The bizarre TV interview of Love/hate star quizzed over murder six years ago
Paudge Behan’s attempt to communicate in Italian eeza funny, no?
HE BURST on to our screens earlier this year as the godfather of crime in Love/Hate’s latest series, but Paudge Behan had a dalliance with cops and crime long before he became drug lord Terence Big Balls.
In 2008 he was wrongfully caught up in a murder investigation involving a 72-year-old woman in Italy.
But while his ordeal made head-
‘They had me as guilty until proven innocent’
lines, it was an interview he gave to an Italian station that raised the most eyebrows. The interview eventually disappeared from YouTube but the Mail on Sunday uncovered it this week.
Speaking to a reporter near his home in Tuscany, it was his bizarre combination of broken English and creative Italian that caught our immediate attention.
Asked if he was ‘unperturbed’ about the ordeal, he replied: ‘No tranquillo, no, no particularly happy, no felicia no.”
‘Suppose normala for investiga-- tizioni, it’s the attituda of the persona sometimes meo bono. Guilty until innocent. In Irelandesa, inocento until guilty.’
Behan, 48, was arrested in July 2008 in the small town of Arcidosso in Tuscany, near Grosseto, after retired businesswoman Silvana Abate was found stabbed to death.
Behan attended a casualty ward in the Castel del Paiano hospital nearby with a knife wound to his leg the following night.
A member of staff later rang the police and he was questioned over the next day for 17 hours.
The actor, who appeared in the film Veronica Guerin, said he was not given an interpreter for several hours and this prevented him from explaining exactly how he had sustained the serious leg injury.
He was understandably furious over the incident which was compounded by the fact that there was a massive language barrier – despite his attempts here to speak Italian. Behan, who was born in Dublin, later took to the airwaves here to put the record straight.
He told RTÉ radio: ‘The way these guys were going on anyway I was guilty until proven innocent.
‘Are they really that stupid that they think that someone is going to murder someone and then go into a hospital with a knife wound?
‘As they say in LA, on a clear day you can sue forever.’ He added that Tuscany was ‘not like Dublin where there’s a knife injury or a stabbing every day’.
He said that five policemen surrounded him in the hospital, where he sought attention for his leg injury. ‘They insisted in being in the room when I got a tetanus shot in my a**e,’ he said.
He was relieved when a chef named Aldo Staiani was identified as the murderer from DNA retrieved from under Mrs Abate’s fingernails – and Paudge vowed to sue the Polizia di Stato. Paudge Behan is the son of Brendan Behan’s long-suffering widow Beatrice ffrench-Salkeld, the widow of the playwright. He was reared to believe he had been adopted by Beatrice to hide her ‘shame’ that she had a son with retired IRA chief of staff Cathal Gouldling a year after her husband died. Behan has had several TV and movie roles. In 1996 he starred as Brian Meehan, the only man convicted of the murder of Veronica Guerin. He is now tipped to play a starring role in Love/Hate if the series returns next year following the death of kingpin Nidge.
For his role as Meehan, he visited him in Portlaoise where the convicted killer is serving a life term.
But the move proved fruitless. Meehan wanted to call a halt to filming, claiming that the movie makers had his story wrong and that he wanted to take out a High Court injunction to stop it.
Meehan is believed to have been the driver of the motorcycle which carried the killer, but he has always denied the murder. He was a key
‘On a clear day you can sue forever’
member of mobster John Gilligan’s drug gang in the 1990s and acted as his muscle.
Gilligan was acquitted of murdering Ms Guerin in 1996 but convicted of a massive drug smuggling scan and was sentenced to 20 years in jail. He was released earlier this year and has fled to the UK following two failed attempts on his life.