Michael Boyle waited three hours in a parked van in Walworth, disguised and awake. When Tony Brindle stepped out of his house, Boyle opened fire. One bullet went through Brindle's left elbow and lodged in his lower left chest. Another went clean through both his thighs.
Brindle still ran. He got himself back towards the house he had just left. Boyle jumped from the van and went after him down the street, a Browning pistol in his hand with seven bullets still in it. British police said he meant to finish the job.
It was September 1995, and Boyle had come over from Ireland to do it. This film reads a detailed Sunday Tribune report of the court case that followed, and of the man behind the gun.
The contract
The court heard the shooting was the last chapter of a long-running feud between two South London families. The members' film tells that war in full.
Then Michael Boyle was contracted to kill Tony Brindle.
The man from Bray
Boyle did not fit the picture. He grew up in Bray, County Wicklow, the second eldest son in a family of three boys and three girls. His father was a soldier, his mother a legal secretary. Neighbours remembered a decent, honest family, and a boy with a brilliant mind who could turn his hand to anything. He went to Presentation College, never got into trouble at school, was good at football and could hold his own in conversation with adults. A retired Garda who arrested him early on said he came from a respectable home and was a sharp dresser.
He did not get into crime until he was 20. It may have started with burglaries. A Special Branch officer said that from his mid-twenties Boyle was a suspect in the immediate aftermath of every kidnapping or gun crime in the Republic.
Escapes and kidnaps
In April 1975, on trial at the Four Courts in Dublin over armed robberies in Rathfarnham and Enniskerry, he asked to go to the toilet. He came out minutes later holding a pistol that an unknown associate had hidden by the cistern. He was recaptured in May and held at the Central Mental Hospital in Dundrum. He escaped from there too. He was caught again in June and convicted of the robberies.
In 1983 he and an accomplice kidnapped a Wicklow solicitor and demanded a 50 grand ransom. The man was tied to a tree with a plastic bag over his head for two days. When Boyle rang the family, a detective recognised his voice. Out on bail, Boyle kidnapped the wife of a Greystones art collector and demanded £60,000. He was caught after a dramatic chase at Rocky Valley in Kilmacanogue. In 1984 he was convicted of both kidnappings and jailed for 12 years.
After his early release he told Gardaí he was an intelligence officer in the Irish Republican Army and offered to sell them information for £20,000. They refused. A former member of the Republican Army who had served time in Dublin said he had never heard of Boyle and doubted he had ever been a member. When he was charged in 1995 he gave an address in Inchicore, Dublin. A man at the local working men's club remembered him drinking there often, mostly alone, keeping to himself.
The Old Bailey
At the Old Bailey Boyle denied trying to murder Brindle. He blamed a Dublin figure, who has never been charged, saying the man was his paymaster and had threatened to kill his girlfriend's young daughter if he did not do it. He said he only planned to shoot Brindle, not kill him. And he said the Gardaí had encouraged him to become an informer after an arrest over a hijacked vodka load. In March 1997 Boyle was convicted of attempting to kill Anthony Brindle.
The Gardaí told the court Boyle had warned them, six months before, that he had been contracted to kill Brindle. So why was he able to sit in a van in Walworth for three hours with a loaded Browning? What was waiting for him in that street when he chased Brindle, and what did one Garda later tell the Sunday Tribune about why he was allowed to travel? The answers are in the members' film.