Brogan’s partners were Tommy Savage and Michael Weldon, hardened criminals and terrorists from Swords. Savage, nicknamed ‘the Zombie’ because of his unpredictably dangerous personality, was also a former member of Saor Eire who had later joined the INLA. Weldon joined the terrorist group in the late 1970s, while serving as an infantryman in the Irish Army. Described as a ‘top-class’ soldier, Weldon had been promoted to the rank of corporal. He was suspected of stealing a number of weapons from his battalion, including a rifle and machine-gun, which he threw over the barrack wall for ‘the cause’. Another member of the drug gang was INLA man Danny McOwen, from the north inner-city, who cut his teeth with Savage in Saor Eire.
Brogan, Savage and Weldon, all of whom were associates of the Dunnes, established major international supply routes for cannabis into Ireland. Some years later Brogan described to this writer how he established the gang’s contacts with hashish producers in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and international dealers in Holland: ‘I knew people who knew people and I was introduced to the producers in Lebanon when I travelled there. Savage would never have gotten into the business as much as he did if it hadn’t been for me.’
In Ballymun, Hourigan used local youths to distribute Brogan’s drugs from a club in the basement of the Joseph Plunkett Tower. The ambitious lieutenant seized an opportunity to branch out on his own, however, when Myler was arrested in France in January 1983, as part of a drug investigation. It created a shortage of cannabis in Ballymun and Hourigan had to source the product elsewhere. He decided to set up his own operation and began eating into Brogan’s patch. He also approached the Dunnes with a view to doing business and told them of his plans to oust Brogan. When one of the Dunnes’ men warned Hourigan that he had dangerous ambitions, the young hood arrogantly laughed if off.
Brogan was held for three months but released without charge in early April. When he returned to resume his role, his old friends in the Dunne family tipped him off about his former lieutenant’s plans for the future. Myler sent word to Hourigan that he was sacked and that people were talking about shooting him. In retaliation, Hourigan and his associates raided the home of Brogan’s parents in the north inner-city, looking for the proceeds of drug deals. On 7 April, he robbed Myler’s prized silver BMW from outside the Penthouse pub in Ballymun and rammed it into a wall. Hourigan returned the crumpled car to its parking spot and visited one of Brogan’s henchmen, to let him know what he had just done.
In September 1992 this writer interviewed Brogan, who had moved to live in London and had cut his ties with his former partners-in-crime. Myler revealed how he and two other well-known criminals dealt with the errant underling: ‘We went to see him and gave him a hiding because he was trying to muscle in on our patch. He was getting too big for his boots and he had to have manners put on him. I warned him that he was messing with the wrong people especially Tommy Savage.’ Myler then went to his partners in the gang and told them of Hourigan’s impertinence. They laughed off the mouthy hood, describing him as a ‘souped-up granny-basher’ and told Myler to deal with it himself. But then Brogan claimed the situation changed: ‘Savage and the lads heard that Hourigan was going around laughing at them.’ The young drug-dealer sealed his fate with another act of foolhardy bravado. He went looking for members of the gang in Swords, where most of them lived, armed with a handgun and a sawn-off shotgun. Hourigan had taken a step too far.
Shortly after midnight on 10 April, Hourigan and four of his friends returned to Ballymun, after spending the day drinking in the city centre. Earlier he had bragged to his mates about the death threats from his old associates. The young crook joked he’d get a haircut and wear his best suit, so he looked well when he got shot. But the hit man, on the back of a waiting motorbike, wasn’t going to give Hourigan the chance to dress up for his execution. The killer got off his bike and fired a shot at the drug-dealer. Hourigan ran for it and tried to hide in the basement club. The hit man followed him inside. He fired two shots at close range into Hourigan’s chest, killing him instantly. Then he calmly walked out and jumped on the back of the waiting bike.
When we met in London, Brogan was adamant that he had not been responsible for Ireland’s first gangland murder. ‘I was one of the prime suspects and I was lifted for it but I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I heard about it a few days later,’ he claimed. ‘After that I got out of the hash business and went back to robbing.’ Savage and Weldon, however, continued in the drug trade and were among the most successful traffickers in the country. By the late 1980s they controlled a large portion of the drugs market in Dublin and Cork.
No one was ever charged with Hourigan’s murder, although the Gardaí and the underworld knew who had been involved. During our meetings Brogan named the two hit men, both associates of his, who carried out the murder. Police sources in Dublin later confirmed that the two men were the prime suspects. Gangland murders would remain the toughest crimes to solve. Professional hit men have a tendency to disappear behind the biggest wall this side of the Wall of China – the wall of silence.
The public didn’t realize the significance of the Hourigan murder and it didn’t receive much media attention. Less than 24 hours earlier, Sergeant Patrick McLaughlin was shot and fatally injured by two men who called to his home in Dunboyne, County Meath. This time there was no hit man or terrorist gang involved. Two local men, Joseph Green and Thomas McCool, both drunk and with minor grievances against the Sergeant, were responsible for the shooting. They were both subsequently convicted for the murder.
Two months later the gangland hit man struck again. Danny McOwen had fallen out with Savage and Weldon and had set up his own armed robbery gang – the Gang of Six. In 1980, McOwen had refused to take the rap when he and Savage were caught in a stolen car together. McOwen was driving the car at the time and broke with the villains’ code that the driver put his hands up for the crime. McOwen also began moving in on their drug-dealing territory. Like Hourigan, McOwen made no secret of his ambition to build a criminal empire. In the process he was making a lot of enemies. He’d also involved himself in a row between associates of a gang led by a young criminal called Gerry Hutch from Buckingham Street, in the north inner-city. One of McOwen’s friends had an affair with the girlfriend of a member of the Hutch gang. The criminal concerned was the prime suspect in a number of gangland hits over the following years.
On 7 June, 29-year-old McOwen discovered he was being actively targeted for assassination and went into hiding. But despite his precautions the would-be crime boss was a creature of habit. On the morning of 14 June 1983, he turned up to collect his dole in the Cumberland Street Labour Exchange, in the inner-city. He made the same trip to the city centre every week from the comfortable detached home he’d bought in 1982 at Cloghertown, Clonalvey, County Meath. Although officially unemployed, he paid £25,000 in cash for the house. That morning McOwen collected more than he’d bargained for. As he left the Exchange, a lone gunman suddenly appeared and shot him four times in the head and chest. McOwen died in the street. No one was ever charged with the hit although Gardaí had a number of strong suspects.
On St Stephen’s Day 1983, heroin-dealer Eddie Hayden, a former international amateur boxer, also became a gangland murder statistic. A lone gunman emerged from the shadows as Hayden left a girlfriend’s flat in Ballybough, in the north inner-city. The killer, armed with a sawn-off shotgun, blew half Hayden’s head away, when he fired at point-blank range. Hayden had been arrested in relation to the McOwen murder six months earlier but it was never established if the two killings were connected. The era of the hit man had arrived.
Hayden was one of 17 people who had been questioned about the McOwen murder. Included among them were McOwen’s armed-robber friend George Royle, veteran gangster Eamon Kelly and his protégé, 20-year-old Gerry Hutch. Despite his young age, Hutch was considered to be a serious criminal. The unholy villain would later become known as ‘the Monk’. A year earlier Kelly and Hutch had also been arrest
ed in Crumlin, after they were accused of threatening a 17-year-old called Alan Morgan. The teenager had been threatened over money that had been ‘stolen’ from their associate, after he’d taken part in a hold-up at the Allied Irish Bank in Drumcondra with Martin Cahill in February 1982. The teenager’s younger brother, Gerard Morgan, was shot dead on 26 May as he was about to answer the door at the family home in Lismore Road in Crumlin. Investigating Gardaí believed that the murdered youth was mistaken for his older brother. Cahill’s associate was later charged with the murder but the case was dropped by the DPP because a witness had refused to testify.
In a Garda file on that case, Eamon Kelly was described as having involvement in ‘major criminal activity’ and being ‘a constant associate of hardened criminals’. ‘He [Kelly] has Godfather status among city criminals and through fear and intimidation maintains this status,’ it read. The same document contained the following observations on the Monk. ‘Although of tender years, Gerard Hutch is much respected and feared by the criminal element on account of his previous exploits and violent disposition. He is full-time involved in the organisation of major crime.’ Gardaí had spotted Hutch’s ‘talent’ early on.
Gerard Hutch was born into poverty in Dublin’s north inner-city in April 1963. His family lived in a flat in Corporation Buildings, a rundown tenement where a communal toilet served the whole block. In 1971, they moved to a pokey Corporation flat at Liberty House on Railway Street. Like most of his peers, the future criminal mastermind first ran into trouble with the law for petty theft at a very young age. He received his first conviction in the Children’s Court when he was eight years old.
Hutch hung out in a gang of tough teenagers who terrorized the city centre in the late 1970s. They were nicknamed ‘the Bugsy Malones’ after the famous children’s spoof gangster movie of the same name, in which the bad guys were armed with machine-guns that fired cream cakes. The Bugsys, however, preferred bullets. As a result of their exploits they attracted considerable media attention. On one occasion Hutch was interviewed for RTÉ radio: ‘I can’t give up robbin’. If I see money in a car I’m takin’ it. I just can’t leave it there. If I see a handbag on a seat I’ll smash the window and be away before anyone knows what’s goin’ on. I don’t go near people walking along the street … they don’t have any money on them. They’re not worth robbin’.’ And when he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up he giggled: ‘I’d like to be serving behind the bank … just fill up the bags and jump over the counter.’
Gerry Hutch notched up over thirty convictions for burglary, assault, larceny, car theft, joyriding and malicious damage over the 12 years following his court debut. He was jailed 11 times and served his sentences in the notorious St Lawrence’s Industrial School in Finglas, St Patrick’s Institution for young offenders and, later, Mountjoy Prison. The institutions were the equivalent of his primary, secondary and third-level education. While inside he taught himself to read and write. From his late teens, Hutch stood out from the rest of his peers as different and much cleverer. He was sensible with the money he stole. When he became a dad for the first time at the age of 18, he paid £10,000 for a house for his new family on Buckingham Street, in the heart of his old neighbourhood. The quiet, intense young man didn’t drink and assiduously avoided the heroin scourge that devastated his neighbourhood in the early 1980s. Jem Dixon and his siblings were his first cousins. Several of Hutch’s friends became addicts and at least four of them died as a result.
Eamon Kelly and his brother Matt, who were from the north inner-city, first noticed that Hutch was wiser than a lot of the other young thugs in the neighbourhood and decided to take him under their wing. The young Monk ran ‘errands’ and worked in the Kellys’ large carpet business on the North Circular Road. Eamon Kelly was a former member of the Official IRA and an armed robber with a fearsome reputation for violence. Garda intelligence at the time believed that the business was being used as a front for criminal activity.
In 1981, the carpet company was wound up by the High Court and a liquidator was appointed on behalf of the Revenue Commissioners over unpaid taxes. In a controversial, landmark case the liquidator issued proceedings against the brothers, to have them held personally responsible for huge debts. A year later the premises mysteriously burned down.
In November 1982, Hutch’s friend Eamon Byrne, a fellow member of the Bugsy Malones, died when he was accidentally shot in the back of the neck by Gardaí during a botched robbery in Dublin docks. Around the same time a criminal mob calling itself the Prisoners’ Revenge Group (PRG), of which Martin Cahill, George Mitchell and John Gilligan were leading members, carried out several attacks on prison officers and their homes.
The long-running Kellys case hit the headlines again in 1983 after several people involved were threatened and intimidated by the brothers and their associates. On the first morning of the hearing the home of the leading counsel for the liquidator was targeted in an arson attack. The State’s legal team, revenue officials, witnesses and Mr Justice Declan Costello were all given armed police protection for the duration of the hearing.
The Kellys’ former accountant, Brendan McGoldrick, who agreed to testify, told the court that he had been threatened with murder if he opened his mouth. He said Matt Kelly and an associate, Mickey Deighan, had made the threats. As a result the two hoods were jailed for contempt of court. The accountant then admitted falsifying company documentation on behalf of the brothers. Gerry Hutch’s mentors had such a reputation for violence that McGoldrick was forced to live under armed police protection for several years, as there were fears that a contract had been put out on him.
The court later held that the business of the company was carried on with ‘intent to defraud creditors’ and for ‘other fraudulent purposes’. It ruled that both brothers were ‘knowingly parties’ to the carrying on of the business in that manner. Both men were held liable for all debts, including a £1.8 million tax bill, and Matt Kelly was made a bankrupt. In 1984 Eamon Kelly, who lived with his family in Clontarf, was charged with stabbing a 21-year-old man in the chest outside the old Workers’ Party Club on Dublin’s Gardiner Street. He was subsequently convicted of wounding and jailed for ten years. However, the case was appealed and, after a retrial, he was convicted of assault and his original sentence was reduced to three years.
Gerry Hutch was jailed for the last time six months after the McOwen murder, in December 1983, when he got two years for malicious damage. When he was released in May 1985, like all the other gangsters, Hutch promised himself that he would never do time again. But unlike so many of his contemporaries the Monk achieved his ambition. Very soon he had earned a reputation as a clever blagger who carefully planned robberies down to the last detail. But he was also regarded as a potentially dangerous enemy.
Myler Brogan spent much of his criminal career working with Hutch and his brother Eddie. ‘We were all good mates for a long time. Gerard was a very cold fish and very calculating. He didn’t go looking for trouble and minded his own business but if you fucked with him you were walking on thin ice,’ he revealed. ‘Whenever they [the Hutches] needed a gun man on a job that they could rely on they came to me. During the ’70s and ’80s I went on several jobs with Gerard Hutch, Thomas O’Driscoll and others. I was always the first one in the door of the bank or wherever it was we were robbing. In December 1985, we went to rob a security van which was delivering wages at the Initial Laundry in Rathfarnham. It was supposed to be carrying £1 million in cash. There were three of us waiting for it and I ran over and fired a shot into the van to scare the crew and they threw the bags out to us. When we looked inside there was a £1 million all right but it was in cheques and there was just £25,000 in cash.’
The relationship went sour, however, when Brogan failed to come up with the cash he’d agreed to pay for a shop the Hutches were selling in Killarney Street: ‘I was supposed to make the money from a couple of strokes but I didn’t get it. When I said I wanted out I was told
that I would have to answer to Gerard if I didn’t pay up. That was when I decided to leave Dublin. I was sick of it.’
Gerry Hutch meanwhile gathered a tightly knit team of other hard-nosed young criminals around him. They were about to make the big time. On the evening of 26 January 1987, the crew of a Securicor van made their last pick-up from the Bank of Ireland at Marino Mart, Fairview in North Dublin. As the front seat observer was getting back into the van, a red BMW pulled up and three armed and masked men jumped out. One of the raiders, armed with a handgun, pointed it in the security guard’s face, shouting: ‘Get out or I’ll blow your fucking head off.’ A second raider, armed with a rifle, joined the first. They pulled the security officer from the van and threw him onto the ground. He was kicked and warned to stay down or he’d have his head ‘blown off’. At the same time a third raider appeared at the opposite door and pointed a gun at the head of the driver. He was ordered to hand over the keys and get out.
The Monk and one of his accomplices jumped in behind the wheel of the van and they drove off. The other two robbers got into the BMW and followed. They stopped briefly and pushed out a third security officer whom they’d discovered in the vault in the back of the van. The gang drove the van a short distance into school grounds off Griffith Avenue, and unloaded the bags of cash into a waiting car. They vanished as Gardaí were being alerted to the robbery.
Hutch and his crew later met in a safe house to count the cash. They’d expected to get between £25,000 and £100,000. But it took them the whole night to count the money. When they finished the large stack of money came to £1,357,106 (over €3.1 million today). The young villains couldn’t believe it – they had just pulled off the largest cash robbery in the history of the State. The Monk and his mates had elevated themselves to the top tier of organized crime. It would be remembered as the Marino Mart job.
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