The Accidental Spy Read online

  He got a job as a lumberjack and timber buyer for several years, cutting forests along the Canadian border.

  It was 30 degrees below zero in the winter, so cold that they were forced to stop work when the machines froze.

  Through it all, Tamara was dismayed by the financial fallout between her husband and father, who never forgave what he saw as a betrayal.

  She found solace in the born-again Christian movement that was sweeping 1970s America in correction to the excesses of the 60s.

  The meetings were energetic and intense. Tamara and her friends would speak in tongues and jump up and down to the sound of frenzied drum beats. Her husband, whom she called Dave, not Joebe, would stand beside her, awkwardly clapping and looking at his watch.

  “It was a major, major problem in our marriage. I think I lost her to them,” he recalls.

  Tamara later divorced and married someone in the Christian meetings named Kenny, who had ridden the school bus with Rupert when they were kids.

  It was about this time that Rupert first met Julie Smith, whose father was a vice president of Massena Savings and Loan Association and a major political force in Massena’s town council. He also owned the town’s meat market, where Julie worked. She soon became his second wife.

  Rupert set up his own trucking company, hauling aluminium to Detroit and developing a cross-border business to Canada.

  It was the infancy of modern trucking. The interstates, like the East Coast I-95, were not yet complete and truckers would have to use local roads for 20 or 30 miles.

  The trucks had 220 horsepower diesel engines, half that of a modern 440 horsepower small pickup truck.

  A steep hill meant dropping down to first and barely reaching the top at 10 miles an hour.

  By 1980, Reagan was in power, trucking was deregulated and money started to roll in. Rupert used it to buy up as much of Massena as he could. First, there was Charlie’s Bar in the centre of town, where aluminium plant engineers mixed freely with the local motorbike gang, Satan’s Soldiers. Rupert called them Satin Soldiers to annoy them.

  Then he bought the rundown hotel across the road, because it had a bar, and later, the Boardwalk coffee shop, which he renovated and called the Wildside Café.

  Soon, he got in trouble with the Savings and Loan for a house mortgage he did not repay.

  He moved the money between accounts to escape the debt and declared bankruptcy in 1984. As with Tamara before her, Julie found that her father had been burned by Rupert.

  They moved down to St Petersburg, in western Florida, to escape the intractable financial mess, and Rupert ran his trucking company from there.

  St Petersburg, on an island reached by bridge from Tampa, was booming in the 1980s.

  The warm air, long days and bright colours were redemption from the cold air and small-town politics of St Lawrence County.

  Julie was working as a masseuse and became more and more influenced by new age spirituality.

  Her husband spent his time working out at a St Petersburg muscle gym called The Iron Work. “It was a bunch of guys with a lot of muscle and probably not a whole lot of brains,” he says.

  Its owner, Bob Hodge, was a former steroid user with a gravelly voice who had reformed and saw in Rupert an opportunity. Pantomine TV wrestling was only just beginning in the 1980s and it was hungry for the novel. He referred Rupert to a coach in Tampa who prepared fighters for TV theatrics.

  At 6ft 7 and 350 pounds, Rupert was chosen to play a caped giant who could lift other wrestlers by their spangled shorts and throw them around the ring. Rupert, always hungry for the next business that would make a fortune, signed up immediately.

  It was to be a painful experience. “When you are 350 pounds and you are repeatedly thrown on your back, you really feel it. I was real beat up. I did a few training sessions with this guy and had enough. I knew there must be easier ways to make money.”

  The following year, always searching for some unorthodox business idea, he planned to set up a gambling ship in international waters, with the help of the mafia and 38-year-old David M.R. DeValta, who lived in a high-walled Florida mansion and was a financier for General Pinochet, the dictator of Chile. At that time, Pinochet was salting off millions of dollars and hiding it in America.

  For Rupert, the idea fell apart at their first meeting.

  “I brought down this mobster from Syracuse named Guy A. Scalzi. He drove his big Lincoln down from New York because he’s scared of flying. He went out to a steakhouse with us to hear our proposal. It was me, him and David DeValta, Pinochet’s guy. Scalzi was a thug and a bad drunk. David was much more refined but also couldn’t hold his drink. So Scalzi says that he’ll run a red-hot poker up DeValta’s ass if the deal goes wrong. DeValta goes for him and the two of them are screaming at each other in the restaurant. I couldn’t have that, Pinochet’s people on one side and the mob on the other, nothing good was going to come of this.”

  But through all his gimmicks, it was the money from trucking that kept coming in. Deregulation meant that smaller trucking companies could act as agents for larger ones, and soon he was moving freight for America’s biggest haulers.

  As trucking expanded in the late 80s and into the 1990s, his marriage to Julie became more and more volatile. The couple moved up and down between New York and St Petersburg but Julie longed to stay in Florida, where her massage business and new-age beliefs found greater currency than in rural New York. They formally split in 1992.

  It had a devastating effect.

  Like Tamara, Julie was kind, thoughtful and committed and yet, for the second time, his marriage had fallen apart.

  He lost his pubs and café in New York because of time spent in Florida. Also, the trucking business was starting to fade, eaten by cheaper competition.

  With DeValta, the financier, he would go drinking and womanising in the beach bars of St Petersburg.

  Their usual was called Jimmy B’s, which blasted 1990s rock while patrons played air-guitar and knocked back shots.

  One night, he heard the sound of traditional Irish music from across the road. “I was getting tired of his horrible bar scene and suddenly I hear what sounded like bluegrass, but it’s Irish fiddle and I just connected with it. I want to hear more, because it was traditional and away from everything going on in the beach bar.”

  He wandered over to the green-coloured Irish bar called the Harp and Thistle. Inside, a band was mixing traditional Irish music with Irish rebel songs. Many Irish Americans casually supported the Irish Republican Army terrorist group and its campaign of bombings and shootings against the British state. Some gathered to sing support for the IRA, many others just sang along with the folk songs.

  “I was just curious,” Rupert recalls. “I knew nothing about Ireland, but I liked this music. It seemed pure and had some meaning. So I left the beach bar and went over to the Harp and Thistle. It was the biggest decision of my life.”

  CHAPTER 2

  He could barely hear her above the rebel songs, the cheers, the stomping of feet and the clink of glasses.

  She had fiery red hair, curled to the shoulder, sallow skin and piercing eyes. She danced around his giant bulk. Her name was Linda.

  Rupert had been a regular at the Harp and Thistle for several months.

  The owners, Pat and Bob Packer, built the pub in defiance of the bland beach bars around them. Only Irish traditional or folk music was permitted and there were live acts five nights a week. Searching for authenticity, the Packers pulled out the cigarette machine, pool table and jukebox and the TV was only switched on Monday nights. Anyone who wandered in from the beach wearing a bikini or shorts had to cover up with an oversized Harp and Thistle T-shirt.

  The main entertainment was the music and Pat herself, who liked to dress outlandishly and would drag customers out to dance. She was always in search of the exotic, the carnival, to keep the energy alive.

  Michael Jones, the barman, was a former seminary student, who dressed as a monk wh
ile legally marrying people in the bar, to cheers from the crowd. Pat first met him when he and two nuns came into the bar dressed as clowns and did some impromptu juggling.

  He was now a semi-professional magician and would bring Gina, his sawn-in-half lady, into the pub to entertain the crowd when they weren’t performing at his revue show further down the beach. He also performed free tarot readings and illusions for the customers while serving in the bar.

  In Linda, Pat found a fellow party animal. When not working, Linda was in the Harp and Thistle, dancing with Pat and her friends and occasionally going up on stage to sing.

  “Pat was never in a bad mood and she loved to be at the centre of everything. Pretty soon, we had people coming from Michigan, Boston and New York just to spend St Patrick’s Day with us,” remembers another barman at the time, Sean Nordquist. “They wanted an Irish community in Florida and when they found it, there was an explosion of people – students, retirees, tourists, people walking by, it was a real big party.”

  Every four years, Pat dressed head to toe in red, white and blue for the Republican National Convention, where she loved to be interviewed by reporters about her devotion to presidents Reagan and Bush.

  Children were welcome in the bar and would be given colouring books and markers in exchange for doing Irish dancing on stage. The local running group started and finished at the pub, where Pat offered them Guinness or cocoa.

  At the back of the bar was a cottage occupied by a man named Pelican Joe, who walked around with a chainsaw in a shopping trolley, cutting slabs of wood into the shape of pelicans for $50 a time.

  His eccentricity was too much, even for Pat. He was barred from the bar after slashing all four tyres of her Cadillac. After his death, the Packers moved the touring musicians into his house. The Guinness Duo, Rupert’s favourite, were a husband-and-wife act flown in from Prince Edward Island, Canada, for six weeks at a time. One visiting Irish musician was pulled over by a Florida traffic cop, who discovered he only had an old-fashioned Irish driving licence. The cop escorted him to the pub and stayed for his session. The cop, too, became a regular.

  Politics in an Irish American bar is complicated.

  The Harp and Thistle sponsored pro-IRA bands when they played at festivals in Tampa, but never wanted them performing in the bar.

  Bob, an ex-navy man, was adamant that the bands could play rebel songs, but there were to be no overt displays of support for the IRA and strictly no fundraising for the IRA, Sinn Féin, Irish Northern Aid or a multitude of front groups.

  “There were IRA sympathisers there but there were also a lot of English, who definitely were not of that persuasion,” remembers Nordquist. “You couldn’t have that with so many tourists and British retirees coming in and out.”

  The Harp and Thistle was so successful at luring away customers that the beach bar across the road launched an embargo, refusing to allow Harp and Thistle customers to come over to buy cigarettes. The beach bar would order a tow truck if any of the weekend hordes dared to pull into its cark park. Even wearing a T-shirt from the Harp and Thistle or any other Irish bar led to eviction.

  The Guinness Duo were blasting out ‘Rathlin Island’ when Rupert suggested that he and Linda go out to the deck to talk. It was summer. Outside, the heat of Florida mingled with the stolid sweat rushing out from the bar. Sand blew up from under the deck.

  Her full name was Linda Vaughan. She was a staffer for a local state senator and she had been chairwoman of the Paul Tsongas For President campaign in Florida.

  Senator Tsongas, the most liberal of the mainstream Democratic candidates, had stunned political commentators by winning the New Hampshire primary.

  Linda had been busy organising fundraisers and rallies for him in Florida. If he could beat Bill Clinton here, he would likely win the nomination, and the White House. Linda might be chosen as a White House staff member as a reward.

  Sometimes she was at the podium with Tsongas, other times she was at the back of the auditorium, telling reporters that the Tsongas campaign was sure he could beat Clinton and retake the party for the liberal wing. Clinton won the state but Linda had shown she could run a major campaign. Now, dancing in the Harp and Thistle, she was letting go after an exhausting political season.

  The first night they talked, Rupert discovered that Linda was also a lobbyist for Irish Northern Aid, or Noraid, the American political representative of the IRA. “She was beautiful and she was smart and exciting,” Rupert recalls. “She talked a lot about the cause in Ireland. I played along.

  “She was done with her Paul Tsongas campaign since he was out by then and she was working on a congressional campaign for another Democrat. She was staying in a condo in Sarasota, which was a fairly long drive for someone who had been drinking. So, being a gentleman, at the end of the night I invited her home. Things developed from there. I discovered she was really liberal and really republican, in the Irish sense. So I tried to impress her with my knowledge of Ireland. I was having to learn a lot about politics.”

  “Linda was always out fighting for a cause,” remembers her best friend, Barbara DeVane, who had campaigned with her since the 1970s. “When we weren’t doing that, we were partying. Linda was an absolute party animal and she was magnetic for both men and women because she had so much energy. I often heard about the Harp and Thistle, because she loved Irish things, but there was a party going on somewhere every night of the week.”

  Rupert was always a Democrat but was on the periphery of the system looking in. Linda, sophisticated, wild, hedonistic and rebellious, was at its core. She asked about his views on all kinds of issues. He was intrigued by her and her politics.

  “At the time, there was a battle between the progressives, like us, and the Dixiecrats, for control of the Democratic Party in the south,” says Barbara. “Tallahassee, the state capital, was very progressive but all around us, in the rural counties, were Dixiecrats, who were real southern, conservative Democrats. Blue Dogs, they are also called. A lot of them defected to the Republicans in the mid-1990s Republican Revolution and Jeb Bush was elected governor. I despised them, and so did Linda, and we were trying to take the party from them.”

  Pat and Linda personified the two wings of Irish American life: the older conservative pro-life and low-tax self-employed and the younger, progressive wing that saw the Northern Irish problem not through lachrymose ballads and shamrock jerseys, but as a political issue that could be solved, violently if necessary.

  The previous summer, Linda was guest speaker at the IRA hunger strike commemoration in Bundoran in the north-west of Ireland, in which she spoke of Irish America’s unyielding support for the IRA’s armed struggle. “She was so excited about making the speech and about speaking in Ireland, she really was committed. Only those close to her could work out that she was an IRA supporter. She pretty much let me fill in the gaps to what was going on,” said Barbara.

  Dating her from the first night he met her, Rupert was trying to catch up with Linda’s social life and her politics.

  “I was impressing her with a little knowledge of Irish republicanism combined with a lot of feigned fervour. It was a winning strategy.”

  He invited her to the Cayman Islands on holiday.

  “As usual, because of my size, I had my knee in the aisle a bit. The flight attendant came down the aisle and hit me with the cart, it split my knee open. So Linda and I spent a few days in the Cayman Islands with me not being able to bend my knee and in pain. I could drink but it hurt to have sex. That was real bad luck.”

  Linda introduced Rupert to Barbara DeVane over breakfast. She was excited because it looked as if she was about to succeed in her long struggle to have Tallahassee twinned with Sligo in the Irish Republic. The organising committee had a budget and she was allowed to travel to Sligo at least once a year. She invited Rupert to come. He agreed immediately.

  What united them apart from physical attraction? He wasn’t a dancer, and wasn’t sophisticated or overtly poli
tical. He was big and protective and his blue-collar simplicity was a break from the Florida politicos, brokers, reporters and scammers who filled her answering machine, looking for dates.

  She and Rupert were battling the system, as they saw it. She, with a college degree and a career in politics, was fighting against the Blue Dogs and the Republicans for the Equal Rights Amendment and tightening gun control. Rupert’s battle was far more nebulous, but equally intense. It was against the system run by men in suits, who were trying to pin him down with tax and mortgages, rates and penalties. He had spent his whole life trying to find a way to escape the system, but never knowing how.

  What they had in common meant that her world would become his, that the definable goals of her anti-establishment politics would seep into his innate feeling of being wronged, and that he would attach himself to one of her causes.

  “We were kinda hoping he would get involved in the liberal causes here in Florida, fighting for women’s rights or for the environment,” says Barbara DeVane. “We hoped he would get on board with Linda’s ideals about taking the Democratic party from the Blue Dogs, but it wasn’t to be.”

  *****

  “Ah hello, Linda! How are ye?”

  Vincent Murray leant across the bar to give Linda a peck on the cheek and, looking up, shook hands with Rupert.

  “This is David. He’ll be with me here for a few days.”

  “Welcome to Ireland.”

  Murray, who was then a member of Sligo town council for Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, raises his hands to show me his first impression of Rupert.

  “He comes into a bar and he’s this huge big tall man. You think: Jesus, he’d be a great full back, you know? He was a nice, friendly big fella.”

  Murray’s accent, once hard and Northern, has softened over the years since moving an hour south of the Irish border.

  His bar in the centre of Sligo was festooned with Gaelic football and republican memorabilia. On stage in the bar was Sean Sands, brother of the IRA’s greatest martyr, Bobby Sands, singing republican ballads.