One of Northern Ireland’s most dangerous loyalist terrorists Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory dies in tumble outside flat in Ayr, Scotland

Sam “Skelly” McCrory was killed after falling down concrete steps leading up to his flat in Ayr on Sunday evening, friends confirmed today.

He had been living in exile in western Scotland ever since he and his best friend, the former UDA commander Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair were expelled from Northern Ireland following an internal loyalist feud in the 1990s.

Originally from Belfast’s Shankill Road, McCrory had been a close associate of Adair since they were boys.

McCrory was renowned as a UDA assassin and was believed to have been involved in the murder of an old republican veteran, Francisco Notarantonio in west Belfast in 1987.

He and the UDA unit involved in the killing acted upon intelligence provided by British Army spy Brian Nelson.

Nelson had targeted the victim after learning that the UDA were about to assassinate another republican in the same part of west Belfast. Nelson’s handlers learned from him about the plot and then diverted the murder squad to target Francisco Notarantonio instead.

McCrory and Adair ‘graduated’ in violence from a Skinhead gang based around the Lower Shankill into the UDA in the late 1980s. Adair and his allies supplanted the leadership of older UDA veterans such as a Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle and intensified the organisation’s violent campaign particularly in Greater Belfast.

McCrory carried out a number of attacks on leading members of Sinn Fein and was involved in a UDA unit that fired an RPG missile at the party’s main office in the west of the city. He was also involved in an aborted plot to kill Martin McGuinness in Londonderry in the early 1990s.

By the time of the loyalist ceasefire McCrory was being held in the Maze prison alongside Adair.

McCrory was commanding officer of UDA prisoners in the jail in the build up to the 1998 Belfast Agreement. It was his and Adair’s orders from prison that halted a brief but very violent UDA ceasefire breakdown which saw sectarian murder return to the streets of north and west Belfast in late 1997/early 1998 that almost scuppered the peace deal.

Famously McCrory met with the then Secretary of State Dr Mo Mowlam in early 1998 who came into the Maze to ask him and Adair to order a stop the violence on the outside.

In the machismo world of loyalist paramilitarism, McCrory was unusual given that he was gay coming out finally in an interview in The Observer when he confessed that he had “hidden my true self” for decades.

More from the News Letter:

Click here: WATCH as Danny Dyer calls Sam ‘Skelly’ McCrory one of the most ‘dedicated soldiers of his generation’

Click here: Number of murals on public property growing – and loyalist ones far outnumber republican ones

Click here: ‘UDA could not have picked worse target’: remembering the murder of primary school teacher Cyril Murray in east Belfast exactly three decades ago