Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  Initially Daley’s mob asked Mitchell to provide a hit team to help them wipe out three members of the Brindle gang. In spring 1995 the Penguin called a meeting with Mickey Boyle and a number of other gang members, to discuss the request. The targets were to be George and Patrick Brindle and at least one of their closest associates. Surveillance had already been carried out by Daley’s hoods and it was reckoned that Tony Brindle was too secure for a hit. Mickey Boyle volunteered to organize the murder operation and later travelled to London, to assess the ‘job’.

  In the meantime Mitchell had also come to the assistance of his Cork partners-in-crime – the Munster Mafia. The Cork mob were afraid that Golly O’Connell was considering turning State witness against them in the Courtmacsherry drug case and asked Mitchell to send him a message. On Saturday 22 April, O’Connell parked his car in a restaurant on the Naas Road in Dublin. He was approached by three masked men and shot in the back of the leg.

  That June, Boyle proved his credentials as a hit man when Mitchell sent him to murder Fran Preston, who had no links to crime. Preston had fallen foul of the Penguin’s protégé David Lindsay, after he had an affair with a girlfriend of Lindsay. Preston was gunned down at his home in Baldoyle, North Dublin by Boyle. It was the second time that the Penguin had gone to such extremes to protect Lindsay. Mitchell and Lindsay were among the suspects later questioned about the murder, but no one was ever charged.

  At the same time Mitchell found himself on a potential collision course with the Monk and his mob. Soccer star Derek ‘Maradona’ Dunne lived with Mitchell’s only daughter, Rachel, with whom he had a daughter. The 28-year-old footballer’s exploits with St Patrick’s Athletic made him a hero to thousands of kids. But Dunne was also one of the biggest heroin-dealers in the north inner-city. He was a member of a group of young criminals from the area who’d made a conscious decision to become drug-dealers. Maradona had no problem selling his drugs to the same kids who admired him. One of Dunne’s business partners was another local sporting hero, Thomas ‘the Boxer’ Mullen. The drug-dealers, who were not addicts themselves, had witnessed at first-hand the devastation the heroin scourge had caused throughout their neighbourhoods – but that didn’t upset the likes of Dunne or Mullen. In May, Dunne had beaten up Gerry Hutch’s nephew following a row. Immediately after the fight, Dunne and Rachel Mitchell were forced to move out of their home as the result of an arson attack.

  Mitchell made it clear to the Hutches that he would not tolerate his daughter and grandchild being caught up in the crossfire. He also let it be known that he was prepared to protect Dunne. Dublin’s underworld teetered on the brink of war for a number of weeks. There was speculation that Mitchell had brought in hit men from the UK to deal with any problems. He also had a large group of loyal hoods around him who weren’t afraid of the Monk. By the summer of 1995 there had been a steady increase in the number of gangland shootings and murders. There was no scarcity of new weapons available – or the men to use them. Eventually the stand-off subsided when it was agreed that Dunne would not return to the north inner-city. After that Mitchell and Hutch, who had both invested money in Paddy Shanahan’s construction business, made up their differences and the Penguin could focus his attention on his ecstasy factory again.

  Operation Barbie had moved into a critical stage when the Maradona row erupted. By the end of June the secret factory was ready to go into production. Gardaí believed that Buckley and Mitchell were so anxious to see it up and running they would turn up to see the first batch being made. But the team were forced to make their move on the night of 30 June 1995, when Brian Cooper suddenly decided to leave the country. The chemist was angry that he had not been paid £7,000 which Fitzsimmons owed him for work already done. He decided to make up the shortfall by taking enough MDMA mix to manufacture £157,000 worth of tablets when he got back to the UK. Cooper was busted as he boarded a ferry. The following morning Jones and Skelly were arrested as they made the first batch of 9,000 tablets, worth £90,000. Fitzsimmons was later arrested at his home in Castleblayney, County Monaghan. Detectives searched the other premises used by the gang and recovered enough MDMA to make £2 million worth of the drug. Cooper’s sudden decision to leave had effectively saved the Penguin. It was another close shave.

  Alan Buckley was subsequently arrested and questioned but there was insufficient evidence with which to charge him. The other arrested men informally identified Mitchell and Buckley but refused to testify against them in court because they were terrified. Buckley had told Fitzsimmons that the gang had been secretly watching his wife and children, just in case he didn’t do what he was told. ‘He said my job was to get the chemicals for the gang and if I didn’t I was going to be shot,’ Fitzsimmons later claimed to detectives. In June 1997, Jones and Fitzsimmons were both jailed for ten years, with the final seven years suspended. Cooper was also jailed for five years, while Skelly got a five-year suspended sentence. All of them pleaded guilty. In direct reference to Mitchell, a senior GNDU officer told one of the hearings that he was ‘quite capable of having people shot’. One person who would agree with that comment was London villain Tony Brindle.

  Mitchell’s plan to wipe out the Brindles had, however, been compromised from the start – by his hit man Mickey Boyle. Within weeks of his release from prison in 1993, Boyle began terrorizing the wealthy residents of North Wicklow again. He was responsible for at least 16 armed robberies and attempted abductions, in less than two years of his release. In each case the families of businessmen were held at gunpoint in their homes, while ransoms were paid.

  In 1993 Boyle tried to organize a protection racket aimed at wealthy landlords and businesspeople, using the guise of being a subversive group. Detectives quickly identified Mickey Boyle as the prime suspect behind the crime spree but he proved a difficult target. He used the forests and mountain tracks in North Wicklow to give his watchers the slip. Boyle had a warren of hides scattered throughout the area, which were impossible to detect. One Garda recalled: ‘He operated like some kind of Rambo.’

  When the Serious Crime Squad arrested Boyle in February 1995, following a hijacking, detectives were stunned when he agreed to co-operate with their investigation. The unpredictable gangster offered to work as an informant – and help them to catch George Mitchell. The officers were suspicious of Boyle but decided to wait and see what happened.

  In a series of meetings, Mickey Boyle gave his Garda contacts general information about Mitchell and his associates. At the same time, however, he continued to target the families of businessmen in Wicklow, using the same methods he had used in the 1980s.

  In May, Boyle told his handlers about the meeting with George Mitchell to discuss the Brindle murder plot and outlined the plan for the proposed hits. He gave the detectives the name of the gangland armourer being used and the location of the safe house, where guns and other hardware were being stored. When the cops advised Boyle not to get involved he was amazed that they cared about what happened outside Ireland.

  London’s South-East Regional Crime Squad (SERCS) confirmed that there was some truth in the information about the proposed Brindle hit. A major surveillance operation, codenamed ‘Partake’, was mobilized on both sides of the Irish Sea; the objectives were to foil the Brindle assassinations and to arrest Boyle and the other members of the Penguin’s gang.

  Over the following eight weeks, Boyle made a number of trips to London. He was secretly watched by the SERCS as he stalked members of the Brindle family. By the end of August 1995, Mitchell and the Daleys had decided to just hit Tony Brindle. Armed police watched as Boyle staked out Brindle’s home at Christopher Close, in Rotherhithe. Scotland Yard’s specialist firearms squad, SO19, moved into the area to prepare for the showdown.

  Boyle proved to be very patient. On 20 September his target finally appeared and the hit man was waiting in a parked van. At 10.42 a.m. Brindle emerged from his house and walked to his parked car, and the SO19 squad braced themselves for action. As the London g
angster reached his car, Boyle fired three shots at him from inside the van, hitting Brindle in the chest and thighs. As Brindle staggered back to his house, Boyle jumped out of the van and went to finish him off. At the same moment two police marksmen fired a total of 14 shots at Boyle, hitting him five times. The Penguin’s hit man was critically injured and spent over two months in intensive care. When he recovered, Boyle was charged with attempted murder and two counts of possession of firearms with intent to endanger life. Brindle, who made a full recovery, refused to co-operate with the police investigation and accused them of allowing him to be shot.

  Mickey Boyle was convicted and sentenced to three life sentences following a three-month trial in 1997. Armed police officers ringed the court and jurors were placed under protection. Boyle had put up an extraordinary defence, claiming that he had been a member of both the IRA and the INLA, while at the same time being a police informant. The hit man also put the boot into his old friend George Mitchell, who, he claimed, had coerced him into the shooting. ‘Mitchell told me that if I sorted out the Brindles that he would be able to re-establish himself in London and that we would all be better off,’ said Boyle.

  The increasing heat as a result of the various arrests and the Brindle assassination bid in London had turned the media spotlight on George Mitchell. In June 1995 this writer published a major exposé of his activities in the Sunday World newspaper and shared his nickname with the Irish public, assigned because of the way the overweight Godfather walked with a waddle. Although Mitchell wasn’t named, the newspaper ran his picture, with the eyes blacked out, and detailed his involvement in organized crime. The story centred on the ongoing Maradona dispute. The Penguin became a household name.

  A month after Mickey Boyle’s arrest in London, Mitchell was back in the news. This time Gardaí publicly named him in court as a major player in the drug trade in the city, when they objected to the renewal of a night-club licence. A senior officer told the District Court that Mitchell was a ‘noted drug-pusher’ whose men had threatened security staff at the Waterfront night-club at gunpoint. Inspector Thomas Murphy revealed: ‘The purpose of the visit [of the gunmen] was to intimidate the bouncers and to allow Mitchell’s lieutenants to operate with impunity on the premises. Mitchell sent in his lieutenants with firearms to remind them who was the boss.’ The case gave the media the chance to legally name Mitchell and show his picture. Life was becoming decidedly difficult for the crime lord.

  But the workaholic Penguin was too busy putting together one of the biggest drug shipments in European history to worry too much about being named in court. By the mid-1990s, Mitchell was part of a major international consortium involving Irish, English, Dutch, American and Canadian drug-traffickers. The plan was to smuggle 13 tons of cannabis for the Irish and UK markets. It was to be shipped directly from Pakistan for an estimated investment of over £10 million. The syndicate expected to more than double their money on the deal.

  Mitchell was playing with some of the heaviest hitters in the world. The Dutch gang was one of that country’s biggest crime organizations. It was known as ‘the Octopus’, because its tentacles spread throughout the world. Two major criminal gangs, based in Canada and America respectively, were also involved. The Canadian organization was led by international player Normand Drapeau. The American partners were Gary Matsuzaki and his sidekick, Brian Auchard. Matsuzaki was born in New Zealand but lived in the US, where he had Mafia connections in New York, Los Angeles and Montreal. He was a business associate of Drapeau. They were among the top targets of the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

  The Irish end of the deal involved Mitchell and members of the Munster Mafia. The job of organizing the collection of the drugs was down to John Noonan, a former truck driver from Finglas in north-west Dublin. He was known as ‘the Manager’ because of his logistical skills. The self-proclaimed smuggler was also nicknamed ‘the Sicilian’ because of his dark skin and slicked-back, black hair.

  Unfortunately for the syndicate, the international law enforcement community had learned of the plot. The story of what became known as the ‘Urlingford bust’ is one of the most daring undercover operations ever carried out by the Irish police. The international investigation involved police and customs on three continents. The Irish operation was codenamed ‘Way Fair’ and was spear-headed by Kevin Carty and his GNDU team. On 16 October 1995, Gardaí confirmed that the deal was on when they secretly monitored a meeting in Cork City between John Noonan, Alan Buckley, Gary Matsuzaki and Brian Auchard. The GNDU and their international colleagues managed to infiltrate the gang, and the man Noonan hired to land the haul was a Garda agent.

  On the night of 7 November a trawler, crewed by armed undercover Gardaí, set off from Castletownbere, West Cork, to rendezvous with the mother-ship, the Master Star, inside Irish territorial waters. The 13 tons for the Irish mob was the last drop-off from an original load of 500 tons. The rest of the cargo had been off-loaded along the way. The Navy kept the ship under surveillance as the huge haul of hash was unloaded, while loud rock music boomed from the Master Star and men, armed with assault rifles, roamed its decks. The hash haul was then brought back to Castletownbere by Carty’s men and loaded onto a container truck supplied by Noonan.

  Later that day undercover Detective Sergeant Pat Walsh drove the load to Urlingford, County Kilkenny, where he parked the 40-foot trailer along the Dublin Road. The plan was for Noonan and other gang members to arrive in another truck and take the hash away. However, the operation fell apart when news of the action in Castletownbere leaked out and Noonan failed to turn up. He was arrested in Dublin carrying £233,000 in cash. He would later boast in a newspaper interview that he wasn’t busted with the Urlingford shipment because the police lifted him prematurely. Matsuzaki and Auchard had left the country before the drugs arrived. No one was charged in connection with the shipment.

  The GNDU were left with no choice but to move in and claim the biggest drug seizure in the history of the State. There was considerable public controversy when it emerged three months later that the undercover Gardaí had been in control of the drug shipment. But the brave and highly risky operation illustrated to the underworld that the Gardaí had developed much more sophisticated methods of investigation. In 1997 the GNDU finally caught John Noonan, as he collected a large haul of ecstasy. He was subsequently jailed for eight years. While the Urlingford seizure was a major financial blow to the Penguin and his partners, George Mitchell had managed to escape the net – yet again.

  By the late 1990s the Penguin had become a powerful and extremely wealthy gangster. His personal wealth was estimated to be in the region of £10 million. Mitchell had so many irons in the fire, and so many different criminals working with him, that the cops could only latch onto a handful of his myriad scams. But Ireland was becoming too difficult a place for the ambitious Godfather to do business without being hassled by the police. Always the pragmatic villain, Mitchell was the first major crime figure to leave Ireland as a result of the murder of Veronica Guerin in June 1996. He got out before the unprecedented backlash by the State and the newly established Criminal Assets Bureau. Mitchell decided to move his family to live permanently in Amsterdam, where he continued to build his international empire. Maradona Dunne also moved to Holland, after he was acquitted by a Liverpool court of conspiring to ship heroin into Ireland in 1996.

  Mitchell continued to supply drugs to the Irish and UK markets. In October 1996, the GNDU were tipped-off by the US DEA that a freighter called the Tia had set sail from Suriname in South America bound for Ireland with a cargo of timber. Hidden in the cargo was 3 tons of high-quality cocaine. Mitchell, Alan Buckley and ‘Father Hash’ John McCarthy planned to land it on the Cork coastline. The deal, with a staggering street value of £250 million, was negotiated through a Colombian cartel, on behalf of Mitchell’s international partners. When the Tia arrived in Irish waters in November the Irish Navy were waiting for it. When the freighter anchored off Castletownbere, th
e Navy and Gardaí stormed aboard – and found nothing. But naval divers discovered hidden compartments for stowing drugs under the ship’s hull and the DPP decided to charge the skipper and the ship’s cook with conspiracy to import cocaine. The cook pleaded guilty to the charges while the skipper was found not guilty on the instructions of the trial judge. Fr Hash was arrested and questioned but never charged.

  A year later Mitchell was implicated in a plot by the Russian Mafia to ship a load of heroin, worth millions, to Shannon Airport from Moscow. Intelligence was also uncovered by Dutch police that he had successfully established an ecstasy factory in the Gambia in West Africa.

  Mitchell continued to stay one step ahead of the law – until March 1998, when he was caught red-handed stealing £4 million worth of computer parts. The components, which were being transported from the Hewlett Packard factory in County Kildare to a Dutch customer, were being tracked by Irish, English, Belgian and Dutch police forces. ‘Operation Wedgewood’ had been set up a year earlier to smash a multi-million-pound trade in stolen computer parts which Mitchell had organized from Holland. Detectives couldn’t believe their luck when they surrounded a disused warehouse near Schipol Airport in Amsterdam. The Penguin was caught sitting behind the wheel of a forklift, in the process of unloading the goods. The gangster, who usually stayed a safe distance from the merchandise, had been forced to intervene after his associates failed to intercept the truck as it drove through England.

  At his trial in August 1998, Mitchell was described as the ringleader in the operation. The Penguin claimed he was a businessman trying to make an honest living. When he was challenged about his prison record, the Godfather said: ‘In prison I furthered my education, doing business studies and accountancy, but when I came out I was over the borderline of forty and couldn’t find work easily. I arrived to start a new life in Holland. I was working every day up to my arrest.’