IN the late 1980s, an executive on the Daily Mail, where I was then a staff writer, threw down a challenge to me: “Why don’t you get hold of that fellow, Barney Curley?”

This seemingly straightforward request, but one received with a certain trepidation, was to profile the man responsible for a huge punt in Ireland in 1975 – the so-called ‘Yellow Sam’ coup at Bellewstown which netted him over £300,000 (worth over £2.5 million today) – and the (as it turned out, illegal) raffle of his Georgian mansion Middleton Park House, in Co Westmeath, that had made news pages worldwide.