Robbery spurs look at IRA criminal ties
JONESBOROUGH, Northern Ireland -- British military security cameras captured the white van at dusk, cutting through fog over the hills of South Armagh, the rugged terrain along the border with the Republic of Ireland.
It is the Irish Republican Army's heartland, and it has long been known as Bandit Country.
On that Sunday before Christmas, the van went unnoticed by the towering military observation posts as it traveled on the M-1 highway headed for Belfast's Northern Bank, where its driver and at least 20 accomplices carried out the largest robbery in the history of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The take was $50 million in cash. The gang took the families of two bank managers hostage and threatened to kill them if the robbery did not go as planned. It did, and no one was hurt. Crime specialists say the robbery surpassed -- in sophistication, daring, and haul -- even the Great Train Robbery in 1963.
The Irish prime minister and the head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, or PSNI, last week laid blame at the doorstep of the IRA, although no arrests have been made and detectives concede that the trail is cold.
The IRA has used criminal activity as a funding source since its inception in 1970. But police investigators and analysts say this robbery illustrates how one of the most sophisticated, disciplined, and heavily financed paramilitary organizations in the world has, in the decade since declaring a cease-fire in its fight against British rule in Northern Ireland, transformed into an organized crime syndicate.
If it is committed to its stated intention to end military operations, then why is it still planning and pulling off robberies, especially of such magnitude?
Crime specialists say the question underscores the need for the PSNI to alter its approach to the IRA and other paramilitary organizations involved in the 30-year sectarian conflict. In this view, the police need to confront the IRA less as a terrorist organization and more as a Mafia family.
In the twilight era between the end of the conflict and the halting steps toward a future built around a power-sharing government for Catholics and Protestants, the IRA seems to have carved a new path. But critics say the PSNI has been slower to find its way.
And it is not only banks that stand to lose.
Political observers say this crime also has stolen hope from Protestants and Catholics that a breakthrough could occur soon in the deadlocked Good Friday political process.
The IRA's purported involvement has cast a dark cloud of suspicion over Sinn Fein, the political party long affiliated with the group. Although Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams has denied IRA involvement in the robbery, his foes note that his denials have been heard before on other IRA operations.
The list of apparent IRA transgressions in the peace process has mounted in recent years: the conviction of three members for training a narco-terrorist organization in Colombia; the theft of documents from inside a fortresslike compound of the police Special Branch; and the uncovering of an alleged IRA spy ring inside Stormont, seat of the power-sharing government.
The incidents steadily eroded the confidence of the British and Irish governments, as well as political parties representing Catholics and Protestants, that the IRA would live up to its stated intention to end armed struggle against British rule.
The IRA cessation of violence covers only so-called military operations, a definition that presumably never included bank raids.
That Sinn Fein's political organization could share in the takings from this crime is a burning political issue. The Rev. Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party, which opposes any political deal with Sinn Fein, called Thursday for Sinn Fein assets to be frozen.
Ronald Goldstock, the former head of New York's Organized Crime Task Force who is now a paid consultant to the PSNI, has been warning for several years about the changes within the IRA. In a report last year, he outlined recommendations to the British government's Northern Ireland Office to address the threat.
After helping to break the Italian Mafia in New York in the 1980s and '90s, Goldstock has turned his attention to Northern Ireland, where he has encouraged authorities to pursue the IRA -- as well as Protestant loyalist paramilitary groups -- as though they were racketeering organizations.
''Was this the last big caper for the IRA before it goes out of business, or is it the beginning of a new direction for the IRA? We'll see," he said in an interview. ''But definitely, the structure of the IRA -- its discipline, its hierarchy, and its members' skills -- lends itself to the classic structure of organized crime."
Goldstock has encouraged Britain to consider legislation similar to organized crime statutes passed in the early '60s in the United States that enabled law enforcement to penetrate the Mafia. He also has urged liberalizing British legal statutes against using electronic surveillance in the prosecution of criminals.
Organized crime, including bank robbery, is not new for the IRA. Smuggling operations and counterfeit rings, as well as vast money-laundering operations, have netted the IRA an estimated $20 million a year.
That republicans have profited handsomely from these industries, police say, is evident in South Armagh, where expensive homes are sprouting up under the names of suspected IRA members who do not have discernible, legitimate incomes. The white van that carried out this robbery was seen, police sources on both sides of the border say, returning to South Armagh and disappearing into its hillsides.
''Everyone knows that the IRA is setting up its members, people who have served time, and this bank robbery was part of that, part of creating a pension system for the IRA," said a member of the Garda, as the police in the Republic of Ireland are called, who is involved in the cross-border investigation.
He said that the Garda and the PSNI were intensifying their investigation of border areas for clues about who carried out the bank robbery and for the possibility that the thieves have begun trying to replace the stolen pound notes with other untraceable denominations of British pounds or euros, which are used in the bustling economy -- both legal and illegal -- along the border.
The thieves snatched 26.5 million British pounds (about $50 million), predominantly in notes from the Northern Bank, a private institution empowered to mint currency. The bank has recalled all its notes in the hope that it will render the paper that the criminal gang is holding useless. But the recall probably will not prevent the robbers from keeping what police concede is at least 10 million pounds in untraceable currency.
On Tuesday, reporters were permitted inside the PSNI ''situation room" in Belfast, where detectives were scouring leads.
The PSNI has steadily transformed under the leadership of Chief Constable Hugh Orde. The former police service, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was a deeply divisive department stacked with Protestant police who were perceived as hostile to the Catholic community. That constabulary's Special Branch created a dark corner of policing in which abuses were numerous; in the overhauls after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the unit was gutted. That unit, police inside the investigation note, would have had the confidential informants now needed to crack the current case.
The PSNI says much of the criticism of the force after the bank robbery overlooks the ways in which the department is trying to change.
''Our policies are evolving," said a PSNI spokeswoman who talked with reporters on condition that her name was not published. ''We are doing a lot with organized crime investigations. . . . Our seizures of counterfeit merchandise are way up, and smugglers are being prosecuted."
Globe correspondent Jim Cusack contributed to this report. 