While inside, Martin Cahill was joined by Christy Dutton, a close friend since childhood who had taken part in a number of heists with Cahill and Henry Dunne. Dutton was a professional armed robber from Ballyfermot, with a reputation as a dangerous criminal. Cahill even named one of his sons after the mobster. He was also joined by another Ballyfermot hoodlum called Noel ‘Noelie’ Lynch, who was the same age as the other young criminals. Lynch was doing ten years for a payroll robbery at the Master Stevedores in Alexandra Basin in Dublin, during which shots were fired. At Lynch’s trial in October 1972, the judge told him that it was ‘one of the worst cases of armed robbery that has come before the courts in recent years’. Both Lynch and Dutton would later become integral members of the General’s gang.
Another individual who would be important in Cahill’s future plans also joined him in Mountjoy Prison. John Traynor was jailed in December 1977 for five years for possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. The man, who would later be nicknamed ‘the Coach’ by journalist Veronica Guerin, had grown up in Charlemont Street, near Ranelagh in South Dublin, before his family moved to Crumlin. The two hoods had known each other from childhood and Traynor was a regular visitor to Hollyfield. When his family went to live in Kildare, he stayed in touch with his odd friend. It was Traynor who first helped Paddy Shanahan achieve his goal of becoming a gangster. Described as being ‘extremely clever, manipulative and duplicitous’, Traynor played games with everyone he ever did business with. Like Sean Fitzgerald, he worked hard to portray himself as a respectable criminal who was a cut above the rest of the underworld riff-raff. Ironically, he looked like a policeman and, being an inveterate opportunist, often posed as one, as did Sean Fitzgerald.
Traynor and Cahill formed a criminal partnership which was to last for almost twenty years. They had a strange relationship and were best summed up as gangland’s odd couple. Traynor was everything that the General despised – a flash, hard-drinking chancer who only cared about saving his own skin. On the other hand, Traynor described Cahill as ‘totally odd and very paranoid’. There was no written legal agreement between the unlikely partners. There was no need for one. Cahill knew that if there was a ‘legal’ problem he could sort it out in his own inimitable fashion, and Traynor knew that Cahill was the one man in the world he could never rip off. It was a classic underworld version of a gentleman’s agreement. Traynor became Cahill’s adviser and organizer – in Mafia parlance, his consigliere.
In July 1978, Anthony and John Cahill robbed a £4,600 payroll at the Smurfit paper mill in Clonskeagh, South Dublin. Ironically Martin Cahill had worked in the mill for a short time after his release from Daingean – he never worked in gainful employment again. As the brothers drove off, they ran into two armed detectives who were escorting a security van. The cops and robbers exchanged gunfire and John Cahill was hit in the chest. The brothers managed to get away but were caught in Ballsbridge. The money and three firearms were recovered. In hospital 31-year-old John Cahill told detectives he had tried to pull the bullet out of his chest. Seven months later, in February 1979, the brothers were both jailed for ten years by the Special Criminal Court. When he was initially brought before the court, John Cahill objected to being there. He told the three judges in the non-jury court: ‘I do not recognize the jurisdiction of this court. I am not political. I have no political association and have never had. It is wrong to bring me here. It is a bastardization of law to try me in this court.’
Four of the Cahill brothers were in prison by the late 1970s, but the General still believed he was king of the castle. A year earlier Dublin Corporation had finally taken action to relieve the squalid conditions in Hollyfield Buildings, which had become a health hazard. The ‘Corpo’ planned to demolish it and build again, but the General was not prepared to allow the destruction of his crumbling powerbase and he launched a legal bid from his prison cell to stop the demolition. A dozen families who refused to leave were served with eviction orders. After that the only flat left standing on the dilapidated site was Cahill’s because he was still appealing the eviction in the courts. Eventually his wife Frances accepted a flat in Upper Kevin Street, in inner-city Dublin – across the road from the local Garda station. When he was released from prison in 1980, Cahill took on City Hall but he was forced to move into a caravan, after his flat was demolished one night. When the caravan mysteriously burned down, Cahill slept in a tent. Eventually the Lord Mayor of the time came to the site and pleaded with Cahill to allow the new building work to go ahead. After all, the new houses would be for Cahill’s neighbours. The unemployed criminal backed down after he was promised a Corporation house in Rathmines.
Gangland was in the process of dramatic change when Cahill had walked out of Mountjoy Prison in 1980. Heroin had gripped the old neighbourhoods where he had grown up. His erstwhile friends, the Dunnes, had discovered a much more lucrative form of turning a dishonest pound. Cahill would later reveal why he refused to get involved: ‘I was asked to go into drugs when I came out of prison but everyone was knackered. They would sit around all day talking about drugs and money, but they had no money. When I said “Yeah, let’s do a robbery,” they’d start talking about drug stores and I knew I was wasting me time.’
The General had other plans.
6. Turmoil
Des O’Malley had been a Fianna Fáil TD for less than two years when he was appointed Minister for Justice in May 1970. Within hours of sacking ministers Charles Haughey, Neil Blaney and Michael O’Morain over the ‘Arms Crisis’ (see Chapter 2), Taoiseach Jack Lynch gave O’Malley what would be one of the toughest jobs in Government from that point on. The 31-year-old Limerick man had a baptism of fire. He recently recalled: ‘Being in Justice in the early ’70s was like being in charge of the fire brigade, you were running around all the time trying to put out fires and you could do very little constructive work.’
The situation in the North rapidly deteriorated after the British Army shot 13 innocent civilians dead in Derry on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 30 January 1972. Before the year was out, almost 500 people had been killed in the violence that followed. After the announcement of a ceasefire by the Official IRA, the Provisionals became the main terrorist threat. The Provos were responsible for the bulk of the deaths and injuries, and they opened a new front south of the Border which threatened to destabilize Irish society. The serious security crisis inevitably distracted successive governments and forced them to take their eye off the looming menace of organized crime. In the shadow of the shadow of the gunmen, the gangsters were thriving.
The former Minister for Justice revealed in an interview for the RTÉ series Bad Fellas: ‘All of these extreme acts of violence in the North and to a lesser extent down here, were all happening for the first time; people hadn’t seen anything like that since the Civil War and not many people were still around who had seen the Civil War. It was a fairly frightening scenario and it meant that you had to concentrate all your efforts on that. I had hoped to engage in a lot of law reform which was tremendously necessary at that time but I never really got around to doing that at all.’
Brendan Halligan was a former Labour party Senator and TD during the 1973–77 Fine Gael/Labour coalition government. Halligan has no doubt about what the violence cost Irish society: ‘The cost of the IRA and the security crisis they created is all the things that we did not do in health, in social welfare, in education, in housing, in infrastructure and simply building a better society. When they brought the bomb and the gun back into society things changed for ever. We would not have had the descent into organized crime to the extent that we have suffered from. It is inescapable that the direct causal link is the IRA and the introduction of the gun and the introduction of the bomb and the application of organization to criminal activity. The Gardaí didn’t react rapidly enough to this new phenomenon of criminals organizing themselves. To our shame we have created a Mafia that is equal to any Mafia in Europe and have created an international crime problem of a high ord
er.’
Former Justice Minister Paddy Cooney inherited the poisoned chalice from O’Malley in 1973. He found himself on the frontline in some of the worst days of the Troubles and recalled: ‘Organized crime as we know it today had not emerged except in the ranks of the Provos. The cult of organised crime and the cult of the gun began in those times with the Provos and spilled over into gangland in cities like Limerick, Dublin and Cork. The appalling crime situation we have today can be linked quite clearly back to the Provos and their campaign of the ’70s and ’80s.’
Apart from armed robberies, the IRA also used the Republic as the logistical support base for their campaign in the North. The Provos set up training camps and smuggled munitions into Ireland which were stored in bunkers in the South and then moved to arms dumps in the North. In March 1973, the Government was given just cause to be concerned at the level of the threat posed by the terrorists. The Irish Navy intercepted a gun-running ship, the MV Claudia, off Helvick Harbour in Waterford. It contained a huge arsenal of weapons which had been sent to the IRA by the Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi. The haul included 1,000 rifles and anti-tank guns, 100 cases of landmines, 500 grenades and 5,000 pounds of explosives. The overall commander of the Provisional IRA, Joe Cahill, was caught with the weapons and was subsequently jailed for three years. It later emerged that a number of other large arms shipments had also been smuggled into the country during the 1970s.
The enormous financial cost of security during the Troubles put an intolerable burden on an economy already on its knees. The 1970s in Ireland were marked by industrial unrest and high unemployment, amid a crippling recession caused by a worldwide oil shortage. In 1975, Irish inflation was the highest in Europe when it reached 20 per cent and once again emigration became the only option for tens of thousands of Irish men and women. The only area that showed a growth in employment figures was the security forces. In a four-year period the strength of the Gardaí and the Irish Army was increased by over 6,000 personnel – 2,000 Gardaí and 4,000 troops. A massive re-equipment programme was launched to modernize the Irish Army and a number of new military barracks were built. Dozens of dilapidated camps and barracks which had not been used since the Second World War were also pressed into service, to accommodate over 2,000 Irish troops who were permanently garrisoned along the 280-mile Border. They provided armed support to a force of over 1,000 Gardaí that was also on permanent border duty. In addition, Gardaí and troops were providing an average of 5,000 escorts every year, for the transport of cash, explosives and prisoners. The Army also had guard posts on all of the country’s electricity generating stations and other vital installations, to prevent bomb attacks by Loyalist terror groups. In the early stages of the conflict, soldiers and armed Gardaí were posted to protect the studios of the national broadcaster, RTÉ, to prevent terrorists from trying to take them over. Extra armed Gardaí were also required to protect members of the Government, who were threatened with assassination by the IRA. At the height of the Troubles the Irish Government was spending a much higher proportion of GDP on security than the British.
The Troubles also placed tremendous pressure on the prison system throughout the 1970s as hundreds of IRA and INLA members were jailed for serious offences. Troops and Gardaí were deployed to guard prisons, but there were still escapes. In one incident a hijacked helicopter was used to airlift top IRA figures from the exercise yard of Mountjoy Prison. Attempts were also made to smash through the gates of Portlaoise Prison, as the bulk of subversive criminals were held there. The terrorists’ activities provided a welcome relief for ordinary criminals, many of whom were freed on temporary release to make room for the ‘political’ prisoners. Michael Noonan, who was Justice Minister in the early 1980s, had no doubt of the overall effect this had on the growth of organized crime: ‘The IRA in particular put enormous pressure on the prison system and I believe that we released people who would later become key players in organized crime.’
On 12 March 1974, the Provos showed the depths of their murderous intent against the State when they gunned down Fine Gael Senator Billy Fox. The 35-year-old Monaghan Protestant had also served a term as a TD for the area. He was shot dead by a 13-member Provo gang at the home of his fiancée near Clones. It was the first murder of a serving member of the Oireachtas since the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins in 1927. Brendan Halligan recalled how the country teetered on the edge of anarchy after the killing: ‘The IRA at that point did not recognize the legitimacy of the State, it referred to us all as quislings and traitors and at a point in this Government every member of the Cabinet was under threat of assassination which was not widely known for quite a while. That was the atmosphere in which you lived and the legitimacy of the State itself was being questioned. So there wasn’t a day when you didn’t expect the unexpected or something more dreadful or appalling than the day before.’
Paddy Cooney, who had been a friend of Senator Fox, still believes that the murder was a deliberate act of sectarian violence: ‘It is inconceivable that the people who murdered him didn’t know who he was. They [the gang] were neighbours; they were from the same locality. I am quite satisfied that they knew who he was and killed him notwithstanding his status as a member of the Nation’s parliament.’
The Provo threat was a dominant factor throughout the 1970s. On 8 June 1972, 60-year-old Garda Inspector Samuel Donegan was blown up by an IRA booby-trap bomb on the Cavan–Fermanagh border. He was just two years from retirement. Garda Michael Clerkin was killed in another booby-trap explosion on 15 October 1976 near Portarlington, County Laois. The young officer was killed when he stepped on a flagstone, at the front door of a house. The booby trap was the work of the IRA and one of a number of breaches of their so-called code which forbade the murder of Gardaí or members of the Defence Forces. The police were lured into the trap by an anonymous tip-off. Three months before the Portarlington ambush, the IRA also assassinated the British Ambassador to Ireland, Christopher Ewart-Biggs. He was killed when his armour-plated car was blown up by a landmine, just 12 days after taking up his post. In 1979, Lord Louis Mountbatten and three other people, including two children, were killed when an IRA bomb exploded in his fishing boat at Mullaghmore, County Sligo.
At the height of the unrest, the Provos even got into the art business as part of their so-called war effort. On 26 April 1974, an IRA gang led by Rose Dugdale, the daughter of an English millionaire stockbroker, robbed 19 paintings. They were valued at £8 million and were stolen from the home of Sir Alfred Beit at Russborough House in County Wicklow. Shortly after the robbery the IRA demanded a ransom of £500,000 and the transfer from England to Northern Ireland of sisters Dolours and Marian Price, who were serving jail sentences for car bombings in London. Dugdale and her gang were to be the first victims of what became known in underworld circles as the curse of the Beit paintings – she was caught and the paintings were recovered. Dugdale was subsequently jailed for nine years by the Special Criminal Court after pleading ‘proudly and incorruptibly guilty’.
In 1975, the Provos struck another blow to the floundering Irish economy when they kidnapped Dutch industrialist Dr Tiede Herrema in County Limerick. Herrema owned the huge Ferenka factory which employed 1,400 workers. The republican strategy succeeded in disrupting inward investment to Ireland for years to come, as foreign business executives began to fear for their safety. IRA members Eddie Gallagher and Marian Coyle held the industrialist for 36 days. They demanded the release of Gallagher’s girlfriend, Rose Dugdale, and Coyle’s IRA boyfriend, Kevin Mallon. Dr Herrema was eventually released following a 16-day siege in Monasterevin, County Kildare.
The Provos and the INLA also continued to rob financial institutions throughout the country. The terrorist gangs often took over entire towns and villages, using the same modus operandi as Saor Eire. But the republicans weren’t the only source of the mayhem.
In the early 1970s the Loyalist terror groups launched bombing attacks on the Republic. Between 1972 and 1973, 12 people we
re killed and several more injured and maimed when Loyalist bombs exploded in Dublin, Dundalk and other border towns. On 17 May 1974, three, no-warning, car bombs ripped through central Dublin. They exploded at the height of the Friday evening rush hour, killing 26 people and injuring 300. A short time later, another car bomb exploded in the centre of Monaghan Town. In all 33 people were killed that day – the highest number of casualties in a single day during the thirty years of the Troubles. No one was ever convicted for the atrocity and it took the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) another twenty years to admit responsibility. The finger of suspicion, however, has always pointed to the involvement of British intelligence operatives in organizing the bombing campaign. The theory is that the offensive was timed to influence the Irish Government’s plans for the introduction of tough, new anti-terrorism legislation. Strangely the atrocity was purposely played down by successive Irish governments. There seemed to be a fear that, if handled differently, the outrage would have played into the hands of the IRA and plunged the entire island into all-out civil war.
Amid so much turmoil and fear, the emerging criminal gangs managed to avoid the spotlight. Despite their own penchant for creating chaos, the activities of the Cahills, the Dunnes and their associates looked mild when compared to the Provos. As the 1970s came to an end, it was easy to see how tackling the organized crime gangs had slipped further and further down the list of pressing priorities – and Irish gangsters would not be the only ones to take advantage of an overburdened and distracted Irish State.
Oxford graduate Howard Marks was one of the first members of the international drug-trafficking community to realize Ireland’s potential as a major European transit point. The Welshman was not a criminal in the traditional sense – he had no time for violence and most of those involved in his organization were toffs. Marks first got involved in the drug trade when he supplied hash and marijuana to fellow students while studying Philosophy at Balliol College in the 1960s. He went on to become one of the biggest cannabis suppliers in the world, smuggling individual shipments of up to 30 tons of hash and marijuana from Pakistan and Thailand into Europe, America and Canada. At one stage he was reputed to control 10 per cent of the world’s hash trade. Once described in the English Daily Mail as the ‘most sophisticated drugs baron of all time’, Marks was said to have been involved with MI6, the Mafia, the CIA and the IRA.
Badfellas Page 12
