Word: mccord
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...Raymond McCord is, in local parlance, a ?hard man? - one of the tough guys that seem to grow out of the cracks in the sidewalk in the little working-class streets between Belfast's docks and its hills scarred by heavy industry; men who could take a punch, and then another, and keep on throwing. Generations of conflict between Protestants and Catholics only hardened the alloy. But McCord, 53, a powerfully built welder from a Protestant family, always showed his mettle in standing up to the sectarian men of violence. Having grown up in North Belfast, the crowded, often...
...only after his eldest son was murdered by one of the Protestant gangs that McCord proved how tough he really is - by taking on not only the killers, but also the police spymasters alleged to have shielded them from justice. McCord's decade-long odyssey that turned him from street fighter to amateur investigator was vindicated, Monday, when the official police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O'Loan, alleged that officers of the Special Branch of Britain's Royal Ulster Constabulary had knowingly colluded with Protestant paramilitaries responsible for at least a dozen murders, shielding them from justice. Her report...
...Raymond McCord, Jr., was battered to death with a concrete block by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1997. The 22-year-old had been caught transporting drugs allegedly belonging to a leader of the group, who, police believe, lost $100,000 as a result. It was the type of murder from which Northern Ireland would quickly turn away - there was a drugs link, and because it was Protestant-on-Protestant violence, it didn't threaten the fledgling peace process...
...even if it didn't have a wider political significance, the murder of McCord, Jr., cut the bottom out of his father's life. The hard man's instinct was for revenge, but McCord's ex-wife and his two surviving sons extracted a promise that he would stay within the law. Bound by that commitment, he used his head, channeling his rage into a determination to bring the killers to justice...
...McCord spent years furrowing through Belfast's paramilitary underworld. "When I think of the people I met, some of the dodgy areas I went into, some of the clubs I went into?" he says. "But it's been worthwhile...