
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 14, 1993                   TAG: 9311140065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

AUTHORITIES UNVEIL BRINK'S EVIDENCE

Federal investigators who seized three men and recovered millions of dollars in one of the nation's largest armored car company robberies unveiled a web of evidence Saturday linking the suspects to one another and to money orders, new bank accounts, duffel bags full of cash, a new car and sunny vacation trips.

The suspects seized in New York City and Rochester on Friday night in the $7.4 million Brinks depot holdup in Rochester in January - a priest, an illegal Irish immigrant with a criminal record and a retired police officer who was a Brink's guard at the time of the holdup - are known to espouse the Irish Republican Army cause in Northern Ireland.

But Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, and Noraid, which raises money in the United States for Irish prisoners, on Saturday disavowed any connections with the robbery or the suspects, and federal investigators said they knew of no direct link between the men and the IRA and had no evidence that any of the stolen money went to the rebel cause.

"We do not know at this time if it was intended for the IRA," William Doran, a special agent in charge of the criminal division of the FBI's New York office, said at a news conference at which piles of money - duffel bags and suitcases full of it - were displayed, and the details of a nine-month undercover investigation were disclosed.

One suspect, the Rev. Patrick Moloney, who was ordained in an Eastern rite Catholic Church, is a well-known priest on the Lower East Side. For decades he has run a halfway house for troubled teen-age boys, and Saturday, friends tried to reconcile the man they knew as Father Pat with the suspect in federal custody.

Doran and other officials said that postal money orders, some for as much as $4,000, had been bought by the suspects while they were under surveillance. Postal money orders have serial numbers that can be traced, and investigators said it might be possible in coming days to determine where they were cashed.

If links to the IRA are established, other investigators said, the case could signal a major shift in tactics by supporters of the Irish cause in the United States, who largely have confined their activities to legal fund raising for the IRA's Provisional Wing, or political arm, though some cases of arms shipments to Northern Ireland have come to light in this country.

by CNB