Comical echoes of Borat with a sinister twist

BACKGROUND:The case involving Ted Cunningham had a slightly comic air about it with tales of millions being hidden in cupboards, thousands being stashed under beds, and Bulgarians buying a sand and gravel pit in Offaly

IT WAS perhaps a telling crystallisation of how things had changed. On the second day of the trial of Ted Cunningham, his legal team had thundered at a description by the prosecution of his company, Chesterton Finance, as an unregulated firm of moneylenders.

By this week, in the course of arguing that there was no evidence to convict, defence counsel Ciarán O’Loughlin described the case as “bizarre” and suggested the jury might well think Cunningham “was a bit of a scamp and he behaved in the oddest of ways”.

A concession undoubtedly to the worldly wisdom of the jury, it was an apt description of Ted Cunningham whose statements and testimony had for the past 10 weeks at Cork Circuit Criminal Court ranged far and wide in an odyssey not just of geography but of credibility.

In terms of geography, the case involved a bank raid in Belfast, a churchyard in Farran, a sand and gravel pit in Shinrone, money drops in Tullamore and Navan, a visit to Sofia and, lastly and perhaps most unexpectedly near the case’s finale, a letter from Kazakhstan.

The letter from Dynasty Attorneys in Almaty threatened legal action against Ted Cunningham if he did not repay the £3 million he claimed to have received from Bulgarians for the sale of Shinrone pit. As one wit on the prosecution side remarked “What next – Borat?”

But while the whole case had a slightly comic air about it with tales of millions being hidden in cupboards and thousands being stashed under beds, the jury of seven men and five women were jolted sharply back to a more sinister reality by prosecution witness Kevin McMullen.

McMullen chillingly told how both he and his wife had guns put to their heads and he was told they would both be shot if he did not assist in facilitating the robbery of £26.5 million from the Northern Bank Cash Centre in Donegall Square West in Belfast on December 20th, 2004.

Police investigations North and South focused on the Provisional IRA and led gardaí to raid Cunningham’s home in Farran on February 16th, 2005 and it was there, upon Cunningham’s return in the early hours of February 17th, that they found £2.3 million.

The money was found in a wooden press in the basement and Insp Declan O’Sullivan told of the “shocked silence” that ensued when Cunningham broke open the press to reveal the huge haul of cash visible in six holdall bags and a Dunnes Stores plastic bag.

According to Sgt Seán McCarthy, Cunningham broke the silence by saying “that money is not from the Northern Bank robbery” before going on to tell gardaí that he had received the cash from some Bulgarian businessmen seeking to buy a sand and gravel pit in Co Offaly.

That essentially became the nub of the case with Cunningham repeating the story of the Bulgarians, following his arrest on suspicion of IRA membership and insisting throughout his trial, even under penetrative cross-examination, that that was where the money came from.

“I got the money from the Bulgarians – how many times do I have to say it?” snapped the avuncular and jovial Cunningham at prosecution counsel Tom O’Connell in a rare moment of exasperation during a trial where, for the most part, he exuded an air of almost beatific calm.

The problem for Cunningham was that while he initially told interviewing gardaí on February 17th, 2005 that the cash came in a single delivery to the churchyard in Farran in October 2004, he later gave a different version on February 18th, 2005 – off video camera.

Gardaí said Cunningham blurted out the details in a torrent – hence the hurried note – but in essence revealing that he had received the money in four deliveries in Tullamore on January 17th, Navan on January 20th and two at his nursing home in Rahan in February.

The interview also included an admission that he knew the money was from the Northern Bank robbery, a claim that former Bank of Scotland (Ireland) chairman Phil Flynn was the “boss behind everything” and that he (Cunningham) had at one stage agreed to take up to £10 million.

The memo was crucial to the prosecution and after it successfully argued in the absence of the jury to have it included, Cunningham was left facing an uphill battle as he sought to discredit the memo of interview and insist that he got the money from the Bulgarians.

He claimed that he had been coerced by gardaí into agreeing to the details of the memo after being told by Chief Supt Tony Quilter that gardaí would leak it to the press that he had named people in the IRA and he would end up with a bullet in the head.

He said he had not slept for up to 60 hours when he signed the memo of interview and went on to compare his treatment by gardaí in the Bridewell to Guantánamo Bay and memorably said that if gardaí had asked him if he had met Bin Laden, he would have agreed with them.

Throughout, he maintained that gardaí already had all the details of the four deliveries from his phone records and that he was simply putting a “rubberstamp” on their version though he failed to take account of the fact that gardaí at that stage had not obtained his phone records.

Cunningham repeatedly insisted through his legal team’s cross-examination of gardaí that the version of events he gave gardaí on February 17th was the correct one.

But when he testified himself, he amended his story to take account of the further evidence gathered by the State.

As prosecution counsel suggested, when Cunningham later discovered that one of the £20 bank notes carried a December 2004 bank stamp, he could no longer claim the money all came in one delivery to Farran in October 2005 and had to change tack.

The result was that when it came to his own testimony, Cunningham blended the two versions so that the cash was delivered in six instalments – two before Christmas at Farran and Blarney and four after Christmas at Tullamore, Navan and Rahan – and all from the Bulgarians.

While the State’s case was complicated by the fact that Cunningham had given £50,000 to Tullamore jewellers, the Douglases, before the Northern Bank raid, and more cash issued after the raid to Portlaoise accountant, Declan Whelan, Cunningham was in a spot.

His version was not only riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions – why, for example did he subsequently sell the pit to an Irish company if he was holding £3 million belonging to Bulgarians for its purchase? – it also stretched credibility to elastic lengths.

What was the jury to make, for example, of the fact that the Bulgarian businessmen never once sought a receipt from Cunningham when handing over £3 million in cash? What did it make of his admission that there wasn’t “a scrap of paper” relating to the sale of the pit?

In the final analysis, it’s impossible to say what particular aspect of the heavily circumstantial case brought by the prosecution persuaded the jury to find Cunningham guilty of the 10 charges on the indictment against him.

And perhaps in the end it does not matter. All that needs to be said is that the jury sided with prosecution counsel Tom O’Connell when he described Cunningham’s story of the sale of the pit to the Bulgarians as “a load of lies . . . an utter nonsense”.