[1] Adair's father, Jimmy, had no involvement in loyalist activities and maintained close friendships with a number of nationalists in the New Lodge area, where he was a member of the local homing pigeon society.

[2] Although the gang still officially attended school, they would frequently play truant, take a bus into the countryside and consume large quantities of cider.

[6] The gang regularly congregated outside the Buffs Club on the corner of the Crumlin Road and Century Street, where their numbers were swollen by other young men from in and around the Shankill.

[7] Eventually, Adair started a Rock Against Communism-styled band called Offensive Weapon which openly espoused support for the National Front.

[3] At 17, Adair began a relationship with Gina Crossan, three years his junior and also a skinhead, who at the time had shaved her head to leave only a tuft of hair at the front.

[11] The gang was not sanctioned by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and led to South Belfast Brigadier John McMichael declaring that he wanted its members "run out of town".

[3] Upon joining the UDA in 1984, Adair and his friends were assigned to C8, an active unit that formed part of the West Belfast Brigade's C Company, which covered the lower Shankill.

[12] The unit was eager to become even more active and from an early stage plotted to kill a nationalist solicitor, Pat Finucane, although the plan was initially vetoed by the brigade leadership.

[14] Adair formed a so-called "Dream Team" of active gunmen, with many of his friends from his former skinhead gang including Sam "Skelly" McCrory, Mo Courtney, "Fat" Jackie Thompson, and Donald Hodgen recruited into the unit.

[15] In the early 1990s, Gary ‘Smickers’ Smith, who also ran a pet shop on the Shankill Road, was eventually promoted to second in command of C Company and became deputy to Adair.

During this time, Adair and his colleagues were involved in multiple random murders of Catholic civilians, mostly carried out by a special killing unit led by Stevie "Top Gun" McKeag.

[27] The IRA's Shankill Road Bombing of a fish shop in October 1993 was an attempt to assassinate Adair and the rest of the UDA's Belfast leadership in reprisal for attacks on Catholics.

The UDA retaliated by carrying out the Greysteel massacre in County Londonderry, an attack on the Rising Sun bar in which eight civilians, two of whom were Protestants, were shot dead.

[30] During this time, undercover officers from the RUC had recorded months of discussions with Adair in which he boasted of his activities, producing enough evidence to charge him with directing terrorism.

[27] At the end of April 1999, while he was on home leave from prison, Adair was shot at and grazed by a bullet in the head at a UB40 concert in Belfast which he had attended with his wife.

The motivation for such violence is sometimes difficult to piece together; it usually involves a combination of political differences over the ceasefires, rivalry over control of territory, and competition over the proceeds of organised crime.

[43] Adair's men also sacked the homes of Gusty Spence and Winston Churchill Rea as part of a move to drive the UVF off the Shankill.

As a result of his involvement in the violence, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Mandelson revoked Adair's early release and returned him to prison.

[46] Once free, he was a key part of an effort to forge stronger ties between the UDA and the LVF, a small breakaway faction of the UVF founded in 1996 by Billy Wright and following his killing, commanded by Mark "Swinger" Fulton, with whom Adair was on good terms.

[55] By this point Adair had even lost the support of the Shoukri brothers, his proteges in north Belfast who had been amongst his closest allies outside of his own area but who decided to side with the mainstream UDA in this dispute.

Adair returned to prison in January 2003, when his early release licence was revoked by Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Paul Murphy on grounds of engaging in unlawful activity.

Among the mainstream UDA, a powerful faction of Adair opponents quickly formed under the leadership of South Belfast brigadier Jackie McDonald.

[57] Following the ousting of C Company from the Shankill Road, Adair's family and supporters went to Bolton where they garnered the nickname 'Bolton Wanderers' after the football club of the same name.

[60] The police in Bolton questioned his wife, Gina about her involvement in the drugs trade, and his son, Jonathan Jr (nicknamed both 'Mad Pup' and 'Daft Dog'[61]) has been charged with selling crack cocaine and heroin.

The focus of the film centred around Adair and another supposedly reformed character, a former neo-Nazi from Germany known as Nick Greger, and their trip to Uganda to build an orphanage.

In November 2008, Adair appeared in an episode of Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men which profiled fellow C Company inmate Sam "Skelly" McCrory.

On 20 July 2015 three Irish republicans (Antoin Duffy, Martin Hughes and Paul Sands) were found guilty of planning to murder Adair and Sam McCrory.

In December 2023, while recording a podcast with far-right activist Tommy Robinson, Adair surprisingly expresed a grudging respect for the IRA hunger strikers, describing the manner of their deaths as "dedication at the highest level" for a political cause and admitting that he would not have volunteered to do the same if asked.