Cocaine Wars (9 page)

Although he was not involved with Brian Rattigan and the others, he had not completely given up on breaking the law. It is believed that Lodge had become involved in a dispute with a local man, and that Lodge was constantly threatening and harassing the man and his family, and making their lives hell. Gardaí believe that a hit man was paid to shoot Lodge as a warning and to make him back off. However, the hit man went too far and shot Lodge dead, instead of just shooting him in the leg, as had been intended. On 25 May 2002, Gardaí received a phone call informing them that ‘The man who did the murder in Tallaght on St Stephen's Day got a €1,000 to shoot Derek Lodge.'

The man referred to was Shay Wildes, a notorious hit man from Tallaght. On St Stephen's Day 2001, Wildes, who was born in December 1967, walked up to Joseph Cummins outside the Dragon Inn and shouted, ‘Merry Christmas,' before shooting him in the head from close range. Wildes then fired two more shots into Cummins as he lay on the ground, killing the father of five. Wildes later claimed that he carried out the murder as revenge, because Cummins had allegedly raped a woman eighteen months previously, although there was no evidence to back this up. In September 2003, Wildes received two life sentences after he was found guilty of the murder and possession of the murder weapon, a .22 semi-automatic handgun. Gardaí believe that Wildes operated as a gun for hire, had links to the Continuity IRA and was behind protection rackets in and around Tallaght. In April 2003, Shay Wildes also coldly shot dead thirty-two-year-old Declan Griffin in a packed pub in Inchicore. Wildes had been paid by a gang that Griffin owed money to, and lured the victim to the pub, saying that they would offer him protection. Griffin was suspicious and arrived expecting trouble. He was wearing full body armour and had a pistol in his waistband to protect himself. But before he got a chance to take it out, Wildes calmly shot him in the head, through his right ear from close range with a .38 pistol, before strolling out. A jury later found him not guilty of the murder. Witnesses due to give evidence in the case had been intimidated, and Gardaí were also threatened. Although he was later arrested in connection with Derek Lodge's murder, Wildes replied, ‘Nothing to say', to every single Garda question. He was released without charge. Nobody was ever charged with Derek Lodge's murder. The investigation remains open.

In the eyes of ‘Fat' Freddie's gang, anybody involved or suspected of being involved in Declan Gavin's murder was fair game. On 28 May 2002, a man, who the gang believed had telephoned Rattigan on the night of the Gavin murder informing him that ‘Deco' was outside Abrakebabra, was shot. There is no evidence that such a phone call ever took place, but the victim was shot in the chin with a .38 round when he opened his front door at 3.00 a.m. The victim refused to make a statement or co-operate with Gardaí, but members of the Thompson gang were the Gardaí's prime suspects.

Even though Brian Rattigan was still recovering from his injuries and was out of the picture for the moment, the Thompson gang was on high alert to finish him off, should he be seen anywhere near Crumlin. He was staying in a safe house and keeping a low profile. In July 2002 the opportunity arose to take out Rattigan's beloved younger brother Joey. It wasn't a chance that the Thompson gang was going to pass up.

On 16 July 2002, eighteen-year-old Joey Rattigan was sitting at home with his girlfriend when he received a call asking him to go down to Dublin 8 for a few pints. He went to the Pimlico Tavern pub, in the heart of Dublin's south inner city. There Joey met twenty-one-year-old Paul Warren, the man that had made the phone call. Warren was with twenty-six-year-old Ritchie Edwards and twenty-two-year-old Paddy Fogarty. Paul Warren had been Gavin's friend, but Joey Rattigan didn't know the extent of this friendship. He believed that he was perfectly safe having a few pints with the trio, as he looked upon Warren as a mate. Joey was very much mistaken though, and it was this error that would cost him his life. After Declan Gavin's murder and the permanent split of the gang, allegiances were still being formed, and it was hard to know who to trust. Friendships were cheap, and a person you thought was on your side one minute could suddenly turn against you the next. Joey Rattigan thought that Paul Warren was on his brother's side, but in gangland there is no such thing as real friendship, and loyalty is not a commodity that is in rich supply. Unbeknownst to Joey Rattigan, Paul Warren was a turncoat.

Warren, Edwards and Fogarty had been in the pub since 8.00 p.m. At around midnight Joey Rattigan rang his girlfriend and asked her to come and meet him in the pub. She got a lift in and arrived at about 12.15 a.m., and met her boyfriend and his three drinking companions at the door of the pub. Ritchie Edwards said he would give Rattigan and his girlfriend a lift back to Rattigan's house. When he dropped the couple there, he told them he was going to Islandbridge to leave Paul Warren off at his flat. However, there is no evidence to prove that Paul Warren was dropped off at Islandbridge. A while later Paddy Fogarty rang Joey Rattigan's mobile, and said that he and Ritchie Edwards were on their way back to Drimnagh to collect his girlfriend and drop her home. The pair arrived at Cooley Road, picked up Rattigan and his girlfriend, and dropped her safely home. The three men then drove to Ritchie Edwards' apartment in Inchicore and stayed there for a short time. Gardaí believe that all the complicated lifts was a guise to buy time, and that Paul Warren had arranged for Joey Rattigan to be murdered and was putting a plan in place to have him shot. The exact plan that was put in motion is unclear, but it is known that Rattigan, Fogarty and Edwards left Inchicore shortly before 2.00 a.m., and that at 2.05 a.m. Joey Rattigan got out of Ritchie Edwards' van at the bottom of Cooley Road, just metres from his home. As the van pulled away and left, somebody who had clearly been expecting and awaiting Rattigan's arrival came out of the shadows and approached him. A female neighbour later told Gardaí that she heard a loud bang and looked out her window and saw a male lying injured on the footpath. Joey Rattigan had suffered a single gunshot wound to the head from close range. By the time the neighbour got out of bed and peered through her window, both the gunman and Joey Rattigan's lift had gone.

Gardaí received the 999 call informing them about a possible shooting at Cooley Road at 2.18 a.m. on 17 July. Gardaí Carolyn Cullen, John Fitzpatrick, Ciaran Nunan and Kelly Dutton arrived at the scene within minutes, with an ambulance from the Dublin Fire Brigade not far behind. It was clear to members of the emergency services that Joey Rattigan was not in a good way. There was a large gunshot wound to the front of his head, and it looked like a pistol was used to inflict the wound. The injured man was rushed to St James's Hospital. Senior Gardaí from the ‘G' district, which encompasses Crumlin and Drimnagh, rushed to the scene. It was the opinion of senior officers present that they would soon be launching a murder inquiry. An incident room was immediately established at Sundrive Road Garda Station, under the command of Detective Superintendent Denis Donegan. The investigation was led on a day-to-day basis by Detective Inspector Tom Mulligan, with Detective Sergeant Joe O'Hara running the incident room on a full-time basis. On the morning of 17 July, approximately thirty Gardaí came together for a case conference to review the evidence. Detective Garda Eamonn Maloney was appointed family liaison officer and he dealt with the Rattigan family. Dinah Rattigan was heartbroken that her son was in a critical condition in hospital, as were other members of the immediate family. Sources say that Brian Rattigan was apoplectic with rage that his younger brother was targeted, and immediately ordered his closest associates to find out exactly what happened – so that revenge could be swift and brutal. It soon became clear that Joey Rattigan was being kept alive by a life support machine. He was brain-dead and had little chance of ever recovering. The Rattigan family had a meeting as Gardaí were holding their case conference, and they decided that Joey's machine should be switched off. The extended Rattigan family was at Joey's bedside when he lost consciousness for the final time, and Dr Ryan pronounced him dead. An hour later a relation of Dinah Rattigan identified Joey Rattigan's body to Garda Alan Kerin, who in turn identified the remains to Dr Marie Cassidy at the Dublin City Morgue. A murder investigation was immediately launched, while a grieving and furious Brian Rattigan launched his own witch-hunt. What had started out as a feud among close friends had now resulted in two murders, and there would be no going back. It was a case of a brother for a brother, and the feud was now a full-blown war.

Because Joey Rattigan was involved in the drugs gang controlled by his brother, there was little doubt that he was murdered as revenge for Brian Rattigan's murder of Declan Gavin. Joey Rattigan was well known to Gardaí, not because he was a serious criminal or found himself getting into trouble every week: he was known because of his infamous brother. Brian Rattigan doted on his younger brother, but this love did not go as far as making sure that Joey kept on the straight and narrow and stayed out of a life of crime, a life that the older Rattigan had made sure was permanent for himself. Although Joey was not a criminal mastermind, he was still well able to move drugs around, sell small quantities of ecstasy and generally take the adulation that comes on the street when your bigger brother is an up-and-coming gangster. Gardaí described Joey as Brian Rattigan's gofer. A kid who was handy for running errands and passing messages, but not somebody you would trust to help run a major drugs empire. Apart from his arrest for assaulting the two brothers at Basin Street with Brian, Joey Rattigan had never been in serious trouble with the law. He was stopped twice for being drunk and disorderly, but the offences were so minor that he was cautioned by Gardaí rather than taken to court. In fact, one of his more serious offences occurred on 20 August 2001, just five days before Declan Gavin's murder, when he was stopped by Gardaí on the Crumlin Road on suspicion of handling stolen property. The offending item was a bundle of twenty-five copies of the
Irish Independent
, which had been stolen from a nearby newspaper seller. It hardly qualified as the crime of the century, but nevertheless, he was summoned to appear before Dublin District Court. He was fortunate – the only witness against him failed to show up in court. Whether he had heard about the family's reputation is open to debate, but Joey escaped a conviction. Indeed, when he died, he did not have one single criminal conviction registered against his name. His softness was highlighted when Brian was shot. Instead of getting psyched up and taking on the gunmen who were trying to break down the door while his mother slept upstairs, Joey ran for his life and hid in a bush while his brother was nearly killed. He then started bawling when Gardaí arrived, which is a no-no among criminals who never like to show Gardaí emotion or let the police know that something has got to them. Joey's softness and inexperience in dealing with hardened and experienced murder detectives was obvious when he was arrested in connection with Declan Gavin's murder on 2 October 2001. He had originally lied to the Gardaí. During his time in custody, Joey was interviewed on four different occasions, and naïvely agreed to sign two of the memorandums of interview. It didn't take the younger Rattigan long to break down and admit that he had lied in his original witness statement. He named everyone who was at his eighteenth birthday party and admitted that he went to Karl Kavanagh's at 4.30 a.m. because he had a ‘free house'. He also named everyone at the Kavanaghs'. The group, he told Gardaí, ‘were all talking about what happened at Abrakebabra, that ‘Deco' Gavin had been stabbed. They all seemed very happy.' Joey said that most of the talking was being done by his brother and that they heard about the stabbing on the radio when the 7.00 a.m. news came on. He also described how someone told Shane Maloney to burn his car, but claimed that he did not know who this was. He said that Maloney ‘had arranged to meet someone else up the road' and then went with that unnamed person to burn the car. Joey also told Gardaí that Brian Rattigan left the family home to go to the Kavanaghs' at 2.30 a.m., but he did not arrive until around 4.30 a.m. This was the exact timeframe in which Gardaí believe that Rattigan went to Abrakebabra, murdered Gavin, disposed of the evidence and then went back to Cooley Road. Joey Rattigan was released without charge, but detectives could not believe how different he was to his brother. Brian Rattigan would never help the law or give them any nuggets to investigate. Joey had all but implicated his brother in the murder and he was naïve at best. He was certainly innocent, but definitely guilty of an unforgivable crime in the eyes of serious criminals – co-operating with Gardaí. The arrest just showed how much the young Joey Rattigan was out of his depth. He was singled out not for what he did; he was killed because of who he was. Put simply, he was collateral damage.

A post-mortem examination on Rattigan confirmed that he died as the result of a single gunshot wound to the head from a .38 calibre pistol. Gardaí at least knew what sort of gun they were looking for, and the motive for the murder quickly became apparent. Although the possibility that Rattigan was killed because of some mysterious feud that he alone was involved in was not ruled out, the most likely cause of his death was revenge. Two hundred and seventy-nine questionnaires were completed by residents and neighbours of the Rattigans. A number of witnesses reported hearing the screech of tyres just seconds after a loud bang, which led Gardaí to believe that a vehicle had been present at the murder scene and was probably used when the gunman or gunmen made their getaway. There was little initial progress made in the case. Nobody saw the gunman or was able to identify the vehicle that left the murder scene at high speed. A search team carried out an inch-by-inch search of Cooley Road and Kilworth Road, where the vehicle had been heard leaving the scene, but nothing materialised. After speaking with a confidential informant following the first case conference, a detective learnt that Rattigan had been drinking with three men on the night he died. The detective also found out about the lift Rattigan had received just before he was shot dead. The name Paul Warren was not new to detectives from Sundrive Road. Gardaí knew that he had associated with Declan Gavin before he died.