When the law got too close for comfort the General resorted to acts of chilling savagery, similar to those employed by the Sicilian Mafia. He bombed the country’s top forensic scientist, and shot a social welfare inspector just because his dole payments had been cut. Cahill also burned down two Dublin criminal courts in a bid to stop an armed robbery case being heard against him. He even dug up the greens on the Garda golf club and later openly taunted them about getting a ‘hole-in-one in Stackstown’. In his latter years, his arrests were accompanied by tyre-slashing sprees which were carried out by his henchmen in Dublin’s middle-class neighbourhoods. It was his way of demonstrating his annoyance to the public – and embarrassing the police in the process.
In appearance too, Cahill was somewhat unusual. Short, portly and bald, dressed in worn jeans and stained T-shirts he looked more like a down-at-heel bag-snatcher than a criminal mastermind. The General was a man of many contradictions. He was obsessive, conniving and clever; sometimes compassionate and often cruel. He was also different to other hoods because he didn’t drink, smoke or take drugs. His main orientation in life was towards crime – plotting it, committing it and talking about it. Cahill’s other passions were pigeons, motorbikes, cakes and curries. Cahill’s love life was like every other aspect of his anarchic character – bizarre, complex and different.
While he no more resembled the popular concept of an ardent lover than he did a swaggering gang boss, he shared the love of two women in his life – his wife Frances and her sister Tina. The sisters were happy to share the man they both loved, and between them they gave birth to the General’s nine children. In his anarchic world there was nothing strange about the arrangement. To him social morals were dictated by a hypocritical Establishment, ruled by corrupt politicians and a perverted church.
Cahill had created his own parallel universe, with its own set of rules and standards. The world beyond the borders of Gangland was there to be robbed and its inhabitants were seen as the enemy. Rejecting society’s codes of behaviour was integral to Cahill’s philosophy in life, which was best summed up by his favourite song – ‘Que Sera Sera!’
Like the Dunnes, and most of his fellow mobsters, Martin Cahill was born into abject poverty, on 23 May 1949, the second child of Agnes and Patrick. His mother endured 21 pregnancies, from which 15 children survived – 8 boys and 7 girls. One child, a toddler, was killed when she was hit by an ice-cream van. Cahill spent the first 11 years of his life in an overcrowded slum at No. 6 Grenville Street, in Dublin’s north inner-city. Grenville Street had changed little since 1898, when it was described as ‘Hell Street’ where ‘drunken brawls, stone throwing and filthy practices’ were its main characteristics. The large family often went hungry as Patrick Cahill’s meagre wages as a lighthouse keeper could not support them. He also drank heavily at the expense of his wife and children. Martin Cahill, who never drank, later bitterly recalled that his father had little to show for a life as an honest man.
In 1960, the Cahill family was moved to Captain’s Road, Crumlin. They settled into one of the thousands of houses built on the edge of the city to clear the slums and give people a decent place to live. But poverty followed the slum refugees and the estates became a breeding ground for young criminals. Most of the members of Cahill’s gang came from Crumlin, which became the de facto spiritual homeland of organized crime in Ireland. He attended school in Kimmage but dropped out because, he claimed, the teachers beat and humiliated him. This experience added to his detestation of normal society.
Even before he reached his teens, Martin Cahill was becoming a prolific burglar, as were his brothers John, Eddie, Anthony, Paddy and Michael or ‘Styky’. Like the Dunnes, the young Cahills were making a name for themselves as very good ‘house-breakers’. He was 12 when he received his first criminal conviction on 15 September 1961, on a charge of larceny. At the time he was given the Probation of Offenders Act. It was meant to act as a caution to encourage him to mend his ways but he had no intention of doing that. Two years later he was back before the Metropolitan Children’s Court on more larceny charges and was fined £1 – it didn’t deter the young burglar. He was up again two months later, this time for two counts of larceny and was given a one-year suspended sentence. On 20 September 1963, he was given one month’s detention in Marlborough House detention centre in Glasnevin, on two charges of burglary. Cahill was building up an impressive CV as a young delinquent.
At 15, Cahill made his first journey outside Dublin when he travelled to Belfast for an interview to join the Royal Navy. He later recalled how applicants were given a list of trades and asked to chose which one would suit them best. Cahill picked bugler. Unfortunately, he’d misread the word and thought it was ‘burglar’. He reckoned that breaking into houses on behalf of the Royal Navy, and being paid for it, was just the job for him. The stuffy officers on the interview panel were stunned when the young Dublin lad explained his choice of trade. He didn’t get to join up.
A year later, Cahill was arrested in connection with a string of burglaries. A young cop called Dick Murphy convinced Cahill to confess to the crimes and make a full statement. It was the last time the General ever admitted to anything. As a result, he developed an intense hatred for Murphy, who became one of the city’s leading detectives. On 9 July 1965, he was convicted and sentenced to two years in St Conleth’s Reformatory School in Daingean, County Offaly.
The General’s first taste of incarceration would have major repercussions for Irish society. In Daingean, Martin Cahill formed strong bonds of friendship with several other juvenile delinquents, who would usher in a new era of organized crime. Two of Martin’s brothers, Anthony and John, were incarcerated in various reformatory/industrial schools at the same time. They also established important alliances with other young hoodlums. This was where Gangland’s brat pack set up their networks and began their journey together.
St Conleth’s Reformatory School was run like a brutal prison camp by the Oblate religious order, who subjected the teenagers in their care to systematic, savage beatings and sexual abuse. Martin and his younger brother, 13-year-old Eddie Cahill, were both in the hellhole at the same time. Martin was seen as a strong, silent character, who sized up every situation and made the best of a bad lot. He never made eye contact with his captors because to do so would be to acknowledge their authority. If he saw a piece of paper on the ground he picked it up rather than suffer the indignity of being told to do so. By contrast his brother Eddie was a hothead who openly fought against authority – and gave the sadistic brothers an excuse to beat him. Eddie would become one of the most violent members of the General’s gang.
Martin Cahill made two very important contacts in Daingean. He struck up a strong friendship with Larry Dunne, which brought their two families together, and he also befriended 14-year-old John Cunningham, who would later become known as the General’s ‘Colonel’. Cunningham was sent to Daingean for two years in 1966 when he was convicted of house-breaking and larceny. The two hoods became close friends and partners-in-crime. John Cunningham’s family had also been part of the mass exodus from the slums. They’d been moved from a tenement on Blessington Street, around the corner from Grenville Street, to a new house in Le Fanu Road in Ballyfermot, West Dublin.
John’s brother Michael would also become a career criminal, and they went on to do armed robberies with both the Cahill and Dunne clans. Other young crooks came into the fledgling criminal network, including two notorious fraudsters and chancers, John Traynor and Sean ‘the Fixer’ Fitzgerald, who in turn became members of the Dunne/Cahill crime network. Another young gun who became allied to the Badfellas’ brat pack was a diminutive little thief called John Gilligan, whose family was moved from slums in Grangegorman, in the north inner-city, to Loch Con Road, close to the Cunninghams’ home in ‘Ballyer’. Gilligan, whose criminal career started with a conviction for stealing chickens at the age of 15, managed to avoid being sent to the reform schools. He would go a long way in his criminal
career.
Brothers from two other families also became important members of Gangland’s first generation: George and Paddy Mitchell from Benbulbin Road in Drimnagh and Michael ‘Jo Jo’ Kavanagh and his brother Paddy from Crumlin. They all started off as burglars but were soon in the thick of the action. Many of them had also cut their teeth as inmates in the asylums run by the religious orders. George Mitchell, nicknamed ‘the Penguin’, started working as a truck driver for the Jacobs biscuit company in Tallaght, Dublin, as a 16-year-old. It was an ideal job for a gangster who would specialize in organizing major warehouse robberies with his pals Martin Cahill and John Gilligan. The Mitchells and the Kavanaghs were soon classified as dangerous criminals who were involved in armed robbery, fraud and, later, drugs.
The brat pack included the extended families of the main players and some individual associates, such as Martin ‘the Viper’ Foley and his best friend Seamus ‘Shavo’ Hogan, both of whom were also from Crumlin. Together, these families and individuals would form the complex network at the centre of organized crime. They were the driving force that made the underworld what it is today. The fact that the vast majority of them came from Crumlin, Drimnagh and Ballyfermot is one of the reasons these suburbs are known as the birthplace of Gangland. Everyone involved in the emerging, underworld syndicate worked with Martin Cahill at various stages in their criminal careers. All of them considered him to be their General.
By the time 18-year-old Cahill finished his sentence in Daingean in 1967, the Corporation had moved his family to a dilapidated flat complex in Rathmines, called Hollyfield Buildings. His parents had fallen hopelessly into arrears on their rent payments in Crumlin. The semi-derelict flat complex was a dumping ground for tenants who couldn’t pay the rent or were too troublesome elsewhere. The inhabitants were treated as social outcasts. Built in 1911, the dwellings consisted of 120 one/two-bedroom flats. They stood in two-storey blocks and resembled a military barracks. Some of the buildings were considered to be perilously close to collapsing and sewage ran from broken drains. One former resident commented: ‘It was the worst, poorest, smelliest, rat-ridden scum-pit in Dublin.’ But Martin Cahill loved the place because it symbolized his world. Out of this imposed isolation grew a deep-rooted sense of loyalty and contempt for authority – factors which moulded Cahill’s complex personality. ‘What [the authorities] never counted on was that we’d like it. Everyone knew everyone else and we all looked out for one another,’ he fondly recalled.
Hollyfield was a breeding ground for outlaws. For most families crime was the principal source of income for food and clothes. The Cahill brothers became professional burglars and plagued the large houses in the neighbouring areas. The General was considered to be one of the best ‘creepers’ in the city and ‘worked’ every night of the week – he was rarely seen out during the day. Even when he graduated to organizing big cash heists, he still went ‘mooching’ at night. He once commented: ‘If you think that you can see everyone but they can’t see you, then you will be invisible.’ Cahill’s passion in life was rummaging through people’s homes while they slept in their beds. He was also a sleazy voyeur who liked to watch the goings on in the bedrooms of the big houses. Cahill revelled in his anti-social existence and once compared his beloved Hollyfield to an anthill: ‘If you were looking down at Hollyfield from above at night you would see the ants moving out in all directions in search of the honey-pot.’
Cahill and his brothers took part in large-scale burglaries from warehouses around the country with members of the gangland brat pack, including John Gilligan and George Mitchell. The Penguin selected targets as he delivered Jacobs’ biscuits all over Ireland. But on 19 March 1970, Cahill ran out of luck when he received a four-year jail sentence. He had been caught red-handed in a lock-up garage in Rathmines with a haul of cigarettes which had been stolen earlier in Portlaoise. While inside Cahill shared a landing with Christy Dunne, who was doing a two-year stretch for receiving stolen goods. Their friendship solidified the alliance between the two families.
By the time Cahill was released from Mountjoy Prison on 25 January 1973, Gangland had transformed. The Dunnes, and many of his associates, had become armed robbers. Christy and his brothers offered to show Martin the ropes. The house-breaker from Hollyfield joined their ‘Academy’ and soon discovered he was a natural-born blagger.
Henry Dunne was considered to the most ‘talented’ and dangerous robber in the family. He loved the frenzied excitement of pulling off a job. The more difficult it was the better. It was his idea to first start hitting cash-in-transit security vans. In an interview in 1990 he proudly explained the logic for the initiative: ‘Why should we be hitting individual banks when we could hit the money from ten of them in the back of a van? We just watched it collecting the cash and then hit it … simple. We never went out with the intention of hurting anyone but when we came through the door we were going to get what we came for.’ In an interview with this author in 1994, for the book The General, Dunne explained how Cahill first became involved with his family business: ‘Martin and Eddie first met Larry in Daingean and they decided that they would work together when they got out. When Martin came out [in 1973] we teamed up with him, Eddie and John and started doing strokes. We were pulling off jobs that were being blamed on Saor Eire which suited us fine at the time.’ Martin Cahill’s first armed robbery was planned by Henry Dunne.
For weeks Henry, Martin and Eddie Cahill watched one particular security van as it did its regular collections, across the south of the city on Monday afternoons. It wasn’t a difficult job because the van never changed its route or schedule. Henry Dunne recalled the General’s inaugural blag. ‘Martin wanted to hold up a supermarket in Rathfarnham but I said let’s do the security van collecting the money instead. I told him that you could get the money from eight banks in the back of the van. So he sussed out the security van that collected the cash and we watched it for two weeks. It was our first job together.’
On Monday, 18 November 1974, the gang watched as the van left the Securicor Depot in Herberton Road, Rialto at 3.30 p.m., to begin its rounds. Over the next two and a half hours it collected cash from seven branches of the Allied Irish Bank in Ballyfermot, Bluebell, Kimmage, Dundrum and Rathfarnham. Its final collection of the day was from the Quinnsworth supermarket on Marian Road in Rathfarnham. Darkness had fallen as security man John Tennyson collected a canvas bag containing £900, just before the shop closed at 6 p.m. As Tennyson returned to the van a ‘woman’ pushing a buggy walked towards him. His partner John Moraghan, who was sitting with the cash in the van’s vault, released the bolt locking the door, so Tennyson could get in quickly.
Dunne remembered: ‘There was me, Larry and Shamie, as well as Martin, Eddie and John Cahill on the job. Martin’s brother-in-law from Hollyfield, Hughie Delaney, was given the job of hiding the money afterwards. Everyone had a part to play and we had to pounce on the security man just as he was getting back into the van. Then we had to get in at the guy in the back who was in the vault with the money and the radio.’
As soon as the door opened, the ‘woman’, Henry Dunne, dumped the buggy and pulled out a sawn-off shotgun. At the same time Eddie Cahill, wearing a cap and wig, appeared behind the security man and hit him hard on the back of his helmet. Tennyson was turned around and hit in the face and forehead with a revolver, breaking his teeth and leaving a gash in his forehead. The security man then got a boot in the chest, as the cash bag was torn away from him and he was pushed face down on the pavement. Tennyson was warned that he would be shot if he moved. At the same time, Martin Cahill got into the van, just as Moraghan was about to radio for assistance. He grabbed the security man and pulled him out, shouting: ‘That means you too.’ Two other members of the gang ran into the supermarket and the newsagent’s next door. They ordered everyone to lie down and warned them they would be shot if they tried to call the cops. A few minutes later, the robbers sped off in two getaway cars. They got away with £92,600 in cash – the e
quivalent of around €1 million today.
Henry Dunne recalled: ‘We [Dunnes] were used to the buzz from a good job but Martin was all excited and said he loved it. He was a natural and after that he was doing at least one decent job, every week or so. But the day after a big robbery he still went out breaking into people’s houses after pulling a big one. He was strange like that.’
Within an hour of the robbery, the Gardaí began to make progress in their investigation of what was now one of the biggest cash robberies in the history of the State. Shortly after the heist, garage owner John McKenna spotted a number of men acting suspiciously. They were standing around a yellow Volkswagen car at the end of the cul-de-sac beside his premises on Garville Lane in Rathgar. When he approached them they said the car had broken down. McKenna gave them a push to start it. When the men left he checked the area and found some of the empty cash bags from the Securicor van. He had also taken the registration number of the VW. Gardaí later located the car abandoned in the area, and when they searched it they found a sawn-off shotgun. Detectives then checked the registration and discovered the car belonged to 22-year-old Martin Foley, a petty thief and a known associate of the Cahills, from Cashel Avenue in Crumlin.
When Foley was approached he told detectives he had loaned the car to Hughie Delaney earlier that day and hadn’t seen it since. Foley told them that Delaney had given him the log book for his own car, a Triumph Toledo, as security against the Volkswagen. The truth was that Delaney’s car had indeed broken down and Foley had loaned him his VW to take away the money after the gang dumped the getaway cars. The hood, who would be a central member of the General’s mob for the next 16 years, wasn’t about to take the rap for his pals.
Badfellas Page 10
