HE once said the only Catholics ever in his car were dead ones. "That was just an oul' joke somebody took the wrong way, " says Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair with a big smile as he bounces out of the car at Glasgow airport and holds the door open for me.

I climb into the back seat. "This is Ian, " he says, introducing the driver. It's Ian Truesdale who ran a taxi firm in Belfast.

The police called it 'murder cabs' because so many of its cars were 'hijacked' for UDA killings.

Truesdale's not long out of jail for selling heroin and crack cocaine with Jonathan, Adair's 'Mad Pup' son. Four years ago, Truesdale was charged with killing his daughter's fiance, Jonathan Stewart, in a UDA feud. His own brother turned supergrass and gave evidence against him but the charges were later dropped.

Adair jumps into the passenger seat.

He's lost his licence for drink driving.

"Right, Ian, let's go, " he says and off we set for Troon, the sleepy seaside town in the west of Scotland that the former UDA commander now calls home.

He fires a volley of questions at me: "Are you married? Have you ever been married? Have you kids? Do you have a boyfriend?" And so begins a day with Johnny Adair and the strangest interview I've ever done.

It's an hour's drive to Troon but it takes us twice as long because Truesdale keeps taking wrong turns. "I know the road from Troon to the airport but not from the airport to Troon, " he says. "Can't you read the f**king signs?" barks Adair as we drive around a roundabout three times. "That's why Ian was never a getaway driver!" he says and laughs.

'Do you think I'm bad?'

So how many people has Adair killed?

"Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

Have I killed? The answer's no." He lights up, gives Truesdale a cigarette and offers me one.

He's a tiny man, 5ft 3in, but somehow you hardly notice. He talks big.

He's brimming with energy. His C Company was responsible for 43 murders. He rarely pulled the trigger, but organised most attacks.

It's justifying nothing he's ever done to say he has charm. He's good company too. Menace might always lurk behind those piercing blue eyes, yet he's unfailingly friendly and courteous. People say he's a man of many sides, that he can change like the flick of a switch.

Sometimes, he seems more mischievous schoolboy than murderer. There's as much innocence as streetwise swagger. "Do you think I'm bad? Do you think I'm a monster?" he asks.

He's tanned and well-built but not as muscular as before. He's not training as heavily, nor taking steroids. He's wearing pale blue jeans, white slip-on shoes and a short-sleeved blue-and-white checked shirt.

His arms burst with tattoos: 'Mum and Dad', 'UFF' and 'Mickey Mouse'. He wears diamond ear studs. A pair of shades perch on top of his head.

Despite the UDA death threat, Adair (43) shirks body armour: "I've nothing to fear. The IRA's war is over. The UDA leadership are useless. C Company fought the war. The UDA leadership couldn't cross the peace-line to do a killing, so they won't be crossing the Irish Sea.

"Johnny Adair has survived 15 murder attempts from republicans and so-called loyalists. I don't go to church but I believe God has saved me. You can be lucky once or twice but when you're lucky 15 times you know God wants you here, not in hell . . . and I'm hoping to go to heaven anyway."

'My heart is in Belfast' He talks of eventually returning to Belfast: "Of the six brigadiers who expelled me, two are dead, two have been sidelined. My heart is in Belfast. I was born there, I want to die there."

He has just published his autobiography, Mad Dog. Yet he professes to hate that name: "I'm a human being, not an animal. I don't foam at the mouth. It was the publishers' title . . . it's pounds, shillings and pence for them." He denies receiving a �100,000 advance: "You're mistaking me for Jordan."

He went to the book launch party in London with lotto lout Michael Carroll, who has blown �10m on drink and drugs.

"There were waiters with drinks on fancy trays and snobby women wanting their photo taken with Johnny Adair, while their husbands looked on raging."

He loves "the buzz" of London and would visit New York "if I could get a visa".

He has a "grudging respect" for the IRA. It carried out "big hits". It was far more advanced than loyalists in procuring high-tech weaponry. "Had I been a Catholic, I'd have ended up on the IRA Army Council." He believes the union is secure and the UDA should decommission and disband.

He loathes its leadership. "Do you know that bastard McDonald?" he asks.

Jackie McDonald is the UDA's south Belfast brigadier, head of its six-strong inner council and friend of the president's husband, Martin McAleese.

"Oh, Jackie the statesman, the big boss of bosses. Well, he got to where he is through extortion. He's never put a sledgehammer through anybody's door.

He's brigadier of nothing. I've been there, done it with the t-shirt. McDonald was always trying to isolate me, oul' jealous balls."

Adair's two mobile phones ring constantly. "No sweat" and "respect", he says to countless callers. One is a young prisoner. "Did you get my book? You want a flag . . . a tricolour? Oh, an Ulster flag. I'll send in a few quid too. You keep your head up . . . always keep your head up, " Adair says.

Another loyalist rings to celebrate the news that Mo Courtney, a UDA opponent, has just been jailed for manslaughter. "Mo stood in the dock dressed like a tramp, with a t-shirt riding half-way up his back. You'd think he'd have put on a suit. He's as grey as a badger too, " says Adair.

'I've got the Big C . . . charisma' "My enemies have big beer bellies, double chins, bags under their eyes. Not me. And I've got one thing, they haven't: the Big C. And it's not cancer, it's charisma. If you Google me, you'll find 300,000 stories on me . . . that's as many as Ian Paisley or Gerry Adams, it's as many as the prime minister."

He's interested in keeping up with the new faces back home. A recently elected Sinn Fein Assembly woman has caught his eye. "Who's that blonde popping up beside Gerry Adams on TV?" he asks. It's Martina Anderson, ex-Derry beauty queen and Brighton bomber.

"She's a bit of alright!"

We arrive in Troon, its pretty sandstone buildings bathed in the afternoon sunshine. "I can jog on the beach and walk to the shops without minders here, things I couldn't do in Belfast, " he says.

"Troon is now famous for two things . . .golf and Johnny Adair."

On the beach, women in designer tracksuits power-walk and well-to-do pensioners amble with their poodles.

After the UDA ordered the Adairs from the Shankill, Adair's three Alsatians . . .Rebel, Shane and Butch . . . were "kidnapped" by Dessie Truesdale, Ian's supergrass brother. Dessie and the dogs now live in a high-rise flat in Leeds. "I loved those Alsatians and I miss them, " Adair says. He had tropical fish in the Shankill. Were they seized too? "No, Ian ate them."

We walk through Troon's pictureperfect streets, past shops selling art and antiques. Nobody looks at us oddly.

Adair chooses a restaurant with fresh red daisies on every table: "I couldn't go somewhere like this in Belfast. I was stuck with the Shankill chippies. I took Gina [his ex-wife] into town for a Chinese once and we'd eight minders at different tables."

He orders a bottle of white wine: "It's my favourite drink. I eat out a lot because I'm barred from every pub in Troon but one. I hadn't even been in half them. The police sent my picture to the owners."

Still, it's better than Bolton where he first lived: "Parents complained about me picking up my kids from school.

They probably thought, 'That Mad Dog bastard will eat our kids alive.'" It's a condition of Truesdale's release from prison that he stays in Bolton but, when that expires, he's joining Adair in Troon: "I hate Bolton. When they hear an Irish accent, they think 'IRA'."

Adair and Truesdale order steak, chips and pepper sauce. In the background, James Blunt sings, "You're beautiful, you're beautiful, it's true." "I like that song, " says Adair. As a teenager, he was in skinhead band Offensive Weapon. "We wrote songs like 'Smash the IRA' and 'We Killed Your Kid With A Plastic Bullet'."

The food arrives. We argue about the murders. While C Company did target republicans, most victims were ordinary Catholics, like Philomena Hanna (26), a mother-of-two shot dead in a west Belfast chemist's in 1993. The UDA claimed she was an IRA member and the sister of a prominent Sinn Feiner. It wasn't true.

'I'm unpredictable, up for anything' "I've heard reports she was an innocent girl but I'm not in a position to judge, " says Adair. "If innocent people lost their lives, it was because the intelligence supplied by Special Branch, or the likes of Brian Nelson in FRU [a covert British army unit] was wrong. Don't blame the foot-soldiers, blame those who supplied the information. The majority of targets were chosen and set up by Special Branch and MI5."

He claims he was never "at war with innocent Catholics". But a skull-anddagger flag with the slogan "Kill 'em all. Let God sort them out" adorned his Long Kesh cell. "Look, people send you in all sorts of things to jail . . . and it was a good saying, wasn't it?"

After the IRA's Shankill bomb in which nine Protestants were killed, a UDA plan to open fire on mass-goers was thwarted by police. Adair is pleased that happened yet had no qualms about C Company's attack on a west Belfast bin depot in which two workers died. "Right, you Fenian bastards!" the gunmen shouted as they opened fire.

"The IRA killed many innocent Protestants, " says Adair. "C Company was the UDA's SAS. They were soldiers fighting for freedom amidst IRA terror. I did things illegally in Northern Ireland that the British and US armies do legally in Iraq." He mentions Iraq a lot.

Would he like to go there? "I wouldn't rule it out. I'm unpredictable, up for anything."

'Is three-in-a-bed an orgy?'

His ex-mistress, Jackie 'Legs' Robinson, agrees. In her recent book, In Love with A Mad Dog, she claims Adair asked her to work in a brothel and that C Company celebrated murders with drugfuelled orgies.

"After an operation, volunteers burnt their clothes, had a bleach bath and lay low for 24 hours. They weren't partying, " Adair says. "Jackie's a f**king header. I banged her a few times but I wasn't going with her 10 years as she claims.

She was a fatal attraction job. When I was in jail, she moved to live near my wife Gina because it made her feel closer to me.

"I laughed like f**k when I read Jackie ended up in the nuthouse. She tried to meet me recently but I gave her the run-around. I'm playing games with her.

The lunatic still loves me. I click my fingers, Jackie comes running.

"She claims I asked her if I'd a small cock. Well, what's a big one, what's a wee one? It takes a woman to judge. If she loves you, she tells you it's big; if she hates you, she tells you it's small. Did I have orgies? Is three-in-a-bed an orgy?"

Jackie says that after Adair's father died he became sexually aroused as she bent over the coffin. "She invented that.

I'd do it over the bonnet of a car, not a coffin." He denies running brothels: "All I did was organise a good night out every month for the volunteers . . . free drink and strippers."

Another affair was with Kathy Spruce, who once dated the brother of a republican paramilitary. "She loved me but she was mad as f**k. The second time I met her she took off her knickers to show a tattoo of my name in big black letters. She'd drive down the Shankill with me, flashing her tits."

'Gina was a tough bastard' Gina, his ex-wife, is the only woman he's ever loved. They have four children . . .Natalie (20), Chloe (14) and Jay (8), who live with Gina in Bolton, and Jonathan (22), who lives with Adair in Troon.

They split up after Gina took a lover, Wayne Dowie, 16 years her junior and an associate of Adair's.

"She denied it but half-taunted me about it one night when I was drunk. She betrayed me big-time. I still trust her on loyalist matters but not as a partner. We both cheated over the years. Gina loved the cock and I loved the women, though I was probably worse.

"We met as teenagers. We were together 24 years. She was my rock.

Gina was a tough bastard. As a loyalist, she had more balls than most men. She was interrogated in Gough barracks and Castlereagh. She was as strong as the Muslim women. She wouldn't say a word. You'd never get the truth out of Gina."

Adair's most recent girlfriend is Jacqueline, a 21-year-old Scot. He claims it's over: "These young girls get too attached and there's no future in it. So it's better to end it than break their heart. I need someone nearer my own age, a Belfast girl." Would it matter if she was a Catholic? "No, love knows no religion." He's never been short of women.

"It's a power thing, a fame thing. It's like Robbie Williams. You get groupies.

I don't mind!"

Loyalist Michael Stone dubs Mad Dog "the pink paramilitary" and claims he's having an affair with ex-C Company man Skelly McCrory, who is also living in Scotland. "There are two things Johnny Adair is not . . . an informer and gay, " declares Adair.

"I'd sex with a woman who later dated Stone, a pretty pole-dancer from Rathcoole. He's jealous about that." Adair says he's not anti-gay: "Back in Belfast, gays were treated as dirty bastards.

Scotland is more open. I hear Belfast is changing too." He denies drug-dealing but admits to having taken ecstasy and cannabis. He says he survives on the dole in Troon.

Unlike most interviewees, he asks as many questions as he answers: "What cars do you like? Where have you travelled? What music are you into?" He wants to make sure the meal is perfect: "Go on, have dessert or a coffee! Is there anything else you want?" He insists on paying the bill.

Truesdale is sent to the bank-machine to withdraw money to put on Brazil who are playing Ghana that night. "I'm not into football, apart from betting on it, although there was the Celtic thing, " says Adair. As a UDA brigadier, he'd don a Celtic shirt so he could drive around Catholic areas without suspicion. A "justified military tactic", he argues.

No journalist has ever been to his flat in Troon. "Come on round, " Adair says after lunch. We meet four little girls who live nearby. They want a mobile phone just like his. "I'll buy you one tomorrow, " he promises.

He asks what they think of him. "I heard bad things about you, " says the 13-year old, "but you're nice. A man fell out with my mother and threatened her with you, but he'd made it up." The sixyear old says: "I like Johnny 'cause he's funny." The girls hang around Adair's door, bantering with him. Later, they make a card wishing him "Easter Blessings".

'Hell roast the Shoukris' The flat is spotless, unbelievably tidy for a man. It's comfortable, not luxurious. There's an ordinary TV . . . not plasma or LCD. Adair brings two glasses of chardonnay and I sit on the lemon leather sofa. The living room is tastefully decorated in beige and brown.

African carvings and candles dot the shelves.

A Trainspotting DVD is buried beneath the CDs: Paul Weller, Oasis, Bob Marley, UB40 and Take That. He has no fancy stereo system. There's a ghetto blaster tuned to Radio Ulster.

The evening news brings details of a court appearance by Ihab Shoukri, one of the Egyptian loyalist brothers.

"Hell roast the Shoukris, " says Adair, once their friend. "One or both of them are informers." Isn't he just jealous they were handsome and wore their suits too well?

"That's a lie by that silly old crossdressing fool, Sammy Duddy. He never got over C Company shooting his wee dog."

Pictures of masked UDA men and a woman line the hall. "Are you going to ask me if that's Gina?" Adair says. "Now I'll show you the bedrooms."

First, it's his son Jonathan's, then his own. "This is where all the action happens!" he says, pointing to a huge bed.

His bedside reading is unconventional: Ed Moloney's history of the IRA, two SAS books, three bibles. In the bathroom is a huge bottle of baby oil.

Next, it's the kitchen. "Do you want to see what Johnny Adair eats?" he says, opening the fridge to show two bottles of white wine, bacon, pickles and strawberries and cream . . . used for something other than dessert. "The women like them, " Adair quips.

On the fridge is a painting by his young grandson, Jonathan's child. There are three magnets . . . two of murdered loyalist leader Billy Wright, one of Mike Tyson. "I love Tyson, " says Adair. "But my hero is Amir Kahn. I sat on the bed in jail cheering him on TV, this wee Pakistani fighting his heart out in the Olympics.

"I've been to all but two of his fights since. I loved Barry McGuigan too, didn't care that he was a southerner. But it was too dangerous for me to go to fights in Belfast because the boxing crowd were mostly Catholic."

As night falls, Truesdale and Adair drive me back to Glasgow. It's touch-and-go whether I'll make the last plane.

"We'll wait at the airport in case you don't and you need us to drive you to a hotel, " insists Adair. The flight hasn't left.

"Give me a ring, let me know you get home safely, " he says. Not all Catholics who met him were that lucky.

'Mad Dog' by Johnny Adair is published by John Blake, /26.81