Northern Ireland: Every phase of the last 35 years of violence in the North has thrown up one or two gunmen to terrorise either the nationalist or loyalist community and earn notoriety in tabloid banner headlines, writes Brian Feeney.
In the last decade, Johnny Adair, a semi- literate, five-foot-three-inch psychotic, performed the role. For most of the 1990s hardly a week passed without the exploits of himself or members of his "teams" making the front pages of the Sunday red-top newspapers.
Adair's teams, groups of men from the desolate streets at the bottom of the Shankill Road, made up "C Company" of the Shankill UDA. Their area ran from the city end of the Shankill to Tennent Street, a distance of barely half a mile. Yet by dint of their homicidal ferocity they came to dominate the whole of loyalist west and north Belfast and by 2001 looked set to take control of the UDA in the city.
Lister and Jordan track the blood-soaked footsteps of Adair from skinny teenage leader of a gang of petty criminal ne'er-do-wells whom the UDA compelled in 1984 to join their ranks to control their criminality, to the steroid-enhanced gangster who in 1990 took over the unit which had press-ganged him.
Adair's opportunity to seize control came in 1989 when London police chief John Stevens began his inquiry into collusion between security forces and the UDA. Stevens quickly broke up the network of agents and informers the RUC Special Branch had been running for years within the UDA: they included most of that organisation's leaders in north and west Belfast. He also arrested British military intelligence's top UDA agent, Brian Nelson.
Stevens discovered to his consternation that members of British military intelligence's Force Research Unit and RUC Special Branch had been complicit in directing the targeting of UDA murder victims, ostensibly to prevent them murdering "innocent" Catholics. Who decided who the "guilty" ones were? The terrible irony was that when Stevens removed this layer of agents in the UDA leadership it left the way open for the completely uncontrollable Adair to move in with his bloodthirsty "C Company" teams to control the whole Shankill.
For the next decade, Adair's men killed scores of people, mostly Catholics, but plenty of loyalists too, victims in his power struggle. Adair killed few himself especially as police surveillance began to dog his every move, but his crazed energy drove his willing accomplices out on an almost nightly basis. In the space of less than three years, one, Stevie "Top Gun" McKeag, killed at least 14 men and women before he succumbed to a drugs overdose.
Adair's manic criminality and his frantic compulsion to run everything - racketeering, drugs, murders - ultimately led to internecine feuds in the Shankill between the UDA and UVF and then within the UDA itself which brought his downfall and imprisonment. The fact that he was able to get away with such horrendous activities on and off for almost a decade whether in or out of jail is itself a symptom of the collapse of society in the Shankill, now a wasteland of urban decay, a tragic contrast with its glory days of industrial prosperity and working-class pride. Adair's long reign also raises serious questions about policing.
The loyalist feud Adair provoked in 2000 led to half a dozen dead and almost 300 families being driven from their homes in the Shankill. The final curtain fell in spring this year when his "C Company" men murdered John Gregg, a UDA leader based in north Belfast, legendary because he shot and wounded Gerry Adams in 1984. The night before Gregg's funeral A, B and D Companies, acting out of self-preservation, combined to drive Adair's gang out of Northern Ireland.
Dillon's book also inevitably ends up dealing with Adair's murderous career and using some of the same material Lister and Jordan present. Most of Dillon's book is devoted to notorious gunmen from earlier periods. The familiar names crop up: Dominic McGlinchey, the media's first "Mad Dog"; Francis Hughes, who died on hunger strike; Billy "King Rat" Wright; and of course the group Dillon is best known for portraying, the Shankill Butchers.
To some extent Trigger Men is a scissors- and-paste job, sticking together episodes Dillon covered in detail in previous books. However, like Lister and Jordan he raises disturbing questions as a result of recent disclosures by Sir John Stevens. First is what Dillon calls "the lack of serious RUC and army scrutiny of the UDA and UVF" throughout the whole period. Secondly, both books, but particularly Mad Dog, deal with the routine, casual collusion between the security forces and loyalists.
For example, Adair regularly drove around nationalist districts spying on targets. Like all drivers he was often stopped at vehicle checkpoints, but in the case of Adair, instead of noting his identity and address, soldiers and police would regularly give him the most recent known addresses or sightings of IRA men or their associates.
Third, and perhaps most relevant in present circumstances, how is it that Lister and Jordan reveal the names and power bases of all the UDA bosses as many newspapers regularly also do, and yet none is ever charged with membership of the UDA, an illegal organisation which is opposed to the Good Friday Agreement and is not on ceasefire?
Fundamentally, the gravest question both books raise in the reader's mind is whether the security forces in the north ever seriously set out to extirpate loyalist terrorists, or whether at some level they were regarded as a class of auxiliaries.
Brian Feeney is a columnist and commentator. His most recent book is Sinn Féin: A Hundred Turbulent Years published by O'Brien Press
The Trigger Men. By Martin Dillon, Mainstream Publishing, 320pp. £15.99
Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and "C Company". By David Lister and Hugh Jordan, Mainstream Publishing, 272pp. £15.99