there was nothing suspicious in his business dealings with Bulgaria.

“I was doing business with the Bulgarians long before I ever knew Ted Cunningham. I had no issues whatsoever with the Bulgarians then or since. No problems with them. No illegality or anything else,” he said. “I still have many close associates friends and connections in Bulgaria.”

Tom Lyons (TL): What do you think really happened with the Northern Bank?

Phil Flynn (PF): I don’t know. I can only speculate. I can only speak for what I saw, what I know and experienced myself.

TL: Why did you go to Bulgaria?

PF: I didn’t know Ted intimately before I became involved with him. All we did was we went to Bulgaria to look at potential business opportunities and we set up two companies. Nothing ever happened and then the whole thing blew up.

TL: How did you learn of the raid of Ted Cunningham’s home?

PF: Ted rang me. He was in Dublin Airport at the time (immediately after his home was raided.)

TL: What did you say to each other?

PF: I said ‘Why are you ringing me? This is nothing to do with me.’ I told him to go back down to Cork like anyone else would have told him.

TL: Do you think you were damaged reputationally by being linked to the robbery?

PF: I don’t. I had a colourful life and that’s just one chapter of it.

Phil Flynn said he continued to have business dealings with Bulgaria after his trip there with Cunningham. “I had a lot of contacts with Bulgaria over the years. Never anything illegal. I know that the business people we met over there deny that they were involved with Ted in any wrongdoing.”

“There is an awful lot about Ted that I didn’t know,” Flynn admits. “I also know that the Guards from here went to Bulgaria to interview people out there. I don’t know what they found.”

TL: What happened with the pen gun that was found on your desk?

PF: The pen gun. I think they just felt they hadn’t got me for one thing so they felt they had to get me for something. I think most people saw it for what it was. It was just another experience.

TL: Afterwards did the fallout hurt you in business?

PF: Everyone was very good to me. In some cases I had to force them to accept my resignation. I am still in business. I am still active. I have various business interests.

TL: What do you think really happened?

PF: It is all very strange. You think it is clear and then something pops up and that makes the thing you were looking at suddenly look unclear.

TL: Did Ted Cunningham ever contact you again over the years?

PF: He did get in touch at some point to see if I could be of any assistance.

TL: And could you be?

PF: No.

TL: Was Ted Cunningham in any way hard done?

PF: He probably did get a raw deal alright. I definitely believe he came under pressure and he thought at least he had some sort of agreement (with the state). He has been around. If he hadn’t have made a statement like he did, he wouldn’t have been convicted. He convicted himself in my view.

TL: What happened with Chesterton?

PF: I didn’t become a director until Ted had to step down (after the raid.) I was asked to do so by his other director. I tried to establish what the situation was and see what could be resolved.

Phil Flynn says it is news to him that Cunningham says he later put money into the business to pay creditors. “All I know is that I paid money to keep the thing afloat,” he said.

Our conversation turns to Wikileaks which published a raft of leaked US diplomatic cables in 2010 including ones from 2006 that discussed the Northern Bank robbery.

One of these cables dated May 31, 2006 discussed the fallout and includes information that US diplomats claimed to have gleaned from then Department of Justice (DOJ) Secretary General Sean Aylward.

The cable read:

“Money Launderers. Before November, the Irish Government would bring charges against several individuals connected to the police seizure of several million pound sterling in February 2005, believed to be from the 2004 Northern Bank robbery.  Phil Flynn, former Chairman of the Bank of Scotland (Ireland) and confidante of the Taoiseach, would not be among those charged.  DOJ Secretary General Aylward maintained, however, that Flynn had been “at the heart of the enterprise” and was “an enemy of the state.”

TL: What did you make of Wikileaks?

PF: There was this massive robbery. Big news worldwide. I remember Wikileaks coming out. The Guardian newspaper rang me up and said I was being described as an ‘enemy of the state.’ I just laughed. I told the journalist if you’re going to use any of that make sure you use that quote!

TL: Do you think it will ever come out what really happened?

PF: No. Maybe when we are are all dead. I know there are people who think that the robbery wasn’t a robbery (This is a reference to a theory that the Northern Bank robbery was let go ahead by the authorities in order to get money to the IRA so that its members could afford to retire). It is a bit far fetched to think that. There was a significant amount of money that was easily traceable. If the robbery was actually something else they wouldn’t have done that. The money would have been all untraceable. They (the authorities) don’t do things like that. It was a huge robbery. There was a lot of ego and reputations involved in trying to catch who did it. It was a robbery. 

TL: It’s 15 years on. How will the robbery be viewed by historians?

PF: There was nobody killed. At the end of the day it was only money. Historically it won’t be seen as that significant.

TL: How do you see Ted Cunningham all these years on?

PF: How would I describe him in a word…

TL: OK.

PF: Can I have two?

TL: Sure.

PF: A character.

Drawing a robbery to a close

It is certainly remarkable – given the confidence with which the IRA was linked to the robbery from very early on – that ultimately only Ted Cunningham, hitherto a relatively minor businessman from Cork, went to prison in relation to such a spectacular crime.

The operation required to rob the Northern Bank involved a large number of people who executed their plan fearlessly and with clinical professionalism. There was a lot at stake for anyone involved in the robbery.

Context is important. The IRA had been at war for decades against the far better resourced British army. As the Republican movement began to move towards a final peace it had to work out what to do with the money it had stashed both to fund its campaigns and support its active and injured members as well as their families. This money had been made from everything from smuggling, to running bars, to robberies, to collections from supporters overseas.

Men and women who were callow youths at the start of the conflict were now middle-aged. The IRA agreed to decommission its arms but not hand back its money.

 A decision was taken at the top to move the IRA’s money out of the state where it could be used to help its members in peacetime. At a senior level it was known within the IRA that this was happening for some time prior to the Northern Bank robbery. Raising funds to secure a pension type fund for the IRA in the run-up to peace was sanctioned. Crimes were being committed by different IRA units as part of this last-minute drive to raise money before decommissioning. Robbing the Northern Bank was however a crime at a level far greater than anticipated by most senior figures in the IRA.

Only a very small number of senior IRA members – less than a handful – knew about the Northern Bank robbery well in advance. They meticulously planned the raid and only informed some of the operatives involved just prior to the action. The amount of money taken from the Northern Bank was extraordinary. While, in anticipation of peace, the IRA had established routes for getting money out of Ireland – – suddenly it had huge sums to launder quickly under the full glare of the authorities.

In these extraordinary circumstances could the IRA have turned to a man like Ted Cunningham, someone who appeared to have a track record in dealing with large cash sums and was friendly with its founder Joe Cahill? Could the IRA have decided to use his services perhaps for smaller sums at first before suddenly increasing the amount to millions?

The argument put forward by the state in Ted Cunningham’s first trial covers much of this scenario.

If Cunningham was, however, money laundering for the IRA, why did the state’s investigations not catch more people?

Perhaps, in the bigger picture, the need to ensure peace in the North intervened, and one man was enough?

For various reasons cases taken against others suspected in the Northern Bank robbery fell apart. 

Cunningham maintains he was only involved in regular-or-garden moving money about for various Bulgarians. As he tells it he was both very unlucky in the timing of what occurred, and a scapegoat for the state not catching the real culprits.

Cunningham maintains they didn’t and he is the victim of circumstance, and a convenient scapegoat for everything. 

Another possibility is that Cunningham did have some money from the Northern Bank, but he didn’t realise this. In this scenario, he was very foolish to accept bags of money from mystery men in vans in church car parks.

A final possibility is that Cunningham was directly involved in the Northern Bank robbery, but over the years either he has convinced himself otherwise or he has knowingly decided to create an elaborate fantasy in order to be able to say he is innocent. Cunningham resolutely denies that he is making things up.

The Northern Bank robbery was carried out by meticulous professionals. Cunningham’s career was colourful. He is charming. He is smart. But he is not hardened like the operatives who robbed the Northern Bank who have never been caught, even 15 years later.

It does seem strange that expert paramilitary minds would have chosen Ted Cunningham to be involved, if that is what they did.

Cunningham maintains they didn’t and he is the victim of circumstance, and a convenient scapegoat for everything. 

Alternatively, perhaps the IRA was too successful with its robbery. Under intense pressure, with tens of millions to launder, it made the fatal mistake of relying on Cunningham, who found himself in way over his head.

There was much at stake during this crucial time of Irish history as the island finally moved towards peace. It is all very curious.