After almost three weeks of investigation the Gardaí had drawn a blank on identifying the suspects. But the Serious Crime Squad got a lucky break when Detective Garda Tom Barbour pulled in Isaac Turner, who was wanted for another offence. When he searched Bronco’s nephew, the cop found a wad of £1 notes in an envelope and a building-society book showing that Isaac had lodged £4,000 a few days after the Cafolla kidnapping. When the notes were checked, it was established that they came from a consignment of cash that had been delivered to the post office just before the robbery. When he was questioned about the money Turner cracked and spilled the beans.
Turner and Roberts subsequently pleaded guilty while Ryan Dunne fled to England, and Turner agreed to testify at his uncle’s trial. It was the final shame for a family who had once lived by a code of omertà – and it was Bronco’s ultimate nightmare. At Isaac Turner’s court hearing, the judge noted that his evidence might make ‘a major professional criminal amenable to justice for this heinous crime’. Turner was given a four-year sentence and segregated in prison for his own protection.
Christy Dunne used every legal mechanism at his disposal to prevent the trial going ahead. Typically, he even tried to mount another media campaign, claiming, yet again, that he had been stitched up. He also tried to intimidate his nephew to prevent him taking the witness stand. But that also failed. When Bronco finally stood trial, Turner testified against him.
During the two-week trial in the Circuit Criminal Court, Bronco put on one of his finest performances for the jury. But in the end they didn’t believe him and he was sent down for the longest sentence he’d received in his thirty-year career as a professional criminal. He was devastated. During a subsequent court appearance, the one-time gangland hard-man whined to a judge about his predicament: ‘If I don’t get justice in this case I’ll be leaving Portlaoise Prison in a coffin.’
Dunne continued to plead his innocence twenty years later, despite the overwhelming evidence against him. In his mind he was the victim of a nefarious plot by the police. On E1 in 1992, however, no one was interested in listening to Bronco’s tale of woe. As far as the younger hoods were concerned, he was a burned-out, over-rated has-been. The most infamous of all the Portlaoise alumni, John Gilligan, was already planning a very different type of evil empire to the one the Dunnes had once aspired to. Factory John dismissed Bronco and his family as ‘muppets’ – and instead focused on implementing his future plans.
A prison sentence is a sanction where a malfeasant loses his liberty for a set period of time. It is also intended to convince the gangster to change his ways and reform. But rarely has any career criminal exited a prison’s gates as a law-abiding citizen. In fact, an analysis of the records of any committed gangland player shows that his crimes tend to be better organized after a spell behind bars. Gangs formed on the prison landings and exercise yards are more ruthless and loyal than most. Retired Chief Superintendent John McGroarty witnessed the development of the mobs during his forty-year career. ‘Gangs normally come from blood relationships, from localised areas in the neighbourhood and particularly prison,’ said McGroarty. ‘You invariably find that they’ve served time in prison together and that is where strong bonds of friendship are forged. The criminals assure each other that when they get out they’ll have a bigger and better plan. A gangster will have some information or an idea which he will develop and bring other individuals into the mix. Between them they will hatch a wonderful plan to do highly profitable crime and next time they won’t get caught. That’s what so many of them like to think. And that is how the John Gilligan gang got started, on E1 in Portlaoise.’
While the likes of Eddie Cahill, Larry Dunne and John Cullen took art classes, and others learned how to play guitars or to read and write, Gilligan was busy networking, making contacts and winning the respect of his fellow inmates. Factory John already enjoyed a formidable reputation. One former inmate recalled: ‘For a small fellow Gilligan had a tougher reputation than some of the biggest fellahs on E1. He was known for having mad bottle and he was a violent bastard who wasn’t afraid to do anyone who fucked around with him. It was like he always wanted to make up for the fact that he was so small. Gilligan was a big mouth and was always demanding to be the centre of attention but he was still well-liked. He was always slagging the other lads and having the craic and trying to help out. But he was making connections; nurturing fellahs who could help him on the outside. Gilligan was a great grafter.’
A video of a soccer match that took place in Portlaoise Prison on 23 May 1992 is a remarkable piece of gangland memorabilia. It provides a rare insight into how Gilligan ingratiated himself with the rest of the prison population. The match was between the criminals on E1 and a team from the IRA. Gilligan lavishes praise on his team of violent hoods: Brian Meehan, Paul Ward, Harry Melia, Eugene Scanlan, Martin Farrell, Fergal Toal and Warren Dumbrell. Harry Melia is ‘man of the match’ as he scores most of the goals. The criminals eventually win by an impressive 16 goals to 5.
Gilligan prompts the cameraman to film the Provos and walks over to commiserate with them. Dessie O’Hare, who had missed the match, then appears in the yard and Gilligan shouts: ‘It’s himself, the Border Fox, would you come over here, Dessie, and say a few words to us or I’ll blow the whistle on ya!’ It is obvious that Gilligan is working hard to be everyone’s favourite lag. Four years later, the same tape provided the Gardaí with important corroboration of the close relationship between Gilligan and his co-conspirators in the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin.
On E1 wing, Gilligan developed a close relationship with Brian Meehan and Paul Ward. He’d known Meehan for a number of years and treated him like a son. He admired the young criminal’s ‘bottle’. Meehan and Ward had a lot of potential and Gilligan would make them wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. In return the two hoods were staunchly loyal lieutenants and became the backbone of his criminal organization. They epitomized the new breed of ruthless young criminals Larry Dunne had prophesized would take over when his career as a Godfather came to an end. Ironically Larry was rubbing shoulders with his successors as he served his 14-year sentence on E1.
Gangland’s new brat pack grew up in a world where organized crime was already well established and they had plenty of role models to choose from. Meehan in particular had a natural talent for serious crime. Born in Crumlin in April 1964, Meehan was a joyrider from his early teens, robbing high-performance cars and having dangerous high-speed chases with the police. He was known as ‘Meenor’ to his friends but was later dubbed ‘the Tosser’. He became very proficient at ramming squad cars and showed no fear. Older criminals who heard of his prowess as a ‘wheels man’ soon took notice of the reckless youngster. A member of the General’s gang, Michael ‘Jo Jo’ Kavanagh, took Meehan under his wing, using him to rob getaway cars for heists. Then he began using him as a driver. By his twenty-first birthday, Meehan was an accomplished armed robber.
The young thug had a fascination for guns – and had no compunction about using them. In February 1987, Meehan tried to shoot an unarmed Garda. He held a gun to the head of the officer who was trying to arrest him after a robbery, but the weapon misfired. As Meehan ran away, he pointed the weapon at another officer but it misfired again. The third time it worked and he fired a warning shot in the air. A month later Meehan and Kavanagh were part of a four-man gang, who held up a wages’ delivery at the Ringsend Bus Depot, East Dublin. As the gang was escaping, the raiders were confronted by an armed detective who was protecting the premises. He fired several shots at the gang, who had pointed their weapons at him. Two members of the gang were later arrested and charged. Kavanagh had been wounded by the detective and Meehan brought him to a corrupt vet in County Wexford, who gave him medical treatment.
By the late 1980s, the young thug was attracting the attentions of the Serious Crime Squad. He was regularly spotted by Gardaí in the company of Gilligan, Kavanagh and Martin Cahill. It was obvious to them that he was being groomed for
greater things. On one occasion Meehan was stopped at a Garda checkpoint in Clontarf, driving a high-powered, stolen jeep. He was with PJ Loughran, the head of the Athy Gang, on their way to take part in a robbery. When Meehan was asked for his name, he pulled a pistol and pointed it at the cop. He told the guard to ‘fuck off’ before driving away at speed. On 21 December 1987, Meehan, Kavanagh, Paddy Shanahan and Canadian-national Norman McCaud pulled a daring daylight robbery from the Allied Irish Bank on Grafton Street, Dublin. McCaud was a Mafia hit man who was on the run from Canadian police who wanted him for murder. He and Shanahan provided back-up, as Meehan and Kavanagh posed as window-cleaners. They gained access to the bank using a ladder and crossing a number of roofs. When they were over the cash-counting room, they broke through a skylight and lowered themselves down using ropes. They held staff at gunpoint and took £55,000 before climbing back up the ropes again and escaping.
But Meehan had become a major target of Detective Inspector Tony Hickey’s Serious Crime Squad. A week later he was arrested for the robbery and was subsequently charged. In a bid to save his neck, Meenor offered his services as an informant. He told detectives where they could find a number of weapons he’d hidden, including the one he threatened the cop with in Clontarf. He was released on bail.
Brian Meehan continued to take part in robberies with members of the Cahill and Gilligan gangs. He was arrested for questioning following the robbery of £1 million worth of pharmaceuticals from the Dublin Drug Company. There was insufficient evidence with which to charge him but he agreed to continue working as a tout. As part of the arrangement, Meehan was placed back in custody while awaiting his trial for the Grafton Street bank job. A few days later he simply walked out of prison, by arrangement with his Garda handler, and went into hiding. But he was soon ‘recaptured’ when the detectives realized he was playing for time.
Meehan’s trial for the AIB robbery was aborted a number of months later, when two female jurors told the police they’d been followed home from the court and intimidated. Gardaí identified associates of Cahill and Kavanagh as the culprits, but the jurors were too scared to give evidence in court against them.
A second trial was set for April 1989. Meehan pleaded guilty and was jailed for six years and sent to Mountjoy. He was one of the ring-leaders of a full-scale riot in the prison in the summer of 1990. Millions of pounds worth of damage was caused when the gangsters staged a roof-top protest. The riot won Meehan his ‘promotion’ to gangland’s Alma Mater and he was moved to Portlaoise’s E1 wing.
Paul Ward’s involvement in the Mountjoy riot also earned him a place in Portlaoise with the big players. Ward was the same age as Meehan and came from Windmill Park in Crumlin. The two young thugs had been pals since they were kids, and Ward was going out with Meehan’s sister, Vanessa. Ward had graduated from car thief to armed robber alongside Meehan, and in November 1989 he’d been sentenced to four years for a hold-up in Crumlin. Known as ‘Hippo’, Ward had a reputation for violence and had a heroin habit.
In the early 1990s, Gilligan would sit in his cell with Meehan and Ward, discussing the future. Everyone on E1 had found out the hard way that the cops were getting much better at catching the robbers. The Athy Gang had shared their experiences of what it was like to get up close and personal with the new ERU. But they had been luckier than Doyle and Wilson in the Fairview shoot-out. The gangsters had also heard that a new squad, called the Cobra Unit, had been set up in Dublin to specifically target armed robberies. Teams of heavily armed officers, wearing bullet-proof vests and driving high-performance cars now cruised every division in the city. Their rapid response times shocked the serious blaggers and forced them to look around for an alternative source of income. The former warehouse robber realized that in such circumstances moving into drugs was a no-brainer.
Meehan told Gilligan about how his best friend, Peter Mitchell, was running a very lucrative business selling hashish and a new drug called ecstasy, which had arrived with Dublin’s rave scene. He also dealt in cocaine, which was becoming increasingly popular with Ireland’s growing number of recreational drug-users. Known as ‘Fat Head’ or ‘Fatso’, with a reputation as a loud-mouthed thug, Mitchell was from Summerhill in the north inner-city. He was five years younger than Meehan. Physically big, with a violent reputation to match, Mitchell had befriended Meehan while they were both in Mountjoy. Fatso also took part in the infamous riot but wasn’t sent to Portlaoise because he’d been due for release. When Mitchell got out he began dabbling in the drug trade, but steered away from heroin because it was considered too troublesome. Junkies were difficult to deal with and the trade was loathed in the working-class communities. Mitchell controlled an area that stretched from his own neighbourhood in the north inner-city out as far as the working-class suburb of Coolock. During visits to Meehan in Portlaoise, he would brag about the huge money he was making. One good deal could yield more hard cash than a whole fleet of Factory John’s stolen trucks. And there was a lot less risk and aggravation.
The decision of Gilligan and his protégés to become drug-dealers would have a profound effect on the future of organized crime. Taking Mitchell’s advice, the new gang opted to get heavily involved in cannabis and to explore the ecstasy and cocaine markets. They’d also learned from Larry Dunne’s fatal mistake. Gilligan vowed that he would never come into contact with his own supply.
From when he joined the force in the 1970s, Assistant Commissioner John O’Mahoney spent most of his career in the Serious Crime Squad and witnessed first-hand the evolution of organized crime. O’Mahoney was a member of the CDU team who first targeted the Cahill gang in 1984. He was also a team leader in the Tango Squad and recalls: ‘When John Gilligan came out of prison he identified a niche in the market and decided that cannabis resin was to be his business. He decided that for a number of reasons: one was that he felt that by operating in the area of cannabis that he would not be as big a target for law enforcement as if he was dealing in heroin. He also saw that there were more people in this country using cannabis and the people who were using it had more money to spend. This was also the beginning of the Celtic Tiger era.’
John Gilligan already had ambitious plans for the future before he was jailed in November 1990. His wife, Geraldine, was the driving force behind her husband. She acted as his secretary and adviser in his criminal activities and was later described in court as her husband’s partner-in-crime. In September 1987, he paid £7,000 in cash for a derelict farmhouse called ‘Jessbrook’, on five acres of land at Mucklon near Enfield, County Kildare. The Gilligans immediately began reconstructing the house and building stables, as Geraldine’s dream was to turn it into a world-class equestrian centre. When he was in the company of his law-abiding acquaintances, Gilligan preferred to describe himself as a horse-breeder rather than an armed robber.
Geraldine’s plans for Jessbrook put huge pressure on her husband. Factory John switched his attentions to hardware outlets and warehouses to rob the materials he needed for the reconstruction work. His efforts were interrupted in May 1988, at the height of the Tango Squad’s operations, when he was jailed for 18 months, and again when he was convicted and jailed for four years in November 1990 for the Enniscorthy robbery.
With Gilligan in prison, Geraldine had to take over some of his operations. In late 1989, Detective Superintendent Noel Conroy and Detective Inspector Tony Hickey had learned of Gilligan’s involvement in a proposed deal to sell the Beit paintings. Drogheda fence Tommy Coyle had been finding it very difficult to set up a deal with a buyer who was not an undercover cop. Then he discovered that the Loyalist terror group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was interested in buying the paintings to raise cash to buy arms and explosives from a South African gun-runner. The UVF and the other Loyalist terror groups, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Resistance, had pooled their resources to boost their arsenals, after revelations that the Provos had received tons of weaponry from Libya. Coyle had arranged a number of meeting
s between Martin Cahill and a representative of the UVF. The General, who was desperate for cash, thought the Loyalists’ blood money was as good as the Provos’, and had appointed Gilligan to act as a go-between in the complex negotiations. Cahill also agreed to hand over the least valuable painting in the collection, ‘The Letter Writer’ by Gabriel Metsu, so the Loyalist middlemen could show it to a prospective buyer, as proof that they had the collection.
When Gilligan was jailed, Geraldine took his place in the discussions with the UVF and Conroy and Hickey began watching her. In January 1990, a surveillance team watched as a representative of the Portadown terrorists visited Geraldine at the family home in Corduff Estate in Blanchardstown. The UVF man actually asked one of the undercover men for directions to Gilligan’s house. The police secretly monitored a number of other meetings between Geraldine and two Loyalists, which took place in pubs on the outskirts of Dublin. She would then visit her husband in Portlaoise and report on progress.
A month later, however, the jinx of the Beit paintings struck again when the conspiracy with the UVF went disastrously wrong for Martin Cahill. Two of the Loyalists travelled to Istanbul to do a deal with a Turkish businessman. He claimed he represented a sheikh who was interested in buying the collection. On 24 February 1990, the terrorists gave ‘The Letter Writer’ to the businessman to prove their bona fides. But before they could be lured further into the trap the UVF men were tipped-off and advised to get out of Turkey. As they headed to the airport they were arrested by the ‘businessman’ and his associates, who were all undercover policemen. It was later suspected that the operation had been compromised by British intelligence.
The seizure of the stolen Beit painting, and the connection with the most notorious sectarian terror group in Northern Ireland, made big news back in Ireland. It was the last type of publicity that the General wanted and it gave his old enemies in the Provos a new reason to watch him.
Badfellas Page 31
