Loyalist Volunteer Force
Along with his older brother Mark, also known as "Swinger", and cousin Gary, Jim Fulton was a close ally of Billy Wright in the Ulster Volunteer Force's Mid-Ulster Brigade. Sometime in the early 1990s, Wright succeeded Robin Jackson as commander of the brigade. In 1992 Fulton was found guilty of possession of items for terrorist purposes and served nearly three years in prison, one of ten separate convictions he had picked by 2000.
The Fultons were founder members of the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) which Wright had formed in 1996 after he and his Portadown unit were stood down by the UVF Brigade Staff in Belfast on 2 August 1996. This came about after the unauthorised killing of Catholic taxi driver Michael McGoldrick by gunmen from the Portadown unit of the Mid-Ulster Brigade during the Drumcree standoff when the UVF were on ceasefire. The killing has been reported as the first to be carried out by the LVF although the unit remained within the UVF when it was carried out and were stood down by the Belfast-based Brigade Staff as a result of the attack. Wright took most of the members of his expelled unit with him. Following the assassination of Billy Wright inside the Maze Prison in December 1997, Fulton's brother Mark took over as commander of the LVF.
In 2000 Fulton was arrested in California along with his wife Tanya and Odysseus and Mahatma Landry, two of the sons of LVF member Muriel Gibson, on charges of possession of firearms and explosives, as well as drugs charges. When all charges not related to drugs were dropped campaigners seeking a full investigation into the murder of Rosemary Nelson asked the US Congress to investigate the circumstances surrounding the case. Fulton had left for the United States in 1999 soon after Nelson's killing, fuelling speculation that he had been involved.
Read more about this topic: William James Fulton
Famous quotes containing the words loyalist, volunteer and/or force:
“In the genuine hope that this peace will be permanent, we take the opportunity to pay homage to all our fighters, commandos and volunteers who have paid the supreme sacrifice. They did not die in vain. The union is safe.”
—Combined Loyalist Military Command. New York Times, p. A12 (October 14, 1994)
“We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the inner force of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air—a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)