Cocaine Wars

by Mick McCaffrey

  Eddie first appeared before the Children’s Court when he was just fourteen. He was charged with missing school and being a passenger in a stolen car. Linda accompanied him. The judge remarked that he was so small that he would need a box to be seen. The kindly judge said that he had the face of an angel, and let him off with a rap on the knuckles. It would not be the last time that he was before the courts. Just a few months later, he was back and was sent to the Oberstown young offenders’ institute, for missing school and stealing a car. He spent a few weeks there before escaping in his bare feet. He told his mother that he didn’t like being locked up because it gave him too much time to think. When he completed his sentence, Eddie began to run away from home regularly and effectively left the care of his mother, staying in friends’ houses and also being looked after by relations. Linda McCabe could not bear to live in Tallaght any more, passing by the site of her husband’s murder each day. So the family moved to a house in Rafter’s Lane in Drimnagh. Eddie spent a few weeks there but kept on running away, even staying in a tent in a field near their old house in Tallaght for a week, before being tracked down by his distraught mother. On another occasion, his grandmother found Eddie unconscious, lying on top of his father’s grave. She had gone to pay her respects to her dead son. An empty bottle of vodka lay by her grandson’s side and his face was stained with tears. He had spent the night asleep next to his father. After running away again, Eddie was found in the shed of the old family home in Tallaght. Eddie Snr was a skilled carpenter and had built the shed. When Eddie was found, he said that he went there because it reminded him of his dad.

  Linda was herself struggling to accept the loss of her husband, and life was very tough, trying to come to terms with her grief and pull her troubled son back from the brink, as well as look after his three younger brothers. But much as she tried, Eddie did not allow himself to be helped. He was in and out of detention centres, and when he was just thirteen, somebody gave him a painkiller to help him sleep. He said that he liked the way it made him feel and started to heavily abuse pills from then on, mixed with large amounts of cannabis and alcohol. He used to regularly steal cars while high on drink and drugs. He often crashed and was arrested by Gardaí. He would then be sent away to detention centres again. Every time he was taken into state care, he quickly escaped. Once he even managed to flee the Children’s Court in Garda handcuffs, after being arrested in Blessington for stealing a car. On another occasion, he stole a horse and rode off into the countryside to escape the pressures of life and to think about his father.

  Eddie once told his mother: ‘I will be lucky if I live to see my twenty-first birthday.’ His father’s death had pushed him to the edge and he always imagined that he would be killed in a highspeed car crash. Although Eddie did not live at home, he was still very close to his mother and brothers. Linda met him every week. She used to take him to Joel’s restaurant for a hearty meal and give him money for clothes. She was at least comforted by the fact that he was not sleeping rough and was with friends and family who understood him and understood the trauma that he had been through. Linda once asked Edward (she called her husband Eddie and son Edward) why he wouldn’t come home. He answered that when he saw her, he didn’t think it was right that she should be alone and without her husband by her side.

  When he was seventeen, Eddie was old enough to be dealt with by the law as an adult. He was sent to St Patrick’s Institution for the first time. For the next three years, he was regularly sent to prison for a few months, before being released for a few months and then sent back again, mainly to Mountjoy. He was never a free man for a full year, and he managed to accumulate nearly fifty criminal convictions. The vast majority were for stealing cars and his most serious conviction was for ramming a Garda car. His addiction to tablets had become very serious – some days he was taking up to two dozen Valium.

  Eddie McCabe was a tiny scrap of a lad, but was an accomplished boxer and fought at a high level with his friend, Joey O’Brien, who was a member of the Rattigan gang. When Eddie used to go to town, his friends always joked that he was their bodyguard because he had the ability to knock people out with one punch, although he was gentle and wouldn’t fight for the sake of it. He was more likely to be seen with a smile on his face than an aggressive scowl. Eddie would never have been involved with drug dealing or gangland activity though, and was a relatively harmless sort who posed no danger to ordinary members of society, except if he took a fancy to their cars. When you are sent to prison, you have to adapt to your surroundings and do what it takes to get by. McCabe had the gift of the gab and got on with people. He was able to survive in jail by himself and didn’t mess around with gangs or try to get involved with ‘Mr Big’ types to protect himself. This made him a vulnerable target. In 2003, McCabe was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for stealing a car in Tallaght and ramming a patrol car. He served two and a half years, and when he was coming to the end of his sentence, he owned up to the fact that he had a mobile phone in his cell and handed it over to the prison authorities. It was by far the longest sentence he had ever served and he didn’t want to put his release date in jeopardy by being caught with an illegal phone. This led to him being branded as a rat and he was attacked in his cell with a knife. A close associate of Brian Rattigan sliced him on the leg and face and gave him a severe beating. Almost overnight Eddie fell out with his friends who were members of the Rattigan gang. Linda McCabe knew that there was something wrong with her son, but he was never one to open up and burden her with his problems. Eddie McCabe was released from prison in December 2005. He was only out a short time when he met a local girl, Donna Mills. The couple fell in love and after they were together a couple of months, Donna became pregnant. This was the happiest that Eddie had been in a long time. He moved back in with his mother and seemed to be at peace with himself. His relationship was going strong and he spent most of his time with Donna and was looking forward to being a dad.

  Unfortunately, Eddie McCabe had been messed up for so long that it was hard to break out of the dangerous cycle. He was lured back to his old ways, and was arrested for stealing a car and sentenced to four months in prison in August 2006. While he was in jail, his son, Eddie McCabe III, was born. Linda went to visit him in Mountjoy and showed him a photograph of his healthy baby. He broke down and said that he didn’t want his child to grow up without a father and vowed that he was going to turn his life around and break away from the old temptations. However, Linda noticed that something had changed in her lad. His happy smile had faded, and for the last four months of his life a change came over him. It looked like he was doing heavy drugs and was worried about something. Something was wrong, but Linda couldn’t put her finger on it. It didn’t help that he was back in Mountjoy, where he had been attacked a few months before. He had to go into protective custody for his own sake to make sure that he wasn’t attacked again. He was released from jail in November 2006, when his son was six weeks old. He then mostly stayed with Donna and her family so he could look after Eddie III. He got up for all the night feeds and never let his son out of his arms. One of Linda’s most treasured possessions is a photo of the two Eddies asleep, holding hands. On 1 December 2006, Eddie had been out of jail for only three weeks. He was in Donna’s house with the baby when a navy car pulled up outside. It was about 7.50 p.m. when Eddie gave her a kiss and said that he was going out for something and wouldn’t be long. A witness described the driver of the car as being a big, heavy-set man. Eddie had been in the middle of cooking a chicken, and at 8.25 p.m., Donna rang him. He told her that the chicken would be ready now, but not to put the chips on, because he was on his way home and would do it then. Mobile phone cell site analysis later determined that McCabe was in the Dolphin’s Barn area when he received this call. When there was no sign of him, Donna rang his mobile at 8.50 p.m., but it was turned off. Around the same time that Donna was trying to get Eddie on the phone, a car ground to a halt and the back-seat passenger grabbed the unconsci
ous Eddie McCabe and threw him out onto the hard concrete. The driver quickly left the area, leaving the twenty-one-year-old for dead in a laneway just off Tyrconnell Road in Inchicore.

  At 9.15 p.m. a local resident was parking his car, when he stumbled upon the lifeless body. Gardaí described the beating that Eddie McCabe suffered as the worst they have ever seen. The torture that was inflicted on him was as needless as it was savage. One of his eyes was gouged out and was found beside his body. His second eye was loosely hanging from its socket. A sewer rod had been jammed into the back of his head and pushed through his skull in an attempt to push his eyes out. He had received multiple injuries to the back of the head and suffered seventeen fractures to the skull. It was an act of sustained and savage torture that was inflicted to send out a message. When Gardaí arrived at the scene, the person lying injured on the ground had no identification. He was rushed to St James’s Hospital and was put on a life support machine, but with the extent of his injuries, it didn’t look good.

  The following day an officer who arrived at the hospital saw the tattoo on Eddie’s arm – a cross with his father’s name on it – and recognised the victim as being young McCabe. Gardaí called to Linda’s house and asked if Eddie was there. She immediately broke down screaming and shouting that she didn’t want to know what had happened. It was almost a carbon copy of the call that Gardaí made enquiring about her husband nearly twelve years previously. Her mother’s instinct told her that something terrible had happened to Eddie. She locked herself in the bathroom and began banging her head on the wall with the grief. When she recovered, she was asked to go to St James’s to see if the victim was indeed Eddie. She went with her sister, and immediately knew that it was her son lying in a vegetative state. A large bandage went around his head, covering what once had been his eyes and hiding the shocking injuries to the back of his head. His face had no cuts or bruises, and apart from the bandages, Eddie was as handsome as ever. Doctors told a heartbroken Linda that the prognosis was not good. If Eddie did survive, he would be blind in both eyes and would suffer the effects of severe brain damage, such had been the ferocity of the torture.

  Six months before Eddie died, Linda McCabe became a born again Christian. She worshipped at a church in Gardiner Street. She had put herself through college and was volunteering in the Drimnagh community. Were it not for her faith, she would never have survived the ordeal of losing a second loved one. Even with her strong faith in God, Linda found it very difficult and could not easily visit her gravely ill son. Members of her church used to drive her to the hospital every night, where she would sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ to Eddie. Linda knew in her heart of hearts that Eddie would not want to live without being able to see his beautiful son, and knew deep down that he would prefer to die than not be able to live a full and independent life. On 8 December, his brother George was in the hospital ward and was holding Eddie’s hand when he felt a squeeze. George rushed to the doctor, who told Eddie that if he could hear them, he should squeeze George’s hand. With that he squeezed, and did the same thing to a nurse who also went to examine him. It was clear Eddie had feeling in the right side of his body and his family were initially ecstatic. However, the faint trace of life just reinforced in Linda’s mind how unfulfilling a life Eddie would lead if he recovered. The chances of a full recovery were very slim indeed. Linda did what no mother ever should have to do. She leaned into her son and whispered into his ear, telling him what had happened and the extent of the injuries he had suffered. She told him that if he wanted to pass on, not to be afraid to do it. She prayed to the Lord to take her son from his living nightmare and end his pain. Six hours after whispering in Eddie’s ear, neurological experts from Beaumont Hospital examined him and declared that he was brain dead. It was almost as if Eddie was waiting for his mother to tell him that everything would be OK, and that he would soon be back with his father forever. Either way, after a lengthy discussion, his family decided that they should turn the life support machine off. Linda didn’t go back into the room after telling Eddie that it was OK to die and that God would look after him now. She couldn’t bear to say a final goodbye to her son. She wanted her last memories of him to be happy ones, memories of him with his own son, not in the terrible state that he now found himself in.

  Doctors turned the machines that had been keeping him alive off and after fifteen minutes his heart stopped naturally, and Eddie died peacefully in his sleep. The following day was the McCabe twins’ eighteenth birthday party. Eddie had donated €50 to his brothers, George and Wayne, to put towards renting a stretched Hummer, so they could celebrate in style. The party never went ahead. In many ways a large part of Eddie McCabe died the day that his father was murdered. Although he was still alive, it was almost as if he was in a living coma and never really lived in the real world after his dad was taken from him. In many ways the person who murdered Eddie McCabe Snr and Catherine Brennan also killed a third person that night.

  Because of the injuries to his face and head area, it was impossible for the McCabe family to have an open coffin so that his many friends could say goodbye to Eddie. The funeral took place at Our Lady of Good Counsel church in Drimnagh. Eddie was a massive fan of folk music, Christy Moore in particular, and loved ‘The Lonesome Boatman’ by the Furey Brothers. One of the people at Linda’s church was a talented flautist, and touched the crowd with a moving rendition of the much loved song. It was a fitting tribute to send Eddie to his final resting place. Eddie had previously told his mother that if he died he wanted the song played at his funeral. He had first heard it at his father’s funeral and had grown to love the song and took great comfort from its haunting melody. Linda had ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ played at communion during the funeral. It was as a reminder to herself and Eddie’s friends and family that they would always have each other and be there to support each other.

  Linda McCabe is a brave and courageous woman who has somehow managed to go on despite all the pain she has suffered in her life. She is now preoccupied with helping others and trying to save a community that has been torn apart by the Rattigan and Thompson feud. She is the first to admit that she is not a rich woman. She had a dream about having a horse and carriage to transport Eddie’s remains. When she woke up, she decided that that was what she must do. The funeral was an expensive one, and her loyal family chipped in, but there were still bills to be paid. The story of Linda and her double loss spread around the Christian community. People were asked to pray for her and her family and keep them in their thoughts. Out of the blue, a strange thing started to happen. Unsolicited cheques from around the world started to arrive at her church and were passed on to Linda. People from as far away as France, the US and the Netherlands were all touched by her story, and started to send her money to help with the burial costs: over €3,000 was donated to Linda and every cent went to pay for Eddie’s funeral expenses. Although she had lost her first son in the most horrible way imaginable, these gestures of kindness reminded Linda that there was still good in the world.

  The murder investigation was launched at Kilmainham Garda Station, and, as with so many other feud-related murders, it fell to Detective Inspector Gabriel O’Gara to take care of the day-to-day running of the investigation. Superintendent Thady Muldoon, who was in overall charge of the murder probe, issued an appeal to the public for help in solving the murder. He said the victim had suffered ‘a severe and brutal assault’ and said his injuries had been ‘absolutely horrendous’, before adding: ‘He would appear from our investigations to have been dumped in that laneway. There are people who have information; we are fully aware of that. There are people who know what happened to Eddie, and we are appealing to them to come forward.’

  Superintendent Muldoon didn’t want to add fuel to the media fire about the extent of the injuries or what weapons were used, saying: ‘At the moment we don’t know what implements or weapons were used. We assume there may have been more than one person involved, but that’s something that
will become clear as the enquiry moves on. At this stage our investigators are following several lines of inquiry but we wouldn’t be able to say yet what contributed to this.’ He did confirm that McCabe had completely lost the sight in one eye and that the other had been seriously damaged, but didn’t want to go into too much detail.

  Gardaí believe they know the identity of Eddie McCabe’s killer. There is little doubt that more than one person was involved, but the actual torture is thought to have been inflicted by one of Brian Rattigan’s top men, who cannot be named for legal reasons. He is regarded as being a total psychopath who takes great pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and would have thought nothing of pushing McCabe’s eyes out of his head and mutilating him. It is not known whether McCabe went to meet his killers and a row developed, or if the sadistic beating was inflicted as a warning or act of revenge. Gardaí did receive one promising lead. An informant told them that McCabe might have been tortured in an empty house in Drimnagh before being dumped in the laneway. The council owned the premises and the tenants had only just moved out, so it was empty while the new tenants were preparing to move in. A Garda forensics team combed the building and removed floorboards from each room, in an attempt to find the remnants of blood, but the search drew a blank. Information received by Gardaí has suggested that Eddie went into the house thinking he would be safe, but that the Rattigan gang member was hiding in a wardrobe, then came out suddenly and attacked the unsuspecting McCabe, knocking him to the ground before commencing with the terrible torture. The extent of Brian Rattigan’s involvement in the murder is unclear. Eddie McCabe served time with Brian Rattigan in Mountjoy but was never really known to associate with him all that much, although he would have been friendlier with other members of the gang. Rattigan does not have a history of ordering murders to be carried out in such a brutal and heinous fashion; murders that were linked to him usually went the traditional route – a gun to the back of the head. Media reports at the time claimed that a ‘jailed crime boss’ had ordered that McCabe’s eyes be taken out of their sockets and that the assault be filmed on a mobile phone, but there is no hard evidence of this. One newspaper quoted a ‘Garda source’ as saying: ‘McCabe was tortured in the most horrific way just hours after the gangster issued the order. The ganglord allegedly told his henchmen, ‘I want his eyes. I want you to take them out of his head and film it.’ The plan was to circulate the footage to other criminals in the city as a warning.’ The ‘ganglord’ referred to was Brian Rattigan, but he couldn’t be named because he had been charged with Declan Gavin’s murder and was awaiting trial. Gardaí do not know if Rattigan had ordered the murder to be filmed, but what is clear is that members of his gang would not have been able to go around murdering people without their boss’s knowledge and permission, so it can be assumed that Rattigan was aware of the plot to kill McCabe and had given it his blessing. Gardaí know who murdered Eddie McCabe but they are still uncertain about the motive. They know that Eddie was not involved in gang activity, but it has been speculated that he may have become involved in running small amounts of drugs for the gang to earn some money for his new son and might have been blamed for some product going missing. Detectives simply do not know, and the case is still very much open. The brutal injuries inflicted to McCabe’s eyes might be symbolic. Some officers believe that the torture could mean that he saw something that he shouldn’t have, or that he saw something and went to Gardaí with the information. McCabe was no rat though, and it is possible that his murder was connected to the prison stabbing and beating he received, although it is almost unprecedented for jailhouse disputes to continue like that on the streets, especially over a mobile phone, which at the time would have been easily available in Mountjoy. Gardaí say that they will keep trying to find Eddie McCabe’s killers. All investigating officers are united in saying that Eddie did not deserve it, and his murder was savage and totally excessive.