The Gangs Of Belfast.(Protestants, Catholics turn to organized crime)

Twice in recent months, John Gregg survived bomb attacks on his home in Belfast. On Feb. 1 his luck ran out. Traveling back from a football game, the powerful local boss of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association and a colleague were shot dead as their taxi halted at a city intersection. To blame: a renegade faction of the same Protestant group fighting for control of local crime rackets. Some 7,000 mourners turned out for his funeral.

The murder--and the mass demonstration in Gregg's support--brings an ugly truth to light. The 1998 peace accords, signed by the major Protestant and Roman Catholic political parties in Northern Ireland, were supposed to put an end to 30 years of religious and patriotic conflict. But if the sectarian bombings and the shootings have abated, the killing continues. With no war to fight, the paramilitaries have refocused on crime. This is especially so on the Protestant side. Leaders who once claimed to be protecting their communities against attack from the Irish Republican Army--Gregg himself served nine in years in jail for the attempted murder of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams- -have morphed into mobsters fighting viciously for turf and personal fiefdoms. Police estimate that half of the 80 crime gangs operating in the province are linked to the Ulster gunmen. Alan McQuillan, a former Belfast police chief, leads a new antiracketeering drive. "These people are into every aspect of organized crime," he says. "Drug dealing, extortion, armed robbery, counterfeiting and prostitution."

Too often, ordinary people are caught up in the warlords' feuding. The working-class Shankill Road district of Belfast, a staunchly Protestant area that saw some of the worst violence in Northern Ireland's Troubles, is now an epicenter of gangland violence. With unemployment running at more than 60 percent, racketeers find no shortage of recruits among young men in search of excitement and status. Until recently, this was largely the fiefdom of Johnny (Mad Dog) Adair, a jailed terrorist and the leading adversary of the murdered John Gregg. Blamed for Gregg's killing, many of Adair's henchmen have now fled to Scotland after a local UDA ...