At the trial of celebrity chef Conrad Gallagher, Conor Lally hears how it all turned sour
In the end it was a fear of the Sunday papers that plunged Conrad Gallagher into his darkest hour. So worried was Gallagher's former personal assistant, Sophie Flynn Rogers, about her boss after his arrest over three missing Phelim Egan paintings in December 2001, that she went around to his house and hid all the "knives, skewers and painkillers".
"I feared he would do something," she said from the witness box yesterday.
"When I went to the house all the lights were off. I called him and he answered the phone. I told him that I was outside, that he didn't have to let me in if he didn't want to, but that I was there for him."
When Gallagher answered the door he was not in good shape.
"The TV was switched on with the volume down and he was just staring into space. He said the fact he had been arrested would be in the Sunday papers. He told me 'Sophie, I have been called many things, they can call me many things, but I am not a thief'." She stayed with him until 3 a.m. when he assured her it was "OK to leave him alone".
"I rang him the next morning and he was up. I was happy enough with that," she said.
All week a packed Court 29 in the Four Courts has heard how Gallagher's once- booming business rapidly unravelled around the time he relocated his Michelin Star restaurant, Peacock Alley, to the Fitzwilliam Hotel in 1998. The former celebrity chef is facing charges of allegedly stealing three paintings from the Fitzwilliam and then selling them. He denies the charges.
Yesterday Flynn Rogers and another former PA, Hazel Hurley, offered an insight into the chaos of Gallagher.
Flynn Rogers described her former boss as someone who would go without money to pay her and other staff. But he was erratic too, "volatile, jumpy . . . always talking". He didn't like to be left alone, was always stressed and was under huge financial pressure. He also had bad judgment in business.
"We had a rule that when I rang him in the morning on the way to work I couldn't give him bad news first, nothing about money, I had to tell him something happy first".
Gallagher has sighed in the witness box, shifted in his seat, taken notes and swigged his mineral water as the fall of his empire was revisited again and again.
The most surprising aspect of the sorry saga has been his apparent lack of business acumen at a time when to outsiders he seemed invincible.
At 26 he was the youngest chef ever with a Michelin Star, and restaurant with a wine cellar worth more than €254,000. He personally owned the €570,000 lease on Peacock Alley's original location at South William Street. Even the plates for the eatery had been commissioned from a French company, at €120 a go. Everything had to be right. And for a time it was.
He had the Rolex watch, the car, the house, fine art, fine food, a big reputation, immense talent, and even bigger plans. Everybody knew his name.
But when it came to the basics he just wasn't at the races. The court heard he employed 250 people but, amazingly, had no audited accounts. He sought no legal or financial advice when he relocated Peacock Alley - one of the best and most successful restaurants in the country - to the Fitzwilliam Hotel.
When the relocation was mooted Hurley said she had reservations. Peacock Alley in its original South William Street location, she said, was "a machine that worked . . . it was booming".
But Peacock Alley moved and bookings plummeted.
Gallagher was bankrolled for a while by the hotel but in the end he simply ran out of road and "left with a bag under his arm", according to his barrister Richard Kean SC.
The hotel says he got so desperate he robbed its paintings. Conrad says he didn't do it.
Next week we'll hear more, when Conrad takes the stand, and after that the jury will decide.