Loyalist maverick Johnny Adair was back in prison last night. As he is wanted dead by former UDA friends in an ongoing feud, it might be the safest place for him. Earlier this week, Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor, called on Adair at home in the Lower Shankill.
To get into Boundary Way off the Lower Shankill - Johnny Adair's stronghold - you must negotiate a couple of corners and chicanes, stepping over all the red, white and blue kerbing in the shadow of loyalist murals. His fortified home is on the far side of a semi-enclosed rectangle of houses with a paved courtyard. Difficult to access, but hardly impenetrable.
Adair is with his family inside the neatly decorated house, which is fitted with security gates and cameras.
Standing on the pavement outside, seeking an interview with Adair, I can't avoid a shudder of apprehension at the sound of a revving motorbike and the sight of a helmeted rider turning into the courtyard. But no, he's local, he's safe, perhaps some sort of lookout.
The main loyalist paramilitary icons of the past 15 years are Billy Wright, Milltown cemetery killer Michael Stone and Adair. Stony-faced Wright is dead, Stone has taken to lucrative abstract art work, which just leaves Adair. Now that he's expelled from the UDA, the organisation leadership wants him dead.
At last he emerges from his home with his trademark rolling swagger. "An interview! For an Irish newspaper!" he exclaims. Initially he refuses, but then relents.
"OK, OK, let's do it," he says.
But first he wanders around the back of his house accompanied by his friend John White, also under threat from the UDA leadership, to survey the barely discernible damage caused by a pipe or blast bomb early on Wednesday morning. Hours earlier the British army had removed the remains of the device that exploded at the back wall of his home.
His opponents sneered that he planted the bomb himself to provide cover for his failure to attend the funeral of yet another feud victim and supporter, Roy Green, in south Belfast later that day.
"Johnny gets blamed for everything," says White, who insists there was nothing bogus about the attack. Still, you'd wonder how a loyalist bomber managed to hurl the device from a parallel street over a front and back garden and two-storey house, and land it at the Adair dwelling.
"Easy. Like this," says Adair, happy to demonstrate. He adopts the left-hand aim, right-hand throw stance of a man who fired many a missile in his younger days. Squat and tanned, he's dressed casually but expensively in a grey fur-lined bomber jacket, red baseball cap, blue jeans, and brown boots.
Adair walks purposefully with White and some of his minders to another secured building on the other side of Boundary Way. Adair's dog, Rebel, trails his master.
Remember Rebel and the "UDA C-Company, Simply the Best" T-shirts he and Adair wore at Drumcree? Just a black-humoured act, according to Adair, who often takes life from an oblique angle.
"Man's best friend," he says warmly of his pet Alsatian. "His oul' head went when I went to jail. Oul' Rebel lost it, he starte chasing shadows."
Then: "C'mon, c'mon, time is money," he laughs, entering a room filled with half a dozen young C-Company members and a CCTV monitor checking on the comings and goings outside.
What's happening within the competing murderous factions of the UDA at the moment is on the border of insanity and surrealism. Rather than politics, ideology or the great Irish question, this is mainly a deadly turf war and power struggle between former allies over who runs the loyalist streets. It conjures up Al Capone's gangland Chicago or Jesse James' murderous escapades after the American civil war.
It's a strange, dangerous world that Adair inhabits. It veers between occasional comedy and much fear and terror. His enemies want to corral him in the Lower Shankill and to finally eliminate him. He insists he won't be caged in and is distinctly unimpressed with the loyalists who want to see him dead.
"Amateurs," he snorts. "These mindless thugs, because that is all they are, don't have the bottle to come and face me myself. So they come like a thief in the night. These same criminals know that I have four young children, one as young as three years," he says.
Can he survive the bloodletting? "I don't know. You never know what is around the corner. I hope I do. My life is always at risk, I always keep my guard up."
As he talks, Adair's eyes dart to and from the interviewer and the TV monitor. Constantly fired up, he's working to his own fast internal beat and, to keep pace, questions must be zippy.
Adair insists he is not involved in drugs and other criminality, but the police and almost everybody else disagree.
"I have been accused of everything from drugs to extortion to prostitution to everything, it's just ridiculous. If the PSNI have any evidence, or whatever, why don't they charge me?"
Since the feud erupted in September there have been at least five killings, several more people have been wounded, and many more forced from their homes. No side, it seems, is prepared to compromise. Efforts by churchmen and third parties at mediation are ridiculed.
Even having the most tenuous links with Adair's C-Company on the Lower Shankill or the opposing UDA leadership can result in terrible grief. Some of the victims on either side had little or no connection to the UDA or the main protagonists.
In the past, the people who most wanted to see Adair transported in a hearse to one of Belfast's cemeteries were republicans. Now that it is his own side, what does he think?
"I think it is wrong, and I feel sad that loyalists have turned against myself and John White who have spent a long time in prison in defence of this country. We have committed so much to the cause but now find ourselves on the receiving end."
Since the autumn, the PSNI has told him of 20 threats on his life, he says. This has taken a toll on his wife Gina and their four children. "They were very shaken up, as anyone would be."
Would he consider upping and leaving the Shankill? "I did not get out for the republican movement. I am hardly going to get out for a bunch of criminals," he says. "I don't mean to sound cocky but I don't fear them."
Adair says loyalist paramilitarism is in disarray because of the feuding and the racketeering, the drugs and other criminality. He blames the commanders of the other five brigade areas for that meltdown. "Loyalism is finished because of these leaders," he laments.
Speaking too freely in the past to police who were secretly taping him landed him in prison for directing terrorism. He is more cunning now, and is anxious not to say anything in this interview that could give the authorities an excuse to put him back in a Maghaberry Prison cell, although you can't help but wonder would that be the safest place for him.
I remind him of several reports saying he killed or ordered the killing of more than 20 Catholics. Is this correct? "That's something you would need to check with the PSNI," he says, neither denying the claim, nor implicating himself.
"I have nothing against Catholics," he adds, but with no great convincing emphasis. And it does not square with C-Company's record of brutal sectarian killings. In Adair's viewpoint that was taking the war to the IRA.
"Just speak to the PSNI, and they will brief you on who was responsible for most of the attacks against republicans during the conflict. One thing for sure, it was not south-east Antrim or south Belfast or any of the other [UDA brigade] areas. I am sure that the PSNI will tell you that yes, it was C-Company who were the cutting edge."
Adair insists he is for the Belfast Agreement, and that his UDA adversaries are hellbent on bringing it down. He wants the loyalist-republican war to be over, he says.
"I support the peace process. I believe it will work out in the end. I believe the paramilitaries have played their part, and through time, perhaps in five,10 or 15 years they should all be decommissioned as organisations."
The only way to end the feud is to ditch the "so-called inner council" of the UDA, he adds. "If it is to be resolved certain elements within the leadership of the UDA would need to stand down, and be replaced by a new leadership to let the UDA get back to being the good organisation that it once was."
He is withering in his comments on the leaders who want him dead. These same leaders, however, say he is being gradually worn down. Has he any concerns that he could be isolated within the Lower Shankill?
"None whatsoever. Time will tell and these people will be found out. Unfortunately they are brainwashing rank-and-file members of the UDA throughout the province to hate myself and John White. I know that most of these young fellows who turned to despise myself once looked up to myself as a hero in their eyes.
"I done my bit," Adair adds, prepared to resist his challengers. "Myself, I defended my community, my people, from the daily onslaught of republicans, and I believe I did my job well, and that I served my organisation well."
Words that could be his epitaph, but he hopes that epitaph won't be chiselled for a long time yet.