I had been dreading this name – but knew it was prone to come.
‘They want you to find Michael Lynn,’ the chirpy voice of reports editor Neil Michael barrelled down the telephone line.
By they he meant my Editor at The Irish Mail on Sunday, Sebastian Hamilton – and the Editor in Chief, Ted Verity.
Former solicitor Michael Lynn was jailed for 5 and a half years for fraud after he stole tens of millions from banks within the 2000s
When he mentioned, ‘find Michael Lynn’, what he really meant was discover him, get him to talk completely on the file and safe pictures from varied completely different angles. No stress.
‘He’s that solicitor who legged it final month,’ Neil continued. ‘Lord knows where he is, but if anyone can find him, we can.’
I didn’t agree. The man had absconded.
He could possibly be anyplace – actually anyplace – on the earth. There had been studies he was utilising a personal jet. For all I knew he could possibly be useless. And if we did discover him, he was hardly going to talk to a journalist.
Plus, I knew nothing of the case and had by no means written or learn a phrase concerning the man, regardless of rising information protection of his affairs. Truth be advised, I had ignored the story altogether and hoped to maintain it that means. Anyone tasked with discovering Lynn was very doubtless doomed to failure. But now I had no alternative within the matter.
‘Sure, no problem. I’ll do my finest,’ I replied, slumping again on my home workplace chair, cursing silently to myself. How was I going to tug this one off?
It was January 2008 and Lynn had already spent Christmas on the run. He had an excellent month’s head begin.
Outside a flash of white in opposition to black caught my eye as a lone magpie swooped down from a naked ash tree to the frozen garden. Great, I believed. One for sorrow. Not the omen I wanted. I solid my eyes additional afield, making an attempt to identify one other one, and obtained fortunate. ‘Two for joy,’ I mouthed and clicked by way of to Google.
The McCarthy-Dundon crime gang from Limerick think about themselves fairly powerful. And they’re. In 2007 they may maintain their very own in opposition to anybody in their very own stomping grounds. And that’s saying one thing. Limerick’s homicide charge that yr, seven homicides per 100,000 residents, noticed Forbes journal describe the town because the ‘murder capital of Europe’.
But within the port metropolis of Varna, on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, just one factor occurs if you flash thick wads of {dollars} if you’ve come to a gun vary for weapons coaching.
And so it was. The Irish gang members quickly discovered themselves on the unsuitable finish of a gun barrel and liberated from their money, watches, cellphones and a sizeable chunk of gangster ego. That was September 2007.
Now, it was our flip to pattern the edginess of Varna, a metropolis the place it was rumoured Lynn had deliberate a beach-front resort.
Discarded paper from Lynn’s workplace within the Algarve, Portugal, which supplied Michael O’Farrell with proof of the solicitor’s transactions
Michael’s guide Fugitive tells the story of how he was tasked with monitoring down Lynn, who had gone on the run
Strategically positioned between the Balkans, Russia and western Europe, Varna is a hub of legal exercise sandwiched amid an arching seafront dominated by freight cranes and marine exercise. It can also be the nerve centre of a burgeoning underground tobacco, drug, automobile and people-smuggling community run by competing gangs of Chechen, Russian and Bulgarian mobsters. Many of the legal outfits in Varna depend previous members of varied particular forces and state businesses from the previous USSR amongst their numbers. People who get the job carried out. No questions requested.
Whatever Lynn was as much as right here, it was positive to show attention-grabbing. More attention-grabbing, actually, than we might ever have imagined.
‘”You want him disappeared?” The former detective gestured casually, cocking a chubby index finger to his temple’.
Beside him his three colleagues – additionally former members of the Bulgarian Murder Bureau – remained immobile. On the desk, seven glasses of Kamenitza beer fizzed into the summer time sunshine. Time stood nonetheless.
‘No, no,’ I practically choked on my drink. ‘We want to talk to him, take his photo.’
The detectives look bemused and disillusioned. Even extra so once we declined to pay something upfront and insisted no legal guidelines be damaged. This encounter would solely cost the worth of a spherical of drinks.
Absurdly, this face-to-face had come about exactly due to my want to keep away from dodgy eventualities – but Bulgaria saved delivering them.
Arriving in Varna, I’d insisted on going straight to police HQ to file an official request for details about Lynn. In a metropolis with close to day by day gunfights, I wished to declare my presence and intentions somewhat than danger being mistaken as one thing aside from a journalist.
We discovered the chain-smoking press officer for the police in a dimly lit basement room beneath the headquarters.
A white desk fan swung slowly back and forth, glowing up the ember of her cigarette and scattering ash throughout the desk. Somewhere behind her, a police radio crackled and beeped, bringing life on the streets into the room in bursts of pressing static.
Our fixer spoke. She listened and nodded, sometimes smiling at Seán Dwyer [a vegan veg-munching veteran press photographer] with the stamina and focus of a navy sniper] and me as if to maintain us within the loop. We smiled again. They would possibly as effectively have been sharing recipes for blackberry jam for all we knew. It would have been extra productive.
Three hours later, on the third of a collection of hatches – earlier than which got here a maddening sequence of queuing for official stamps and authorisations – our written request was accepted with a grunt and a promise of a response in two weeks.
A torn notice from Lynn’s workplace within the Algarve reveals transfers he made that had been value tens of millions
Michael O’Farrell assembly with Lynn after monitoring him down
That was the official route. Officially we’re nonetheless ready for a solution.
Unofficially, we discovered ourselves rapidly talked into shopping for drinks for ex-police officers available for rent, whose companies we politely declined. As all the time, it was old-fashioned shoe leather-based, tyre rubber, door-knocking, document-searching and question-asking on our half that obtained the job carried out. We began asking these questions at Shkorpilovtsi, situated simply off the E87 coastal freeway, 20 minutes’ drive south of Varna. This was the place we’d heard Lynn had deliberate his resort. Nothing of that plan had ever been made public in Ireland.
Shkorpilovtsi is a protected nature reserve that includes historical rolling forests alongside one facet of a low-lying valley pierced by the almost chocolate-brown Kamchia river because it empties into the ocean. At the shore, a lone, ramshackle seaside bar of wrapped cane windbreakers and solar umbrellas was empty. The barman, who regarded as if he slept behind the counter, was cautious.
‘An Irish guy? Kendar? Resort here? …Couldn’t say. Not positive.’ Each utterance delivered with a shrug.
Across the street, three workmen had been making ready a boundary wall at a vacant property. As we started to ask questions of them, the environment instantly bristled with pressure. A telephone name was made. Our fixer regarded nervous.
A BMW with blacked-out home windows appeared. The suited occupant listened. Sized us up. Decided we weren’t value his time and drove off in a cloud of mud.
‘Lynn’s agency no Like Portuguese I peeled off my footwear and socks and ambled right down to the water’s edge, the nice and cozy sand between my toes. Staring intently in direction of the horizon, knee-deep in salt water, I mulled it throughout. What was there to do? What had Lynn deliberate right here? Where the hell was it, too, been he? What might this place inform me about him?’
The coast was deserted so far as the attention might see in every course. To the south, the sand petered out into rocks and crumbling cliffs. To the north, a large arc of sand dunes was wedged between the shore and the rising slopes of the character reserve’s forest.
Beside me a crumbling concrete body of an deserted pier stretched far out into the deep water – a one-time dock for ships, it appeared. Today its solely occupants had been a fisherman, with a rod and bucket by his facet, and his two boys.
‘Communista holiday platz,’ he mentioned, gesturing in direction of the dunes and timber once I requested concerning the location. We fishermen can all the time talk, regardless of the language. What he was making an attempt to clarify was that this place – the final stretch of undeveloped Black Sea beachfront in Bulgaria – was as soon as a famed Communist Party vacation camp for youngsters from all through the Soviet Bloc.
‘Kaput.’ He gestured breaking an imaginary stick together with his arms.
‘Communista system kaput,’ I agreed.
‘Bulgaria kaput,’ he shot again. ‘Mafia. Everything mafia. No good.’
Soon after, we chased down the property deeds. Shkorpilovtsi – or no less than huge tracts of it on one facet of the Kamchia river – was owned by Lynn. And he had some attention-grabbing neighbours. The different facet of the river mouth was being developed by the then mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and his billionaire spouse Yelena Baturina – Russia’s richest lady. ‘Little Moscow’ locals known as it. Michael Lynn and the mayor of Moscow facet by facet on the shores of the Black Sea. There’s a saying in Bulgaria that every one international locations have a mafia – however solely in native was extra…
Bulgaria does the mafia have a rustic. How on earth had a rustic boy from rural Ireland wound up on this place? And what had he carried out to get right here?
Lynn had deliberate a large growth known as Longosa Beach in Shkorpilovtsi – by far his greatest and most formidable venture. There had been to be 1,000 residences in 11 building complexes, lodges, eating places, bars, swimming swimming pools, state-of-the-art gyms, a cinema and a grocery store. Had it been accomplished, Longosa Beach would have realised a €50m revenue for his Kendar firm. The web site alone, with planning permission and building permits, was value greater than €19m.
But it had already been offered. Just as in Portugal, Lynn had moved rapidly. His Bulgarian property had already been secured or cashed in and hidden behind an internet of latest offshore corporations. Lynn’s native agency – Kendar Bulgaria – was no extra. Like its Portuguese counterpart, it, too, had been quietly given a brand new identify – GLS Property Bulgaria – on April 4, simply eight weeks earlier than our go to. GLS Property Bulgaria in flip was totally owned by one other firm, S And A Services – an offshore firm not too long ago registered in Panama and designed to maintain its house owners’ identities secret.
As ever, Lynn was streets forward of the authorities, his property vaporising into skinny air like steam from a kettle. GLS Property Bulgaria had already offered one in every of Lynn’s developments to a newly established Sofia agency known as Vagner Bulgaria, which in flip was totally owned by an nameless firm of the identical identify within the tropical islands of the Seychelles.
Michael O’Farrell together with his photographer Seán Dwyer after their interview with Lynn was revealed in The Irish Mail on Sunday
This sale, which had simply been accomplished, concerned the event web site in Bansko, Bulgaria, which Lynn had publicised together with his brazen Late Late Show residence giveaway. It was value €7.2m.
The Black Sea land had been offered simply three weeks beforehand. This time the customer was Boyana Estates, one other new agency with an handle in Sofia. It, too, was owned by an nameless offshore agency, this time in Cyprus, known as Caviarteria Technologies. Just months earlier, I’d recovered proof within the papers discarded at Lynn’s headquarters in Cabanas, the Algarve, of tens of millions being transferred to a ‘Caviarteria Tec’.
Mayor Borislav Natov’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. Somehow the phrase ‘gobsmacked’ appeared to have been invented particularly for his face at that very second.
No one had advised him Kendar was no extra. He had completely no thought Michael Lynn was on the run and that his lands at Shkorpilovtsi had simply been mysteriously offered offshore.
Flustered, he rose from his desk and commenced heaping thick folders on a desk from a submitting cupboard, opening out maps and technical drawings of building after building – all the case file for Lynn’s Black Sea resort.
As mayor of Shkorpilovtsi, Natov noticed these plans as the important thing to lastly opening up his impoverished rural group to the tourism revenue loved by the remainder of Bulgaria’s Black Sea resorts.
‘They came to us and they asked us to speed up the procedure for changing the land from agricultural land,’ he mentioned.
‘Kendar made a donation and helped to repair the church in the town, so we did this for them. They received their construction permits in the autumn of 2007. We are just waiting for it to begin – we were sure it was a serious investment.’ A day later and 700km away, the mayor of Bansko, Alexander Kravarov, was equally shocked on the information that Lynn’s deliberate mountain resort had been offered, ‘This Kendar company has been smearing Bansko’s fame as a location for funding. We need actual traders right here, not fraudsters. I hadn’t realised he has offered up. That’s information to me’.
It could be information, too, for the a whole lot of Irish individuals who had paid Lynn tens of 1000’s for his or her Bansko residences. Fearing the worst, Lynn’s prospects had pinned their diminishing hopes on promissory notes issued by Kendar Bulgaria in January. ‘We at Kendar Bulgaria apologise for the delay in providing you with the most current information about your investment in Bulgaria,’ learn the January 23 e-mail with the promissory notes hooked up.
‘Following recent publicity surrounding Michael Lynn in Ireland, we at Kendar Bulgaria wish to distance ourselves from these events. Kendar Bulgaria Ltd is working in a full capacity with regards to the project Bansko All Seasons resort in Bulgaria. The construction has started and is proceeding as planned.’
Heading again to Sofia, I sought out Kendar’s Bansko web site.
Against the treeline, an enormous Kendar billboard, yellowed by the solar, nonetheless marketed the ‘final release’ of 333 models. The telephone quantity on the signal had lengthy since been disconnected. A thick blanket of tall weeds had begun repopulating earth as soon as stripped in preparation for building. The place was as empty as Michael Lynn’s phrase.
The pressing whirr of Seán’s Nikon tore by way of the tense silence in our rental automobile like a sudden burst of muffled gunfire.
An hour and a half after getting into the Algarve’s Vila Galé Hotel, Tavira, Michael Lynn had simply exited by way of its revolving door and into our sights. Head down, wanting stern and preoccupied, he was shifting rapidly in direction of his automobile. At a pace of eight frames a second, Seán’s digicam shutter captured each second.
‘It’s positively him,’ whispered Seán after a number of shot bursts of the digicam.
I remembered to breathe once more.
One means or one other the story was now within the can. The pictures, alone, had been a outcome. Anything else could be a bonus. But there was nonetheless extra to play for.
Checking the crimson file gentle on my dictaphone to verify it was recording,
I set off after Lynn, sliding the machine into the breast pocket of my jacket. Seán took the alternative facet of the road. Darting behind parked automobiles and doorways, he stayed inside shot however out of sight lest he spook Lynn and smash any likelihood of him talking.
‘Michael,’ I name out from just a few metres away, simply as he reaches his automobile. ‘Can I grab you for a second?’ My tone and pitch are informal, non-threatening. The final thing I need is to look threatening. I’m positive the dictaphone in my breast pocket is capturing the sound of my coronary heart thumping with each phrase spoken.
‘Who are ya?’ Lynn asks suspiciously. ‘Michael O’Farrell is my identify.’
‘How ya doin’?’ he responds warmly, mimicking my easy-going method.
‘I’m a journalist. I work for The Mail on Sunday.’
‘Yes,’ he replies, the realisation and reduction dawning on his face. ‘I know you.’
He is aware of now he’s not in any hazard – bodily no less than – and that I’m not an indignant creditor or debt collector, one thing of a hazard of late for Lynn.
‘Forgive me – I’m out of breath,’ I splutter, making an attempt to catch some air. ‘Can we have a coffee?’
‘Yeah, sure,’ comes the seemingly straightforward reply. His physique language suggests in any other case.
‘You need to get fit – no more than myself,’ Lynn jokes. Though his voice stays jovial, his bodily manner is almost menacing.
He turns to face me and I look him within the eye. Here it’s. Here and now. Months within the making, every little thing will come right down to the following few milliseconds. It’s as if we’re in a automobile that’s skidded to a halt and is rocking perilously on the sting of a cliff as a butterfly hovers above the bonnet considering a touchdown that may tip us over the sting.
Lynn emerges from the Vila Gale Hotel in Tavira, the place Michael discovered him
Synapses firing in overdrive, I maintain his gaze and attempt to ooze benevolence. We are two minds reaching to learn the opposite. One of us will get it unsuitable. Whatever non-verbal cues are being transmitted between us, Lynn should depend on instinct to decipher them and make a alternative. The butterfly will land or dance away. A judgement might be made – to belief, to deceive, to take a measured likelihood or to show and run. It’s as much as him.
I lean up in opposition to Lynn’s automobile inserting myself in between him and the car’s door, forcing him to show sideways from the place I decide Seán to be. If I’ve obtained it proper, Seán might now shoot with out drawing Lynn’s consideration, but nonetheless seize his goal. Also, if he wished to flee, I used to be now in the way in which. He’d have to maneuver me to open the door. And I wasn’t going anyplace.
‘Can we sit down?’ I nod in direction of a close-by cafe.
‘Yeah of course,’ he begins, earlier than stumbling by way of a collection of half-formed excuses. ‘I’m going to… I’m not making an attempt to keep away from you, it’s simply… Could I meet you in…? I would like to satisfy someone now,’ he lastly trails off, taking a look at his wristwatch.
The butterfly touches down. The stability of weight begins to shift. I’ve misplaced him, I feel. He’s off. Shit. I’ll must resort to shouting pointless questions at him as he will get into the automobile and speeds away.
‘Relax. Relax,’ he reads my concern intuitively.
‘I know everything you’ve written about me, okay – blah, blah, blah. Some of it’s proper and a few of it’s fully unsuitable.’
‘Well, if we can sit down and go through it all…’ He cuts me off. ‘Yeah – I’m not going to provide you an interview, Michael, actually.’
The rejection is spoken in a whatkind-of-idiot-do you-take-me-for? tone. I’m unsure what my subsequent play may be. Then it occurs. There’s a pause. He’s contemplating one thing. It’s as if a coin spinning within the air in his ideas has simply landed fortunate facet up and clicked him into impulsive mode.
‘Actually – I’ll have a fast cup of espresso with you.’
- Abridged extracts from Fugitive by Michael O’Farrell, Merrion Press, €20.
