Page One
Monday, June 30, 1997

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Eugene Mallon, the Irish bookseller whose name Ira Einhorn used while on the lam in France, had no inkling that Einhorn had stolen his identity.

Mallon learned of the ruse about a week ago, when he read an article on Einhorn's arrest in the Sunday Irish Tribune. Einhorn had been living in the south of France under Mallon's name with his wife, Annika Flodin, who also was using the name Mallon.

``It was out of the blue,'' Mallon said yesterday as he took a break from the stall where he sells military surplus wear and dog food at a suburban Dublin flea market. ``It was a bit of a shock. I was stunned.''

As he thought about the theft of his name, though, Mallon mellowed toward his old friend, whom he had known for 16 years as ``Ben Moore.''

``I felt annoyed for a few days,'' Mallon said. ``I felt he should have asked, but I might have said no.

``He probably didn't have a lot of choice.''

Einhorn was convicted in absentia of the 1977 murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, whose body was found in a trunk in his apartment. He fled Philadelphia while out on bail and is reported to have hidden in England, Ireland, Sweden and France.

Mallon, 53, a wiry 5-foot-6, said he believed that looks had had nothing to do with Einhorn's taking his name. Mallon, like Einhorn, has a beard. But beyond that, said the bookseller, there was ``no resemblance. He was much bigger than me.''

Instead, he said, he thinks Einhorn took his name because Einhorn knew him so well. For one thing, Mallon had never left the British Isles and had never had a passport.

He said he suspected that Einhorn was able to get a copy of his birth certificate from Northern Ireland, and to get a passport from that.

Mallon said he remembered when Einhorn first walked into his bookshop, the Cathair, in Dublin's Temple Bar neighborhood, and introduced himself as Ben Moore. That was 1980 or 1981.

``He said he'd just moved to Ireland, and he wanted to read some Irish history, and he didn't have much money. I sold him a 10-volume history of Ireland, which was reasonably priced,'' Mallon recalled. ``He came back two days later and said he'd read it and what should he read next.''

Mallon, a self-taught intellectual who reads voraciously but never finished college, was impressed. Their friendship started from there.

``He was a very intelligent person, one of the best minds I'd ever met,'' Mallon said. ``You couldn't mention a book he hadn't read.''

By 1981, when Mallon moved to the rural Wicklow area, about an hour's drive from Dublin, they were seeing each other weekly and staying overnight at each other's homes.

``If I went to a party at Dublin, I'd stay at his two-bedroom flat at 67 Pembroke Rd., near the American Embassy,'' Mallon said.

Mallon and Einhorn soon formed a philosophy study group in Dublin with about four others, including an artist and geneticist, reading a chapter a week from Rene Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche and the like. It lasted about two years.

He described Einhorn as a ``warm person,'' someone who was able to comfort Mallon after a 12-year relationship broke up. He remembers seeing Einhorn cry once: ``It was when the writer Arthur Koestler died [ in 1983 ] . I think he lived with Koestler in London.''

In retrospect, Mallon said, Einhorn let slip only once something that should have made him suspicious.

Einhorn often came to poetry readings with a group called Poetry Ireland, when Mallon was deputy chairman.

``I once invited him to hear the American writer Philip Agee, and [ Einhorn ] explained he'd been falsely accused of a crime and he couldn't go -- there'd be too many Americans. I thought no more about it.''

Suddenly, about 1986 or '87, Mallon said, his friend disappeared without a farewell. ``I rang up his flat, and was told he'd gone.''

Soon after, the police started asking questions.

Mallon said he had been particularly distressed when two men he said were Philadelphia police officers showed up at his bookstore.

``They were big fellows,'' Mallon said. ``They said I knew more than I'd told the police and I would get in trouble if I didn't tell the truth.''

Mallon said he had ordered them out of his shop, called the Irish ``serious crimes squad,'' and soon got a call back that the Americans had been ushered to the airport.

It was at this point, Mallon said, that he realized that the man he had known as Ben Moore was really Ira Einhorn.

Then came the day when the wife of the fake Eugene Mallon came to Dublin to visit the real Eugene Mallon.

About 1991 or '92, Mallon said, a woman called at his bookstore, saying that ``she was married to Ben and that he couldn't contact me.''

Mallon put up the woman, Annika Flodin, for a couple of nights in his apartment. She returned again three months later for one night. Since then, he said, he had received an occasional Christmas card from Flodin but heard nothing from Einhorn.

Mallon said he had had no idea that his friend was in France (the cards had come from Sweden) or that Flodin was calling herself Mallon. In fact, it was the name Mallon -- used by Flodin when she applied for a French driver's license -- that eventually led to Einhorn's arrest on June 13 in a small Bordeaux village.

Thinking back on his friendship with Einhorn, Mallon said he could not imagine him a murderer. He said Einhorn had had a ``stormy relationship'' with his girlfriend in Ireland, Jeanne Morrison. There was ``a lot of friction between them, bickering,'' Mallon said, but ``I never saw him lose his temper.''

Mallon closed his bookstore three years ago and now lives in the village of Rathdrum, where the movie Michael Collins was filmed in part, in a ranch house so cluttered with books that it is difficult to find the floor. He said it was ironic that the last book he read before hearing of Einhorn's arrest was by Irish writer Brendan Behan.

In it, the protagonist says: ``They've sentenced me to death in my absence, so they can execute me in my absence.''

``I might write him,'' Mallon mused. ``I'd probably forgive him.''