Early UDA Activity
White began his career in loyalism with a group called the Woodvale Defence Association, a vigilante group based on the Woodvale estate in the upper Shankill, in the early 1970s. Before long the WDA was absorbed into the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and White became one of this group's leading members.
White was close to Charles Harding Smith, who emerged as the first leader of the West Belfast UDA, and in April 1972 he accompanied Harding Smith to London, where the two held a meeting with an arms dealer in order to procure weapons for the UDA. However both men were arrested after the meeting and charged with the procurement of arms. After a series of mistakes by the prosecution however, the case collapsed in December of that year allowing White and the other defendants to return to Belfast.
Read more about this topic: John White (loyalist)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or activity:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)