Multi-million dollar fraud exposed in Birmingham could be heading for Hollywood

Feb 1 2012 by Adam Aspinall, Sunday Mercury

A FORMER IRA member has written a novel about the multi million ‘superdollars’ fraud which was exposed in Birmingham.

And the fictional tale based on the true story, penned by Joe Brennan, could be made into a Hollywood blockbuster.

Mr Brennan, 57, claims he had ‘insider knowledge’ to write his story which follows the real-life plot that saw $30 million worth of high quality fake $100 bills flood into Europe.

The scam involved the IRA, the Russian mafia and King Jong-il’s Communist regime in North Korea.

The notes were so perfect only highly trained experts could tell them apart from the genuine currency.

But the fraudsters became unstuck when a Birmingham gang became embroiled in the scam and were caught red-handed.

Terence Silcock, 67, Mark Adderley, 54, were convicted of setting up the conspiracy at Worcester Crown in 2002. And Alan Jones, 55, was jailed for three years in 2006.

Now Mr Brennan, from Warren Point, Co Down, Northern Ireland, said he has drawn from his own experiences with the IRA to publish a his own account of how he believes the elaborate plot was orchestrated.

And he has been contacted by a Hollywood film agency who say they want to buy the rights to the screenplay.

Mr Brennan, jailed for armed robbery in 1982, says he left the IRA in 1986 and is now a property developer in Belfast.

He said he was recently inspired to write about the amazing scam and the title of his novel is aptly named “The Superdollar”.

“I was involved in the Republican movement very heavily in the 1970s and 1980s and I knew quite a few of the characters who would later become involved with the superdollar scam,” he told the Sunday Mercury.

“I took a keen interest in it over the years and learned a lot about it from friends who knew what they were talking about, lets put it that way.

“It is just an incredible story and I think one of the reasons many people have not heard of it is because it is just so unbelievable that many people struggle to get their heads round the enormity of it all, and the fact that such ordinary men from Birmingham could ever have been caught up in it.

“That is why when I decided to be a writer I knew I had to choose this subject and although my work is fiction I feel the reader can rest assured that most of what you read is based upon practical experience.”

The ‘ordinary men from Birmingham’ Mr Brennan refers to were small-time crooks Silcock, Adderley and Jones.

Silcock, a Birmingham-based wheeler-dealer, living in Gloucestershire, was jailed for six years for acting as a distribution agent.