“Now I’m settled in Scotland, I don’t feel I have to run and hide from anyone. I live here openly and have no fears of attempts on my life.”
Johnny Adair was the former leader of the Ulster Defence Association’s (UDA) notorious C company who fled for his life to Ayrshire. The Record have taken a look at his life and ties to Scotland.
The 62-year-old, infamously dubbed ‘Mad Dog’, was the ruthless leader of the Ulster Defence Association’s notorious C Company before a savage loyalist feud forced him to flee for his life. Alongside his family and closest allies from Belfast’s Shankill Road, Adair eventually washed up in Troon, Ayrshire.
The youngest of seven, Adair clawed his way to the top of the UDA in the early 1990s. In 1993, he narrowly escaped death in an IRA assassination attempt that left nine people dead in a fish and chip shop.
Two years later, in September 1995, Adair was jailed for 16 years at the Maze Prison for directing terrorism. While on home leave in April 1999, he was grazed by a bullet to the head while attending a UB40 concert with his wife Gina in Belfast.
Released under the Good Friday Agreement later that year, Adair’s return to freedom sparked fresh bloodshed, becoming embroiled in a bloody feud with former comrades and other loyalist factions. This would result in Adair being expelled from the UDA in September 2002.
After being jailed again in January 2003, his loyalist network was blamed for the murders of UDA divisional leader John Gregg and member Robert Carson, who were gunned down after returning from a Rangers match in Glasgow. Fearing revenge, Adair’s family fled to Scotland and later Bolton.
When Adair walked free again in 2005, he joined them down south but after attacking his wife Gina following a night in the pub, he relocated to Troon just 10 months later.
In his autobiography Mad Dog, he claimed: “Now I’m settled in Scotland, I don’t feel I have to run and hide from anyone. I live here openly and have no fears of attempts on my life.”
In 2013, a plot to assassinate Adair and his right-hand man Sam McCrory was foiled by police. Three men were later jailed for the conspiracy to blast McCrory in the head with a sawn-off shotgun in a lane near his Ayr home – and then assassinate Adair.
Adair would continue to live on Ayrshire’s coast and would be a pall bearer at McCrory’s funeral in August 2022 in Ayr, who had lived in the town for around 25 years.
Adair’s son, Jonathan Adair Jr, died aged just 32, in September 2016, one day after being released from prison. Known as “Mad Pup”, he died from an accidental overdose of “heroin intoxication”.
A devastated Adair later said: “I want people to realise that this is what this drug does to you. My son was a fit, good looking, healthy big boy who went to the gym, but that horrible drug got its grip and that’s what it did to him. He no longer had any control over it and sadly that was the end of my son.
“So I am not ashamed to say what killed him. Why should I hide away the drug that killed my son, because me saying lets people know, if it kills Johnny Adair’s son it can kill me. If I was hiding that I would be a cheat, if one person listens to me it’s worth it.”
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