Cocaine Wars (33 page)

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.

On 24 June 2008, Freddie Thompson's grandparents were preparing to go to bed in their home in the Coombe, when gunmen fired three shots at the house. The couple, who were both in their eighties, were lucky to escape injury during the shooting, which took place just after 10.00 p.m. A car was heard screeching away from the scene after the shots were fired. Anthony Cannon is thought to have been the man who fired the shots. Thompson was furious when he heard how his innocent and elderly grandparents had been dragged into a feud that had absolutely nothing to do with them. However, the incident did not happen out of the blue, and it was meant to send out a message to Thompson. Earlier that day an eight-month-old baby had a close escape when his fifty-year-old grandmother was shot in the shoulder in another drive-by attack. The victim was carrying her baby grandson when six shots were fired at her house on Knocknarea Road in Drimnagh. Three men in a silver-coloured BMW car pulled up outside the house shortly before 1.00 p.m., after chasing a man. The man running away managed to gain entry to the victim's house and barricade himself inside. Two men jumped out of the car and fired three shots from a handgun into the glass panels of the front door and another into the letterbox before trying to kick it in. They failed, so one of the men ran to the front window and fired another two shots, one of which hit the victim in the left shoulder, and missed her little grandson by a matter of inches. The quick-thinking woman threw the baby to the safety of a couch. Had the youngster been hit by the stray bullet he would surely have been killed. The woman's eighty-four-year-old grandmother and two other adults were in the house at the time of the broad-daylight attack, which took place just 20 m away from Our Lady of Good Counsel primary school on the Mourne Road. The gunmen escaped and the BMW was later found partially burnt out at the back of the Superquinn supermarket in Walkinstown. It had been stolen and fitted with false number plates. The woman whose house had been shot at was not the intended target, and the attack was a case of mistaken identity. She was rushed to St James's Hospital and luckily made a full recovery. Freddie Thompson's gang is thought to have been behind the shooting. It was a case of a grandparent for a grandparent. The woman who had been attacked was an innocent grandparent and so were Freddie Thompson's grandparents. Gardaí were very concerned that both sides were starting to target innocent people who had nothing to do with the feud, especially when children were being dragged into the hostilities.

Gardaí got a great boost when Declan Duffy was arrested on 25 June on suspicion of membership of the INLA. He was remanded into custody to Portlaoise Prison, just metres away from Brian Rattigan, although the two men were on different landings. Gardaí had put a lot of resources into collating evidence to use against Duffy, and once he was off the streets, the threat of the INLA against Thompson was effectively lifted. This meant that all of the Gardaí's resources could be put into keeping a watchful eye on Freddie's escalating feud with the Rattigan gang.

On 28 June 2008, innocent people were again targeted in a horrendous grenade attack. Madeleine Frazer, mother of former Freddie Thompson associate Michael Frazer, had her home attacked with a hand grenade. At 2.30 a.m. a red Fiat Punto pulled up outside the Frazer home, and somebody used a rock to smash a glass panel on the front door, before lobbing a Czech fragmentation grenade into the house. The grenade exploded, causing a considerable amount of damage to the downstairs rooms, the ceilings of an upstairs bedroom, the upstairs toilet area and as high up as the attic. The grenade was designed to kill anyone within a 6-m radius. It was the most serious fragmentation grenade incident in the history of the state. Gardaí say that the house looked like ‘a bomb site in Beirut', such was the amount of damage caused. Sources said it was a miracle that nobody inside the house had as much as a scratch on them, especially considering that six people were in the house, including a six-year-old boy.

Paul Dunphy, who was arrested on the Walkinstown Road in possession of two grenades and a handgun less than four months previously, was arrested for questioning about the incident, but was never charged, as there wasn't enough evidence to charge him. After the Frazer grenade attack and the shooting of the innocent grandmother, tensions in Drimnagh were at an all-time high because of the tit-for-tat incidents that had resulted in innocent grandmothers being injured. Detective Superintendent Denis Donegan and Detective Inspector Brian Sutton made direct representations to senior figures on both sides, and with the assistance of the local clergy, brokered an agreement whereby family members would not be targeted in the future. Both sides agreed and things settled down. Just days later, Freddie caught a flight bound for Spain. His mother was quoted in
The Sunday Times
as saying: ‘He doesn't want to talk to anyone. The Gardaí told him he was under threat. He hasn't done anything, but he's being blamed for everything that's happening.' Freddie spent several weeks in Spain, and the sort of cease-fire agreed by Gardaí seemed to be holding for the moment.