Groom remembers night he was kidnapped with beloved charge
SMALL details stick in Jim Fitzgerald’s mind from the night he and Shergar were kidnapped.
He had just returned to the head groom’s house in the grounds of Ballymany Stud at about 8.30pm after checking the horses one last time as he always did before settling down for the night when there was a loud knock on the door.
Jim’s teenage son, Bernard, got up to answer it and was roughly pushed aside by two masked men with guns. “One said sorry,” Jim recalls. “I remember it the same as if it was yesterday.”
‘Sorry’ couldn’t cover for what Jim and his family were about to endure. The men announced they were taking Shergar and ordered Jim out into the yard to get the horse.
He obeyed without question, mindful of the gun pointing at his wife, Madge, and the two youngest of the couple’s six children, eight-year-old Patrick and Gillian who was just five.
In the yard, Shergar was led into a horse box attached to a waiting car carrying three or four more gang members and Jim was bundled into a second vehicle. Madge was warned to tell no one what had happened if she wanted to see her husband again.
Both vehicles pulled out of the yard, through the gates of the stud and into the dark night leaving behind a mystery that has defied illumination since.
It was 25 years ago today, February 8 1983, and Ireland was going through a rough patch.
Events north of the border were grim and deadly and in the south, the unemployment rate was 16% and rising. Good news had to be celebrated wherever it could be found and Shergar was a welcome excuse for a party.
The young stallion, owned and bred by billionaire horse breeder, the Aga Khan, at Ballymany near the Curragh in Co Kildare, had become a national hero and international sporting legend over a few months in 1981 in one of the most extraordinary debut seasons ever on the flat.
In June that year, he won the Epsom Derby by the longest distance in the history of the race and by the end of the summer, he had achieved the near impossible triple of the Irish Derby and the King George VI too.
Soon after, the Aga Khan announced he was retiring the three-year-old prodigy to stud and Shergar was returned to Ballymany.
A civic reception was held in nearby Newbridge and Shergar was paraded up the main street to the sight of flag-waving schoolchildren and the sound of cheers.
Jim Fitzgerald didn’t get to go to the parade. He was hard at work at Ballymany as he had been since the age of 16 when he joined his father, also Jim, as groom at the prestigious stud.
By then it was second-nature to the younger Jim who succeeded his father as head groom in the 1960s, as he had been born yards from the stables and had a brother also working there.
“When you like what you’re at, it’s no hassle,” he says now of the dark early mornings and cold late nights caring round-the-clock for bloodstock that could amass more from running one good mile than he could ever hope to earn in a lifetime of labour.
“I just took the job as a job, first on the farm and then with the horses but it took me a while to feel anything for it.”
He remembers the moment his feelings changed. He was sent to the Newmarket sales in 1947 and spotted a grey colt called Migoli who would go on to win the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and become a valuable sire.
“I can still remember the horse’s face and him looking at me. Something got me. I couldn’t explain it but I knew then it wasn’t just a job.”
Shergar got to him too although, ever the professional, Jim showed no favouritism.
“You cared for them all to the best of your ability. But I did like Shergar. He settled in well and he was a nice horse to do anything with.”
It was that common or garden good nature combined with elite athleticism that made the horse so popular. Endearing rather than imposing, he wasn’t particularly elegant, had that clumsy white blaze spilling down his face, sported two odd eyes and was a bit on the short side.
“Shergar wasn’t big, no, but if they’re good enough, they’re big enough in my book,” Jim says.
He felt sickened as he was forced at gunpoint to take the horse from his stable and guide him into the crude box.
“They both had guns but one was very aggressive and the other wasn’t,” he says recalling the one who had apologised in the doorway of his home.
“He was a bit helpful. He helped me to be relaxed. I suppose in every walk of life, you get some is worse than others.”
To Jim’s relief, when he was finally dumped out on the side of the road with orders not to look back, he found himself in the same county and on the outskirts of Kilcock village about 30 kilometres from home.
He got to a phone and called his brother, Des, asking him, without offering any explanation, to come and pick him up.
It was midnight when Jim returned home and found his family shaken but safe. Only then could he raise the alarm, rousing the stud manager, Frenchman, Ghislain Drion, to tell him the barely believable news.
Drion didn’t ring the gardaí, calling instead Stan Cosgrove who was Shergar’s vet and a member of the 35-strong syndicate who between them had paid £10 million for the horse on the basis of the £70,000 a day stud fees he was expected to command for anything up to 20 years.
Cosgrave rang his friend, then chairman of the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders Association and former army Captain Sean Berry, who in turn dialled his neighbour, Fine Gael TD for Kildare and recently appointed minister for finance, Alan Dukes.
“They were in a seriously agitated state,” recalls Dukes.
“The horse had disappeared, nobody knew where it was gone and they were wondering what to do. I said they should call the police immediately which I think they did pretty soon after that.”
Dukes confesses he really didn’t want to get dragged into it. He was due to present his first budget later that morning, he had been working all hours getting it ready and now he was trying to keep focused.
“I was woken up at three in the morning and you’re not too lucid in those circumstances but I knew I wanted to have this particular chalice pass from me so I said who I can shift the burden to?”
The answer came quickly — his colleague, the newly- appointed minister for justice, Michael Noonan.
By now, however, the kidnap gang had enjoyed almost an eight-hour head start. The gardaí were on the back foot from the start because the gang had also executed their plan the day a major sale had taken place at nearby Goffs and asking the public if they had seen a horse box on roads swarming with them was pointless.
An appeal was made for every farmer to check their fields, barns and outbuildings but the scale of the search required was dispiriting, there were many false sightings and theories were abounding that the horse was already across the border or even overseas.
Reference had been made to a ransom when the gang burst into Jim Fitzgerald’s home but no definite instructions were received, and several hoax leads also helped the gang to muddy their tracks.
At midnight, while Jim was breaking the news to his boss, a man was ringing the home of Co Down horse breeder, Judy Maxwell, claiming to have Shergar and demanding a £40,000 ransom.
The Maxwells thought it was a bizarre joke but shortly afterwards there was a call to the BBC in Belfast from a man demanding to meet with three racing journalists to negotiate the horse’s release.
John Oaksey of the Sunday Telegraph, Peter Campling from The Sun and ITV’s Derek Thompson were all roused from sleep and asked if they wouldn’t mind helping to rescue Shergar.
They agreed and arrived in Belfast the next afternoon in the Europa Hotel tailed by a posse of reporters to record the moment Oaksey took a call and was directed to go to the Maxwells.
The trio, their journalistic entourage and a crowd of police all sat out the evening there until the early hours of the morning when a man rang, first to establish a code name, Arkle, to be used for future discussions, and later to say there had been an accident and Shergar was dead.
Meanwhile, a man had rung Ballymany using the code name, King Neptune, which had been given to Jim Fitzgerald before he was dumped from the kidnap gang’s car. Neptune demanded £2 million in used notes and a number for the Aga Khan’s office in Paris for negotiations.
Over the next two days calls took place with the kidnappers repeating their demands while the Aga Khan’s office stressed the difficulties of getting unanimous agreement on a course of action from 35 different shareholders.
Neptune agreed to provide proof Shergar was alive and an arrangement was made for Stan Cosgrove to go to the Crofton Hotel on the Swords Road in Dublin and pick up a message using the name of Eurovision winner, Johnny Logan.
Garda detectives staked out the hotel and when Cosgrove presented himself at reception, there was no message. Unimpressed by the garda welcoming committee, Neptune rang back some hours later and made a fresh arrangement for a pick-up at the Rosnaree Hotel outside Drogheda.
A photograph had been left there, showing Shergar’s head and a current copy of a Belfast newspaper, but the Aga Khan’s office was not satisfied and demanded a full standing shot of the horse. Neptune had had enough. He didn’t call again. The loss of contact with the kidnappers was a major blow. And, Ireland’s image in the equine industry was at stake.
ALSO STRAINED was the reputation of the gardaí, depicted, predictably in the British press, as less than sophisticated in their approach. They had a field day with head of the investigation, the well-regarded but old-style Chief Superintendent James “Spud” Murphy who wore a fedora like Humphrey Bogart but had a manner of speaking more in keeping with Inspector Clouseau, unwisely revealing one occasion that unorthodox steps were being taken to find Shergar. “Between diviners, clairvoyants and psychic persons, they must be running into the 50 now,” he declared.
Sean Berry rallied the bloodstock industry and put up a reward of £100,000 for information leading to the return of the horse.
“Then the fun started,” he recalls.
His phone rang incessantly with people claiming to know where Shergar was.
“I did all sorts of things — agreed to meet some people, went to meet some people, was on the Late Late Show — anything really to try and flush out whoever was involved.
“We did it off our own bat but the guards worked with us. There was a detective in my house the whole time. He had my house taped and he took all the calls. My car was bugged too. This went on weeks afterwards.
“Clairvoyants used to drive me up the walls. Two called from California and my wife went to Ardmore in Co Waterford with them. Every time they saw a spire of a church, they’d say the vibrations were starting and they could feel a presence.”
However, Berry admits the reward money “never existed”.
Someone did make money out of the effort to find Shergar, however. Stan Cosgrove was contacted by a man who offered information and twice by arrangement returned large sums of money sent to him to establish his bona fides before a final deal would be done. But the final sum, £70,000, disappeared from the pick-up point apparently before the contact there and certainly before Cosgrove got his information.
As time went on, it became more obvious that all involved in the search for Shergar were looking for his remains and that hunt took on an urgency of its own for some of the syndicate members, including Cosgrove, who were being refused compensation from their insurers because there was no incontrovertible proof the horse was dead.
A quarter of a century on, Shergar remains the most costly investment the otherwise shrewd vet ever made. Yet there is near unanimous agreement that the horse was killed within days, if not hours, of his theft from Ballymany.
“What happened was, they took the horse out of his beautiful big stable where he was warm and pampered and brought him out into a bitter cold night and put him into a rickety box and I’d say he kicked the box to pieces and they probably shot him and he was carted off to a meat factory and minced up,” says Berry.
“What else could have happened him? You’d have a job burying a full corpse without being seen. If I drove from here to Cork and I stopped for a pee, somebody would see me. Everybody sees everything in Ireland.”
“It was a small enough horse box and he probably would never have been in one like that before. And there would be all strange voices around him. He would have known something was wrong.”
Jim Fitzgerald, now 78 and ten years retired from stud work, he still treasures a photograph of the stallion, presented to him by the Aga Khan with a hand-written message expressing gratitude for all his years of dedication.
He never thought for a minute not to return to the stables after his ordeal.
“It’s amazing how we got through it. I think the man above was a great help.”
The family atmosphere of the stud, where key staff lived, worked and reared their families, was also a big help and the Aga Khan’s attitude was also crucial because he laid no blame.
“He really understood. People said after were the gates not locked but they wanted the horse and gates wouldn’t have stopped them. A gun is better than any key.”
As for the delay in alerting the gardaí, Jim says everyone did what they thought best. “I was their [the gang’s] insurance. They took me away and they told the family that they were not to ring anyone and I was away for three hours. What could they do only do as they were told?”
Jim continued working for the Aga Khan until he retired, as did Ballymany manager, Ghislain Drion, who returned to his France in 1998 where he died last year aged just 64.
Jim keeps a close eye on all the new stars from the Aga Khan’s stables but it moves him that people still carry a torch for his most famous charge.
He refuses, however, to add to the speculation industry surrounding Shergar’s fate.
“There are all sorts of stories out there and people add to them. They don’t need me adding any more.”
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