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What the Conspiracy! - The Kidnapping of Shergar
22 Plays3 years ago
Josh tells M about one of the most notable horse kidnappings in Ireland in the 20th Century...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction to Conspiracy Topic
00:00:00
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy has the following to say on the subject of Insert Josh's topic for what the conspiracy hear. It is about a from the century. To say that people were amazed as well as bewildered by the scale and audacity of Insert Josh's topic for what the conspiracy hear would be an understatement. The fact that implication and as well as the entire country of in
00:00:30
Speaker
shook people to their very core. More importantly though, some people were doubtlessly also turned on by insert Josh's topic for what the conspiracy here is definitely a fetish for some people. Now it's perfectly natural. Some would say it's even desirable. But the moral of insert Josh's topic for what the conspiracy here is clear. Never when in unless which of words we should all live by.
COVID-19 Lockdowns and Optimism
00:01:01
Speaker
Possibly the wisest thing the good doctor's ever said.
00:01:22
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison, locked down in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. Ndentath Freezabood in Zhuhai, China. And suffering from a case of deja vu. I feel like we've done this preamble before. Well, it's possible we've been experimenting with different recording technologies this evening.
00:01:42
Speaker
And also you were locked down last week as well. That's actually true. Yes, yes. No, the lockdown continues from where it was before the case numbers continue to rise as we knew they would. Hopefully within about a week they'll have plateaued and we won't be getting any more cases because everyone's being good little citizens and staying put. But we will still have to wait and see, I think.
00:02:04
Speaker
Yes, this is one of these situations where I'm fairly sure things are working out because the case numbers are nowhere near as bad as I dreaded they might be. But I'm also very much aware that I am an epistemologist and not an epidemiologist, although I was once referred to as an epidemiologist in a newspaper back home. So maybe I am both an epistemologist and an epidemiologist.
00:02:31
Speaker
But I am cautiously optimistic, which are of course famous words that I could live or die for come next week. Yes, I think the the telling thing at the moment seems to be that the rise has been kind of linear and not exponential, which is what you'd expect if the virus were free and wild in the population. So fingers crossed, it looks like we're definitely in for a bit more lockdown.
00:02:56
Speaker
at least in the North Island. Things might ease up a little bit down south, given there have been no cases reported there. But yes, certainly, I'm probably going to be... But didn't they detect some COVID-19 in the wastewater and fresh church? There was one instance of COVID being detected in the wastewater, but they think it was probably a person who came into the country
00:03:17
Speaker
infected and had been released from quarantine and there might have just been some residual virus in their system. I imagine that they'll be checking again and if it shows up again that will probably be cause for concern but I think that just that one thing can probably be accounted for but
00:03:35
Speaker
Anyway, we're still very much at the wait and see point. But yes, once again, to all the people who said, what are they thinking? Locking down after a single case? Well, now there's like 200 of them. And there always was before we even locked down. It's just we didn't know about them. There was just the one that showed us it was out in the community. But anyway.
00:03:55
Speaker
Enough COVID talk. I think everyone's had enough of COVID talk. I think people had enough of COVID talk around about a year ago. Yes, no, definitely.
New Conspiracy Game: Shergar's Kidnapping
00:04:06
Speaker
So it's another What the Conspiracy episode, and it's my turn in the driving seat, in the hot seat.
00:04:15
Speaker
We never did quite work out if I'm the one in the chair, meaning that I'm the one being grilled like it's an episode of Mastermind and you're the host or if it's the other way around. But it doesn't matter, because it's not Mastermind, it's what the conspiracy, and I'm going to be introducing in to a conspiracy that I'm hoping you haven't heard of. But again, who knows?
00:04:32
Speaker
Who knows? Well, precisely. I mean, I am the expert in the field. Well, exactly. There's always the possibility you'll go, what the conspiracy? And I'll go, no. What the conspiracy, Josh? What the conspiracy? Try to pull one over on me. What the conspiracy, Josh? Right. Well, play that. I said good day, sir. I said good day. Play that. Good day. I said good day.
00:05:02
Speaker
It's time to play Want the Conspiracy.
00:05:13
Speaker
So, have I got a conspiracy for you? Yes is the answer to that question, but I guess we should do the traditional thing and get you to give me your best best shot at where, when and what this conspiracy concerns. Where?
00:05:32
Speaker
I don't think you've done a local conspiracy recently, although I think you're going to think that if you go local and we go local Aotearoa, New Zealand, then I'm going to know what's what. So I think you're going to go local, but you're going to go local Australasia and the Pacific.
00:05:51
Speaker
Now, I'm assuming, and this is a problematic assumption for a bunch of reasons, but I'm assuming there are probably more conspiracies in Australia than there are in Australasia and the, I mean, actually, by definition, if there's going to be Australia in the Pacific as a G salt, and given that Australia is the biggest part, it's got to be the case, Australia has the majority of them. But I'm going Australia.
00:06:16
Speaker
And possibly, really going out here, I'm going to go for New South Wales. So New South Wales, the time period I think is going to need to be the 20th century, although maybe you might hit your bets and go into either the early 21st or late 19th, but I'm going 20th century.
00:06:39
Speaker
And the kind of conspiracy is missing Prime Minister conspiracy theories. I think you're going to try and pull one over with me with a missing Prime Minister from Australia. And I'm telling you, he went for a swim and he didn't come back. Right. Well, your reasoning is impeccable. Your conclusions are so-so. The 20th century, 1980s, in fact. Oh, one of the worst decades and also one of the best decades.
00:07:09
Speaker
It had its high points and low points, yes, and we're going to talk about one of the lows. It takes place in the Republic of Ireland, and actually Northern Ireland a little bit as well. That's not Australia, though. It's also not New South Wales. I mean, if it had been Wales, that would have been amazing. Yes, you would have been close. British Isles, but yeah, that's as close as you can be. Well, I suppose the Republic is actually quite close to Wales.
00:07:34
Speaker
So geographically, actually, I'm a lot closer than you might think because Wales, you know, they've got a sea border with the Republic of Ireland. So frankly, I think Wales is part of New South Wales. I'll give you a third, maybe a half, half marks on that one. Far too generous, far too generous.
00:07:56
Speaker
And in terms of the topic, it is about something going missing, but that something was not a famous prime minister. I want to talk to you about a kidnapping, but no ordinary kidnapping, a horse kidnapping.
00:08:14
Speaker
Today, I wish to tell you the tale of the kidnapping of Shurgar. Subtitle, thank you for your horse brutality. Sorry, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait. Please, please do that joke again. I'm going to tell you the tale of the kidnapping of Shurgar. Subtitle, thank you for your horse brutality.
00:08:34
Speaker
Well deserved. Now, it's interesting, actually, I basically last week thought, OK, I need to come up with a topic, did a bit of Googling on what are some obscure conspiracy theories. This one came up. So I started doing a bit of reading. I thought, oh, yeah, this looks good. And then in reading about this topic, I discovered that there has actually been a podcast on this very topic released just this year, just a few months ago.
00:08:57
Speaker
It is a topic, a podcast by the BBC called Sports Strangest Crimes about a kidnapping of a horse in Ireland. Now, my challenge to you without doing any surreptitious Googling is to tell me who do you think they got to narrate this BBC podcast about the kidnapping of an Irish horse? Is it going to be?
00:09:25
Speaker
Oh, actually, now I've now forgotten. So I'm gonna go with the obvious option the BBC always goes for, which is Stephen Fry. But at the same time, I'm also going to go for the obvious reference to last week, Sean Locke.
00:09:40
Speaker
No, we'll come back to this. As long as you promise not to Google it while I'm talking. Is it Adele? I can't remember how his last name goes. Dougal. No, it's not him either, I'm afraid. What's his name from Black Box?
00:09:56
Speaker
I'm going to place money on the fact that you won't get this answer unless you've been surreptitiously googling. Right. Is it Queen Elizabeth II? Can you go for a big punt? No, actually no. Bigger punt. No, you need a bigger punt. Pope Francis. No, okay. We'll come back. George W. Bush.
00:10:16
Speaker
No. Donald Trump? No. Horse racing. Horse racing, I don't know a lot about horse racing or the country of Ireland, but apparently horse racing is quite big in Ireland, or at least it certainly was in the 1980s. And obviously in the 1980s, Ireland was not in a great place. Either the troubles were in full swing, the economy was not doing particularly well,
00:10:36
Speaker
And so a champion racehorse, like the one we're about to talk about, was kind of a figure of national pride. And so this whole affair became quite a big deal.
00:10:47
Speaker
So the horse in question is called Shurgar. He was born in 1978 in County Kildare in Ireland. One quick question. So what D&D class is? Shurgar, this certainly sounds like a random monster name that's been generated from a table. It does a little bit. I don't know. Was it Shurgar, the Magnificent? Just about, yeah. So remember, actually, no, you won't remember, but our listeners will remember a few of the conspiracies ago when I talked about Patrick Ewing.
00:11:16
Speaker
and how talented and sought after he was, Shurgar was basically the Patrick Ewing of racehorses. Or in fact, since, I mean, this was happening around the time Patrick Ewing was probably just getting started in his basketball career, so I'd probably be more accurate to say Patrick Ewing was the Shurgar of basketball players. Or indeed, since they're around at the same time, and I never saw photographs of the two of them together, it's entirely possible Patrick Ewing was Shurgar the racehorse, but I don't think that's ever been proved.
Shergar's Racing Legacy
00:11:46
Speaker
We'll move on. Shergar started racing in 1980 when he had some very strong performances, but really hit his stride, literally and figuratively, in 1981, winning, among other things, the Guardian Classic Trial, the chest of ours, the Epsom Derby, the Irish Derby, and the King George VI, then Queen Elizabeth's steaks. Sorry, Adam Kirste, those steaks were they Chevelier steaks by any chance?
00:12:15
Speaker
No, it's S-T-A-K-E-S, unfortunately. I'm just going to add this in for my own pleasure.
00:12:23
Speaker
Well done. So he was apparently, he was known for being not just a great racehorse, a great, a fast running horse, but he was also apparently very, very even tempered and very easy to work with. He sort of, you know, he had everything basically. He was great to race, but also great to train and work with and handle and so on. They had sort of school children could come and visit and would be allowed to pet him. Apparently one time he got out of his stables
00:12:52
Speaker
and just went for a wander around the local town until somebody caught up with him and just happily walked him back. And it was fine. He was just a great horse, apparently. And of course, he was a very, very valuable horse. He was owned by the Aga Khan, which is the title, a title given to the Imam of one of the major denominations of Shia Islam, who then and now
00:13:18
Speaker
was Prince Shah Karim al-Husseini. Now I'm aware I just said the word Khan and I'm going to be saying it a lot to this episode so off you go get it out of your system.
00:13:33
Speaker
Very good. So after his win at the Epsom Derby in 1981, the Aga Khan sold shares in Shergar. Shergar was valued at 10 million pounds, and that's 10 million pounds in 1981. So I don't know how much it'll be worth these days, but a fair bit more.
00:13:49
Speaker
So there were 40 shares, so that's £250,000 a piece. The Aga Khan kept six, and he and the owners of the other 34 formed an owner's syndicate to make money off sugar, and make money they did.
00:14:06
Speaker
He did phenomenally well for most of 1981, but towards the end of the racing season, his performance started to drop. And after he came in, I think, a mere fourth at the pre-Dulac du Triomphe race, late in 1981, the Aga Khan decided rather than investing, putting more resources into training him up and possibly getting him back on four more, possibly not.
00:14:31
Speaker
they'll just put them out to stud at the Ballymanny Stud Farm in Ireland. And I gather, again, don't know much about racing, but I gather the real money from a champion racehorse is not from like prize money from winning races. It's for putting them out to stud. That is basically, yeah. It's putting them out to stud and horse breeders from all around the world will want the opportunity to have this horse sire there, next generation of race horses.
00:14:57
Speaker
So, yes, he was put out to study an island. This was apparently a bit of a point of pride for islands. Supposedly, the Aga Khan had been offered quite a lot of money to take Shergar to America for the horse breeders over there, but he decided to stay in Ireland. Ireland's much more lax tax laws may have had something to do with that, but this was a big deal. There was apparently a parade in County Kildear when
00:15:22
Speaker
Shergar was brought home, but created him down the streets. And he got to work. He got down to business, did this horse. Stud fees for him could be as high as 80,000 pounds. In 1982, he, what's the word, serviced?
00:15:42
Speaker
44 mares, siring about 36 foals. He was booked for another 55 mares for the 1983 breeding season. It's a lot of horse-loving right there, which was expected to make over a million pounds for the for the syndicate. Unfortunately,
00:16:03
Speaker
At around 8.30pm, on the night of February the 8th, 1983, not long before the breeding season, the stud season was about to begin, he was kidnapped. On that night, three masked armed men burst into the home of a man called Jim Fitzgerald, who was the head groom at the Ballymani stud farm. So at gunpoint, one of them said, we have come for Shergar, we want two million pounds for him.
00:16:30
Speaker
And so Mr. Fitzgerald's family was locked in a room and he was taken to the stables at gunpoint where the rest of the kidnappers were waiting. Apparently there were, he reckoned there were between six and nine men altogether. Obviously he wasn't in an entirely reliable state of mind, bit of a state of shock, but that was his guess.
00:16:50
Speaker
And he was ordered to put Sugar into a horse float so they could take him away. And unfortunately, Sugar's easygoing nature kind of worked against him in this case because he basically went without any trouble. He was a fairly chilled out horse who was happy to just jump on this float even if it was a bunch of strangers getting on there.
00:17:10
Speaker
And away he went. So one lot of this group drove Shurgar off. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald was taken off in a van, made to lie face down so he couldn't see where they were going and was basically just driven around for a good wee while just to stall basically so that he wouldn't be able to raise any alarm. Drove him around for a while and then dropped him off at a village around 20 miles away from Ballymani.
00:17:35
Speaker
The killers, when they dropped him off, told him not to contact the police or he and his family would be killed. And they told him that the gang would contact him using the phrase King Neptune to identify themselves. Now, as far as we're aware, King Neptune himself, aka Poseidon, the Lord of the Deep, was not involved in the killings in any way, but we can't be sure.
00:17:55
Speaker
We can be sure, because the Emperor Caligula had a decisive victory against Neptune during his reign, and Neptune has not troubled the world since. Well, there we go then. You've heard it here first.
00:18:12
Speaker
So once Fitzgerald managed to get back to Ballymanny, apparently he sort of had to walk to the next town, again remembering this is 1981. So after this would have been, I don't know, 9.30 or 10 o'clock at night, nothing would be open. He walked to another town, managed to ring his brother who gave him a lift back to Ballymanny.
00:18:33
Speaker
And at that point, he didn't really know what to do. This was, you know, this is not a situation he'd ever prepared himself for. It wasn't something he'd ever, a possibility he'd ever considered. So his first thing was, well, I really feel like I should call the police or certainly, you know, tell some people, but they, they told me I shouldn't. So what do I do? So then this big, big game of phone tag basically commenced.
00:18:57
Speaker
Jim Fitzgerald first called a Frenchman by the name of Gillain Drian, who was the manager of the Aga Khan's Studs in Ireland. Drian tried to get in touch with the Aga Khan, but couldn't, so he called a man called Stan Cosgrove, who was Shugar's vet and also one of the shareholders in the syndicate, and we'll come back to Mr Cosgrove later.
00:19:18
Speaker
But Mr. Cosgrove then called Sean Berry, the manager of the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders Association. Sean Berry called his friend Ellen Dukes, who was the Minister of Finance. Ellen Dukes referred him to Michael Noonan, who was the Minister for Justice. And both Ellen Dukes and Michael Noonan, both ministers said, yeah, you should definitely call the cops. And around four o'clock in the morning, local time,
00:19:43
Speaker
Mr Drion, who'd been trying to get in touch with the Aga Khan all that time, presumably, finally did manage to get in contact with him, told him what had gone on, sugar had been stolen, and the Aga Khan instructed them, yes, no, definitely call the police, call them right away. But by this time, like more than eight hours had passed since the actual kidnapping,
00:20:03
Speaker
So the trail had gone fairly cold, and the police didn't really have a lot to go on. And to complicate matters, and presumably this was something that the kidnappers knew, and this was the reason for their timing, there had just been a big thoroughbred, an auction of thoroughbred horses in the area. So it wasn't as simple as saying, look out for some people towing a horse float, because there were lots of horses being transported around the area at that time.
00:20:33
Speaker
So to begin with, they'd taken the horse and they'd basically seemed like they'd gotten away with it, initially at least.
00:20:42
Speaker
So let's take a pause there. Having heard a bit more about the case, who do you think they might have got to narrate a podcast about this on the BBC? Give me another guess. I've already punted big with Pope Francis, Donald J. Trump, George W. Bush and the Queen of England. I'm going to say it may be the person you least would expect to host a British podcast about the kidnapping of an Irish
Failed Ransom and Theories
00:21:09
Speaker
horse.
00:21:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, if we're talking about the person I would least expect to host a podcast about strange British sporting crimes, I'm going to go, is it me? Am I the host of the podcast?
00:21:21
Speaker
that it's a better guess than the previous ones, but no, unfortunately, you're wrong. So let's move on. So the horse had been kidnapped, but kidnapped for ransom. And so obviously then came the ransom demands. Now, apparently, the syndicate had decided pretty much early on they weren't going to pay the ransom. They were basically afraid that if they did, they would set a precedent. And obviously, if you're rich enough to drop 250,000 pounds in shares on a racehorse, you're probably rich enough that you actually own a lot of horses.
00:21:50
Speaker
and certainly the Aga Khan did, and I imagine a bunch of the other people did as well, so they didn't want to basically paint a target on any of their other valuable horses if it was shown that kidnapping a racehorse was a way to make a lot of money.
00:22:04
Speaker
And of course, they were also insured. And I mean, don't forget that for the, for the syndicate, you know, this is an investment, they're in it for the money. I don't know how many, how much, if any of them had much of a sentimental attachment to the horse. And of course, they were all insured, although some apparently, sort of, I think they were all insured in the case of Shergar's death, although not all of them had thought to take out insurance in case he was stolen. But anyway,
00:22:30
Speaker
So, as for the ransom demand, straight away a horse trainer, I believe located in Belfast, which is fairly far from County Kildare and also in Northern Ireland, not the Republic of Ireland, he was kidnapped, he was contacted by the kidnappers, who at that point were asking for apparently only 40,000 pounds, or they later raised that to 52,000.
00:22:54
Speaker
They told him that they would only deal with these three certain British horse racing journalists. They wanted them to be neutral third parties, but who knew what they were talking about when it came to horses. All these men were told to meet at a particular hotel in Belfast.
00:23:12
Speaker
And from there, they were all told to go back to Jeremy Maxwell's house and wait for the kidnappers to call. And call they did. Over the next few days, they called a bunch of times. And being the 1980s, it was the good old fashioned, keep them talking for as long as you can so we can trace the phone call situation. But unfortunately, that never happened.
00:23:33
Speaker
There was apparently only one time where the kidnappers stayed on the line long enough for a trace to be run, but unfortunately the person who was supposed to be running the trace had gone home because their shift had ended. And so that never happened.
00:23:48
Speaker
Now, at the same time as Jeremy Maxwell and these reporters were dealing with kidnappers, a whole second sort of line of negotiation, a second sort of stream was going on in parallel. On the afternoon of the 9th of February, so it's the day after the kidnapping,
00:24:07
Speaker
the kidnappers got in touch with Gillain Dreon himself. And apparently things got a little bit farcical at this point, because Mr. Dreon was a Frenchman whose English was not spectacular. And between his poor grasp of English, his heavy French accent, and the kidnappers' heavy Irish accent, they could barely actually understand each other. And I gather the kidnappers basically gave up at one point and had to ring back a bit later.
00:24:35
Speaker
apparently speaking very slowly and clearly were able to establish that they were after two million pounds and they wanted a contact number in France because they wanted to do all the negotiations through France. Again, like neutral territory may make it harder to investigate for the police if it's another country, I don't know, but they wanted to talk to people in France for their negotiations.
00:24:59
Speaker
And over the next four days, the owner syndicate negotiated with the kidnappers through a third party sort of consulting firm that the syndicate had brought in, acting out of the Aga Khan's office in France. Now, you may be thinking at this point, why, what's going on? Why were there two different lanes of negotiations going on? Well, some people thought that the first lot was a hoax. Some people thought the whole
00:25:23
Speaker
Jeremy Maxwell and this business in Belfast was just someone else trying to trick other people out of the rents and money and who actually had nothing to do with the kidnapping.
00:25:35
Speaker
The problem with that is that apparently these people who called Jeremy Maxwell had used the King Neptune code phrase. But more than that, the first call that they placed to Jeremy Maxwell was on, it must have been on the night of the 8th because it was actually, they got in touch with him before Jim Fitzgerald had got back to Bellimani and been able to tell anyone about the kidnapping in the first place.
00:26:04
Speaker
it does seem they were genuine. And so people then thought, well, perhaps the whole, it was all just a distraction that this was, these were fake negotiations. But the whole point of it was to get the media and the police looking at what's going on in Belfast, what's happening in this hotel, what, you know, what's going on in a completely different part of the country, to make it easier to a move shirigah around to whatever safe house they had them at and and throw them off the seat of the
00:26:29
Speaker
of the real negotiations. That would suggest a fairly complicated plot then. Because if your plot is not just we've kidnapped a horse and we want a ransom, but we also have a cover story so that people will be investigating a kidnapping plot in one location whilst we actually do our negotiations and our transfer in a completely different location. That suggests a very, very organized conspiracy.
00:26:58
Speaker
Yes, well, I mean, this was a very valuable horse owned by some very rich and presumably powerful and well-connected people. We have already established it's a very valuable vessel of horse semen. Yes, a very valuable semen delivery system. Or at least 18 of them. No, not just a delivery system, a production system. Production site, yes. Yeah. Now,
00:27:21
Speaker
Certainly, the second lot of negotiations did appear to be the legitimate one. This was the real ransom demands, but they did not go particularly well either. For one thing, the kidnappers seemed to, going by how they spoke, they seemed to think that Surgar was owned solely by the Aga Khan. They didn't, to begin with,
00:27:44
Speaker
realize that he was actually owned by a syndicate of people. And that so therefore, they were dealing with a whole bunch of people who all needed to have a say in who needed to confer and agree on things and so on. So that complicated business. They also, some of the demands would were just impossible, essentially, that they would say things like, you know, talking to people in the evening, say, okay, you need to get 2 million pounds, and you need to have it all together by the end of the night.
00:28:12
Speaker
not seemingly not realizing that at the time they were calling all the banks in France were already shut and there was literally no way of getting two million pounds together by the end of the night, things like that.
00:28:23
Speaker
which is led people to think some people thought again maybe this was another more more sewing more confusion or that maybe it wasn't about publicity and these it wasn't about money and these people are after publicity or something but it does kind of seem like they were for all the sophistication of it they didn't quite know what they were doing when it came to the negotiation side of things
00:28:46
Speaker
And sure enough, the negotiations eventually broke down, as they were basically bound to since, as I said, the syndicated basically decided they weren't going to pay out. And so I imagine we're probably just trying to draw out negotiations as long as they could in the hope that the police would be able to hunt them down and get the horseback or something.
00:29:09
Speaker
So, the syndicate started demanding proof of life from the kidnappers. On February the 12th, the kidnappers directed them to where they could find some polaroids showing Sjurghar's face. With these polaroids showing Sjurghar in compromising positions,
00:29:28
Speaker
Unfortunately, Shugo was a stud horse. If you wanted photos of him in a compromising position, it probably happened daily throughout the breeding season. Now, it was the good old holding up a newspaper with today's date, or I think yesterday's date technically, next to a picture of him. But the syndicate weren't satisfied with that, because all you could see in the photo was his head, and there you want to say, no, we want proof that he's actually alive in one piece, not injured in any way.
00:29:55
Speaker
And they sort of went back and forth. And on the evening of February the 12th, the kidnappers, possibly just getting fed up with them or possibly finally twigging to the fact that these guys weren't going to pay out, basically said, well, if that's not good enough with you, then to hell with you, hung up and never, never called back.
00:30:14
Speaker
And then apparently, also on February the 12th, there was a call placed to Jeremy Maxwell, the guy from the other line of negotiations, claiming that things had gone wrong and the horse was dead, but that was never substantiated. Now, that was when negotiations broke down and the trail went dead, and that was almost to the end of it.
00:30:37
Speaker
except eight weeks later, remember I mentioned Stan Cosgrove, the vet of Shergar and one of the shareholders. Eight weeks after the kidnapping, he was contacted by the police and introduced to a man called Dennis Minogue, who said he had contacts in the IRA and would be able to arrange for the release of Shergar for only 80,000 pounds. And Stan Cosgrove was apparently quite desperate. He was one of the people who didn't have theft insurance on Shergar.
00:31:06
Speaker
and so was looking to be quite out of pocket. And also he was an Irishman, so I assume was quite actually attached to Shergar. And so in between his desperation and possibly had ideas of being the hero who finally managed to get Shergar back, he went along with the scheme, took 80,000 pounds of his own money,
00:31:28
Speaker
gave it to a detective. The detective locked the money in the boot of his car, or trunk if you're American, with the idea that Minogue would arrange for the release of sugar. Once sugar had been got back, the detective would then hand over the money to Minogue. What actually happened was that night somebody broke into the detective's car, stole the money, and Dennis Minogue was never heard from again. So that seemed to be very much just an opportunistic scam.
00:31:56
Speaker
like people had suggested the other one was. And so that's basically all we know about the Shergar kidnapping. So it might now might be another good time to have a break and ask, who do you think the BBC got to narrate a podcast about the kidnapping and disappearance of this famous Irish horse? Was it Boris Johnson? It was not Boris Johnson. Further afield. Well, something to say, was it ex-Prime Minister David Cameron?
00:32:24
Speaker
It was not, I can tell you, it was not an ex-prime minister. Right, so what about the current president of France, Emmanuel Macron? I can tell you, I can rule out the entire country of France, no Frenchman. Angela Merkel? Not Angela Merkel, no. Victor Orbán? Not a world leader. What about a minor despot?
00:32:48
Speaker
No, I'm going to say no. Is it the ghost of Charlie Chaplin? It is not the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, but you're getting a little bit closer. Now, I'll let you think about that. Was it Eddie Izzard who played Chaplin in The Cat's Meow, a topic we had to do at some point?
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, we do, actually. Yes. No, I'm afraid it wasn't. So moving on. So the question became, of course, who was behind the kidnapping? Now, obviously, the media was following this case fairly breathlessly. But once the case went cold and the police had no leads for the media to report, apparently the first police officer they had fronting the investigation was a bit of a character and but was quite upfront about the fact that they had no idea and no leads on. So Josh, were you saying that the person leading the investigation was
00:33:33
Speaker
...horsing around. A little bit, yes. He eventually got replaced, I think. But anyway, the point is that once the... Sorry, are you saying that he got sent to the glue factory?
00:33:47
Speaker
You could say that, yes. After that happened, and once the media had no official leads or anything to report on, they started basically publishing a lot of speculation and people's theories about what had gone on. Some people thought a Middle Eastern horse owner had stolen sugar for his own breeding purposes.
00:34:08
Speaker
Some people theorised a link to the Mafia in New Orleans, specifically. Supposedly someone came up with a link there and suggested that they had kidnapped Shergar as revenge against the Aga Khan for another horse sale that had gone bad in the past or something.
00:34:28
Speaker
Some people suggested Colonel Gaddafi, who was not the narrator of the BBC podcast, just to cut you off there. Colonel Gaddafi might have been... I was never going to guess him as the narrator because he's dead.
00:34:39
Speaker
that didn't stop you with the ghost of Charlie Chaplin, suggested that maybe Colonel Godard, it was some sort of a part of an arms deal with the IRA. Sugar was something he wanted in exchange for arms. But none of those, I don't think, were seriously entertaining. The IRA, though, were right from the start and have remained to this day the main suspects.
00:35:01
Speaker
the IRA were in need of a lot of money. Apparently the whole thing they did of going for political power via Sinn Féin plus being the IRA and all the violence and the what have you was fairly expensive. Political campaigns cost money and so do guns and bullets and bombs. And so two million pounds ransom would have been very helpful for them.
00:35:26
Speaker
But obviously they have denied everything and nothing ever came of that. But in 1999, a man called Sean O'Callaghan, who was a former IRA member who later turned informant for the police, published his autobiography. And in that he said that the IRA were behind the kidnapping, naming a man called Kevin Mellon, possibly Kevin Malone. Do you pronounce it Malone if there's no E on the end?
00:35:56
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know my Irish names, unfortunately. I'll say Kevin Malone, because it sounds nicer, who was a high-ranking member of the IRA. A bit of a notorious figure himself, apparently. He had a couple of quite high-profile escapes from prisons in the past. But they said that he had come up with this idea in prison, and he was the one who put the whole plan together. Now, according to O'Callaghan, Shergar was killed within days of being kidnapped.
00:36:27
Speaker
But the IRA kept up the pretense that they still had him alive to try and still get the ransom money. So the story that O'Callaghan heard, he doesn't claim to have been involved in it, but had heard through his IRA channels that what happened was fairly early on, they weren't able to control Shurgar. He might've been easygoing, but there are limits. And eventually Shurgar sort of went a bit wild and injured himself, and they ended up having to euthanize him.
00:36:56
Speaker
And according to him, the operation had three teams. One team were responsible for guarding Shergar. There was another group of people negotiating with the Aga Khan and a third group who were indeed responsible for the negotiating happening up in Belfast, which was, as some people had suspected, all just a distraction to keep attention away from what was really going on.
00:37:22
Speaker
This is all very plausible, but we only have Mr O'Callaghan's word for it. There's no actual evidence behind this, and obviously the people who he claimed were involved have all flat out denied it.
00:37:35
Speaker
Then a little bit later in 2008, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper published information from what they called an impeccable source. This was an anonymous IRA member who claimed to have been a close friend of one of the kidnappers who, speaking to the Telegraph through an intermediary, said that while the kidnapping of Shergar was an IRA plan with Kevin Malone at its head, O'Callaghan hadn't been given the whole story.
00:38:04
Speaker
So supposedly the real story is, the first interesting detail was that the IRA had arranged for a vet to look after Shurgar while they were holding him, but this vet told his wife what he was going to do, and she told him that if he went through with it she would leave him. And so he bailed out and they had no vet. But nevertheless, Shurgar was not out of control.
00:38:28
Speaker
his easy temperament remained intact. He didn't injure himself. And in fact, once the kidnappers had realized that the syndicate wasn't going to pay up, they decided to cut their losses and just release him.
00:38:40
Speaker
But unfortunately, by that stage, the country was swarming with police. They were looking everywhere for him. Kevin Malone himself was, as far as he was aware, under very close surveillance. And so it was just they couldn't see a safe way of releasing sugar without getting caught, either leaving the place where they were holding him or being caught on the road somewhere and it all getting back to, you know, the whole point was they wanted to
00:39:08
Speaker
They wanted to be able to deny all knowledge of it and not have it traced back to them. And so, so Mellon decided that because there wasn't a safe way for them to release Shugar, the only thing they could do was kill him and hide the body.
00:39:23
Speaker
And so, according to the, according to this IRA source, the quote was,
00:39:39
Speaker
Because unfortunately, to slaughter a horse humanely, you kind of need to be a vet with the right equipment, not a couple of IRA guys with machine guns. And so the story goes that this gentle and beloved animal unfortunately suffered quite a horrible, brutal death.
00:39:56
Speaker
the only upside to which is it justified the horse brutality pun at the start of this episode, so... I don't know if it does justify that pun, no. Well, I mean, it was, if it had just, if they'd let him go at the end. Anyway.
00:40:12
Speaker
So this source did not know where Shergar was buried, and apparently over time there have been occasionally people will find the skull of a horse or something and wonder, oh, maybe I found Shergar's body, but they still had his hair and presumably other DNA remains of him. But it's never been found.
00:40:35
Speaker
And so yeah, once again, this is the story that's come out, but the IRA and everyone named have always denied responsibility.
Shergar's Unsolved Mystery
00:40:43
Speaker
No arrests have ever been made because there's never been any actual evidence. According to the Sunday Telegraph informant, the IRA were actually kind of embarrassed that the operation had gone so wrong, which is why even amongst themselves, the story they spread, which is the story that O'Callaghan had heard,
00:41:00
Speaker
what wasn't, you know, wasn't actually what really happened because what really happened was worse and made them look even worse. And I think they also underestimated a little bit just how much the Irish public cared about sugar and his fate. So, you know, it would have been very bad PR for the IRA were it to be shown conclusively that they were behind the bloody death of this nation's beloved horse. And in fact, as it was even
00:41:28
Speaker
even without any sort of proof or anything. At the time, the police were raiding IRA safe houses all over the country, looking for proof, evidence of where he might be or trying to find out. So the IRA did
00:41:41
Speaker
lose a bunch of arms, caches, and things like that to these raids. But Shergar's body's never been found. It's assumed they probably dropped in a bog somewhere in Ireland. And in that part of the world, the case has just joined the canon of famous unsolved mysteries. Apparently, even at the time, people made jokes about Shergar was last seen being written by Lord Lucan.
00:42:05
Speaker
who we did do an episode about very, very early on in this podcast's run. I think it was one of our very first ones on famous disappearances.
00:42:16
Speaker
But that's the story of the kidnapping of Shurgar. So now we've come to the end with everything you've heard today. What is your guess for the person who the BBC got to narrate the podcast about the kidnapping of an Irish horse possibly meeting a sticky end at the hands of the IRA? Was it one of Shurgar's offspring? It was not a horse.
00:42:45
Speaker
Well then, my only final guess is... I should be kind of a drumroll here, which is actually just me vamping because I've really got no idea whatsoever. My final guess is going to be...
Vanilla Ice and the BBC Podcast
00:43:02
Speaker
Horace Walpole. No. The person, if you, if you go, this is not a lie. This is God's honest truth. If you were to go onto the podcasting medium of your choice and look up sports strangest crimes, you will find that this podcast series is narrated by Vanilla Ice.
00:43:26
Speaker
There was no way I was ever going to get that. There was no way you were going to get that. It's a seven-part podcast series on the kidnapping of Shergar. The fact that it's called Sports Strangest Crimes leads me to suspect that there will be other series about other sporting crimes, but this seems to be the first.
00:43:44
Speaker
It's not very good, I have to say. I listen to it a bit. It's one of those ones that's quite overproduced or something like every sentence is punctuated with a sound effect or a snippet of music or something, a very on-the-nose bit of sound engineering to the extent that
00:44:05
Speaker
In one of the later episodes when they're talking about the police investigation and how they eventually were consulting psychics and remote viewers, they introduced that sentence with a snatch of superstition by Stevie Wonder, just because. I mean, it's a good song.
00:44:21
Speaker
It's a good song, but a little bit on the nose, I thought. I didn't listen to the whole lot because it just drew the whole damn thing out so much. You'd get one sentence from Vanilla Ice, then a sound clip, then a sound effect, then a bit of music.
00:44:39
Speaker
I don't know that I can recommend it, but it probably, if you did have the patience to listen to the whole thing, it would probably contain more information than this one podcast episode here. Or you're a fan of Vanilla Ice, which I suppose, I mean, obviously someone at the BBC is a fan of Vanilla Ice because I can only assume that's the rationale as to why they went, what we need is a famous person to narrate a podcast. There's no one more famous than Vanilla Ice.
00:45:07
Speaker
And other people go vanilla who? You know, it's really big in the eighties. It's for what? Well, no one's entirely sure what he was famous for, but he was famous. Did one very successful song that ripped off Queen.
00:45:24
Speaker
And then he disappeared to start his movie career. Unfortunately, two years later, once the movie he decided to make was released, no one remembered who the hell he was, I think. I mean, he became a punchline in The Critic. He did. And then keeps continues rapping under the name Rob Van Winkle. Did some celebrity boxing as well and apparently has a house renovating show or something like that.
00:45:47
Speaker
I think almost every 80s and 90s celebrity in the US has some kind of, you know, a burger making show, a house renovation show. I became an undertaker. This is how I embalmed a corpse show. But there you have it, the story of Shergar.
Personal Horse Racing Anecdotes
00:46:06
Speaker
It's, I assume, is horse racing enough of a sport that you're going to force yourself to forget all of this as well? Or does it not? I have a bit of sympathy to the old GG's, because my grandfather was really big on betting on the horses. And I remember sitting at his knee, his copy of best bets in his hand, and his asking, do you want to play at a bet? And I would go to best bets and I would look at who was likely to win the race, because I'd always have the first second and third likely winners.
00:46:36
Speaker
And as a five-year-old, I would choose, well, obviously put my money on the first place winner. I mean, why wouldn't you? And my grandfather trying to explain to me how, how odd to work in my, as a five-year-old, not understanding anything about numbers. Arguably, I don't understand anything about numbers now, but at five, I was even worse. And insisting we put the money on, on the first place of a call in the best bet. So there's a bit of me that's actually,
00:47:04
Speaker
And my mum talks about how her parents' generation, they went into owning a horse, which is located down in Frankton. So there's a bit of horse racing in the family, so I will remember the story, even though this Charles Ewing basketball thing that you mentioned earlier on rings no bells whatsoever.
00:47:30
Speaker
No, no, I didn't imagine it would. So there you go. That is the end of the episode for you, but not for you. If you I'm referring to is one of our patrons, because of course we have a bonus episode coming up after this. What are we going to be talking about there?
00:47:48
Speaker
Well, we've got some updates on those lockdown protests that have been going on across the country. A mysterious group of people meeting in a mysterious location, talking about mysterious things, which is all the more mysterious because the people who research these mysterious people have no idea about these mysterious people.
00:48:09
Speaker
We'll probably make a joke about how Hobby Lobby is probably going to be indicted once again for trading in terrorist antiquities. A horrible story about the NZ SIS and then of course an update on that old Havana sound.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:48:27
Speaker
So if you're interested in hearing all of those and you are not currently a patron, you can become one at patreon.com by searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy and signing up. If you are a patron, good news. You get it anyway, but you probably already know that because you're already a patron. And if you're not a patron and you don't want to be one, well, thank you for listening to our story of the kidnapping and death of a beloved horse. And I hope if you're an animal lover, this did not traumatize you too much.
00:48:56
Speaker
And if you happen to be someone who was involved in the kidnapping of Sugar, please do get in contact so that we can reveal that to the world. But until then, I think it simply remains for me to say goodbye. And for me to say... I almost made a horse noise myself that chose not to.
00:49:17
Speaker
Now I must talk with the dolphins.