SPEED KILLS

Newry drug dealer Brendan Fegan certainly lived fast, and it came as no
surprise when he died young, writes JIM CUSACK

"Speedy" is a common enough nickname among drug abusers, usually denoting
something to do with the use of amphetamines. But Brendan "Speedy" Fegan was
actually quick on his toes and liked to drive fast cars.

Two years ago he was surrounded by RUC drugs squad officers on the Shankill
Road as he was apparently making a drugs deal with two local loyalists. The
loyalists were quickly collared but in the confusion Speedy disappeared. The
street was sealed off and it seemed clear he couldn't have escaped. No doors
had opened.

The police searched the street for half an hour before one officer lifted
the lid off a bin close to where the arrests were made and found Speedy
crouched inside. If he had drugs with him he had also been able to hide them
under the noses of the police. The three were released shortly after without
charge.

The disappearing act apart, it was remarkable to find a young Catholic man
doing business with members of a loyalist organisation which has a history
of purely sectarian violence against Catholics, and to be conducting his
affairs with them in the loyalist heartland of the Shankill Road.

Fegan, then only 20 or 21, had already risen to become one of Northern
Ireland's most efficient drugs dealers. Not only that, but he was consorting
with organised criminals in Dublin, particularly the gang which murdered
Veronica Geurin, as well as loyalists who, only a few years earlier, would
simply have murdered him because of his religious background.

If this wasn't risky enough, he was also acting as an informant for both the
RUC and the Garda, passing on information about other drug dealers and,
presumably, intelligence on republican and loyalist paramilitaries.

And if that wasn't enough, both Fegan and his friend and drug-dealing
associate, Brendan "Bap" Campbell, were also involved in a running row with
the Provisional IRA, regarded as one of the world's most efficient and
deadly terrorist organisations. At one point, Fegan and Campbell acquired
hand grenades and attached them to the gate of the Sinn Fein offices in
Andersonstown.

The IRA caught up with Campbell as he left a restaurant on the Lisburn Road
in Belfast in February 1997. He received the customary multiple gunshot
wounds to the torso and the coup de grace to the head when he fell to the
ground. The lame attempt at evading blame - by adopting the cover-name
Direct Action Against Drugs - failed to cover up the IRA's responsibility,
and Sinn Fein was expelled from the Stormont talks for two weeks. It was a
highly embarrassing moment for the party leadership.

Fegan should have chosen this same moment to quit Northern Ireland. His
friends in Dublin had fled to Amsterdam and the Costa del Sol after
murdering Guerin. He could have joined them and still be living the
hedonistic life of the exiled drug dealer. But, then, that mightn't have
suited his live-fast-die-young character.

He went straight back to business, making further loyalist contacts -
including people who were close to the (since assassinated) Loyalist
Volunteer Force leader, Billy Wright.

And he continued to court trouble. He fell out with his mentor, the man who
recruited him into the drugs business, Paddy Farrell, after Farrell found
out it was Speedy who had nicked a large consignment of his cannabis in
Dundalk in summer 1997. Farrell began to gear up for a fight with Fegan and
tried to import a load of handguns with a cannabis consignment from
Amsterdam, but these were discovered by Customs in Dublin docks.

Farrell was a much bigger dealer than Fegan and could not allow himself to
lose face to the young upstart. Fate intervened, however, when Farrell's
girlfriend, Lorraine, blew his head off with a shotgun as he lay in bed,
naked and with a blindfold on, awaiting something quite different. Lorraine
(also named Farrell, though no relation) then killed herself. She may have
become unbalanced because she suspected he was about to dump her. A week
earlier, while she was acquiring the shotgun, she had also purchased a grave
in a Drogheda cemetery.

Fegan's reprieve could only be temporary, however. He fell out with another
dangerous young loyalist drug dealer from east Belfast, a man who is on the
RUC suspect list for attempting to murder the notorious Shankill Road UDA
leader, Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, two weekends ago as he attended a UB40
concert in Belfast's Ulster Hall while on parole from prison. The .45
handgun which was pointed at Adair's head misfired and the bullet only broke
the scalp.

Last February, the same gun may have been turned on Fegan as he emerged from
a new apartment block in south Belfast. Several bullets hit Fegan, one
causing a serious enough shoulder injury, but the others bouncing off his
bullet-proof vest.

Fegan was only a minute's drive from the casualty ward of the City Hospital
but he chose, instead, to drive in the other direction, past one police
station to Musgrave Park RUC station where, it is presumed, the undercover
police who "handled" him worked. They brought him to the hospital.

Similar indications of Fegan's working relationship with the Garda Siochana
emerged a year into the investigation of Veronica Guerin's murder, when
detectives raided one of the gang member's girlfriend's apartment. They
found Fegan on the couch, canoodling with the other man's girlfriend, and
some lines of cocaine on a coffee table. He was arrested, but within a few
hours was released, apparently at the behest of drug squad officers. He took
off back North in an open-topped sports saloon.

Despite the precautions Fegan was taking - rarely staying in the same place
for more than one night and wearing body armour - his demise had been
predicted from the time the Provos killed "Bap" Campbell.

He was too flash for his own good and it was well known in Newry that his
latest passion was gambling on pony trotting. He had bought a good quality
pony and was betting heavily on a race meeting near the Warrenpoint Road
early last Sunday. He was in the company of a group of young travellers, all
in

exuberant mood, in the Hermitage public house when the two gunmen called.
"It's the Provies," were his last words.

While Sinn Fein sources were feeding journalists with stories that their
military wing was not responsible, the consensus among the better informed
sources in the North this week was that the IRA killed Fegan. He was the
11th drug dealer killed by them since calling their first ceasefire.

Strangely, Fegan's death is an indication of how "normal" life is coming
back to Northern Ireland. Since the ceasefires, the drugs trade, which had
been artificially suppressed by the threat to dealers from the
paramilitaries, has flourished. Belfast now has the beginnings of a heroin
problem with three overdose inquests so far this year.

In most cases, the paramilitaries now tend to turn a blind eye to drug
dealing, though some have switched career paths, as it were, and are now
controlling trafficking in several parts of the North. Fegan could probably
have survived a little longer, had he not picked a fight with the IRA, and
let so many people know he was betting on the ponies last Sunday.