‘I was so tired I would have agreed to anything’

A GARDA chief wanted the Cork man accused of money-laundering to rubberstamp the view that Phil Flynn was behind the Northern Bank robbery, but the accused said he was so tired and confused during interrogation that he would have agreed that Mother Teresa was his sister.

The accused said he was told that gardaí would leak it to the media that he named names and that the IRA would put a bullet in his head and that his family would suffer the same fate.

This was the claim made yesterday by Ted Cunningham, aged 60, of Woodbine Lodge, Farran, Co Cork, who denies 20 charges of money-laundering, in a case that arises out of the investigation of the robbery of £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in Belfast on December 20, 2004.

Cunningham said he was frightened in the Bridewell where he and his wife, Cathy Armstrong, were being questioned separately in February 2005. “A rat in a corner will do anything to get out, that is all I wanted to do — get out of that hellhole... My attitude to anything is to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I must have said, yeah, yeah, yeah, a hundred thousand times.

“At that stage I had decided that all I was interested in was getting Cathy out, I didn’t care what I said, it wasn’t a chit-chat, there was banging on tables. If they asked me or told me Mother Teresa was my sister I would have agreed with that,” he said, adding that he had given up mentally and physically, due to lack of sleep, interrogation and a serious nosebleed condition.

He said Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Quilter told him: “If I did not co-operate I was in deep sh*t.” He said Det Chief Supt Quilter told him he had a photograph of him with Phil Flynn and IRA people. “I knew that was not true, it was said to me that they knew who robbed the bank up in the North, they knew Phil Flynn had an involvement in it.

“It was said to me I was only a pawn and that Phil Flynn was the main man. If I was to name Phil Flynn as the person behind it, he (Det Chief Supt Quilter) said they knew all of this, they basically only wanted me to rubberstamp it.”

Cunningham said the money found at his house had come from Bulgarian business people in October 2004 and he was never in the IRA. He could have been telling them the truth for the last four years, but this was not what they wanted to hear. As he sat in the Bridewell under what he called serious interrogation he thought of the McBrearty family in Donegal. In all of this what was going through my mind, I could see myself signing stuff like the McBreartys had to do above and they kicked the sh*t out of them. I lived with this for four years, I blanked a lot of it out of my mind to keep myself sane.

“All I wanted was to get out of the place and get Cathy out of the place. I was told that if I co-operated I would be put into a protection programme, I would never again see Cathy or the boys. That, if I named names, they would give me a new identity, it was like the stuff you’d see in the films,” he said. “I was 50 or 60 hours without sleep. I was sh***ing myself. It is grand to sit here four years after and ask me to be precise. All I do know is I was under severe duress, I felt deeply intimidated, this whole scenario what is written down here, anything else could have been written down and I would have gone along with it.”

Cunningham’s allegations about having words put in his mouth related to an interview that was not recorded on video. He had asked to have it turned off, but said yesterday this idea was suggested to him by guards. “Why the hell did they not have it fecking on camera? I was only doing what I was told. How can you explain that you were being led like a pup, like a greyhound?”