The godfather of Irish radio

People have a lot to say about Chris Cary, but no-one ever claimed the man who revolutionised Irish radio was boring. A hyperactive, dynamic, divisive figure, never far from the margins of illegality, Cary has lived a rollercoaster life of dealmaking and intrigue. He has made fortunes and lost them, twice. He has been sentenced to prison, twice. Yet there is a touch of the Robin Hood about his crimes, and even his detractors express admiration for the brash Englishman who ran Radio Nova in Dublin in the 1980s.

Today, following his release last month from a four-year prison sentence, Cary is embarking upon his most difficult chapter. Last July, at 53, he suffered a major stroke while in jail in Parkhurst. He lost the use of his left arm and hand. A man more accustomed to a RollsRoyce - one had the registration plate THE 60S - Cary found himself confined to a wheelchair.

Now he spends his days in physiotherapy, totally dependent on the care provided by his long-time partner Sybil Fennell, a former DJ on Radio Nova.

"I can walk a little and do crosswords. I don't know what I'm going to do now - sod all, I suppose," Cary says, speaking from his home in Surrey. "Maybe I'll write a guide to being in prison, and call it `In the Nick of Time'."

Radio Nova was a broadcasting phenomenon. It was illegal, of course, yet, peaking at over 60 per cent, it had the largest audience share ever enjoyed by a commercial station Dublin. In 1984, a 50th-caller competition prize attracted so many calls it shut down most of Dublin's phone network for several hours.

There had been pirate radio before Nova. I grew up listening to these garden-shed affairs, as unprofessional as they were passionate. I remember Dave Fanning excusing a scratched record by claiming a cat had jumped on the turntable. "P&T" raids, and even management splits, often unfolded on air. Here today, gone tomorrow - the only thing predictable about these outfits was their unpredictability.

Cary changed all that. A veteran of Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg - "Spangles Muldoon" was an early broadcast name - he breezed into Dublin in 1980 to fix a computer and ended up starting a radio station. For me, Nova's "clutterfree" blandness spelt the end of romance in radio, but for others it was a beginning. Many of today's household names made their name with Nova - Mike Hogan, Dave Harvey, Bryan Dobson, Ken Hammond, Anne Cassin. More crucially, the money started pouring in.

"There wasn't a law to break as far as I was concerned. Stations were starting every 10 minutes, so I said `why not do it properly?'," says Cary.

He recognised the potential of FM - up to then, most stations were broadcasting on medium wave. He put £20,000 into a high-powered transmitter, moved to a good business address, pinched the news headlines from RTE and tweaked Nova's signal to the maximum. Advertisers loved the no chat, greatest hits formula and the money rolled in.

But so did the problems. Cary clashed repeatedly with his various business partners. RTE jammed Nova's signal. After the P&T raided, Nova started to lose money and Cary laid off staff.

There followed a long and bitter dispute with the National Union of Journalists. In 1984, the High Court granted an order restraining Cary from assaulting or intimidating Hammond, who was on an NUJ picket outside Nova's offices. This was after Hammond told the court that Cary had "put his face up against mine and said he was going to smash my face in, at the same time pounding a clenched fist into his hand".

Today, Cary says he is "well versed" on what to do with "militant" union members. "Now I know you just pay the lads the money and they'll bugger off. Some of them were earning more on strike than they were at work," he adds, with unconscious irony.

Nova went out of business in 1986, but Cary re-emerged to challenge for the first national radio licence in 1989. The other three shortlisted bids proposed piggybacking their signals on RTE's transmission network but as usual Cary was thinking big, and proposed a satellite system.

"I had enough problems with two-bob DJs and I didn't see any point in being in bed with RTE. I wasn't political and it wouldn't have suited me to be running a station that would have to give voice to politicians."

Cary was the only contender with real radio experience but his wide-boy image was never going to cut ice with the judging authorities. Century Radio won the licence (see panel) but already Cary had moved on.

Cary devised a way of cracking the smartcard codes that enable decoders to unscramble satellite television stations. The illegal cards were sold for £450 each, a fraction of that charged by companies such as Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB. Cary was taking £20,000 a day until he was arrested by British police in 1996.

Cary got a four-year sentence after pleading guilty to the fraud, which is estimated to have cost BskyB up to £30 million.

Then, after serving four months of the sentence, he walked out of his open prison and fled to New Zealand. Private detectives paid for by Murdoch tracked him down and, after receiving a further 15month sentence for absconding, he was returned to prison.

He may be at a low ebb today, but on past form Chris Cary will bounce back. Fennell says he is still intensely interested in the radio business.

Publisher Mike Hogan, who was Nova's general manager, says Cary was a "hard but dynamic boss".

"He was a buccaneer who enjoyed sailing close to the wind. But he was also the godfather of Irish radio. Before Chris Cary, there was nothing. After, it's . . . not too bad."