THE hardest of Irish republican hard men could never have thought that he would be undone by placing his trust in a friendly descendant of the Mohawk Indian nation.
Posing as a slightly dumb conduit for American money, David Rupert, 51, an FBI spy, became the most successful mole to be planted inside the murky world of IRA terrorism.
Terrorists called him “The Big Yank” as he drove around Ireland with McKevitt, listening to his boasts at the scenes of his worst atrocities. Mr Rupert, a 6ft 5in, swaggering fellow, would visit Ireland, then fly back to the US via London, reporting to his MI5 minders en route.
The four-times married New Yorker has been given a new identity and lives with a permanent armed guard. He was paid $1.25 million by the US and British authorities before the trial, and is receiving significant extra payments.
The 2,140 encrypted e-mails sent to his handlers will form the backbone of a memoir he is compiling with two journalists. He will get 55 per cent of the profits from the book. His need to earn money has been made more urgent by a $750,000 debt for unpaid taxes owed in the US. But what persuaded him to risk living under the permanent threat of death was a documentary about the Omagh bombing.
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McKevitt’s mistake, after so many years of evading justice, was to trust Mr Rupert, a failed trucking boss who had inveigled his way into the dissident hierarchy. The two men only met in 1999.
Mr Rupert recalled secret Real IRA gatherings in houses and hotels where McKevitt disclosed his terrorism plans.
A self-confessed “whore” who would do anything for money, he spent more than half of the trial squashed into the witness box at Dublin’s Special Criminal Court.
Mr Rupert’s hostile examination by the defence team, before it was dismissed by McKevitt, included references to his three bankruptcies and a bevy of girlfriends. His money-making schemes had included a proposed gambling boat off the Florida coast, using the expertise of a New York mob lieutenant, the court was told.
But the deal foundered and the search for his fortune went on. He had stomach surgery in an attempt to make it as a wrestler, but soon lost his taste for it.
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“It was supposed to be pretend,” he said. “But when you get thrown on your back and weigh 300lb, it hurts.”
Mr Rupert had previous experience as an undercover agent. In 1974, he aided New York police in an operation targeting drug dealers. But, he told the court, he did it simply because “I didn’t want to be in the house because my first wife was a bit of a bitch”.
He was smuggled in daily as FBI agents and police swarmed over the old Dublin courtroom.
Mr Rupert never believed McKevitt’s attempts to distance himself from the Real IRA’s leadership. “He said to me he was not the head of the army council and he did not want it to be known as his army . . . I have been in business a long time, and when you meet the man in charge, it is not hard to tell.”