Cocaine Wars

by Mick McCaffrey

  On 4 February 2008, Paddy Doyle, Gary Hutch and Freddie Thompson were in Cancelada, sitting in Doyle’s BMW jeep. Paddy Doyle was in the front passenger seat of the luxury BMW X5, Gary Hutch was driving and Freddie was in the back seat. Doyle had recently paid an estimated €70,000 for it and was letting Hutch take a spin to see how it drove. Hutch was a nephew of ‘The Monk’, Gerry Hutch, an infamous criminal. Gary travelled a lot between Ireland and Spain. The three amigos had just finished working out in the gym in Cancelada, near Doyle’s home. They were heading towards Marbella, when another BMW jeep pulled up alongside theirs. It was about 2.00 p.m. and Paddy Doyle turned his head to the right and looked out his window just in time to see a machine pistol being raised by a passenger in the other car. Shots started to rain out with four flying through the windscreen on the passenger side of the jeep and a fifth piercing the door where Doyle was sitting. In an attempt to escape, Gary Hutch smashed the car into a lamppost, around 30 m from where the rival jeep initially approached them, and his jeep ground to a halt. He and Thompson hopped out of the car and started to run away in blind panic, in an attempt to get away from whoever was shooting at them. They fled into an apartment complex close to where the BMW had crashed, and luckily for the two men, the gunmen were obviously not after them and made no attempt to pursue them. Paddy Doyle was the man they wanted, and as he lay wounded in the jeep, the shooter came up and shot him twice in the head from point-blank range, killing him instantly. The killer hadn’t even bothered to wear a mask. He must have been confident that the Spanish police would never bring him to justice.

  As usual, Freddie was totally unscathed and didn’t have as much as a mark on him. Gary Hutch was taken to hospital and given treatment for an arm injury he had sustained in the crash. It was not until an hour after the shooting that both men returned to the scene and presented themselves to Spanish police for questioning, although no charges were ever brought against either man.

  The day of the Doyle murder, Spanish police found a consignment of €8 million worth of cocaine in Estepona, but the seizure had nothing to do with Doyle’s shooting.

  Although it was initially reported that Doyle had been murdered after falling foul of the Russian mafia, it is actually Turkish criminals that are suspected of killing him. In October 2007, Gardaí began to receive information from Spanish police that a dispute had arisen between Patrick Doyle and a Turkish crime syndicate. The gang had been introduced to a major Turkish crime family in London in early 2005 and had been supplied with cheap heroin, which was being imported from Afghanistan, since then. Paddy Doyle was the point man in Spain, and initially things had gone very smoothly, with both sides being very satisfied with their business arrangement. The dispute with ‘Whacker’ Duffy had meant that business had to take a back seat to staying alive, so there hadn’t been a whole lot of revenue coming in for the previous six months or so, so paying suppliers wasn’t Freddie’s main priority. Gardaí had also been increasingly successful in intercepting shipments and several seizures had cost the gang millions of euro in profits and hundreds of thousands of euro of original investment. The Turks organised a €2.4 million heroin shipment into Dublin Port in late August 2007, on behalf of the Thompson gang. The drugs were smuggled from Rotterdam to Dublin in a truck that was supposedly carrying ‘Antique-style wood burning ranges’. Customs officials examined the ranges. Lulu, a Revenue drug detection dog, smelled drugs in the ranges. Two ranges revealed 12 kg of heroin, with a street value of €2.4 million, along with cocaine worth €175,000. At the time it was the biggest ever seizure in Dublin Port. It was a serious blow to the gang, because the majority of the drugs had been given on credit, which meant that Thompson and Doyle were seriously out of pocket. Because they were short on cash, Thompson and Doyle had been putting off paying the Turks. Because Freddie Thompson was back and forth between Ireland and Spain the whole time, he also became involved in the growing dispute. Spanish police told Gardaí that Doyle and Thompson had been told that they would both be murdered if they did not pay outstanding bills for a number of sizeable heroin shipments that the Turks had supplied to them. When a messenger was sent to warn the pair, Thompson is said to have given him the two fingers, while Doyle laughed at them. Although the two gangsters put on brave faces, things were not going well for them at all, but they didn’t believe that the threats would amount to anything. Two weeks before his murder, Doyle was given a final warning that if he did not settle his bill, action would be taken. Again, it seems he underestimated the sheer ruthlessness of the Turks.

  It seems that Paddy Doyle didn’t learn the lessons of some of the other young gangsters before him. Doyle tried to use his brawn, instead of using diplomacy like John Cunningham or Christy Kinahan did. Because he was a big fish in a small pond in Ireland, he thought he could go to Spain and push people around. Although he was feared in Dublin, he was considered a nobody in Spain. In reality, Doyle and Thompson were way out of their depth, swimming with the international sharks operating on the Costa del Sol.

  Paddy Doyle’s family was not happy with the Irish media’s coverage of his murder. His father Donal complained to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission that a report on RTÉ’s Six One News and Nine O’Clock News bulletins had breached regulations by causing undue distress or offence to his family. Donal Doyle complained that the news item showed the bullet-ridden car his son had been shot in, and also showed a private family photo of his son. He said that he didn’t know how RTÉ had obtained the photo and that RTÉ had not asked permission to use it. Doyle claimed that the family’s personal grief had not been considered. The complaint was rejected. Donal Doyle was a prominent anti-drugs campaigner in the north inner city, and his sister is a respected youth worker. The Doyles rushed out to Spain, as soon as the news of Paddy’s murder reached them, and went to the scene of his murder, where they laid flowers and other mementos. Doyle was a father of two boys with his partner Melanie Thompson, ‘Fat’ Freddie’s cousin. Although Paddy Doyle was a ruthless criminal with forty-two convictions, he still left behind him a loving family who will obviously miss him dearly.

  Freddie Thompson was rattled after Paddy Doyle’s murder. As well as losing a close friend and his international fixer, he had also lost his main enforcer, which meant that he was now very vulnerable. Freddie didn’t know if the Turks would come back and look for him, so he decided to leave Spain, head back to Ireland and try to resolve the Declan Duffy row. It didn’t help things that the day after the Doyle killing, a Toyota Avensis taxi was stopped by the Crumlin Garda Drugs Unit on Davitt Road in Drimnagh, and the passenger searched. Gary Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old from Monasterboice Road in Crumlin, was found in possession of €198,000 worth of heroin that he was holding for the Thompson gang. Johnston was a former heroin addict who owed a significant amount of money to the Thompson mob, so he was used by the gang to ferry drugs around for them. His arrest and the seizure of the drugs was another bitter blow to Thompson. But double trouble was also coming for Thompson. Declan Duffy soon learned of Freddie’s return, and went all out to try to eliminate him and move in on his turf. He is said to have upped the contract on Freddie’s head. Gardaí warned Thompson on three occasions that there was a contract out on his life, and Gardaí who spoke to him at the time say that he was incredibly rattled. There was also the Rattigan gang to be concerned about. They had also taken a keen interest in Thompson’s change of circumstances and realised that if they could collect themselves a scalp or two, they could redress their recent losses and even out the feud again. So, it really was trouble on two fronts for Thompson.

  At lunchtime on 13 March 2008, Freddie Thompson was drinking in a pub on Parnell Street, when members of the Emergency Response Unit swooped on a car as it crossed from the south side of the city across O’Connell Bridge. The two men in the car, aged thirty-two and forty-five, were both from Ballyfermot. They had been under surveillance for several days, after information was received that they had agreed to shoot Freddie. The thir
ty-two-year-old is regarded as being a hit man, and is the suspect in at least five unsolved gangland murders. He has links to the Rattigan side of the feud, but is very much a gun for hire, so Gardaí did not know whether the contract was being carried out for Duffy or Rattigan, although sources believe that Rattigan was the more likely candidate. The pair of would-be assassins were followed after they left an address in Crumlin and drove towards the city centre. They were in a stolen car that had been fitted with false number plates. Gardaí believe that they were supposed to meet a motorbike on Parnell Street to pick up a handgun, but detectives decided to stop their vehicle before the rendezvous – in order to ensure that the safety of members of the public was not compromised.

  Four unmarked Garda cars boxed the vehicle in as it crossed O’Connell Bridge, as dozens of shocked onlookers watched in horror. The driver of the motorbike on Parnell Street became concerned when the hit man didn’t show and drove away. The suspects were taken away to Store Street Garda Station. Freddie Thompson got into a car minutes later and drove away from the city, unaware of what had happened. He was soon informed of what had occurred, and Gardaí believe that he boarded a flight back to Spain to regroup until the heat died down. Gardaí did not even know that Thompson was in the country at the time of the incident, so there were major suspicions that one of his own side set him up to be murdered. The two men were released without charge because they had not been arrested in possession of a firearm and there was no concrete evidence that they were planning to shoot Thompson. It was frustrating to Gardaí, but they took the attitude that they had probably prevented an assassination attempt, so they were happy with that and would just have to try to bring charges against the hit man and his driver again.

  With the two feuding gangs and the INLA all operating furiously, because of the vacuum created after Doyle’s murder, Gardaí from the Organised Crime Unit started to make some notable successes against the three groups. On 18 March, Paul Dunphy, a forty-five-year-old Rattigan ally from Allenton Drive in Tallaght, was stopped on the Walkinstown Road and searched. Two hand grenades and a Glock 9mm pistol were recovered from down his trousers. Gardaí had received a tip-off that the devices were being stored at empty premises in Walkinstown. Dunphy was subsequently jailed for five years. As part of the same operation, the following day detectives searched the back garden of a house on Rutland Avenue in Crumlin, and recovered €2 million worth of cocaine and heroin that was being stored in a hole in the ground. Three men were detained – the drugs also belonged to the Rattigan gang.

  On 7 April, Gardaí from Roxboro Road Station in Limerick stopped a car on the Loughmore Link Road and arrested two men after finding €200,000 worth of heroin in the boot. One of those detained was a twenty-seven-year-old key ally of Brian Rattigan – so the arrest really illustrated the links between Dublin and Limerick criminals. The man was charged with possession of drugs with intent to supply, and is currently before the courts. On 23 April, a pipe bomb exploded in the front garden of a house on Monasterboice Road in Crumlin. Gary Johnston was the target; he was the twenty-eight-year-old who had been arrested in the taxi with €198,000 worth of heroin the previous February. There was a small amount of damage to the front of the house but nobody was injured. It is thought that the INLA was behind the attack. It was one of four pipe bomb attacks in the capital in less than a week.

  In April 2009 Johnston was jailed for ten years after pleading guilty to having the drugs in his possession in February 2008. Just days after being sentenced, two Thompson associates viciously assaulted Johnston in Mountjoy as punishment for losing the drugs. He suffered a punctured lung, ruptured spleen and broken jaw. In mid-May, Freddie Thompson returned from Spain, and it was not long before he was appearing on the Gardaí’s radar.

  In early June, an attempt was made by a local drug boss, who was being supplied by Thompson, to run over Declan Duffy. The drug dealer was driving his Alfa Romeo car close to Duffy’s partner’s home on Hanover Street when he saw the INLA leader and mounted the footpath in a bid to mow him down. Duffy managed to cower in a doorway and escaped. Because of the huge increase in incidents involving the Thompson gang and the INLA, senior Garda management, in an unprecedented move, ordered uniformed Gardaí to request armed back-up if they had any suspicions about emergency calls they were responding to. Senior Gardaí were so concerned that the simmering feud was going to escalate into all-out war that they told armed detectives to back up their uniformed colleagues in dealing with any call-outs that could be linked to Thompson, Duffy or Rattigan.

  A series of bogus 999 calls were made to both Crumlin and Kevin Street Garda Stations, claiming that an incident was happening in one area of the division. While Gardaí directed their resources to that area, criminal activity was taking place somewhere else. The calls were designed to divert Gardaí, so that the criminals could go about their business in peace. Detective Superintendent Denis Donegan directed that not all resources would react to calls, as he felt response times to incidents were being monitored by the feuding criminals. So while some units responded to calls, others patrolled the general division and headed in the opposite direction. That decision came after a spate of gang-related incidents in the space of a couple of weeks.

  On 15 June, Gardaí were called to a popular pub in Dublin 8, after two masked men walked in in the middle of the afternoon and asked where Freddie Thompson was. The pair had been seen loitering outside the pub in a white van. When they realised that Thompson was not on the premises, they got back into their vehicle and drove off. The following day, two armed and masked men burst into a bookmaker’s in the south inner city, where Thompson had been seen placing bets earlier in the day. When there was no sign of him, they again left without any serious incident. Freddie was on high alert at this stage and knew that his life was in serious danger. Duffy stabbed one of Thompson’s close associates in the arm in an incident on Dean Street. Duffy was arrested and at 4.00 p.m. the same day Gardaí received a call that shots had been fired outside shops on Galtymore Road in Drimnagh. The reports Gardaí received stated that a black Volkswagen Golf GTI had been involved in a hit-and-run accident. Witnesses said that after the incident, a lone male with his hood pulled up had run from the victim towards the Volkswagen with a handgun in his possession. CCTV footage later led Gardaí to believe that the man with the gun was Freddie Thompson. This was backed up when Aidan Gavin walked into Sundrive Road Garda Station that same day to report that his car had been damaged in a hit-and-run incident.

  What happened was that Freddie Thompson was cruising around Crumlin, Drimnagh and Dublin 8; he was hyper and trying to avoid being shot. By coincidence, he happened upon a car, a Volkswagen GTI, that was being driven by a relation of the man who had been arrested on O’Connell Bridge, the previous March, on his way to murder Thompson. As luck would have it, the hit man for hire was also in the car, along with Joey Rattigan, one of Rattigan’s top dogs. When Aidan Gavin saw the car, he drove towards it; Thompson pulled out a handgun and jumped out of the car. He was prepared to open fire and get instant sweet revenge. The driver of the Golf GTI saw what was happening and slammed his car into reverse and struck the wing mirrors of several parked cars as well as hitting Aidan Gavin’s rear tail light. Passers-by mistook the sound of the wing mirrors being hit as gunshots, but CCTV later showed a person who looked uncannily like Freddie Thompson getting out of a car brandishing a handgun in any event. The GTI fled the area but armed Gardaí from the Organised Crime Unit stopped it at around 4.00 p.m. near Dolphin Road. All the occupants were searched and Joey Rattigan was arrested after being found in possession of a knife. Freddie Thompson and Aidan Gavin were both arrested, but the gun was well gone by that stage. The CCTV footage was not of good enough quality to bring a prosecution against Thompson. Despite it being an almost unprecedented twenty-four hours, ‘Fat’ Freddie again managed to survive unscathed and lived to fight another battle. Because of the sheer number of threats to his life and those of other gang members, Thompson
then routinely started travelling in convoys of at least three vehicles, with between six and ten gang members accompanying him at all times. A number of ‘spotters’ also travelled around Crumlin, Drimnagh and the south inner city on motorbikes on the lookout for Duffy and his mob. The spotters were armed and ready to rush to Thompson’s gang at short notice, to provide them with weapons to be used in opportunistic attacks on the INLA and the Rattigan gang. So well-disciplined was Thompson’s gang that they had an appointed ‘nobody’, who would act as a ‘runner’ if the convoy was stopped by the Gardaí. This runner would literally run or speed away and hope that the Gardaí would chase him, while the main gang got away. The runner would never carry any drugs or weapons.

  A spur of the moment attack happened on 21 June at the Planet Love music festival in Fairyhouse, Co. Meath. Freddie Thompson’s cousin, twenty-four-year-old Eoin O’Connor, was involved in an altercation with an associate of Brian Rattigan, Gerard Eglington. Eglington, who was twenty-one and from Fatima Mansions in Dublin 8, was a passenger in a stolen sports car that struck and killed Garda Tony Tighe and Garda Michael Padden on the Stillorgan dual carriageway in April 2002. Eglington was only fifteen at the time of the incident, and was handed a four-year jail term in St Patrick’s young offenders’ institute. He got to know Brian Rattigan in prison, and was at the music festival with Rattigan’s most senior enforcer, Anthony Cannon, when they happened upon O’Connor. O’Connor and Eglington became involved in a fight and were both detained. While O’Connor was in handcuffs, Cannon managed to slip away, and he brutally slashed O’Connor from one cheek to the other, causing him horrific and permanent facial scars. O’Connor was found to be in possession of a flick-knife and was taken to Connolly Hospital for treatment under arrest. Cannon was also detained but was ultimately not charged. Freddie Thompson is said to have gone absolutely ballistic when he heard about the vicious assault.