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 Rough Justice
Memoirs of a Gangster

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Memoirs of a Gangster

MAURICE ‘BO BO’ WARD

WITH JOHN MOONEY
   
Published by Maverick House,
Unit 115 Ashbourne Industrial Estate,
Ashbourne, Co. Meath.
info@maverickhouse.com
http://www.maverickhouse.com

ISBN 0 9542945 2 1

Copyright for text © 2004 Maurice Ward and John Mooney

Copyright for typesetting, editing, layout, design
© Maverick House Ltd

The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp of managed forests. For every
tree felled, at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing natural resources.

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means without written permission from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
For my children
 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank a few people that were very

important in my life. Firstly, my good friend Seanie
Morrissey. You know what you mean to me. Thanks to
my good friend, John Kelly, who restored my faith in
people again. Victor Hackett has always been very
good to me and I’d like to say thank you to him.
I would like to sincerely thank the gardaí in Bandon,
Co. Cork who investigated my abuse claims,
particularly Sergeant Gerard Crowley for the
kindness, understanding and humanity he showed me.
Thanks to my family – my brothers and sisters. You
probably have a fair idea about what will be in this
book, but I hope you understand why I wrote it.
I’d also like to thank my counsellor, Muriel Moran,
who changed my life.
Lobbins, you gave me a wonderful home for so
many years and stuck by me through thick and thin.
Thank you for your loyalty and for our children.
Lila, there are so many reasons I need to thank you
and I don’t say it often enough. Thank you for our
boys and for your continued love all these years.
I’d also like to thank my children for all their love.
 Introduction

n the night of 28 April 2002, two masked men

O knocked at the front door of Maurice ‘Bo Bo’

Ward’s home on Greenfort Avenue in
Clondalkin, Dublin. When his partner Lila answered
the door, one of the men forced his way into the house
and walked into the kitchen where Bo Bo was having
tea with his young sons.
The intruder was armed with a sawn-off shotgun.
When Bo Bo saw his assassin coming, he remained
calm and told the intruder he was in the wrong house.
The gunman did not respond but forced Bo Bo to
his knees. He then lowered his gun and shot him at
point blank range in front of his screaming children.
Bo Bo fell face down on the floor in a pool of blood.
The killer stood over his body and fired another shot

9
into his back before making his escape. A fighter to
the end, Bo Bo struggled to remain conscious but his
injuries were fatal. He died minutes later.
No one knows why he was killed or who was
responsible. Theories abound to this day.
Some people think he was murdered by a local drug
dealer who blamed him for the murder of Simon
Doyle, a heroin pusher from Clondalkin. Bo Bo had
kidnapped and threatened to murder Doyle for
selling heroin to local youngsters.
Doyle died in a similar fashion to Bo Bo. He was
shot in the chest after answering a knock on the front
door of his home. He was also shot in the back as he
lay on the ground.
But the truth is that no one knows the identity of
the gunman or who ordered the murder.
It was always likely that Bo Bo would die a violent
death. He was 56 years old and had been a criminal all
his life. Ironically, just hours before he died, he had
finished dictating this autobiography.
Bo Bo had begun writing the book in the autumn of
1999 while campaigning on behalf of child sex abuse
victims. He had been physically and sexually abused
in St. Patrick’s Industrial School in Upton, Co. Cork.
By his own admission, he emerged from St. Patrick’s
a disturbed and violent young man who brutalised his
wife and children. He also became a major player in
Dublin’s underworld.

10
 Bo Bo sold heroin on behalf of the notorious Dunne
family, he helped gangboss Martin Cahill to rob banks
and also worked alongside Ireland’s biggest criminal,
John Gilligan. Anyone who crossed swords with him
suffered the consequences.
His violent tendencies only subsided when he
received professional help from a counsellor in the
later years of his life. Those who knew him personally
say he became a transformed character. You could say
that he saw the error of his ways.
Writing Rough Justice was a depressing and heart
breaking experience for him. When he examined his
life in detail, he fell into a deep depression. He
refused to forgive himself for the brutal beatings he
administered to his wife, girlfriends and children.
His only wish was to make amends for the crimes he
had committed.
I regret that he never got to see the publication of
his book. I hope Rough Justice does him proud, but
more importantly gives his children an insight into
the man their father was.
On a personal note I would like to thank Fiona
Barry and Michael Kealy of William Fry Solicitors for
their legal advice on various aspects of the
manuscript. Names that appear in italics have been
changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

John Mooney
June 2004

11
12
 chapter one

rime is the most addictive drug in the world. It

C consumes you. When you commit a crime for the

first time, the feeling overwhelms you. There is
no turning back. You never forget it. That rush of
adrenaline pumping through your veins; it makes you
feel invincible and drives you to commit more crimes.
You develop an attitude; fuck the law and everyone
else. You spend the rest of your life searching for that
special feeling.
I know this now. Hindsight is a great thing but there
was no talking to me all those years ago. And even if
someone had tried to sit me down, I would not have
listened. I would have told them to fuck off. That was
my way of dealing with people. If I didn’t like what I

13
was hearing, I gave them a smack, kicked the shit out
of them and burned down their house.
Sometimes I wonder would I have become a
criminal if I had been born into a different back-
ground. Would things have been different?
I am middle aged now. I have fathered loads of
children and made a mess of my life. I have been
brutalised and tortured and I have brutalised and
tortured others. I am a victim and an abuser in one.
To be honest, I don’t want to write this book. I want
to forget about what happened to me. I want to
rewrite my life story. Start afresh as the posh people
would say. If I could get a brain transplant to forget
everything I would. I would give anything to start out
again but I can’t. It’s funny, I spent my whole life
telling lies to the gardaí and to my wife but now I’m
trying to remember the truth that I desperately
wanted to keep from everyone. That’s the thing: there
is only one truth.

I believe I became a robber to survive. Like most big

time criminals, I was just a kid when it all started. A
hungry, little, innocent kid, who took opportunities
that landed at his feet because he had no choice. I
could say the same about most of the gangsters that I
befriended over the years. We all started out on the
road to jail when we were still in short trousers.
The first time I robbed a shop was both the best and
the worst experience of my life.

14
 How could it be both, you might ask yourself ? Well,
I’ll start at the beginning and see if I can explain along
the way.
I was born in the Rotunda Hospital on 24 March
1946. My parents, just like any other young couple,
were over the moon at the birth of their baby boy, or
so they told me when I was a little older.
By the time I came along, my Ma and Da already
had my older sister Mary though I was their third
child. My older brother James had died of meningitis
two years before I was born.
My father’s name was Patrick and my mother was
called Esther. They loved each other in their own way
and did what they had to do to survive. In those days
babies were not planned. They just arrived but my Da
always told me that he loved me and wanted me.
When I was old enough to understand, he would sit
me down and tell me about the day I was born. He
used to say that he was on his way to the hospital to
see Ma when I entered this world. I’d have you know
that I had lots of black hair and blue eyes, just like my
father.
Apparently he held me in his arms, kissed me and
promised to never let any harm come to me.
That’s what they told me when I was old enough to
talk but I do think Dad was delighted when I was
born. You see, they were devastated when my older
brother James died.

15
 In those days it was survival of the fittest. The law of
the jungle ruled because no one gave two shits about
my people.
We were the poorest of the poor; we weren’t even
working class because my parents couldn’t even find
regular work. You get the picture.
We lived in one of the old tenements in Summerhill
in Dublin’s north inner city. There was only one room
for us all – me, my sister Mary, and Ma and Da. It was
a shit hole.
The only people who know the type of desperate
poverty I’m talking about live in the poorest countries
of the Third World. I’m not exaggerating; it was
squalor.
The actual flat we lived in was over a bread and cake
shop. A stairwell, which led down to a lane, joined all
the flats together.
Our tenement was used as a toilet by the locals.
When the men would fall out of the pubs at night,
they would come into the lane and relieve themselves
by urinating on the walls and on the ground. A lot of
them did more than piss – they let everything out of
their bodies. I will never forget the smell of that place.
Can you imagine living in a building that people used
as a toilet? The contrast between the beautiful smell
of fresh bread and cakes mingled with piss and shit
was overwhelming. I’m not kidding but I can still
smell the piss and shit. It’s lodged in my nostrils. It
never went away. Even to this day I don’t like using

16
rough justice 6/28/04 9:19 AM Page 17

public toilets; it brings back too many old memories

and smells that make me sick to my stomach.
But I suppose the smell of piss and shit made me
immune to fear. Most people can’t stand the sight of
other peoples’ shit, but I was forced to wade through
it as a child. That made me strong although I didn’t
realise it until recently. When you can look at other
peoples’ shit, you can do anything. But it also made
me want to get my own back on the world.

When I was a boy I harassed the people that used our

stairs to piss and shit. There were old wooden rafters
that hung over the lane. I used to climb up on the
rafters and hide but I’d never play hide and seek. I got
jam jars full of water and piss and when the women
came into the lane to have a piss, I would be there in
the rafters overhead and I would drown them.
It was my way of getting back at them for what they
did every night. The people who lived in the
tenements were forced to walk through their shit –
you could not avoid it. That smell is the only memory
I have retained of being a young child.
The smell of the bakery used to fuck me up. It was
beautiful so you can imagine what it was like to go
down the stairs smelling the bread and then having to
walk into shit and piss and everything, because there’d