WAS Doris Day about to sing? As police made six arrests over the murder of Jim Gray, a notoriously violent loyalist terrorist leader nicknamed after the 1960s singer/actress for his camp dress sense, the word on the street was that he was murdered by former comrades who feared that he was preparing to tell all as part of a plea bargain.

If so, the only public reaction to the removal of the “Bling Brigadier” on the streets of East Belfast, where he and his henchmen — known as “the Spice Boys” — plied their drugs and extortion rackets, was a sense of relief.

Gray, 47, was shot five times in the back on Tuesday after being tricked into dropping his guard, it emerged last night. He was assassinated as he shifted weightlifting equipment from the boot of a car outside his father’s home in the Clarawood Estate in East Belfast.

He was the highest- profile loyalist godfather in Northern Ireland after Johnny Adair was forced to flee by rivals. Adair was found guilty in Bolton last week of intimidation and also pleaded guilty to beating his wife, Gina.

Gray had been living at his father’s home since his release on police bail three weeks ago on charges of money laundering. He had been arrested in March as he drove towards the Irish border with a bank draft for €10,000 euros (£6,800) and £3,000 cash in his car. It was believed that he was about to fly from Dublin to the Costa del Sol, either to lie low for a while. A few days earlier he had been deposed by the five other “brigadiers” of the Ulster Defence Association’s ruling inner council. Gray had ruled East Belfast for years from his Avenue One Bar on the Newtownards Road, opposite the UDA’s “Freedom Corner” — murals urging the Irish to leave Ulster and depicting Cuchulainn, a mythical warrior, as a loyalist leader.

With the arrival of paramilitary ceasefires, figures such as Gray — a man who issued death warrants to be carried out by his men — drifted ever deeper into purely criminal activities such as drug trafficking. He used his licensed premises to launder the money.

Gray was said to have been a cocaine user and his son, Jonathan, 19, died of an overdose at a party in Thailand that both men attended in 2002.

Belfast’s terrorist underworld has always been a shadowy place but, unlike the tight discipline of the republican groups, loyalist chiefs have a history of falling victim to their own vanity and perishing as a result of it.While some loyalists sought to formulate political statements, Gray seemed exclusively committed to parading his misguided fashion statements. When he joined other loyalist leaders to meet John Reid, the Northern Ireland Secretary, in July 2002, he wore a Hawaiian shirt, chunky gold necklace and bracelet, earring, sunglasses and a pink pullover.

With his thinning peroxide-blond hair and chubby form, he looked like a cut-price Elton John; but unlike some other loyalist patriarchs who tried to portray themselves in a benign light, Gray did not care what people thought of his cruel, bullying ways. Before a captive audience at a Rod Stewart concert at Stormont Castle in 2002, he battered and kicked a man who had spilled a drink on his clothes while his lieutenants held the victim down.

Two months after meeting Mr Reid, Gray was shot, reputedly by the Loyalist Volunteer Force in retaliation for a murder. It was not clear if the shooting was a murder attempt or an attack on Gray’s vanity, since the gunman aimed at his face.

Detectives said yesterday that their main line of inquiry was that Gray had been killed by fellow UDA members. Some of his associates were reported to have gone into hiding last month as rumours grew that he had done a deal with officers investigating loyalist racketeering. Whether or not there is substance to the allegations, Gray has joined the list of other toppled UDA brigadiers.

In truth, he and his former cohorts had been running on empty for a decade, waiting for the courage of the public to consign them finally to the past; but on the Protestant side of the community there has so far been no equivalent to the McCartney sisters’ campaign, which weakened the Provisional IRA’s stranglehold.

John “Grug” Gregg, who led a murder attempt on Gerry Adams in the 1980s, was killed in an internal feud in 2003. Jim “Jimbo” Simpson earned the derisory nickname “the Bacardi Brigadier” and was also swept aside. Billy “King Rat” Wright was killed in jail. That leaves Andre Shoukri, known as “The Egyptian”, as the leading loyalist tabloid subject, with Irish newspapers for months relating stories about his £10,000- a-day gambling addiction.While their nicknames may reduce them to cartoon proportions, the danger they pose to the public may have diminished but cannot be written off. As a local radio commentator, voicing the sentiment on the street, said of Gray yesterday: “He’s been taken out — who cares so long as it’s only the bad elements killing one another?”

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