In 1990, this writer interviewed Henry Dunne shortly after he was released from prison for firearms’ offences. He blamed the industrial/reform school system for brutalizing him and his brothers. Dunne believed the institutions had a damaging influence on youngsters who later turned to crime: ‘They beat and abused us so much, they made animals of us. When we came out of there all we wanted to do was hit back at society. We were angry and warped, with no loyalty to anyone except our own. They savaged us even when we played by the rules. After that we felt what’s the fucking point? The Brothers made us the way we became and crime was the obvious choice. When we came out we just wanted to fuck up society.’
Sceptics would say that this was an easy cop-out, considering that the vast majority of inmates who endured the barbaric system did not become criminals. Through the years the Dunne family’s well-worn defence was that they were more victims than villains. It originated with their older brother Christy, who worked it out while he was languishing in his cell in Mountjoy Prison. He developed a deep-rooted resentment and blamed society for making him a criminal. He rationalized that his crimes were committed out of economic necessity, in order to feed and clothe his family. In a corrupt, capitalist society working-class people were left without jobs, education or self-esteem, and forced to live in squalor. Crime, Christy decided, was the only way of fighting back against the system. He blamed the police, the politicians, the judges and everyone else in authority for his predicament. As far as he was concerned, the Dunnes were as much victims as the people they robbed.
After he finished his stretch in Mountjoy in 1960, Christy Dunne was soon on the run again, this time on a robbery charge. Bronco sought shelter from the law with Father Michael Sweetman when he escaped from two detectives who tried to arrest him. The priest harboured Dunne for six months in the Jesuit Retreat House in Clontarf. Father Sweetman was a well-known campaigner on behalf of the underprivileged and deprived in society. He had a genuine interest in trying to help young offenders like Bronco Dunne to reform. The Jesuit first befriended the aspiring gangster while he was being held in Marlborough House. Sweetman was one of the first people to listen sympathetically to the confused young Bronco and to treat him like a man. The pair formed a strong bond of friendship and Father Sweetman became a close family friend. Over two decades, the kind-hearted cleric regularly appeared as a character witness for the Dunne brothers in court. Each time he would explain the family circumstances to the judge and plead for a chance to help them reform. Bronco wrote of Fr Sweetman: ‘He was a priest, a father, a friend and a teacher. I always felt I really wanted to keep out of crime after talking with him. He was the only one to make me keep from crime. He took time and great patience to help and teach me. He showed me the way of God.’
In the retreat house Dunne attended daily Mass with the priests and worked hard. He convinced his mentor that he had changed and wrote about his salvation from crime: ‘I knew I had passed the stage of being drawn back to my old environment. How I wish men could see how stupid a life of crime is. I always knew I would have to answer to God for the wrong I had committed, but still I could not lead a decent life. I felt I was owed something from somebody.’
Father Sweetman believed him and made approaches to Charles Haughey, who was the Justice Minister at the time, the Attorney General, Aindrias Ó Caoimh, and Assistant Garda Commissioner William Quinn, to ask them to give Christy a chance. It was agreed with Fr Sweetman that Christy Dunne had made a serious decision to go straight. Haughey remarked at the time that six months’ lying low in a Jesuit retreat house was ‘as good as any jail sentence’. But Commissioner Quinn had a better knowledge of the Dunnes than Haughey and warned: ‘You’ll never be able to reform any of that family.’
After leaving the Jesuits, Dunne did attempt to go straight. He married Jeanette Bermingham, an attractive young woman from Dublin’s south-side, with whom he had four children. Bronco worked as a taxi driver and then started a building firm with his brother John – the only brother who went straight, following his stint in Upton Industrial School.
In 1966, Bronco’s aspirations towards respectability got him involved in the presidential election campaign of Fine Gael candidate Tom O’Higgins. Dunne was attracted by the liberal wing of the party. It espoused a vision of a more egalitarian society, where the working class got a bigger slice of the cake. Dunne canvassed for votes and even supplied a lorry for a mobile platform during the Dublin campaign, but Eamon De Valera won. He was re-elected for a second term with a narrow majority.
Bronco soon got bored with conformity and he felt that the middle-class party membership was sneering at his social pretensions. At the same time the brothers’ building business foundered. Bronco inevitably blamed the police and not the quality of the workmanship. Some years later, his brother Shamie used a similar excuse to explain his failure as a legitimate businessman. When he returned to Dublin from London in 1970, Shamie set up a mobile hamburger business. He blamed the Gardaí, and not the burgers, for the fact that the enterprise soon failed. Henry Dunne at one stage made the same claim. The Dunnes didn’t believe in accepting personal responsibility.
Inevitably Bronco’s changing politics attracted him to the rhetoric of hard-line, republican ideology – and Saor Eire. He befriended Martin Casey and Liam Walsh, who were pleased to discover that he and his brothers had extensive underworld contacts in England. Through Bronco’s connections in Birmingham, they started smuggling 9mm and .22 Star pistols into Ireland from the Parker-Hale armoury. Christy was running with the heavy-hitters at last – and making money out of it.
In his interview for the National Geographic channel in 2011, Dunne was still coy when asked about the smuggling operation: ‘I was named in a court trial in England that I was supplying guns to people in Ireland. If I did do it, I would be proud to do it at the time because of the situation in the North of Ireland. I was never charged with it.’ But Ireland’s longest-living arch villain was anxious to maintain his image as a republican rebel. He claimed he ‘collected’ weapons with the help of other criminals, which he then ‘handed over to people who needed them’. When he was asked about the weapon used to murder Garda Dick Fallon in 1970, he replied: ‘They said the gun that shot him [Fallon] I brought into the country … but sure I mean I cannot say anything about that. It was all just speculation. I was never charged with it.’
In 1972, Dunne was jailed for two years for receiving stolen goods. He claimed later that the goods were a truckload of food, destined for people in the North.
After Dunne’s release from prison his marriage to Jeanette broke down; she left with their four children. Like his father before him, Christy Junior had neglected his wife and children. He was too busy pursuing his dream of gangland infamy. He was also fond of drink and had a serious gambling problem which often left him penniless and his family wanting. Bronco, an incorrigible womanizer, soon met and fell in love with Mary Noonan, an attractive 17-year-old girl from Coolock, North Dublin, who was at least half his age. The couple went on to have three children together.
With his growing responsibilities Christy needed a steady supply of money, and began organizing robberies with some of his brothers. Gradually the other brothers came home to join the well-organized family ‘business’. They had been in and out of UK prisons and had made contacts in London, Birmingham and Liverpool that would stand the family well in the future.
Christy, Henry, Shamie and Larry were the nucleus of the mob. Although they never killed anyone, the Dunne brothers had no reservations about using violence on a job. Henry was considered to be the brother with the most ‘bottle’ who revelled in the excitement of a heist. Henry once explained that the guns were brought to ‘control the situation’ and ensure that the victims allowed them to get on with the job. If anyone decided to ‘have a go’ and they got hurt in the process, that wasn’t the Dunnes’ fault because they had been warned. It wasn’t personal, just business. But not all the brothers were natural-born blaggers;
some of them had to work at perfecting their ‘skills’. Shamie had a lucky escape during his first job with the family, a security van hold-up. He was accidentally shot in the arm by Larry who wasn’t accustomed to handling a firearm.
The Dunne brothers soon became a highly effective team of blaggers. While banks were their main targets, everything was up for grabs – post offices, payrolls, supermarkets, pubs, jewellers, petrol stations and bookies. The loot was divided up equally among the brothers and other members of the family were also looked after. Christy kept a fund offside to ‘finance’ the logistical side of the operation.
The family brought a new level of sophistication to the business. Christy had learned a lot from Saor Eire. They were among the first criminals to realize that the day of the ad hoc heist was over. Careful planning was crucial to success – and a big cash reward. As a result Garda detection rates plummeted throughout the 1970s as armed robberies became a major industry. Other hoods branched out to provide logistical support to the gangs. Some underworld entrepreneurs provided getaway cars and either sold or rented weapons for jobs; others provided information, safe houses and alibis. Hairdressers did a profitable sideline in making wigs and false beards. One Dublin hairdresser, Billy Wright, was shot dead after one of his customers suspected he had acted as a police informer. Business was booming and Christy Dunne, head of the ‘family’, was ideally placed to play a pivotal role. He became a broker for various gangs – setting up jobs and providing inside information on cash movements – for a percentage of the take.
There were so many heists taking place that it became something of a national joke. Popular comedian Niall Tobin even used it for a sketch on a TV show, when his newsreader character presented a robbery report in the form of the weather forecast: ‘Today there were robberies in Carlow, Athlone, Navan and Dublin. Tomorrow they will be in Kildare, Tipperary, Cork and Monaghan and next week …’
On the street, uniformed and plainclothes officers were literally being outgunned by the robbers – the majority of detectives were still unarmed until the early 1980s. Cops could only stand by and watch helplessly when they arrived on the scene or else possibly suffer the same fate as Garda Dick Fallon. Many brave officers tried to intervene and were held at gunpoint, pistol-whipped and shot at.
The best of the robbers could do a hit in less than three minutes, but the cream of the profession could be in and out in 90 seconds. The Dunnes were the leaders of an underworld elite and, as the number of robberies continued to rise, well-armed criminals were becoming dangerously reckless. In September 1975, Ireland was reminded again of the dangers posed by the crime gangs. An unarmed off-duty officer, Garda Michael Reynolds, was shot dead when he chased a gang, following a hold-up at the Bank of Ireland in Killester, North Dublin. A married couple, Noel and Marie Murray, both former members of the Official IRA who described themselves as anarchists, were subsequently charged with Garda Reynolds’s murder. During the trial Noel Murray declared that the couple’s ‘whole purpose in this State is to destroy it’. They were convicted by the non-jury Special Criminal Court and sentenced to death by hanging for the capital murder of a Garda. The execution orders were overturned by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that neither of them knew their victim was a Garda, and they both got life in prison.
The Garda Reynolds murder caused massive public anger but it made little difference to the crime mobs. The Garda authorities were being overwhelmed by the high levels of serious crime and appeared powerless to take on the blaggers. Christy and his siblings openly bragged that they were running rings around the police – and this was not idle bravado. If a robber wasn’t actually caught doing the crime, the chances of them being convicted were practically non-existent. At the time, the laws were such that the Gardaí could not arrest and question a suspect while an investigation was ongoing. Instead a criminal was ‘invited’ to the station to help the police with their enquiries. Many cases invariably foundered on legal loopholes that were not closed until the 1980s.
While the strength of the Garda Síochána was increased dramatically, the structures and practices in the organization remained the same. In the five years between 1970 and 1975 the number of Gardaí grew from 6,500 to 8,500. By the early 1980s, the strength of the force had risen to 11,500 but the Troubles, and the spill over into the South, was the primary security concern of the State. The bulk of the extra personnel were diverted to the Border and anti-terrorist duties. From 1970, the Provos had unleashed mayhem, robbing banks throughout the country to fund their war. They also carried out murders, kidnappings and bombings. The ordinary blaggers took full advantage of the confusion; they would muddy the waters of police investigations by using Northern accents and telling their victims the money was for ‘the cause’. Christy Dunne claimed authorship of that novel idea. In September 1977, following a spate of robberies in which a publican was shot dead, the Provos were finally forced to issue a statement denying any involvement in ‘recent appropriations’. By the end of the decade, Garda chiefs estimated that non-political criminals were responsible for 70 per cent of all robberies.
In Garda HQ there was just one officer assigned to collate intelligence on ‘crime-ordinary’ activity, using an antiquated index card system. An ad hoc robbery squad was eventually set up in the Central Detective Unit (CDU) in the mid-1970s to investigate heists. But only 20 men were assigned to the squad and the manpower was divided up as they worked on a three-shift system. The squad knew that the only way to win was to catch the robbers in the act and that meant planting informants in their midst. The Dunnes soon learned to organize themselves into ‘cell’ structures, similar to those used by the Provos. Only those involved in the small, select group would know where and when a job was to take place.
Christy looked down his nose at the cops who tried to keep him and his family under surveillance. A gangland snob, he called them poorly paid ‘culchies’. In the clubs he would often send an expensive bottle of champagne over to his Garda watchers, to show them that crime paid.
While other criminals kept a low profile, the Dunne brothers were never shy about flaunting their new-found wealth after a big heist. They wined and dined in the best clubs and restaurants in Dublin. One of their favourite haunts was a club on Nassau Street called Vile Bodies. The Dunnes would turn up with their wives, girlfriends and associates and take the place over, ordering the most expensive champagne in the house and buying drinks for everyone. They wore designer suits, expensive jewellery and drove flash cars. Their wives and girlfriends also had all the latest designer fashions. Mickey Dunne was such a natty dresser that his associates called him ‘Dazzler Dunne’.
Life looked like it couldn’t get any better. The brothers were the princes of the city and Christy was king.
4. The Dunne Academy
The Dunne ‘Academy’ was Gangland’s equivalent of a premier, third-level educational institution. The industrial/reformatory schools and young offenders’ prisons had provided their students with a first- and second-level education, but it was the Dunnes who showed them how to excel at a life of crime. Christy Dunne and his brothers helped pickpockets and burglars make the transformation into well-organized, armed robbers.
By the mid-1970s the era of the armed robber had been firmly established. During Saor Eire’s three-year reign there had been 18 robberies in Ireland. Between 1972 and 1978 that figure rocketed to over 200 a year and the amount of money stolen increased fifteen-fold to £2.3 million. Older criminals remember these as the halcyon years of organized crime – a time when a hoodlum could drive a Jaguar and live in a mansion, despite having no visible means of income. Each week he could pop down to the local Labour Exchange to collect his unemployment assistance; then later he could return with a sawn-off shotgun and help himself to a much more generous pay out. Every Thursday and Friday businesses, banks and the Gardaí braced themselves for another wave of hold-ups. The terrorist and ‘crime-ordinary’ gangs committed robberies all over the country. Their activities c
reated a boom in the security industry. The physical face of towns and cities were changed for ever, with the installation of reinforced steel shutters, metal grilles and alarm systems, as banks and businesses tried to keep the robbers out.
As the Dunnes’ ‘Academy’ grew throughout the 1970s, the brothers often divided into different teams to do robberies because the pickings were so easy. Any ‘outsiders’ brought in to take part in heists were carefully screened by Bronco before being accepted into the gang. Only criminals with whom solid bonds of loyalty had been established in the reform schools and prisons were fully integrated into the organization.
Among the Dunnes’ closest friends and associates were criminals Joey Skerrit, Martin Kenny and Joe Roe. They had grown up with the Dunnes and were considered loyal ‘soldiers’. It was a badge of honour in the underworld to be classified as a member of the ‘family’. There was also a close friendship between the Dunnes and another up-and-coming crime family, the Cahills. Martin Cahill and his brother Eddie had done time in Daingean Reformatory School with Larry Dunne. Soon other gangs were being formed by ‘graduates’ of the ‘Dunne Academy’.
Behind the façade of the charming rogue, the head of the ‘Academy’, Christy Dunne Junior, was a ruthless hood. He didn’t want to confine himself to armed robberies and soon discovered he had a flair for an even nastier type of crime – ‘Tiger kidnapping’.
Badfellas Page 7
