Badfellas
Page 26
The Squad also ran into difficulties when dealing with other agencies of the State. The report revealed: ‘Requests to both the Revenue Commissioners and Dublin Corporation to investigate Cahill’s gross abuses of the system have proved unfruitful. This is in no doubt through fears of reprisal and/or intimidation of the various departmental staffs involved. This, coupled with the widespread notoriety of the Cahill gang, seems to have closed down this avenue of investigation.’ Martin Cahill would soon justify those fears.
The ten-member detective squad involved in compiling the dossier offered strategic recommendations on how Cahill could be put out of business. In the report’s conclusions they made a number of practical recommendations. These included additional personnel, a secure radio channel, more surveillance vehicles, and a co-ordinated investigative strategy going forward.
The Squad’s immediate superior, Detective Inspector Gerry McCarrick, gave his full backing to the report and its recommendations. Garda management classed McCarrick as a loose cannon and a maverick because he challenged the archaic views in the force. In reality he was a hugely talented thief-taker and a man before his time.
Throughout the 1980s it was Garda policy to refuse to acknowledge the term ‘organized crime’. Garda management tended to adopt the ostrich approach to the unfolding crisis on the streets – they stuck their heads in the sand hoping it would all go away. The prevailing ethos was indirectly helping the gangs to prosper and thrive. Around the same time there was an infamous internal report, colloquially known as the ‘Three Wise Men report’, which directed a move away from specialist squads. The theory was that every man and woman in the force should be able to fulfil any policing role that the job required. The first casualty had been the disbandment of the ‘Mockey’ squad. Despite the impressive number of drug-dealers it caught, the ad hoc undercover unit was derided as gimmicky. The Drug Squad was also still being starved of personnel. The deployment of resources was a critical issue at a time when the Troubles were still draining available manpower. During the Cahill enquiry the members of the team had been redeployed to investigate the murder of their colleague Detective Garda Frank Hand, who was shot dead by an IRA gang on 10 August 1984. The 26-year-old officer had just returned to duty after his honeymoon when he was gunned down while providing an armed escort for a cash-in-transit van at Drumree Post Office in County Meath. A year later an INLA gang shot dead Sergeant Patrick Morrissey following a bank raid in County Louth. He was the twelfth member of the force to be murdered since 1970.
Despite the stultifying atmosphere and poor resources, the SCS still enjoyed a number of notable successes against Cahill’s mob. They located a flat in Dartry and a yard in Templeogue which were being used as logistical bases for the gang’s operation. The detectives discovered stolen motorbikes, false number plates, scanners, balaclavas, postmen’s uniforms, a bullet-proof vest and tools used for fixing weapons. They also seized a number of weapons from the gang’s awesome arsenal. Members of the Squad also arrested Cahill’s brother-in-law, Eugene Scanlan, and Harry Melia in October 1984, following a shoot-out near Rathfarnham Shopping Centre. Both men, who were on their way to rob a security van, were on temporary release from prison to make room for IRA prisoners.
The detectives compiling the dossier also discovered that Eamon Daly and Cahill had been using a man to store firearms, motorbikes and stolen money for them, as well as moving weapons before and after robberies. The man, who was gay, was being blackmailed by Cahill and his mob over his sexuality, which was illegal in Ireland until 1993. Although the blackmail victim gave detectives detailed statements, he was too terrified to testify against the gangsters in court. The investigation also led to the discovery of a former Saor Eire member who ran an extensive ‘guns-for-hire’ racket from his business premises in the inner-city and the Squad gleaned valuable intelligence when he was put under surveillance.
Garda management would not be able to ignore the General and his mob for much longer.
On 21 May 1986, Cahill strolled into Russborough House near Blessington, County Wicklow and stole 11 of the most valuable paintings in the world. In the process he became an international gangland celebrity with the second-biggest art heist in history. Vermeer’s ‘Lady Writing a Letter’ was among the Dutch Old Masters stolen. It was conservatively valued at £20 million and the only Vermeer in private hands in the world, aside from one owned by Queen Elizabeth. The collection belonged to Sir Alfred Beit, a former British MP, whose family made their fortune mining diamonds in South Africa. He’d brought the priceless art collection with him when he moved to the Palladian-style mansion near the Blessington lakes in 1952.
Ironically Cahill had again proved himself to be a more accomplished thief than the Provos. In April 1974 a gang led by Rose Dugdale also took the paintings, after holding Sir Alfred and Lady Beit at gunpoint. But in less than two weeks Dugdale was in custody and the paintings were recovered. It was one of the reasons why Cahill was attracted to the Beit heist when Paddy Shanahan approached him with a plan.
The armed robber from Kildare still had a keen interest in art and antiquities, even though they had cost him dearly. In 1980 he’d been arrested with two accomplices in England after the robbery of antiques from the Staffordshire home of collector Sam Firman. Shanahan received a six-year sentence and returned to Ireland after his release in 1984. After his return he burgled a number of stately homes around the country and off-loaded the stolen art and antiquities through his contacts in London. They tapped into the huge black market for stolen heirlooms across Europe. Shanahan had first discussed the prospect of robbing Russborough with his English contacts after Sir Alfred featured in a TV documentary about his priceless treasures. Shanahan and his partners were more interested in the furniture, clocks and Ming porcelain than the paintings, which were so well known they’d be impossible to sell. Shanahan asked Cahill to do the actual robbery while he would then sell the valuables through his contacts.
But the General had other plans. He confidently predicted that the paintings would fetch millions on the black market or in a ransom demand. Over a two-month period, Cahill and John Traynor made several visits to Russborough House, which was open to the public. He planned the art robbery down to the last detail. When Shanahan went to England to get an underworld alarm expert, Cahill did the job behind his back.
The Beit art robbery was a precision job and immortalized Cahill’s reputation as a craftsman thief. Up to 12 gang members were involved, including Martin Foley, Christy Dutton, Noel Lynch, George Mitchell, Shavo Hogan, Eamon Daly and Rossi Walsh, a violent armed robber from Pearse Street Flats in the south inner-city. Cahill got around the alarm system by carefully removing a pane of glass in a window. He then deliberately stepped in front of an infrared sensor and, in the next few seconds, disabled the sensors in the section of the house he wanted to rob. The glass was replaced and the gang retreated into the trees to wait for the police to arrive. After inspecting the house with the caretaker, the police decided that everything seemed to be in order and left. Cahill and his gang then simply walked back in and took what they wanted. After the robbery the paintings were stashed in two stolen jeeps which were driven in the dark through fields, guided by plastic bags the gang had placed on sticks at regular intervals along the way. The paintings were then taken to a bunker which Cahill had built in the Dublin Mountains before the job.
Cahill was stopped by uniformed Gardaí in Terenure on his way home, just over an hour later. The General never missed an opportunity to give himself an alibi. When the officers tried to search him Cahill began peeling off his clothes and shouting at the top of his voice, ‘I’m being harassed by the police … I don’t want to talk to youse …’ Then for good measure he went to his local Garda station in Rathmines and alleged that the officers had assaulted him at the checkpoint. He reckoned that the incident would be helpful, in the unlikely event that he was charged with the robbery. The fact that he was in Terenure so quickly afterwards would surely put
a doubt in the minds of a jury. Gardaí knew, however, that whenever Cahill made an uninvited visit to his local station it meant he was up to something – and the alarm was raised to expect another serious crime.
Weeks before the heist, Noel Lynch had registered a bogus security company with the Companies Office. The plan was for the company to approach the Beit Foundation and offer to help ‘find’ the paintings, for a suitable reward. The security firm even had its own card with the letters, ‘RIP’ emblazoned in gold on a black background. Apart from the ‘recovery’ of stolen goods, the company specialized in the movement of ‘large amounts of cash’ and ‘debt-collecting’. But the Beit Foundation refused to have anything to do with Lynch and informed the police. The Gardaí were now in no doubt about who they were dealing with and Cahill was not unhappy about that. At the time the Beit Foundation was in the process of donating the collection to the State. Robbing the paintings was another two fingers to the Establishment, especially the police. It was also a blow against the wealthy, whom Cahill regarded as the real criminals.
The Beit art robbery was to be the beginning of a fascinating and complex story of international intrigue, involving police forces and criminal organizations in several countries. In the many efforts to offload the priceless collection, the General had to play his game of wits with the FBI, Scotland Yard and several other police agencies who participated in various Garda stings to recover the art. On more than one occasion the General’s sixth sense forced him to pull out of deals at the last minute. In his paranoia he also believed that the South African Secret Service, BOSS, had put a contract on his head because of the Beit family’s connections in that country. Several villains were involved in efforts to sell off the haul, including Drogheda-based fence Tommy Coyle, who had contacts all over the globe. Coyle dealt with paramilitaries and criminals on both sides of the Border – and the sectarian divide. He was also an informant who worked with MI5 and Garda Special Branch. One of the great gangland mysteries is how he was never shot before he died from cancer in 2000.
The Beit paintings were blamed for putting a jinx on Cahill and any criminals who came into contact with them. Shavo Hogan would later recall of the robbery: ‘It was a really simple robbery. Robbing the paintings was the easy bit. Everybody thought they were going to be millionaires. But after that night everything went downhill. There was a curse on those paintings.’
One of the first gang members to suffer from the curse was John Traynor. In August 1986, Gerry McCarrick’s men in the Serious Crime Squad raided a shop which was owned by a relative of Traynor, off Dublin’s George’s Street. But instead of finding Dutch Old Masters the cops recovered £33,000 worth of stolen cigarettes. They were part of a haul stolen earlier by ‘Factory’ John Gilligan and his gang. Traynor was arrested and accepted responsibility for the cigarettes. He was charged with receiving stolen goods and released on bail. He was also facing charges for receiving over £15,000 worth of video game-machines which Gilligan had also purloined.
To add to the pressure, one of his stolen cheque scams came back to haunt him at the same time, when the Fraud Squad traced revenue cheques that had been lodged by one of his runners. Twenty-five-year-old car salesman Brian Healy from Tallaght was arrested after cashing four of the forged cheques for nearly £5,000 between July and August 1986. Healy told detectives that he got them from Traynor. The runner was convicted and given nine months in prison while the Fraud Squad caught up with their old adversary.
Traynor then ran into more trouble than he could handle. In January 1987, Eileen Egan, the wife of Michael Egan whose workshop was used after the O’Connor’s robbery, decided to spill the beans about his involvement. When Egan was arrested he told the police that he had only been paid £5,000 from the robbery. ‘I have ended up with no financial gain of any kind from this incident. All I have had from this is trouble and threats,’ he said.
When Cahill heard that Egan had been duped out of his share of the loot he was furious with his erstwhile partner. Cahill also suspected that Traynor had ripped him off in a property deal. The Jetfoil pub had become the biggest drug-dealing centre in the north city and there was constant hassle from the police, so Cahill and Traynor burned it down in May 1984. They’d estimated they could claim £50,000 for the ‘malicious’ damage to the property from Dublin Corporation. The premises were also the subject of an impending compulsory purchase order by the Dublin Port and Docks Board. In his paranoia Cahill believed that Traynor had secretly sold the place to them behind his back and had pocketed his share.
One night in March 1987 the General went looking for his partner, in the company of John Foy and Martin Foley. Cahill was armed with a gun and he intended punishing his consigliere. But the conman had fled town and gone to England, just in the nick of time.
In England, Traynor teamed up with an old fraudster friend, James ‘Danger’ Beirne, from Elphin. Traynor and Danger Beirne began operating with a number of other English and Irish fraudsters, dealing mostly in stolen and counterfeit bank drafts and cheques. A central figure in the fraud syndicate was John Francis Conlon from Westport, County Mayo. Conlon, who was born in 1940, emigrated to the USA in 1959. He’d become the quintessential international man of mystery who dabbled in the high-stakes world of spying and gun-running. He had documented links with several ‘spook’ agencies, including the Israeli secret service Mossad, the CIA and MI5. The arms-dealer also had contacts in the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the major Colombian drug cartels. Conlon did international arms deals in the Middle East and Eastern Bloc countries. The former East German secret police, the Stasi, held an extensive file on the Mayo man which detailed deals he’d negotiated, including the supply of weapons to Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War and also to the Afghan rebels. Conlon bought his own private Learjet for his jaunts across the world. At one time, he dealt with a notorious Syrian arms-dealer, Monzer al-Kassar, but the Syrian placed a contract on Conlon’s head after the Mayo man tipped off Mossad that al-Kassar was planning to murder two of its agents in Amsterdam. The following year Conlon, who was an old acquaintance of Danger Beirne, obviously decided to take a break and indulge in some old-fashioned criminal activity with his countrymen.
In 1990, the three cronies came into possession of a batch of stolen treasury bonds, registered with the Bank of England. They planned to obtain millions of pounds by placing the bonds with a bank as collateral for a mortgage on a huge international ‘development’. In London, a crooked official who worked for a Swiss bank had been offered a cut if he helped them out. Conlon, who had a base in Miami, Florida, produced plans for a huge holiday complex on a Caribbean island which required a Stg£100 million mortgage. As collateral, the stolen bearer bonds, which had had their numbers altered, were produced and a deal was agreed.
The fraudsters managed to draw down an initial payment of around Stg£200,000, which was collected by a runner from the Swiss bank’s headquarters in Geneva. But in the meantime the City of London Police and the Serious Fraud Office had been tipped off and an investigation begun. Traynor and company made another application to draw down Stg£1 million of mortgage funds from the Geneva bank in July 1990 and Traynor dispatched his courier to collect the new funds for the ‘Caribbean project’. When the courier went to the bank in Switzerland, he was told that there would be a slight delay with the paperwork and he was asked to wait. The courier rang Traynor, who was sitting on a park bench near Bayswater Road in London. As they were talking, Swiss police arrested the courier for fraud. At that same moment the City of London police swooped on Traynor. He was charged with handling stolen bearer bonds and remanded in custody to Wormwood Scrubs. On 18 October 1991, Cahill’s consigliere was sentenced to seven years for his part in the international operation. He was shattered when he was sent down and blamed Conlon for setting him up.
Five months after Traynor’s sudden departure, Cahill dealt his most humiliating blow yet to the police. On the night of 29 August 1987, his crew broke into the offices of
the Director of Public Prosecutions on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Cahill had already visited the offices on a number of previous occasions. He knew how to get around the security system and where to find what he was looking for. In the ultimate act of provocation he stole the files and Books of Evidence pertaining to some of the State’s most sensitive criminal cases.
Among the files he was most anxious to get his hands on was the one on the O’Connor’s case against Michael Egan and the file dealing with the death of his brother Paddy, who’d been stabbed in Ballyfermot in December 1986. Paddy Cahill had become partially crippled after falling off a motorbike during a getaway. Despite being on crutches, he was still a notorious burglar and drug-abuser who terrorized the people in his neighbourhood. A month before the visit to the DPP’s offices, Paddy Cahill’s killer had been acquitted by a jury after he told the court he was acting in self-defence. Within hours of the result the family had packed their belongings and left for England. That night their house burned down. The General believed that the acquittal was the product of a conspiracy between the police and the DPP. He imagined they were getting at him – so he decided to get back at them.
Cahill also stole important files on major armed robberies, assault and drug cases. Included in the haul of 145 files were documents relating to a number of Garda corruption cases and the controversial death two years earlier of wealthy Midlands priest, Fr Niall Molloy.
Like so many other strokes by Martin Cahill, the infamous ‘files’ became the stuff of gangland legend. Cahill ensured that word filtered back to the DPP and the Gardaí that he was responsible for stealing them. He wanted the Establishment to know he had a bargaining chip. The files were to become a valuable currency in the underworld, with criminals offering them in return for charges being dropped or reduced. The thefts were extremely embarrassing. But the police reckoned they already had a surprise in store for their nemesis.