Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  The sense of panic in the underworld was so intense that several crime bosses emptied their bank accounts and left the country to get out of the way before the CAB hit. One of the fleeing gangsters was the Penguin. George Mitchell even suggested Gilligan’s mob should murder a Garda to divert the heat. He advised his old pal that a third high-profile murder investigation – alongside the Guerin and McCabe cases – would stretch the cops beyond their limits. But the Garda offensive was so strong that Gilligan didn’t have a chance to carry out the evil strategy. Nevertheless, Hickey and his team were ordered to be extra vigilant and officers, armed with Uzi submachine-guns, were deployed at night to guard the investigation incident room. The actual station house was also refurbished to accommodate bomb- and fire-proof safes, to store evidence in the case. Hickey summarized what his officers were up against during one of scores of court appearances connected with the case: ‘We know from intelligence that the people concerned [the Gilligan gang] have the resources, the money and the firearms and will resort to anything, to maintain this wall of silence which they believe is necessary to protect themselves.’

  One notorious criminal who decided to relocate after the murder was Gilligan’s old pal, kidnapper John Cunningham. In September 1996, Cunningham had two years left to serve of his sentence for the Jennifer Guinness kidnapping and had been moved to Shelton Abbey Open Prison in County Wicklow. He’d been granted temporary release to attend the wedding of his adopted daughter Caroline. But two weeks before the bash, an off-duty prison governor spotted Cunningham and another former member of the General’s gang, Eamon Daly, out drinking in a pub with the prison officer who was supposed to be guarding them. As a result Cunningham lost his privileges, including temporary release, and was due to be sent back to Limerick Prison. The Colonel decided to do a runner instead. Gilligan organized a safe house for him and then helped to smuggle Cunningham out of the country, using the same route that had worked so well for Bomber Clarke.

  Cunningham was warmly welcomed by his former gangland pals in Holland. A big party was thrown in his honour at one of the city’s plush restaurants. Many of his old friends, including Gilligan, had become extremely wealthy men while Cunningham was inside. Gangland had undergone dramatic changes during those ten years. The Colonel was regaled with stories about how easy it was to make money in the drug business. He was given money, a nice place to live and told that if he wanted to get involved in the rackets there was plenty of ‘work’ available.

  At first Cunningham dealt with Gilligan’s Dutch contacts and helped to organize drug shipments for the gang. But following Gilligan’s subsequent arrest he formed a partnership with another expat, a Dublin hoodlum called Christy Kinahan. Together they would build a vast criminal empire.

  Meanwhile the Lucan Investigation Team was making significant progress. In October they made the breakthrough which brought down the Gilligan gang. Following a series of arrests three members of the organization agreed to become witnesses for the State.

  Detective Inspector Todd O’Loughlin was a central player in the historic criminal investigation. ‘One of the first things we noticed was the extent of the operation and the size of the pyramid that Gilligan had created. In a two-year period we conservatively estimated that his organization had smuggled in cannabis worth over £200 million on the streets. We had never seen a gang making such profits before and it opened our eyes to the true extent of organized crime,’ he recalled. ‘It took 400 arrests before we finally got a full picture of the size of this pyramid. The people who served time with him in Portlaoise wouldn’t talk and they remained loyal right to the end. But because of the size of the operation he also recruited people who were not hardcore criminals like Charlie Bowden, Russell Warren and John Dunne. When they were taken into custody they had remorse, which none of the other guys had, and through this then we were able to obtain details of the entire organization, and this was how we dismantled it from within.’

  Charlie Bowden, Russell Warren and the Sea Bridge shipping manager John Dunne became the first official supergrasses in Irish organized crime. In the fast-moving situation Tony Hickey and Pat Byrne found themselves in completely uncharted waters. They established an ad hoc witness protection programme and the DPP had to agree to grant the three criminals immunity from prosecution. At the same time Gilligan was arrested in London’s Heathrow Airport with over £300,000 in cash which he had collected from Michael Cunningham, the Colonel’s brother. Brian Meehan was convicted of murder and Gilligan got 20 years for drug-trafficking. Paul Ward, who was originally convicted of the murder, was subsequently acquitted on appeal, and Dutchie Holland was also jailed for drug-dealing.

  Gilligan’s use of intimidation and fear helped him to escape the murder rap. His former mistress Carol Rooney and the Dutch criminal Martin Baltus were both too scared to testify against him. Several other associates were also convicted and jailed for drug and gun offences. The CAB seized property and cash belonging to all the gang members, including houses and apartments owned by Meehan, Ward, Mitchell, Holland and Traynor. By 2011 John Gilligan was still fighting a seemingly endless legal battle with the Bureau, to stop them selling off Jessbrook.

  The Criminal Assets Bureau caused turmoil in the underworld. Murphy, McKenna and Galvin sat down with the Gardaí in the Bureau and began compiling a long list of their principal targets. Apart from Gilligan, the list included the Monk, the Munster Mafia and several of the foreign villains Barry Galvin had talked about on the Late Late Show. They pursued drug-dealers, smugglers, terrorists, pimps and money-launderers. They seized houses, cars and cash. Hundreds of hidden bank accounts, in Ireland and across Europe, were traced and frozen. The CAB’s very first seizure of money was from Derek ‘Maradona’ Dunne, who flew home from Amsterdam in October 1996 to withdraw £57,000 from his bank account.

  The Bureau also forced one of the world’s biggest drug-traffickers, Mickey Green, to flee his Irish bolt-hole from justice. Dubbed ‘the Pimpernel’, the former London bank robber, who was wanted by police all over the world, had quietly arrived in Ireland in the early 1990s after escaping the FBI in the US. The CAB seized and then sold his luxury mansion near Kilcock, County Kildare.

  Tax demands began falling onto doormats in the homes of gangsters all over the country. The investigation centred on Gerry Hutch, his gang and his mentor Matt Kelly was extended to take in at least a dozen other associates. Between them they were forced to pay over €10 million in taxes and penalties based on their criminal activities. In a ten-year period, the CAB recovered over €100 million from organized crime.

  The Bureau’s investigations were ground-breaking. In their probes into George Mitchell’s finances they discovered a link between the gang’s bagman, convicted fraudster Peter Bolger and former Government minister Michael Keating. As a result the high-flying politician was publicly disgraced and forced to pay a large tax bill. The most spectacular success was the conviction and imprisonment of Raphael ‘Ray’ Burke, who was Minister for Justice when John Gilligan was doing time in Portlaoise Prison. Burke was part of a corrupt clique of Fianna Fáil politicians, led by the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey. Ironically Haughey was the man credited with assisting in setting up the smuggling ring that first provided weapons for organized crime gangs back in 1968. The story had come full circle.

  George Mitchell, Gilligan and other criminals pooled their money and mounted a number of major High Court challenges to have the ‘draconian’ powers of the CAB revoked. In March 1997, John Gilligan made his first attempt to have the Bureau abolished when his Irish legal team mounted a challenge to the constitutionality of the Proceeds of Crime Act which had set up the Criminal Assets Bureau. It was the first major test of the new legislation and the Bureau’s survival depended on the outcome.

  During the four-day hearing David Langwallner SC, Gilligan’s counsel, claimed that the powers allowing Gardaí to confiscate and dispose of an individual’s assets meant: ‘We are on the slippery slope towards the creati
on of a police state.’ He stated that the Proceeds of Crime Act ‘masqueraded as a civil statute when it was a criminal law which circumvented the criminal process’. He described as ‘Kafkaesque’ the fact that the word of a Chief Superintendent or Revenue Official could have an individual’s assets frozen, put in receivership and disposed of, on the basis of assumed criminality, without charge, trial or conviction. He likened the Proceeds of Crime Act to emergency legislation, where the courts were deemed to be inadequate to protect the public and preserve public order. But Ireland, he claimed, was not in a state of emergency and had one of the lowest crime rates in the world.

  Detective Superintendent Felix McKenna (who would later become the CAB’s second chief) told the court that one of the effects of the Proceeds of Crime Act over the previous eight months had been to ‘force criminals above ground’. Before the Act, a lot of money had also been taken out of bank accounts and moved abroad. ‘Over the last six to seven months, one major criminal gang has put millions of pounds into apartment blocks and licensed premises, principally in Dublin,’ McKenna revealed.

  Deputy Commissioner Noel Conroy testified that people would become frustrated and disillusioned with the criminal justice system and be less likely to come forward as witnesses or informants, if major criminals were not stopped. Conroy said that the Bureau was a success and revealed ‘major criminals are being forced to work on the shop floor’ of their activities since the Proceeds of Crime Act came into force. He emphasized that this meant they were running the gauntlet of being charged with criminal offences.

  Underlining the changed times, Conroy was the first senior member of Garda management to publicly give a frank assessment of how organized crime had evolved in Ireland. In the past, the top brass had no place for such candour. He told how criminals had switched from armed robbery and used that money to get involved in supplying drugs on a grand scale, using runners or couriers, so they could remove themselves completely from the operation. ‘The Godfathers could command respect and fear within the criminal community,’ he said, ‘so that the runners would not inform on them and they had become wealthy.’ Conroy said the Proceeds of Crime Act had resulted in major criminal figures attempting to leave the jurisdiction with their cash and trying to dispose of properties.

  Ms Justice Catherine McGuinness delivered her seminal judgment on the first anniversary of Veronica Guerin’s murder. The judge ruled that the Proceeds of Crime Act was constitutional. She said the question was whether the Act, within the framework of the Constitution, was a proportionate response to the threat posed to society by the operations of the major criminals, described in evidence by Felix McKenna and Noel Conroy. She said it appeared that, as a matter of proportionality, the legislature was justified in enacting the Act and restricting certain rights through the operation of it.

  She said the two Garda officers ‘painted a picture of an entirely new type of professional criminal who organised, rather than committed, crime and thereby rendered himself virtually immune to the ordinary procedures of criminal investigation and prosecution’. The judge stated: ‘Such persons are able to operate a reign of terror so as effectively to prevent the passing on of information to the Gardaí. At the same time, their obvious wealth and power cause them to be respected by lesser criminals or would-be criminals.’

  The judgment represented a decisive victory against the underworld. It showed the Godfathers that there was a new, unified determination to take them on.

  The Penguin had already decided to take his own form of action and put out a contract on Barry Galvin. He was aware that Galvin was one of the driving forces behind the Bureau. The fact that he was not a cop made Mitchell consider that he would be vulnerable. And he wasn’t the only criminal with the idea. English drug-trafficker John Morrissey, a business acquaintance of Mitchell, had moved to live in Kinsale, County Cork in 1995. He was a major international crime figure who had been linked to a string of gangland murders in Europe and the UK. Morrissey spent €600,000 opening an upmarket restaurant in the town, where he was known as ‘Johnny Cash’ – because he always paid in cash. Among his new friends was the local antiques dealer and drug-trafficker Alan Buckley.

  Barry Galvin ensured that Morrissey didn’t get a warm welcome and the CAB hit him with an initial tax bill of over €100,000. In December 1997, the gang boss was forced to leave his beloved adopted home when the Bureau seized whatever assets and cash of his they could locate. Garda intelligence sources and their UK colleagues received information that Morrissey was plotting revenge. He planned to fly a hit team into Cork to murder Galvin. Mitchell’s men had agreed to supply the weapons. But the plan was foiled when a massive security operation was put in place and armed bodyguards were assigned to the crusading legal officer. Gardaí and their UK counterparts ensured that the plan never got off the ground. Commissioner Byrne took the unprecedented step of issuing Galvin with a Garda revolver for extra protection.

  The murder of Veronica Guerin and the demise of the Gilligan gang was a watershed in the history of organized crime. And for a short time at least, the underworld appeared to be on the back foot.

  19. The Penguin

  George ‘the Penguin’ Mitchell was released from prison in October 1991 and immediately set about establishing his own drug-dealing empire. Mitchell hated his time in prison and, according to former associates, ‘went to bits’ inside. The experience taught him to be much more cautious in how he conducted business in the future. In criminal terms, the former biscuit delivery man was a complete workaholic, with a finger in every pie. Within a few years he had become one of the biggest drug-traffickers in Europe, with contacts in the Russian Mafia and the Colombian drug cartels. Mitchell was an extremely devious and clever mobster. He was also as dangerous as he was smart and had no problem resorting to violence and murder to sort out his problems.

  The Penguin surrounded himself with the most potent collection of villains yet seen since the heyday of Martin Cahill’s gang. The group of hardened mobsters were involved in every type of serious crime, including drugs, armed robbery, extortion, hijacking, handling stolen goods and gun-running. In addition to his brother Paddy, George’s inner-circle included his long-time friend from Ballyfermot, Johnny Doran. The armed robber had been released from prison in 1989 after serving eight years for his part in the Stillorgan heist. In December 1990, the leader of the same team, Frank Ward, was also released from prison. Doran, who became Mitchell’s right-hand man in the new drug venture, brought Ward into the mob. Meanwhile, Ward made ends meet by carrying out a string of armed robberies around Ireland. Other members of the gang included INLA man Danny Hamill, Gerry Hopkins and Stephen Kearney from Ballyfermot. Thirty-year-old John McGrail from St Theresa’s Gardens, a convicted armed robber, was one of the gang’s main organizers. The mob was also joined by Mickey Boyle, the Bray kidnapper, when he got out of prison in 1993. The dangerous head-case became the Penguin’s hit man.

  Mitchell began to regularly commute between Dublin, London and Amsterdam to do deals with other gangs. He also dealt in firearms, which were smuggled into Ireland and the UK by the most important member of the Penguin’s organization, Liam Judge from Allenwood, County Kildare. Judge was a long-distance truck driver who had an excellent knowledge of the transport business and routes across continental Europe. One former friend recalled how the trucker had no idea about drugs when he first got involved with Mitchell. ‘He was a gent really; a real character and a serial womanizer. Judgey knew fuck all about gear [drugs] in the beginning. I remember once that there was a bag of speed [amphetamine] sitting on the table and he put a spoon of it in his tea thinking it was sugar. He was out of his head for days.’

  Judge organized the transport of drugs in container trucks from the Continent to warehouses he rented around Dublin and the Midlands. In one elaborate scam, Judge and Mitchell imported huge quantities of ecstasy inside second-hand car tyres which were delivered to Judge’s yard in Allenwood. Despite his suspicious nature, Mitche
ll trusted his transport manager and placed him at the heart of the organization.

  But there was a side to Judge the Penguin knew nothing about – the trucker was also a police informant. He had been recruited following an arrest for drunk-driving in 1993 and would prove to be one of the most important touts in gangland. Judge lived a precarious existence as a double-agent but seemed to like the buzz. At one stage he operated a lay-by chuck-wagon for truckers on the Johnstown Road in County Kildare. It was a popular meeting place for drivers seeking illegal work and for drug-traffickers who needed transport. No one knew that the wagon had been equipped with bugging equipment by Judge’s Garda handlers. Intelligence gleaned from the talkative truckers and traffickers led to several arrests and no one ever suspected where the information came from.

  It wasn’t long before Gardaí began taking notice of the Penguin’s activities. In October 1993, Mitchell and Stephen Kearney travelled to the Costa del Sol to organize a cannabis deal with an English gang. The plan was to swap a truck-load of French wine for the hash which would then be driven by Kearney to the UK. Mitchell flew back to Dublin alone. When Kearney returned on the ferry from the UK a month later, Gardaí seized £60,000 in cash which they found hidden in the spare wheel of his car. Cops also seized £80,000 when they searched a car driven by another gang associate who had also returned from the UK. The cops suspected the money was part-payment for drugs. An unsuccessful claim was later made in the Dublin High Court for the return of the money. It was under a Police Property Application by a convicted London fraudster called Kenneth Chester Whitehead. On appeal, the Supreme Court upheld the High Court decision that it did not believe Whitehead was the true owner of the cash. In the days before the Criminal Assets Bureau, the courts would have been left with no option but to return the money if a more credible claimant had come forward.