ART OF STONE; Milltown attacker swaps pistols for paint in studio

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Apr 29, 2001 | by TED OLIVER

EVEN in a small country where the number of killers roaming the streets runs into hundreds, the name of Michael Stone still stands out amid the crowd.

No one else in Northern Ireland has had his worst crimes recorded on international TV cameras, as he launched his gun and grenade attack on the funeral of the three IRA terrorists shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar.

But now the hands that pulled the triggers and ripped out the pins from the grenades are being used to fashion other, more positive and possibly lucrative, images.

Michael Stone the mass murderer is fast becoming a fashionable artist whose works are selling for thousands of pounds and are found hanging in some unexpected homes in Belfast and Dublin.

It is not just his notoriety that is selling his paintings. This summer he will mount his first exhibition. Soon prints of his works will be available on the Internet and a top London dealer will shortly be visiting his studio with a view to marketing his work internationally.

But a viewing of his vivid paintings in bright oranges, reds and purples is not a simple matter.

First a "minder" collects you at a neutral spot and leads the way through a maze of streets to the heart of a loyalist housing estate where Stone dispenses tea, biscuits and chat in a studio with no natural light behind the heavy metal shutters.

Across the street more minders watch from a flat equipped with at least walky-talkies and on a hat-stand hangs his body-armour, a Christmas present from his fiancee Suzanne, who got an identical set in return.

This is the reality of life for the artist formerly known as Rambo. He knows that, ceasefire or no ceasefire, dozens of republicans would gleefully kill him in revenge for his six murders and he is not even safe from rival loyalists who resent his support for the Good Friday Agreement.

At home, a place known only to a few close associates and a house where he sleeps only infrequently, he keeps seven dogs and tanks full of tropical fish swimming behind armoured glass.

""I don't want people to hear that Michael Stone drowned in his own front room because the bullets hit the fish tanks," he says.

He told the London dealer that a trip to Bond Street was out of the question because he would have to bring five minders with him and even then he would not feel secure.

With no hint of self-importance, he says: "I have a responsibilty to stay alive. I don't move outside my own areas and I always have heavy protection with me.

"If I was to be killed, there are a lot of people who would go out and seek vengeance and I don't want anyone else to die or loyalists going back to jail because I took risks."

He adds: "I regard myself as having been a soldier and I am proud that I defended my country and my community and if I didn't firmly believe that I wouldn't be able to sleep at nights."

Stone opens his studio to the local children, to try to get them involved in art and "maybe to find a way out of the ghettoes".

"On their first visit I say to them: 'Right! Let's get all your questions about me being Rambo out of the way. I am getting plump, I walk with a limp and my hair is going grey'.

"I tell them: 'It's not like the movies. The director doesn't shout 'Cut!' and all the dead get up and walk away. There are sounds and scenes and smells that you will never forget'.

"My war is over and I hope that the whole war is over. The Good Friday Agreement is by no means perfect but it is the best we've got."

Stone's delight at what passes for freedom, especially the freedom to use proper painting materials, is over-whelming and he recalls his first days of his artistic career.

After the Milltown cemetery attack in 1988 when he killed three mourners, one of them an IRA man, he was remanded in custody at Belfast's Crumlin Road prison for a year.

"Because I was such a high-risk prisoner and the jail had IRA prisoners, I was put on Rule 25 in the punishment unit, 'The Boards', underground in solitary with only a tiny window high up the wall.

Stone survives on pounds 110 social security. Any money he makes from his art goes towards paint and "helping the kids".

His latest work is his first venture into semi-sculpture, called 'Red Hand', a commissioned work.

The bronze hand has been painted bright red and set on top of a piece of Irish bog oak laid upon a piece of slate from a quarry close to Stone's birth place in east Belfast.

"The slate," he explains, "just happens to come from the quarry where I was first taught to fire a gun thirty years ago."

Told that his work is impressive and that some day he may become a well-known artist, Stone says: "You're just trying to flatter an old mass murderer."