`Speedy" is a common enough nickname among drug abusers, usually denoting something to do with the use of amphetamines. But Brendan "Speedy" Fegan was actually quick on his toes and liked to drive fast cars.
Two years ago he was surrounded by RUC drugs squad officers on the Shankill Road as he was apparently making a drugs deal with two local loyalists. The loyalists were quickly collared but in the confusion Speedy disappeared. The street was sealed off and it seemed clear he couldn't have escaped. No doors had opened.
The police searched the street for half an hour before one officer lifted the lid off a bin close to where the arrests were made and found Speedy crouched inside. If he had drugs with him he had also been able to hide them under the noses of the police. The three were released shortly after without charge.
The disappearing act apart, it was remarkable to find a young Catholic man doing business with members of a loyalist organisation which has a history of purely sectarian violence against Catholics, and to be conducting his affairs with them in the loyalist heartland of the Shankill Road.
Fegan, then only 20 or 21, had already risen to become one of Northern Ireland's most efficient drugs dealers. Not only that, but he was consorting with organised criminals in Dublin, particularly the gang which murdered Veronica Geurin, as well as loyalists who, only a few years earlier, would simply have murdered him because of his religious background.
If this wasn't risky enough, he was also acting as an informant for both the RUC and the Garda, passing on information about other drug dealers and, presumably, intelligence on republican and loyalist paramilitaries.
And if that wasn't enough, both Fegan and his friend and drug-dealing associate, Brendan "Bap" Campbell, were also involved in a running row with the Provisional IRA, regarded as one of the world's most efficient and deadly terrorist organisations. At one point, Fegan and Campbell acquired hand grenades and attached them to the gate of the Sinn Fein offices in Andersonstown.
The IRA caught up with Campbell as he left a restaurant on the Lisburn Road in Belfast in February 1997. He received the customary multiple gunshot wounds to the torso and the coup de grace to the head when he fell to the ground. The lame attempt at evading blame - by adopting the cover-name Direct Action Against Drugs - failed to cover up the IRA's responsibility, and Sinn Fein was expelled from the Stormont talks for two weeks. It was a highly embarrassing moment for the party leadership.
Fegan should have chosen this same moment to quit Northern Ireland. His friends in Dublin had fled to Amsterdam and the Costa del Sol after murdering Guerin. He could have joined them and still be living the hedonistic life of the exiled drug dealer. But, then, that mightn't have suited his live-fast-die-young character.
He went straight back to business, making further loyalist contacts - including people who were close to the (since assassinated) Loyalist Volunteer Force leader, Billy Wright.
And he continued to court trouble. He fell out with his mentor, the man who recruited him into the drugs business, Paddy Farrell, after Farrell found out it was Speedy who had nicked a large consignment of his cannabis in Dundalk in summer 1997. Farrell began to gear up for a fight with Fegan and tried to import a load of handguns with a cannabis consignment from Amsterdam, but these were discovered by Customs in Dublin docks.
Farrell was a much bigger dealer than Fegan and could not allow himself to lose face to the young upstart. Fate intervened, however, when Farrell's girlfriend, Lorraine, blew his head off with a shotgun as he lay in bed, naked and with a blindfold on, awaiting something quite different. Lorraine (also named Farrell, though no relation) then killed herself. She may have become unbalanced because she suspected he was about to dump her. A week earlier, while she was acquiring the shotgun, she had also purchased a grave in a Drogheda cemetery.
Fegan's reprieve could only be temporary, however. He fell out with another dangerous young loyalist drug dealer from east Belfast, a man who is on the RUC suspect list for attempting to murder the notorious Shankill Road UDA leader, Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, two weekends ago as he attended a UB40 concert in Belfast's Ulster Hall while on parole from prison. The .45 handgun which was pointed at Adair's head misfired and the bullet only broke the scalp.
Last February, the same gun may have been turned on Fegan as he emerged from a new apartment block in south Belfast. Several bullets hit Fegan, one causing a serious enough shoulder injury, but the others bouncing off his bullet-proof vest.
Fegan was only a minute's drive from the casualty ward of the City Hospital but he chose, instead, to drive in the other direction, past one police station to Musgrave Park RUC station where, it is presumed, the undercover police who "handled" him worked. They brought him to the hospital.
Similar indications of Fegan's working relationship with the Garda ana emerged a year into the investigation of Veronica Guerin's murder, when detectives raided one of the gang member's girlfriend's apartment. They found Fegan on the couch, canoodling with the other man's girlfriend, and some lines of cocaine on a coffee table. He was arrested, but within a few hours was released, apparently at the behest of drug squad officers. He took off back North in an open-topped sports saloon.
Despite the precautions Fegan was taking - rarely staying in the same place for more than one night and wearing body armour - his demise had been predicted from the time the Provos killed "Bap" Campbell.
He was too flash for his own good and it was well known in Newry that his latest passion was gambling on pony trotting. He had bought a good quality pony and was betting heavily on a race meeting near the Warrenpoint Road early last Sunday. He was in the company of a group of young travellers, all in exuberant mood, in the Hermitage public house when the two gunmen called. "It's the Provies," were his last words.
While Sinn Fein sources were feeding journalists with stories that their military wing was not responsible, the consensus among the better informed sources in the North this week was that the IRA killed Fegan. He was the 11th drug dealer killed by them since calling their first ceasefire.
Strangely, Fegan's death is an indication of how "normal" life is coming back to Northern Ireland. Since the ceasefires, the drugs trade, which had been artificially suppressed by the threat to dealers from the paramilitaries, has flourished. Belfast now has the beginnings of a heroin problem with three overdose inquests so far this year.
In most cases, the paramilitaries now tend to turn a blind eye to drug dealing, though some have switched career paths, as it were, and are now controlling trafficking in several parts of the North. Fegan could probably have survived a little longer, had he not picked a fight with the IRA, and let so many people know he was betting on the ponies last Sunday.