Former IRA man Sam Millar swears he no longer has his half of a $7 millionheist. So who does? Gerry Moriarty reports

Sam Millar is anxious to emphasise that when he robbed Brinks of $7.4 million in New York, he wasn't doing it for his old mates in the IRA, or for Noraid, or for Sinn Féin, or any republican splinter group. "I was doing it for myself."

But the FBI never quite believed him, suspecting that some, at least, of the money went to the IRA. And when Millar was arrested with a priest, a former cop and a teacher, initial reports suggested the money was bound for the Provos. "The money was never going to Ireland; it was going to me," Millar stresses.

Millar, who claims he is now apolitical, "although I support the Good Friday Agreement", is back living with his wife, Bernie, and three children in the New Lodge area of north Belfast. He should be serving 60 years in a New York jail.

For the guts of a year, in 1993, he had about $3.5 million - his share of the heist, the fifth largest in US history - stashed first in a garage, then in an apartment in New York, with a fire-escape ladder beside the window he kept open in the apartment. "The pile was about eight feet by eight feet, and it reached the ceiling."

Millar got to spend some of it, but not a lot. He opened a comic store in the borough of Queens, for example, and it was very successful before the Feds took him away. The FBI recovered about $2 million. The other $5 million must be out there somewhere. Millar hasn't got it, he says; otherwise, he wouldn't be living in a Housing Executive home in north Belfast, trying to make a living as a writer.

As he puts it in On The Brinks, his new book about his life and the robbery, there was money, money, everywhere, but not a drop to spend.

The robbery was, as he says, "the Keystone Kops meet Laurel and Hardy". There are also elements of an Ealing comedy about the tale, which sounds perfect for a film. The protagonists are all from central casting. Based on their ethnic backgrounds, the director could call it The Irish-American-Italian Job.

Millar is obstinate, laconic and hard nosed, a typical Belfast Provo. He was in Derry on Bloody Sunday as a 16-year-old and joined the IRA shortly afterwards. The following year he was the first person to be sentenced under the non-jury Diplock courts - three years for membership of the IRA. He got out in 1975 but was back in for a 10-year stretch by 1976, caught with explosives in central Belfast.

He was one of the first to go on the dirty protest, on the blanket, and the last to quit. When the hunger strikes ended, in 1981, he was one of six who refused to come off the protest. He was still on the blanket in September 1983, when an IRA leader begged him to stop, explaining that the protest was jeopardising the planned great escape from the Maze, the 20th anniversary of which was controversially celebrated in Donegal last weekend. That did the trick. "I was happy to facilitate in those circumstances," he says.

He was released soon after, and in 1984 he travelled to New York, where he got a job as a croupier, working for Irish mafia types in the city's illegal casinos. He was good at the business, quickly rising through the ranks.

He had an Irish-American friend called Tom O'Connorwho was a security guard at Brinks in Rochester, about eight hours' drive from New York. He wondered if Millar fancied a job at the firm, away from the dodgy casinos, so he showed him around. Millar fancied the job all right, but a different job to the one O'Connor had envisaged.

"I was dumbstruck by the lack of security," he says. "If I had not seen the inside of it I would never have thought about it, but I felt this is too good an opportunity, something has to be done. Doors were held open with pencils, pizza guys coming in and the security guys saying, 'Just leave 'em there,' and all that money around, millions and millions of dollars. It was crazy."

He hatched a plan, one as basic as they come. He and his friend Ronnie, a Del Boy-type Liverpudlian of Irish extraction, would drive to Brinks, hold up the security guards and drive back to New York with the loot. Simple. But Ronnie chickened out en route to Rochester in 1987 and the robbery was aborted, much to Millar's fury.

Six years later, in January 1993, he and another friend from the casinos, Marco, an Italian-American veteran of the Gulf War, drove back along the route. Marco was game. When they got to Brinks the first person they held at gunpoint was O'Connor. The other guards put up little resistance - apart from a character he called Trigger Happy, who was tempted to draw his gun until the sound of Millar pulling back the hammer of his weapon "snapped him back to the real world".

It took just three minutes to handcuff the guards, another minute to get their van into the depot, a few more to load bags and bags of money. Thunderbirds are go, Millar thought as he prepared to drive away, but instead of zooming into the night the engine started overheating and belching black smoke. Incipient panic.

Marco twigged what was wrong: too much weight. They flung out $3 million or $4 million, then away they went, home to New York City, taking O'Connor with them as a hostage but releasing him en route. Millar says O'Connor didn't recognise him because he was wearing a balaclava. It sounds extraordinary - and his readers can believe it or believe it not.

The FBI didn't believe it. O'Connor, a former policeman, was one of the four people taken into custody as an alleged conspirator. The court found him innocent. O'Connor is back working, but it's not at Brinks, says Millar. They don't speak to each other.

The story still has many twists and turns. Millar was a free man from January until November, opening his comic store, donating money to the Special Olympics and to benevolent funds for the widows of New York's police and firemen. "Don't get me wrong, I was no Robin Hood," says Millar, ever anxious to stress that his one and only robbery was for the great cause of Samuel Millar.

The big problem was what to do with all the money. This brings Father Pat Moloney - an ascetic, bearded Irish priest who impressed Millar because he had worked with down-and-outs in New York for decades - into the complicated script. Millar asked for help, so the priest found him an apartment where he stored the money, all the way up to the ceiling.

Unfortunately, and unknown to Millar, the apartment belonged to Charles McCormack, an Irish-American teacher who was innocently brought within the embrace of this weird tale. He too was arrested, but, as with O'Connor, the court accepted he was blameless.

Millar and the priest were also arrested that November 1993. The priest would seem a totally innocent party as well, because he could argue that he thought the money was what Millar had creamed off from the casinos. He had deniability.

Millar says he was prepared to exonerate Father Pat, but his lawyer, another central-casting character called Tony Leonardo - now serving 12 years in prison after a former business partner was murdered - prevailed upon him to fight his own battle and let the priest's lawyers look after the priest.

At first Millar refused, but he changed his mind when Leonardo played him FBI footage showing the priest and two men regularly entering the apartment with empty bags and leaving with full ones. (Millar and Father Pat don't speak to each other now either.) This didn't win Millar any friends, because Father Pat's work with the poor made him a bit of a hero in New York. "There were nuns writing to me, saying: 'You're going to hell for what you've done to Father Pat.' "

The priest and the Provo were facing 60 years in jail, but it was the priest's lawyers, not hotshot Leonardo, who beat the legal system on a technicality. The case against them was heard in Rochester, but Millar and Father Moloney were arrested in New York City - where, constitutionally, they should have had the choice of having the case heard, according to the judge, who threw outthe main charges.

Millar was sentenced to 60 months, Father Pat to a few less. It got better for Millar. This was the time of the peace process; the feelings were good. President Clinton decided with some prompting from Martin Morgan, now the SDLP lord mayor of Belfast, that he should be allowed to spend the rest of his prison time in Northern Ireland. Why did Clinton intervene in an ordinary criminal case? "I haven't a clue," says Millar.

He was released in November 1997. The following year he won the Brian Moore Short Story Award. His first novel, Dark Souls, was published earlier this year by Wynkin deWorde, which is also publishing On The Brinks.

What happened to the remaining $5 million? Marco got his half of the $7.4 million, but Millar says a lawyer who was minding Marco's stash claimed to have been robbed of most of it by a cocaine addict. Again this has aroused wide suspicion but Millar says he trusts Marco.

I ask if Millar has any moral scruples about the robbery. The question surprises him, because he obviously hasn't. "I should never have done it, because I love America," he says. He salves whatever guilt he feels with the thought that although he robbed Brinks in the US, England still suffered. "The only thing that justifies it in the back of my head is that Lloyds of London had to pay the insurance bill."

As for all that money, "I keep thinking about who has got it, although I don't want to think about it any more, because I am so fed up with it", he says. "I keep thinking has somebody got it and are they away on a big cruise? Or have they bought houses or whatever? Is it stuck in a mountain somewhere? Is it buried somewhere . . . . I don't want to think about it, because it will only break my heart."

• On The Brinks by Sam Millar is published by Wynkin deWorde, £10.50