Billy Wright once boasted that he was arrested and interrogated more than any other loyalist in Northern Ireland.
However, despite the widespread belief that he was directly involved in more than a dozen killings, he was never convicted of any of them.
Last March, he was finally sentenced to eight years for threatening a Protestant woman in his hometown of Portadown.
Known as King Rat, a nickname under which he gave press interviews in the early 1990s, he came to represent the most ruthless face of extreme loyalism. He unashamedly justified massacres of innocent Catholics at Greysteel and Loughinisland, saying they were a response to IRA violence and "that's just war".
Wright's media profile grew alongside his reputation as a hardliner in the mid-Ulster area. After his role in the Drumcree crisis of 1996 and the killing of a Catholic taxi-driver during the stand-off, he was expelled from the UVF and ordered to leave Northern Ireland within 72 hours or face "summary justice".
Wright ignored the death threat from the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC), the umbrella body of the UVF and UDA which called the loyalist ceasefire in 1994, and went on to form his own Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).
A public rally condemning the CLMC threat against Wright and another loyalist dissident Alex Kerr was held in Portadown, during which Wright told his supporters he was "not afraid to die".
The former DUP MP, Rev Willie McCrea, shared the platform with Wright, saying he was there to defend democracy and the right to freedom of expression.
At the time, Wright told journalists that he had already survived numerous murder attempts by the IRA, and added: "If I die, then I will die believing what fellow unionists believe in."
His "loyalty" was questioned in Belfast, where the LVF failed to woo significant numbers. Graffiti appeared regularly on the Shankill Road, claiming Wright was working for the British secret services.
When LVF inmates demanded better conditions in their wing at the Maze prison earlier this year, sources in the PUP, the political wing of the UVF, accused the Northern Ireland Office of giving in to "a bunch of thugs".
Rev McCrea was not the only mainstream politician to brush shoulders with Wright. Ulster Unionist Party leader, Mr David Trimble, admitted holding talks with him during the Drumcree stand-off of 1996, at which the dissident loyalist played a leading role.
A police officer later told The Irish Times how Wright had orchestrated a protest in Portadown at the time: "Billy had about 300 drunken yobs around him. When he told them to sing, they sang. When he told them to sit, they sat. "When he told them to stop shouting, they stopped. Whatever Billy told them to do, they did."
By this time Wright was notorious, and his shaved head, heavily-tattooed arms and menacing stare were well-known throughout the North.
Many Catholics breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally convicted in March for threatening to kill a Protestant woman during a punishment attack on her daughter's boyfriend in Portadown in 1995.
It was widely believed however, that he continued to plan LVF attacks from inside the Maze.
During his trial, Wright maintained he was innocent and claimed his arrest was a "vindictive" action by the RUC and a payback for Drumcree.
Wright, who was born in 1960, always claimed to be religious and was a lay preacher for a time. He didn't drink or smoke and was said to have banned swearing in the LVF wing of the Maze.
He came from a broken home, and after his parents' separation, when he was six, he spent some years in a welfare home in south Armagh.
In media interviews, he recounted learning Irish history and playing Gaelic football as well as soccer.
He also maintained that the 1976 IRA Kingsmills massacre in south Armagh, in which ten Protestant workers were killed, was a turning point in his life. Wright then joined the youth wing of the UVF and, as a teenager, was imprisoned for six years on a hijacking and arms charge.
He was not convicted as a paramilitary but served his time in UVF wings. Three relatives, an uncle and two in-laws, were later killed by the IRA.
At the age of 21, he was charged but later acquitted of the murder of a man in Armagh.
Last year, he estimated that he had spent at least 12 months of his 36 years in RUC interrogation centres, where he was said to be "unbreakable".
Instead of responding to questions, he would whistle The Sash.