By Jim O'Sullivan

"The most important thing in this life is you've got to have proof." This is Martin Hanley speaking now, 86 years old and nothing if not spry. Spry in his storytelling, spry in his movement, and spry in his verbal jousts with radio talk-show hosts. Eighty-six years old, uncrating tales from his days in the Merchant Marines: a guy smoking a cigarette with his foot at the Grand Orient Hotel in Sri Lanka, barfights in Venezuela in the days after World War II, lugging prisoners around the Continent, and tracking down a deviant waiter aboard a ship while traversing the Panama Canal.

With the evidence to back it all up. Here's his pay stubs from 30 years in the press room of the New York Daily News, a stack of passports that he says make him the most passported man in the City of Boston, a pin and plaque honoring him for compassion and charity toward disabled military veterans and their families, pictures of him with every Boston political figure from Peggy Davis-Mullen to John F. Kennedy, Jr., and letters from Presidents Truman, Reagan, Clinton, and the sitting Bush.

The next morning, Veterans Day, the 23-year resident of Adams Village will attend a reception in the State House office of Gov. Mitt Romney, joining fellow WWII vets and those from other wars. Hanley used to take a drink at these things, he says, but with the knee acting up the way it's been, there will be no more of that for a while.

He was born in Ireland, County Roscommon, in 1917, before Ireland won her independence from England. An American citizen by way of his parents' citizenship over here, he retains the lilting brogue sported by those who hail from the West, and wears his shock of white hair swept back from his face. He has blue eyes that crackle and crinkle as another story dances to the finish. There's the time he stumbled off a Dutch merchant ship, the Biscop, to fall in love with a Russian girl named Tasha, or the time Billy Bulger introduced him to Paul Cellucci as "the Mayor of Castle Island."

"The thing about this is, if someone doesn't talk about it, it's going to be lost," he says.

So talk, Martin.

'It takes a while'

His people now are fruit wholesalers in Dublin, and if there's a relative in the New World they brag about back home, it's likely Martin. The Roscommon Association of Boston's Man of the Year in 2000, he's got enough commendations hanging on his wall to choke a file cabinet. There's the one certifying his circling of the globe and the letter from Harry S. Truman thanking him for wartime service.

Martin's somewhat circuitous route to life Stateside brought him through the Merchant Marines, in which he'd enlisted during World War II. Young and smirking in the pictures of himself he's kept from those days, Martin found himself onboard the Biscop, bound for allied Russia with munitions and medical supplies. He worked in the engine room with an Aborigine fellow as they steamed by the mouth of the Barents Sea. "Can you imagine me," Martin says more than 60 years later, "a guy who's never been out of Ireland in his bloody life?"

In Murmansk, he was smitten with a Russian lovely, Tasha, and stayed with her family for a few days, before again boarding the ship and sailing for more adventures. He helped transport "DPs" (displaced personnel) to Melbourne, Australia, and pooh-poohs today's political correctness about them. "Of course, you can't start mentioning names, or they'll say you're anti-this or anti-that," Martin chuckles.

His service earned him enough medals to make one side of his jacket sag. There's the Philippines Liberation Medal, the Mediterranean Middle East Medal, the Atlantic War Zone Medal, and the Pacific War Zone Medal.

After the war, Martin came to New York, fortunate groom of Winifred Hanley, also of Roscommon, who tolerated his seafaring for only so long, before Martin's brother, later a monsignor in San Diego, persuaded him to come home to his bride. Martin explains, "And then I began to get sense, because it takes a while for a young guy to get responsibilities."

Martin joined the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and still has his dues slips from 1953. Last month, the union honored him as a member in good standing for half a century. He plied his trade in the pressroom of the Daily News, working there for 30 years before moving up to Boston, and retirement.

Once here, he fell for the "next parish west of Galway," and his walls serve as a veritable who's-who of the city's Irish pols. A staunch defender of former state Senate and UMass President William Bulger, he plays audio tapes of his calls to the old "Blute and Ozone" talk show, speaking eloquently in Bulger's defense, and predicting the firing of shortly-thereafter-fired co-host John "Ozone" Osterlind in August.

"This is good theater, you know what I mean?"

Ample proof

Winifred died at 52 of breast cancer, "much too young," he says. They had three children: Andrew, Martin, and Nuala, whom Martin calls "Nell." She and her family send him postcards from Ireland, where they've just bought a new home.

Martin has something of a real estate speculator's eye for a good buy himself, he says, though he missed out on land in California years ago when the family was living out there. "There was plenty of houses I could've bought then, and now I'm kicking myself in the teeth," he says. "But, what the hell, I don't need it anymore."

No, he seems quite pleased with what he has gathered 'round him. There's the letter from George W. Bush, stamped from Crawford so you know it's not one of those jobs where a White House intern working in the basement spends three hours stuffing envelopes with form letters. In the August 6 letter, Bush responded to a note from Hanley, who had written to let the president know just where he stood on the war in Iraq.

"I wrote to the president of the United States and I told him I'm a lifelong Democrat, but I have respect for you because you're the skipper of the ship," Martin says. "I was at sea much of my life, and I know you have to respect the man in charge. And I feel bad for the young fellows that are dying over there now, and all I can do is pray about it."

The Bush letter joins pieces of correspondence from other heads of state &emdash; including Boris Yeltsin's decades-late thanks for delivering supplies to Russia &emdash; and they join pictures of Martin aboard his ship, and the medals that adorn his jacket as badges of courage. It's the memorabilia of a long life lived well.

There's the ring they gave him for 50 years in the union, a real diamond embedded in it. He walks over to the sliding-glass door that opens onto the terrace of his fourth-floor apartment, opening a view of Adams Village and the spires of St. Brendan's in the distance. The late afternoon sun glints off the diamond in the ring, and Martin holds it for a beat before turning to another story.

He starts pulling out pay stubs from his days working the presses for the Daily News during the 1970s, and pulling down pretty good money for those days, too.

"Now, I'm going to show you something," he says. "You're going to say, 'Jesus, Martin Hanley, you're something.'"

And he is, and has proof.

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