Cocaine Wars

by Mick McCaffrey

  If Sharon was in shock over the murder, then her brother Brian was in an uncontrollable rage. When he heard what happened, in his cell in Portlaoise Prison, he saw red and smashed the cell up and started screaming and crying at the top of his voice. Prison staff had to restrain him. He was put into a special straightjacket until he calmed down and was sent to solitary confinement. Shooting a female was a new low in the feud, and there was little doubt that it would lead to repercussions down the line, even if the gunman wasn’t actually trying to murder Sharon Rattigan, but merely trying to get her off him so he could escape. Shay O’Byrne’s murder was a personal killing carried out to send out a message to Brian Rattigan that his power base was now gone and that he was effectively defeated. O’Byrne and Rattigan were like brothers, and O’Byrne’s murder was part of a wider objective of the Thompson gang to kill as many of Rattigan’s relatives as possible. Shay was fifteen months younger than Rattigan. He had been going out with Sharon since his early teens. He was one of the founding members of the drugs gang. It is fair to say that he was far from one of the top dogs in the gang, but he was a trusted junior lieutenant and regularly acted as Rattigan’s driver before he was jailed. O’Byrne worked as a runner for the gang on and off. He would pick a bit of product up in one place and drop it off at another. He had been a target for the Garda National Drugs Unit for years but had never been caught with drugs. O’Byrne was not the worst type of criminal in that he was a dedicated family man and was very much in love with Sharon. He was probably only still used by the gang because he was effectively related to Brian and was part of the Rattigan family. He lived at the family home on Cooley Road for several years, and had been asleep in bed with Sharon when Freddie Thompson and Paddy Doyle burst in and shot Brian in March 2002. In November 2005, Gardaí had found fourteen shotgun cartridges in a car that was used by O’Byrne, close to his old address at Lansdowne Valley in Drimnagh, but apart from that, he very much operated on the periphery of the gang, and like many other victims of the feud, was an easy target. O’Byrne had not taken the proper precautions when it came to his personal safety. He had changed addresses on several occasions over the years but had lived at the same rented house in Tallaght for nearly six months prior to his murder, and his address was well known by the rival gang. Because he was not a key player in the Rattigan gang, he might have thought that he was safe enough.

  A murder investigation was immediately launched at Tallaght Garda Station under the command of Detective Inspector Pat Lordan. On the face of it, Gardaí had a huge amount of evidence because although the murder had been carried out, several aspects of it had been spectacularly botched. The suspected gunman was waiting close to O’Byrne’s house for well over an hour before the actual shooting took place. The man decided that he was thirsty and went to a nearby newsagent where he bought a four-pack of Red Bull energy drinks. When the gunman saw Shay O’Byrne emerge from the house, he did manage to shoot him dead, but was taken by surprise by Sharon Rattigan’s ferocity and determination. Instead of shrugging her off and getting away, he got involved in a tussle, where Sharon managed to partially pull his balaclava off his head. She also scratched him. Undoubtedly his biggest error was dropping the gun on the ground after being struck by Rattigan. The forensic evidence that could be gleaned from the gun was immense and a huge plus for Gardaí. A mobile phone was also found at the scene, but, it was later determined that the handset had just been bought, and no numbers had been dialled from the phone, therefore there was not a lot the Gardaí could do with it. A full can of Red Bull was found close to the murder scene, and Gardaí were able to tie the drink to the local newsagents by the special batch number printed on the side of the can. This discovery opened up the possibility of witnesses in and around the newsagents and CCTV footage being available to identify the shooter. It was an almost comical tale of ineptitude, which was not typical of the gunman. He was hired by the Thompson gang through a well-known criminal associate.

  Detectives arrested three members of the Thompson gang in a car in Crumlin just an hour after the murder. Members of the Organised Crime Unit had spotted the men around Tallaght on the afternoon of the murder in a Nissan car. When witnesses described seeing a Nissan speed away from the scene, Gardaí immediately thought of the trio and took them into custody, but they were released because they had nothing to do with the shooting.

  Another four people – including a sixteen-year-old girl – were also detained in the days after the murder, and again released without charge. After considering all the evidence, Gardaí arresteded the suspect in his home on the afternoon of 17 March. He was taken into custody at Tallaght Garda Station.

  In May 2010 a thirty-two-year-old man was charged with the murder of Shay O’Byrne and is currently awaiting trial.

  Shay O’Byrne’s murder was a big personal blow to Brian Rattigan and his extended family, but it had little impact on his ability to do business and the feud continued in earnest. Gardaí were continuing to have major success against the feuding criminals. In March, a twenty-two-year-old was arrested in possession of a loaded Glock handgun on the Crumlin Road. A search of his house saw a stolen sawn-off shotgun seized as well as a pistol silencer. He is currently charged before the courts. In April 2009, a member of the Rattigan gang was arrested in possession of a 9mm Luger handgun close to his home in Crumlin. The twenty-seven-year-old is also before the courts. The Limerick connection is obviously still alive and well, with the various feuding factions continuing to do business together. Also in April 2009, Gardaí from Mayorstone Park in Limerick observed ‘Fat’ John McCarthy from Moyross in the passenger seat of a car on the Long Pavement Road being closely followed by a Dublin-registered Range Rover. The Range Rover was stopped, and among its passengers were Graham Whelan and two junior members of the Thompson mob. They were doing nothing wrong and were allowed to go on their way, but it is doubtful that Whelan was down in Limerick on his holidays.

  The following night, Brian Rattigan received yet another kick in the stomach when Joey Redmond was arrested on 18 April following an incident in which shots were fired at a pursuing Garda squad car. Joey Redmond was arrested and a Walther pistol with seven rounds of ammunition was recovered. Also in the car was twenty-five-year-old David Roche, the younger brother of John and Noel Roche who had both been murdered as part of the feud. David obviously hadn’t learnt any lessons from the deaths of his two brothers and had become heavily involved in the feud in order to get revenge for the deaths of his brothers. At about 10.30 p.m. Redmond and Roche had used a .22 semi-automatic pistol to fire a shot into the home of an innocent woman on Keeper Road in Crumlin in what was a case of mistaken identity. Roche was driving an Audi A6 and sped past a Garda patrol car near Bunting Road. The Gardaí fired a shot in the direction of the car but Roche lost control and hit a bollard, bursting one of the car’s tyres. They threw the gun and a tea-towel out the window of the Audi but were forced to abandon the car and were arrested shortly afterwards. They were charged the following day and remanded in custody until their trial date in November 2010 when they were both handed eight-year sentences.

  The final nail in the coffin of Brian Rattigan’s gang was struck on 17 July 2009. Anthony Cannon, the twenty-six-year-old Rattigan enforcer, was dropped off by car close to Ruby Finnegan’s pub in Ballyfermot at 3.50 p.m. to go to a prearranged meeting. The area is known locally as ‘The Ranch’. Cannon walked along the street behind the pub and turned onto a laneway leading to the Liffey Gaels GAA pitch. He realised that he was being followed and had been set up. So he attempted to climb a gate onto Longmeadows Park, when he was confronted by a man armed with a pistol. He ran down the road to try to escape from his killer, but the gunman pursued him, opening fire as he ran. Cannon was hit with a bullet to the back and fell to the ground. The gunman stepped over him and shot him twice in the head at point-blank range, killing him. A total of eleven shots were discharged. CCTV footage clearly captured Cannon attempting to run away, before the gunman, who was weari
ng a motorbike helmet, caught up with him, shot him and escaped on a motorbike being driven by an accomplice. Cannon was well aware that his life was in danger and was wearing a bulletproof vest when he was shot. But as Freddie Thompson once told Gardaí, there is little point in wearing a vest when you get shot in the head. Youngsters who had been playing on the street witnessed the murder, which took place in broad daylight. Cannon was originally from Robert Street in Dublin 8, and was the last remaining ‘hard man’ in the Rattigan gang. His job was to get money that was owed to the gang from addicts who hadn’t paid up. Apparently, the sight of Anthony Cannon in a van was enough to make junkies soil themselves. He was said to have taken several people up the mountains and handed out horrendous beatings over small sums of money that were owed. As well as dishing out the hidings, Cannon often acted as the middleman in drugs deliveries. He had been arrested on 21 May 2008 at a house on Hughes Road South in Crumlin. Unbeknownst to him, Gardaí had raided the house a few minutes before and recovered €1 million worth of heroin and €36,850 in cash. Three members of the one family were in the process of being arrested when Cannon, using his own key, let himself into the house. Gardaí believe that he was there to collect the drugs and deliver them elsewhere. Cannon was arrested and charged under Sections 3 and 15 of the Misuse of Drugs Act, but the charges were subsequently dropped because he was not in the house with the drugs when detectives first arrived. Gardaí had raided the house after receiving confidential information about Cannon’s activities. An informant had told them of how he would ring a drugs courier on his mobile phone and tell him to go to a certain location. When the courier got there, a holdall would be waiting for him with a couple of kilos of heroin and another mobile phone. The courier then picked up the drugs; Cannon would ring the new phone and tell the courier to break the drugs up into a certain amount of individual deals. When the drugs were broken down, the courier would get another call from Cannon, who would tell him where to drop the holdall. When the drop took place, an envelope containing €2,000 in cash would be waiting for the courier. Cannon would then pick up the drugs and deliver them to other smaller dealers. He himself would receive in excess of €5,000 for his troubles, so it was a lucrative little business.

  Cannon had a number of criminal convictions. He was fined for the possession of cannabis resin in 2006, but had a more serious charge of possession of ecstasy for sale and supply struck out in 2002. His longest prison sentence was one year for criminal damage. He was suspended from driving for ten years in February 2008, and given a suspended six-month jail sentence for careless driving and giving a false name to Gardaí. He was due in court the week after his murder on public order and assault charges. These were subsequently struck out. Cannon, along with Wayne McNally, had become the main lynchpin for the Rattigan gang and the pair of them wreaked havoc together. Cannon was the suspect in the shooting of Freddie Thompson’s grandparents’ home in June 2008. He was also under investigation for an incident where the home of a twenty-six-year-old Thompson associate was shot at on the June Bank Holiday weekend in 2009. The man was asleep on the couch in his home on Derry Road, when three shots were fired through the front window. One of them hit him in the leg, although he was not seriously injured. He had paid €6,000 the previous week for reinforced glass. His house had been shot at the previous March, with damage being done to the front door, so he didn’t want to take any chances and invested in the expensive glass, although it failed to stop the bullet anyway. A car was heard screeching away from the scene, and Cannon was nominated as having fired the shots. He had been involved in the feud for years but had only really started to get to the top rung of the ladder in the gang in the last couple of years before his death. He was arrested as part of the Paul Warren murder investigation, as far back as March 2004, although he is not regarded as having been involved in the actual killing. Loyalty means a lot to Brian Rattigan, and Cannon had earned his stripes time and time again over the years. Rattigan had trusted him enough to let him be the point man with the Keane gang in Limerick. It was Cannon who was arrested outside the pub in Crumlin in April 2007, when Liam Keane pointed a Glock at a motorist who had wolf whistled at Natasha McEnroe.

  The Gardaí at Ballyfermot Garda Station were tasked with handling the investigation into Anthony Cannon’s murder. The probe was led by Superintendent John Quirke, with Detective Inspector Peter O’Boyle leading the plain-clothes officers who would investigate the shooting on a day-today basis. The investigation is still ongoing and it is known that Anthony Cannon had started to encroach on the drug-dealing territory in Dublin 22 that had once been controlled by Karl Breen, prior to his (Breen’s) jail sentence.

  Rattigan had seen ‘Fat’ Freddie and his mob cannibalise a lot of his territory in Crumlin and Drimnagh because of the gang’s sheer size and the fact that it had far more muscle than his side. Rattigan ordered his associates to broaden their horizons and to expand in order to keep making money. This was obviously a very dangerous tactic, because areas are traditionally well defined, and a gang only starts dealing in rival areas if it is prepared to fight for the privilege. The Rattigan gang simply did not have the appetite or the strength to fight anyone, so Cannon was playing a dangerous game. The man suspected of ordering the hit on Cannon is a well-known figure in organised crime in Dublin. He has been responsible for at least three gangland murders over the last decade. He was implicated in the murder of suspected informer Keith Ennis, who was followed to Amsterdam in March 2009, dismembered and put in a suitcase before being thrown into a canal. When the thirty-four-year-old finished a jail sentence, he took over Karl Breen’s former business in Ballyfermot. He also became embroiled in a feud in Dublin 22, in which several men were murdered. Anthony Cannon was blamed for an assassination attempt on this man in 2006 in Tallaght, in which the crime lord was hit in the arm. Cannon owed him money and decided to murder him rather than pay the debt, but the hit did not go down as planned. Cannon always knew that revenge for that botched hit was on the cards at some point, and once he and other gang members started dealing in Ballyfermot, there was only one way things were going to go. If it wasn’t the thirty-four-year-old that got Cannon, somebody else would have. It can’t have failed to have struck Thompson and his gang that he was the last remaining rock in Rattigan’s crumbling foundation, especially because Cannon had shot at ‘Fat’ Freddie’s grandparents’ house, which was like putting a red rag in front of a bull. When you live by the sword you invariably die by it, and Cannon knew that as well as anyone. He probably knew that it was inevitable that he would breathe his last breath staring down the barrel of a gun.

  With McNally jailed and Cannon dead, the Rattigan gang had effectively been defeated. There were still members on the streets, but they were only concerning themselves with moving drugs around the place and had no real interest in taking up arms against the Thompson gang. According to prison officer sources, when Rattigan heard of the murder of his right-hand man, he was deeply depressed. He put on a brave face and continued to direct operations from his prison cell but he must have privately known that the game was up and that his power base was destroyed, probably forever. It might have been different if he was on the streets himself, taking the fight to the other side, but there was only so much you could do in jail. Even if he managed to get off on the Declan Gavin murder, it would be 2012 before he was a free man. Probably by then he would be forgotten, subsumed by the even more ruthless next generation of criminals who were already starting to smell blood and wanted to take over his patch for themselves.

  With Gardaí quietly confident that the worst of the feud was now over and that a victory of sorts was in sight, the boys in blue also got their chance of a first ever feud-related murder conviction. This chance came when Craig White appeared before Dublin’s Central Criminal Court charged with the murder of Noel Roche on the Clontarf Road on 15 November 2005. The trial kicked off on 14 July 2009, in front of Mr Justice George Birmingham. Senior Counsel Anthony Sammon told the jury during
his opening statement that they would hear that on the night of the murder, Noel Roche left the Point Depot with friends suddenly at around 9.30 p.m. in a Ford Mondeo. A stolen Peugeot drove up alongside the Mondeo near the junction of Seafield Road and Clontarf Road, and a number of shots were fired, killing Roche. Some time later, a lady on nearby Furry Park Road saw two men abandon the Peugeot. The Gardaí arrived and the vehicle was forensically examined. Evidence was found linking twenty-three-year-old Craig White to the car. Sammon continued that a brown paper bag containing a balaclava, a gun, a tea towel and gloves was found in the rear seat of the Peugeot. White’s fingerprints were found on the bag and his DNA was also recovered from the handles of the bag. Two gloves that were found along Furry Park Road both contained White’s DNA, and fibres on the gloves could also be linked to the abandoned Peugeot. A container of petrol was found in the footwell of the car, and Sammon said that the inference could be drawn that there had been the intention to burn the car and destroy all the evidence. He said that the bullet casings found at the murder scene could also be linked to the Glock semi-automatic pistol found in the car. While there were no actual witnesses to the murder, the jury would be shown a video taken by an American tourist on a passing bus. The jury was told that Eddie Rice, who had been driving the Mondeo when it was ambushed by White, would not be giving evidence. The prosecution also made the point that White was involved in Roche’s murder as part of a joint enterprise. It was not necessary to establish whether White had actually pulled the trigger or just driven the car. Sammon added that White was one of those two people, and each was as guilty of murder as the other. During the trial the elephant in the room – Paddy Doyle – was brought up in evidence. Detective Inspector Willie McKenna agreed with Defence Senior Counsel, Brendan Grehan, that Gardaí had been told by other sources that Paddy Doyle had been the one who had shot Roche, and that he was on the back of a motorbike when he pulled the trigger. The jury was told that Doyle had been murdered in Spain in 2008, and was known to Gardaí. DI McKenna also said that when Noel Roche’s mother, Caroline, arrived at the scene, she named Paddy Doyle as having been responsible. McKenna added that sources, other than Mrs Roche, had given information about Doyle’s alleged involvement, and that the Garda investigation could find no evidence that a motorbike had been used in the murder. He added that the driver of the Ford Mondeo in which Noel Roche was shot provided no helpful information to Gardaí. The most interesting part of the trial – and certainly the part that had the potential to cast the most doubts in the minds of jurors about Craig White’s guilt – was when Detective Garda Ray Kane from the fingerprint section of the Garda Technical Bureau gave evidence. He told the prosecution that he found three fingerprints and one thumb print on the paper bag that was found in the Peugeot. He subsequently compared them to the prints taken from Craig White. Detective Garda Kane said that he had no doubts that the finger marks found on the bag matched White’s prints. He himself had taken fingerprints from White at Raheny Garda Station on 5 December 2005, after White was first arrested. DG Kane matched White’s right thumb, left little finger, right forefinger and right middle finger to the fingermarks that he took from the paper bag.