Cocaine Wars

by Mick McCaffrey

  They were not long in coming either. Just five days after Rattigan’s relation’s house had been shot at, Aidan Gavin was shot in an incident at his house at Foxdene Avenue in Clondalkin. Shortly after midnight, Gavin answered a knock at his front door and was faced with a masked man brandishing a revolver. The first shot missed the target and the second whizzed past Gavin’s cheek and grazed the bridge of his nose. Gavin slammed the door and ran out the back of the house into the back garden and jumped over a wall and escaped. His wife and two children were in the house at the time. This was a bona fide murder attempt, and it was a miracle that Gavin survived at all. The gunman escaped in a waiting car, and there was no forensic evidence left at the scene. It is not known who carried out the gun attack.

  Aidan Gavin was born in December 1971, and spent most of his life living on Mourne Road in Drimnagh. He was involved in the feud from day one, and moved large volumes of drugs around the city. He had nine criminal convictions for possession of drugs with intent for sale and supply, simple possession of drugs, burglary, robbery and a conviction for assaulting a Garda. When his brother Declan Gavin was murdered, Aidan took it personally and began to lose the run of himself. He developed a bad drug addiction and got more and more drawn into the world of organised crime, a world that had already claimed the life of his brother.

  On 8 August 2005 at around 5.50 p.m., Kevin Redmond, a brother of Eddie, was fixing a car outside a house on Knocknarea Road in Drimnagh, along with a man he had recently sold the vehicle to. The pair were hard at work when a motorbike pulled up with two men on it. The passenger on the bike pulled out a revolver and fired a number of rounds at the two men, hitting them both but not causing serious injury. The two men were totally innocent, and Gardaí believe that they were shot in a case of mistaken identity, because Kevin Redmond closely resembled his brother Eddie. Gardaí believe that the attack was in revenge for the attempted murder of Aidan Gavin the previous month.

  The day after, Gardaí recovered the .375 Magnum revolver that was used in the shooting of the innocent men. It was hidden in the garden of a house in Dublin 8. Gardaí seized the weapon and placed the garden under surveillance. A number of hours later, a twenty-eight-year-old man from the north inner city arrived and attempted to recover the gun. He was a close friend and known associate of Paddy Doyle, but he refused to say anything and was later released without charge. Following this shooting, members of the Rattigan gang took photos of the bloodstained footpath where the two men were shot. They then sent the photos via picture message to a mobile phone that Brian Rattigan secretly had in Portlaoise Prison. Rattigan had been transferred to the high-security jail because he was becoming too powerful in Mountjoy. A text accompanying the photos asked him what should be done about his friends and lieutenants being shot at. A couple of weeks after the shootings, there was a random search of cells in Portlaoise and the mobile phone and picture messages were discovered. Gardaí were called in to investigate, and they got a reminder – if they needed any – that it was still the jailed crime lord who was calling the shots in the feud.

  A week after the two men were shot by mistake, twenty-four-year-old Daniel Doyle from Clonmacnoise Road in Crumlin, was drinking in Sundrive Park, which is also known as Eamonn Ceannt Park, when he was approached by three men, one of whom was carrying a sawn-off shotgun. One of the trio opened fire from close range with a .22 rifle, hitting Doyle in the thigh and back. He survived, but was left paralysed for life as a result of the incident and will have to live permanently in a care home. When he recovered enough to be interviewed, he gave a statement to Gardaí identifying Paul Hurley, a seventeen-year-old from Clonmacnoise Road, as one of the three men. Doyle told Gardaí that he had been shot at the behest of the Rattigan gang, after he was blamed for being the man who shot the two innocent men the previous week. Doyle told detectives – off the record – that he was shot because he had recently stopped sourcing his drugs from a close associate of the Rattigan gang and changed to Graham Whelan.

  Whelan was with Declan Gavin in the Holiday Inn during the Garda operation in March 2000. He was serving a six-year sentence in Mountjoy, but he was running a drugs operation from his prison cell. Phone records obtained by Gardaí linked Graham Whelan’s prison mobile to having contacted a number of well-known feud members, so detectives had little doubt that Whelan was a serious player. Whelan was far from a young man being influenced by more serious criminals – as he had argued in court after the Holiday Inn seizure.

  Paul Hurley was subsequently charged with the shooting. On the first day of the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, the prosecution Senior Counsel told the jury that Doyle recognised Hurley as the gunman, but he was refusing to give evidence. Detective Sergeant Gerry Quinn took the stand and read out the statement that Doyle had given to Gardaí fingering Hurley as the gunman. He told officers that he recognised one of the men as Hurley but, ‘I thought nothing of it because I recognised one of them. As they came towards me, I saw a flash and heard a bang and I started to run. Then the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.’ Doyle said that Hurley was not carrying the rifle, but was standing on the left of the group and wore a baseball cap. He said that he brought his hand up to block his face from further shots. ‘I heard one of them say, “You got him in the head,” so I went along with that. I played dead.’ In his statement, Doyle added that he heard one of the group suggest that they take his mobile phone. ‘They says, “Hurley, get his phone,” and he said, “No, I’m not touching him.” Somebody then turned Doyle over and began searching him. He still had his hand over his face when he was turned, and opened his eyes and saw Paul Hurley. When the group left Doyle, seemingly dead, he dragged himself to the front gate of the park and a passer-by called the Gardaí.’

  As Detective Sergeant Gerry Quinn read out his statement, Doyle shouted that the Garda was telling lies. When he was questioned by Judge Paul Carney, he refused to answer him and said that if he did, he would be killed. Judge Carney said that the only reason Doyle wasn’t spending a night in the cells was because he was in a wheelchair. Judge Carney said that the law gave him no alternative but to acquit Paul Hurley of attempting to murder Daniel Doyle or cause him serious harm. Hurley walked free from court. Gardaí say there is no doubt that Daniel Doyle was intimidated and frightened into not following through on his statement.

  Three days after Daniel Doyle was shot, Gardaí searched a house in Portarlington, Co. Laois, after a tip-off, and found a note identifying members of the Rattigan gang and some of their loved ones who could be targeted. A number of individuals were identified in the note, including Joey Redmond. The note listed: ‘Joey Redmond. Navy Blue Bora which his ‘girl’ drives’; ‘Shay one arm Valley apartments.’ This was a reference to Shay O’Byrne, one of Brian Rattigan’s lieutenants. The note went on: ‘Rattigan’s sister silver Golf easy got.’ This was a reference to Sharon Rattigan, O’Byrne’s partner. ‘***** easy got.’ This is thought to refer to Brian Rattigan’s disabled relative. He was obviously considered to be fair game because his home was shot up the previous month. It is possible that he was shot after he was included in the seized list; detectives didn’t know how old it was or if it had been acted on yet. Another name to appear on the list was ‘B Rattigan’s girl silver Bora easy got.’ This was obviously Rattigan’s partner, Natasha McEnroe.

  ***

  On the same day as the note was recovered, Joey O’Brien went to Sundrive Road Garda Station at around 11.00 p.m., and said that two cars pulled up alongside him on nearby Keeper Road. He recognised the occupants of the cars as Aidan Gavin, Darren Geoghegan, Freddie Thompson and Thompson’s cousin Eoin O’Connor. Also present, O’Brien claimed, were brothers David and Liam Byrne from Raleigh Square in Crumlin. When O’Brien saw some of the men get out of the cars, he ran away and hid in the front gardens of houses that backed onto Sundrive Road Garda Station. He told Gardaí that while he was hiding in a bush, he looked out and saw Freddie Thompson standing nearby, carrying a handgun. Thomp
son and some of the others searched for O’Brien, but couldn’t find him and drove off. When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, O’Brien headed to the Garda station to report the incident. It was the second time in five months that O’Brien had managed to get away from Thompson and his cronies.

  On 19 August, the day after Freddie Thompson had allegedly come looking for Joey O’Brien, he was again keeping busy. Freddie’s partner, Vicky Dempsey, had been friendly with a man from Crumlin while Thompson had been serving a jail sentence in 2003 and 2004. When he got out of prison in late 2004, Thompson had stabbed the man in the back with a knife, leaving the injured man needing twenty-seven stitches. He did not report the incident to Gardaí because he believed that he and ‘Fat’ Freddie had sorted out their differences. However, at around 1.00 a.m. on 19 August, while he was in the Texaco garage on the Crumlin Road, the man saw a silver BMW car pass by him. Freddie Thompson was sitting in the front passenger seat. The BMW suddenly did a handbrake turn and sped after him. The man managed to jump into a car being driven by a friend and made it home safely. He spotted the BMW driving past his house on several occasions immediately after he escaped. While he was in his house, he received a call on his mobile from Freddie Thompson. He asked Thompson what he had done wrong, and was told that he was going to have his throat slit. The following week, the man was again attacked by Freddie Thompson, this time with a baseball bat. He had done nothing wrong, but Thompson obviously still held a grudge over the man’s friendship with Vicky Dempsey.

  8

  Forty-eight Hours of Mayhem

  BY LATE 2005, the Thompson gang was making so much money from drug dealing that it literally did not know what to do with it. Gardaí estimate that the gang was making in excess of €250,000 some weeks, although that would be when a major shipment arrived. Other weeks the gang might have been low on supply, and would only be taking home €20,000 or €30,000, while they awaited the arrival of another shipment. Also, if Gardaí intercepted drugs that were destined for the Thompson mob, it would have a major effect on their profit – because the supplier would have to be paid anyway. When there were lots of drugs on the market, the price would drop and profit would be down. If Freddie’s gang had most of the product that was on sale in Dublin, they could pretty much charge what they liked and would make serious money. So some weeks were better than others. Being strictly a ‘cash only’ business, drug dealing can pose major problems in what to do with the profits. A senior gang member cannot go around buying top of the range cars and luxury apartments with used notes, because the authorities will soon cop on and seize them if they cannot be legitimately explained. Any large criminal organisation therefore has people to launder its money. These senior figures use a network of dodgy solicitors and accountants to rinse the dirty money and legitimise it, so that when it comes back into the hands of the gang, it is clean and untraceable. Even in a bad week there would be lots of cash that needed to be looked after. According to Gardaí, it was twenty-seven-year-old Darren Geoghegan’s responsibility to take care of the Thompson gang’s loot.

  Geoghegan, from Galtymore Drive in Drimnagh, had grown up with Brian Rattigan and Declan Gavin, but had been closer to Declan Gavin. So, after Gavin’s murder he pledged his allegiance to Freddie Thompson. He had developed into one of the most senior, trusted and, arguably, most important members of the gang. Geoghegan was highly intelligent and had a good head for figures. Indeed, if his life had been different, Gardaí say he could easily have worked for one of the country’s top accountancy firms, such was his grasp of complicated numbers. Sources describe Darren Geoghegan as purely a businessman who was not involved in the day-today business of running the drugs gang. He would have been far more comfortable with a pen than a gun. Although he had been arrested as part of the John Roche murder investigation, Geoghegan was not suspected of actually pulling the trigger.

  Being the money man for a major drugs gang is one of the most sought after criminal jobs because it means that you are indispensable. It is the money man who knows how much each dealer makes per week and where the cash has been sent to be cleaned and made legitimate. He has the direct line to the crooked accountants and the unscrupulous solicitors; he controls the properties and investments that have been bought with the clean money. He basically knows where all the metaphorical bodies are buried – leaving the dangerous matter of disposing of the real bodies to other minions. He enjoys the rewards of the trade, without handling the drugs and without any of the risks that more ‘hands-on’ gangsters take.

  Gardaí only have a basic idea about how Darren Geoghegan laundered his group’s money. This information has been gleaned from intelligence, and because the CAB never looked into his activities, we do not know many details of the complicated web used by Geoghegan to cover his tracks. It is suspected that Darren Geoghegan established a property company under the name of a person with no criminal record, and used the clean company to purchase dozens of apartments and several large commercial premises around Dublin for the gang. The properties would be rented out, and the income would be used to buy more drugs from Spain and the Netherlands. Then the profits would be used to expand the gang’s property portfolio. Some sources have estimated that he had bought scores of apartments with the drugs money in places as far away as Bulgaria, Latvia and other Eastern European countries, where the authorities do not ask too many questions when foreign business transactions are being conducted. A solicitor, who is based in Walkinstown, and a number of accountants in Dublin are currently being investigated by CAB on suspicion of facilitating property deals for several criminal gangs in Dublin. Gardaí are confident that when the probe is finished, they will be able to link these individuals, especially the solicitor, to Darren Geoghegan and will have a clear picture of exactly how much money he laundered and what he used the money to buy.

  Gardaí also believe that Geoghegan had a business relationship with Walkinstown-based car dealer Brian Downes, a smalltime criminal with major gangland connections. They believe he gave Downes large sums of money to launder through his dodgy second-hand car firm. Downes was in business with several other criminal car dealers. He hatched a money laundering scam for drug gangs, whereby a wide range of high-powered cars were imported into the country but were presented to Revenue officials as lower-specification cars, with fake paperwork vouching for the vehicles, so Downes would get away with paying lower rates of Vehicle Registration Tax and VAT. The scam was a lucrative one, and profits of up to €25,000 could be made on each car. Downes was also suspected of providing the Thompson gang with cars that were used as getaway vehicles in several murders, and cars in which to transport drugs. He was shot dead at his dealership in Walkinstown in October 2007, along with his innocent associate Eddie Ward. Like Darren Geoghegan, Downes had been arrested for questioning about the murder of John Roche, on suspicion of giving the Thompson mob the Saab that the killers had escaped in.

  Having access to all that cash meant that the Rattigan mob regarded Geoghegan as a key player, and as a result he was one of their top murder targets. Geoghegan had been targeted on several previous occasions. A drive-by shooting on his family home on Galtymore Drive, back in June 2001, was one of the first feud-related incidents documented by Gardaí. The Geoghegan family home was shot up again in November of the same year. Darren Geoghegan rarely returned there after that because he wanted to send out the message that he no longer lived there, so his family would not be targeted.

  People who knew Darren Geoghegan point out that he was no thug or lowlife. They say that he was quick to step in and break up fights. And that he looked out for his friends and neighbours, and was incredibly loyal. If he saw people taking drugs in the local park, he would make sure that young kids were moved along to ensure their safety. He was big into swimming and going to the gym; he was naturally well toned and never used steroids or hard drugs. The closest he ever got to drug use was smoking the odd joint. While there was no doubt that there was some good in Geoghegan, he also had
a darker side and began to get involved in criminality. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact time when this happened, but when he was twenty he grew tired of his job as a painter and decorator. So he quit and went on the dole. It was probably then that he started to get involved in crime with his other mates, and the gang, then united, started dealing drugs and grew to be a large organisation quite quickly. In early 2001, when he was twenty-one, Geoghegan moved out of the family home. Soon after that, the feud kicked off in a big way, and because of the threat from the other side, Geoghegan moved around a lot and did not call any one place home. He stayed away from Drimnagh and Crumlin as much as possible, and mainly stayed in rented houses and apartments around South Dublin.

  Geoghegan had managed to stay under the Gardaí’s radar and had only amassed a handful of criminal convictions for road traffic offences. He was suspended from driving for eighteen months in September 2001 for dangerous driving, which was the most serious sentence he had received.

  Gavin Byrne was Geoghegan’s assistant when it came to looking after the drug money. Originally from Windmill Road in Crumlin, Gavin Byrne moved to Clonsilla to try and ensure his safety. Byrne had also grown up with Brian Rattigan and Declan Gavin, but he was not as intelligent as Geoghegan and was never treated with the same level of respect by his own gang. Gavin Byrne had made it to his thirtieth birthday, which is very unusual for somebody so involved in gangland crime. He was always one step ahead of the law, and didn’t have any criminal convictions. He had been in court three times to contest parking fines, and had always left the courthouse vindicated, with the charges being struck out. The fact that he hadn’t been caught didn’t mean he wasn’t involved in serious crime though, and Byrne was a regular target of Gardaí from Crumlin and Sundrive Road. He had been arrested as part of the Joey Rattigan murder investigation in late 2002, when he was linked to a car in which the revolver that had been used to shoot Rattigan was found. He submitted his DNA to Gardaí, obviously knowing that he had never been near the abandoned silver Volvo. That arrest was part of a Garda exercise to ‘round up the usual suspects’ because most of his mates, Darren Geoghegan, Paddy Doyle, Freddie Thompson and Aidan Gavin had been arrested, to see if their DNA could be linked to the car, but in the end it was a fruitless exercise for the Gardaí.