Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  But getting started in the narcotics trade is an expensive business and Gilligan and Traynor needed the start-up capital for their venture. They turned to the General for help.

  Two months before Gilligan’s release in September 1993, Traynor and Martin Cahill had started planning one of their most ambitious strokes yet. Through an inside source, Traynor had compiled information on the main cash-holding centre of the National Irish Bank (NIB), in Dublin. At certain times of the week there could be as much as £10 million in cash in the vaults. The difficulty was how to get their hands on it. A traditional armed hold-up would be pointless because of the location and the level of security. To get away with it, they’d need to be able to enter the building unchallenged and ensure that the police weren’t called.

  Traynor and Cahill came up with a plan to abduct a senior NIB executive and make him collect the cash. After preliminary surveillance the General selected the bank’s CEO, Jim Lacey. They plotted to hold the banker and his family hostage overnight. Lacey’s wife and four children would then be taken to a hiding place with Lacey left under no doubt that the lives of his family were in his hands. Meanwhile a member of the gang, posing as another kidnap victim, would convince the banker that his family had also been abducted. Lacey would have to ensure the cash was handed over, to secure the safe return of both families.

  Brian Meehan was already recruited for the job, along with Jo Jo Kavanagh, who would pose as the victim. Kavanagh, the last remaining member of Cahill’s original gang still free, was facing a serious criminal charge in the courts and had fallen out of favour with many of his former associates. The widower felt he had nothing to lose.

  On 5 September 1993, three armed and masked men burst into the Crumlin home of Kavanagh’s mother-in-law, Esther Bolger, with whom two of his five children were living. His wife, Marian, and her brother Derek had both been killed in November 1988 when Kavanagh drove a van they had been passengers in into a parked truck while drunk. In the house one of the masked men put a gun to the grandmother’s head when she confronted them. He warned her: ‘This is serious. Open your mouth and you’re dead. I mean what I say. Don’t make a sound.’ But by then Mrs Bolger had recognized two of the gunmen – Martin Cahill and her hated son-in-law. She identified them and pointed a gold sovereign she was wearing around her neck at Cahill, saying: ‘You know who gave this to my dead daughter, Cahill? It was your wife, Frances.’ Cahill ignored her and produced a Polaroid camera. He took pictures of Kavanagh’s two scared children to be used by Kavanagh to convince Jim Lacey that his children were also being held hostage. Then, on 15 October, Kavanagh was ‘abducted’ by his associates.

  Meanwhile Cahill and his gang had been watching the movements of Jim Lacey and his family. Two other executives at the bank had also been monitored in case the choice of hostage changed. Cahill even tested the security system at the Laceys’ home in upmarket Blackrock, when he purposely activated the alarm to test police response times.

  Traynor had organized most of the logistical support for the operation, but the born coward preferred to stay a safe distance from the action. Just to cover all eventualities the duplicitous rogue even tipped-off the detective he was dealing with in the Serious Crime Squad that there was ‘a big stroke’ being planned involving a bank. Traynor knew that the police did not have the resources to mount a major surveillance on such vague information. He made it clear that he’d only heard a ‘whisper’ and was simply doing his duty as an informant. If he was involved then why would he tip-off a cop that something big was going down? On the day of the crime he made sure he was at a safe, highly visible distance and was seen walking through O’Connell Street with John Gilligan and visiting a bookie’s shop.

  On the night of 1 November 1993, Cahill and six members of his gang went about their brutal work. The gang was lying in wait for Jim Lacey and his wife, Joan, when they returned to their home at 1.25 a.m. on the morning of 2 November, after attending a bank function. The hoods rushed the couple as they walked through their front door and there was a violent struggle as the Laceys fought back. Jim Lacey was struck across the head with a pistol which left a large gash in his forehead. The family’s babysitter was ordered to lie on the ground at gunpoint and the Lacey children were awakened and ordered out of their beds by the men in masks. Brian Meehan was one of the most aggressive members of the kidnap gang. He delighted in causing terror. The Tosser cocked a gun over the heads of the Lacey children for added emphasis, as Cahill warned Jim Lacey he would never see his family again if he did not follow instructions.

  The level of organization that went into the crime would later help identify Cahill as the prime suspect. Each gang member was dressed in a two-piece overall, balaclava, knitted gloves and white runner boots – all of which were to be disposed of after the job. They also each had a number, between one and seven, sewn onto their overalls and they addressed each other by number only. Around 6 a.m. Joan Lacey, her children and their babysitter were hooded and taken away in a van driven by Brian Meehan. He brought them to a disused stable at Blackhorse Avenue, North Dublin. Around the same time, Kavanagh was dumped on the floor beside Jim Lacey. To keep up the ‘hostage’ pretence, the gangster was tied up and had a hood over his head. Cahill gave Lacey strict instructions. He was to go to the NIB cash-holding centre with the other hostage and organize for a van that would be provided to be driven inside, where it was to be filled with cash.

  ‘I don’t want any bollix about time locks. We know all about this place and the amount of cash there, which is millions. I don’t want any small stuff. We want fifties and twenties. You’re to make sure the place is totally emptied – the big room, the secret room, all the rooms, right? Because if it’s not we’ll kill your children. We’ve already shot your son in the hand just so that you know this is serious,’ the General blustered. They had faked a shot to convince Lacey they were serious. When the gang left, Kavanagh told the bank executive that he’d been detained ‘for at least two weeks’. He showed Lacey the fake pictures that Cahill had taken of his kids two months earlier. Kavanagh kept saying, almost in desperation, ‘They have my kids.’ Lacey showed Kavanagh pictures of his own children and the criminal began playing on the banker’s fears.

  Later that morning Kavanagh drove with Jim Lacey to pick up a van that had been left for them at Merrion Road Church. Cahill had even strengthened the suspension system in the van to ensure it could carry the huge amount of cash.

  When Lacey and his fellow ‘hostage’ got to the NIB, the executive told his senior manager of the unfolding drama and the instructions he had been given to ensure the safe return of his family. Despite being terribly shaken by his ordeal, Jim Lacey outwitted the General’s other ‘victim’. The banker told his staff to take £250,000 or so in the vaults and put it in bags. Kavanagh was handed three large bags, stuffed with cash and told that was everything from the vaults. In reality there was £7 million in the NIB vaults that morning. The ‘victim’ grew impatient and angry and kept repeating that there was supposed to be millions there. He warned Jim Lacey that his family would be killed if the gang’s orders were not followed. But to maintain his story Kavanagh couldn’t push the issue and he left with the money.

  Later that afternoon one of the gunmen holding the Lacey family in Blackhorse Avenue told them that everything had gone to plan and they had got ‘more money than you could dream about’. The gang left and a few hours later the hostages managed to break free.

  It had been a bad day for Cahill and his mob. They got away with just £233,000 – a fraction of what they had been after. Cahill and Traynor were furious the next day when the newspapers reported that the gang had missed the £7 million. They had been outfoxed by their courageous hostage.

  Over the following two months the gang members, including Cahill, Meehan and Traynor, were identified, arrested and questioned about the kidnapping, but with no success. Cahill had even left a box of chocolates with the Laceys’ babysitter to give the Gardaí a clue that i
t was his ‘job’. The same officers who had dealt with Meehan during his earlier stint as an informant interviewed him but this time he wasn’t opening his mouth. Meehan was confident that they had nothing on him and the gang members were released without charge. But there was strong circumstantial evidence against Jo Jo Kavanagh and he was charged with the crime. The case eventually came to trial in the Special Criminal Court in October 1997 and he was jailed for 12 years.

  The Lacey kidnapping was to be Martin Cahill’s last major crime. After the kidnapping, Cahill agreed to loan Traynor and Gilligan just over £100,000, for which he was promised a return of at least half a million. They used the cash to buy their first drug shipment.

  Towards the end of November, Gilligan flew to Amsterdam with his childhood friend from Ballyfermot, trucker Denis ‘Dinny’ Meredith, who had been a member of the Factory Gang for years. He had impressive criminal connections and had used his contacts to smuggle cigarettes, booze and small amounts of drugs into Ireland from Europe. His contacts then put the gang in touch with one of the biggest international drug-traffickers operating in Holland at the time – Simon Ata Hussain Khan Rahman.

  Born in Surinam in 1942, Rahman was a major league criminal who made gangsters like Gilligan, Traynor and Cahill look like schoolboys. He had criminal connections throughout Europe, the old Soviet Bloc countries, the Middle East and North Africa. His criminal empire, based in The Hague, dealt in narcotics, fraud and firearms. His front was that of a legitimate millionaire businessman who specialized in the import and export of goods, from foodstuffs to furniture. Rahman nurtured a veneer of respectability and was Chairman of a Muslim cultural association called Jamaat Al Imaan. In 1994 the Dutch authorities estimated that the practising Muslim was worth between £20 and £50 million. Rahman had well-established supply routes and smuggled cannabis into Holland from Nigeria and Morocco, disguised as cargos of foodstuffs and furniture. He supplied gangs in England, France, Belgium, Germany and the Eastern Bloc countries.

  One of Rahman’s closest associates was Johnny Wildhagen, a Dutch national from The Hague. The 40-year-old was a violent cocaine addict who worked as Rahman’s enforcer and manager. Wildhagen organized shipments of drugs and guns for export, using invoices from bogus companies. Rahman also appointed one of his associates, Martin Baltus, as the Gilligan gang’s liaison man. Rahman was not impressed by Gilligan and referred to him disparagingly as a loud-mouth and ‘De Klein’ (‘the little one’). He didn’t trust Factory John or his gang members, like Meehan, Ward and Mitchell, whom he dismissively described as ‘the others’.

  At their first meeting, Rahman informed Gilligan that each deal would have to be paid for up front, in cash. The price of the first shipments of hash was in the region of £1,300 per kilo, but it would be cheaper depending on the quantities being ordered. Rahman also explained that, as trust and goodwill developed, the payment for shipments could be broken into three parts: a portion would be paid in advance, upon delivery and shortly after the drugs were sold.

  Gilligan and Meredith returned to Dublin the following day. The negotiations and talks continued. A week later, on 29 November, Traynor and Gilligan travelled to Amsterdam where Traynor, who controlled Cahill’s £100,000, finalized the first deal for 170 kilos. Rahman and Wildhagen were impressed by Traynor, describing him as ‘Big John, the real boss of Gilligan’. Traynor, it is understood, convinced Rahman that if he reduced the price of the initial shipment from £1,300 to around £1,000 per kilo, as a sort of introductory offer, it would mean more cash for the businessman in the long run. The gang invested every penny they could steal, borrow or con into the first deal. It would be the start of a very lucrative relationship.

  On 5 December the first consignment of drugs arrived in Dublin Port, on a transport truck organized by Dinny Meredith. The 150 kilos of hash were packed into six boxes, specially sealed, labelled as leather jackets and addressed to an engineering works in Chapelizod, West Dublin. The truck delivered the boxes to the transport company’s main warehouse. The following morning the boxes were picked up by a courier and sent to Chapelizod. Gilligan and Traynor had the truck followed to ensure that it was not under surveillance. When it stopped at traffic lights, Brian Meehan knocked on the window and told the driver he had been sent to collect the boxes for the engineering works. He signed for them using the fictitious name ‘Frank O’Brady’. The deal went off without a hitch.

  On 12 December the second part of the deal, 20 kilos, arrived on a transport truck from the same haulage company. This time it was packed in one box, labelled ‘compressor parts’. The Gilligan gang were in business.

  In the early days of the operation, Gilligan and Traynor distributed the hash through Peter Mitchell, Brian Meehan and Paul Ward. They in turn had set up a network of dealers who bought the drugs from them. Over the following months the operation expanded rapidly, with dealers throughout Ireland buying from them. Peter Mitchell recruited Charlie Bowden, a flash, arrogant character with a natural talent for organization, who had no previous involvement in crime. Bowden was a hard man with military training who’d left the army with an ‘unsatisfactory’ discharge. He eventually became the gang’s manager.

  When one of the earlier shipments was intercepted by Customs at Dublin Port in February 1994, Gilligan and Traynor decided to switch smuggling routes. Dinny Meredith introduced them to 38-year-old John Dunne. He was operations manager with the Sea Bridge shipping company, at Little Island in Cork. Dunne, who was originally from Finglas in Dublin, asked no questions when Gilligan and Traynor offered him £1,000 to handle each shipment. Like Bowden, Dunne also became a vital cog in a well-organized machine.

  Before each drug shipment, various members of the gang would travel to Amsterdam where they exchanged large quantities of Irish and UK currency for Dutch guilders at Bureaux de Change in the city. The cash was then handed to either Rahman or Baltus. The Dutch mob packed the drugs in crates, labelled ‘machine parts’, and shipped them to Cork. John Dunne would then arrange to have them delivered to the car park at the Ambassador Hotel on the outskirts of Dublin, where Bowden would be waiting. The crates were taken to Greenmount Industrial Estate in Harold’s Cross, where Bowden checked the load and divided it into individual orders. The gang then delivered the drugs to its customers in a van bought specially for the job – it was dubbed the ‘dope mobile’.

  Gilligan’s operation became one of the most secure and lucrative illegal drug-smuggling operations in gangland history. In 1996 the newly formed Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) and the Gardaí investigating the Veronica Guerin murder painstakingly compiled a detailed document on the gang’s activities. It was uplifted from flights taken by various gang members to Holland, the amounts of money they each exchanged and the weight of the shipments arriving in Cork. They conservatively estimated that between April 1994 and October 1996 over 21,000 kilos of hashish arrived through Cork, in 96 individual shipments, none of which was detected. Large quantities of automatic pistols and machine-guns were also sent.

  The figures involved were staggering. In two years Gilligan’s mob had exchanged £11.5 million alone at Bureaux de Change in Amsterdam and had paid Simon Rahman over £25 million. With an average price of £2,000 per kilo, Gilligan had made a personal profit of £16.8 million, with Traynor’s take also running into millions. The five core members of the mob – Meehan, Ward, Ward’s brother Shay, Mitchell and Bowden – made an estimated £8.5 million between them. But these figures did not include a number of other large consignments of cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis which had been smuggled through other routes. It was the first time that anyone in Ireland discovered the real value of organized crime. It completely dwarfed the profits being made in the early 1980s by the likes of Larry Dunne.

  When Charlie Bowden subsequently turned State’s evidence against his fellow gangsters, he admitted in the Special Criminal Court that he had made between £150,000 and £200,000 in just over a year. He explained what he did with it: ‘I spent a lot of money on c
ocaine. I bought designer clothes and went on foreign holidays. I would go out. I would live well. I would buy stuff for the kids.’ He also revealed how handling the bundles of drug cash became a problem for the gang: ‘This was a constant refrain throughout the whole time when we were earning this type of money, where to put it. I used to stuff it in a laundry basket. When it got full I got another one. We spoke about offshore accounts and how we would go about doing it. We were thinking about getting the money into bank accounts in the Isle of Man.’

  Gilligan decided to launder some of his loot by gambling in Dublin betting shops. Sometimes he’d bet on all the horses running in a race, at up to £10,000 a time. Some of the larger bookmakers conducted discreet enquiries but could not detect any pattern suggesting a scam. One major bookmakers’ chain eventually limited the amount of money he could wager at any one time. Between 1994 and June 1996 Gilligan wagered a total of £5,480,849, which included the betting taxes. His return was £4,860,714, after a loss of £620,135. Laundering his cash this way cost him 13.5 per cent. On the surface he appeared to have been unlucky. But when it was measured against the lowest standard rate of taxation, Gilligan’s laundering operation was providing superb value for money.

  Detective Chief Superintendent Tony Quilter, the head of the Garda National Drug Unit (GNDU), which had taken over from the old Drug Squad in 1994, described the operation. ‘The Gilligan gang brought drug-trafficking to another level in this country. They brought a highly organized, businesslike structure to their empire. They dealt directly with associates on the Continent. They bought in bulk and they had a sophisticated and logistical distribution network.’

  Traynor and Gilligan also established a partnership with the INLA, who were heavily involved in organized crime rackets, including drugs. Gilligan had developed a close relationship with Fergal Toal while he was networking in Portlaoise Prison. In fact the friendship was so strong that at one stage other inmates began to joke – behind their backs – that they were lovers. At the same time the Coach acted as a liaison between the Gilligan gang and INLA boss Michael Kenny and his sidekick Declan ‘Wacker’ Duffy. Kenny would meet Traynor and Gilligan on an almost daily basis. The gang supplied drugs and guns to the INLA, who effectively became Gilligan’s private army. At the same time the hypocritical thugs were in touch with the media to claim that they were involved in ‘anti-drug’ activities in South Dublin.