Erik Weisz
It is April 12th 2018. I am a farmer being cross-examined in the High Court. Having grown up almost mute, I am certainly not cut out for this kind of thing. I am also extremely tired, having slept maybe two hours in the three nights since our company's solicitor organised the planting of fifteen documents with my affidavit of the 9th. Five or six of these have just been used by counsel for the plaintiff Mr. Shortt (who shouts a lot) to make it look like I've been siphoning money from our company for my own benefit. It is nonsense (as it will take another year to prove to court). I do my best, but I don't have the understanding that our accountant or the other directors (both businessmen) would have. None of the three has turned up.
Our counsel Mr. Forde has just caught me out with a trick question, which causes me to undermine the evidence I have given (and which he had warned me, though not specifically, not to give) in answer to Mr. Shortt's questions about a VAT rebate. Forde's eyes light up, he raises an eyebrow and smiles. Shortt jumps to his feet and says something, then Forde, then Shortt then Forde and up and down they go like whack-a-moles. They are having fun now, playing to the gallery with a television approximation of courtroom to-and-fro. I'm not really listening anymore, slipping back into the old mute habit. I look to the Judge (Richard Humphreys) for reassurance, but he gives me a look of total contempt. I look out over a courtroom full of the happy supporters of the plaintiff David Dully. The only person to come from Athlone to support us is Tony. He has his head down. I look up for Emmet, the only journalist who has shown an interest in our case. He will leave in a few minutes and will never come back. Once the inversion of justice becomes apparent, as with legal people no journalist will want to know.
Over the next two years (and on up to today), granted an opportunity by Garda Dully's pursuit of the E160k damages (facilitating which was was the primary purpose of the plant), I will learn to recognise and deal with the simple peasant cunning of the members of the most self-reverential of professions. I will learn the basics of law and the baseness of lawyers. I will learn to handle being cross-examined and even do some (not bad) cross-examining myself. And all of it will amount to a friendless fighting for justice, four years of being lied to and laughed at, tricked and threatened, the insanity of it leading me to consider murder and suicide, before settling on a hunger strike. And that has been like everything else, a useless action, both too late and too early. Conditions 2 and 3 are dead in the water, which gives the FAI a credible way out of condition 5. Condition 1 is in legal advice limbo, so what's left? A statement in a Garda station ... Jesus.
Be sensible, Martins.
This isn't the time or the place to stop fighting. The hawthorns are coming into flower in Drumraney and I am so lucky; the house I live in is full of music and laughter. I am going to enjoy some Korean cooking tonight and figure out something that will actually work. We need to find a way to bind the two most obvious criminalities, the match fixing and its private school educated cousin of case fixing, which are very similar in design and execution. The authorities know that fixing is fraud, yet they will run a mile from dealing with any of it.
I have long suspected that the reason for the urgency behind the plaintiff's taking of proceedings against us so soon after my refusal to first sign the property over to the FAI and then to sell it to them (under what I believe to have been a crooked contract) was because of a contractual obligation which Athlone Town AFC CLG held with the Anping front company Pre Season and the embarrassing proceedings that would have followed if it were not honoured. The probably (concrete information is tightly guarded by both FAI and 'club') Pre Season majority owned Athlone Town Athletic Football Club has certainly been looked after in the High Court. And shamefully, our Court of Appeal Judges have chosen to tiptoe around that particularly rotten cart of apples. Although in all likelihood motivated by a fraternal desire not to have a colleague's complicity exposed, this was both an implicit toleration of international organised crime in their jurisdiction and, in relation to the opposition's company history, an explicit judicial blessing for those Irish who profit by doing business with same. Anping owner Xiaodong Mao, himself a university graduate, knows not to target more developed European countries that have a tendency to prosecute white collar crime (or crime, as it is known in those countries). If Mr. Xiaodong can get members of the professional class on board in, say, Latvia or Romania or Ireland, then he knows that his operations will get no hassle from the authorities there and his product will still sell as authentically European in the East Asian betting markets.
Some time in the second decade of the Twentieth Century, my grandfather Matt Molloy took his new bride to a show in London. As he was a big strong man, he was picked out from the stage. His job was to pull chains as tight as he could around Harry Houdini. It must have seemed impossible that the great man could escape, but escape he did. Maybe it is only the chains we put around ourselves that cannot be escaped from. Two good things happened over the past eight days. I achieved clarity, at last. And I lost 22 pounds, which brings me back to fighting weight.
That fight is only beginning.
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