Not everyone who appeared on the cover of The Phoenix magazine over the last 43 years had reason to be grateful.It’s not a good look to be caught, as I was, smiling broadly at the antics of Ireland’s most notorious and dangerous criminal, Martin Cahill, after another time-wasting appearance in the Four Courts on relatively minor charges. As a reporter with the Evening Press, I had been assigned the task of covering his court appearances and attempting to get an interview with him.On this day, he was hiding in plain sight in the body of the courtroom wearing a Groucho Marx-type disguise, which he swapped for a balaclava when he came out to Inns Quay where someone handed him a ghetto blaster. As usual, there was a coterie of plainclothes detectives keeping a close eye on him. He pressed the play button and the air was filled with the melodious sound of Fats Waller singing: “I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter and make believe it came from you.”It was another move in the mind games he had started to play with gardaí since they mounted a 24-hour surveillance operation on him in December 1987.He began to gyrate and dropped his trousers to show off the latest thing in underworld underwear, a pair of Mickey Mouse shorts with a matching Mickey Mouse T-shirt. It was all too much for the detectives on hand who tried unsuccessfully to rip off his balaclava before frogmarching him to the nearby Bridewell where he was soon let go. It was sometimes hard not to laugh at his antics as the late Brendan O’Brien of RTÉ discovered when he became the first reporter to confront Cahill when he buttonholed him on camera shortly after Cahill collected his dole in Werburgh Street unemployment exchange. Keeping his hood up and his hand over his face, he told O’Brien that gardaí had the wrong Martin Cahill. [ Why the Phoenix magazine failed after 43 years of pestering those in power ]Public interest in the so-called General skyrocketed when he became the chief suspect in the theft of 11 paintings from Russborough House, Co Wicklow, in 1986. Cahill was also implicated in the 1983 robbery of O’Connors jewellers in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, which resulted in the closure of the business and the loss of more than 100 jobs. He was never prosecuted for the 1982 attempted murder of the late Dr James Donovan, the courageous director of Forensic Science Ireland, who suffered life-changing injuries when a bomb attached to his car exploded. Cahill was shot dead in 1994. Donovan’s view was that Cahill was irredeemably evil. In 1988, the best gardaí could do was to bring charges related to Cahill’s abusive behaviour towards his neighbours in upmarket Cowper Downs in Rathmines, Dublin, where the house bought in the name of Tina Lawless, sister of his wife Frances, was eventually seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau. He fathered nine children with the two sisters.When I picked up the story, the question of the day was would he or would he not enter a recognisance to keep the peace, so for several days in a row I had been knocking on his door in Cowper Downs to obtain an interview without any response.When we appeared together on the cover of The Phoenix magazine, I wrote him a note and shortly afterwards his wife Frances phoned me to say that Cahill would meet me the next day in his corporation residence at Swan Grove, Ranelagh.His brother Eddie, who went on to make a reputation for himself as an artist, showed me into the kitchen and a few minutes later Cahill walked in wearing a balaclava. We exchanged pleasantries and I made a routine inquiry as to whether Cahill had anything to do with the Russborough House art heist. He pointed at his children’s drawings on the wall and said: “I don’t think there’s any Old Masters hanging here.”I was up against a deadline for the city edition of the Evening Press, so I had my story once he told me that he was going to do his six months on Spike Island, rather than enter a bond to keep the peace, in protest against the “harassment” he was suffering from An Garda.In those far-off, pre-internet days it was a “scoop”, which made a lead for the Evening Press, which then had a circulation of more than 100,000.I had further reason to be grateful to The Phoenix when I won the 40th anniversary photo caption contest, which featured an exchange between Ryan Tubridy and Pat Kenny at the time of the controversy over Tubridy’s salary. That nobody congratulated me on winning a weekend at the Seafield Hotel and Spa Resort, Wexford, was possibly an early indication that circulation was falling and the flight of The Phoenix was about to end.