IRA past turns US businessman's dream into a nightmare
Dramatic downfall of Irish-born construction and restaurant boss after police found photo with Gerry AdamsIt was at 6am on 27 June 2008 last year that Sean O'Neill's comfortable and well-ordered life in America came, literally, crashing down around him.
There was a huge bang as the front door of his large house outside Philadelphia was forced from its hinges by a battering ram. Armed FBI agents, with weapons drawn and pointed, swarmed in. O'Neill was handcuffed in front of his wife and daughter, and taken away.
At the time of the raid, O'Neill could consider himself to be a classic American success story. He had come to the country from Coalisland, County Tyrone, in 1983, aged 23, and – from nothing – had amassed a construction and restaurant business worth millions of dollars. On top of the family home in the expensive Newton Square area of Philadelphia, he owned Maggie O'Neill's, an Irish pub renowned for its authenticity with the homely sign above the door: "There are no strangers here just friends that you have yet to meet". He had property across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a holiday home in the countryside and another on a tiny island off the Jersey shore, as well as several houses in Ireland.
And then fortune and her fickle wheel began to turn. Through a combination of bad luck and the drunken waywardness of his children, details of his youth that he had been keeping hidden for more than 30 years began to surface. His teenage membership of the IRA was exposed, as was later immigration and tax fraud and weapons violations. He now faces a sentence of up to 146 years in jail and fines of up to $4m (£2.5m). As his long-time friend and insurance agent, Jack Ruane, put it: "There he is living in the mansion on the hill, and all of a sudden his world falls apart."
Drunken partyThe beginning of the end came one weekend in September 2006. O'Neill and his wife, Eileen, were away and his son, Sean Jr, aged 17, held a drunken party in their home. Late at night, he pulled one of his father's guns, a .45-calibre pistol, from under a mattress and he and his friends began to play with it. In the melee, Sean accidentally shot his friend Scott Sheridan, also 17, in the face; he died on the driveway.
When police arrived, they searched the house and found several guns, and a silencer which had no serial number.
There were documents relating to the older Sean O'Neill, referring to his arrest as a teenager back in Belfast, though the charges were unspecified.
They also found a photograph of O'Neill standing next to Gerry Adams. That piqued the interest of the police, legal documents show, because "officers knew [Adams] was one of the leaders of the Irish Republic [sic] Army".
Their curiosity aroused, the police began digging. They discovered that, before he had come to the US, O'Neill had been imprisoned for membership of Fianna Éireann, the junior IRA, when he was 17. He had not informed the US authorities of his record, which would have barred him from entry, thus making his immigration status fraudulent.
They dug some more, and discovered he had entered into a sham marriage with a US woman to gain permanent residency and had failed to get a divorce before marrying his real wife, Eileen, technically rendering him a bigamist. He had also acquired four guns under false pretences, giving a false date of birth and claiming he was from Texas.
In 1985, he even stated he was an American citizen in order to be able to vote in a Pennsylvania election. As the final detail, officers also established O'Neill had failed to declare his earnings between 2005 and 2007 and had been paying staff at Maggie O'Neill's in cash to avoid paying up to $200,000 in tax.
Vigorous defenceAt first, O'Neill made a vigorous defence through his lawyers. In court filings they accused the police of showing a "strong and impermissible Irish-Catholic prejudice", pointing to the way Gerry Adams had been dubbed an IRA leader when he was in fact "a man widely acclaimed for his crucial role in laying the groundwork for the peace process in Ireland".
The Guardian spoke to one of the IRA's most important gun-runners, once based in North America, who said he believed O'Neill had no contact with the organisation since his conviction in the 1970s. Gerry McGeough, who served a jail term for trying to buy Stinger missiles in the US for the Provisional IRA, said O'Neill had "never been on my radar".
He added: "I have no idea who he is until I read about him in the papers. Given the circles I mixed in, I would have known about him if he was active."
But as his own past was coming back to haunt him, O'Neill's family was descending into its own abyss. His son, Sean, served nine months of a two-year sentence for the manslaughter of his friend but was then put back in juvenile detention for violating the terms of his treatment. He is now on probation.
O'Neill's daughter, Roisin, 23, drank herself three times over the legal limit last September and then drove the wrong way down a motorway, killing a 63-year-old grandmother. She is on bail awaiting trial for vehicular homicide.
Awaiting sentenceAfter these multiple blows, O'Neill told the Belfast paper Sunday Life that his own legal problems were the "least of my worries. To face every day is just too hard right now. There is really nothing anybody can say or do to change these horrible circumstances."
In April, perhaps to spare his family the trauma of his own trial, O'Neill pleaded guilty to immigration and tax fraud and the gun charges. He is at home on bail of $2.5m.
Despite a tumultuous few years, Ruane said his friend was in remarkably good spirits. "Believe it or not, he's actually pretty upbeat. I don't see how he could be but he's still hoping he can get out of this mess as best as possible."
Whether such optimism is well placed will become clear on 8 October, when O'Neill is sentenced. At worst, he will become familiar with America's prison system; at best he is likely to have to reacquaint himself with the life he left behind in Northern Ireland. Either way the secrets that he tried so hard to hide have finally come back to haunt him.
