AH, now here comes Father Moloney, ambling down East Ninth Street in his priest’s outfit, a crucifix on a heavy chain around his neck. This cuddly 80-year-old priest with the Limerick lilt doesn’t exactly look like “the underground general” of Irish Republican Army gun runners, as one British intelligence officer pronounced him in 1982.
“That’s what he called me,” said the Rev. Patrick Moloney, chuckling on Wednesday as he recounted being arrested along with his brother John, who wound up serving three years in prison.
The charges against Father Moloney were dropped after he spent two months in Portlaoise Prison, Ireland’s maximum-security lockup, with notoriously militant I.R.A. men.
Now the man known to his faithful simply as Father Pat, the street priest of the East Village, was in his brownstone on East Ninth Street just off Tompkins Square Park, which he opened a half century ago as Bonitas House, a shelter for troubled teenagers and illegal immigrants.
Though he grew up a Roman Catholic, he was ordained in the Melkite Church, an Eastern Rite church.
He sank into a sofa, leafed through his mail and launched into another story, this one about serving four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester — at the time, called the fifth biggest Brink’s robbery in history — which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers.
Father Moloney, a slight man with a short gray beard and glasses, emigrated from Ireland in 1955 and, inspired by the Catholic activist and anarchist Dorothy Day, began his ministry for the poor in the blighted East Village. He battled the gang leaders and drug dealers as ferociously as he now fights the developer-gentrifiers.
He also became a hero among Irish nationalists and a fixture at I.R.A. fund-raisers, calling for a united Ireland and denouncing British governance of the “occupied zone” of its northern counties.
Father Moloney is the son and grandson of I.R.A. fighting men, and he keeps his father’s Fenian rifle nearby and Irish nationalist posters hanging in his room.
Above his headboard is a postcard for the Provisional I.R.A. and a snapshot of himself at a protest supporting the hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981.
Father Moloney said violence in the name of a united Ireland may have been justified up through the 1990s, but no longer.
Over the years, he has constantly run afoul of the authorities for helping people he believed were in the right, he said. He has defended and hidden fugitives, the undocumented and I.R.A. members on the lam.
The list includes relatives of both Gerry Adams and Malcolm X, he said.
They have stayed in the secret apartments he has kept around the city for this purpose, some of them in public housing.
“I have never broken a law, but I have circumvented most of them,” he said, fingering his ever-present prayer beads, a mischievous glint in his eye.
In November 1993, Father Moloney was arrested in connection with a January 1993 holdup in which $7.4 million was taken from a Brink’s armored car service by masked gunmen, one of whom was a former I.R.A. hunger striker named Sam Millar; Mr. Millar was using one of Father Moloney’s refuge apartments in Stuyvesant Town.
Mr. Millar hid $2 million in the apartment.
Father Moloney was arrested for conspiring to hide the money.
Arresting agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered $168,000 from a safe in Bonitas House.
Father Moloney, who has always maintained his innocence, said he was safeguarding the money for members of his flock.
The judge set his bail at around $1 million.
“The judge said, 'you’re going to need a miracle,’ ” Father Moloney recalled. “I said, ‘Judge, I’m in the business of miracles,’ and I raised it in contributions in a matter of days.”
He and Mr. Millar were tried together and both were convicted.
While Father Moloney was in federal prison — he called himself a political prisoner — “Free Father Pat” graffiti was scrawled around the East Village.
The remaining $5.2 million in Brinks money was never found.
Certainly Father Moloney never showed signs of getting richer.
He has lived like a monk, sleeping in a closet-size room on a cot stretched over his filing cabinets.
“I never took a dollar — I didn’t need to,” said Father Moloney, who used the Brinks publicity for his causes and never missed a chance to gleefully snub the authorities about it.
“I rubbed the government’s nose in it,” he said, and he poured himself a cup of Irish tea.