05/08/07 - Hardman to Harborne
By Lorne Jackson
Sunday Mercury

BERNARD O'Mahoney pulls up his t-shirt and shows me his most recent battle wound. A fat, crimson scar daggers a diagonal from stomach to chest, in the fashion of a Mexican bandit's bullet belt. Most of Bernard's slash marks were inflicted by thugs.

But this memento comes courtesy of the medical profession. "If you really want sliced up good, go see a doctor," says O'Mahoney. The reformed gangster almost died this year as a result of an alleged medical blunder. He claims too much air was pumped into his bowel during a routine cancer scan at Birmingham's Selly Oak Hospital, causing his lung to burst.

Some people will no doubt see this as divine retribution. After all, O'Mahoney spent most of his life bullying and battering. The hardman, now living in Harborne, Birmingham, started off as a football thug in the Midlands. Later, he was a gun-toting enforcer in South Africa, then one of the most feared gangsters in the Home Counties.

But most shocking of all were his days breaking and entering - as a soldier in the British Army. O'Mahoney enlisted in the late 1970s, to avoid a prison sentence for violent behaviour. As his parents were Irish Catholics and he was with an Irish regiment - the Enniskillen Dragoon Guards - he didn't think he would be sent to Northern Ireland. He was wrong.

Once in the thick of The Troubles, the Brummie bad boy felt right at home. "I was paid to do what I enjoy," says O'Mahoney, 47. "People were running round the streets, throwing bricks at each other. "It was football hooliganism with a uniform.

"The British Army behaved appallingly.Respectable Protestants farmers used to phone and ask us to look after their bungalows while they were on holiday, in case the IRA tried to bomb them. Smashed "When we found out, we'd go and burgle their houses and sit there watching telly. "It was better than going on patrol. We'd have their food, beer and music tapes, whatever we needed."

After completing three years in the army, O'Mahoney moved to London in 1982, where he smashed a bottle over a man's head during a pub fight. Another prison sentence loomed, so he fled the country, first to Holland, then South Africa, where apartheid was crumbling. "I signed up to this thing called Community Protection Services," he said.

"Basically, it was a private police force. Within weeks of getting there I was given a gun and uniform and sent out to patrol the streets of Johannesburg." Once again, there was a fight. O'Mahoney battered a Portuguese man with the butt of his gun. He was dumped in Deepcliff Prison, although eventually bailed. Which is when he decided to escape the country.

Back in England, he was picked up by Customs, and forced to serve his initial prison sentence of one year. Twelve months later, he promised himself that he would tread the straight and narrow path. But the road zig-zagged again, just like one of O'Mahoney's scars.

Hired as a doorman at Raquel's nightclub in Basildon, he became a key figure in the Essex Boys firm, who controlled most of the nightclub doors and ecstasy trade in the area. It was from O'Mahoney's club that tragic 18 year-old Leah Betts bought the ecstasy tablet that killed her in 1995.

A month after Leah's death, three men - Pat Tate, Craig Rolfe and O'Mahoney's partner in crime Tony Tucker, who supplied the pill that killed Leah - were shot dead in a Range Rover in rural Essex. O'Mahoney was arrested in connection with the savage murders, but never charged.

He later wrote Essex Boys, a book about the killings, which was made into a movie starring Sean Bean. Leah Betts' father blamed O'Mahoney for his daughter's death - but he feels no guilt. "Mr Betts said: 'That b*****d killed my daughter'. I thought that was absolutely outrageous," he said. "I had banned her from the club a few weeks before, so she had to send in a friend to buy the drugs.

"I don't feel bad. People have choices, don't they? "If someone chooses to take drugs, it's their own choice. It would be different if I held her down and shoved pills down her throat. "There's no way I can be held responsible." O'Mahoney hasn't quite left his violent life behind.

His new profession as an author means he researches and writes books about tough guys and gangsters. But he now despises the London criminals who were once allies. "I used to be friends with the Kray twins, but I fell out with them," he says. "They both had sex with under-age boys. As far as I'm concerned, they were sex offenders. "People down south still say they were proper gents and never dealt drugs, but they did! "They were clowns. They all are.

"I couldn't care less about gangsters. They're full of s**t, wearing stupid suits and dark glasses in the middle of winter. "It's just a pantomime - a sick circus." O'Mahoney is now more interested in taking on the criminals at their own game. Teaming up with an investigative journalist, he has worked undercover, infiltrating the British branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

"I went to an induction ceremony at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham, where the Klan had hired a room," he recalled. "About 12 guys, all wearing robes and hoods were there, and I had a secret camera, transmitting pictures. "They spotted the camera and told me to get out. "I started going down the back stairs with all these Klansmen in hot pursuit. I burst through the door into the reception area of the hotel, with my pursuers behind. "Everyone in the place started screaming. The Klan realised they were in a public place and belted back up the stairs."

O'Mahoney now divides his time between writing and looking after his mother, who has senile dementia. Analysing modern gangs, like the Midland-based Burger Bar Boys and Johnson Crew, he predicts greater bloodshed in the future. "It's totally changed," he explained. "There is a hierarchy but it doesn't last long because some kid will come along and blow the leaders away. It's really just a disorganised rabble. "I suppose it's more money for the undertakers and the florists..."

O'Mahoney has four adult children - two boys and a girl - with an ex-partner. His eldest son is a prison guard, and Dad is very proud of him. He says he would hate any of his children to follow him into a life of crime. So how would he advise young men to avoid such an existence? O'Mahoney thinks hard for a moment. Then he grins: "Always be home before nine o'clock!"