Where the X#%$@ is this bank?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Here’s how life sometimes works.

Richard O’Rawe is a former IRA operative who was imprisoned first for bank robbery, and later for political activity, in the Long Kesh, Ireland penitentiary during the 1981 hunger strike by prisoners, which resulted in the death of ten prisoners.

O’Rawe was the IRA’s press officer for the prisoners, and years later would write a bestselling book about the grueling experience, BLANKETMEN. He also wrote the biography of Gerry Conlon, IN THE NAME OF THE SON. O’Rawe still lives in Belfast.

Now he has a new book. Fiction. And it is getting raves.

NORTHERN HEIST has been called “Riveting” by Publishers Weekly in its starred review, which deemed it "a heist thriller full of sharp twists and gritty dialogue.” It was also praised by The Wall Street Journal.

The fictional story? James “Ructions” O’Hare puts together a crack team of thieves and money launderers in 2004 to rob the National Bank in Belfast. The take: over 25 million pounds—if Ructions can pull it off. But the Provos—the Provisional IRA—will expect half of the haul if they learn of the heist. And so Ructions decides to simply not tell them... But can it ever be that simple?

The story is based on the actual robbery in 2004 of a Northern Bank in a suburb of Belfast. The thieves got away with 26.5 million pounds. To this day, the case has never been solved.

Want to hear more?

Where the X#%$@ is this bank?

by Rick O’Rawe

In 1976, the British government decided to criminalize the freedom struggle in Ireland by criminalizing the IRA and INLA prisoners. As an IRA volunteer, I had just been sentenced to eight years imprisonment for robbing a Northern Bank on the outskirts of Belfast. It was a risky operation because the bank was twenty miles from our base, which made our run-back very precarious, and escape highly improbable. 

Had I have had the benefit of a dummy-run beforehand, I’d have told my IRA superiors that they were sending us on a suicide mission. Moreover, we must have passed a dozen banks to get to it. In fact, my abiding memories of the trip to the bank was, ‘Where the xxxx is this bank?’, and ‘Why can’t we rob that [closer] bank?’


And so, after I was captured, in 1977 I was sentenced to eight years in Long Kesh/Maze prison. In the end I served six.


I had long been intrigued by the Northern Bank robbery that had taken place in Belfast in December 2004, when £26,500,000 was taken out of its vaults. And the perpetrators got clean away with the dough! Most of it is still unrecovered.


It may not be politic to say this, but at the time, the job struck me, in terms of its professionalism, as, ‘A work of art’. Such was the ingenuity behind the robbery that I believed the only people in Ireland capable of pulling off a job like this was the IRA. Of course, that evaluation has to tempered by the reality that innocent people were traumatized and victimized during this robbery. Meanwhile, the security forces on both sides of the Irish border agreed with my assessment.


So how did I go from believing the IRA had carried out the robbery, to opening up the prospect that an individual like ‘Ructions’ O’Hare —my protagonist in NORTHERN HEIST—could have put it together? 

One evening in early January 2005, I happened to be sitting in a bar in Belfast with my daughter, Berni, and the thought struck me, ‘What if the IRA didn’t do it?’ We discussed a scenario whereby an ordinary decent criminal (ODC), a mastermind, could have put together a special team to pull off the job... and, within an hour, the protagonist for my book, James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare, had drawn breath—although he wouldn’t actually appear in HEIST for another 12 years, due to my nonfiction book writing.


I’ve always believed that the first and last lines of a book are the most important. Unwittingly, Berni gave me the first line when she laughingly recalled telling a nephew that he had ‘lazybonitis’. Thence the first line of the book: ‘They say lazybonitis is in the blood. It’s not in James ‘Ructions’ O’Hare’s blood. Not when it comes to robbing banks’.


But there was very little of my personal experience in the carrying out of the story’s robbery. I did not confer with anyone other than my daughter when researching and writing the book. What I did do was to try to keep the storyline as close to the actual 2004 Northern Bank robbery as possible.



HANK: Well, there’s some interesting research. Questions, anyone?

 

By the way, the Wall Street Journal says; "Full of double and triple-crosses . . . Northern Heist’s deeds and details seem as real as a smashed kneecap, while its stopwatch tension, heightened by present-tense voice, is reminiscent of such classic caper films as 'Rififi' and 'The Asphalt Jungle."

Friend of Jungle Reds Reed Farrel Coleman says: ”As authentic as a jar of Guinness and as real as an exit wound. A fast-paced, uppercut of a novel.”

And a copy of NORTHERN HEIST to one lucky commenter!


Questions, anyone?