The People reports interview with murder suspect Mambo

The People, 29 February 2004:

Ludlow suspect slams loyalists

'Drug dealers make me mad'

By Brenda O'Neill

A Loyalist murder suspect has said he has quit all connections with terror groups in Northern Ireland because they've become involved with drugs.

Samuel Black Carroll was a suspect in the 1976 murder of Dundalk man Seamus Ludlow and was also once quizzed about the killing of Sinn Fein vice-president Maire Drumm.

Now Carroll, who has a new life in England, has gone public to denounce loyalist gangs.

"The concept of Loyalism has been degraded. I don't want to be identified with it anymore," said Carroll.

"A lot of loyalists today are drugs barons. I came to England in 1991. My sister died from cancer and I became responsible for bringing up her children."

But Carroll did speak in detail about his loyalist past and claimed to be personal friends of both Shankhill Butcher Lenny Murphy and shot LVF leader Billy Wright.

Carroll - nicknamed Mambo - was arrested in a blaze of publicity in 1998 after the RUC re-opened its investigation into Seamus Ludlow's killing.

The forestry worker, 47, was shot three times and dumped in a ditch near his Dundalk home on the Irish border in 1976.

The Irish Government is expected to receive a report into the death of Seamus Ludlow from former Supreme Court Judge Henry Barron in April.

"It just doesn't make sense for me to have been involved in the Seamus Ludlow case," said the leading loyalist.

"The name Samuel Black Carroll was never mentioned in the interviews. It was always Mambo.

"There's only one person who carried that name in the whole of Ireland and that's me. The murder is associated with that name rather than me.

"But during 1976 I was out of the country for a while and I went 'missing'.

"Many people thought I was dead. They thought I had been killed in a car crash in Guernsey."

"I was arrested in 1998 in Rugely and flown under a glare of publicity to Ireland, which caused me a lot of hardship.

"At first I thought I was being arrested for the murder of Maire Drumm, who was vice-president of Sinn Fein. I've been arrested for that before on the word of a supergrass.

"The people who killed Seamus Ludlow apparently were drunk. I'm not a serious drinker, that's well known."

Carroll admitted being associated with Ulster loyalist terror gangs, adding: "I have never denied I am a Loyalist. My closest friends in Northern Ireland are from various Loyalist groups, including the Red Hand Commando with whom I have been closely associated for years.

"I have also been associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Freedom Fighters and the Orange Volunteers.

"One of my greatest friends was Lenny Murphy, who ran the Shankhill Butchers. People have identified me as one of the Shankhill Butchers but I wasn't - although I was closely associated with the leadership.

" I supported the killing of known activists in the area, not the killing of innocent people. People who were not activists should not have been targeted.

Carroll, who says he has severed all links with organised loyalism says the groups became as bad as republican terrorists.

"I have lots of regrets and sorrows about Northern Ireland," he added. "But I have not mellowed and I am still a very angry man.

"I am angry about the indiscriminate car bombings that were carried out in my neighbourhood.

"Republicans were bombing our streets, destroying our community, killing our people. That's the community I come from. But I was never against my Catholic neighbours. I was against the terrorists of the day. Unfortunately the groups I was connected with became terrorists.

"They were terrorising our friends and neighbours."