A former All-Ireland football winner, who gambled away more than half a million pounds he stole from his employer, has been handed a 30-month sentence.
John (Johnny) Malachy McGurk won the Sam Maguire Cup with Derry in 1993, but years later became a gambling addict and then a thief while an accountant for one of Northern Ireland’s best known construction firms.
Antrim Crown Court had heard that the loss brought the quarry and tarmac family-run firm of Patrick Bradley Ltd of Kilrea to the verge of bankruptcy.
In all, the 50-year-old company accountant pleaded guilty to the theft of £572,206 from Bradley’s and 34 other charges involving fraud by abuse of his position of trust from July 2006 until the end of 2011.
Passing sentence, Judge Desmond Marrinan said McGurk later told experts he was placing single bets of up to £3,000 a time and the thrill of the wins was “like playing football again”.
However, he told McGurk had “almost wrecked” the firm and for a long time it had been at risk of financial collapse.
The judge said like many top-level sports stars, after his playing days ended, it appeared the “excitement and the thrill one gets out of playing at the very highest level needed to be replaced with something” and McGurk became a gambling addict.
His downfall, he added, showed how “a decent man can ruin his life by succumbing to the seductive siren call of gambling”.
The judge said the defendant may have harboured an honest but unrealistic view that he could have paid the money back “with the next roll of the dice”.
He also accepted there was no evidence that McGurk had spent the money on an extravagant house, cars or holidays and that he had even empted £38,000 from his joint account with his wife to spend on gambling.
It was, he said, a “very sad and distressing case” which had an addiction to gambling at its heart, leading to McGurk stealing from Bradley’s where he had been the firm’s highly trusted full-time accountant for 18 years.
Imposing the custody/licence sentence, the judge said normally there would be 50/50 split, but in this case he ordered McGurk to serve 10 months without remission, in the hope he would come out of prison “chastened”, followed by 20 months licenced supervision to help “kill off this addiction”.
The judge noted McGurk was not able to make recompense to the firm which had lost a huge amount of money.