Samaritan in Exile After Call for Help Backfires : Northern Ireland: Resident of Catholic ghetto faces threat of execution because he telephoned police after hearing a neighbor’s screams, inadvertently giving away plans for an IRA raid.

Michael Williams lived with his wife, Mavis, and eight of their 12 children in a cramped but tidy rowhouse in Bogside, this city’s Catholic ghetto.

One afternoon, as he was putting out the milk bottles, he heard a woman’s hysterical screams next door and did what any good neighbor would--he bounded to the nearest telephone and dialed the police.

But Bogside is no ordinary community, and the two young gunmen inside his neighbor’s home were no ordinary hoodlums.

As a result of that phone call, one man is in prison for 10 years, another committed suicide and Williams finds himself condemned to a bizarre form of exile from his home and family under threat of death by the Irish Republican Army.

It is a story that demonstrates the power the outlawed IRA wields in its urban strongholds. Ordinary people can suddenly find themselves trapped between IRA gunmen and the police.

The two young intruders were IRA members who had commandeered the house and a car for an attack on British soldiers. By calling the police, Williams betrayed the ambush and violated an unwritten but fundamental law of survival in Bogside.

“Michael Williams was responsible for the capture of an IRA volunteer and IRA materials,” said Hugh Brady, a city councilman and member of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s legal political wing. “The IRA’s position was a reasonable one--he can return home to his family on the same day the captured volunteer can return to his.”

Williams remains in hiding on the island of Jersey, hundreds of miles from home, more than a year after his banishment. “The IRA reckon they’re fighting for a cause, but that doesn’t justify what they’ve done to me,” he said in a telephone interview arranged through relatives. “If I appeared in my own home, I’d be dead tomorrow. That’s for trying to help my poor neighbor.”

Bogside is one of Western Europe’s poorer communities, a stark landscape of anonymous housing projects and aging tenements. Male unemployment in projects like the one in which Williams lived runs about 50%. Houses are small, families are large, people age quickly and often die young.

“It is a community created by negativity,” wrote David Apter, a Yale social scientist who has studied the area. “Cut off from the mainstream, depressed, oppressed, drawn into its otherness,” it is “a nesting place, part sanctuary and part target.”

Bogside has a long, bloodstained history of opposition to British rule and Protestant domination, and members of the mainly Protestant police force are often viewed as the enemy here. Uniformed police seldom enter the area without an escort of soldiers in armored cars bristling with automatic weapons.

With ordinary police work often impossible, many residents have come to rely on the IRA for protection from drug dealers, burglars and car thieves. Some support the movement wholeheartedly, while others hold it responsible for two decades of conflict and intimidation. But no one denies its power.

Williams was always something of an outsider in Bogside. An English Protestant and an army veteran, he converted to Catholicism when he married Mavis 32 years ago and moved here.

They had lived in the house on Malin Gardens for 24 years, and he had been on the dole for the last five after losing his job at a local factory.

On that afternoon 14 months ago, he said, he saw two young strangers come up the walk to the home of his neighbors, the Garnon family. There had been a rape in the area not long before, Williams said, and when he heard Mrs. Garnon’s screams, he ran to phone police.

“House-taking” is a common IRA tactic in such communities, and Sinn Fein officials say Williams should have gone next door to determine the identity of the intruders before calling police, or at least he should have warned them after he made the call.

The only person Williams warned was Clifford Garnon, 33, who was on his way to the house when Williams intercepted him and told him his mother was being held.

Garnon had a very different notion of what to do. He ran to the local Sinn Fein office to report what had happened, but by then it was too late to alert the gunmen.

Police had sealed off the area, arrested Martin O’Neill, 22, and seized a high-powered rifle and grenade launcher. The second intruder escaped. Police also arrested Clifford Garnon and held him two days for questioning.

When Mavis Williams heard what her husband had done, she said, “My whole body turned to jelly. I screamed at him; I won’t tell you the language I used. You have to understand the situation here. If you say too much, they’ll say you’re an informer. I’m not brave; the police, the army, the IRA--to me, they’re all the same.”

The next day, Michael Williams was summoned before an IRA tribunal to explain his actions. He took along a priest to ensure his safety. The group seemed to accept his story and assured him no harm would come to him or his family.

But Mavis was uneasy. A few days later, she insisted that her husband leave town temporarily. “He had faith in these people, but I didn’t, not 100%,” she said. “I said to him, ‘Do me a favor. Go to your aunt’s house for a few days and let my nerves settle.’ ”

As it turned out, her instincts were correct. While Mavis was away from the house one day, four men in ski masks came to the front door and told the couple’s 16-year-old son, Robert, to pass a message to his father: “Tell him if he comes back, he’ll be executed.”

The family has conducted a long, fruitless campaign to get Williams back home, enlisting support from the local press and the Catholic Church. Bishop Edward Daly, who investigated the case personally, called the IRA’s behavior “outrageous and profoundly unjust.”

The IRA has waged its own publicity campaign in response, alleging that Mrs. Garnon had never screamed, and that Williams knew when he phoned the police that the men inside the house were IRA members. Its main witness was Clifford Garnon, who told a press conference that Williams had lied about the incident.

Soon after, Garnon committed suicide by jumping from a bridge into the Foyle River. Family members say he felt under intense pressure from all sides in the affair and also was depressed by the death of his father a year earlier.

After conducting yet another secret inquiry, the IRA announced it had changed its death sentence against Williams to banishment from Bogside until O’Neill’s release. Sinn Fein officials who helped mediate pronounced themselves satisfied.

“The IRA didn’t get its way, and the family didn’t get its way either,” said Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader in Londonderry, who security sources allege is also a senior figure in the IRA. “I think most people in the community felt it was a satisfactory outcome.”

Michael Williams says he is angry at not being able to see his children and bitter at being banished from his home. But he has learned his lesson.

“I chose the wrong option,” he told a Londonderry newspaper. If it ever happened again, he said, “I would go back into my own home, close the door and turn up the television.”