Fun-Lovin' Criminals

What is it that makes a good interview? That particular form of journalistic endeavour has been something of a speciality around these parts over the years. As a result, I’ve seen a lot of different inquisitors strut their stuff on behalf of Hot Press. Tall guys, small guys, fat guys, slim, some who polished their shoes and others who didn’t, girls with specs and girls without – a liquorice all-sorts box of characters and types, of greatly varying strengths, weaknesses, attention spans, dispositions, attitudes, influences and hair length.

As you might imagine, it’s been a source of considerable fascination, watching the way individual writers, from neophytes to seasoned pros, approach the task – and the differing degrees of success they achieve.

Bill Graham was one of the most revered writers ever to work for Hot Press and rightly so: you could send him to talk to anyone from a struggling purveyor of hardcore showband erotica like April South to the astrologer Patrick Moore and (as long as he made the plane) he’d deliver a brilliant piece. There might not be much in the way of quotes in it – there seldom was with Bill – but that didn’t matter. Bill understood more about most interviewees than they did about themselves and, once the deadline was looming, he could get it down in hand-crafted prose that was as full of surprises as an El Bulli tasting menu. (You’ll get a taste of it in Peter Murphy’s trawl through the Hot Press U2 archives elsewhere in this issue).

But Bill was a one-off and his technique couldn’t be replicated. Which may be just as well. Because his thing wasn’t to get the subject to open up, so much as to test what he thought about them against what they had to say and to deliver the synthesis for the reader’s delectation. In the long run, for better or worse, in general, we began to aim for a different target – that of getting those who sat down in front of the mike to be honest and frank, and, all going well, to open up and reveal themselves, their foibles and their indiscretions to the greatest extent possible. The motto was that no question was unthinkable: finding the right way to ask it was the key.

Which we have done, on and off, with considerable success. I don’t intend to get into a roll call here of all of the writers who’ve handled the brief for us: we’ve had a lot of very good interviewers on the team, including plenty that never hazarded the higher profile stuff but who still contributed immensely. The leading lights from the early days onwards know who they are. But often, when an issue of Hot Press has been out for a few days, I glance through it and am struck by just how good so much of it is, including the shorter interviews and introductory profiles on bands that are beginning to make their mark.

In a different vein, Jason O’Toole has struck a chord in recent times. Some interviewers attempt to put themselves at the centre of the action. It’s a risky strategy. Shine the spotlight on yourself, and you have to have the prose to justify the pose. Plus, if you go the confrontational route, there is a distinct possibility that the subject will simply clam up and give you the minimum. It all depends on whom you’re dealing with.

Other interviewers lay back and seem to make themselves almost invisible. As an approach, this is worse than useless, if it means that the subject gets to waffle on endlessly about things of no consequence, and all of the potentially interesting questions are either glossed over or missed entirely. But, in the right hands, it can also be a very successful angle.

The first time I spoke to Jason, I suspected that this would be his metier. He joined the Hot Press team having secured an interview with Martin Sheen. He very quickly began to notch up stories that made a national impact and he became one of our frontline interviewers, handling a plethora of headline-making tete-a-tetes – including a sensational interview with Ireland’s IT girl of the moment, Katy French. It was the beginning of a roll.

Jason also interviewed Giovanni di Stefano, infamous as the lawyer who defended Saddam Hussein, Jonathan King, Dutchy Holland and John Gilligan, amongst other high-profile criminals. After the interview, things took a curious turn. Giovanni had enjoyed talking to Jason and liked the fact that what appeared in print was a faithful reflection of what had passed between Hot Press and him. We didn’t sensationalise what had been said. What’s more, he was quoted accurately and fairly – and at sufficient length to justify the time and effort that went into it.

A short time later, Jason got a call from di Stefano. How, he was asked, would he like to interview Ireland’s most notorious criminal, John Gilligan? Jason buzzed me to see what I thought. Doing it wouldn’t be without hazards, we knew that, but it was far too interesting an opportunity to pass up and so the wheels were set in motion.

Jason handled the job impeccably. We secured one of the most sensational interviews in the history of the magazine. It attracted a lot of flak, with the Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern (himself a previous HP interviewee) going so far as to denounce Hot Press on the basis that the interview wasn’t helpful to the cause of maintaining order in the prisons. Hot Press was duly banned in Irish jails – though this ban was later lifted.

John Gilligan hadn’t been convicted of any involvement in the murder of the Sunday Independent writer, Veronica Guerin, but he was widely believed to have been the ringleader. He was public enemy No.1 here: that was reason enough for a lot of journalists and commentators to argue that no one should talk to him. Ever.

Joe Duffy was on holidays, but I spent an entertaining fifteen minutes on Liveline dodging similarly shaped bullets. This man is a criminal. He shouldn’t be given the oxygen of publicity. It’s a disgrace. No one should buy Hot Press. Newsagents should take it off the shelves. And so on.

We knew it was bullshit, especially coming from journalists. There wasn’t a newspaper, magazine or broadcaster in the world that wouldn’t carry an interview with Osama Bin Laden – and he had been responsible for the mass slaughter of thousands of people in the infamous attack on the twin towers. So what sense did it make to suggest that the fact that someone had committed – or was suspected of having committed – a crime was reason enough to impose a permanent media boycott on them?

At the time, we issued a statement making the very obvious point that you couldn’t understand crime without talking to criminals. There was, of course, a good old-fashioned journalistic aspect to the Gilligan interview: it was a scoop, which in part at least was what had the crime correspondents in a lather. But we knew we had done the right thing in publishing it also because the interview offered a remarkable insight into one of the most notorious characters ever to have claimed a headline in Ireland.

Looking back now at the John Gilligan interview, it genuinely is a fascinating read. Whether or not you believe what Gilligan has to say during the course of the interview, and in particular his denial of any involvement in the murder of Veronica Guerin, is up to the reader. But this is his story, in his own words, and it’s stitched permanently into the record. When the history of Ireland during this period is being written, and the subject of crime is being researched, this is a document to which academics, historians and criminologists will return again and again. That is one of the functions of good journalism: to lay down the foundations on which future history will be written.

It was the first in a series of interviews we carried with people involved in crime or on the periphery. Jason went to London to meet Dutchy Holland, another of the men accused of involvement in the murder of Veronica Guerin. This interview invoked none of the outrage that had greeted the Gilligan interview, and it wasn’t as detailed, as defiant or as challenging. But it was fascinating nonetheless for Holland’s admission that he had wasted his life (which came to an end last month in prison).

We had another scoop when Jason got a hold of Kieran Ducie, the man in whose house Katy French had been on the night before she died. Ducie, a 38-year-old trucker, nicknamed “the Wolf”, may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time – but he was hounded by the media and vilified on occasion, as the Gardaí and their friends in the press mounted a campaign designed to smoke him out. He needed someone to talk to that he could trust. Jason got a hold of Ducie’s number and called him. The Wolf trusted Jason and Hot Press that we would allow him to tell his story. And so we did. I remember the afternoon the issue arrived back at the office very well. Everything stopped as virtually the entire staff read the piece from start to finish. It was riveting stuff.

The last couple of years have been hugely satisfying in a number of different ways. There’s been great music writing in Hot Press, impressive photo shoots, brilliant cover stories – our two interviews with Stephen Patrick Morrissey stand out in the memory right now – and any number of big political interviews. But many of our most interesting stories have been with characters who exist in and around that grey area that is associated with the word crime.
Of their nature they are diverse, uneven and vary in their long-term significance. But that is the nature of journalism. In any magazine, or newspaper, you need a balance between stuff that is light and frivolous and the kind of weightier material that needs to be pored over and takes time to digest. What’s gratifying is that, when you bring them together, stick a good cover on them, call it Crime Ink and there’s a book in your hand, these stories do indeed add up to more than the sum of the parts. And, maybe even moreso, there is the fact that I know Bill Graham would have applauded it.

In matters of this kind, that, you might say, is the ultimate test.

Crime Ink (Merlin Books), by Jason O’Toole – a collection of material originally published in Hot Press – is now available.