The name Malocco is associated with a swindle by an ambitious young solicitor who was sentenced to five years in prison in the 1990s. With a new movie about to be screened in Galway, a new partner and even a new first name, David Elio Malocco hopes it is as a film-maker that he will eventually be known, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent.
In The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald observes that there are no second acts in American lives. The reinvention of Elio Malocco makes a persuasive case that there is indeed a second act in this particular Irish life, one that has experienced a meteoric rise and an even more precipitous fall, and is now rebuilt. Once an ambitious, high-profile young solicitor, Malocco was charged with and convicted of uttering forged documents to Irish Press plc. He was sentenced to five years in prison, served half that term, and his marriage broke up.
Now, at 46, he has embarked on a new career as a film-maker, having written, produced and directed two movies in the past 12 months, and he has been happily involved in a new personal relationship for the past five years.
Even his name on the credits is different - David Elio Malocco. He is, he says, more content than he has ever been in his life, and he exudes the air of a man at ease with himself.
When we meet at his home in suburban north Dublin, he says he wants to concentrate on the present and the future, and to put the past behind him.
Virgin Cowboys, his first feature film, will have its world première at the Galway Film Fleadh next Saturday. He is in the final stages of completing his second film, Magdalen, which deals with prostitution in Dublin and has been selected for the Calgary Film Festival in Canada in October. And he is already planning to make a third film later this year.
Virgin Cowboys is a lively, sardonic comedy-thriller in which a Dublin psychiatrist (played by Peter Vollebregt) and his Birmingham-born nephew (Lee Janes) exact revenge, with the help of seasoned criminals, on a corrupt banker who robs them in a share-dealing scam.
"People ask me if it's based on my own life and it's not," Malocco says, sitting in his garden on a rare sunny summer afternoon. "I'm planning a new feature now. It's called The Macaris, about an Irish-Italian family living in Dublin - and that's not based on my life, either, but on experiences of people who may have touched me in my life. I have no intention of making a film about my own life, because it's too boring."
Nevertheless, there are unmistakable personal references running through the fictional narrative of Virgin Cowboys. The psychiatrist is suspended from practice; his wife leaves him; he is charged with forgery and serves time in Mountjoy.
Dropped into a restaurant scene is a copy of Patrick, the short-lived men's magazine Malocco started after leaving Mountjoy. The film shares his own deeply cynical view of his former profession as a lawyer. And it includes a key line that would appear to mirror his own philosophy of life: "It's only after you lose everything you have that you are free to do anything you want."
The prison scenes in Virgin Cowboys work, he says, "because that's the way people speak in prison - or at least, the way they spoke there between 1993 and 1995, when I was in there. It's good to document it, because so many people have gone to prison in this country. I have a good ear, I think. I listen to people all the time."
Asked why he is credited David Elio Malocco on the film, he explains: "My first name on my birth certificate is actually Antonio, and I asked my father why they called me Elio instead, and with typical Italian logic, he said, 'Because we preferred Elio'.
"When I went to America and studied film, I assumed people wouldn't understand the name Elio, so I called myself David. As everyone I know in the film business there knows me as David, it sort of stuck with me. And my son is called David Elio, and I like the name."
He was born in Dundalk, the third of six children in a family of four boys and two girls born to an Italian immigrant, who had come to Ireland as a child, and his Irish wife. On finishing school, he went to UCD and did a Bachelor of Civil Law degree.
"I set up in practice when I was 21 and did that for about 15 years," he says. He married Jane de Valera, a granddaughter of the founder of the State. He took on controversial extradition cases involving Father Patrick Ryan and Kevin McDonald, a passport official at the Irish embassy in London. He was elected to the board of Irish Press plc, chaired by Eamon de Valera. In 1991 the company sued him, leading to the forgery charges. What motivated him?
"It was a frame of mind at the time," he says. "More money was going out of the law firm than was coming in. It's a situation people from different walks of life find themselves in, like a builder who gets a deposit to start one job and uses it to finish another.
"Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul was something people did in Ireland in the 1980s. I wish it never had happened - but I also wish I had never been a lawyer. I wish I had started making films instead of studying law."
He adds: "I have always had, and continue to have, great admiration for Dr Eamon de Valera, who has only ever had the interests of the [Irish Press] company at heart."
The charge carried a maximum sentence of seven years, and he got five.
"I served two years and six months," he says, "and then they started letting me out as a kind of part-time prisoner. It was the turning-point in my life because that's when I started writing seriously. And while I was in prison I got a first-class honours degree - I did a Bachelor of Science in cognitive psychology and child development with the Open University, and I loved that."
How one deals with being in prison is very much a matter of individual response, he believes. "I had spent five years in boarding-school and that would equip you for anything in life. I knew I was going to be in prison for some time and I asked myself what would I do to make the time fly, so I decided to do the degree and to learn all about computers and to start writing.
"It was great. It was like taking two-and-a-half years off - getting your life together, learning new skills and getting focused on what you want to do."
He did not connect with the other middle-class prisoners in Mountjoy at the time. "There were some priests and lawyers, and they weren't interested in hanging out with me for some reason," he says. "They wouldn't even talk to me, so I used to hang out with the ordinary guys in there. I got on really well in there. Anyone who would talk to me, I would talk to them. If you go to prison, I think you value your freedom an awful lot more, and you value your life and what you're doing with it. I'm enjoying my life an awful lot more now because I'm doing what I want to do. The fact that I don't make any money is irrelevant, completely irrelevant, whereas before I would only do something if it were going to make me money. Now that doesn't matter any more, as long as I can get by."
To his surprise, there were some comforts on offer in prison.
"I was there about 10 days and I was approached by a prison officer who said he had been asked by someone on the outside to look after me, and if there was anything I wanted he would get it for me," he says. "I said I didn't want anything. I thought this was some sort of set-up. Then he came up to me the next day and he asked me again was there anything I wanted.
"So I said: 'Okay, I want a bottle of vermouth, dry not sweet, and a bottle of Cork dry gin, some limes and a jar of olives, seeded olives.' The following day it all duly arrived and I had my Martinis every day. We used to have a cocktail hour at six o'clock and I would ask two or three other guys into the cell for a drink and a chat about life.
"There were a lot of people in Mountjoy who were getting drugs brought in for them - not by prison officers. We weren't interested in taking drugs. We just wanted to have a quiet drink. Everybody knew about it, but a blind eye was turned to it."
Readjusting to the outside world afterwards was difficult, but easier for him than many other prisoners, he believes.
"I was lucky because I had friends and family, but a lot of people come out and they have nowhere to go," he says. "Two years after I left prison I joined the Simon Community and I did soup runs on Friday nights - and I would meet guys I had been in prison with. They had nowhere to stay. It was terrible.
"They had no jobs. No one would give them a job because they had criminal convictions. That's the mentality in this country, even though they had served their time, paid their debt to society. Whatever chance I had, so many of them had no chance. No wonder so many of them end up back in prison. I really haven't seen any change since the Celtic Tiger. I've just seen things getting worse and more depressing for people like that."
The experience clarified and changed his perspective on life, he says. "To become a lawyer, you're trained to lie and cheat, to find out what the rules are and bend them. It's not a nice way to live your life. When I look back on it, I got some really dodgy people off, who should have gone to prison. I wouldn't want to do that job again. I've now found something that I love doing."
He studied film when he left for New York in 1992, when the storm was brewing in Dublin.
"Some people said I was on the run, but I wasn't," he insists. "The authorities knew where I was and when they asked me to come back, I did. In New York I planned to go to NYU and study psychology. By the time I got there, all the psychology classes were full up, so I looked at what classes were available at NYU and the only thing that interested me was film, and I went for that. I loved it from day one. It was very technical, but I found it very easy."
He made his début as a film director with a 22-minute short, Exordium. "I shot it on 35mm, which was really expensive," he says. "It was about apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Wicklow and about two girls who claimed to have seen her, but one of them was lying. It was a kind of psychological thriller, but I never got anywhere with it.
"I realised that I could have made a feature film for the same amount of money, especially now with digital video. I've heard people say that their short has been in 17 film festivals, but they still can't raise the money to make a feature film - so what's the point? I'm only interested in making feature films, writing the stories myself, developing them and getting good actors in to work on them."
He wrote a screenplay and sent it to an English company. They didn't like it, but asked if he had anything else.
"I came up with the idea for Virgin Cowboys and pitched it to them over the phone, and they really liked it and were interested in financing it," he says.
"I wrote it in four days and sent it over to them and then heard nothing from them. I showed it to different people, and an English investor gave me £20,000 to make a pilot. I shot that, but it was atrocious. I went back to the investor and he thought it was terrible, too, but he gave me another £20,000 and I managed to raise another £15,000, and we shot it from scratch.
'WE went to Galway Film Fleadh last year and met a couple of people there, and word got around about the film. Peter Dwan, a businessman in Dublin, offered to help us make the film. It cost £125,000, which is very little for a feature film.
"If you're working on such a low budget, you can't make a Hollywood movie, so you've got to do something completely different. This started off as something serious, but while we were making it I got a feel for it and started to make it quirkier by having the main character talk to the camera and in voiceover. The great thing about film-making is that you can do anything you like. Going to film school you learn a series of rules, but I think there should be no rules in film and that they are there to be broken."
He applied to the Irish Film Board for funding to blow up Virgin Cowboys to 35mm, making it viable for cinema screenings.
"I thought it was brilliant when they told me they were going to back it," he says. "It wasn't just for the film. It was like they were saying: 'We know what you've been through. We know you're completely different now. We like what you're doing with film.' It was just wonderful. It was like saying the slate is clean.
"My life has changed around so much. But I'm not the least bit bitter about it. I'm actually grateful that I was given a second chance, to do something I really wanted to do.
"I couldn't imagine doing anything else now. If I was still a lawyer, I would be desperately unhappy. Now I'm doing something I love and I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. It's a good feeling.
"And it proves you don't need to have a Porsche and a huge house to be happy. Those things are irrelevant."