Foley and Hogan were buying their drugs from their neighbours, Brian Meehan and Paul Ward. On 1 February 1996, Meehan arranged to meet Foley on the pretext of collecting a payment. But a short distance from Foley’s home on Cashel Avenue, Crumlin, Meehan and Ward ambushed him. They were armed with an Agram 2000 machine-gun and a .45 automatic pistol which had been shipped from Holland. They blocked Foley’s car in and jumped out, opening fire. The hail of bullets peppered the veteran hoodlum’s car, as he reversed up the road while they ran after him. The Viper abandoned his car and made a run for it, with Meehan in pursuit carrying the two weapons while Ward went back to collect the getaway car. Foley tried to take refuge in a house but Meehan ran in after him. Meehan opened fire again, this time hitting Foley in the back as he ran upstairs. Other bullets went through a bathroom door. Foley leaped through a window in a back bedroom, landed on an extension roof outside and jumped into the garden of the house next door. Meehan climbed onto the roof and fired more shots as the Viper raced through several gardens in his desperate bid to escape. Foley burst through the back door of another house and bolted it. He ran through the house, locked the front door and phoned for police and an ambulance as he lay cowering on the floor.
Foley had cheated death for the second time. He was hospitalized for two weeks and again made a remarkable recovery. Foley knew who had shot him and why, but he hadn’t the ‘bottle’ to take revenge. His keen survival instinct told him that there was little point taking on Gilligan’s powerful gang. Martin Foley would survive another two gun attacks in which he was shot and left for dead both times. His body is peppered with at least 22 bullet wounds. He also lost the top of a finger. As a result he’s earned legendary status in gangland history as the mobster they couldn’t kill.
Four weeks later Meehan and Peter Mitchell fired a number of warning shots at one of PJ Judge’s dealers who was encroaching on their turf in the inner-city. As a result Judge went looking for Meehan to kill him. But Gardaí prevented an escalation of that feud when they stepped in and arrested everyone involved. The gangsters decided to wait and fight another day.
On 1 April 1996, Johnny Reddin, a drug-dealer and underworld heavy, was having a drink in the Blue Lion pub on Parnell Street, the scene of several gangland shootings. Reddin was a close associate of Paul Ward and sold drugs for the Gilligan gang. At the time he was facing a charge relating to the death of a teenager, Sean McNeil, who was killed in a north city night-club. As Reddin sipped from his pint, a hit man walked up to him and produced a pistol. ‘Here, Johnny, take it out of that,’ he said, and then shot him once in the head. Reddin’s was to be the fifteenth unsolved gangland murder in Dublin in less than four years. Gardaí later confirmed that they received reliable information that the shooter was Dutchie Holland. The hit had been organized as a ‘favour’ for Sean McNeil’s associates, who had sworn to revenge his murder. At the time Paul Ward was said to be ‘very angry’ with his gangster pals over the murder.
Two days after the Reddin murder, Brian Meehan was arrested by Gardaí in the early hours of the morning. He was brought to the Bridewell Garda Station for a drug search. While the violent mobster was being strip-searched, he began masturbating in front of an officer and asked him: ‘Do you like men with big cocks?’ He turned around, grabbing his buttocks and exposed his anus: ‘Maybe you fancy me arse instead.’ – which is how Meehan earned himself the fitting sobriquet, ‘the Tosser’.
During the search, the cops found over £600 in cash, and seized it for forensic examination. Meehan sneered at the officers: ‘Youse fuckers need it more than I do. Give it to the Police Benevolent Fund. Youse are a bunch of fucking idiots working and paying tax. I earn more in a week than you earn in a month.’ He was charged with causing a breach of the peace and indecent behaviour. Meehan couldn’t care less.
A few weeks later, on 25 April 1996, Meehan, Mitchell and Ward sprung a notorious armed robber called Thomas ‘Bomber’ Clarke as he was being driven to court in a prison van. Gilligan had been asked to help the dangerous thug escape by another criminal associate and was happy to oblige. The gang drove a stolen BMW in front of the prison van on the Naas Road, at the junction with Boot Road. The prison warders were threatened at gunpoint, as Clarke jumped out of the van through a window. Gilligan had organized for Clarke to be smuggled out of the country to Holland in a truck. Johnny Wildhagen provided a safe house. To impress his Dutch business-partners, Gilligan offered Clarke’s services as a hit man. Bomber Clarke was subsequently caught while watching the home of one of the gang’s rivals in Amsterdam. With their power growing every day, the gang believed they were untouchable and had no hesitation proceeding with their plans to murder Veronica Guerin.
The journalist had become the focus of Gilligan’s dangerous attention. His trial for the assault was due to be remanded at the next hearing of the District Court in Kilcock. The gang knew that Guerin was due to appear for speeding offences in Naas Court the following day. Gilligan decided his henchmen would attack her on the way back to Dublin. Dutchie Holland agreed to be the hit man and Meehan would drive the bike. Peter Mitchell and one of the gang’s most important bagmen, Russell Warren, would watch her movements and report them back to the hit team. Warren and his family ran a cash-counting centre at their home in Tallaght. A shiny new .357 Magnum was oiled and loaded for Dutchie.
On 7 June 1996, a few weeks before the gang intended to carry out their plan, Detective Garda Jerry McCabe and his partner Ben O’Sullivan were providing an armed escort for a post office lorry. It was delivering £81,000 to the post office in Adare, County Limerick. At 6.55 a.m. the truck stopped at the post office and the two Special Branch officers pulled up six feet behind. A four-man IRA gang immediately drove up behind them, at speed, in a stolen jeep and rammed the squad car. A second jeep pulled alongside. Masked gunmen jumped out and stood on either side of the detectives’ car, while two more hooded raiders stood in front. The two detectives never had a chance. The leader of the gang, Kevin Walsh from Patrickswell, fired three bursts of lethal armour-piercing rounds into the car with his AK47. Jerry McCabe was killed instantly and Ben O’Sullivan was critically injured. The gang didn’t touch the money in the truck and left the scene in one of the jeeps. McCabe was the thirteenth member of the force to be murdered in the line of duty since Dick Fallon was gunned down in 1970.
The news of the shooting of the Gardaí was greeted with widespread shock and revulsion. Within an hour of the attack, investigators were convinced that it was the work of the IRA. The robbery had the hallmarks of Kevin Walsh’s Munster unit, which had been responsible for armed robberies in the mid-west and south-west for several years. Subsequent ballistic tests on the bullets found at the scene showed that the murder weapon had also been used in the robbery of a post office van in Kilmallock two years earlier.
Whenever the republicans were involved in an embarrassing act of terrorism they tried to deny it. Sinn Féin was due to sit down to continue the peace talks process three days later. That afternoon the Provos issued a statement: ‘None of our units were in any way involved in this morning’s incident in Adare. There was absolutely no IRA involvement.’ The Fine Gael Coalition Government believed the Provos at first, although the Garda top brass were telling them otherwise. Garda intelligence sources confirmed that the Provos had carried out the attack. The Garda Commissioner of the day, Pat Culligan, issued an unambiguous statement: ‘I and members of An Garda Síochána have no doubt whatsoever that it was carried out by members of the IRA.’
The Provos were eventually forced to admit that their members had been involved in the atrocity but then tried to claim that the shooting was not sanctioned. Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, who was also a senior figure on the IRA Army Council, played down the organization’s involvement. He tried to wriggle out of the publicity disaster by blaming a breakdown in the command structure. ‘In fairness to them what they did was carry out this act having been authorized by someone within the IRA,’ Adams claimed. He said the
attack had not been authorized by the Army Council but ‘authorized at a lower level, by an authorized person’. Martin McGuiness, Sinn Féin’s deputy leader and a member of the Army Council, refused to condemn the horrendous act – even though he was involved in the peace-process talks.
The republicans even spun a yarn that the murder weapon had been fired accidentally. The Gardaí who investigated the case do not believe this. Kevin Walsh was an experienced gunman who had fired his weapon in anger many times before. He wasn’t the kind of terrorist to make such mistakes. His gang members, Jeremiah Sheehy, Pearse McAuley and Michael O’Neill, were initially charged with murder, attempted murder and firearms offences. In March 1998 Kevin Walsh, who had been in hiding, was finally caught in a house in County Cavan. When the ERU swooped, he was armed with an AK47 rifle and a handgun. At the time there was speculation that Walsh had been ‘allowed’ to continue to be at large because he was involved in the peace-process negotiations on behalf of the IRA.
The four terrorists subsequently pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in the Special Criminal Court. The State accepted the plea after a number of witnesses admitted that their lives had been threatened if they testified. McAuley and Walsh each got 14 years, Sheehy got 12 and O’Neill was sentenced to 11 years. Sinn Féin, which had initially denied and then denounced the crime, vigorously campaigned to have the men released under the Good Friday Agreement, portraying the cop killers as ‘patriots’. The Government held firm and the gunmen served their full sentences.
Fifteen years after the incident in Adare, three members of the IRA are still wanted by the Gardaí in connection with it. They include the man who was OC of the IRA’s Southern Command at the time, Richard ‘Dickie’ O’Neill, who lived in Tallaght. O’Neill was ‘stood down’ by the IRA Army Council after the Adare fiasco. He has been living in Spain ever since, where he is known to associate with dissident republicans and international drug-traffickers. The second wanted man is Paul Damery from Cork, whose fingerprints were found on the incendiary devices recovered from the Adare gang’s getaway jeep. The third suspect, Gerry Roche, was the former INLA bomb-maker, who supplied the explosives to the General for the bomb attack on State forensic scientist Dr James Donovan in 1982.
Roche’s career path had been interesting since he helped Martin Cahill. The violent INLA terrorist was involved in the blood feuds that tore the criminal organization apart in the late 1980s. He was close to both Tommy Savage and Michael Weldon and was one of the organization’s ‘liquidators’. He was supposedly thrown out of the INLA and moved to live in Shannon, County Clare, where he joined the IRA Munster Brigade. In 1990 Roche and two other Provos were arrested by Belgian police in Antwerp while plotting to attack British Army bases in Germany. In the raid police recovered three AK47 rifles, two automatic rifles, a revolver and a pistol. Roche admitted to being the leader of the group and took responsibility for the cache of firearms. On 30 April 1991, he was convicted of conspiracy to attack the British bases, possession of firearms and false documentation. Upon his release from prison, Roche had immediately returned to Ireland and became active again with the Munster Brigade. Roche’s involvement was yet more proof of the dangerous nexus between the republicans and the organized crime gangs.
The McCabe murder was good news for John Gilligan. To him it seemed like every cop in the country was working on the case. He decided that meant they would be distracted from fully investigating the Guerin hit – the time was right for murder.
On 25 June 1996, the assault case against Gilligan was adjourned for two weeks at Kilcock District Court, in County Kildare. Veronica had attended the brief hearing with her husband, Graham, and a friend. That evening Gilligan flew to Holland with his teenage mistress, Carol Rooney. He told his girlfriend: ‘After tomorrow all my problems will be over.’
The following afternoon, Veronica Guerin was shot dead as she drove back to Dublin after appearing for the speeding offence at Naas Court. On her return journey to Dublin, Veronica was constantly on her mobile phone and didn’t notice the motorbike behind her. When she pulled up at traffic lights, at the same junction of the Naas Road and Boot Road where Gilligan’s mob had sprung Bomber Clarke, the bike pulled alongside. Dutchie Holland stepped off and fired five shots into the journalist with the powerful Magnum handgun. The courageous journalist died instantly. The bangs of the murder weapon were for ever recorded in the voice message she was leaving for a contact, as she was shot.
Gilligan personally supervised the murder operation on his mobile phone from a hotel room in Amsterdam. Carol Rooney witnessed everything and later recalled what Gilligan said to Meehan after the job was done: ‘Ah well that’s that. She wasn’t going to get away with it. I wonder what criminals she will be writing about and investigating in heaven.’ She told Gardaí how Gilligan received full reports directly from Meehan and Holland. When the diminutive thug phoned Dutchie later that day he said: ‘Did you hear the good news? I hear you put a smile on her face.’ Rooney also told how Gilligan was terrified of the lone raider: ‘He was terrified of Holland because he said he could put a bullet in your head if the price was right.’ Gilligan threatened to do the same thing to Rooney and her family if she ever opened her mouth. He also told his terrified girlfriend that Veronica had cancer and ‘was going to die anyway’, as if that was some sort of warped justification for the atrocity. The journalist had been in perfect health.
If Gilligan thought his problems were over he was sadly mistaken. The hit would prove to be the most monumental miscalculation in the history of organized crime in Ireland.
The journalist’s murder caused an unprecedented outpouring of public anger and revulsion. Coming so soon after the Garda McCabe murder, it also sent a shudder of fear through the Establishment. Politicians, judges, prosecutors, civil servants, media, anyone who could interfere with the workings of organized crime were justified in believing they could be the next target.
Tony Hickey remembers the shock his colleagues felt at the murder. ‘Despite the fact that there had been an attack on Veronica’s house and she had been shot I don’t think that anybody would visualize a situation prior to the 26th of June that anyone would have thought of assassinating her.’
Within 24 hours of the atrocity, people began placing flowers at the gates of the Dáil in Kildare Street. Soon there was a virtual wall of flowers, symbolizing the sentiment of a nation reeling from shock at what felt like a criminal coup. Thousands of notes and prayers pinned to the bouquets expressed sorrow, demanded action and asked God to mind the woman who overnight had become a heroine in the eyes of the Irish people. A brave young mum who had stood up to the cowardly Godfathers had been wiped out in the most brutal fashion.
The politicians inside the railings of Leinster House did not need a ton of flowers to realize they had to act decisively. Decades of neglect and inaction had created a monster that now threatened the security of the Republic. Organized crime had issued a spine-chilling threat and society demanded vengeance.
Over the period of a month, the toughest package of anti-crime legislation in the history of the State was enacted by a united parliament. The most significant new law was the one giving power to a revolutionary new multi-agency unit called the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). The CAB included Gardaí and officers from Customs, Social Welfare and Revenue. They were given authority to seize the assets and money of the criminal Godfathers. The Bureau could go wherever the money trail brought them. They could search the offices of solicitors and demand bank records. It would prove to be one of the most successful law enforcement agencies in the world. Four years after he’d highlighted the problem on the Late Late Show, Barry Galvin was the first man the Government called to help establish the new Bureau and fine-tune the necessary legislation.
Within weeks of Veronica Guerin’s murder, Pat Byrne was appointed as Commissioner of the Gardaí. Byrne, a talented officer who had trained with the FBI and Scotland Yard, had spent most of his career in anti-terro
rist operations and national security. A few months earlier he’d impressed the Cabinet when he gave them a detailed briefing on the state of drug-trafficking and organized crime in the country. Byrne was a modern, forward-looking cop who believed in using a more sophisticated approach to taking on the crime gangs. He promoted Tony Hickey to the rank of Assistant Commissioner and put him in charge of the Guerin murder investigation. The force’s most experienced financial and fraud investigator, Chief Superintendent Fachtna Murphy, was appointed as the head of the CAB. Felix McKenna, the man who’d helped secure Gilligan’s residence in Portlaoise Prison in 1990, became his second-in-command and Barry Galvin became the Bureau’s legal officer. The criminal underworld was about to be turned upside down.
The investigation into the murder of Veronica Guerin involved the biggest search and arrest operation ever mounted by the Gardaí. It was based in Lucan Garda Station and the squad of detectives became known as the Lucan Investigation Team. Their approach was robust and aggressive. In the months following the murder every criminal and terrorist got a visit from the team, irrespective of where he stood in the gangland hierarchy. Over 330 individuals were arrested, 1,500 were interviewed without arrest and 3,500 statements were taken. A large quantity of drugs, guns and cash were also seized. The investigation unearthed a huge amount of information and evidence. For the first time the Gardaí got a full picture of the true extent of organized crime. It was an example of what could be achieved when law enforcement resources were fully focused. Information gleaned also helped detectives to solve scores of hitherto unsolved crimes.
In the eyes of a dying breed of so-called ordinary decent criminals, the murder was an egregious breach of unspoken protocols. During the investigation, the Gardaí received an unprecedented level of co-operation. The criminals wanted to see Gilligan and his ruthless thugs get their comeuppance just as much as the law-abiding community. But they were not solely motivated by a sense of outrage – the consequences of the crime were very bad for business. With so much intense police activity, whole drug-distribution networks were closed down overnight. Greedy gangsters, who were waiting for the dust to settle so they could go back to ‘work’, were getting nervous as there appeared to be no sign of the Gardaí winding down. To make matters even worse, the criminals were reading about the powerful new agency that could take their money and property from them. And it was all Gilligan’s fault. One gangster, who was particularly agitated by the arrival of the Untouchables, as the CAB officers became known, declared at the time: ‘Gilligan or one of those fuckers will have to be whacked for this. They’ve fucked everything up.’
Badfellas Page 39
