Gangster (8 page)

An IRA squad comprising five people carried out the hit.

‘You have no idea how many times we tried to kill him. We must have went for him about six times but something always happened. I remember a garda appeared out of nowhere as he was about to be executed. I don’t like using the word murdered,’ said one.

His ‘executioner’ struck as he pulled up to a traffic intersection that lies between the Oxford and Charlestown Road in the leafy suburb of Ranelagh in Dublin. It was far from a meticulously planned assassination—the IRA were desperate to murder the General.

His killers were acutely aware that he would be untouchable in two weeks’ time when the leadership would declare its first ceasefire. The month of August was their last window of opportunity. On the day of the actual killing, the hitman disguised himself as a Dublin Corporation worker pretending to count cars as they drove by. Another member of the unit assigned to carry out the shooting drove a motorcycle. Yet another was perched nearby scanning the Garda frequencies with a hand-held scanner, whilst another two IRA men waited nearby to drive the killers to safety and dispose of the motorcycle.

The bike rider dressed as a courier and was charged with keeping Cahill’s corporation home on Swan Grove under surveillance. At 3.10 p.m. Cahill emerged from the front doorway of his house and sat in his Black Renault 5. He was heading to a nearby video store to return a copy of the film
A Bronx Tale
. He paid no attention to the courier who sped off when he stepped outside his door.

When Cahill pulled up, the Corporation worker stopped counting traffic, walked towards his car and fired directly through the front windscreen. The bullets hit their target in the head and shoulder. The first shot knocked Cahill unconscious, causing him to lose control of his car, which throttled across the road. The gunman was under orders to kill. So having spent weeks following the General, he spent a few more minutes making sure Cahill did not survive. ‘That would have been a public relations disaster for the IRA. Even if he had have been left in a wheelchair we would have had to go after him again. Once the order was given,’ said one of his killers, ‘he had to die.’

The gunman calmly followed Cahill’s car as it chugged across the road crashing into a garden wall, and fired another three shots into the General. He even put his head in through the car window to make sure Cahill was dead before jumping on a getaway motorcycle. The IRA had carried out another professional hit.

That is what police investigating his murder assumed, the radio reports announced over the airwaves and journalists wrote in the morning papers. John Gilligan thought otherwise. In his own mind, he believed his associates had scalped the General, that a paid INLA gunman had shot him dead. In the hours following Cahill’s slaying, the INLA, using a recognised code-word, claimed in a telephone call to the 98FM radio station that it had carried out the shooting. Two and a half hours later the IRA, also using a recognised code-word, said one of its volunteers had carried out the shooting using a .357 Magnum. The IRA statement said Cahill’s activities had included extortion, intimidation, robbery and drug dealing.

‘However, it was his involvement with and assistance to pro-British death squads which forced us to act. Through their association with the UVF, Cahill’s gang have endangered the lives of many more Dublin people. The IRA reserve the right to execute those who finance or otherwise assist loyalist killer gangs.’

Then came a third statement to the radio station, this time from the INLA, denying all involvement in the killing and threatening those who had made the first call.

The Garda investigation into the General’s slaying went nowhere. The detectives assigned to trace his killers were met with a wall of silence. No one knew anything. The IRA leadership who organised the ‘execution’ took all the necessary precautions to cover their tracks. They instructed an IRA member from Dún Laoghaire in south Dublin to let it be known that he had assassinated Cahill to throw the police off the scent. This information, as planned, filtered back to Garda headquarters who attributed the crime to the republican in their intelligence files. However, this man had nothing to do with the shooting. He wasn’t even in Dublin on the day.

Cahill had proverbially lived by the sword and died by it. At the time of his death, most of his friends were serving sentences in Portlaoise Prison. When news of his death reached E1, it sent shock waves through the prison. Cahill’s brother John was serving a sentence at the time. Fearful of a reprisal by the inmates, the INLA prisoners asked the IRA for protection. The request was rescinded minutes after the IRA claimed responsibility. John Cahill himself then went to the IRA leadership in the prison. He accused the IRA of doing the State’s dirty work. After being told in no uncertain terms that the General’s days of bullying and intimidation were over, he left. Later the same day, he sent a message to Brian Kenna to say the prison Mass on Sunday morning would be dedicated to his brother. Few of the criminals went to Mass, so Kenna voiced no objection, telling him that it was his own business.

But the proverb that nothing is more wonderful than faith proved true in Portlaoise Prison that week. Before the Mass began, every prisoner from E1 walked into the small church and one by one kneeled down and prayed for the soul of Martin Cahill. The mood was both sombre and tense inside the oratory; the prayers were said not so much out of religious belief, but more in an act of defiance to the IRA.

Gilligan to this day believes his associates killed Cahill. The IRA abducted all but one of Dublin’s leading crime figures after they shot the General. Many, like Martin Foley, a trusted lieutenant of Cahill’s, were dragged from their homes. They all confessed. Traynor did, George Mitchell did.

‘The rest were beating a path to Sinn Féin headquarters in Parnell Street. There was a queue of them around the corner, promising this, that and the other,’ joked one IRA officer.

But the Provisionals missed one key player—Gilligan escaped the round-up. The IRA had arranged to collect him from a house in Crumlin for interrogation purposes. Gilligan had volunteered to go. But on the night in question, fuelled by the belief that he had the INLA standing behind him, he made a number of demands. He told the IRA intelligence officer charged with overseeing his ‘arrest’ that he wanted assurances he would not be harmed. He also wanted to know when he would be released. He would not consent to a blindfold either.

His demands were phoned through to the Chief of Staff. Gilligan, he said, was to be left alone. They would deal with him later. The next day, Gilligan sent a message to the IRA apologising for his insubordination.

‘We were supposed to go back and shoot him. But we didn’t, not for any particular reason, but because we were in the middle of peace negotiations and Gilligan was way down the list of priorities. It was as simple as that,’ said one of the IRA unit.

Regardless, the series of events as they unfolded left Gilligan in a very powerful position. Cahill was dead, and his gang were now running scared from the IRA. Gilligan believed his gang had killed the most notorious gangster to have emerged from the Irish underworld, and he’d told the IRA to harass someone else and got away with it. Traynor, an influential figure in the underworld, was by his side. He was also rich.

This gave him confidence. Two years after the killing, he remarked that if the IRA stood up in a witness box and said that they had murdered Cahill, he still wouldn’t believe them: ‘I know who murdered the General, and it wasn’t the IRA.’

Chapter 8

Invisible Criminals

‘He was a fella who suffered from mood swings.’

TONY CODY, British CUSTOMS and EXCISE, TALKING ABOUT GILLIGAN

Dublin’s north inner city was Brian Meehan’s and Peter Mitchell’s stomping ground. It was a hard area, where unemployment was high, heroin addiction among the youth spiralled and HIV was a common ailment. At the time, thousands of people lived in dilapidated flat complexes ignored by Ireland’s political parties, who turned a blind eye to the social injustices inflicted on the people living there. For the most part, heroin was the root of its misery. In 1995, if one walked 200 metres in any direction from Buckingham Street, a road that runs through the area, you could pass a house bought with the proceeds of drug trafficking. Therefore, it was one of the most heavily policed communities in Ireland; not that this ever stopped the pushers. Nevertheless, the police stationed there do their best to stop and search criminals on sight. So when Garda Dave Cherry and his colleague Vincent Marky stumbled upon Meehan driving a green Mitsubishi Colt with Mitchell sitting in the passenger seat on Dorset Street, on the evening of 24 August 1994, six days after Cahill’s death, they stopped the car and asked them to step out.

Cherry asked Meehan where he was going, then through the corner of his eye noticed a plastic bag lying on the floor. He asked what was in the bag. Mitchell, normally a confrontational criminal, looked nervous as Meehan said the bag was his, sounding as if he knew how evasive his answer was. Cherry opened the bag. Inside was hard cash—what looked like thousands of pounds wrapped in small bundles. Cherry seized the cash under a police property act. Meehan argued he had no right to take the cash and was arrested. He was taken to Fitzgibbon Street Station in Dublin’s north inner city for questioning.

The gardaí counted the cash, which came to £46,175 in Irish punts and £120 sterling. In typical fashion, Meehan refused to say anything. Later that evening he was released without charge. Hours later, he returned, only this time he was accompanied by Gilligan who stood outside the station while Meehan went inside and asked for Cherry. The garda stepped outside where Gilligan introduced himself as a professional gambler. Meehan, he said, was minding the cash for him, the profits of a day’s gambling. As the garda stood there, Gilligan produced betting dockets to support his story. He haggled with Cherry, who believed none of it. He said he would let the courts decide the matter. Gilligan didn’t give a damn. This was a temporary setback and there was no cause for anxiety—he would get the money back.

The greatest trick John Gilligan ever played was convincing society he didn’t exist. By becoming obsessively secretive, he ensured few outside of Dublin’s criminal fraternity and the police knew anything of him. Of those who did, most knew only his name. The force’s criminal intelligence section knew little about him. Few of Dublin’s young gangsters knew what he looked like, where he lived or how he conducted his business. He likened himself to the clandestine gangland figures of old. People knew only what he wanted them to know. His name was spoken in hushed voices by criminals; he was known as a man with no clear sense of what was rational, a man capable of striking out without thinking; a psychopath. Under this cloak of anonymity, he had immersed himself in the drugs trade, importing cannabis in bulk.

The business was good to him, earning him hundreds of thousands of pounds. It was also good to Meehan and Mitchell, who sold his product with the competency of shrewd businessmen. Slowly they started supplying the suppliers, effectively becoming wholesalers to the dealers. Other criminal organisations couldn’t match their prices or reliability. There was never a shortage of product, none was ever seized and Gilligan reaped the rewards. The link between money and crime was absolute for Gilligan. His life changed beyond his wildest dreams. For a start, he began combing his hair and changed his dress code. Gone were the tracksuits and jeans. He left behind his scruffy appearance and started dressing the part—suits, shirts and sports jackets. That he pretended to be a professional gambler had to be one of his most arrogant oversights.

If there were matters in life that Gilligan didn’t know about, money laundering wasn’t one of them. He understood it was the lifeblood of organised crime. He earned so much cash that he was forced to spend money to launder it. Money laundering derives its name from the practice of putting cash earned from crime through a cycle of transactions that obscure its origin, thereby making it ‘clean’. The most important thing is to make sure the owner of the cash remains anonymous. In this case, Gilligan paid a team of young couriers to launder his cash and to keep his name out of the picture. The scam was simple. He would place bets on every horse running in a race. Because one was sure to win, depending on the betting odds, he would make a return of around IR£80,000. The winnings would be paid out in cheques and could be lodged in an account without the bank feeling obliged to report the lodgement as a suspicious transaction. He wrote off the IR£20,000 he lost as a business expense. The ‘cleaned cash’ could then be used to purchase whatever he wished. This was foolproof. ‘Sheer genius,’ he would say. He targeted reputable bookmaker chains—the Power Leisure Group, Coral Racing, Ladbrokes and Boyles. None of the bookmakers had any idea that Gilligan was using them to launder drugs cash.

The Power Leisure Group was the first chain to be targeted when on 18 June 1994 he sent his minions into the chain’s shops. Between this date and 11 April 1995, people working under his instruction placed bets totalling a whopping IR£1,052,282 inclusive of tax. He won IR£880,301, showing a loss of IR£171,981. This money represented the tip of the iceberg. Between 3 March 1994 and 24 November 1995 he bet IR£342,650 with Coral Betting Group. He received a sum of IR£292,577, showing a loss of IR£50,073. Not only was he laundering dirty cash through some of Ireland’s most respected companies, but he was also fulfilling his addiction to gambling.

In April 1995 his messengers targeted Ladbrokes, placing bets on his behalf. They bet IR£721,185 till they were barred the following year in April 1996. He received a return of IR£784,461, for once showing a profit of IR£63,276. Boyles Bookmakers were also used in the conspiracy. He started laying bets in their shops in August 1995. Gilligan bet exactly IR£1,444,333 with the chain the following June. He received a return of IR£1,234,018. This showed a loss of IR£210,315. All in all, his total bets with all the bookmaker firms amounted to IR£5,371,696 inclusive of betting tax at 10%. That left a deficit of IR£537,472.

Within weeks of Cahill’s murder, he started investing in a derelict house on five acres that he had purchased in his own name for IR£7,000 in 1987, although he later added Geraldine’s name to the title. The property was located in Mucklon in County Kildare, miles away from Dublin. He decided to pump as much cash as possible into the cottage. It underwent a complete overhaul. As soon as it became habitable, the Gilligans moved from their Dublin Corporation home in Corduff.

Geraldine had great ambitions. She saw wealth she could previously only dream of. She lost her flat Dublin accent and started speaking differently, with a defined gravelly voice. She held parties at Jessbrook attended by horse breeders, dealers and society figures from all walks of life. She decorated the family home but with gaudy furniture and items. She installed a minibar in the backroom, similar to the type seen in the BBC sitcom
Only Fools and Horses.
She devoted herself to opening up a riding school on land adjoining the site. This she called the Jessbrook Equestrian Centre, named after a pony the couple owned, Jessie. ‘Brook’ was added to round off the riding school’s name.

Throughout their life together Geraldine had always pushed Gilligan to better himself. She now had serious aspirations of climbing the social ladder and ingratiating herself with the hunting fraternity. With ample cash coming in, Gilligan started buying up as much land as possible next to the house. In August 1994, he bought 30 acres for IR£50,000. Geraldine was registered as the owner, but she did not register the title in her name.

The couple then purchased 15 more acres, paying IR£28,000 for a parcel of fields located between Mucklon and the townslands of Mulgeeth. Another eight acres were acquired costing IR£16,000. He couldn’t buy enough land. Anything that came on the market was purchased. He bought a further four acres for IR£28,000 and finally 21 more acres for IR£40,000. In all, he would spend IR£169,000 buying land for Geraldine’s beloved horses to graze in.

He couldn’t spend enough cash. When there was no more land left to purchase, he decided to finance the construction of a show-jumping centre built to international specifications—the jewel in his crown. Professional architects, designers and building contractors were hired—all oblivious to the true source of his wealth. Over the next two years, he would spend IR£1,516,553 on this part of the development. Architectural plans for the house and arena cost IR£10,000. The renovation of the cottage cost IR£57,000. Constructing the show-jumping centre cost IR£300,000 for the building alone. Building it cost IR£107,311. Geraldine wanted Jessbrook designed to international standards so the structure incorporated steelwork that cost IR£407,000. The arena was also fitted with purpose-made seats. These cost IR£300,050. Building stables to livery horses cost IR£66,900. There were other expenses paid with cash from drugs. The windows cost IR£106,522, dry fitting IR£25,000, dry filling IR£20,000, Fiber Sand IR£21,870, polytrack IR£30,250, and IR£18,000 was spent fencing off the land. When Jessbrook was finally completed, the Gilligans bought the freehold address at 13 Corduff Avenue in an up-yours gesture to the State.

Gilligan was affected in an entirely different way. Riches changed him into a psychopath. He thought he could do anything. He saw himself as an awesome gangster in the underworld, a man to be reckoned with. He surrounded himself with people he believed he could trust and, most importantly, who believed in him.

Traynor fulfilled this role, telling Gilligan what he wanted to hear. Traynor was of a distinctly different character. He was a hopeless bluffer, a man deeply insecure about himself, his personal life and his criminal career. ‘He didn’t know whether he was a gangster or a businessman,’ said one detective of him. ‘He didn’t know his place. That’s what made him dangerous.’

Traynor was Gilligan’s confidant, a man he trusted implicitly. Few criminals could tolerate Gilligan’s irrational mood swings and arrogance, but Traynor could. He would listen and agree with everything Gilligan said. He liked the fact that Gilligan confided in him. What Gilligan didn’t know, or failed to realise, was that his confidant told his secrets to just about anyone willing to listen, and Guerin was a good listener.

Like all great journalists, Guerin had an insatiable appetite for news. This passion brought her public recognition and shaped the lives of those around her. She was born on 5 July 1958, the second youngest of five children—three girls and two boys. She had grown up on Brookwood Avenue in Artane, a solidly middle-class suburb in Dublin where the children spoke with polite accents and left school with the necessary qualifications. Her father, Christopher, was an accountant who ran a practice from a small office on Gardiner Place in Dublin city. She loved sports, playing basketball for the local team, the Killester Kittens, and was skilled enough to play women’s soccer for the Irish team. She was a supporter of Manchester United. Because she grew up in a highly political household, it came as a surprise to no one when she joined Fianna Fáil.

Politics and Charles Haughey were her passions in life. She canvassed for Haughey, knocking on doors, encouraging voters to ‘do the right thing’ and vote for her leader. Haughey saw in her a loyal supporter, and in 1982 he rewarded her by appointing her to the board of the NIHE College in north Dublin. Two years later, she became the Fianna Fáil secretary of the New Ireland Forum. This was a highly prestigious posting by any standards. She married Graham Turley, a man she met through the party, a year later in a ceremony attended by political dignitaries from across the political spectrum.

Her entry into journalism was accidental. When she left school, after finishing the Leaving Certificate in 1976, she worked as a secretary in a Credit Union office. She then worked in her father’s practice for about a year. At one point, she attempted to make a living running a small catering company, but this enterprise failed miserably. Evergreen, a small vegetable shop she opened with Turley in the village of Malahide, was her next foray into business. It shut down three months after opening. Guerin worked in a travel agency for a while, then suddenly decided to become a journalist in the autumn of 1990.

The
Sunday Business Post
was a relatively young publication at the time, and so she decided it should be her first port of call. She literally walked into the office off the street where she was introduced to Aileen O’Toole, the newspaper’s deputy editor. ‘She had never written an article for a newspaper before but wanted to give journalism a shot. At the time, she was doing research on the aviation sector and filled our heads with facts, figures and concerns about the unstoppable growth of GPA,’ O’Toole later wrote.

Guerin was not a particularly skilled writer, but was more than capable of getting information that no one wanted disclosed. She started writing articles, at first business articles about the aviation industry, later moving on to politics. She contributed to the paper for the next three years, also working with RTÉ.

Her next employer was the
Sunday Tribune
. It was here that she became, in journalistic terms, a force to be reckoned with. She delved into controversy, seeking out stories that raised eyebrows. She rejoiced in getting the impossible interviews, like that with Jim Livingstone, the head of the Revenue Commissioners Special Investigation Branch, whose wife, Grace, had been murdered.

She wrote about the General, how he had stolen the Beit art collection, and penned incisive political stories. But it was her interview with a bishop that made her famous, trebling her newspaper’s sales. Bishop Eamonn Casey had fathered a child with an American divorcée, Annie Murphy, and fled to Ecuador when his clandestine love affair became public. Guerin, on her own initiative, flew to Ecuador where she found Casey living in a clerical friend’s house outside Quito.