On 10 February 1975, six armed men burst into the Dun Laoghaire home of Robert Halpin. He was the manager of West’s jewellers in Grafton Street in Dublin, one of the longest-established jewellers in the capital. The gang, which included Martin Cahill, held his terrified wife and three children hostage while they waited for Halpin to return home at midnight. When he walked through the front door he was surrounded and manhandled by the raiders. They demanded that he take them to West’s immediately. The jeweller told them that the safes could not be opened until 8 a.m., so the gang held him and his family overnight.
The following morning, three members of the gang brought the manager to the store, while the others stayed with his family, to ensure that nothing went wrong. They forced him to hand over £170,000 worth of gems. Before they left the jewellers, they tied Halpin up and took his car. At the same time, the other members of the gang released Halpin’s family.
Christy Dunne had pulled off another record – the biggest jewellery robbery in the State’s history. Shamie had arranged to sell the loot to a London fence called Les Beavis after the robbery. Beavis was due to pick the jewels up a few days later but Bronco disagreed. As head of the ‘family’, he insisted that he would dispose of the jewels himself. It was to be a big mistake.
A few weeks after the robbery, word reached the Central Detective Unit (CDU) in Dublin Castle that a man, high on their ‘most wanted’ list, was trying to offload the proceeds of the West’s robbery. Bronco had put the word out through the gangland grapevine that he had some very hot merchandise for sale. Detective Superintendent Mick Sullivan had suspected Christy Dunne was behind the job, but he’d had nothing to go on until informants tipped him off.
Det. Supt Sullivan used his limited resources to set up a sting operation to trap Dunne. The detective contacted a dodgy businessman who owed the police a favour. The businessman agreed to set up a meeting with Bronco, after he’d established that he was interested in buying the stolen jewellery. The first meeting took place on 13 March. Dunne offered the businessman the jewellery for a bargain price of £45,000, cash. The businessman said that he’d try to set up a deal with an American buyer but he needed to see some of the merchandise first and value it for himself.
Bronco agreed and the next day he brought the businessman to a field outside the city. Two members of the ‘firm’ produced bags containing jewels from the West’s heist. Keeping his Garda handler in the loop throughout, the informer continued to negotiate with Dunne over a number of days, until a figure of £37,000 was agreed.
The following day the businessman and Bronco went to the Dunne family home on Rutland Avenue, Crumlin. Security was tight – two gang members guarded the front of the house and there were two more at the back. The loot was hidden upstairs. It took the bogus buyer a few hours to sort through and itemize the jewels. Later that night, he reported back to Det. Supt Sullivan and his team. Christy was taking the bait.
When the informant returned home he got a surprise – Bronco was waiting for him. He was worried that the cops were on to him. The mob boss insisted that the businessman store the loot overnight in his house. The informant had no option but to agree and Dunne left. The businessman immediately called his police handlers and his house was placed under surveillance. When he returned for the jewels Bronco would be walking into a trap.
The following afternoon, Dunne arrived at the businessman’s house. He thought he was coming to collect £37,000 in cash. Det. Supt Sullivan and his squad swooped as Dunne placed the jewels in the boot of the businessman’s car. The Godfather had finally been caught red-handed. He was even wearing one of the solid gold bracelets that had been stolen from West’s. The police reckoned they had a cast-iron case against him. He was arrested and charged with the West’s robbery and receiving the stolen jewellery. Despite Garda objections, Bronco was released on bail.
Christy Dunne might have had serious charges hanging over him but it was still business as usual. Bronco continued to direct the family’s operations and oversee his academy of crooks. He was determined to fight the system and win his case. Like most career villains, he had a good working knowledge of the law – or thought he had. Bronco said he learned the law when he was in Mountjoy Prison, under the tutorship of an older criminal who had a library of law books in his cell. And whenever he or any of his brothers were in a tight spot with the law they invariably cried ‘stitch-up’. Years later, standing in front of the Four Courts building, he portrayed himself as a victim in his war with the law. ‘At one stage [in the 1970s] I had fourteen trials pending in this court and was acquitted of all of them except one. Every crime in the book I was charged with. It was a continuous battle and I remember I was in the law courts for years. I don’t think I gave them [the police] the run around. It’s just that they were anxious to put me away because they obviously considered me to be a threat,’ the ageing hippie said, without the faintest hint of irony.
The ‘firm’s’ next major target was Brereton’s jewellers and pawnshop on Capel Street in Dublin city centre. On 19 June 1976, members of staff were getting ready to close the shop. The last customers of the day were three ladies from Belfast who’d come down for a day’s shopping in Dublin. They were chatting about how much they were enjoying the break from the tensions of the Troubles when a priest walked into the shop, and produced a handgun. As the ‘priest’, Bronco’s brother Robert, pulled a mask up to cover his face, three other masked men ran in behind him. They were Joey Skerrit, Shamie Dunne and Londoner Patrick O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan, who had Irish parents, had done time in prison with Shamie. He had recently joined the Dunne ‘family’ firm.
The Brereton’s heist was a particularly violent crime as the four hoods showed no mercy to their victims. The owner of the store, John Brereton, made a run for the door but was grabbed and pistol-whipped by two of the raiders. He fell to the ground and one of them continued beating him. When his son, John Junior, came to his rescue he was also set upon and severely beaten. The shop owner was dragged into the basement where he was hooded and tied up. His injured son, the other staff members, and the three women who had been enjoying a stress-free day in the South, were also brought to the basement. The gang rifled through the drawers upstairs. When they couldn’t open one of the safes they dragged John Brereton up to unlock it. When he said he didn’t have the key his son, who was bleeding heavily, was dragged upstairs and a gun was held to his head. ‘Give me the fucking money,’ the ‘priest’ demanded. When Brereton refused, Robert Dunne told the raider holding the gun to count to ten and then ‘blow it off’. One of the shop assistants produced the key when the raider reached ‘six’.
As the gang emptied the contents of the safe, John Brereton pleaded with them to leave the pawn stock because it included important family heirlooms belonging to local people. The working-class hoods didn’t care and took it all. One of them threatened him: ‘If you don’t shut up your head will be blown off and your body brought to the Wicklow Mountains and you will never be found.’
In all the raiders took £60,000 worth of assorted jewellery and £5,000 in cash. None of the haul was ever recovered. As they were leaving, O’Sullivan told them in his cockney accent: ‘It’s for the cause; the insurance will look after it.’
John Brereton and his son were hospitalized after the savage attack. The father received 30 stitches and his son 65. In a series of searches in the homes of Joey Skerrit, Robert, Shamie, and their father, Bronco Senior, the Gardaí found items which linked them all to the robbery and the theft of the getaway car. In a line up, two of the victims pointed out Robert Dunne as the man who’d pretended to be the priest.
The four hoods, including Bronco Senior, were charged with the violent robbery. Christy Junior, Henry, Gerard and Larry later claimed that they were drinking with the three men when the crime took place. Three years later Robert Dunne was the only member of the gang who stood trial for the robbery. He was acquitted. Robert’s accomplice, Joey Skerrit, was accidentally shot dead six ye
ars later by a fellow gang member during a robbery in Limerick.
Bronco Senior was interviewed eight years later by the journalist Tom McGurk, for a special Channel Four documentary on Dublin’s drug scene. McGurk asked him about his sons’ criminal activity. The old man sat next to his wife, in front of a fire, drinking whiskey. She was on a bottle of stout.
McGurk asked old Dunne, ‘Were you aware that your sons were robbing banks?’
‘I was yes. Yes and I quite admired them for it.’
‘Why?’
‘As long as nobody was hurt.’
‘Why?’
‘They were getting money the handy way; there was no loss of life; no malicious damage or injuries to anybody.’
‘But they are taking someone else’s money?’
‘Yes, but how do you know whose money it is in the banks. How did they get it?’
It was obvious that old Bronco had passed on his selective memory to his sons.
After the Brereton robbery, Patrick O’Sullivan and Christy Junior hatched a plan to cash in stolen drafts and cheques from a bank in Dublin city centre. The cockney was getting the precious documents, together with authorized signatures, from a crooked porter at the bank. They decided to cash several of them, one after the other, in Allied Irish Bank branches in London. Unfortunately the lackey they sent to cash them in screwed up. When he handed in the first draft, which Dunne had filled out for £15,000, the gang member misread it and asked for £1,500 instead. Staff got suspicious and asked him to come back later. The henchman’s survival instincts kicked in and he headed back to Dublin. A second runner was sent to try again, but he was immediately caught and ended up getting a 12-month jail sentence.
As Christy Junior’s trial for the West’s heist was approaching, he needed funds. Shortly after 8 p.m. on 11 January 1978, just a month before the trial, a post office van carrying a consignment of cash and jewellery from the Munster mail train was stopped by a uniformed Garda. The van was en route to the Central Sorting Office, which was located in Sheriff Street, in Dublin’s north inner-city. When the van came to a halt, the ‘cop’ pulled out a gun and pointed it at the driver. At the same moment Christy Dunne, who was also armed and masked, appeared at the other window. The ‘cop’ and the gangster ordered the driver and his helper to get into the back and to keep their mouths shut. The ‘Garda’ was Paddy Shanahan, a recent recruit to the Dunne ‘firm’ and one of the most unlikely armed robbers in the history of Irish Badfellas.
Unlike his partners-in-crime, 32-year-old Shanahan from Kill, County Kildare, couldn’t blame society for ending up on the Dunnes’ side of the tracks. Shanahan came from a respectable middle-class family who lived in the heart of horse-breeding country. As a young man he was an excellent student and sportsman and was never in trouble with the law. The teachers at the Christian Brothers secondary school he’d attended in Naas had high hopes for young Shanahan. He left with a good Leaving Certificate and spent a year studying English and History at University College Dublin, before dropping out. He then ran an auctioneering and tarmacadam business for a while. But the Christian Brothers’ star pupil soon discovered that he had a natural aptitude for another form of business – crime – and he began operating with another aspiring gangster, John ‘the Coach’ Traynor. Through Traynor, Shanahan met other Dublin-based villains. Considered an ‘outsider’ at first, he gradually won the trust of Joey Skerrit and did some robberies with him. Skerrit introduced the well-spoken ‘culchie’ to Christy and Henry, who regarded him as a very strange character. The brothers accepted him into the ‘family’ more out of curiosity than anything else. Many years later, Henry Dunne described Shanahan’s motivation: ‘He loved crime; he was fascinated by the whole thing. He wasn’t like the rest of us. We did it for a living; he did it for the buzz. He loved dressing up [for a job] and handling guns.’
Shanahan and Dunne jumped into the front of the post van and drove it to a disused storage yard on a side street near the derelict docklands. Other members of the gang, including Larry and Shamie Dunne, were in another car covering the action in case they were needed. The hijackers ordered the postal workers to get out of the van and lie on the ground. Shanahan, who had robbed mail trains with Traynor, knew what he was looking for. He grabbed seven, specially coloured bags carrying registered mail, which often contained cash and cheques. The two raiders then jumped into a waiting getaway car and drove to a house on Dublin’s north-side to empty the bags.
Christy and Shamie took the cash and selected packages away to sort through them. They had a strict rule that associates did not get to count the proceeds from a heist. The robbery hadn’t been very worthwhile, as most of the cash in the haul was worthless. The notes had been perforated before being returned to the Central Bank for incineration. Shamie dumped a large batch of small, brown envelopes into a skip, thinking they were of no value. But a few days later the newspapers reported that over £100,000 worth of industrial diamonds, stolen in the post office van robbery, had been found in a skip in North Dublin. Shamie, who was illiterate, couldn’t read the words ‘Industrial Diamonds’ on the envelopes and hadn’t bothered to ask one of his brothers what they said. He went back to the skip in the forlorn hope that the cops might have missed some of the haul. When he found nothing, he vented his anger by beating up an innocent man who just happened to be walking past.
Despite his indefatigable bravado, Bronco decided to go into hiding before his trial for the West’s robbery, which was due to start on 23 February 1978. Not only was he avoiding a possible conviction but he had also run foul of another criminal family. Christy Junior had been caught having an affair with a daughter of the family, who was much younger than him. A bench warrant was issued for Bronco’s arrest when he failed to appear. Dunne had achieved his youthful ambition – whether he liked it or not. As he was about to reach his fortieth birthday, his name and photograph were circulated to every police station in the country.
The following day, 24 February, West’s jewellers was robbed for a second time. Detectives uncovered leads which pointed in the direction of one of Bronco’s pals, Eamon Saurin. The two blaggers were sharing the same safe house in Sundrive Road, Crumlin. Saurin was an armed robber, originally from Liberty House, off Sean McDermott Street in Dublin’s north inner-city, who was wanted by English police for the robbery and murder of a pensioner in 1972. He had been arrested in Dublin on an extradition warrant in 1974 but jumped bail during the proceedings.
Almost a month later, on 19 March 1978, Saurin and a criminal associate, Laurence ‘Clicky’ Maguire, met another armed robber called Christy McAuley from Donnycarney, North Dublin. After a booze-fuelled night, Saurin accused McAuley of ‘riding’ his girlfriend while he had been on the run. McAuley, who was gay, told him he was wrong. Later that night McAuley gave Saurin and his friend Clicky Maguire a lift home. On the way Saurin asked McAuley to pull in on Killester Avenue. When McAuley stopped the car, Saurin, who was sitting in the passenger seat, pulled a pistol and shot him twice in the head. The injured man managed to get out of the car but collapsed on the pavement. Saurin put two more rounds into him for good measure. ‘He won’t shag my chick again,’ Saurin told Maguire, who was stunned by what had happened. Maguire made a full statement to Gardaí the next day. Saurin was quickly identified and a manhunt ordered. Christy Dunne’s associate was now wanted for murder in two jurisdictions.
Two days later, the Bank of Ireland branch in Finglas was held up by an armed gang and relieved of almost £19,000 in cash. This time Henry Dunne was charged with the heist, after a witness picked him out on an identity parade. By now the courts, like the police, were becoming familiar with the ways of major villains. As usual, Henry applied for bail and it was granted – but for the ground-breaking sum of £20,000. This was an astronomical amount of money for the time and is equivalent to approximately €120,000 in today’s values. Despite the fact that he had no visible means of income and was officially unemployed, Henry Dunne had no problem stumping up t
he cash for the court and he was released. It would be another 18 years before the State would finally have the powers to investigate the source of a criminal’s wealth. Six months later the charge against Dunne was dropped, on the instructions of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
Meanwhile Christy had decided to give himself up. Before he handed himself in he wrote to several journalists in Dublin, to ensure he got the maximum publicity for himself. One letter he wrote to Sunday World journalist Sean Boyne was headed: ‘Christy Dunne on the run, 9th April, 1978.’ In the letter Bronco made wild allegations that he was the victim of Garda corruption. He claimed that a detective had tried to shoot him and that he was only saved because bystanders got in the way. He never offered any proof to back up his claims.
When Bronco stood trial for the West’s heist in the Central Criminal Court in June 1978, Mr Justice Finlay directed that the robbery charge be dropped due to a lack of evidence. Dunne now only faced a charge of receiving the stolen jewellery. The DPP decided not to call the businessman who had acted for the Gardaí, for fear that his life might be in danger. Intimidation had worked in Bronco’s favour again. His defence team argued a convincing case that he could not be accused of receiving the stolen jewellery because the bags were in the informant’s car when the Gardaí swooped. A jeweller also gave evidence on behalf of the defence. He said that the bracelet Dunne was wearing at the time of his arrest could have been bought in ten other jewellery shops around Dublin. The jury found Dunne not guilty. Bronco was ecstatic.
Dunne’s acquittal, however, aroused suspicions among other criminal outfits. They believed that it had been a quid pro quo arrangement for information Christy had provided on their activities. But it wasn’t an issue that the other criminals were prepared to take up with the family – they were still too powerful. The West’s debacle also created a rift among the brothers, with several of them blaming Bronco for losing the jewels. Some of them stopped speaking to each other but they still ensured that the rows were kept ‘en famille’. The split widened, however, when certain members argued that some of the brothers were not contributing enough to those who needed support.
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