Alan McQuillan says he and his Assets Recovery Agency will make adifference, writes Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor.
So, is Alan McQuillan the new Eliot Ness to Northern Ireland's criminal underworld? He laughs.
The comparison has been made before in the rounds of interviews he is completing before assuming his position on Monday as Northern Ireland chief of the Assets Recovery Agency, the UK's equivalent of the Criminal Assets Bureau.
"Well, someone has described me as a rather larger version of Eliot Ness," he says, making the self-deprecating and self-evident point that he is a big man.
He exuded the appearance of a man relishing a new challenge, as he cleared out his desk at PSNI headquarters in east Belfast after almost 27 years a cop. He finished his career as acting deputy chief constable, having been pipped for the top job by Hugh Orde.
"Yes and no," he says more seriously of the Eliot Ness comparison. His job is to hit the 80 or so republican and loyalist paramilitary and ordinary criminal networks which run the North's multi-million-pound organised crime industry where it hurts: in the pocket.
He won't be personally ramming his way into any illicit breweries, but he will be going after the assets of paramilitaries and criminals, their money, their businesses, their holiday homes, their laundered bank accounts. Like gangland Chicago, there is no shortage of bootleggers and racketeers who have salted millions away.
McQuillan's operation is pretty tight. He is recruiting a team of 15, none of them serving police officers. They will come from British government departments and agencies, from the legal world, from Customs and Excise. Some, like him, are former police officers. Their main function will be to act as financial investigators.
CAB has a staff of more than 50 - shouldn't his operation be on a grander scale? Jane Earl, he says, the overall director of the Assets Recovery Agency, has 200 officers who can augment his team when the need arises. Still, there is an element of work in progress about the new agency.
This will take some time to bed down, although the aim of the agency UK-wide is to seize at least £60 million annually, either through seizures or tax demands.
McQuillan, as assistant director of the agency's only regional office in Belfast, will have his own seizure target. His agency comes under the umbrella of the Organised Crime Task Force, chaired by Northern Ireland Office security minister Jane Kennedy and involving the police, customs, the Inland Revenue and the British National Criminal Intelligence Agency.
With this concentrated approach to criminality, he believes criminals will begin to feel the pressure.
"Last year police seized more than £4 million in counterfeit goods. That is more than in all of the rest of the UK. I think that that is a good start."
McQuillan takes great heart from the successes of CAB, with whom he has a good relationship. In a number of ways, though, his work will be more difficult. For instance, after over 30 years of violence,there is a culture of paramilitary control in many working-class areas.
If they can bring in smuggled cheaper booze, cigarettes, fuel, CDs, DVDs, videos, counterfeit clothing to the streets, in many ways they are seen as the "good guys", he admits. Drugs, extortion, prostitution and loan-sharking is also seen as normal life on some streets. Here the general community might wish it wasn't so, but who is going to argue with say, Johnny Adair's C-Company, which says it shall be so?
Organised crime yields about £18 million for the paramilitaries, which doesn't account for the takings of the so-called ODCs, "ordinary decent criminals", according to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee of the House of Commons. It says the IRA rakes in up to £8 million, the "Real IRA" up to £5 million, the Loyalist Volunteer Force £2 million, the UVF £1.5 million and the UDA £1 million.
Many people would quibble with these figures, particularly the fairly low estimates for the UDA and UVF and perhaps the over-estimation for the "Real IRA". McQuillan says it is very difficult to quantify but reckons the £18 million figure is an under-estimate.
He says there are distinctions between IRA and loyalist paramilitary criminal operations. "The IRA, you have to say, is better organised and a lot of its money is now tied up in 'legitimate' businesses." Its revenue mainly comes from smuggling fuel, alcohol, cigarettes, counterfeit clothing, CDs, DVDs and videos, he adds.
Loyalists work this trade as well but are also heavily engaged in drugs, extortion, loan-sharking and prostitution. "As an organisation, the IRA is not involved in drugs because that would not be acceptable to its community."
He believes, however, that a number of individuals in the IRA, "some at senior level", impose a levy on drugs dealers to operate in their territory. "The reality is that if the IRA said there must be no drugs in their particular areas, then there would be no drugs, and that is not the case." He also says some IRA figures are "creaming off" funds for their own personal purposes.
During the loyalist feud, UDA leaders such as Johnny Adair and others were often featured on TV, radio and in the papers as the so- called brigadiers, without any of them protesting their innocence. So, why aren't the police just hauling them in?
The police have strict evidential tests to be met "and paramilitary leaders tend to isolate themselves from prosecution", he says. He can understand public frustration at such flaunting of wealth and criminality, but adds that the PSNI has enjoyed considerable success in tackling loyalists such as Adair and some of his henchmen.
With the Assets Recovery Agency, he expects the leaders can be squeezed. The agency will be going after the bank accounts of the criminals, demanding that they account for their cash, property and four-wheel drives; if they can't, their assets will be seized or the agency, as within its power, will impose hefty tax bills.
Married with two children, McQuillan, as with other big men, has a cheerful demeanour, despite having served through some of the most difficult periods of the Troubles. He lost good friends and colleagues through violence, yet loved the policing life.
He knows that Sinn Féin and the IRA in particular and the paramilitaries generally don't like him, but says that won't undermine his commitment. "I have been shot at by both sides, which is the epitome of a balanced Ulster man," he jokes. "It's going to be good fun. We're going to make a difference."