Cocaine Wars
Page 1
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
MICK MCCAFFREY is the author of the No. 1 bestseller The Irish Scissor Sisters. He is News Editor of the Sunday Tribune. As Security Editor at both the Sunday Tribune and Evening Herald, he has specialised in crime journalism for the last eight years.
Praise for Cocaine Wars
‘Well-researched and authoritative account of a vicious gang war.’
IRISH INDEPENDENT
‘An Intimate knowledge of the engagement and a commendable level of research render this account indispensable for interested parties.’
SUNDAY BUSINESS POST
‘An in-depth exposé.’
IRISH DAILY MIRROR
‘Explosive.’
SUNDAY WORLD
Praise for The Irish Scissor Sisters
‘This is a unique insight into the underbelly of a “new” Ireland. Riveting.’
JOE DUFFY, RTÉ
This edition published in 2011 by
Y Books
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Text © 2010, 2011 Mick McCaffrey
Editing, design and layout © 2011 Y Books
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photograph section.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-908023-03-2
Ebook – Mobi format ISBN: 978-1-908023-04-9
Ebook – epub format ISBN: 978-1-908023-05-6
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Cover design by Graham Thew Design
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For Jennifer Stevens
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THANKS TO THE many Gardaí and members of the legal profession who gave up their time to speak to me. Their insight and knowledge was an invaluable help. This book would not have been possible without them.
Thanks to Sunday Tribune Editor, Noirín Hegarty, and Deputy Editor, Diarmuid Doyle, for giving me the time to write this. Maureen Gillespie and Mark Condren from the Sunday Tribune picture department were always happy to organise photos at short notice.
The advice given to me by journalists Ken Foy from Irish Daily Star Sunday, Jim Cusack of the Sunday Independent and Ali Bracken, Crime Correspondent with the Sunday Tribune was an enormous help, and was very much appreciated.
Gerry Curran from the Courts Service Press Office was always available to answer any queries; as was the staff of the Irish Prison Service Press Office.
Thanks to Chenile Keogh, Managing Director of Y Books, for all her help and support. Thanks also to Y Books’ Robert Doran for copy-editing and proofreading. Thanks to solicitor Kieran Kelly for his help and suggestions.
Also, thanks to Fintan Maguire, Head of TV3 Productions, for his support in making the TV series of Cocaine Wars. A special word for Cocaine Wars Producer and Director, Warren Tennyson, whose dedication to making the show bordered on the obsessive! He did a wonderful job.
Thanks to Kenneth Swan, Donal Galvin, Brian Hurl, Ronan Bent, Dave Dehora, Gareth Curley, Mark Hilliard and Brendan Cronin. Also, thanks to Tim Tuomey for giving me the encouragement to get into journalism. Thanks to Ian Mallon, Deputy Editor of the Evening Herald, for giving me my break.
Thanks also to my mother and father, sisters, brothers-in-law, and nieces and nephews.
Finally, thanks to Jennifer Stevens, who encouraged me to write this book from the outset, even though it was a difficult topic. I wouldn’t have been able to finish it without her support and advice.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Gang members
Introduction
Chapter 1 A Feud is Born
Chapter 2 A Night of Drama
Chapter 3 Cold-blooded Murder
Chapter 4 What the Witnesses Did or Did Not See
Chapter 5 A Brother for a Brother
Chapter 6 Rattigan’s Revenge
Chapter 7 Freddie Hits Back
Chapter 8 Forty-eight Hours of Mayhem
Chapter 9 Old Habits Die Hard
Chapter 10 Making New Friends
Chapter 11 Sinking to a New Low
Chapter 12 From Bad to Worse
Chapter 13 War on Unexpected Fronts
Chapter 14 The Emergence of the Next Generation
Chapter 15 The Demise of the Rattigan Gang
Conclusion
GANG MEMBERS
* = Deceased
Thompson/Gavin gang and associates Rattigan gang and associates
‘Fat’ Freddie Thompson Brian Rattigan
Declan ‘Deco’ Gavin* Shay O’Byrne*
Aidan Gavin Joey Rattigan*
Paddy Doyle* Eddie Redmond
Gavin Byrne* Joey Redmond
Darren Geoghegan* Eddie Rice
David Byrne John Roche*
Liam Brannigan Noel Roche*
Karl Dempsey Wayne Zambra*
Graham Whelan Anthony Cannon*
Ritchie Thompson Trevor Brunton
Eoin O’Connor Gary Bryan*
Paul Warren* Shane Maloney
Philip Griffiths Wayne McNally
Albert Doyle Karl Kavanagh
Christopher ‘Git’
McDonagh* Eric Wansboro
Freddie Thompson’s gang is aligned to the McCarthy/Dundon gang in Limerick. Brian Ratti/gablen’s gang is aligned to the Keane/Collopy gang in Limerick.
OTHER VICTIMS
Ian Kenny*, Eddie McCabe*, Terry Dunleavy*
INTRODUCTION
THEY STARTED OUT as most criminals do – robbing cars, joyriding and getting involved in petty thieving. They were boyhood friends and neighbours. They had gone to the same primary school, and those that continued in education also ended up in the same secondary school. They were a tight group – around ten friends who were fiercely loyal and protective of each other. If you took on one, you took them all on. That was the way it was.
The Crumlin and Drimnagh area towards the end of the 1990s was a tough place. Notorious criminals like ‘The General’, Martin Cahill; ‘The Viper’, Martin Foley; Seamus ‘Shavo’ Hogan and Dublin’s original drug baron, Larry Dunne, all hailed from the area. Crumlin and Drimnagh are often referred to as the ‘home of organised crime in Ireland’. Many in the local community treated these old-school gangsters like Robin Hood type figures. The gang looked up to these men, admired their lifestyles and made a vow that one day they would be like them and would have what they had – one way or another. Their chance came earlier than they anticipated. In 1996, Sunday Independent journalist Veronica Guerin was murdered at the behest of John Gilligan, the country’s biggest drug importer. An unprecedented wave of public outrage followed, and the government made Gilligan its public enemy number one. A massive Garda investigation put Gilligan and his gang out of business, and almost overnight a major vacuum developed in Dublin’s gangland. The gang ha
d started working for John Gilligan a few years before his downfall and had started to move up the drug-dealing ladder. With Gilligan permanently out of the way, the young and eager gang was perfectly posititoned to take over, and did so with gusto. The gang developed contacts with two Irish expatriates in Spain and then with contacts further afield. They built up a supply line and began importing millions of euro worth of cocaine, heroin and ecstasy into the capital. As sweeteners, and to show their appreciation to the gang for its business, the foreign suppliers threw in dozens of high-powered weapons with each shipment. The mob began to make tens of thousands of euro each week dealing drugs, and had soon conquered the market around Crumlin, Drimnagh and Dublin’s south inner city. The future seemed bright, but a petty squabble saw the gang permanently disintegrate – with deadly results.
Two separate groups formed, with Brian Rattigan leading one faction, and ‘Fat’ Freddie Thompson taking over the other. Over the next nine years, sixteen, people would lose their lives as part of the feud, either directly or indirectly – the average victim being just twenty-three years old. The falling out of old friends quickly became the deadliest gangland feud in the history of the state. Gardaí struggled to keep on top of hostilities, with literally hundreds of tit-for-tat incidents being recorded. The Gardaí’s dedication and hard work undoubtedly saved lives, but the accepted rule in the area of never co-operating with the police made the detectives’ lives very difficult, and they were always fighting to keep a lid on the feud. The deep hatred that the two rival gangs had for each other made the frequent peace efforts futile.
The feud did not just have an impact on the lives of the dead victims; dozens of other lives have been permanently destroyed. From the innocent residents caught up in attacks of mistaken identity to the relatives of feuding criminals becoming virtual prisoners in their own homes, unable to even drop their children to school because of the very real fear that they could be attacked and murdered, it is a feud that has driven a deep wedge in what was once a very close-knit community. Many of the criminals who were central players also desperately tried to get out but found that they were in too far. One notorious hit man took to driving around Dublin dressed as a woman, so he wouldn’t be recognised and shot. While the money man for one of the mobs managed to evade the law and invest hundreds of thousands of euro in property, he wasn’t able to escape a bullet to the head from his own gang. For the first time, the story is told of how one gang leader orchestrated murders from the comfort of his prison cell, with only his beloved pet budgie for company.
The Crumlin/Drimnagh feud has changed the political landscape in Ireland. It has resulted in one Justice Minister nearly having to fall on his sword because of an ill-conceived remark. It has directly led to a crack anti-gangland Garda unit being formed and the introduction of draconian legislation to allow Gardaí to permanently take feuding criminals off the street. Nearly a decade after the feud first began, it is more entrenched than ever, and there is little sign that it will ever end.
A new generation of feuding criminals has emerged and is taking the battle forward, even though most of the original gang members are either dead or serving lengthy jail sentences. This will surely mean that Gardaí will have their hands full over the next few years, and that even more young people will be sucked into this senseless feud. Towards the end of the 1980s, Larry Dunne spoke to Gardaí about the next generation of criminals. He said: ‘If you think we’re bad, wait until you see what’s coming behind us.’ This quote has never been more apt.
The Crumlin/Drimnagh feud will probably be the deadliest that the country will ever see. It has given the area an undeserved notoriety and divided what once was a strongly united community. Sixteen people have now lost their lives and there is little doubt that the murders will keep on happening, all because of a petty falling-out within a group of friends.
1
A Feud is Born
DECLAN ‘DECO’ GAVIN was tired after spending more than a day bagging and tagging the 2 kg of cocaine and 49,000 ecstasy tablets. He had booked into the Holiday Inn hotel on Dublin’s Pearse Street the day before, Thursday 9 March 2000, and along with Graham Whelan and Philip Griffiths had worked through the night breaking up the drugs haul into individual deals. The drugs would be worth around €1.7 million on the street, and nineteen-year-old Gavin and his gang expected to make a profit of nearly €1 million on their investment. Things were going well for ‘Deco’ Gavin of late. He was quickly becoming a very wealthy young man because of his burgeoning drug-dealing business, which was supplying large amounts of cocaine in his native Drimnagh and Crumlin.
The three men had come to the Holiday Inn well equipped for their work. The 2 kg of coke came in a solid block and they used hammers to break up the drugs into smaller blocks. They then put these into coffee grinders and blenders to crush them into a fine powder, which was mixed with glucose to make the finished product. The drugs were then packed into 1 gram deals – about three lines of cocaine – which would sell for up to €80 a bag. Once the individual bags were all sold on the streets, the gang would net around €750,000.
The ecstasy tablets would fetch at least €10 and possibly up to €15 each, depending on how pure they were. So although the trio were putting in the work, they would be rewarded handsomely.
Generally, drugs gangs can make a minimum of five times their investment on a shipment, and possibly up to eight or nine times what they paid if they break the drugs up in the most efficient way, so the job was a very important one.
Declan Gavin should really not have been in the Holiday Inn in the first place. Around Dublin there are three or four expert ‘cutters’ of cocaine who specialise in breaking the drugs up into individual deals. Gavin did this by mixing glucose, a white powder, with the pure cocaine, although the mixing agent of choice today is Lidocaine, which is a local anaesthetic often used by dentists. Lidocaine numbs the sensors in the membrane of a drug user’s nose and gives them a good buzz, leading them to believe that the cocaine is stronger than it actually is. Cocaine in Ireland is very weak, and masking agents like Lidocaine, Procaine and Xylocaine are vital in fooling users into thinking that their drugs are purer than they actually are.
A good cutter can make four diluted kilos out of one relatively pure kilo, which means that the profit margin is increased dramatically. However, Declan Gavin did not trust cutters because he believed that if they spent a day or two mixing cocaine, it was inevitable that they would steal some. This was a short-sighted attitude on his part, because neither he nor his two accomplices were skilled in mixing cocaine. It would prove to be a fatal error.
In order to get repeat custom, you need to ensure that the cocaine you sell is always of good quality; otherwise the user will go elsewhere. It was all about the profit for Gavin though, and he wasn’t prepared to pay an expert cutter the €35,000 fee that is standard for cutting down 2 kg of cocaine. So he really shouldn’t have been in the Holiday Inn with the drugs at all, because the first rule of being a successful drug dealer is never to touch the product. This is a principle that was adopted by Ireland’s first major drug importers, the Dunne family, in the early 1980s. Larry Dunne was the leader of the family and the mastermind behind the smuggling racket. Foot soldiers who used to handle heroin on his behalf often joked, ‘Larry doesn’t carry’, because Dunne knew that the Gardaí would have great difficulty linking him to any seizures if he wasn’t in possession of the drugs.
Declan Gavin was one of the leaders of the drugs gang that controlled distribution in Dublin 12. There were about ten senior members of the gang. Whelan and Griffiths were only foot soldiers brought in to break up the coke under Gavin’s watchful eye. The gang members had clubbed together to buy the batch of cocaine and ecstasy and would probably have paid about €170,000 up front to buy the 2 kg of cocaine. However, it is also possible that they were given a kilo on credit because they were such good customers of their Dutch supplier. Just a euro or two would have been paid up front for each e
cstasy tablet. Gavin had probably personally invested €35,000 in the shipment, so it was in his interests to make sure that things went smoothly.
Organising drugs shipments is a logistical nightmare and is very costly, hence the temptation to dilute the finished product and make as much money as is possible. When a drug dealer organises a shipment with his Dutch or Spanish supplier, it is not just a case of popping over on a flight, packing the drugs into a suitcase and returning home the next day. Professional drug importers send at least two ‘mules’ to the Netherlands to pick up the drugs. They are supervised by a senior and trusted member of the drugs gang, who accompanies them and always watches from a distance to make sure that nothing goes wrong and that the mules do not cream drugs off the main stash. This necessitates booking hotel rooms and organising flights, often with false passports, so that the authorities don’t find out the real identities of those travelling. So it is a very expensive business. Then there is the matter of organising the drugs to be driven back to Ireland. A long-distance lorry driver is usually paid around €30,000 a trip to bring the drugs in through Dublin or Rosslare Ports. So before any drugs arrive in the country, up to €100,000 can be spent on the logistics. This is before unforeseen problems, such as a mule carrying cash through Dublin Airport on the outward journey being caught by Customs and having the money seized, or the Gardaí getting a tip-off and confiscating the cocaine as it comes into the country.
Even arriving at the hotel without getting caught had been something of a victory, then, but there was still serious work to do before the gang could cash in. Gavin, Whelan and Griffiths had rented two adjoining rooms in the hotel. They worked shifts, with two of the men breaking up the coke, while the third caught up on some sleep. The Holiday Inn traditionally attracts tourists eager to see the sights of the capital, and, usually, the vast majority of guests are out during the day and return to their rooms in the afternoon, leaving them vacant for most of the day. The three men told hotel staff that they did not want to be disturbed and turned away the cleaners when they came to change the bed linen. When this happened two days in a row, a vigilant member of staff became suspicious and wondered what three Dublin men in their late teens were doing in two hotel rooms for well over a day without coming out once. He reported his suspicions to hotel management, and Gardaí at nearby Pearse Street station were informed. Five uniformed officers came to the hotel to see what was going on. They knocked on the door, identified themselves as Gardaí and ordered the men to open it. There was no response, so the door had to be forcibly opened. Graham Whelan and Philip Griffiths were caught red-handed. Griffiths was observed running over to a window and throwing a blue holdall out onto the car park below. It was subsequently found to contain cocaine. The two men offered no resistance and were quickly cuffed while reinforcements were called. The Gardaí knew that they were dealing with a major drugs haul. In 2000, a €1.7-million haul would have been the equivalent of finding €10 million worth of drugs today because drugs were far more difficult to source at that time. The Gardaí burst into the adjoining room hopeful of finding more drugs. They found Declan Gavin lying dozing on a bed, but he was not physically holding any drugs, although there was cocaine in the room. Gavin was also arrested and taken to Pearse Street. Coffee grinders, weighing equipment and packages for bagging the drugs were also recovered, as well as other drug-mixing paraphernalia. A major Garda investigation was launched under the command of Detective Inspector John Fitzpatrick. At the station none of the three men co-operated with the investigating detectives. They were all used to being quizzed by Gardaí and knew that the drill was to keep quiet and say absolutely nothing.