Badfellas
Page 1
PAUL WILLIAMS
Badfellas
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE: THE LATE 1960S AND 1970S
1. The Beginning
2. Saor Eire
3. The Godfather
4. The Dunne Academy
5. The General
6. Turmoil
PART TWO: THE 1980S
7. The Human Wasteland
8. Going Down
9. The Ultimate Price
10. The Jewellery Job
11. Murder in Gangland
12. The Kidnap Gangs
13. Crime Incorporated
PART THREE: THE 1990S
14. End of an Era
15. An Evil Empire is Born
16. A New Order
17. The Munster Mafia
18. The Watershed
19. The Penguin
20. The Peacemaker
21. The Vacuum
PART FOUR: THE NOUGHTIES
22. Gang Wars
23. A City under Siege
24. The Dapper Don
25. Marlo’s Story
26. The Don’s Downfall
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
BADFELLAS
Paul Williams is Ireland’s most respected crime writer and journalist. Williams has been on the frontline of crime journalism in Ireland for almost twenty-five years exposing the crime lords and their rackets. A qualified criminologist, he has won a string of major awards for his courageous journalistic work, including Print Journalist of the year, Campaigning Journalist of the year, the Humbert Summer School International Media Award and the Irish Security Industry Association’s Premier Award. His previous best-sellers include The General, Gangland, Evil Empire, Crime Lords, The Untouchables and Crime Wars. Williams has researched, written and presented a number of major TV crime series, including award-winning Dirty Money (TV3) and Bad Fellas (RTÉ). He is a member of the internationally respected International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) based in Washington DC.
By the same author
The General
Secret Love
Gangland
Evil Empire
Crime Lords
The Untouchables
Crime Wars
TV Documentary Series
Dirty Money – The Story of the Criminal Assets Bureau (TV3)
Bad Fellas (RTÉ)
Dedicated to the memory of innocent businessman Roy Collins, who was murdered because his family stood up to evil. And to his courageous father, Steve, who has become a voice for the silent majority whose lives have been blighted by organized crime.
Also to the memories of all the innocent people whose lives have been cut short by Gangland killers.
Introduction
Since the late 1960s a nasty, brutal and violent parallel universe called Gangland has evolved in Ireland. Over the past four decades this dark underworld has destroyed countless lives, demoralized whole communities, and even threatened to undermine the commercial and social cohesion of an entire city. This is the world of organized crime, where life is cheap and the wages of sin are irresistibly tempting. Here power is seized by force, maintained through fear, and lost by the assassin’s bullet.
Badfellas is the story of how organized crime has gained a foothold in Irish society over the past forty years. It reveals how a generation of young petty thieves, delinquents and so-called revolutionaries emerged in the 1960s to bring an end to an era of superficial innocence. These new criminals were the founding fathers of Gangland. Together they ushered in a culture of guns and narcotics, murder and mayhem – and an alternative economy which today is worth over €1 billion a year.
This book tells the story of how organized crime evolved in each of the four decades, illustrating how the foundations were laid for the violent gang culture we have today. Badfellas tells the stories of the major players and events which have moulded the criminal underworld. It also examines how crime levels on the streets of the Republic were influenced by the fallout from the Northern Troubles and charts how the Godfathers and paramilitaries became indistinguishable from each other – and collectively tried to intimidate and undermine the wider society.
Badfellas provides a chilling insight into the phenomenon of the gangland murder, which first appeared in 1982 and which has escalated dramatically ever since. It traces the genesis of the gang wars in the Noughties, which were fuelled by the excesses of the Celtic Tiger, and claimed 200 lives in the process.
As Ireland continues to struggle under crippling debt and economic meltdown, the one group that will not accept redundancy are the citizens of Gangland. Badfellas tries to give an understanding of how we got to this stage in our social history – and how the story is far from over.
Welcome to Badfellas.
Paul Williams
October 2011
PART ONE
The Late 1960s and 1970s
1. The Beginning
Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966
Soldiers, airmen and sailors paraded in step down Dublin’s O’Connell Street, to the rousing drums of army bands. As they trooped past the reviewing stand in front of the GPO, the rumble of a 21-gun salute, coming from the grounds of Trinity College, could be heard in the background. Fighter jets and helicopters performed a flyover and then, as the Tricolour was raised, soldiers manning the ramparts on the roof fired a volley of shots in unison. Over 200,000 people were crammed into Dublin city centre, craning to catch a glimpse of the pomp and ceremony. Ireland was commemorating the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Easter Rising – and celebrating it as the catalyst of the hard-won Independence which followed. The ceremony was a hugely symbolic milestone in the history of the young Irish Republic. It was an opportunity to display the new State’s pride in the past and hopes for the future. Ireland was showing the world it had become a modern, peaceful, independent nation.
President Eamon De Valera, one of the original leaders of the Rising, took the salute. He stood on the steps of the historically iconic building, where fifty years earlier his comrade Padraig Pearse had read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to the bewildered Dubliners who were taking the air on the sunny, spring holiday. Within a week, the city centre was in ruins and Pearse and most of his fellow leaders were awaiting execution. The aftermath fuelled a new quest for freedom and was followed by the War of Independence and a treaty with Britain that led to civil war. Out of the blood and ashes emerged the Irish Free State. The Golden Jubilee remembering the Rebellion, and those who gave their lives for freedom, was an opportunity to consign the deeply divisive wounds of the Irish Civil War to the history books. The Republic was looking to the future with a new optimism.
In his address to the crowds De Valera declared: ‘Thanks be to God the dissensions and differences we have had down here [the South], they are now past, we are all on the straight road, marching again, side by side.’
But the 84-year-old President, the 900 medal-wearing veterans and the politicians who shared the reviewing stand could not have imagined where that ‘straight road’ was leading. Within a few short years the decades of peace the country had enjoyed since the Civil War would be shattered and forgotten, as terrorists and criminals brought the gun and the bomb back to the streets of Irish cities and towns.
The 1966 commemoration was a watershed in the history of organized crime in Ireland. It marked the twilight years of what many would come to regard as an Irish age of innocence. Behind the peaceful façade, a generation of juvenile delinquents were already cutting their criminal teeth.
Former Detective Superintendent Mick Finn spent thirty years as a cop in Store Street Station, in Dublin’s ‘Charlie’ or C District HQ. The police of C District covered the commercial heart of
the city around O’Connell Street, as well as some of its most deprived residential areas. It holds the record of being the busiest police station in the country since the foundation of the State. Finn remembers the 1960s as an era of innocence: ‘When you went out on the beat you had a baton, a whistle and perhaps a torch. There were very few patrol cars; there was one uniformed patrol car and a car for detectives. The crimes were innocent by comparison with today – mainly break-ins to shops, warehouses and stores and there was some pickpocketing and bicycle thefts. You also had break-ins into public houses or post offices, where professional safe crackers blew the safes and stole cash and insurance stamps. Within a decade or so that was all to change very dramatically.’
Despite its violent origins, Ireland had been an extraordinarily peaceful and law-abiding society since the establishment of the Free State. In fact the crime rate was so low that the Garda Síochána was allowed to decline in strength and there were discussions in Government about the viability of keeping some prisons open. In 1951 there were 6,904 Gardaí, but by 1963 that had fallen to 6,401. But behind the scenes a whole series of events and social factors were conspiring to create a period of unprecedented turmoil and crisis in Ireland. As the military forces marched in step down Dublin’s main boulevard, the leaders of the Republic strained to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room – Northern Ireland. Its partition as a separate State from the rest of the country in the Treaty that ended the War of Independence was the reason for the Civil War. It had remained a ticking time bomb since then – and an explosion was imminent.
Sectarian apartheid against the minority Catholic/Nationalist population by the Protestant/Unionist majority, and the denial of their basic civil rights, had turned the six counties into a tinder box. Both communities feared and loathed each other in equal measure. The 1916 Jubilee commemoration gave Loyalists an opportunity to intensify their persecution of Catholics. The terror group the Ulster Volunteer Force would officially declare war on the IRA, which was largely dormant at this point. Their only military act in years had been blowing up Nelson’s Pillar, in the middle of O’Connell Street, a few months before the celebrations. The commemorations also gave a political platform to the Rev. Ian Paisley, an implacable enemy of nationalists, the Republic and the Roman Church. He marked the occasion with a thanksgiving ceremony to thank the Lord that the Rebellion had been defeated. Over the next few years, the Northern Government feared it was losing its stranglehold over the Catholic population and literally tried to beat the civil rights movement into submission. The authorities’ violent rejection of a peaceful plea for equality lit the fuse. It finally exploded in the summer of 1969 when the North erupted with the Battle of the Bogside in Derry and anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast. The IRA then went through an acrimonious split in December 1969 that produced Provisional Sinn Féin and its so-called army, the Provisional IRA (‘Provos’), on one side and Official Sinn Féin and Official IRA (‘Stickies’) on the other. Two equally violent factions, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) emerged from the Loyalist side. The fallout ignited almost three decades of butchery, which became known as the Troubles.
Inevitably the bushfire spread to the South. In the early 1970s it threatened the very existence of the State. The Provos and their political wing, Sinn Féin, would do everything they could to destabilize the Republic and warp the institutions of the young State. Most significantly the Provos would also bring a new level of organization to crime as they robbed banks and payrolls throughout Ireland to raise funds for the ‘struggle’. They organized kidnappings, bombings and assassinations and insidiously agitated social unrest. The terrorists made crime look easy, as the Gardaí and legislature were ill-equipped and unprepared for the era of the gun. The number of illegal firearms on the streets increased and so did the willingness to use them.
Added to this highly volatile situation was the emergence of a cohort of angry young men who were attracted by the lucrative opportunities available in the new business of crime. By the time De Valera spoke at the 1966 Easter Parade, these new Irish rebels were well on their way down a different road to the straight one he had envisaged. Many of the young miscreants appearing in the juvenile courts at the time would become household names over the next four decades, for all the wrong reasons. Some were destined to become major players on the international crime scene and even feature in Hollywood movies. Names such as Dunne, Cahill, Cunningham, Hutch, Mitchell and Gilligan were already appearing on charge sheets in stations across Dublin. They were also listed as inmates in the notorious industrial and reformatory schools around the country. When they reached maturity these law-breakers would create a Republic of their own – an elusive brutal world called Gangland. They would be the leaders of this parallel society, but unlike the men of 1916, these rebels would become synonymous with fear and intimidation.
By 1966, the social factors which would contribute to the explosion in serious crime had lurked, like a festering sore, behind the façade of normality that had prevailed since the foundation of the State. The crippling deprivation of a marginalized underclass had been carefully ignored by the new rulers of the fledgling Republic, even though they’d promised to relieve the harshness of colonial oppression.
The Democratic Programme of the first Dáil in 1919 outlined the social vision for a free Ireland as the War of Independence from British rule began. It basically promised that things were about to get a lot better – just as soon as freedom was achieved. They declared that there would be prosperity and equality for all. The leaders were particularly unambiguous about their plans for the care of the nation’s children: ‘It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter, but that all shall be provided with the means and facilities requisite for their proper education and training as Citizens of a Free and Gaelic Ireland.’
But the founding fathers soon forgot their revolutionary rhetoric and reneged on their side of the deal.
In the first years of the new nation, industrial unrest among workers, looking for their share of the Independence dividend, was put down with the full force of the Government’s boot. All that had changed, it appeared, was the nationality of the hand holding the whip. The respected historian Professor Diarmaid Ferriter noted in his acclaimed 2010 TV documentary series, The Limits of Liberty, that despite the high-minded aspirations, life was to get a lot worse under the Tricolour and the Free State. While much was promised, little was delivered. He observed that the Government was preoccupied only by power and was controlled by small elites.
The State and the Church formed a powerful, conservative alliance. They demanded unquestioning acceptance and blind obedience from their subjects. The relationship was later given expression through the close association between the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, and Eamon De Valera. Between them they would dominate Irish life for forty years. McQuaid, who reigned from 1940 to 1972, was an admirer of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In his role as custodian of Irish morality, McQuaid zealously used Hoover’s methods to keep tabs on people from all walks of life. According to his biographer, the writer John Cooney, McQuaid ‘imposed his iron will on politics and society by instilling fear among his clergy and people’.
The partnership ensured that an undemocratic Church, with a mandate only from God and the Pope, would play a pivotal role in maintaining the steadfastly conservative State. There was no room for new ideas or social progress, for fear that they might undermine the morality of the nation – and challenge the power of those in charge. The Establishment ensured that dissent was excluded and controversy was buried.
After Independence in 1922, Ireland slid into a stultifying rut that led to the stagnation of the socio-economic life of the country. Any semblance of the life and romantic ideals which the socialists and poets who led the 1916 Rebel
lion had fought for were obliterated during the grim 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. It became clear that some of the State’s founding fathers held the lower classes, the people they claimed to represent, in barely disguised contempt. And nowhere did this harsh attitude become more evident than in the treatment of children.
By 1930, the problems of rape, sexual abuse of minors and infanticide were prevalent in Irish society. A judge in Clare even called his court the ‘dirty assizes’ such was the volume of sex-related cases coming before him. In response the Government established a commission, chaired by barrister William Carrigan, in June 1930. Its mandate was to investigate the disturbing level of sexual crimes throughout the country and to compile a report which would provide the basis for changes in legislation and social policy. The Commission examined illegitimacy, the age of consent, homosexuality (a crime until 1993), child sexual abuse, rape and prostitution.
The Garda Commissioner of the day, Eoin O’Duffy, told the Commission that the sexual abuse of girls under 13 was ‘alarming’. In his submission O’Duffy reported on what he viewed as the general immorality of the country: ‘An alarming aspect is the number of cases with interference with girls under 15, and even under 13 and under 11, which come before the courts. These are in most cases heard of accidentally by the Garda, and are very rarely the result of a direct complaint. It is generally agreed that reported cases do not exceed 15 per cent of those actually happening.’ The Commissioner also noted: ‘Offences on children between the ages of 9 and 16 are, unfortunately, increasing in the country.’
The Carrigan Commission reported in August 1931 and made 21 recommendations for legislative change, including increasing the age of consent to 18 years. But the report was considered so sensitive it was decided that it should not be discussed in the Dáil. Instead, it was buried and forgotten.
This unwillingness to tackle social issues was central to the ethos of governments at the time. Kevin O’Higgins, the first Minister for Home Affairs (later to be the Department of Justice), quickly dismissed the intent of the 1919 Democratic Programme as ‘largely poetry’. In The Limits of Liberty, Professor Diarmaid Ferriter uncovered long-buried documents that betrayed the true feelings of some of the people in power. The evidence was contained in a memo from William T. Cosgrave to his colleague Austin Stack, and concerned the children reared in the hated workhouses. In May 1921, while both were ministers in that first government, Cosgrave wrote: ‘People reared in Workhouses are no great acquisition to the community and they have no idea whatever of civic responsibility. Their highest aim is to live at the expense of the rate payers. Consequently, it would be a decided gain if they were to take it into their heads to emigrate. When they go abroad they are thrown on their own responsibilities and have to work, whether they like it or not.’