Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  The INLA’s inglorious, disreputable history is dominated by a string of internecine blood feuds. Members of the organization have murdered more of their own comrades than British soldiers. Like Saor Eire, the new organization’s selective interpretation of Marxist doctrine also meant that they had no qualms immersing themselves in organized crime, drug-trafficking and gangland murder.

  A year later, in June 1975, Liam White, a leading Saor Eire member in Cork, who also had links to the INLA, was murdered. He was shot 14 times by two men with machine-guns. White was given a paramilitary-style funeral and his brother told reporters: ‘Saor Eire will revenge his death.’ The Official IRA was suspected of carrying out the attack.

  Shortly afterwards Saor Eire was officially disbanded, but by then it had already started to fade into history. In its short, violent existence it had failed to wrench power from the capitalists and create a workers’ republic. It had, however, succeeded in making armed robbery an attractive proposition for the up and coming gangsters.

  Saor Eire’s revolution had won independence for a place called Gangland – and one of its former associates was destined to become Ireland’s first undisputed Godfather. His family-based criminal empire would have a profound influence on the future direction of Irish organized crime. That man was gun-smuggler Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne.

  3. The Godfather

  Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne always wanted to be the Godfather of a Mafia-style crime syndicate, and he craved the notoriety and status enjoyed by underworld celebrities like the Krays in London. Bronco fancied himself as a real-life version of Michael Corleone, the central character in the powerful Godfather movies of the early 1970s. Tall and handsome, with a glib tongue and a good command of the English language, Bronco exuded charm, bravado and menace in equal amounts. He relished his image as the neighbourhood bad boy and working-class hero. He already had the nucleus of a ‘family business’ around him – seven fiercely loyal younger brothers, whom he’d taught to steal when they were still children. Saor Eire gave him his first big break on the road to gangland stardom.

  Although not a formal member of the group, the accomplished chancer managed to place himself prominently among the leaders of the Che Guevara wannabes. Running with gangland’s first real hard cases satisfied Bronco’s hunger for recognition and street cred. In his eyes, it made him a major player. Dunne was introduced to the socialist revolutionary ‘family’ by Liam Walsh and Martin Casey. When his Saor Eire pals then blew themselves up while transporting a bomb, Bronco seized the opportunity to make a name for himself.

  With most of Saor Eire’s leadership wanted for the Dick Fallon murder and a string of heists, Christy Dunne was given the task of organizing a hero’s send-off for Walsh. An old friend and mentor of Christy’s, Father Michael Sweetman, officiated at the funeral Mass, which was attended by over 1,000 mourners. Afterwards a lone piper and a paramilitary colour party led the funeral procession through the streets of Dublin. The procession stopped outside the GPO, the spiritual home of Irish resistance, to eulogize their fallen comrade.

  Father Sweetman gave a homily on the replenishing powers of the Resurrection, while Christy Dunne spoke about the ‘Insurrection’ Walsh had supposedly died for. Not content with enthralling the mourners with his passionate oratory, attention-seeking Dunne produced a handgun. He fired a number of shots into the air to prove his dedication to ‘the cause’. He was subsequently charged with the incident and the case was heard in the Dublin District Court in February 1971. Justice Robert O’hUadaigh threw out the charge on a legal technicality and told Dunne he was free to go. But Bronco had other plans. He expressed his gratitude by jumping up and punching the judge. When Gardaí finally dragged Bronco off the bench, Justice O’hUadaigh gave him six months to calm him down. As a result the opportunistic rebel became a folk hero on both sides of the prison walls. By the time he was released, he’d parted with radical politics but he quickly put to use what he had learned from Saor Eire.

  Within a few years, Christy Dunne had achieved his life’s ambition. He and his brothers Shamie, Henry, Larry, Mickey, Robert, Vianney (‘Boyo’) and Charlie had become the first family-based gang in Ireland. Under Christy’s leadership, they were a highly efficient team of armed robbers – bound together by blood ties. The name Dunne became synonymous with Irish organized crime and earned its infamous place in Gangland’s history books. The Dunnes began to spread their operation, inducting other young hoods, such as Martin Cahill and Paddy Shanahan, into the Mafia-style family.

  The Dunne brothers were men of ‘respect’ in the Dublin underworld, which meant everyone was afraid of them. Christy nurtured his image as the untouchable gang boss. He would brag that the Dunnes were skilled craftsmen at the ‘job’ and the cleverest villains in town. The colourful crook was a popular addition to Dublin’s thriving social scene and he befriended a number of well-known journalists and celebrities. In the less enlightened, more innocent 1970s it was considered chic to hang out with ‘bad boy’ gangsters and republicans in the city’s fashionable bars and clubs. But despite his best efforts, Bronco was no Don Corleone.

  In November 1983, media-friendly Bronco agreed to take part in an interview on RTÉ radio to discuss his family’s reputation as the Irish equivalent of the Mafia. ‘I would have to take responsibility for introducing serious crime into the family only because I felt that with my brothers, that if we ever would do anything together, which we have done, that it was a closely kept secret between us. We worked together, we could depend on each other for our lives and we knew that whatever we did no one else would ever know about it,’ he candidly revealed.

  Then he reverted to his favourite role of ‘the victim’ – a part he performed with aplomb whenever the necessity arose: ‘I think it was convenient for the authorities, and the police in particular, to have a family like the Dunnes who I regard as just scapegoats, to have their names bandied about by the people who knew that we could not come back to them and argue these points with them and say: “Look you are wrong accusing us of this – why don’t you come forward and we will meet you.” ’

  Bronco went public because his family had indeed become famous and most of his brothers were household names – but it wasn’t for the type of hype he had intended. A few years earlier most of the Dunnes had moved on from armed robberies into the much more profitable business of hard drugs – despite the disapproval of their big brother. They’d introduced the scourge of heroin to Dublin’s working-class neighbourhoods, with catastrophic consequences. The family name was dirt and the brothers were despised. Christy had been forced to mount a damage-limitation exercise on their behalf: ‘A lot of my family live in sub-standard accommodation that has been given to them by the Corporation. Dublin Corporation has made it quite clear that under no circumstances will the Dunnes ever be housed in anything other than sub-standard accommodation. I feel that my family, like most other unfortunate people living in these areas, became victims.’

  When asked about his own reputation as a Godfather he was unusually coy: ‘I am not a Godfather, I am a good father.’

  Christy Dunne was born on 10 October 1938, the first child of Christy Senior and Ellen Dunne. The couple, both born and raised in inner-city slums, had married two years earlier. Christy Junior’s father, nicknamed ‘Bronco’ after the cowboy Bronco Bill, was 22 years old and Ellen was 15. After their wedding the couple first rented a rundown tenement flat in Kildare Street, before moving to another one-roomed hovel in New Street. Over the next two decades or so, Ellen Dunne endured 22 pregnancies, of which 16 children survived after birth – 11 boys and 5 girls. When she wasn’t expecting, Ellen Dunne tried to feed her large family with the meagre income she made running her small second-hand clothes stall. It was in the Iveagh Market, off Francis Street in the Liberties area of south inner-city Dublin.

  Christy Senior was a violent alcoholic who stumbled from one job to another. His own father, Christy Junior’s grandfather, had abandoned his family in
the 1930s and gone to live in Liverpool. Christy’s grandfather claimed he was forced to leave because of his republicanism – he had been on the anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War. As a youngster Bronco Senior had been in and out of trouble with the law. When Christy Junior was two, his father was convicted of manslaughter. He had killed a drinking buddy who was paying too much attention to his mother (Christy Junior’s grandmother). Christy Senior punched his victim so hard that the man fell down and cracked his skull on the floor. He went into a coma and died a week later in hospital. Bronco was sentenced to 18 months in Portlaoise Prison, where, over thirty years later, his sons would also take up residence – for much longer periods. By the time he was sent down, Ellen had had another baby and a third was on the way.

  The killing consolidated Christy Senior’s reputation as a hard man. He told his young sons that he was proud of what he had done – he was defending the honour of the family. After his release from prison he went to work in wartime Britain, but was deported twice for not having a proper permit. Christy Senior, like his father before him, also claimed to be a republican and was pro-German during the War. When he came home for good there was no work in poverty-stricken Dublin. The lack of work and the inevitable hardship it brought on his family, however, did not interfere with his drinking habits. During a boozing session one night, the republican rebel produced a revolver and fired off a shot in the pub. As a result he was arrested and given six months in Mountjoy Prison to help him sober up.

  It was in this atmosphere that Christy Dunne and his siblings were reared. In 1951, the ever-increasing Dunne family – Ellen Dunne endured her twenty-second pregnancy four years later – were moved to a new Corporation house at Rutland Avenue in Crumlin. It was part of the Government’s slum clearance programme but the new house changed little. The problems of poverty and deprivation had just changed address with the Dunnes. Their mother simply couldn’t cope and their father was rarely there. When he was at home violence was a way of life. The children would watch their father beat their mother when he fell in from the pub. Bronco Senior would also beat manners into his children, and when he wasn’t around Ellen, who was a hard drinker too, beat them in a vain attempt to control them. The children were often left to fend for themselves for long periods without either parent. They began running wild, stealing or begging for food to eat. Many of them were reared by their grandmother, Nellie O’Brien, including Christy Junior. His brothers Larry, Henry, Robert and Boyo once spent several weeks hiding out in the Glencree Caves in the Wicklow Hills, sleeping rough and stealing food from farms. At the time, they ranged in ages between seven and ten. The children were found after their family got concerned and Gardaí launched a full-scale search.

  Bronco Junior looked after the neglected youngsters as best he could – when he wasn’t in custody or on the run from the police. Inevitably Christy Junior was the first of the brothers to get involved in crime – and he soon showed his younger siblings how it was done. With typical bravado, he once claimed that at the age of ten he was robbing more than some men earned in a week. He stole food from the shops and coal from the dockyard to bring home to his deprived family. Christy would allow his brothers to bunk off school and took them on mini-crime sprees. After a while they quit school altogether. In the Dunne household, a hunger for food far surpassed any appetite for education and their parents didn’t care. An old family friend once recalled visiting the house and finding Christy Junior standing in the middle of a room, with no furniture, dishing out stew from a pot to eight of his hungry siblings.

  One by one, the other brothers began to get involved in petty crime. Christy, Shamie, Larry, Robert, Henry, Boyo, Mickey, Hubert and Charlie had all started their criminal careers by the age of ten. All the Dunne brothers, with the exception of Shamie, would spend most of their teenage years in and out of Ireland’s notorious industrial and reformatory schools. They were convicted on a variety of offences, from truancy to theft. Despite being wild they never, however, bothered any of their neighbours. Christy Junior and his siblings adhered to the few family precepts which had been beaten into them. They were to be courteous, take pride in their appearance and, above all, never steal from their own people. Neighbours who remember the family said that the Dunnes kept very much to themselves and did not share their problems with anyone.

  In 2011, at the age of 73, Christy Junior gave his first interview in almost thirty years. It was for a documentary on gangland in Dublin shown on the National Geographic channel. Unlike the majority of his contemporaries, the years had been good to Ireland’s longest-living gangster. Wearing his long silver hair tied back in a neat pony-tail, he looked like an ageing hippie. The gangland grandfather recalled what life was like growing up in his family: ‘When we were kids we robbed. My father was in prison and my mother found it hard and we just took it upon ourselves that she should have the comforts around her. I had to cook for them [his siblings], get them ready for school and advise them to do the right things in life – especially, don’t get caught!’

  Christy got his first taste of incarceration at the age of 12 when he was sent to the Carriglea Industrial School in Dun Laoghaire for truancy. He later described the place as like something from a Dickens novel – a miserable existence of constant beatings and hard, physical work. One of the sadistic brothers told him that the punishment was to make them better individuals, better Irishmen. Bronco didn’t agree and ran away. He hid out with his grandmother Nellie O’Brien. He later recalled of his first stint in custody: ‘That made things worse for me. The brutality and deprivation was unbearable.’

  While on the run Christy spent time in England, where he worked in a coal mine and laboured on building sites. He was a big lad for his age and no one seemed to notice that he was only in his early teens. Christy was also a tough kid who could stand up to people twice his age. In 1955, he returned home after his 14-year-old brother Hubert drowned. He’d been swimming near Upton Industrial School in County Cork and his death was witnessed by his brother John, who was also an inmate. Christy Junior decided to stay at home and mind his brothers and sisters, while his father took off to England looking for work. Shortly after Hubert’s death, Ellen Dunne gave birth to her youngest child, Gerard. She then had 15 children, ranging from 17-year-old Christy Junior down.

  Bronco Junior quickly got back to doing what he did best – thieving. Shortly afterwards he was sent to Marlborough House, a remand home in Dublin, after he was convicted of burglary. The judge in the juvenile court told him he was a rogue and a pest. Dunne was rather flattered. He wanted to be Public Enemy Number One and have his mugshot displayed on the wall of every police station in the country.

  The young criminal was soon achieving his dubious goal in life. Bronco Junior was regularly before the courts and served a number of short sentences in Saint Patrick’s Institution for young offenders, where he was respected by the other juveniles as a serious criminal. When he got out at the age of 17, he teamed up with two other associates and they specialized in robbing country shops and pubs. By the time he was 18, he claimed he had done more than 200 burglaries.

  Soon afterwards, Bronco wrote an unpublished autobiography called ‘Wildfire’. It would have been the first book exposing the inhumanity of the industrial school system. A crime journalist with the Irish Press, Sean Flynn, who read the unpublished manuscript, described it as ‘sometimes cruel and harsh, sometimes fragile and sensitive, reflecting the contradictory instincts of its author’. Bronco tried to have it published and, he claimed, a number of publishers agreed to bring it out but each one withdrew for fear of libel. In the manuscript he summed up his attitude to crime: ‘I never thought of reforming, I just wanted to rob and achieve a sense of importance.’

  By the time he was 22 years old, Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne was satisfying his craving for recognition. One day he was identified by a Garda who spotted him behind the wheel of a judge’s car he had just stolen. Bronco was arrested and ended up in Mountjoy Prison for a
few months. He was applauded by the older lags for his derring-do – and used his time there to finish his criminal education. He liked to do something unusual during the commission of a crime and then read about it in the newspapers. But despite Christy’s efforts, it was other members of his family who first made it on to the front page of a national newspaper.

  In May 1960, a large picture of his eight-year-old brother Henry adorned the front page of the Daily Mirror in London under the heading ‘ANYONE LOST A SON?’ Henry had been found by police sheltering under London Bridge. He and 12-year-old Larry had decided to go to England in search of their father. They had saved the money for the boat fare to Holyhead and the train to London. When they arrived, the two resourceful kids went to the home of a great-grand-aunt with whom they had once spent a holiday. They didn’t know the woman had died and her home had since been sold. For five days they roamed the streets asking strangers if they knew a ‘Mr Dunne’. At night they slept under bridges and bushes. Henry was identified after the newspaper report and a relative found Larry on the streets looking for him. The police reunited them with their father and the happy occasion made more headline news. Bronco Senior then sent them home to their mother.

  Henry was sent to Upton Industrial School, County Cork, when he was convicted of larceny and receiving stolen goods later that year. He was subsequently transferred to Artane Industrial School in Dublin, where he remained until he was 14. Larry also spent time in Daingean and Letterfrack Reformatories before he decided he had had enough and absconded to England. Boyo, Robert, Mickey, John and Gerard also spent time in Upton and Artane. Mickey and Boyo received particularly savage beatings and Boyo was hospitalized as a result. When Mickey and his brothers were allowed home for the summer of 1955 his father saw the extent of his injuries and decided that he wasn’t going back. The 11-year-old was sent to Birmingham to live with his older sister. He remained there until 1968, when he came home after serving a short prison sentence for burglary.