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New book lifts lid on one of Ireland's biggest heists – and how the robbers got away
Despite the scale of the robbery in December 2004, no one has ever been convicted for the robbery itself.
The bank worker charged in connection with the robbery.
Two decades on from the night £26.5m disappeared from the Northern Bank's vault in Belfast, author Glenn Patterson has written the definitive account of a crime that stunned the country – and yet, somehow didn't.
'It's just the kind of thing that happens in Northern Ireland,' he says in a discussion with CrimeWorld host Nicola Tallant.
It is that almost eerie sense of familiarity, of a city conditioned to violence, that lingers most in Patterson's recently published book, The Northern Bank Job.
At its heart is a chilling moment. Karyn McMullan, the wife of bank manager Kevin McMullan, blindfolded, stripped and dumped in a forest after being held hostage for hours, hears an explosion.
'Well that would be the car being blown up,' she thought, 'because that's just what they do in this country.' A final note in an intricately orchestrated heist that still has no convictions, revealing the uneasy normality of organised crime in post-Troubles Northern Ireland.
Author Glenn Patterson.
The robbery unfolded on December 20, 2004, in what remains one of the biggest cash heists in Irish history.
Patterson's gripping book details the scale and precision of the operation, exposing an inside job pulled off with remarkable audacity, composure and a whole network of accomplices.
It began, as so many of Belfast's darkest stories do, with a knock on the door.
That door belonged to Chris Ward, a young single man from Poleglass who worked at the bank's cash centre, and had opted out of his usual Sunday night bar shift that evening, something he only did occasionally.
Two men arrived claiming to want to talk about the Celtic but seconds later, more masked men followed.
Within moments, Ward and his family became hostages. Meanwhile, miles away, in rural Loughinisland, Kevin McMullan answered a similar knock from men disguised as police.
Cops at the scene.
'They said there'd been an accident involving a member of his family and they needed him to identify a body,' Patterson recounts.
'Then came the guns. A gun to Kevin's head. A gun to his wife Karyn's head.'
What followed was a masterclass in psychological manipulation and coordination. While Karyn was blindfolded, threatened and transported to a secret location, McMullan and Ward were held overnight and drilled in the following day's script.
'They were told to behave as normal if they wanted their families to remain safe,' Patterson explains. 'Dismiss the other staff, say there was a recount and begin moving the resealed cash, to look like waste paper, out the front door.'
And they did... twice.
That is perhaps the most staggering detail of all. The robbers came back for a second run, accumulating £26.5m. All carried out with unnerving composure just a few days before Christmas.
Ward even left the bank during the day to buy sandwiches and a Christmas present. 'I was told to act normal,' he later said. 'So I acted normal.'
In the operation filled with peculiar details, there was, however, one near miss. A member of the public spotted men in striking ginger wigs beside a white van parked near the bank and so alerted a parking warden.
'The warden passed it on to police,' Patterson says, 'but by the time they arrived, the van was gone.'
Despite the scale of the crime, no one has ever been convicted for the robbery itself.
The only man jailed in connection to it was Cork-based financier Ted Cunningham, who laundered approximately £2.3m of the proceeds. He has continued to deny any involvement in the crime.
Chris Ward leaving the bank with the cash.
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Much of the cash was the Northern Bank's own printed notes, made worthless when the bank recalled the entire run.
'They made it the greatest theft of waste paper in history!' Patterson says.
Almost immediately, suspicion fell on the Provisional IRA. Because of the robbery's sophistication, manpower and timing, it all pointed towards an organisation with serious infrastructure and resources.
The bank worker charged in connection with the robbery.
'For this to happen just then, in December of 2004,' Patterson says, referring to the ongoing peace talks and post-Good Friday political negotiations, 'was deeply problematic.'
The IRA denied any involvement and Sinn Féin claimed ignorance, but public scepticism remains to this day.
Ward, initially seen as a victim, then became the focus of a criminal investigation.
'He had prepared the rota,' explains Patterson. 'He was on shift with McMullan, so the prosecution built its case on the grounds that he manipulated the schedule in his favour.'
But when the case was brought to court in 2008, the evidence fell apart. CCTV footage showed McMullan had seen the rota days in advance and had been filmed discussing it with Ward.
'The whole case just crumbled,' says Patterson. 'There wasn't a single piece of direct evidence against him. Nobody asked where the money had gone, he never profited. It just made no sense.'
The trial was held in a Diplock court, without a jury, because the charge was deemed to be terror-related. Yet the prosecution refused to speculate on whether the IRA was indeed involved, leaving the process hanging in complete contradiction. A contradiction that did not go unnoticed.
As Patterson points out, there was often a reluctance to confront certain truths too directly, 'more often, it was a case of a blind eye being turned to IRA activities in the early 2000s... everything was in service to the peace process, and you might say, with good reason'.
For Patterson, the answer may then be quite straightforward. 'They did it because they could,' he says, echoing journalist Suzanne Breen.
'The level of co-ordination, insider knowledge, and forensic awareness involved, pointed to an organisation with serious resources and deep roots in the city, all traits long associated with the Provisional IRA. They had the means, the local knowledge and the infrastructure. And maybe they thought they could get away with it... and they did.'
For all its scale and complexity, The Northern Bank Job is a story anchored in place.
'This kind of thing happens here,' Patterson repeats. 'And people just learn to live with it.'
