Winkie Dodds
| Winkie Dodds | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | William Dodds |
| Born |
7 May 1959 Belfast, Northern Ireland |
| Allegiance | Ulster Freedom Fighters |
| Rank | Brigadier |
| Unit | C Company, 2nd Battalion Shankill Road, West Belfast Brigade |
| Conflict | The Troubles |
| Spouse(s) | Maureen Dodds |
William "Winkie" Dodds (born 7 May 1959) is a Northern Irish loyalist activist. He was a leading member of the West Belfast Brigade of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and for a number of years a close ally of Johnny Adair. Frequently serving as head of the West Belfast Brigade during Adair's spells in prison, Dodds later split from his old friend and is now no longer active in loyalist paramilitarism.
Dodds and Adair first came into contact when Adair was 12 and Dodds was 16. Dodds would demand money from the younger boy as Adair went round the doors of the Shankill Road delivering copies of the Belfast Telegraph. The two soon became friends when Dodds began to hang around outside the Buffs Club with Adair and his gang. Like Adair, Dodds flirted with the white power skinhead scene and sometimes accompanied the others to skinhead discos in areas such as Rathcoole and Monkstown. In appearance Dodds was heavily built and had a tattoo of a pistol on his left arm.
Dodds became active in the UDA before Adair and in the early 1980s he was given a six-year prison sentence for a post office robbery. Released in the summer of 1985 the 27-year-old Dodds was immediately given command of C8, one of numerous "teams" that made up C Company (the lower Shankill section of the West Belfast Brigade), and before long the man known as both "Big Evil" and "Stinky Winkie" was made military commander of C Company as a whole. Dodds took his old friends Adair and Mo Courtney under his wing and trained them in preparation for including them in murder squads. Before long Dodds had turned C Company into one of the UDA's most active murder units, ordering the killing of, amongst others, Francisco Notarantonio in October 1987. Dodds had chosen his name from a security forces list supplied to him by infiltrated Intelligence agent Brian Nelson. The killing of Terrence McDaid on 10 May 1988 was ordered by Dodds in similar circumstances, although in this case the wrong man was killed. Nelson had given Dodds the address and photograph. The address was incorrect, however and the actual target was McDaid's older brother Declan, the two brothers looking very much alike. Nelson criticised Dodds for this failure, who countered that the two were physically very similar in appearance.
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