BACKGROUND:After showing early promise at football 'Rossi' Walsh turned to gang crime and fighting legal battles, writes CONOR LALLY,Crime Correspondent
SOME OF the escapades of 62-year-old Dubliner Stephen “Rossi” Walsh have gone down in gangland folklore.
But that carefully cultivated reputation as a Robin Hood figure, a working class thorn in the side of the Garda and “snooty legal profession”, has been supplanted by the knowledge he is child rapist.
Rossi Walsh has lived most of his life around the Dublin south inner city suburbs of Irishtown, Ringsend and Pearse Street.
He showed promise as a talented footballer as a young man, playing for League of Ireland side Shelbourne FC and taking trials for Arsenal.
He also coached the game. He is nicknamed Rossi after Paolo Rossi, the Italian striker in the 1982 World Cup winning team.
But his talent at football soon gave way to a life of crime and regular forays into the law, during which he gave legal advice to fellow criminals, repeatedly took on the State and sometimes won.
His first convictions were for gangland crime, twice for armed robbery in the mid 1970s, as well as larceny and assault. He also ran protection rackets in the 1980s.
On September 12th, 1992, the then 42-year-old Walsh was almost killed when an arson attempt on a pub went wrong and the building exploded while he was still inside. He was buried in the rubble, his hair singed and the clothes burned off his back.
On being rescued from Collins Pub on Ballybough Road in Dublin’s north inner city, Walsh gave gardaí a false name. He claimed he was one of four or five people drinking late in the pub when “the place exploded”.
His trial the following year was conducted in the Special Criminal Court, though there has never been any real evidence to suggest he belonged to a terrorist organisation. Walsh, who also uses the name Stiofáin Breathnach, dismissed his defence team during the trial and represented himself.
The State contended Walsh had doused the pub with petrol and was about to set it alight when an electrical spark combined with petrol fumes to cause an explosion. Walsh claimed during the trial he could not recall what happened. He said he could have been kidnapped and beaten and then put on the premises “in order that damage be done to me or set up by others to look as if I committed this crime”.
The pub owner, Christopher Collins, told the trial that he had been threatened a month earlier that his pub would be “left like a car park” but said he did not know who had threatened him.
The court heard there was a claim for damages against Lloyds of London under an insurance policy.
Walsh, a married father of three, was sentenced to 15 years for the arson attack. He had 10 previous convictions at the time, stretching back to his teenage years.
When imprisoned he was living with his family in a four-bedroom house in Sandymount, south Dublin, despite having no legitimate income. He later moved to nearby Sandymount Castle Park, where properties reached almost €2 million during the boom.
He was first jailed with terrorist inmates in Portlaoise Prison before being moved to Cork, Limerick and finally Wheatfield prisons.
While on bail awaiting trial for the pub explosion, he had a number of brushes with the law.
He was banned from driving for three years for refusing to give a sample when stopped for drink driving.
In February 1993 a judge claimed Walsh was running a “dial-a-witness” scheme.
He was advising people how to set up false personal injuries claims – mainly by driving vehicles with up to five occupants very slowly into road works – and then putting them in touch with people who would go witness for them.
When the Law Society investigated it was found Walsh had referred 22 personal injury cases to a legal firm.
While on bail awaiting trial for the pub arson attack, Walsh assaulted two girls and three women for which he was later jailed for two years.
Walsh’s daughter, aged 12 years at the time, became involved in a row with other children in a park in Ringsend.
When two of the girls were later pointed out to Walsh he stopped his car and got out and punched one girl, aged 15, in the face before slapping a 13-year-old in the face. When challenged about his actions in a pub, he assaulted three women, one of whom suffered a fractured nose and two black eyes.
Walsh took pride in studying the law and specialised in involving himself in a wide range of cases.
He once tried to get the courts to agree to conduct an appeal into a conviction he had for riding a bike through a red light. He planned to represent himself.
He gave legal advice to inmates in prison, with some of them asking Walsh to represent them in court. During his periods of freedom he was a regular feature hanging around the courts in Dublin advising fellow criminals on their cases and people involved in personal injury cases.
In 2000, while still in prison, he took a case to the Supreme Court and won voting rights for inmates. While the State appealed and won, prisoners today have voting rights.
Between 2002 and 2004 he became involved in judicial review, High Court and then Supreme Court proceedings challenging a condition of his temporary release from jail that he must be handcuffed to a prison officer when going to visit his sick mother in a nursing home. He lost.
In 2005, when he should have been serving a 12-month sentence for assaulting a prison officer, he challenged the legitimacy of the warrant used to detain him. He won the case and walked free from court.
In 2008, when the rapes he has now been jailed for were being investigated, Walsh went on the run for a time but was tracked down and taken into custody.
He will be aged 70 on release and is very unlikely to return to his south inner city stomping ground for fear of being attacked or shot by those same criminals who had often turned to him for legal advice.