Ex-IRA prisoner turned multi-millionaire property developer, Tom McFeely, proudly opened the door to his €15m mansion on Dublin's plush Ailsebury Road.
"It's a bit different to my Long Kesh cell," he grinned, inviting me in. With its white marble fireplaces, ornate ceilings, chandeliers and priceless tapestries, it's poles apart from the death-trap Priory Hall apartments he built across town in Donaghmede.
I'm the only journalist to ever interview him or get a tour of his palatial home. Buried in a drawer beneath photos of himself and other IRA prisoners in the H-Blocks was an original Picasso etching. "I haven't bothered hanging it," he said.
McFeeley does things his way. "All this talk of my transformation from militant republican to millionaire is nonsense," he declared. "There's been no transformation. I brought the energy and determination I gave to the IRA to the world of business. My republican convictions are as strong as ever."
He doesn't speak to his Ailesbury Road neighbours in Dublin 4, branding them snobs. He saw himself as a man of the people: "Other big property developers turn their noses so far up at me they could be used as flag-poles. I've no time for them either. They're arrogant, egotistical and anaemic. I've more respect for street-sweepers and the bar-men in my local."
But it's the ordinary people McFeely professed to care so much about that have been screwed by his shoddy building work. While he couldn't even get the basics right in the homes he built, his own had a luxurious sauna and Jacuzzi.
He picked me up from Connolly Station in a 1994 yellow-and-black striped sports car, affectionately called "the Bumble Bee". The best a passenger could do was hold on tight and hope for the best as McFeely raced around corners, squeezed between buses, and made mad manoeuvres until we pulled up at his home.
In the driveway, sat a €279,000 Bentley which he never drove. "I just bought it to sicken the Criminal Assets' Bureau. I'd to give them €9m in unpaid taxes. When I wrote the last cheque, I bought the Bentley. I was saying, f**k you!"
He told me the rags to riches story of how he arrived in Dublin 20 years earlier, fresh from the hell of the H-Blocks where he'd watched his comrades die on hunger-strike and was days away from death himself. His marriage had broken up when he was prison.
"I arrived in Dublin with £240 to my name and slept in a car on my first night," he said. He worked on building sites, saved what he could, borrowed money, invested it and began building the empire which has now come crashing down. Unlike many other ex-IRA men who enter the business world, he was genuinely self-made. His Coalport company was never a Provo front.
He was born in Dungiven, Co Derry, into a family of 13. His father was a cattle-dealer "that's where I learned my entrepreneurial skills". His republicanism came from his mother.
He was working as a bricklayer in London when civil rights' marchers were beaten off Derry's streets in 1968. He came home and joined the IRA. When loyalists stoned the next march, he attacked them with a hatchet. Unlike Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, McFeely was proud and open about his IRA past.
A British soldier stopped him as he drove a car bomb in 1971. He thumped the soldier, escaped and went on the run. McFeely referred to a raid on his family's home during the IRA border campaign: "I was only a child but I never forgot the hatred contorting the face of one B-Special as he wrecked our house.
"That man later joined the UDR. He was shot outside his own home in 1972." I asked McFeely if the victim died: "He was hit by a 303 (rifle) from five feet. What do you think?" he replied unflinchingly. No-one was ever charged with the murder. In 1974, McFeely was arrested with guns in Leitrim and imprisoned in Portlaoise. He escaped by bombing through a prison wall.
He was recaptured two years later with another IRA man after a gun battle with the RUC. He was charged with attempted murder of police, weapons' possession, and a post office robbery.
His co-accused was sentenced to 12 years, McFeely to 26 years in jail. "You're an extremely dangerous, intelligent and vicious young man," the judge said. "I may serve the term, but you wont!" McFeely shouted from the dock.
In Long Kesh, he retaliated on prison officers who beat young IRA men. "He'd break their jaws," recalled another prisoner. "It took a whole team of screws to visit Tom's cell. He gave, and took, many beatings. He was so hard, we'd say 'he wasn't born, he was chiselled'."
The authorities deemed him so unmanageable, they housed McFeely in isolation. He went on a 11-day hunger-and-thirst strike. "The tips of my fingers and toes went black. My tongue was swollen like a balloon," he told me. "I wasn't sweating so the heat in my body was unbelievable." As he approached death, jail bosses capitulated and returned him to the IRA wing.
He went 53 days without food on the 1980 hunger-strike before it was called off: "I never felt hungry but I was blind by the end and felt constantly nauseous. I was vomiting green bile. I was fully prepared to die."
Remarkably, months later, he volunteered for the second IRA hunger-strike led by Bobby Sands. The IRA leadership refused him, believing his body was so weakened he'd die too quickly.
McFeely clashed with IRA leaders over the 1983 H-Block escape in which 38 inmates left in a prison van. "Only those willing to return to IRA active service should have been allowed to escape. Far too many who had no intention of doing that got out," he complained.
In jail, he became increasingly disillusioned, arguing that Sinn Féin would "destroy the IRA" and agree a deal which fell short of a British withdrawal. It was "immoral to continue armed struggle in such circumstances", he said.
Despite all McFeely's trappings of wealth, his most treasured possession in his home was a Celtic cross engraved with the hunger-strikers' faces. He has two teenage children with his American wife Nina and three grown-up ones from his first marriage in the North.
Even during the boom years, he didn't live the social high life. He hated holidays, never turned his mobile off, and slept only five hours a night. ".
In the end, he proved as greedy as the establishment businessmen he hated. The champion of the weak, who fought for the under-dog in the H-Blocks, became the millionaire cowboy developer who made people homeless.
