At the same time an off-duty Garda revealed that he had spotted Martin and Eddie Cahill, with Delaney, two hours before the robbery. They were trying to start Delaney’s broken-down Triumph on Effra Road in Rathmines – just before Hughie had borrowed Foley’s VW. It was also the same area where one of the getaway cars had been dumped. The focus of the investigation turned to Hollyfield Buildings and three of its residents, who were well known to the Gardaí.
The flats of Martin and Eddie Cahill and Hughie Delaney were searched the next morning by a team of officers led by Detective Inspector Ned Ryan. Nicknamed ‘the Buffalo’ by colleagues, Det. Insp. Ryan was a tough, uncompromising country cop who had been appointed to the Rathmines ‘P’ district a year earlier. He was determined to stamp out the crime epidemic emanating from Hollyfield Buildings and was well aware of Martin Cahill’s potential for mayhem. Ryan had encountered Cahill some time previously while investigating a payroll snatch that the Dunnes had pulled. The pair took an instant dislike to each other. Det. Insp. Ryan told Cahill that his days as an up-and-coming criminal were over and Martin would be ‘reduced to robbing grannies’ handbags’ by the time he was finished with him.
When questioned, Delaney made a number of verbal admissions about being involved in the crime. The three men were arrested and charged with the robbery two days later. They were also charged with the burglary in which the sawn-off shotgun found in Foley’s car had been stolen and with the theft of the two getaway cars. The charges against the General and his brother, however, were dropped before trial, due to a lack of evidence, but the State had more against Delaney. They had Foley’s evidence about loaning his car to the General’s brother-in-law. Gardaí also had the garage owner John McKenna, who could place Foley’s car at the scene where the cash bags were found.
On the first day of Hughie Delaney’s trial in July 1976, Martin Foley failed to turn up in the Central Criminal Court and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. In the absence of the main prosecution witness, the evidence of John McKenna was not enough to prove the case and Delaney was acquitted. Immediately after the trial the gang decided to exact revenge on John McKenna for doing his civic duty. Cahill, Henry Dunne and other gang members broke into his garage at Garville Lane and set it ablaze. It was a routine operation that went badly wrong. Dunne was trapped inside when the fire prematurely ignited. He was severely burned by the time Cahill and the other henchmen dragged him away from the flames. Christy arranged for him to be brought to a safe house in Dun Laoghaire where a crooked doctor treated his wounds. It took months for Henry’s burn wounds to heal and the medic helped ease his pain by administering large doses of morphine. By the time the wounds had healed Henry Dunne had developed a drug habit.
With the trial out of the way and Delaney free, Foley re-emerged two weeks later and handed himself in. When he was brought before the court, Foley claimed that the Provisional IRA had kidnapped him. He said that he knew the identity of his ‘abductor’ but insisted: ‘If I give his name, my life is not worth living.’ He denied, under oath, that he had been paid to ‘get offside’. Mr Justice Gannon released Foley, remarking, in reference to the kidnap yarn: ‘Something should be done about it. I cannot direct what should be done, it is not my function.’
Not everyone who was associated with Cahill and the Dunnes was operating in gangs. Between 1974 and 1975 a mysterious ‘lone raider’ began holding up banks around Dublin. In less than a year he had done at least a dozen jobs. The mystery character attracted intense curiosity from both the underworld and the Gardaí. His modus operandi was distinctive. Before each heist a Mini car was stolen and the robber was always described as being a tall and plump male figure. Following one incident, when a member of the public grappled with the robber and was left holding three jumpers, the police got a vital clue – the lone raider was a master of disguise. They subsequently discovered that it was not unusual for the unknown robber to dress up as a woman when he was on a ‘job’.
The Central Detective Unit (CDU) eventually caught up with the lone raider in 1975. He was caught after a robbery at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. He was charged with that robbery and a second one from a bank on Merrion Row, on the south side of the city. The raider was identified as Patrick Eugene Holland and he would become one of gangland’s most infamous hit men, known simply as ‘Dutchie’.
The gangster Dutchie Holland was very different to the rest of the underworld population. It was hard to find a reason why someone like him had become a professional criminal in the first place. Dutchie was born on 12 March 1939, and grew up in the countryside, at St Lawrence’s Road in Chapelizod, West Dublin. He came from a world completely alien to the likes of the Dunnes or the Cahills. The family was middle class and well-off. Dutchie once described how he’d had an idyllic, privileged childhood. On his seventeenth birthday his parents had given him a car – a luxury far from the reaches of the majority of the impoverished Irish population in 1956. In his younger years he was a dedicated athlete and played professional soccer for a time. When he was in his late teens he went to America and joined the United States Marine Corps. He returned to Ireland in the early 1960s. Through his teenage years and early twenties he was never in trouble with the law. He claimed that the turning point in his life came in 1965, when he got his first criminal conviction for receiving stolen fur coats. Holland claimed he had been set up and the experience left him with an abiding hatred for the authorities.
With two armed robbery charges pending against him, Holland became something of a celebrity in gangland after his capture. Other hoods wanted to work with him. Dutchie broke with his own rule of working alone and teamed up with Michael and John Cunningham, who were also running with both the Dunnes and the Cahills. In 1976, John Cunningham was jailed for 18 months for an armed hold-up at his local post office, but he was out by Christmas. On 29 December 1976, Holland and the Cunninghams robbed the takings from the Carlton Cinema on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, during the main feature of the night. The Cunninghams were later arrested at a New Year’s party. In a search of Michael Cunningham’s house in Rathfarnham the police recovered the guns and the cash stolen in the job. On 3 January, Holland, Michael Cunningham and two other men were charged with armed robbery. With three armed robbery charges against him, Holland skipped bail a month later and went to Chicago, Illinois with his wife. On 7 February a warrant was issued for his arrest. Years later Dutchie claimed to Gardaí that he had made ends meet in Chicago by working as a hit man for the Mafia.
In 1981 Dutchie was caught after he slipped back into the country for a wedding and decided to stay for a few months. The lone raider financed his extended holiday at home with a string of armed robberies and payroll snatches. Gardaí had identified Dutchie as the likely culprit and had issued a nationwide alert. He was arrested as he was about to take a ferry to France, en route back to the US. He was subsequently jailed for a total of seven years. When he was released from prison, Dutchie went to work with the Cahills.
The General had learned one important lesson from his first major heist – the need for meticulous planning. Henry Dunne had described him as a ‘natural’ but the relationship between Martin Cahill and the Dunnes turned sour a year later when he and his brothers took part in the West’s jewellery robbery. It had been agreed that the Cahills would get a share of the loot but Christy lost it following a Garda sting operation (see Chapter 4). Cahill, however, later spotted Larry’s wife, Lilly, wearing jewellery that he suspected had come from West’s. After that Martin always referred to Lilly Dunne as ‘diamond Lil’ and swore that he would never work with Christy Dunne again. The West’s job had also led to a rift between Christy and his siblings. Shamie and Larry later invited the Cahills to get involved in the drug trade with them but the General declined. Cahill would later claim that he had no time for drugs. Several of his friends and family members were junkies. He once commented: ‘Never trust a drug fella … they’re like a helpless thing, not a human being at all.’
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nbsp; In 2011, Christy Dunne tried to rewrite history and claimed that he and Cahill had worked together for years. He said that the General had ‘collected’ weapons for him, on behalf of Northern Catholics. In an interview for a documentary, Dunne said: ‘At the beginning of the Troubles I remember telling Martin that any weapons he came across would be welcome. No one made the connection between me and him because I was older. He was close to my younger brothers. He went out all over the country and he brought me back hundreds of weapons and I turned them over to the people who needed them.’ But the General wasn’t around to comment on the allegation. Most people believed that Dunne hadn’t lost his penchant for bluffing.
In any event, by 1975 the General had learned enough from the Dunne Academy and he set up his own armed robbery gang. The Cahills and their associates soon began to attract the attentions of the authorities. They were robbing banks, security vans and factory bank rolls so often that they were soon averaging one ‘stroke’ each week. The General’s gang were also pulling off aggravated burglaries, which involved breaking into people’s homes and holding them hostage at gunpoint while they robbed the place. The ruthless new kids on the block were becoming an embarrassment to the Gardaí.
A month after the West’s robbery a burglary by Cahill’s siblings Michael ‘Styky’ and Anthony ended in murder. John Copeland, an economist with the Central Bank, was stabbed to death in his home in Rathmines on 24 March 1975. The Cahill brothers had burgled the apartment earlier that night and had returned when 22-year-old Anthony discovered that he had left a torch at the scene. It was one of the cardinal rules their brother had drilled into them – never leave any evidence behind. When the victim returned from a rugby training session, he found Anthony Cahill in his home. During a scuffle, John Copeland was stabbed once in the chest with a kitchen knife. When the brothers were questioned about the murder, Styky made a statement implicating Anthony. He was charged a month later with the murder and burglary. Martin was furious that his brother had broken the family code of omertà and co-operated with the enemy. He taught Styky a lesson by giving him a severe beating.
Despite the serious charges pending against Anthony, the robberies continued. In 1975 Det. Insp. Ned Ryan was transferred to the CDU to head the ‘Flying Squad’. It was a new unit set up to take on the growing number of robbery gangs. The General knew that his name was top of Ryan’s list, so he decided to give his old enemy something to think about. One morning in 1976, Cahill’s gang robbed the Werburg Street Labour Exchange of £100,000 – literally under the noses of the Flying Squad as the offices of the CDU overlooked the Exchange. Detectives drove past the front door every five minutes, going to and from Dublin Castle. It was considered to be the last place anyone would dare to rob. Cahill and his crew drove up to the front door and ran inside, armed with sawn-off shotguns and pistols. They knew exactly where to go as it was where most of them collected their dole every week. The gang were in and out in three minutes; they were speeding away as detectives raced down the stairs from their offices. Three years later they hit the Exchange again and got away with the more modest sum of £25,000.
By the mid-1970s, Cahill had turned Hollyfield into his own domain where he was the undisputed king of the castle. To illustrate his status, he erected a flag pole over his flat and hoisted a Tricolour, in an expression of solidarity with the nationalist minority in Northern Ireland. He also placed loud-speakers on the roof and played rebel songs at full blast, day and night. Whenever the cops came to make him turn the music off he went out and burgled some of the local big houses. With plenty of money coming in from the robberies, Cahill splashed out and bought himself a large Mercedes and a BMW. He also imported a custom-built 1100cc Harley Davidson motorbike for which he paid £4,000. He added other high-powered racing bikes to his collection. The flashy cars and bikes looked rather incongruous parked outside a rundown slum building, surrounded by ruptured sewers and piles of rubbish. His other indulgence was to buy a colour TV, which was considered a luxury item in Ireland in the mid-1970s. The TV aerial parked next to the flag pole and loud-speakers on the roof added to the surreal atmosphere in Cahill’s squalid kingdom. One night, during a Garda raid, the colour TV landed in the courtyard below, smashed into several pieces. The cops had been attacked earlier when they’d driven into the complex and this was the return match. Cahill went out the following day and bought another TV. And when that suffered a similar fate he got another one. The General didn’t believe in allowing his enemies get the better of him.
Money from the robberies was also used to open a pool hall in a disused warehouse at Raleigh Square in Crumlin. It became an ideal meeting place for the many gangsters living in the area. Sean Fitzgerald, John Traynor’s best friend, was given the job of managing the place. The Fixer was a slippery con artist who nurtured an image as a respectable gent. He had the hall refurbished and bought 12 pool tables for cash. Inside the front door a porch was erected, so that when the police came in, the lack of natural light made it impossible for them to see the dodgy customers lurking in the shadows. Many years later when Fitzgerald was interviewed by this writer, he specifically mentioned the porch and explained why it was there. The duplicitous conman was very proud of his ingenuity. The pool hall became a magnet for Gardaí, who regularly sat outside watching who was coming and going. Members of the Flying Squad began to irritate their targets by going inside and playing pool for hours. The club was searched several times. Despite the unwanted attentions, legitimate business was soon booming.
The hall was also used for a most unusual money-laundering operation. A short time earlier, Cahill’s gang had robbed a security van carrying the cash collected from Dublin Gas Company meters around the city. The General and his associates struggled away with £10,000 in silver 10p pieces – 100,000 coins – which they buried. They believed it would be easy to filter them through the successful pool hall. But when the gang dug up their hidden treasure the silver coins had turned black from the damp earth. The young hoods spent a whole night literally washing the coins in buckets. Then the coins were laid out on the pool tables, where they were polished up again with towels and blankets.
The criminal hotspot also became popular with young women who were groupies of the glamorous bad boys. Dozens of them had their first sexual experiences in a bed in a rear office at the pool hall. But one night things got out of control. Sean Fitzgerald described to this writer how Anthony Cahill took a young woman into the back room for sex. He became violent and sexually assaulted the woman with a pool cue. When the other gangsters heard the screams they ran in and found the girl hysterical and sobbing. Her clothes had been ripped and torn off her back. The General arrived later to calm her down but word about the incident leaked out, and after that people stopped going to the hall. Fitzgerald eventually shut it down.
One of the favourite targets of the armed gangs was factories, where cash payrolls were delivered on the same day each week. In the early hours of 12 May 1977, Cahill and five other gang members burst into the Ballyfermot home of Bernard and Elizabeth O’Neill and held the family at gunpoint. The General’s target was the huge Semperit tyre factory, and its grounds bordered the O’Neills’ back garden. Cahill had been planning the job for two months – monitoring the arrival of the security vans and scrutinizing how the money was handed over to the factory’s security staff. A payroll delivery for the 1,000-strong workforce was due to arrive the following morning. During the night the gang cut a hole in the fence and then they settled in to wait.
The next morning, at 10.50 a.m., four gang members, including Cahill, struck with split-second timing, just as the cash was being transferred from the security van to the factory wages’ office. The gang fired several shots in the air as staff tried to keep them out. They snatched the bags, containing over £50,000 in cash, and ran back to the fence, where high-powered motorbikes were parked for the getaway. As they ran away a security guard was shot and injured.
In the immediate aftermath of the Semperit
job the Flying Squad stepped up their overt surveillance on Cahill. Det. Insp. Ryan had received information that the General was behind it. A month after the heist he was followed to Killiney Hill, in South County Dublin, by detectives who believed he was going to dig up the proceeds. As Cahill was coming down the hill, he met Ned Ryan and three of his men walking up to meet him. ‘Now, Martin, you and I are going for a chat up that hill and when we come back down you’ll have given back the Semperit money. It looks like this is the showdown,’ Ryan later recalled in an interview for the book The General. Cahill turned and bolted back up the hill, with the cops running after him. At the top they tried to grab him. The paranoid General was terrified that he was going to be killed. He jumped off a steep cliff into the darkness below, after wriggling out of his anorak which was left in the hands of one of Ryan’s men. The Flying Squad officers were sure Martin Cahill had been killed and began searching for his body.
The following day officers visited Cahill’s wife Frances to see if she had heard from him and was he all right. They dropped in his jacket and the keys of his Mercedes which was still parked in Killiney. Incredibly, Cahill survived the fall and only suffered a fractured shoulder, with some cuts and bruises. He later claimed to his solicitor that the police had tried to kill him. There was no substance to his allegation.
Less than six months later, 28-year-old Cahill was given an enforced break from the attentions of the Flying Squad. On 24 November 1977, he was jailed for four years when a jury found him guilty of receiving a stolen car and two motorbikes which were intended for a robbery. Martin and Eddie Cahill had been arrested at the lock-up they were using to store the vehicles. He was joined in Mountjoy Prison by Eddie, who was also jailed for receiving stolen goods. A month afterwards, following two trials, Anthony Cahill was found not guilty of the Copeland murder. He had admitted burgling the dead man’s apartment and was convicted of the lesser crime.
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