Since the Beit robbery several traps had been laid for Cahill, but he hadn’t fallen for them. But then the elusive gangster began to nibble on some new bait. In Holland, a Dutch fraudster called Kees van Scoaik, who had problems with the local police, offered to help snare Martin Cahill in return for the charges against him being dropped. Before running into trouble with the Dutch police the conman had met with Rossi Walsh to discuss a possible deal to sell the paintings. As proof that he had access to the collection Walsh had given the fraudster one of the paintings. When the Dutch police contacted Garda HQ it was agreed to set up a sting operation. The anti-terrorist Special Detective Unit (SDU) was put in charge of the Irish end of the operation. Through an intermediary, van Scoaik agreed to pay £1 million for four of the paintings. After a number of false starts the Dutchman finally got to meet Cahill with Lynch, Daly and Hogan, in the Four Roads pub in Crumlin on 26 September 1987. It was agreed that the gang would show the paintings to van Scoaik’s French ‘art expert’ the following day. The ‘art expert’ was an undercover agent with Interpol. He was to be picked up by the gang from the Burlington Hotel that afternoon. The police were getting tantalizingly close to catching Cahill – and possibly retrieving the DPP files.
The following day Shavo Hogan picked up the undercover cop and drove him to Killakee Woods in the Dublin Mountains. Cahill and Eamon Daly were there to meet him with the paintings. At the same time a British surveillance aircraft flew high over head. It was supposed to pick up the signal to move when the art expert flashed a special torch he was ostensibly using to inspect the paintings. A large force of armed members of the SDU was standing by, at Bridget Burke’s pub in Firhouse, waiting for their cue from the surveillance plane. The main players of the biggest crime gang in the country were within minutes of being nabbed with some of the most valuable paintings in the world.
But it all went horribly wrong. The police’s radio network broke down, causing utter confusion. As that was happening Cahill’s survival instincts kicked in and he became suspicious of the ‘art dealer’. The undercover cop was pushed into Shavo Hogan’s car and driven back to the city. Cahill and Daly meanwhile put the paintings into a car and headed back towards Tallaght. On their way, they drove past the assembled army of confused detectives who were still trying to work out what was going on. When he later discovered how close he had come to being caught Cahill could not believe his luck. And instead of keeping his head down he couldn’t help taunting the Gardaí about their botched efforts to catch him.
For the second time in a month the Gardaí had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of their hated enemy. Both Interpol and the Dutch police expressed their anger at the way the operation had been mishandled. They accused the Gardaí of putting the life of the undercover agent in danger. There were also bitter internal recriminations. Incredibly, the Serious Crime Squad had been kept out of the loop and didn’t know that the operation was even going on. Detective Chief Superintendent John Murphy who was in overall command of the Central Detective Unit (CDU), which included the SCS, was furious at the deliberate snub. The investigation to recover the paintings was the responsibility of his officers, who knew Cahill and his gang much better than the anti-terrorist SDU or Garda HQ. It also later transpired that the officer in charge of ‘M’ District, where the rendezvous took place, Superintendent Bill McMunn, had not been informed about the operation either. If he had known, McMunn could have informed the SDU that he had recently called in experts who had identified radio black-spots in the area around Killakee Woods.
Cahill was getting cocky to the point of recklessness and had pushed the patience of his enemies to breaking point. He was making such a nuisance of himself that he could no longer be ignored by the people who’d buried the SCS’s report two years earlier. Now everyone in the Gardaí – including the intransigent management – realized that the General had to be taken on.
Garda Commissioner Eamon Doherty, who was appointed in November 1987, had wasted no time in getting to grips with the gangland problem. He asked for a detailed intelligence report, listing all known criminals involved in organized crime in the city. In 1987 alone there had been almost 600 armed robberies in the country, 500 of which had happened in Dublin. Only 100 had been solved. Armed crime could no longer be overlooked because it wasn’t going away. A large dossier was compiled and this time it was not going to be buried. There were, the report concluded, three major gangs operating from bases in Dublin and carrying out robberies throughout the country. Gerry Hutch’s mob, who had started the year with the biggest cash heist in the history of the State, was one of them. The other was John Gilligan’s Factory Gang. But top of the list was the General’s gang.
After the Killakee fiasco, the CDU’s Chief Superintendent Murphy sent one of his officers to meet Martin Cahill. The gangster was bluntly told that he had a few days in which to return both the paintings and the DPP’s files. There was something about the cop’s demeanour that rattled Cahill. The gangster’s instinct told him there was trouble ahead and he cautioned his troops to be extra vigilant. But before the Gardaí could get stuck into the ‘ordinary criminals’, they first had their hands full with the nationwide search for Dessie O’Hare and John O’Grady, which kept them busy for weeks. In the meantime a new terrorist-related crisis had hit the country. On 1 November 1987, the French Navy intercepted the gun-running ship the Eksund. It was carrying a cargo of over 100 tons of weapons and ordnance, destined for the IRA, from Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. There was panic in the Government when it was discovered that two, similar-sized shipments had already been successfully smuggled into the country over the previous two years, under the noses of several international security agencies. The Government called a national security emergency and the biggest search operation in the history of the State was launched. ‘Operation Mallard’ involved over 8,000 police and soldiers who searched 50,000 properties across the country, looking for underground weapons bunkers. In the midst of the distractions the General’s gang continued their operations.
On 31 November, the postmistress at Kilnamanagh Post Office in Tallaght was taken hostage by armed and masked men in her home in Inchicore, West Dublin. The following morning, she and another hostage, who had a ‘bomb’ attached to his chest, were ordered to go to the post office and withdraw £30,000. It was a carbon copy of a similar robbery two years earlier, at Killinarden in Tallaght, which was also the work of the Cahill gang.
For Ned Ryan, the Kilnamanagh robbery was the last straw. He had been promoted to the rank of Detective Superintendent for the Southern Division, which included Tallaght. Ryan was an old adversary of the General’s and, years earlier, had tried to warn his superiors that Martin Cahill would be a major problem. Members of the gang now considered themselves so untouchable that they even visited one of Ryan’s detectives at his home and threatened to kill him.
The Serious Crime Squad team who’d been involved in the 1985 report on the mobster were also vindicated by the sheer volume of Cahill’s audacious and brutal crimes. Cahill was also drawing the attentions of the media on himself. The first major exposé about gangland’s elusive General appeared on the front page of the Sunday World in October 1987. Cahill was now becoming an embarrassment to the political establishment. The time for action had finally arrived.
On the morning of 2 December 1987, Commissioner Doherty held a conference in his office with the chief superintendents in charge of the Dublin Metropolitan Area’s five Garda divisions and Detective Chief Superintendent John Murphy of CDU. Doherty sat back in his chair and asked the question that was about to change the General’s life: ‘What are we going to do about this man Cahill?’ Murphy replied that if he was given the resources and the time he could smash the General’s gang within six months. It was decided that it would get whatever resources were needed.
The next issue was how they would go after Public Enemy Number One. It was eventually decided to use overt, close-up surveillance which was designed to harass and
antagonize the targets as much as possible. In the military it is referred to as reconnaissance by fire. Each division in the Dublin Metropolitan Area was to produce 15 candidates for the new Squad which was to be attached to the Serious Crime Squad in CDU. It was called the Special Surveillance Unit (SSU).
Those selected were young cops, many of whom had only been in the Gardaí a short time. They were to augment the more experienced detectives in the Serious Crime Squad. The SSU was divided into four teams. Each team was headed by an experienced detective sergeant from CDU – DS Felix McKenna, DS Noel Keane, DS Martin Callinan and DS Denis Donegan. The four sergeants were well acquainted with the Cahill gang. Callinan, who was appointed Commissioner in 2010, had been one of the officers who compiled the poorly received intelligence dossier on Cahill two and a half years earlier.
There were to be seven main targets in the initial operation, Martin Cahill and six others – Daly, Foley, Foy, Hogan, Lynch and Dutton. The number of targets would vary as the operation progressed and surveillance would be extended to other criminals as they came into the picture. The plan was to place up to six Gardaí in three squad cars, covering each target. Each target was to be given a codename. Cahill was ‘T One’ or ‘Tango One’. The SSU were to make life as unbearable as possible for the gangsters.
Over the last weeks of 1987, the SSU officers underwent firearms training and were fully briefed on every piece of intelligence that existed on the Cahill gang. The SSU was poised and ready for action. The famous ‘Tango Squad’ had been born.
On 1 January 1988, the seven ‘chosen’ gangsters woke up to a major New Year’s Day surprise. When they looked out their bedroom windows the Squad was there waiting for them. When the hoods stood at their doors and stared at the fresh-faced cops, they were greeted with grins and little waves. Wherever the mobsters went, the T Squad went with them, stopping and searching them several times on a typical journey.
The mobsters were well used to police surveillance but had never seen anything like this before. Shavo Hogan would later recall: ‘The first week it started we thought this is great craic. But it became a nightmare: beeping horns and shining torches into the house at night. It really fucked up everything. You could not go out for a drink without a cop sitting beside you.’ Tango One was the only member of the gang to take up the challenge to play mind games. He once joked: ‘I’m thinking of getting involved in the security business. No one is going to rob me with all these armed police around.’
Over the following six months Dublin witnessed an extraordinary game of cat and mouse, played out on the streets between the Tango Squad and the gangsters. The Cahill mob resorted to trying intimidation and threats against their tormentors. As the intense war of wits escalated, hundreds of car tyres were slashed by Cahill’s people in middle-class neighbourhoods of South Dublin. Then the cars belonging to the criminals were also smashed-up and their tyres were slashed. Tough, young thugs who were part of the new generation of serious criminals were employed to ram squad cars off the road. One of them was a particularly violent 22-year-old hood from Crumlin called Brian Meehan. He had already cut his teeth as a member of the General’s organization and taken part in a string of armed heists. Meehan, who later earned the nickname ‘the Tosser’, had tried to shoot an unarmed officer during a robbery five months earlier with his mentor, Michael ‘Jo Jo’ Kavanagh. When the T Squad appeared he was facing a charge for an armed robbery in December 1987 from a bank on Grafton Street.
Soon the targets turned nasty and the SSU members were given details about their families and warned that they would be ‘got at’. While he was being followed by the Squad, Cahill would drive through estates where members lived and flash his hazard lights outside their homes. Members of the unit began wearing balaclavas to hide their identities from the criminals. In one incident Martin Foley smashed a detective’s jaw and left him unconscious, after he’d crashed into a squad car. As a result Foley was arrested and charged with serious assault. In another act of retaliation, Cahill dug up the greens at the Garda golf club in Stackstown, County Dublin. In a sinister twist, he also ordered a murder contract on Det. Supt Ned Ryan, whom he blamed for all the hassle. A hit team was brought in from Manchester and the veteran detective was placed under armed protection.
But the campaign of harassment by the police soon succeeded in making the hoodlums careless and, one by one, they were caught for armed robberies and firearms offences. Foy and Hogan were the first to be arrested after they opened fire on unarmed officers when they were intercepted on the way to a hold-up in Walkinstown. Daly was caught following an armed stand-off with the Tango Squad during a heist three weeks later. Over the following months a string of other associates were also rounded up. Harry Melia and Eddie Cahill were caught red-handed when the Drug Squad discovered them sorting through a £50,000 consignment of heroin in Cahill’s home. The General’s brother-in-law, Eugene Scanlan, and Harry Melia, both of whom were on bail, were caught that year by Detective Inspector Tony Hickey’s Serious Crime Squad team. They had just collected guns which had been stolen during a raid organized by the General.
Cahill’s brother John, who had been released from prison in 1986, had set up his own armed robbery gang. It included Albert Crowley and Noel Gaynor, who were part of the General’s core gang. Gaynor was married to the Cahills’ sister and the Crowleys were also related through marriage. Lone raider Dutchie Holland, who was also released from prison in 1986, joined the gang, as did two notorious IRA members, PJ Loughran and William Gardiner. Martin Cahill had presented his sibling with a ‘coming out’ present of six handguns, a Thompson and an Uzi machine-gun, to help get him started again. The new gang became very active, and inevitably attracted the attentions of the Tango Squad.
John Cahill, Crowley and Gaynor were arrested following a £107,000 robbery from a security van in September 1988. The gang struck with military precision, as the van delivered cash to an employment exchange on the Navan Road on the city’s north-side. One Garda was held at gunpoint and shots were fired at another. Three of the gangsters were found hiding in a shed at a house in Ballyfermot after a high-speed chase across the city; the other three managed to escape the net. Cahill, Gaynor and Crowley received prison sentences ranging from seven to twelve years. The man who owned the house where they were found was also jailed for seven years. The Serious Crime Squad caught up with Holland a year later. He was arrested with three other men while in the process of delivering explosives which he intended selling to the IRA. Dutchie and his pals were each jailed for ten years, but the sentences were later reduced to seven.
Despite all the police attentions, Martin Cahill was still involved in organizing robberies and ‘tie-ups’. In the winter of 1988, he organized a number of tie-up robberies from the homes of wealthy business figures, stealing jewellery and paintings. Undeterred by his experiences so far in the art world, he also robbed the £500,000 Murnaghan art collection, which belonged to the family of the deceased Supreme Court judge James Murnaghan. The Tango Squad recovered the stolen art and one of Cahill’s associates, Wally McGregor, was charged and subsequently jailed. At the same time a number of the Beit paintings were also recovered in London and his salesman, John Naughton, was convicted of possessing the stolen art.
Another unwelcome consequence of the Tango Squad investigation was that the main targets suddenly found themselves in the full glare of the media spotlight. Brendan O’Brien, who had exposed the Dunnes and the drugs crisis some years earlier, highlighted the Cahill gang in a riveting hour-long Today Tonight show special. It was watched by over a million viewers and made the General a household name overnight. O’Brien and his crew encountered the General when he turned up at Werburgh Street Labour Exchange to collect his weekly dole money. Despite his wealth Cahill always collected his £90 each week – it was something that he never missed. He was determined to collect every penny he was entitled to from the State.
The reporter stopped Cahill outside the Exchange, which the Genera
l had robbed several times, while members of the Tango Squad stood nearby. Cahill decided to bluff it out and gave an impromptu interview. When asked was he the General or did he know who the General was, Cahill glibly replied: ‘I don’t know, some army officer maybe? Sure the way the country is goin’ these days you wouldn’t know what way to think.’ On the subject of the Beit paintings, Cahill claimed that Noel Lynch had appointed him a private detective to recover the art collection. ‘I am on standby with Martin Foley and Eamon Daly for a job to get them [the paintings] back,’ said Cahill.
Cahill even became the subject of debate in the Dáil. The mob’s social welfare payments became the topic of most concern, at a time of high unemployment and recession. It was also a source of embarrassment that the most successful criminal in the country was, effectively, on the State’s payroll. The Minister for Social Welfare announced that there was to be a full investigation. This decision would have dramatic consequences.
The Tango Squad ultimately succeeded in breaking up the General’s once powerful criminal network and within two years at least a dozen of his closest lieutenants were serving long sentences for armed crimes in Portlaoise maximum-security prison. Other gang members like Lynch, Dutton and Shanahan, fed up with Cahill’s antics and his games with the police, decided to go their separate ways. But the operation failed to put their primary target out of business. In the summer of 1988 he served a few months’ imprisonment on Spike Island in Cork for refusing to enter a bond to keep the peace after threatening his neighbours in front of the T Squad. Cahill later claimed that he had enjoyed the break on what he described as his ‘treasure island’. When he got out he continued to organize robberies, but not on the same scale.
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