Season Two, Episode One
The last time we saw Darren he was sprawled on the ground with a bullet in him. He had gone to Huey’s wake, to make peace with John Boy before heading back to Spain. He wanted to know that his sister and her family would be safe if he went. John Boy assured him “I’m not an animal”, but Stumpy had other ideas, and exacted his revenge with a drive-by shooting as Darren walked away from the pub. Doctors fought to save his life as he hovered close to death, close to being reunited too soon with his dead brother and perhaps the man who killed him over what amounted to a piddling small debt. A year has passed, and things have changed in the criminal underworld. Shaken more than he would like to admit by the loss of his brother, John Boy believes Huey has remained behind, and swears he sees what he often describes as “the ghost” late at night, but nobody else has seen this apparition, and privately his rapidly-growing obsession is making him something of a laughing stock and he is losing the respect of his gang. Not that they would say as such to his face, of course.
The Gardai raid John Boy’s apartment, the CAB (Criminal Assets Bureau, a special unit set up by the Justice Department to target the illegal takings of criminals and seize them) taking his car and all his files. He’s less than happy and tells his lawyer to sort it out, while he orders Nidge to collect all the debts that have been owing. Today. Darren, who has managed to pull through his life-threatening injuries, is talking to Rosie, who is over on a visit, having moved back to London, anxious to put all the Stumpy business behind her. Losing the baby, coming close to death herself has taken all she has, and she is in no mood for Darren’s constant attentions when he won’t commit to her.
Darren, for his part, has cut his ties with John Boy and the gang and is working for a smalltime hustler called Fran, who deals mostly in cheap cannabis and dodgy cigarettes. Fran is almost as mental as Darren’s old boss, but he has to make money somehow, and god forbid he should do anything drastic like get a real job! With his record, I guess, they wouldn’t exactly be lining up to offer him a position, now would they? The job doesn’t last long though, as Darren takes exception to Fran’s method of collecting what’s owed to him, which basically entails him setting his rottweiler dogs on a guy. Darren steps in and batters one of the dogs to death when Fran refuses to call it off, and as a result is fired, with the added pressure of now owing Fran thirty thousand Euro, which reminds him is a debt now due in full.
John Boy fires his lawyer, Pat, accusing him of not doing enough to “keep him out of trouble”, and then accusing him of maybe selling him out, asking if Pat has had his office checked for bugs recently? He’s incensed that the Gardai seem to know every move he makes ahead of time, and is convinced someone is ratting him out. Fran calls to Mary’s house, threatening to get the money Darren owes him from her if he can’t locate her brother. He tells her that her house was done up with part of the money and now he wants it back. She sends him packing, but is trembling visibly. Darren, meanwhile, is having flashbacks to when he was shot, when Mary calls him to chew him out over Fran. He says he’ll sort it and apologises. He goes to see Nidge to ask him if he can loan him the money, but Nidge says he hasn’t got it. He floats the idea of approaching John Boy, pointing out that it was Stumpy who shot Darren, that he did it on his own and there was no order given by his boss. With nowhere left to turn, Darren reluctantly agrees, knowing he has no choice but to climb back in bed with the devil.
When he hears John Boy may be covering the debt, Fran asks Nidge to see if he can get him in with John Boy. What Fran has is small time; he wants to break into the big leagues. Nidge agrees to ask, but John Boy refuses to stump up the money, saying that if Nidge is so worried he can cover the debt himself. Nidge pushes though, pointing out that with Darren off the police’s radar now --- having been shot and no longer part of the gang they don’t have any further current interest in him --- they could use him, and also he declares Fran’s interests to join up with them, telling John Boy Fran is making decent money that they could have a slice of. Eventually John Boy sees the logic and gives in, agreeing to pay Darren’s debt, knowing that the kid will owe him big.
At Pat’s home Stumpy throws a petrol bomb at the door as it’s answered, but it’s the lawyer’s daughter who comes to the door, not him, and she is badly burned. Darren has formed a loose friendship with Luke, the kid he rescued from Fran’s dogs; the two are hanging around a bit now. They go to John Boy’s party (well, it’s a party for someone called Pottsy, but everyone’s going there to meet the gang boss and “do business”) as does Fran and his girlfriend Linda, whom Nidge knows from way back and takes an instant re-shine to. She, more or less ignored by Fran, is delighted and puffed up at the attention, while John Boy’s junkie girlfriend Debbie tries to wheedle some gear out of Tommy. Fran explodes when he notices Luke wearing his jumper: Darren’s mate took it when he burgled Fran’s house, presumably in a weak retaliation for Fran having set his dogs on him. He goes for him, but is restrained by Nidge and the others. John Boy follows Darren outside and reminds him that he is now indebted to the crime boss, and when John Boy says be there, Darren had better be there.
Despite his best efforts, Darren is being pulled back into the frame, back into the world of organised crime, and never before did the phrase “I keep trying to get out, they keep pulling me back in!” seem more appropriate, or tragically true.
QUOTES
John Boy: “There’s this disease, you can only get it from
fucking dead bodies. My brother Huey knew this fella, worked in the morgue. Two or three times a week he’d get a knock on the door, middle of the night, offered cash he was, for them to hop up on the dead.”
Debbie: “That’s sick!”
John Boy: “Sure, you’re dead. What do you care who mucks off into ya?”
Rosie: “I don’t want you waiting with me.”
Darren: “Why not?”
Rosie: “You know why not. Cos you can’t keep acting like we’re still together every time I see you.”
Darren: “We’re friends.”
Rosie: “Friends don’t act like this.”
Darren: “Like what?”
Rosie: “Like waiting at bus stops.”
Darren: “Oh! Friends don’t wait at bus stops for other friends, no?”
Rosie: “No. And the other stuff.”
Darren: “What other stuff?”
Rosie: “Talking.”
Darren: “Oh so friends don’t talk to each other, no?”
Rosie: “Not the way you talk to me.”
Darren: “Like what?”
Rosie: “Messing. Making me laugh.You know you’re doing it, I know you do.”
Darren: “What am I doing?”
Rosie: “Making me fall in love with you.”
Nidge: “What’s he got to be depressed about?” (talking about Darren)
Tommy: “What do you think?”
Nidge: “Didn’t have his bollocks shot off did he, like the soldiers in
fucking Iraq! You get a roadside bomb underneath you, you put your hand down to see if your balls are still there and it’s a pound of mincemeat is in your pants!
That’d make you depressed!”
Tommy (after they’ve tried and failed to get the full amount owing): “Do you think he doesn’t have it then?”
Nidge: “I know he doesn’t have it.”
Tommy: “What are you going to say to John Boy?”
(Nidge gives him a harassed look, that says that no matter what he says, no matter how well he puts it or how sympathetic he comes across to his boss, John Boy is not going to be happy and will likely send them back to extract, shall we say, alternative payment? John Boy does not like people to owe him money. Well, he does, but he wants them to pay up, and if they can’t, he doesn’t care what happens to them. They’re no use to him. Besides, it always serves as a good example that you don’t welch or drag out a debt you owe him.)
Nidge: “I can’t believe it! A child of mine being picked on!”
(Nidge is more worried about his image here than his son. How can other kids be bullying his son? His son should be the one doing the bullying! This is bad, as it reflects poorly on Nidge’s hard man image, never mind what it’s doing to Warren.)
John Boy: “I don’t give a
fuck about Stumpy. To be honest the prick bugs the
shit out of me. But you end up on a job with him I don’t want any bollocks.”
(The task of a boss: to make sure that, whether they like each other or not, his staff work together and all personal baggage is left at home. As true in the criminal underworld as, if not more than, anywhere else.)
FAMILY
It’s a real feature of Love/Hate that, no matter what nefarious deeds the guys are up to, rather like “The Sopranos”, they still have to do the little things we all deal with in our lives, the boring, mundane, everyday chores that make up family life. Nidge, on the way to extract money from people with menaces, has to pick up Warren from school and drop him home to Trish. John Boy would, I’m sure, not be impressed! Also, when Nidge drops Warren home Trish is sitting on the sofa watching TV. Why could she not collect their son?
On the way to perform a heinous deed for his boss, Stumpy gets a call from his mother. She has apparently seen a strange man looking in her window, and he rushes to the house. It’s weird to realise that these people, vile and evil and unprincipled and psychopathic as they are, have mothers who love them. It’s almost surreal.
HONOUR AMONG THIEVES
As I’ve been at pains to point out all through season one, this is a fallacy and a fantasy, and it shows here more than in any other crime show. These people are not friends, they’re merely people who band together for a common cause: literally, partners in crime. When one of them gets hurt, hassled, imprisoned or even killed it doesn’t seem to affect the others, unless that can damage them in some way. I mentioned about how when Elmo had the colostomy bag in season one and all Huey could do was laugh at him, leading to his death that might have been prevented if Elmo had rushed him to hospital instead of allowing him to bleed to death in the street. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Here, as Darren recovers from his shooting, nobody seems to care. Nidge plays down what happened, reasoning that it’s not as bad as getting blown up by an IED in Iraq, and when Darren goes to plead with him to help him out by loaning him the money he owes Fran, Nidge smiles lopsidedly and says he hasn’t got it. Of course he has, or could get it, but he’s not interested in helping someone he now probably sees as something of a liability.
FRAN THE MAN
In season one we had Huey as the head-the-ball, but as this season and future ones develop we will come to see that he has one hell of a successor for a psycho among psychos in Fran, who will become a major player, sometimes allied to, sometimes ranged against the gang. Fran is a dog man, that is, he breeds dogs for fights, and he thinks more of his dogs than he does of most people. He is enraged when Darren kills one of them, moreso than when the troubled gangster turns the club on him, hitting him in the face. To Fran, his dogs are his babies and god help anyone who hurts them. After the incident, Fran knows he has Darren, who owes him a huge amount of money, but unlike John Boy (“I’m not some sort of animal!”) he has no compunction about going to see Darren’s sister to demand money from her in the absence of her brother. Like Huey in season one, it seems there is little Fran will shy from, and few if any people he is afraid of. He doesn’t even fear John Boy, who everyone else lives in terror of upsetting. As psychos, they’re almost matched.
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
As was noted briefly in season one, the rules surrounding what can be done about the earnings of criminals and the profits from enterprises proven to be illegal have been tightened up in recent years here in Ireland, with the establishment of CAB, the Criminal Assets Bureau. This organisation tracks the financial assets of known or suspected criminals, pursues writs through the court system and eventually seizes any “ill-gotten gains” in terms of property, land, material wealth or anything else that can be proven to have been bought by the proceeds of crime. As we will see later, this seizure can extend beyond the criminal, to anyone he or she has bought something for that was purchased with money obtained illegally.
This is how the major criminal gangs and godfathers in the recent past have often been taken down here: with their clubs, houses, cars and businesses seized by CAB they have no earning potential and they eventually face the full wrath of the law with no financial backing to help them fight their case. Strip away the assets and leave the man legally naked beneath, and then move in for the kill. It’s a process that has worked for over a decade now, and has required the cleverer criminals to get even more creative, putting property in the names of their wives, family members and so on, in an effort to hide it from the CAB.
Pat, the lawyer for John Boy, also recognises that he is under observation. Under the new money laundering rules, someone who suspects they may be involved in such activity, or knows someone who may be, is bound by law to report it. He has no intention of losing his licence, or worse, serving prison time, but is perhaps rather silly to intimate to the gangster boss that he may be in a position where he is forced to turn him in. John Boy does not treat betrayal of any kind lightly!
PHILOSOPHY OF THE STREET
John Boy waxes lyrical on the life of a gangster: “Load of bul
ls
hit you read in the papers, you know? You get into this, whatever, and you do something because it has to be done, and then somebody wants to do something to you, you don’t let them, and then you’re watching your back all the time. I’m not stupid, like some of them. And the papers are full of
shit. But you know what? The only bit of it that’s true: you don’t get out of it you’re dead.”
GANGSTER PARADISE?
One thing that really impresses me about Carolan’s writing in this series is that he manages to maintain a great balance between making the life of a criminal exciting and powerful, and showing the reality of it what it does to other people, to the gangsters’ families, their loved ones. Collateral damage piles up, and they don’t care. They snipe at each other, as John Boy says above, watching their backs, each knowing the day is coming when they will be the target, when they must kill or be killed by the people they currently count as, if not their friends, then at least their allies. The world they inhabit is dark and scary, and bleak and unforgiving. Behind the parties, the money, the whores and the trips abroad, the car chases, the codewords and the camaraderie of the pub, they’re all just waiting for that knock on the door, or the boot through it, the day when they stare down the barrel of a Glock and see the impassive face of a man they thought was their friend, getting them before they’re got themselves.
Carolan never lets us forget this, never lets us get lost in the fantasy and the glamour, never lets us close the door on the darkness; it’s always open, sometimes only a crack, and the stench of evil and fear and paranoia and revenge and betrayal and madness all filter through it like it’s a gateway to Hell itself, and it’s a door we fear to walk through but wonder what’s behind it? It’s also a door we’re very glad we don’t have to pass through, because what lies on the far side, as O'Brien says in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the very worst thing imaginable. It may all seem like fun now, but we are never allowed to forget that it will, and can, only end one way: in death, despair, hatred and betrayal. The only certainty in the world of the gangland criminal is the dark, dread stone of the grave, a deep dark hole yawning wide, waiting its chance to swallow everyone who gets mixed up in this evil enterprise.