Original subtitles

'07, I think, '08, and it was the time of the crash.

Everything was going.

It transpired it was the biggest, financial-wise, biggest fraud case

in the country.

We tried to keep as level-headed as we could, you know,

we knew we were in something big. We knew it was high profile.

It went from being a fraud, deception,

into actual theft, and it was only then, I think, we realised

the amount of money that was involved.

The case was referred by the High Court into the Bureau,

and we said, yeah, there's a lot in this.

And the discussion was, God, this is going to be huge,

this is going to be huge.

And then we came up with the thing, well, how do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time, so that's the way we took it.

♪ (THEME MUSIC)

♪ (INTRIGUING MUSIC)

I remember being struck by the huge media presence at the trial.

(CAMERAS CLICK)

He was well-known for his flamboyant dress wear, his Burberry coats,

his Ralph Lauren, all the labels coming in and out of court.

It was November and December of 2013.

REPORTER 1: The Thomas Byrne affair resulted in millions of lost euro

and many victims.

REPORTER 2: The scale of his wrong-doing was colossal.

MAN: His dishonesty basically cost the family

a quarter of a million euros.

An incredible amount of work had been done by An Garda Síochána

in preparation for the Thomas Byrne trial.

No trial comes without its risks, and this was high stakes.

REPORTER 2: This was Ireland's biggest ever fraud trial.

Six banks, 12 Dublin properties,

almost 52 million euro and one solicitor.

What was on trial was the banking system itself,

but what was also on trial was the regulation of the legal profession.

When Byrne came to trial, he was depicted as one of the villains

of the Celtic Tiger era.

REPORTER 2: Thomas Byrne denies all the charges.

The trial is expected to last up to eight weeks.

He became kind of a lightning rod for the public's anger over

their sense that nobody had been held accountable.

Often when there has been a major crisis of any kind,

there is a clamour for accountability,

there's a clamour for justice,

and we hone in on the poster boys or girls of that crisis.

I think Thomas Byrne probably had to unduly bear being the public face

of the rogue solicitor scandals in part because Michael Lynn,

who has since been jailed for similar activities,

had left Ireland. He had fled,

but Thomas Byrne was here

and he was the one who was standing.

♪ (TENSE MUSIC)

This is a guy like who started out as a sole practitioner

working from an extension that was built onto the side

of his family home on the Greenhills Road in Walkinstown.

He wasn't part of the traditional D4 set that goes into law,

but he was always aspiring to be part of that world.

He put himself through college by working in a garage at night.

There's very little that stands out about him, you know,

he was just an ordinary guy,

went to law school, qualified as a solicitor.

We were both studying law at the same time actually in UCD,

he was a year behind me.

He used to come to occasional lectures wearing a dickie bow.

He was charismatic, he was a very mannerly guy.

He had a lot of charisma about him, you know, he was a bit flamboyant,

he dressed very well, always fun going to talk to you,

you'd enjoy meeting him, you know,

he'd a good way about him.

People liked him, you know,

you could trust him.

He came from the area originally, he went to school around here

and people knew of the family and they would have known him

and it was nice to see him coming back

and setting up a business here in the area.

It was a family home and he had this garage that was converted,

he even asked us to do it up for him and that's when we first met him.

So you'd go in and you'd meet his receptionist, Joan,

and then if you needed to speak directly with Thomas,

he'd either bring out the piece of paper to the reception area

or he'd bring you into the back room

where you'd walk through his living area,

his kitchen and his kids' stuff and things like that, you know.

His initial clients were all people that he'd grown up with.

Drafting wills, he was doing conveyancing for old ladies

in his neighbourhood who were selling houses.

He would get a slice of the fee,

it was enough to keep him in relative comfort.

He had a nice size practise, you know, in Walkinstown,

which you would expect would have relatively small turnover.

His business was getting bigger, he needed bigger premises,

bigger offices, but he wanted to stay in the area

and just down the road here, there was a retail unit

and he bought two units in that

and he still was the main solicitor in there himself.

He had these two buildings here, he had upstairs and downstairs.

Most people would be either stressed out

or nervous in a solicitor's office because this is serious stuff.

You know, have a cup of coffee, sit down,

tell me what did you do last week, where are you going this week?

I mean, have a bit of a chit-chat and the whole lot,

and he'd put you at ease. Oh, by the way, I think you need to sign this.

And then the business was done in five minutes.

He was such a lovely guy.

The girls even used to call us up

and invite us out for office parties.

Oh, we're having a surprise party for Thomas, come on,

you must come down, you're his favourite client,

all this type of thing, you know. (CHUCKLES)

Little did we know.

He started his business in 1995,

which was literally the start point of the Celtic Tiger.

♪ (PULSING MUSIC)

The Celtic Tiger was a time of great excess.

We got money for the first time ever.

The economy was growing, foreign direct investment was doing fine,

there was jobs that were being created.

It was fairly sustainable.

It made entrepreneurship

open to everyone.

REPORTER 3: Spend, spend, spend.

We bought apartment blocks out in Bulgaria

without even knowing what the monthly rent might be.

It was insanely easy to get money.

Lots of ordinary people who had no relationship whatsoever

to property development suddenly became property developers.

Public servants, teachers, nurses, guards,

all buying and flipping properties to make really quick profits.

And into that context, we find solicitors like Thomas Byrne,

who were involved in that in terms of the convincing in their capacity

as lawyers, as solicitors.

Many people can probably pinpoint

when things were getting a little bit too hot.

One of them was actually sitting in the back of a taxi

and your taxi driver is telling you about property deals.

Ah yeah, look, I just bought my third by-to-let flat in, in Magaluf.

It's grand, the rent will cover this and I'm going to use that,

I'm going to gear up again and then I'll probably buy a fourth.

It was a frenzy.

Everybody was making money out of the property boom

and that was right across the entire professional landscape.

And it was all based on one simple principle,

that house prices were always going to keep rising.

I had in excess of 100,000 euros from the sale of my taxi plate.

So I said, right, put that down as a deposit.

We want to buy not one house, we want to buy four.

The more we got into it, the banks got more confidence in us,

they were throwing money at us then, there was no bother,

you could borrow what you wanted.

Just seeing it as a means to an end for us, you know,

we can have a nice lifestyle at the end of this,

we can retire by the time we're 50.

Thomas Bourne acted for us from the start.

We were introduced to him by the TSB bank.

We had a good relationship with him, you know,

he looked after us in regards to fees.

When houses started to get out of our price range,

we start buying houses with sites on the side.

And we buy a house and we build a house.

We ended up then with 14 houses.

We would go down to his office, sign the contracts,

sign the transfer of deed,

and we assume that's it.

For five years, people were making fortunes

and Byrne happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Back before the 1980s, if you were buying or selling a property,

it was a very, very cumbersome process.

You cannot take down a loan until everything is in place.

So the government brought in a new system

and what it allowed a solicitor to do in his capacity

as an officer of the court,

a trusted person, was that they could give the assurances

to the banks that everything had been looked after.

The deeds were in order, all of the documents were in order,

and on that basis, money could be released much, much more quickly.

What it allowed was for multiple loans to be drawn down

on an individual property.

A property that cost 4 million euro,

you could draw down loans for 20, 25 million euro,

and nobody was checking the bottom line.

But it was a system explicitly based on trust.

If you take who we all looked up to in the old days, the priests,

the local solicitor, the local guard,

the local bank manager, they were gods.

When ordinary members of society were becoming property developers,

buying and selling, flipping properties, making profit,

he sees that there's a lack of regulation

of both the lawyers and of the banks.

What Byrne did was very quickly come to the realisation that,

oh, I can make a lot of money by being a property developer.

He looked at what we were doing and he thought it was quite impressive.

He said, oh, well, I'd have a few bob spare now, he says.

This is the first house Thomas Byrne bought from us.

He came up, had a look at it, thought it was great.

Told him about the possible investment, we'd run it for him,

manage it for him, do all of that. He said, yeah, no problem.

And within a few weeks, the house was his.

And he said, have you any more? I was quite surprised.

I said, how is this coming so easy for you?

He says, oh, he said, well, I have an excess of money

I need to get rid of, he says, before the taxman gets it.

That's what he told us.

I think people hadn't realised the extent to which a small minority

of solicitors had crossed that Rubicon and crossed the line

between being a solicitor and had actually moved into

property development and used their experience in one area

to manipulate another.

Byrne was introduced to a property developer called John Kelly.

And John Kelly asked him to buy a property in Rathfarnham and flip it.

They did that and they made a substantial profit on that one deal.

Kelly's partner then asked Byrne to sell three other properties for him.

They made a million euros on those three properties.

Suddenly, Byrne is catapulted to an entirely different level.

By 2000, within the space of five years, he's got 14 staff.

He's paying himself half a million a year.

And he himself has more than 10 properties to his name.

REPORTER 2: His lawyers told two high court judges

that he intended to cooperate with the investigations into his finances

in any way possible.

He gave evidence in court of how easy it was to go into a bank,

present forged documents and for them to just take his word

as a solicitor that these documents were valid,

that they were legitimately obtained and that they weren't being used

as security with any other financial institution.

But as the case went on and it became clear that

he was determined to blame everybody else for what he had done.

REPORTER 2: He blames this man, John Kelly,

a property developer who used him to take out loans.

He said the money from almost every loan he took out went to John Kelly.

Often he didn't know what it was used for.

Byrne's argument was, I'm a fall guy here.

The real crooks are the banks who are recklessly lending.

He tried to pin the blame on John Kelly

and he presented Kelly as being this poster child for all of the excess

that went on during the Celtic Tiger era.

(REPORTERS CLAMOURING)

Kelly had spent 100 grand on Girls Aloud

to play at his daughter's 21st birthday party.

Kelly had a fleet of Aston Martins.

He had a five million pound mansion in Wicklow

with flood-lit tennis courts, you know, great big fountain and pond.

So he was the perfect sort of bad guy

that Byrne had presented to the jury.

REPORTER 4: John Kelly maintained the allegations levelled against him

by Thomas Byrne were scurrilous and false.

Kelly pointed out that Byrne was unable to produce any witness

or corroborating evidence supporting his claims.

John Kelly was a property developer who has

never faced any criminal charges.

There was a great story of one of the big property developers

going off to lunch in, I think it was Peploe's restaurant

on Stephen's Green.

And he walked out of the lunch with one of the big banks

and he had a term sheet for a 300 million loan

and it was written on the back of a napkin.

That pretty much says everything to me about just quite how easy

it was to get money out of banks back then.

People like Thomas Byrne

were borrowing money, occasionally legitimately, in a very free,

fast rolling credit system where standards were slipping,

commissions were very, very high.

Ireland's economy is growing faster than the average of the EU.

Everyone wanted to be richer.

Everyone wanted success.

I remember you'd see it on the Dart and there was an ad on the Dart

that ran for years and it was the front page of the Evening Herald.

And the headline of the front page was, you've never had it so good.

I remember one property developer

describing that atmosphere to me at the time and he said,

the world had a party, we had a rave.

Byrne wasn't going to sort of the two big traditional Irish banks.

He was going to Irish Nationwide, Anglo Irish Bank,

getting to know the senior executives in these banks.

Well, as regards my own society,

where money is almost readily available.

Byrne was hoovering up all these new clients and then he was seeing that,

OK, the banks aren't really watching what I'm doing.

They're taking my word because I'm a solicitor.

And he thought, OK, I can exploit this.

I can become a multimillionaire.

He was making a lot of money

and he was suddenly at an entirely different level in society

than possibly he'd ever dreamed.

He was getting a bit too big too quick.

He came up one of the days to see the house that we were selling him.

And I showed him the house and he arrived in one of these Bentleys.

And I said, well, changed your car again.

He says, oh, yeah, yeah. He said I've another sideline going.

He says, I fly in people.

He says, pick them up at the airport in the Bentley.

I bring them down to a hotel.

And he says, I do these power breakfast speaks.

I said, OK, right, that's great, yeah.

And that goes on from seven to nine.

And then he leaves that and goes into the solicitor's office

and does his soliciting thing. So I don't know.

That was very weird.

♪ (UNEASY MUSIC)

He has his own chauffeur business where he has a fleet of Land Rovers

and Aston Martins.

He claims that he owns 16 different properties across Europe.

He also claimed to be a consultant for a major fashion house in Paris.

REPORT 2: He faces 51 charges of theft, fraud,

deception and forgery involving 12 properties around Dublin.

Instinctively, I liked him.

I think the media as a whole, we were all drawn to this story because,

you know, a lawyer who's also a crook

is a great story in its own right.

But in the context of the Celtic Tiger

and Byrne suddenly becoming the first guy to face the consequences,

this elevated the story to a whole other level.

REPORTER 2: Prosecuting counsel, Remy Farrell,

said there was an almost comic tragedy to the financial statements

he was submitting to banks as his activity increased.

What is really interesting about the attitude of the banks,

when Thomas Byrne and Michael Lynn, when those stories first broke,

what we really, really saw in these cases and in these trials

was the conduct of the banks themselves.

The media were almost cheering him on, in a sense,

wanting him to tell us everything you know about the banks, you know,

to lift the rock up and show us all the worms scurrying underneath.

What we were there to see and what the public wanted to see, I think,

was banks being held up to the light.

♪ (OMINOUS MUSIC)

Around early October 2007,

there was a lot of rumours going around Dublin media circles

about a solicitor who had been found forging documents.

Most people in the media thought that was Michael Lynn.

REPORTER 5: The court heard Mr Lynn and his companies owned

105 properties across several countries.

And it was days after Michael Lynn was exposed

that we had the Thomas Byrne case, so there was an absolute frenzy.

I was coming back on a train from Belfast

and my phone didn't stop with people ringing, saying,

is it A, is it B, is it C?

I was saying, no, no, it's not. No, it's not.

And that probably was the moment in which I realised that the extent

of the legal undertakings controversy was way, way bigger.

By October 2007, the whole house of cards comes falling down.

A solicitor in Thomas Byrne's practise

discovers that her signature has been forged

on deeds that were used to draw down

a multi-billion euro loan from the bank.

She notified the Law Society.

The Law Society notified the guards.

Byrne was arrested.

There was one allegation made that he had forged the signature

of one of the solicitors who worked in his office.

So when we saw that, we said, you know,

this is not the first time he did it.

When his case came in, I walked into the boss and I said,

come here, this is, is going to be a big one, you know.

When I went to collect the rent from the tenants,

they'd all received letters.

We got a social welfare cheque each month paid directly into the bank.

And then the tenants would have to pay up the balance in cash.

So I came up to pick up the cash and the tenant handed me this letter

from Anglo Irish Bank saying that they now own the house

and to pay them, not pay me.

I'm not the legal registered owner of the house anymore.

So I rang the accountant, I rang the bank and they said,

yes, we know, we need to see you immediately.

And I was literally told,

get yourself a better solicitor immediately

because this thing is going to get nasty.

And then they sent us this.

This is the list of houses, one, two, three, four, five, six

that they have taken control of.

Turns out then six o'clock news that evening,

the whole thing unfolded. I seen it on the news.

REPORTER 6: This is Thomas Byrne,

the 41 year old solicitor originally from Walkinstown,

who's at the centre of the latest investigation by the Law Society.

The society closed his office on the Walkinstown road yesterday

amid concerns that he owes millions of Euro to banks

and has taken out multiple mortgages on properties.

♪ (DRIVING MUSIC)

There were a number of foreshocks or warnings about Thomas Byrne

and his practise.

The first went back as far as 1996 when a Dublin accountancy firm

registered a debt, quite a small debt, just over £1,000 at the time.

A year later, the collector general, the state registered

a debt against him, a much larger debt.

But again, another little bit of a red flag or a warning about him.

Fast forward to 2002 and the Law Society investigate Thomas Byrne

on foot of a complaint.

As a result of that,

he is not allowed to be the sole signatory on the account.

Fast forward another couple of years to 2005

and they discover a much bigger hole in the client account

to the tune of 1.7 million.

So he appears before the Solicitor's Disciplinary Tribunal

and he receives a 15,000 euro fine.

But he's allowed to continue to practise.

Within a year, he appears before the courts accused of stealing

almost 60 million from banks and clients.

When you're involved in an investigation,

like a fraud investigation, you have to find, you know,

okay, it may seem wrong. Is it wrong?

Can we prove that it's wrong?

Started as two folders of paper,

ended up being 50 or 60 boxes of solicitor's files.

There's thousands of documents in it.

It was alleged at the time he had forged signatures on the title deeds

and he had transferred the ownership of the property to himself.

So then we made arrangements to interview him.

That's supposed to be my signature. That's supposed to be yours. Yeah.

Clearly, that's nothing like what I'd sign.

No, no, no. This is transferring the deeds...

Yeah. ...from our name into his name.

He never even included the O or the R.

I mean, I don't spell me name 'Conns'.

I've been conned, yeah, that's for sure.

Mainly, we were called to verify signatures

because a lot of our signatures were forged

and I was asked about my signature.

Do I write it any different? And I said, yeah, I do, yeah.

I said, I always sign my signature Matthew P. Connors.

And on the documents that were put in front of me,

it was only Matthew Connors and completely different,

completely different.

And I said, I don't care what it says.

It's not my signature.

The signature's were chalk and cheese-like. Yeah.

A man on a galloping horse would have noticed

the difference between them.

I remember in about 2003, 2004,

writing a piece about Anglo Irish Bank

and raising questions about it, saying,

what actually happens if property prices fall?

And I remember Sean Fitzpatrick went absolutely nuts.

He was the chief executive of the bank at that stage.

And I got it with both barrels for, you know,

calling into doubt the economic miracle.

REPORTER 7: Ireland's property crash continues.

REPORTER 8: There's no doubt that the bursting of the property bubble

is being keenly felt.

REPORTER 7: House prices are still falling sharply.

I think the banks were in a state of absolute shock.

I remember meeting bankers at the time,

and they really couldn't believe that this was going on.

These were maybe the people who'd written the loans.

But when property prices fall 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 percent,

even more in some cases, you know, you're screwed.

REPORTER 9: Just after 8 p.m. this evening came the dramatic development

that the Irish government is going to nationalise Anglo Irish Bank.

REPORTER 10: It took nearly $40 billion of taxpayers' money

to rescue the bank and the entire sector.

It's Charlie Bird from RTE.

Why are you ducking down? Charlie, what are you doing!?

There are taxpayers at home in Ireland who would like some answers.

Leave now! OK.

When we met Thomas first in the Fraud Bureau,

and we had all the files out, we get them to wear gloves.

So we had a pair of white gloves.

One of the guys said to me, God, he said, it's like a snooker table.

That was the first time he came in, where we showed him the files.

We'd be showing him documentation, and you'd know

by the look on his face he knew he did something wrong.

My colleague said, you look upset.

He said, I am, yeah.

He said, you look like you could do with a hug.

I could, he says.

And my colleague said, do you want a hug?

He got up and he walked over to him and gave him a hug.

When you bring somebody in to question them,

they're at their lowest ebb. There's no point kicking them.

There's no point knocking them down.

He said, your job is to build them back up again.

Tell them there is hope.

OK, you did something wrong. It's not the end of the world.

Let's deal with it.

Move on.

And I took the same approach with Thomas.

And I think it worked great, because we had a good rapport.

When it came to questioning, he exercised his constitutional right.

He started off on the advice of my solicitor,

I have no comment to make.

After we got down to about a page of questions,

I said, I'm not putting words in your mouth.

Could you just say no comment?

It might speed it up for you and for us.

So after the first page or so, he just made no comment.

He was interviewed voluntarily, I think about 15, 16 times.

And it turned out he had said no comment,

I think it was 3,700 and odd times.

In general, were people cooperative with the investigation?

Yeah. Banks?

No.

Because at the time, when we talk about legislation,

there was legislation there for theft, forgery,

all the offences that we're looking at.

But there's no obligation on people to make complaints.

There were people who knew and must have known

about the fraudulent activities of individuals

who did not report those crimes at that time.

When we started our initial investigation,

we were looking at a number of forgeries, deceptions.

But we couldn't get the financial end of it, the theft,

because we had no reports coming in from financial institutions.

Did you ask for them?

We spoke to them. We didn't ask them.

We said, have any crimes to report? Have any issues to report?

No.

REPORTER 9: The new offence of withholding information

will be created.

MAN: It will be available, when enacted,

to the Garda Síochána in future investigations,

and that applies to those being undertaken

with regard to financial institutions.

We knew the Act was coming in, it was going to be signed in.

So, again, that probably added two years onto the investigation.

♪ (MOURNFUL MUSIC)

Like a lot of people, he got greedy.

I mean, Brian Lenihan famously said that we all partied,

but Thomas Byrne definitely partied.

His life was veering out of control.

By 2000, he was, if not a full-blown alcoholic,

he was definitely in the throes of alcoholism.

He was abusing, in his own words, tablets.

He was constantly chasing, chasing that next high.

And that pressure all kind of came to a head in his personal life.

Byrne left his wife and three children,

and he entered into a relationship with a younger man.

He had gone through a change.

He was married, had children, then he came out as being gay.

There were knock-on effects in his own life, in his personal life,

in his family life, in relation to that.

And I think that did play on him, and we did speak about it,

one-to-one.

And you get an understanding of how he was feeling,

and different things that were going on in his life.

He himself admitted during the court case

that the consequence of all that stress and all that guilt,

he lost his family.

Eventually, he ended up sleeping in his car for four months.

REPORTER 9: The government hopes to have this legislation

passed into law before the Oireachtas summer recess

at the end of July.

Lucky enough, when Section 19 of that Act passed in August 2011,

made it an offence for somebody not to report a crime.

So we spoke to the senior counsel, and we said,

can we go back to the banks?

And the agreed term we would use is,

are you aware of the new legislation?

A lot of the banks then, at that stage, started to cooperate.

We served, I think, in the region of 25 to 30 court orders

on different banks all through the investigation.

REPORTER 6: The court continued the freezing orders,

and also ordered that National Irish Bank hand over details

of all accounts held by them for or on behalf of Mr Byrne

since September the 7th, when he got the 9 euro million loan.

We made a big chart, and you could see the properties,

and it was like one of these things you see you photograph the galaxy.

There was lines going, shooting stars going everywhere.

A picture paints a thousand words.

And for us, that was the thing we put up on the wall, and we'd say,

how did he get away with this?

And he knew what he was facing. He knew the game was up.

He knew his goose was cooked, physically broken.

You could see, you know, just emotionally, you could see...

No, I mean, there was nothing behind his eyes. No, he was just...

He was a shadow of the man that he was at his peak.

Yes, he got the money.

The documents were forged.

Now we had another end of it.

This is the first step. Now we're going to the next level.

What did he do with all these documents he forged?

Who did he deceive? How did he deceive them?

♪ (TENSE MUSIC)

If you look at what he did, Byrne would take those deeds, go to a bank.

He dealt with six different banks.

REPORTER 11: The banks, on little more than the say-so of Mr Byrne,

were happy to extend him large sums of money.

In one instance, he borrowed 4.5 million euros

on the basis of three properties, which weren't remotely,

collectively worth 4.5 million, but they were offered as security,

even though he didn't own them.

And in addition to the forgery,

he was also using those same properties

by going down the road to a different bank and saying,

I have these three properties, I want to borrow another 4.5 million.

So what Byrne was doing was illegally exploiting a lack of

regulation within the banking industry.

He retained the deeds of most of our houses,

which should have been in the bank's vaults, not in his office,

which gave him every opportunity to do what he wanted with them,

remortgage them and take out large sums of money on our properties.

Why would he do this? He didn't need to do that.

The guy wasn't short on money, he had a good lifestyle,

he had a lovely family.

Just shell-shocked with the whole thing.

It took us a while to make any sense of it.

We were stressed out to beat the band at the time.

As far as we know, these were some of the first houses

that Thomas Byrne actually transferred the deeds on.

He had the deeds, so he could go to any bank,

present them deeds and get a mortgage.

But he was clever enough to do it not once, not twice, not three,

not four, he was doing it with up to six different banks with up to,

from us, six different sets of deeds.

OK, we're now in Limekiln Green.

This was one of the last houses we bought,

which Thomas Byrne also took from us.

So I have no idea what he was doing.

He seemed to be a completely different person altogether

than the Thomas Byrne we knew when we met him first.

A level-headed businessman.

Being honest with you,

if I had another option, I wouldn't be in this area

because I have to drive by an awful lot of the houses

and I see what's happened to them since we had them.

What's it like when you're here now?

I don't like to be here.

I don't like it at all. I want to go.

It's depressing.

REPORTER 2: The court was told this is one of the biggest

white-collar criminal trials to come before the circuit court this year.

It was only when Byrne himself got into the witness box

and we had three days of him giving evidence on his own behalf

and being cross-examined that the real drama of the case

came to the fore.

He's in a very unusual position because, A, he's a lawyer,

but he's the defendant, and, B,

it's very unusual for defendants to take the stand

and give evidence in their own defence.

But Byrne decided to do that.

What surprised me probably most during the whole trial

was the fact that Thomas actually took the stand.

And we were all wondering, what's he going to say?

Will he put his hands up and admit everything?

Will he break down? Will he do this? Will he do that?

He was a weak man.

I never saw a defendant cry so much in the witness box.

I mean, he spent three days crying.

REPORTER 6: Thomas Byrne today broke down as he tried to explain

his involvement in the alleged sale of his parents' home.

He allowed Mr Kelly to use his parents' home

as short-term security to raise money.

He didn't express or show any willingness

to accept the consequences of his actions.

He tried to blame everybody, not just Kelly, not just the banks,

but he tried to blame the victims themselves.

These weren't just random clients who walked into his offices.

These were people, in many cases, that he'd grown up with.

(CHURCH BELL TOLLS)

These were elderly people from his local community

that he would have known for 30 years.

In one very sad case,

he actually forged a signature of his old music teacher.

He took possession of our house.

There was one woman called Vera McGrane

and her mother, Kathleen, was 91 years old.

She was seriously ill, so seriously ill

that she was confined to bed and she was living with Vera.

Within a week of her dying,

Byrne had transferred Kathleen's property into his own name.

We've known Thomas Byrne for 30 years.

He went to college with my nephew.

The house was up for sale when my mother was alive.

She was 90 years of age.

And she thought that she'd see the house sold

and distribute the proceeds amongst the family herself.

A few months after her mother had died,

Vera received an offer for the house.

I think it was for about 380,000 euro.

Byrne tried to convince her that he could get a higher price,

but in actual fact, Byrne had forged Vera's signature

and Kathleen's signature to transfer the property into his own name.

The banks now owned Vera's mother's property.

♪ (SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC)

REPORT 1: Brothers Michael and Brendan Dunne

discovered a deed of transfer purporting to show

the sale of the family home to him.

REPORT 2: Another client, Dermot Nocton,

discovered mortgages had been taken out on two of his Dublin properties.

Mrs Costigan said she knew him growing up.

He was one of her mother's piano students.

To her horror, she discovered a deed of transfer.

It said she had sold the house to Thomas Byrne for 410,000 euro.

She said she never saw the document before,

never signed it and never sold the house or received the money.

REPORT 3: Vera McGrane and her sister Dolores.

Mr Byrne claimed their elderly mother signed over the family home

at Bunting Road in Walkinstown to him a month before she died.

REPORT 4: Harry Connors, along with his brother Matthew.

How much do you reckon you've lost? The guts of a million euro.

It was Byrne who totally betrayed the trust of childhood friends,

elderly women, his old piano teacher, school friends...

...to the point where

when these people find out about what Byrne had done to them,

they were left at a complete loss.

Not only did he deny the forgeries,

he claimed that they were in on the act,

that anything he did was part of some grand conspiracy

by these elderly women

to defraud the banking institutions of Ireland.

He literally didn't have a defence.

Byrne was responsible for all of his own crimes.

REPORTER 12: The separated father of three

had denied all the charges of fraud, theft and forgery

involving just under 52 million euro,

12 Dublin properties and six banks.

♪ (DARK ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)

I was happy enough the way things were going in the court.

It was in the hands of the fraud squad

and they were doing a good job.

It certainly didn't look as if it was going in his favour, so I said,

leave it alone.

You are confident when you're putting everything together

and then when the jury goes out, then the fear seeps in.

Will we get it across the line?

It's them that makes the decision.

Did they see things the same way that I saw them?

Did they see things the same way that the prosecution side saw them?

You always have that little niggle thing at the back of your head.

Thomas Byrne was hoping to throw himself before the jury

and get some sympathy on the basis that, forget about what I did,

look at what all these bad guys did.

The jury were desperate to believe Byrne

and to almost concoct this new defence of human duress,

you know, which didn't exist.

The judge quickly told them, no, you can't do that.

But still, it took another five days before they reached a verdict.

REPORTER 12: Just after midday today,

the jury in Thomas Byrne's trial came back into court.

At that stage, it had been deliberating for 17 hours

and 29 minutes, and was ready to deliver its verdict.

As the verdict came in,

I would say Thomas Byrne was the only person in the room

who thought he might be innocent.

When they came in and they read out the first one, guilty...

...and once we had the first guilty,

I had a good feeling, yeah, they're going to go the same way.

REPORTER 12: One by one, the foreman of the jury

was led through 50 charges facing the former solicitor,

and to each, the foreman revealed they'd found the 47-year-old

guilty by a unanimous verdict.

He was sentenced to nine years for theft

and a consecutive seven years for forgery,

with the final four suspended.

And when the sentence was handed down, it was for 16 years,

and the last four were suspended.

But it meant Byrne was going away potentially for 12 years in prison.

And he was the first guy to face any consequences for all of the greed

and the criminality that went on during the Celtic Tiger era.

But still, a 12-year sentence was more than

people often served for murder.

When the gavel went down, he said,

well, at least now I know where I am.

(GAVEL STRIKES)

He had spent probably four years living this nightmare,

and I think, in one sense, he was glad to have it over with,

even when the guilty verdict came back,

because he knew where he was going to be for the next number of years,

and I know it sounds corny, but I think he was accepting

of the fact that he was going to go to prison.

REPORTER 2: The scale of his wrong-doing was colossal.

The amounts involved were staggering.

Those were the words of Judge Pat McCartan

before he sent Thomas Byrne to jail for 12 years.

I don't feel happy to see anyone being taken away from their family

or being sent to prison, but I think Thomas

determined his own fate.

Terry Connors said the last few years had been stressful,

traumatic and financially damaging.

I was thinking maybe seven, eight years,

but when I heard 16 years with four suspended, oh, my God,

he's going to be an old man when he comes out.

I feel so sorry for his family, you know?

I don't know, what can you say? It's tough all around.

It was a relief. The biggest thing was the relief.

It's over. It's finished.

Quite surprised at the length of it. The length of it, yeah.

There's no real winners here, you know?

I said, we're getting nothing back so far.

He's going to jail.

His family's left at home devastated, I'm sure.

That's the way I was thinking at the time.

I probably should be wanting to string your man up,

but it's not in me to do that, you know?

One of the things we can't really quantify is the human cost,

and you have to remember that in many cases,

this wasn't to big institutional investors, it wasn't the banks.

Many times the people who suffered were family and friends.

I think that is where the empathy or the sympathy

for someone like Thomas Byrne quickly evaporates.

REPORTER 2: Thomas Byrne showed no emotion

as the sentence was handed down.

Before he left the court,

Judge McCartan wished him the best of luck.

He simply replied, thank you.

That didn't end any of your battles, though, did it?

Well, it only started a lot of them for us, really, you know?

As soon as the houses were back in our name,

Danske Bank stepped in then,

and they were pulling out of Ireland,

and they wanted big accounts to be cleared.

So they basically sent us a letter saying, OK,

we're pulling your mortgage.

We want £1.6 million back off you.

And we hadn't a hope of raising funds anywhere,

no one would lend the money. The banks were all in trouble.

The government was bailing out Anglo Irish

and every other bank in the States, so it was impossible to get money,

and these guys were calling in a debt on all our properties.

So then they sent in the receivers,

and the receivers took every house we had.

So all our income was stopped,

and I was left with 50 quid.

Did you dread the post coming?

Oh, every day.

I'd hide if I seen the postman coming.

More bad news. I'd have a look at him.

I'd look out through the window and say, what colour's the envelope?

If it's white or brown, is it square or boxed?

Is there a window in it?

I'd know, straight away, here we go again.

Who's suing us now?

I still have to drive a taxi every day for a living.

You know, I was hoping not to have to do that.

Ah, we're OK.

Yeah.

♪ (PENSIVE MUSIC)

REPORTER 2: The judge paid tribute to Gardaí

from the National Bureau of Fraud Investigation

for the professional way in which they had pulled together

the evidence and presented it to the court and jury.

He never showed any true remorse for his crimes.

He never apologised to his clients, which I felt was

mean-spirited.

When I look back on this, from a personal perspective,

my own performance and the way things worked out,

we asked him 3,500 questions,

and he never once said he was sorry.

And I think that's the one thing that most victims want to hear.

If he only said, I'm sorry.