Ted Cunningham took quite a gamble when he decided to get involved in money laundering, writes Barry Roche
A HUGE fan of Luciano
Pavarotti, who has been known
to break into an aria himself,
Ted Cunningham had shown an almost operatic disregard for his own predicament throughout the trial, displaying instead a gregariousness that was difficult to comprehend.
However, yesterday, impeccably dressed in a navy suit with a lavender shirt and tie, Cunningham stood sombre and subdued as he awaited sentence, briefly giving a thumbs up to some family members in the public gallery before being led away to start his 10-year term.
It is reasonable to assume that as the main sponsor of
Ballintra Races in Co Donegal, Cunningham, a Cork businessman, enjoyed a flutter or two on the horses. Today though, as he starts a 10-year jail term, he may well be ruing not confining his gambling to the equine world.
Of course it is debatable
what was Cunningham’s biggest gamble.
Was it getting involved in helping the IRA to launder some of the proceeds of the Northern Bank raid or was it deciding to contest the charges arising from same after making certain admissions to gardaí?
It was ironic that Cunningham should take his chance in the courts given that his grandfather, Padna, was a judge of the republican courts during the
War of Independence.
His administration of justice in his native Macroom gave rise to a local saying: “As sure as Padna is my judge.”
Locals in Macroom still tell of Padna’s decision to sentence a local 18-year-old to death for being drunk and disorderly only to accede to the doomed youth’s last request for a few pints and then join him in a libation or two before the death sentence dissolved in a drinking spree.
That same sort of roguish joviality seems to have informed much of the life and times of Cunningham, who first began to surface on the national screen in the 1990s when, after difficulties with AIB Bank, he became involved in the Farm Families Therapy Group.
Set up to assist farmers who had got into difficulties with the payments after over-extending themselves, the group campaigned around the country.
Cunningham was a prominent member, appearing on RTÉ television in the audiences of both the Late Late Show and Questions and Answers.
Always something of a wheeler- dealer, Cunningham had begun working in 1990 for an American, Ron Weisz, whose Dublin-based mortgage lending company Secured Property Loans offered high-cost, high-interest and short- term finance to people with poor credit ratings. Mr Weisz told
the Sunday Business Post in February 2005 that Cunningham was an “an excellent broker” transacting about £2.5 million worth of business over a three-year period when he covered the south of the country for the company.
But Cunningham, seeing the success of the SPL model of business, left Weisz’s operation in 1997 and two years later he established Chesterton Finance.
He offered loans to borrowers at rates of 20 per cent plus per annum and secured money by offering depositors 10 per cent per annum interest.
So far, so good for Cunningham. According to his own evidence during the trial, he invited Bank of Scotland (Ireland) chairman Phil Flynn to become a director of Chesterton Finance in 2003 to increase its profile and help bring in more business – in return for a 10 per cent stake.
Cunningham told his trial how he and Flynn had travelled to Bulgaria.
There they met freelance financial consultant Catherine Nelson and some Bulgarian businessmen with a view to setting up a mortgage lending company there similar to Chesterton.
He also claimed that three Bulgarian businessmen had come to Ireland to buy a sand and gravel pit at Shinrone, Co Offaly, which he co-owned. It was from them he said that he received the £2.3 million found by gardaí when they raided his house on February 16th, 2005.
When gardaí exactly began to suspect Cunningham of having the Northern Bank raid cash did not emerge during the trial, but The Irish Times understands they had begun looking closely at Cunningham several months before the actual robbery on December 20th, 2004.
It is not clear why precisely Cunningham began to interest gardaí at this stage but it is noteworthy that he had given some £50,000 to Tullamore jewellers John and Jack Douglas to mind in early December – before the Northern Bank robbery took place.
Gardaí and the PSNI believe that the raid on the Northern Bank involved up to 30 members of the Provisional IRA. One Garda source suggested that giving the money to the Douglases before the raid was a clever way of muddying any possible traces after the robbery.
Although Cunningham’s family had been staunch Fianna Fáil supporters, Garda Crime and Security had been aware of Cunningham for several years as he fraternised on the fringes of the republican movement, attending various commemorations and fundraising events.
They were even aware that he had sent a Christmas card to veteran IRA leader Joe Cahill, but it was only in the late summer/ early autumn of 2004 that they began to suspect that Cunningham might be about to play a more important role for
the republican movement.
Cunningham himself seemed to suggest that gardaí suspected him of association with the IRA for some time when he said that gardaí told him that they had a photograph of him and Phil Flynn with senior figures in the IRA on a farm at Ravensdale in Co Louth.
That comment by Cunningham came in the course of claiming that he had been coerced by gardaí into making an off-camera confession in which he had named Flynn “as the boss behind everything” and that he knew the money was from the Northern Bank raid.
Critically, the jury did not accept Cunningham’s claim of Garda coercion and accepted that this off-camera version of events, in which he said he got almost £5 million in four deliveries in the midlands in January and February 2005, was correct and true.
Cunningham told detectives off camera that he had agreed to take up to £10 million but when he discovered that £1.5 million of what he had received was new traceable Northern Bank notes, he refused to take any more and tried to dispose of what he had.
Gardaí believe Cunningham gave this £1.5 million to a Cork republican.
Some of the cash was later burned by another person who became anxious and set fire to it in panic at being caught in possession of the money.
Gardaí believed that a chef, Don Bullman, was more centrally involved when he was caught at Heuston railway station with €94,000 hidden in a Daz box which gardaí believe he had received in exchange for stolen sterling.
Bullman, from Fernwood Crescent, Leghanamore, Wilton, Co Cork was sentenced to four years in jail when he was convicted of IRA membership at the Special Criminal Court in March 2007.
Gardaí have always believed he was moving the money for a senior republican in Cork.