Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  Three days after Judge’s funeral, Mark Dwyer suffered a chillingly similar fate to Jock Corbally. The Psycho’s sidekick was horrifically tortured for hours by drug-dealer Joe ‘Cotton Eye’ Delaney and then shot in the head. The 51-year-old Delaney was a business partner of both Judge and Dwyer. A few months earlier a large consignment of ecstasy which Delaney had paid for in Holland was ‘stolen’ when it arrived in Dublin. The drug-dealer was a dangerously unhinged individual whose obsessive, paranoid behaviour was exacerbated through constant cocaine abuse. He began to suspect that Mark Dwyer had been responsible for the rip-off. At the time, PJ Judge had already confided in Delaney that he was planning to kill Dwyer, because he suspected him of talking to the media about the Jock Corbally incident.

  In the early hours of Saturday 14 December, Delaney’s son Scott, a close friend of Dwyer’s, and a number of other hoods abducted Mark and brought him to the drug-dealer’s home near Naas, County Kildare. Over the next three hours, Cotton Eye tortured and beat Dwyer in a bid to force him to reveal where the stolen drugs were hidden. Eye-witnesses later described a horrific scene, worthy of a Quentin Tarantino movie. Delaney used a jemmy nail bar, an iron bar, a pick-axe handle and a number of knives on his victim. Dwyer was repeatedly stabbed in the arms and a shotgun was pressed so hard into his chest that the track of the barrels could be clearly seen on his skin. Joe Delaney put on a CD by M People and turned up the volume to drown out Dwyer’s screams of pain. When the torture session was over, Delaney was none the wiser about what had happened to his precious drugs, but he decided to finish Dwyer off anyway.

  Delaney’s men took the bloodied bundle that was Mark Dwyer out of the house and dumped him into the boot of a car. They drove to Scribblestown Lane, which would become a popular place for gangland executions and a dumping ground for bodies. Dwyer was thrown on to his knees and sat there hunched over, still tied and bound. A sawn-off shotgun was placed against the back of his skull and a single shot ended his agony. Cotton Eye presided over the execution. He then had his son Scott tied up, and left him lying semi-conscious beside his former friend. Delaney wanted it to look like vigilantes were responsible for the outrage. But after a major Garda investigation Joe Delaney was charged and stood trial. A number of witnesses, including his son Scott, testified in the case. In 1999, Cotton Eye was jailed for life. It was the first gangland murder ever to be successfully prosecuted before the courts.

  In another sequel to the Jock Corbally story, an underworld enforcer called Anthony ‘Chester’ Beatty was shot dead in 1997 because he was suspected of taking part in the Dwyer murder. A criminal associate of Rossi Walsh, Martin Comerford, was charged with the murder. The day before his trial was due to start Comerford gave his friend, Paul McCarthy, a shotgun. He asked McCarthy to shoot him in the leg. At the last second, as McCarthy was about to pull the trigger, Comerford pulled the gun up to his chest and took the full blast from the gun. It was suicide by proxy. Despite the tragic circumstances of the case McCarthy was later convicted and jailed for life for the murder of his friend.

  The final chapter of the Jock Corbally curse came when Declan Griffin also found himself at the business end of a hit man’s gun. On 5 April 2003, he was shot dead in a pub in Inchicore by a notorious gangland assassin called Shay Wildes. Griffin had met the killer to discuss a hit he wanted to organize. The drug-dealer, who was wearing a bullet-proof vast, sat down at a table and handed Wildes an envelope containing €5,000 in cash. The hit man put the money in his pocket and then shot Griffin in the head. Wildes had received a better offer – to whack his client. Fear and intimidation later ensured that the hit man was acquitted of the execution because witnesses were too scared to testify.

  By the end of the 1990s, the new generation of criminals was entering an underworld that had been in existence for thirty years. Organized crime had become an integral component of contemporary Irish life. In the process life had become a lot cheaper. The public were no longer easily shocked by the activities of serious criminals. At the same time Ireland’s economy was on the up and was about to give birth to the Celtic Tiger. With it came a boom in the drug trade.

  In Gangland the departure of Godfathers like Judge and Gilligan had left a very large vacuum that had to be filled. With vast profits to be made, the void was quickly filled by gangs of volatile young men who were emerging from the sprawling working-class estates in cities around the country. The thugs created an atmosphere of intimidation and fear as they used their neighbourhoods as hubs for organizing business. If anyone tried to stand up to them or was suspected of calling the police, their homes were burned down. The corrosive influence of the hoods on communities extended to the younger kids who were drawn in by what they perceived as the glamorous gangster lifestyle.

  The most notorious example of the new breed of thugs to emerge was two close friends, Shane Coates and Stephen Sugg from Blanchardstown, West Dublin. Together they became one of the most feared and violent partnerships in gangland – better known as the Westies. Coates’ reputation for extreme violence was so powerful that he was dubbed the ‘New Psycho’ in acknowledgement of his status as PJ Judge’s replacement.

  Assistant Commissioner Tony Quilter, the former head of the Garda National Drug Unit, explained their arrival on the scene. ‘Post the Gilligan gang there was a flight of the more experienced drug-traffickers to Europe. That was where they could prosper; that was where they had the contacts and where they needed to be in terms of organizing distribution, logistics and finance,’ he said. ‘It left a vacuum here in Ireland and into that vacuum came other smaller groups, keen to make a name for themselves but ruthless in their approach. These gangs were typified by the Westies. They were in-your-face criminals who had scant regard for law and order, who perpetrated misery and violence throughout their community.’

  Coates and Sugg, who were both born in the early 1970s, had been best friends since their early teens. They began their careers as joyriders and worked their way up to more serious crimes. From the beginning former neighbours, criminal associates and police recall how the pair had a natural predisposition to violence. Even as teenagers they had fearsome reputations when they got involved in a number of feuds in which guns were used. In 1990 Coates was shot in the stomach and seriously injured. As a result of the attack he was forced to wear a colostomy bag.

  One officer who knew the youthful terrors recalled: ‘You could see then that they were both very close and Sugg was greatly influenced by Coates. They had very little fear of anyone and they were very violent.’ Coates and Sugg both notched up extensive criminal records for car theft, robbery and violence, and served a number of jail sentences. Coates was the dominant partner in the criminal enterprise. ‘Coates led Sugg around by the nose. Without Coates, Sugg was nothing,’ recalled a former associate.

  In the same month that Veronica Guerin was murdered, they were both sentenced to five and a half years each for attempted robbery, possession of firearms, ammunition and car theft. In January 1997, a judge reviewed the sentences and decided to give the aspiring mobsters a chance to mend their ways, by suspending the final three years. However, as a strict condition of their release, the court ordered the pair to enter a bond not to associate with each other on the outside. It was a clear recognition that together they were a toxic partnership. Probation reports handed in to the court suggested that both men stood a better chance of going straight if they were separated. But the dangerous duo had no intention of either quitting crime or breaking up. The following July their friendship cost them their liberty when their sentences were re-activated, after police produced evidence that they had broken the court order. In December 1998 the court lifted the ban on their association and the Westies were free men again.

  From the time of their first release from prison, Coates and Sugg began establishing their drug empire. The deadly duo used the same two devices as PJ Judge to establish their business – extreme violence and fear. The Westies established contacts with heroin suppliers
in Birmingham and used brutal force to take control of the drug scene. Dealers and pushers who were not working for them were severely beaten and threatened with death if they didn’t become employees. Addicts were warned that if they didn’t deal with the Westies then they would be dealing with no one. One addict later recalled: ‘If you wanted gear [heroin] then you got it from them. If you dealt with anyone else or pushed gear for another dealer, then you were looking at a stint in intensive care.’ Several heroin-dealers either moved out of Blanchardstown or began working for the Westies.

  Coates and Sugg assembled a large gang of young criminals and addicts to run their drug-dealing operation on the streets. Some worked at cutting up the heroin, breaking it down and bagging it into street deals, while others acted as couriers and sellers. Sellers in turn sold batches of deals on to street-pushers. The gang also did business with other young drug gangs across Dublin. Gangs in the area who were involved in the distribution of cannabis or ecstasy were forced to pay a ‘tax’ to the Westies if they wanted to continue walking, breathing and dealing. One gang member recalled: ‘They’re mental. They beat you and they’d kill you. They’ve no fear of anybody. They think they’re bullet-proof.’ By the end of the decade, the Westies had amassed a fortune and had an estimated yearly turnover of over £1 million. The operation was well organized, well equipped and very efficient.

  The Westies copper-fastened their reputations when heroin-dealer Pascal Boland decided to set up his own operation on their patch. A former associate of PJ Judge, the 43-year-old father-of-one had been mixed up in the trade for many years and had been jailed for seven years in the 1980s for dealing heroin. When he received an initial warning from the gangsters, the veteran laughed at them: ‘You’re fuckin’ nobodies, now fuck off with yerselves.’

  On the evening of 27 January 1999, Sugg and Coates were waiting for Boland when he arrived at his home at Ashcroft Court in Mulhuddart. Coates confronted Boland and repeated his earlier warnings. When Boland laughed in his face, Coates pulled out a gun and shot him seven times. Coates then ran to a stolen getaway car driven by Sugg.

  In October 1999 Detective Inspector Todd O’Loughlin was one of the senior officers attached to a special team drawn from the Western Garda division to investigate the Westies.

  ‘Basically they were joyriders, tearaways and small-time criminals prior to the demise of the Gilligan gang. But they saw the opportunity of filling the vacuum and creating an empire for themselves in West Dublin,’ he revealed. ‘I have no doubt that they wanted to enslave the community out there in West Dublin. They realized that we had taken down the Gilligan group from within and they ensured, by acts of grotesque violence, that this was not going to happen to them.’

  O’Loughlin’s squad compiled a list of 40 serious attacks the Westies had carried out in just over a year. The gang had used guns, baseball bats, knives, broken bottles, batons, iron bars, jump leads and vice grips on their victims. A drug-addict and mother who owed them money had lighted cigarettes held to her breast, and another addict was thrown off one of the tower-blocks in Ballymun. But there had been many more incidents that the police didn’t know about. Victims were approached and asked if they wished to press charges. No one was prepared to make a complaint. The Westies had successfully insulated their operation with a wall of silence.

  O’Loughlin commented: ‘They used different methods of torture. I recall instances where they used jump leads to electrocute people. They used vice grips on people’s fingers and genitalia. They used baseball bats to beat people and of course they began shooting and murdering rivals and associates that they didn’t trust. One guy was beaten with iron bars first and then he was held down and his face was sliced up and it took over sixty stitches and several blood transfusions to put him together again.’

  The Westies moved to live in Spain in the summer of 2003 because they were getting too much heat from the Gardaí. At the same time their former associates, brothers Mark and Andrew Glennon, moved in to take over their patch when they murdered Sugg’s younger brother, Bernard ‘Verb’ Sugg, in August 2003. The Westies were planning to return to Dublin to settle the score, but they never got the chance. Their reign of terror came to an abrupt end when they were lured to a warehouse in Alicante in January 2004. The Westies’ fatal mistake was that they thought they could throw their weight around in Alicante like they had done in Blanchardstown. As they walked into the warehouse, two other Irish criminals shot them dead and then buried their bodies under the concrete floor. Sugg’s and Coates’ remains were eventually found in the summer of 2006 after an informant told the police about the hit.

  By the time the Westies were exhumed, the mindless, brutal violence they were synonymous with had become the norm throughout Gangland. The new millennium would be an era of unprecedented violence.

  PART FOUR

  The Noughties

  22. Gang Wars

  In the history of organized crime in Ireland, the first decade of the new millennium will be remembered as an era of unprecedented mayhem, bloodshed and murder. Since 2000 narcotics have been at the heart of all organized criminal activity in Ireland. At the height of the economic boom, the Irish drug trade was estimated to be worth in the region of €1 billion. It led to a proliferation of armed mobs competing for a slice of the action – and a dramatic increase in violence. A virulent species of ruthless, gun-toting, juvenile thugs emerged, for whom life became as cheap as the price of a heroin fix. The volatile mobsters showed that there were no longer any boundaries beyond which they would not go, particularly in Dublin and Limerick.

  There was no official declaration that hostilities had begun, but Gangland quickly descended into a state of all-out war. Murder was now the only option for resolving ‘business’ problems in the corporate world of the drug-trafficker. In 1993 there were three gang-related executions in Ireland. Ten years later, in 2003, that figure had risen to 20. Hit men improved their accuracy, going on trips to Eastern Europe and the USA to train in the use of firearms. At home, thugs as young as 18 and 19 equipped themselves with the most sophisticated hardware available – the Glock-automatic being the preferred weapon of choice.

  The most disturbing aspect of the new underworld was that the cocaine-crazed hoodlums no longer seemed to care who they killed. So far this century the death toll has reached almost 200. The list of victims included several innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or had stood up to the hoods. The callous murders of people like Roy Collins, Shane Geoghegan, Joseph Rafferty, Donna Cleary and Anthony Campbell illustrated the depths to which criminals, bereft of humanity, were prepared to sink. Hundreds of other people – both innocent and not so innocent – were also injured and maimed in the madness.

  The first decade of the century was marked by a string of blood feuds in Dublin and Limerick which turned several thugs into household names. Martin ‘Marlo’ Hyland, Eamon ‘the Don’ Dunne, Wayne Dundon, Freddie Thompson and Brian Rattigan became synonymous with the barbarism. At any one time, Gardaí had a list of at least forty gangsters who were classified as potential targets of the warring sides.

  Gangland’s new generation even reintroduced the bomb to Irish streets, in a bid to wipe out their opposition. In the new millennium the services of the Irish Army Bomb Squad have been more in demand than at the height of the Troubles. The savagery earned Ireland the dubious reputation of being one of the most violent societies in Western Europe. In 2006 there were more gangland murders in Dublin than there were in London, a city with a population thirteen times larger.

  The wild excesses of the Celtic Tiger generation fed the crisis. As salaries soared, lifestyles changed and bad habits were acquired. If heroin was synonymous with the doom and gloom of the 1980s, cocaine was the poison of choice for the good times of the Noughties. By the middle of the decade, more Irish people per capita were snorting the Colombian marching-powder than anywhere else in Europe. In the process the profits from drug-trafficking rocketed. With so much money
at stake, greed turned young hoods into merciless monsters. The level of violence became the barometer to gauge the amount of drug activity on the streets.

  But Gangland’s expanding population could no longer use the excuse that social deprivation and a lack of opportunities had caused their involvement in crime. Unlike the Cahills and the Dunnes, the vast majority of the new brat pack did not grow up hungry. In the early years of the new decade there was practically full employment, with good wages on offer even for the unskilled. Crime was a career choice. Inner-city community activist Eddie Naughton knew the kids who became mobsters in the Noughties. ‘What happened was that there was a generation coming up who knew there was phenomenal money in drug-dealing. These kids weren’t interested in work because there were easier ways of making money,’ he revealed.

  Retired English doctor and psychiatrist Dr Tony Daniels, who worked with inmates in the UK prison system, has argued that liberal social agendas in the West have contributed greatly to the creation of a criminal underclass. The liberal philosophy of loving the criminal, not the crime has given young thugs an excuse for their behaviour – it’s all society’s fault. Daniels has little time for politically correct explanations about why young men become involved in serious crime: ‘The idea that criminals lack self-esteem is preposterous. The problem is not that they lack self-esteem, the problem is that they have far too much of it. They haven’t been humiliated nearly enough and haven’t been told how stupid they are. People fight turf wars and by doing so they become king of the castle and they feel big and important and actually, you can see it in their swagger.’

  The violent Westies in Blanchardstown, West Dublin were the pathfinders, epitomizing the evolving gang culture. They provided the first clear indication of the changing psyche of the average Irish criminal. In an interview for the RTÉ TV series, Bad Fellas, Assistant Commissioner John O’Mahoney commented: ‘I would describe the modern-day criminal as unpredictable and paranoid; he is totally protective of his turf and he will go to any lengths to protect his business.’