Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  In September 1998, George Mitchell was jailed by a Dutch court for two and a half years and served one year. When he was released, the Penguin was a lot more careful. But gangland violence came back to haunt him a year later when his son-in-law Maradona Dunne was shot dead in 2000. Maradona was blasted to death in front of his wife Rachel, when members of a Dutch gang called to their home demanding payment for ecstasy.

  By the mid-Noughties, Mitchell was high up in Europol’s list of top ten most wanted Godfathers.

  20. The Peacemaker

  On New Year’s Eve, 1993 a Limerick traveller family gathered together to mourn the death of their brother, whom they’d buried earlier that day. Patrick ‘Pa’ McCarthy had been stabbed to death when he called to the home of the city’s most notorious Godfather. The group of ten adults huddled around a small fire in the cramped caravan, drinking cider. There were also two young children with them. Around 10.30 p.m. two of the mourners left the crowded caravan, which was parked at the Cooperage Canal Bank. They were challenged by masked men who stepped from the shadows. The couple were warned to keep their mouths shut and go while they still had a chance. Then two hit men, armed with a shotgun and an automatic pistol, stood in the door of the caravan and opened fire on the group inside. They clearly intended causing a massacre. This was the moment gangland violence arrived to stay on the streets of Limerick.

  As the emergency crews and police arrived, they found a scene of bloody chaos. One of the brothers, Michael McCarthy, had a gaping gunshot wound in his neck and was bleeding to death. He died on the way to hospital. His brother Joe was hit in the back and leg and his sister Nora in the hip. Their cousin Noreen also suffered a leg wound. Miraculously the two young children were uninjured.

  The outrage was the first major news item of 1994 and was greeted with shock and revulsion across Ireland. But less than a decade later the savagery had become a depressingly regular occurrence in Limerick, the amount of gun crime making it one of the most violent cities in Europe.

  Gerry Mahon was one of the detectives who investigated the incident. He spent his entire Garda career, which spanned almost forty years, working on the streets of Limerick. From the time he joined in 1971, Mahon worked his way up through the ranks from uniformed beat-cop to become the city’s Chief Superintendent. He witnessed how Limerick’s crime mobs dragged the population into a gangland hell of murder and mayhem. The attempted massacre was his first taste of the madness that would soon follow. ‘It was a shock to the whole system and a wake-up call. This was the first time that a criminal gang had stooped to such a level of sheer violence and brutality. That incident in 1993 announced the arrival of gangland in its most brutal form in Limerick. It was a taste of what we would be facing on a regular basis a few years down the road,’ recalled the former chief, who retired in 2009. ‘The clear intent was to wipe out the McCarthy family so there would be no witnesses to testify against the suspect for the death of Pa McCarthy. The only reason that they weren’t all killed that night was that the ammunition used by the gunmen was defective and they had to stop firing after seven shots.’

  The murders of Pa and Michael McCarthy and the near massacre of their family confirmed the fearsome reputation of the city’s first major crime gang – the Keanes.

  Christy Keane and his younger brother Kieran were the first members of the local criminal underworld to discover the value of the drug trade in the early 1990s, and they became the undisputed Godfathers of the city. Within a few years they controlled the largest drug-distribution network in the Mid-West region, supplying cocaine, ecstasy and cannabis. Like their counterparts in Dublin and Cork, they set up a network of drug-dealers and also got involved in money-laundering, trading in illegal firearms, counterfeit money, protection rackets, prostitution, smuggled goods and stolen vehicles. They had links with the O’Flynns in Cork, John Gilligan and the INLA. By the late 1990s the money was coming in so fast that the gang had a number of counting-centres throughout the region. At one stage, Christy Keane had to resort to using a wheelie-bin to store his cash. The war broke out when their rivals decided to take the money and power from them.

  The Keanes grew up in St Mary’s Park, a rundown Corporation estate in the shadow of King John’s Castle, just north of the city centre. Also known as the Island Field, it would become their exclusive domain where Christy Keane was king. It was a perfect base for an organized crime network. Physically there was only one way in and out of the Island and strangers were quickly spotted. It was an extremely difficult area for Gardaí to keep under surveillance. The Keanes had started life as hard workers who ran a successful coal business. According to local people they inherited their mother’s work ethic and they could have been hugely successful, legitimate businessmen. Instead, Christy Keane decided to play both sides of the fence, working hard and robbing at the same time. By the time he was 20 years old Keane had a string of convictions, mostly for larceny and burglary.

  Christy Keane’s most trusted lieutenant and enforcer was a psychotic thug called Eddie Ryan, from Hogan Avenue in Kileely across the River Shannon from the Island Field. Ryan had a long criminal record for theft and violence, dating back to when he was 12. He was a dangerous individual who took pleasure inflicting pain. In 1977, at the age of 17, he stabbed another man to death during a row on a city-centre street and was jailed for five years. In 1984, he found himself back behind bars for armed robbery. By the time Ryan returned to the streets the Keanes were moving into drugs. Together they built a formidable criminal empire. Ryan, who had close connections with republican terrorists, also worked as a freelance hit man. He dealt with unpaid debts and suspected police informants. ‘When Eddie Ryan called to your door looking for something you gave it to him or else he’d give you something you didn’t want. He was a ferociously violent bastard and everyone was scared of him,’ one former associate recalled.

  The incident which ultimately led to the shooting on the canal bank was the death of Pa’s partner, Kathleen O’Shea, in February 1993. She was killed when she stumbled into the path of an oncoming van driven by Daniel Treacy, Christy Keane’s nephew. A Garda investigation later concluded that it had been a tragic accident. Pa McCarthy, who had a history of violence, was heart-broken and threatened to kill Treacy. In a bid to compensate him, the Keanes and the Treacys paid for his wife’s funeral. After that Pa McCarthy began putting the squeeze on the Keanes for money. For a while they paid him but finally refused to pay any more. McCarthy then moved with his children to Cork.

  McCarthy returned to Limerick that year for Christmas and went on a non-stop drinking binge. On the night of 28 December, McCarthy drove to St Mary’s Park with his brothers, Willie and Joe, and a friend, David Ryan. All four were drunk and McCarthy was in an aggressive mood. He called to Christy Keane’s home at St Ita’s Street, where he met Keane’s other nephew, Owen Treacy, the van driver’s brother. Twenty-two-year-old Owen was a member of Keane’s drug gang and close to his uncles Christy and Kieran. McCarthy began making threats and demanding money. Christy Keane joined Owen Treacy at the door and a scuffle ensued, during which Pa McCarthy was stabbed in the chest. He died in the back of his van, as his brother Joe drove him to hospital. Joe and Willie McCarthy and David Ryan later told detectives that they witnessed Christy Keane stabbing Pa. A few hours later Gardaí arrested the Godfather and his nephew for questioning about the murder. The two men were later released while Gardaí compiled a file on the case for the DPP. It was then that the decision was made to get rid of the witnesses.

  Gardaí didn’t have to look far for suspects on 1 January 1994. Later that day, Eddie Ryan and his wife, Mary, Christy and Kieran Keane and another gang member, Declan ‘Darby’ Sheehy, were arrested in connection with the cold-blooded outrage. There wasn’t enough evidence with which to prosecute a case but detectives were satisfied that Eddie Ryan and the Keane brothers had been involved.

  On 4 January Christy Keane was formally charged with the murder of Pa McCarthy. The following morning th
e funeral of Michael McCarthy took place. The priest who officiated at the Mass described the murders of the brothers as ‘senseless and mindless’. He told mourners: ‘Violence begets violence, leading inevitably to more suffering and more grief and more loss of lives.’ Less than ten years later, the priest’s prediction had become a paradigm for life in the city’s seedy underworld.

  In March 1995, Christy Keane was acquitted of the murder of Pa McCarthy when the remaining witnesses proved to be unreliable. His mob continued to thrive and prosper.

  The genesis of gangland in Limerick can be traced back to the sprawling working-class suburbs which were built in the 1960s and 1970s to alleviate the misery of the people living in its grim, poverty-stricken tenements. But the new estates, like those in Dublin, caused more problems than they actually solved. Former local TD Des O’Malley tried to convince the Corporation that they were making a mistake.

  ‘From the late ’60s the housing policy in Limerick Corporation changed when the Department of Local Government insisted local authorities build more houses altogether on the outskirts of cities rather than within the cities. And the first very big development of that kind in Limerick was in Southill where 2,000 or so houses were built in the late ’60s. It wasn’t a success; that was the beginning of the breakdown of the old social and community structure in Limerick,’ said O’Malley. ‘Houses were built without back up facilities of any kind, there were no churches, no schools, no shops, no pubs, nothing and I think very quickly people started to amuse themselves by engaging in violence and vandalism and that gradually degenerated into much worse. What I think was particularly blameworthy was that even though it was clear by the mid-1970s that Southill hadn’t been a success, the Corporation went ahead and built a similar estate at Moyross on the other side of the city. I remember pleading with the city manager at the time not to do it because we were going to replicate the problems that we had in Southill. Limerick is still suffering from the results of those decisions. By the early ’90s large areas of these estates were burnt out and derelict. They had become breeding grounds for crime.’

  Former Chief Superintendent Gerry Mahon had a similar recollection. ‘When I arrived as a young Garda at the end of 1971, the city was much smaller than it is now and there was very little serious crime until the mid to late 1970s. The big problem was the IRA and the INLA who were very active in the region and they robbed practically every bank in the county,’ he recalled. ‘The first thing that struck you when you went into a home in these estates was unemployment, an absent parent and poor conditions – bad clothing, no heating, no food in the fridge. There was no school, no looking for a job. They lived in another world really, without any support from society.’

  The new estates in Southill became a hub for anti-social behaviour and vandalism. The tension and hopelessness of the situation led to feuding between families, which often spilled over into violence and even murder. Inter-family feuding has been a peculiar feature of certain parts of Limerick for generations. Knife crime became a particular problem. The situation got so bad that the Corporation turned to a notorious local criminal, Michael ‘Mikey’ Kelly, to help them solve it. The decision would have far-reaching consequences for the development of organized crime in Limerick.

  Mikey Kelly and his family were among the first residents to move into the new houses in Southill. Kelly was a close friend and long-time criminal associate of Eddie Ryan, with whom he carried out armed robberies. Like Ryan, Kelly was a violent thug with a string of convictions for serious crime, including wounding, robbery, demanding money with menaces, possession of firearms and shooting at a person with intent to maim and endanger life. His last recorded conviction was in July 1986. In 1982 Mikey Kelly was the prime suspect in the murder of another local criminal called Ronnie Coleman. Coleman was associated with two other families who were feuding with the Kellys. One night Coleman smashed a pint glass into Kelly’s face in a city pub. On 12 October that year Mikey got his revenge, when he stabbed Coleman several times in the chest. Kelly was charged with the murder but was acquitted. At the time an associate of Kelly’s was also feuding with the McCarthy brothers from St Mary’s Park (no relation to the McCarthys above). Their sister was married to Eddie Ryan’s brother, John. Two months after the Coleman murder, Sammy and Tommy McCarthy were stabbed to death during a pub row in Limerick. The incident earned Limerick the unflattering media tag line, ‘Stab City’.

  Mikey Kelly was a clever manipulator of the media and successfully portrayed himself as an ordinary decent criminal who had retired and wanted to give something back to society. Kelly loved to tell the story of how he underwent a transformation of biblical proportions when Fr Joe Young visited him in his prison cell in the mid-1980s. Kelly, who was serving a sentence for armed robbery, had beaten up a number of prison warders and there was a stand-off at his cell. Fr Young arrived to mediate and asked him if he was all right. Kelly claimed that he told the priest to ‘fuck off’, whereupon Young replied: ‘No. You fuck off.’ And that, according to Mikey Kelly, was all it took to convert one of the country’s most violent thugs into a born-again ‘crime-free’ citizen. When he got out of prison, Kelly exploited his new status, living on the coattails of Fr Young who was a curate in Southill. Kelly claimed that his only ambition in life was to repay society for the wrongs he had done.

  In 1988, he helped to supervise the Garda Activity Programme in Southill. It was a local community project organized by the Gardaí at Roxboro Road Station. The aim was to break down the barriers between the police and the local youth. Kelly suddenly found a way of building a respectable façade. His photograph appeared in the local newspapers attending various meetings with senior police officers, and he began rubbing shoulders with members of the Establishment in Limerick. Mikey’s story about his road-to-Damascus conversion was soon paying dividends.

  Kelly was an attractive character for the media because he was probably the only criminal ever to speak so frankly about his exploits. It all added to his respectable image and led to a flattering documentary about his life, The Hard Man, which was broadcast on RTÉ in 1995. In it he bragged about his past as a ‘vicious, dangerous criminal’ who was addicted to booze and violence. The truth was that he was still a nasty, drunken brute who subjected his wife to constant beatings.

  Mikey took full advantage of his new-found respectability and set up a company, M and A Security, in 1991. The poacher turned gamekeeper inveigled lucrative contracts from businesses and the Corporation. Break-ins and vandalism were reduced when there was a Kelly sign over the door. It was a perfect, hugely profitable protection racket. Des O’Malley still believes that it was a dreadful mistake. ‘What really worried me about the situation was that it was an indication by public authority in this country that you could and should deal with criminals in the course of public administration and I felt that we’d all live to regret that. I rang the authorities to protest but the response was that Kelly was effective. But everyone knew that his [Kelly’s] modus operandi was breaking people’s legs. It served to give a foothold to the type of criminality that we have today.’

  By making Kelly ‘respectable’ the Corporation had sent out a toxic signal – in Limerick crime pays. The reality was that the gangster was a parasite. He used his new-found status as a protector of the people to collect money each week from the ordinary hard-pressed citizens of Southill. Kelly’s apparent acceptance by the Establishment made it seem like he could do what he wanted. This is a view shared by local TD and current Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan. ‘Mikey Kelly was running a protection racket and agents of the State were hiring him and paying him to continue with the protection,’ said Noonan, who has represented Limerick in the Dáil for over thirty years. ‘Kelly never put in security guards. All he did was put up the sign and sent the word out. The State should never have been involved in that because it validated crime.’

  But the cosy relationship between Kelly and the Gardaí turned sour when they began to investigate
his operation. In 1993 an associate of Kelly’s bought a pub in the city which became a popular haunt for the criminal fraternity. But in 1994 Garda Brendan Sheehan from Roxboro Station began to regularly inspect the premises, to ensure it adhered to the licensing laws. But Kelly’s associate didn’t take kindly to the ‘invasion’ and made complaints to Sheehan’s superiors. On one occasion he arrived in Roxboro Station at 2 a.m., demanding to know why the Garda had insisted that the pub shut its doors at closing time. Despite this Sheehan continued to do his job and raided the pub for after-hours drinking. At one stage Garda Sheehan reported that he had been followed home by a known criminal with links to Mikey Kelly from Roxboro Station one morning, when he finished his shift at 6 a.m.

  The confrontation took a more sinister turn when another associate of Kelly’s, a small-time gangster called James O’Gorman from Cork, claimed to Gardaí that there was a plot to murder Sheehan. O’Gorman said that a number of firearms had been brought in from England for the hit. The threats were taken seriously and, when a gun was found during a search of the home of one of Kelly’s associates, Garda Sheehan was transferred from Limerick to Ennis.

  Following the incident Mikey Kelly held a press conference to protest his innocence. A video was also played for the media which showed O’Gorman retracting his earlier claims and making counter-allegations that the Gardaí had put him up to it. Mikey Kelly had clearly organized the video session as he could be seen sitting across the room from O’Gorman. During the press conference Mikey Kelly bawled his eyes out and accused the police of victimization and not accepting that he was a reformed man. It was a performance that Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne would have been impressed with – although tears were not his thing.