On 9 October, a twenty-five-year-old received serious stab injuries to his face, hand, head and stomach in an alleyway off Ave Maria Avenue in Maryland, after being attacked by Thompson. The victim was singled out by Thompson and his mob because he (Thompson) was frustrated that Gardaí had been seizing too many drugs belonging to his gang. The man was associating with senior members of the Thompson gang, including David Byrne, Freddie Thompson’s cousin. The man is believed to have owed Freddie a sum of money. He was rushed to hospital but refused to co-operate with Gardaí and would not make a statement. He suffered scarring as a result of the attack. Freddie Thompson was arrested close to the scene, along with Liam Brannigan and another man, but they were released without charge.
Six days later, Gardaí from the OCU searched a house on Windmill Crescent in Crumlin after securing a search warrant and located a Glock 9mm handgun concealed in an air vent and a further 250 rounds of ammunition for the gun, which were found hidden in the attic. Three members of the Rattigan gang, aged twenty-six, nineteen and seventeen were arrested, but nobody was charged because the gun was not actually in their possession. The twenty-six-year-old was caught a few weeks later by the Crumlin Drugs Unit, with a large quantity of drugs, and is currently before the courts. The rest of 2008 was relatively quiet and the feud settled down until St Stephen’s Day, when Gardaí were called to the Marble Arch pub on Davitt Road in Drimnagh. When they arrived they saw a man lying unconscious in a side storage area of the pub. The twenty-one-year-old had suffered serious stab wounds, and a trail of blood led from the pub’s smoking area to the storage room. The victim had suffered a stab wound to his upper left thigh. He had been attacked for no apparent reason. One of the next generation of criminals, who has links to Freddie Thompson, was responsible, but the injured party knew the type of individual he was dealing with, and decided not to make a complaint to Gardaí.
On 4 January 2009, Joey O’Brien, who had a habit of getting into trouble with the Thompson gang, walked into Charlie’s Chinese fast food shop on Dame Street. He was followed in by five of the main young players in the Thompson mob. ‘Mad Dog’ started to abuse O’Brien, who was a very handy boxer. Words were exchanged and a nineteen-year-old from Crumlin walked over and caught O’Brien with a sucker punch to the side of the head, knocking him unconscious. While O’Brien lay helpless on the ground, ‘Mad Dog’ started to repeatedly jump on his head. He had to be physically pulled off the injured man. Another nineteen-year-old from Crumlin then hopped on O’Brien’s head before the five left the restaurant. Somebody immediately called 999, and Gardaí from nearby Pearse Street rushed to the scene. They observed three men running from the restaurant in the direction of the Lord Edward pub, near Dublin Castle. The Gardaí who arrived at the scene recognised the men, because of their growing notoriety across the city, and were able to give a description, so Gardaí operating the CCTV cameras at Pearse Street were able to follow their every move. Two of the men got into a taxi, which was stopped on Dame Street. A bloodstained hammer was recovered on one of them.
A file was sent to the DPP in relation to the incident but nobody was ever charged, because witnesses were reluctant to give statements identifying the men who assaulted O’Brien, and O’Brien refused to give a statement to detectives naming the men who had viciously beaten him. The sad reality of the Crumlin/Drimnagh feud is that unless Gardaí actually witness assaults for themselves, it is unlikely that such violent incidents will ever make it to court. The stigma attached to cooperating with the authorities invariably means that victims keep their mouths shut and the perpetrators escape scot free.
On the same night as the vicious attack on Dame Street, a member of the public rang Gardaí and said that he had observed a man getting out of a jeep near the Halfway House pub in Walkinstown, and fire three or four shots at a black BMW. The BMW did a U-turn at high speed and drove towards the Walkinstown roundabout. The gunman jumped back into the jeep and turned left onto the Long Mile Road. The witness saw four men in the jeep and the gunman was described as wearing a baseball cap and grey tracksuit. No broken glass or bullet shells were found at the scene. Gardaí believe that a pellet gun may have been used. A twenty-seven-year-old from Walkinstown, who is a close associate of Freddie Thompson, was detained nearby along with a twenty-two-year-old. Gardaí were forced to release the two men due to a lack of evidence.
In early 2009, a series of bomb warnings were phoned in to Gardaí, which necessitated the deployment of the army bomb squad to Crumlin and Drimnagh, to deal with the suspect devices. In the first four months of the year, thirty-two calls were received. Only two devices were found to be viable. Gardaí believe that the gangs were trying to tie up as much Garda resources as possible, so that they could operate with fewer restrictions. The first hoax call came on 16 January 2009, when ‘Fat’ Freddie and his cronies were dining at Tiffany’s café on the Crumlin Road. Gardaí received a 999 call that a bomb had been placed at the café. Sure enough, it was searched and nothing was found. Thompson and his men waved at Gardaí who came to investigate and were obviously aware of the fake call. The criminals had seen how seriously Gardaí took bomb warnings and thought it was hilarious that so much time and resources were being given to every little false warning, so they kept on phoning false reports in. The feuding thugs had also heard that Pringles tubes were often used to hold pipe bombs, so as part of their sick humour, they would get an empty Pringles tube and stick wires out of it. Then they would watch while army bomb disposal experts examined the device, often using robots to check for explosives. At one stage an eleven-year-old was arrested for carrying a fake Pringles pipe bomb. The youth was dealt with under the youth cautioning system. Several high-profile members of the feuding gangs were targeted in pipe bomb attacks. On 18 February, a bomb was found under a car belonging to the innocent mother of Freddie Thompson’s cousin and key ally, David Byrne. Luckily it didn’t explode.
One of the most serious pipe bomb incidents took place on 27 January 2009, when a viable device was placed under the car belonging to Christina Dempsey, mother of Thompson’s partner, Vicky, outside the family home on Stanaway Road in Crumlin.
The army bomb disposal unit was called to the scene and carried out a controlled explosion on the pipe bomb. The incident did not go down at all well with Thompson, who was obviously furious that the unwritten rule about leaving family and friends out of the feud had been broken.
Thompson and Vicky Dempsey have been going out since they were teenagers and have a young son. They have broken up on numerous occasions only to get back together.
People who know twenty-eight-year-old Vicky Dempsey say she is a decent sort who has absolutely no involvement in crime. The same cannot be said of Vicky’s brother, Karl, who was jailed for seven years in July 2000, after being caught with over €60,000 worth of heroin in October 1998, when he was just twenty-one years old. Detective Garda Frank O’Neill from the Garda National Drugs Unit – one of the founding members of the Crumlin Drugs Unit – lifted him in The Mill shopping centre in Clondalkin. Dempsey had taken a black plastic bag out of his pocket and thrown it on the floor and attempted to run away. The bag contained 5 oz of heroin. In March 2002, CAB went to court and secured a judgment of €424,987 against Dempsey for failing to declare income tax. It was a serious hit to the pocket of the dealer, who had a number of cars and property throughout the city.
Karl Dempsey had started using his own product and became an addict, although he cleaned up his act when he was in prison and is now involved in the used car business. He is regarded as being quite close to Freddie Thompson. The Dempsey family is very close-knit. They were hit by a terrible tragedy on 19 August 2008, when twenty-six-year-old Lesley Dempsey committed suicide at his apartment in Clondalkin.
Lesley was not involved in crime and was a sensitive young man. His tragic suicide was a massive blow to the whole Dempsey family. Freddie Thompson flew home from Spain to attend the massive funeral. On the first anniversary of his death a big ‘do�
�� took place in Lesley Dempsey’s honour at the Green Isle Hotel in Newlands Cross. It was attended by major gangland figures from across the city and whole country, who were all there to pay their respects. Gardaí kept a discreet eye on the party to see if Freddie Thompson would come back from Spain for it. He didn’t but is believed to have donated a sizeable sum towards Suicide Awareness. €100,000 is thought to have been raised that night. Gardaí kept a close eye on the party but it passed off peacefully.
Probably the most successful year that Gardaí have had in taking the feuding gangsters off the streets to serve long stretches behind bars was 2009. Eric Wansboro was a case in point. Born on 13 February 1988, Wansboro was a gifted boxer who represented Ireland and had been national amateur champion in his weight division. He was perhaps talented enough to progress to professional level. However, he suffered a hand injury when he turned eighteen, which put an end to his promising career and he started to go off the rails. He quickly slipped into a life of cocaine and alcohol abuse. Although Wansboro became a parent, this wasn’t enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. He joined the army as a private after his injury, but the disciplined life of a soldier didn’t suit him. Wansboro was constantly in trouble with the Gardaí, and was often absent without leave from the army. Wansboro was brought up in Crumlin and although he lived in Rivervalley in Swords, he socialised in Crumlin. He was a member of the Rattigan gang, though he was really only used to do the gang’s dirty work, and was never really a trusted lieutenant. Wansboro really began to feature in the feud in 2008. On 13 March that year, he was arrested on Balfe Road in Walkinstown, after a member of the public reported that two cars were involved in a high-speed chase, and that shots had been fired by the occupants of one vehicle. The witness subsequently found two spent shotgun cartridges, which he handed in to Crumlin Garda Station. It is not known who the intended target was. Wansboro was released without charge. Military Police officials arrested him on 25 March. He was taken into custody at McKee Barracks after being absent without leave for two months. Three days after his arrest, he appeared before a court martial and was fined fifty-nine days’ pay. He was then ordered to remain in soldiers’ accommodation in the barracks for ten days. He didn’t waste much time sneaking out of his room though, and scaled the wall of the barracks to freedom. Gardaí were immediately alerted. Quick-thinking detectives in Crumlin combed Wansboro’s known haunts, and arrested him a day after his bid for freedom. He was returned to the custody of the Military Police. In early April 2008, Wansboro paid €300 to buy himself out of his army contract, and there is little doubt that the army was glad to see the back of him, especially considering the public embarrassment he had caused them. Gardaí had serious concerns that army intelligence had failed to note that Wansboro’s name was regularly materialising in intelligence reports as being heavily involved in the Crumlin/ Drimnagh feud. Wansboro was not the only soldier who was involved in gangland activity. Gardaí and the Defence Forces are aware of at least five incidents over the last few years, where serving soldiers had been approached by organised crime gangs looking for help in carrying out armed robberies and other criminal acts. The high levels of training in firearms and other military techniques make soldiers particularly attractive for criminals, and Wansboro was a good example. He was only out of the army a matter of days when he was again arrested by Gardaí. On 9 April, he was questioned on suspicion of firing two blasts from a shotgun into a house in Crumlin. Four days later, he was also arrested after allegedly firing shots through the window of an associate of Freddie Thompson after words were exchanged in a pub in Dublin 8. Nobody was injured in either incident, but because he had become such a key player in the feud, Gardaí placed him under constant surveillance. This paid off on 19 August when Detective Inspector Peter O’Boyle, who had been a Detective Sergeant in Crumlin at the time of Declan Gavin’s murder but had since been promoted and transferred to Ballyfermot, received confidential information about Eric Wansboro and the proposed delivery of a gun.
Garda Padraig O’Meara stopped a taxi at Ruby Finnegan’s pub on Sarsfield Road in Ballyfermot. Wansboro was searched and a 9mm revolver was found hidden in his sock and four rounds of ammunition were found in his jacket pocket. The revolver had originally been a starting gun but had been reconstructed so that it could be fired as a conventional gun. Wansboro had only been holding the gun for the Rattigan mob and was due to hand it over to another gang member when he was nabbed by Gardaí. Gardaí arrested gang member Joey Redmond close to the pub at the same time as Wansboro, but detectives swooped before the handover took place. Joey Redmond was arrested and questioned, but was subsequently released without charge. Wansboro was immediately charged, and because of the seriousness of the offence, was remanded in custody, which was a major boost for Gardaí, because he had been causing them so much trouble over the previous few months. In October 2009, Wansboro appeared before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court and was handed a four-year sentence for possession of the firearm after he pleaded guilty. He was also charged with a serious assault that took place on O’Connell Street in May 2007, in which the victim suffered serious facial injuries. Wansboro had used his boxing skills to knock a man to the ground, after words were exchanged between two groups, and proceeded to kick him while he lay helpless. He was jailed for two years for that assault, but the sentence was to run concurrently with his firearms sentence. It was his twenty-first criminal conviction.
In July 2009, the Rattigan gang was dealt yet another hammer blow when Shane Maloney, a close friend of Rattigan, was jailed for ten years, after being arrested with €1.2 million worth of heroin at the Palmerstown Shopping Centre on 13 August 2008. Maloney, from Drimnagh Road, had driven to Abrakebabra in his own car on the night that Declan Gavin was murdered. Maloney pleaded guilty to the possession of the drugs for sale or supply. He had been caught on the hop by Gardaí, carrying the product, after the person who was meant to pick up the drugs pulled out at the last minute. Members of the Organised Crime Unit, led by former Crumlin Detective Garda Ronan Lafferty, had received a tip-off that drugs were being moved and watched from a discreet distance as Maloney parked his car outside the shopping centre and took a bag from the back seat of a car that was parked nearby. Gardaí swooped when Maloney returned to his own car. The officers saw two brown packages in the passenger seat of his car and more packages in the back. Resigned to his fate, he said: ‘It’s only brown,’ meaning heroin. When he was arrested the twenty-seven-year-old refused to comment during a series of interviews. At his court appearance his barrister said that Maloney came from a decent family and regretted his involvement. The barrister added that Maloney was making the best of a bad situation and had started studying in prison. The conviction was his eighty-fifth.
Although Gardaí were getting some notable collars, they were still fighting an almost impossible battle, because the new generation of criminals was so prolific in causing mayhem. On 24 February, ‘Mad Dog’ and one of his minions were arrested after one of them got out of a car on Sperrin Road in Drimnagh, and fired five shotgun rounds through the front window of a house. Young members of the Rattigan gang were in the house and managed to run out to the back garden and flee without anybody being injured. On the same day, the house that had once belonged to a young relation of Noel and John Roche had windows damaged. The members of the Thompson gang didn’t realise that their target hadn’t lived in the house for years. Three days later, there was retaliation from the Rattigan side, when the family home of ‘Mad Dog’ had windows damaged and a car parked in the front garden was also vandalised. The tit-for-tat petty attacks continued. Later the same day, the house on Sperrin Road that had been shot at a few days before had windows damaged by the Thompson mob, while the home of a Thompson gang member was attacked causing damage to the windows. On 28 February, the same house was shot up and five shotgun cartridges were recovered. ‘Mad Dog’ was detained, along with three of his junior cronies, but the homeowner refused to make a statement to Gardaí. There
were dozens of petty attacks like this throughout the first three months of 2009. The young criminals were causing a nuisance to Gardaí more than anything else, but nevertheless, they were regularly discharging firearms, which was obviously potentially very dangerous and a massive challenge to Gardaí trying to police Crumlin and Drimnagh.
The older feuding criminals had long since stopped smashing windows – when they struck they meant business and went armed with firearms. The youngsters hadn’t been educated to this extent yet. On 7 March, four or five young men from the Rattigan gang tried to break into Graham Whelan’s home on Clonard Road in Crumlin. They shouted from outside the front door that they were there to kill the drug dealer. Armed with lump hammers, they smashed glass in the front door and windows, but couldn’t force their way into the house – luckily for Whelan. They escaped in a silver Renault Megane. On the same day, a silver Megane pulled up outside a house on Dolphin Road in Drimnagh, and a number of men got out armed with lump hammers. The men proceeded to smash up three cars that were parked in one front garden. They obviously took the fact that they couldn’t get to Graham Whelan out on the cars. Over the next two days, the same Renault Megane was seen ferrying young men around the area. Several more vehicles were damaged and four more houses were shot up. Again, it was the next generation of criminals trying to make their mark.
Cocaine Wars Page 30