Gangster (9 page)

‘I established more or less the general area where he was. I arrived in Ecuador at six in the morning, and by four that afternoon I had found the house where he was staying. A priest answered the door, and I knew immediately that Casey was staying with him. I said, “Look, I don’t want to hassle him, I don’t want to create any difficulties. If he doesn’t want to talk to me, that’s fine.”

‘At half nine that night I was in bed in my hotel and I was knackered, and the priest rang from the lobby and said, “We’re downstairs.” I walked down and there was Casey. It was incredible. We spoke for five hours but I didn’t publish a word. About six weeks later he called me and said he’d give me an interview.’

It ran for three weeks, catapulting her into the public eye. Ireland’s biggest-selling newspaper, the
Sunday Independent
, headhunted her weeks later. These were to be the happiest days of her life. It was here that she drifted into crime journalism and Dublin’s murky underworld, seeking out informants with hard information, the stuff exclusives are made of.

John Gilligan had never attained the anti-hero status that his old adversary Cahill did. Cahill flirted with the media and enjoyed the chase, posing for photographers outside the courts and granting interviews to a select few. His extraordinary sexual activity, taking two sisters as lovers, whetted Guerin’s appetite and, in the wake of his murder, she dedicated her energies towards uncovering the General’s love life. It was in making these enquiries that she came across Traynor.

At the time, he owned two garages—one in Dublin and another in Naas, County Kildare. She called him at his Dublin office, presumably after being directed there by a garda contact. Traynor was interested. Here was one of Ireland’s most famous reporters seeking his help. He arranged to meet her in a coffee shop in Montague Lane, between Camden Street and Harcourt Street.

He later recalled that Guerin astonished him by telling him intimate details of his life. He told all. He felt important whilst Guerin got her exclusives, three in total—the first appearing in the last week in August and the last two in September in the newspaper’s Living and Leisure section.

But one caused more interest than the others. It was called ‘The General’s Two Women’ and revealed the most intimate and salacious details of Cahill’s sex life. Her mistake was to write that she was getting information from someone close to the Cahill family. Traynor became the main suspect. To cover his own tracks, he let it be known among the criminal fraternity that he would have the journalist seen to. They waited and watched with bated breath.

Guerin lived in a refurbished and extended cottage in Cloughran, a rural townsland in north County Dublin. Her house stands alone on a green site surrounded by high hedges to the front and green fields to the rear. Two rottweilers usually stood guard outside the house, but on the night of 7 October 1994 they were asleep, locked in the house.

Her husband Turley was in the kitchen whilst she typed away in her office, which lies to the rear of the house. Shortly before 10 p.m. she saved a file on her computer and walked to the kitchen. Minutes later, she heard the sound of a crack, then another. Wondering what the sound was, she walked back into the office and saw a bullet hole in the window. She then noticed a bullet lodged in a shelf above where she had been sitting.

She called Turley. They ran to Cathal’s room and called the police. Detective Sergeant Cathal Cryan, a friend of the couple’s, was alerted and raced to the house. The gunman, however, was long gone by the time he arrived. Guerin was shocked but put on a brave face. Cryan inspected the damage, noting the gunman had fired a second shot through the house’s gutter, he presumed in a fit of panic. He considered what had happened. If the gunman had wanted to kill her, he could have.

Guerin’s attitude was that the shooting was a warning. She later commented: ‘I discussed it with Graham, my husband, because he had said, “Hang on a second, if this is the type of shit that we’re going to be faced with . . . ” And so we did think about it, and it did frighten the life out of me. But I thought, what was the point in giving in to them? That’s just what they want. Then they’ll think that they can just continue doing it to everybody else. So I carried on.’

The problem was that she continued communicating with Traynor, not suspecting him of ordering the shooting. The garda investigation didn’t make any headway, but one thing was for sure—the shooting was a response to the Cahill revelations.

It was during the closing months of 1994 that Gilligan made contact with Martinus Maria Cornelis Baltus, a Dutch national from Zoetermeer in The Hague. The introduction came via Rahman who advised Gilligan to invest in a proposed holiday development scheme called Club la Costa. Baltus was seeking investors for the complex under construction in Rosendale, a town that straddles the Dutch-Belgian border. Gilligan saw the investment as a way of laundering cash while at the same time developing new connections in Holland. In the first week of December, he flew to Schiphol Airport and made his way to a hotel where he came face to face with Baltus, who was with Rahman. In the bar of the hotel, the three men chatted about the proposed holiday scheme over drinks. Baltus provided Gilligan with the plans, brochures and other material.

Meeting Baltus was a blessing. Gilligan was in the right place at the right time. He was keen on investing cash in Club la Costa. In an effort to stay sharp and befriend his new-found acquaintances, he invited them out. A little while later, when they relaxed a bit more, they got down to real business. Baltus, a man never cut out for crime, became overtly friendly. Gilligan soon got him involved in the business, setting up deals, in particular laundering cash. When he returned to Dublin that weekend, Gilligan had effectively recruited a set of eyes and ears in Amsterdam.

Back home business was booming. Meehan ran the distribution business like a legitimate company. Bowden rented a lock-up premises to the rear of Emmett Road in Inchicore to distribute the drugs. At the request of Meehan, he used a fictitious name, Oliver Bond, to rent the store. From here, Meehan, Mitchell, Bowden and the gang offloaded more slabs of hashish per week than other criminal gangs sold in a year. Gilligan found he had simply more money than he could handle. So by the end of 1994 he was forced to start smuggling cash to Europe to deposit in offshore accounts. This inevitably led to problems.

On 11 December 1994, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise (HMCE) officers at Holyhead ferry terminal in Wales carried out a routine check of all long-haul trucks alighting off the Dublin ferry. One by one, they stopped each truck and questioned the drivers, asking about their business, destination and cargo.

Customs officer Roger Wilson was on duty that morning. He stopped a Dublin trucker heading to Belgium. Wilson checked his cargo and registration, and had a quick look inside his cab. There he saw gift-wrapped parcels. Wilson, curious to know their contents, asked him to open the presents. When he did, he saw them stuffed with cash: £75,800 in punts and £2,000 sterling in total. Wilson didn’t need anyone to tell him the money was hot. He detained the driver, who seemed taken aback, for interview. The driver explained that a friend had asked him to deliver the parcels to a truckers’ cafe near Dunkirk in Belgium. A man called Martin would rendezvous with him there. That’s all he knew.

Wilson notified his senior officer, Dave Winkle, of the find. Tony Cody, an investigator with the money laundering investigations unit of Customs and Excise in Manchester, was alerted. Customs are allowed to hold large amounts of cash found in such circumstances for 48 hours to establish the source. The money was taken from the driver and Customs waited to see who claimed ownership. ‘Just 24 hours later,’ recalled Cody, ‘Gilligan put his head above the parapet and claimed the money was his.’

Gilligan always had nerve, and when it came to his money, he had nerves of steel. He was also under pressure to continue dealing with Rahman and Baltus. He travelled to Holyhead the next day and presented himself to Wilson and Winkle, introducing himself as a horse breeder and professional gambler. The money, he said, was for Club la Costa. Customs were highly suspicious of his story. Winkle interviewed him but didn’t believe a word out of his mouth. He consulted with Cody who instructed him to seize the cash under the Criminal Justice International Co-operation Act, Section 24, which allowed the seizure of monies believed to be the proceeds of drug trafficking. They went to Holyhead Magistrates’ Court who granted a detention order allowing Customs to hold the cash for a further six weeks to examine its origins. Gilligan attended the hearing. Cody met him outside the courtroom. ‘Physically, he looked a scruffy git,’ he remembers. ‘He wore an ill-fitting suit, his hair looked like it needed combing, he was a dishevelled-looking character.’

Gilligan went mad. In his criminal career he had never lost such an amount of cash, and he wasn’t about to start now. But more than anything, he feared losing face with the Dutch. He travelled home and contacted Baltus to explain the situation. He would send the cash as soon as possible. His appeal against the seizure of the cash from Meehan by Cherry was coincidentally due for hearing in the Dublin District Court. When the case came up for hearing, it was adjourned to 22 December. He was furious but had no option but to wait.

The appeal was held in Court 31. Gilligan stood in the witness box and told the court he had entrusted Meehan with the money. ‘He is a trusted friend,’ he said. He won the case and the cash was returned. He couldn’t believe his luck. But he was still one step behind. British Customs still had £75,000 belonging to him. He had tried smooth talking, which hadn’t worked; now he reckoned a bit of straight talking might do.

In a moment of drunken impulsiveness, he called Winkle at 10:05 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, pressing for the return of his money. He was amicable at first. But when it became clear that he was wasting his time, he resorted to his old tactics of issuing threats.

‘I’m having grief. Give me back me money, I haven’t caused problems here, with me family now, I can’t get on with me business because I don’t know where I stand with me money. I don’t know how much money I have and I know where I stand, I know how much it would cost me for a barrister, and I know it will cost me to get satisfaction, if I need to get satisfaction,’ he growled in gibberish down the phone.

‘But I don’t want nobody messing me family. I don’t mind. If somebody robs my money, I’ll have them shot. And I give that to the judge, I told the judge before in the court case if somebody messes my family I’ll have them fucking shot. And then I’ll go to jail on the consequences of it,’ he shouted.

He then referred to Wilson. ‘He’s messing me about, he’s robbing my money, I’ve accounted for it, I can’t do it any more, the bank manager gets the fucking money, he faxed you, I’ve showed you where I got the money, what’s the fucking problem? He’s backed me into a corner, we can do all dirty things, it’s not a problem for me to get somebody to shoot him, I know people that have been in prison. But I’m not going back down that road, I just want my money back.’

The threat was clear and noted. In the meantime, Cody was trying to gather information to prove Gilligan was a drug trafficker. All he needed was a drugs conviction or even proof that Gilligan associated with known dealers. He ran the Dubliner’s name through SEDRIC, the British Customs criminal database. This contained little information. His next source was the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS).

‘NCIS referred us to the South East Regional Crime Squad in London. They had seen Gilligan at meetings with criminals in the Brighton area. They had an ongoing operation on these people and Gilligan had came into their operation fleetingly,’ said Cody. Gilligan, in fact, had been secretly filmed in a hotel arranging a drugs deal. To confiscate his money, Customs would need to show the footage in court or produce any surveillance photographs taken of Gilligan. But to show this, they would expose the SERCS operation. They asked the rhetorical question.

‘We asked whether or not we could use it. SERCS considered and said we’d prefer you not to. Because their operation was ongoing, we respected that. That was it. At the end of the six weeks’ detention order, we went back again to hold the money and lost.’

In a remarkable stroke of luck, Gilligan had dropped his Brighton suppliers just as the police prepared to make arrests. And in yet another bizarre coincidence, the fact that he had been monitored with them prevented the forfeiture of the seized cash. When the case came up for hearing on 19 January, the magistrates found in Gilligan’s favour and ordered Customs to return the cash. Although he wasn’t aware of it at the time, Gilligan’s criminal career had come close to oblivion. He’d almost been caught but he saw the return of the cash as a reason to celebrate. He believed he’d outwitted the authorities by producing gambling receipts in court. He believed he had devised a fool-proof method of laundering hot cash.

Cody had exhausted every avenue in trying to get evidence. ‘It was as simple as that. We couldn’t show he had a previous conviction for drug trafficking,’ he said. Cody later noted in his reports ‘an aggression’ in Gilligan’s voice.

‘He was a fella who suffered from mood swings. One minute he would be buddy-buddy with you. He’d say, “See it from my side” and all this, trying to smooth you over. Then he’d start to become a little bit aggressive and say the loss of this money was hampering his business. I think his manner fluctuated between being reasonable to being downright sort of irate and aggressive. He seemed to suffer from mood swings.’

Chapter 9

Drugs, Guns & Money to Burn

‘I got a call from the Little Man who I know to be John Gilligan. He told me that there was something in the next consignment of hash.’

CHARLES BOWDEN TELLING DETECTIVES ABOUT ARMS IMPORTS

Guerin continued writing about crime, becoming more famous than her infamous subjects. The Cahills, meanwhile, were not on speaking terms with Traynor. Neither were his former comrades—all accused him of being a fool of a man. Not only had he disgraced Cahill’s memory, but he had spoken to a journalist, which was tantamount to informing the police. The word on the street was that she had him wrapped around her finger.

It was no secret that Traynor had told Guerin a lot more about the underworld than what was printed in the paper. Not content with his information about other criminals, she started writing about Traynor himself. On 21 January 1995 she wrote what can only be described as a deeply flattering article about him. She quoted him as saying: ‘I’m the best in the country at fraud, and if I didn’t live such an extravagant lifestyle, I’d be a millionaire.’ The article didn’t refer to Traynor by name; instead she called Traynor ‘the Coach’. A lot of what she wrote was nonsense, tittle-tattle gossip that he wished was true. She even went as far as saying that his position in the underworld had grown since Cahill’s death.

Traynor was secretly smitten with his new-found notoriety, but the criminal fraternity now saw him as a threat. If that’s what she was writing, how much did she know? He soon realised he was in serious trouble. He was given the benefit of the doubt on the previous articles, but Cahill’s gang saw this as a step too far. Traynor needed to do something drastic to regain his respect. He decided to kill her.

The assassin called to Guerin’s door at 6.45 p.m. on the evening of 30 January 1995. It was a Monday night. Guerin was speaking to her colleague Lise Hand, a society journalist, on the phone. The two were catching up on each other’s lives when she heard a knock at the front door. This was unusual because everyone who knew the family home entered the house by a side entrance. Turley wasn’t at home—he was attending the funeral of a former Lord Mayor—and Cathal was staying with his grandmother.

Guerin thought someone had got lost and was looking for directions. She opened the door and was confronted by a man pointing a large pistol at her head. She froze with fear; she could barely make him out. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet with a visor and a blue sports jacket. The gunman had screwed out the bulb over the porch light. She stepped backwards and he followed. She didn’t break her stare but backed into a wall and cowered, putting her hands over her face in an effort to protect her face, pleading with him not to shoot her. She heard his gun discharge and felt a sudden pain in her right leg. With that, the gunman entered the house and ran down the corridor and out the back door.

‘The first thing I saw was the gun,’ she later said. ‘And it looked huge and the light was shining on the thing. I didn’t see him, I just saw the gun. The first thing that went through my head was that he meant it. I don’t know why but I did it instinctively, I went into the foetal position. As he put the gun to my head, I began to roar—it wasn’t a scream. And then I felt it at my thigh. I didn’t hear it shoot. And then I heard his footsteps running out. And I just said, “Jesus, I’ve been shot.”’

The hired killer had panicked and shot her in the leg. Why he ran through her house and out the back door is a mystery. But he did, past her guard dogs asleep in the kitchen. Adrenaline pumping, Guerin pulled herself to the phone and dialled 999. She struggled into a room at the back of the house where Turley had installed a bar and sat herself up.

Cryan was again the first to arrive on the scene. He had just finished work for the evening in Coolock Garda Station when he got the call. He walked into the bar and could see she wasn’t that badly injured. They exchanged a few polite courtesies, harsh words spoken among friends, and he told her she’d survive. Within minutes, the area was swamped with armed police and an ambulance rushed the injured journalist to Beaumont Hospital. News of the shooting was relayed to media organisations who dispatched reporters to the scene.

The last time shots were fired at her house, her neighbour Patrick Buckley was sitting in the front room of his house watching television. When he saw blue flashing lights outside the house he realised something was wrong and went out to investigate.

‘We did hear something the last time, and it sounded like gun shots because they were so rapid they couldn’t be anything else really. But I couldn’t see anything when I went out,’ he told reporters who arrived at the scene. ‘It was just after 7 p.m. this evening when I saw the ambulance and asked a garda what had happened. Of course we are very shocked and hope that everything is all right. The way things are going in this country, I’m not surprised at something like this happening,’ he said.

Cryan’s officers sealed off the area, leaving two uniformed gardaí standing outside the house. He telephoned Turley, told him what had happened and brought him to the hospital where Guerin was being examined. The bullet had entered her leg just below her right thigh, shaving an artery before lodging just beside the bone. The surgeon used the word ‘miraculous’ four times in his report on her wounds. It was a miracle that she was not more seriously injured.

After the initial shock, Guerin returned to herself. She welcomed hospital visitors and almost appeared to enjoy the attention. Journalists descended on the ward wanting news. Turley emerged and gave an impromptu press conference. ‘Naturally, we’re all horrified about what’s happened, but I’m glad to say Veronica is very stable and in great form. I’m not a medical man, but as far as I am concerned she’s talking away normally and she’s fine.’

Her news editor, Willie Kealy, arrived minutes later and spoke to the media. ‘We are aware, as we were all aware, that there was another shooting before, and to that extent she was cautious about her personal security,’ were the only words he could think to muster. He was fond of Guerin and he was in shock. He felt it was too early to start talking about how she went about her job, but didn’t think she would change her approach. ‘She’s a very courageous woman.’

The Minister for Justice, Nora Owen, arrived when everyone else was about to leave. ‘I went up to her in the hospital without any great fanfare. The media were all in the front hall, I came in the back door and just went in to see her on . . . it was on a personal level. She said: “Well, they’re not going to get me. They’re not going to stop me.” One part of me, as a woman in an occupation that is mainly male-dominated, one half of me said good for you, to have the courage to go on. And I left it at that.’

But that night Guerin spoke to Traynor on the phone. She did not know that he wanted her dead, that she was only alive because of his hired gunman’s incompetence. Traynor, ever willing to lie, told her he had heard the news. He mentioned an article she had just published about another Dublin criminal, saying he had ordered the attack. But he hadn’t—it was Traynor.

The next day, gardaí searching the fields at the back of her home found a pair of black slip-on shoes stuck in mud. A short distance away, they found the gun—an old, reconditioned .45 revolver. The gunman had also abandoned his jacket. Whoever he was he had literally got stuck and kept running, losing the gun in his ensuing panic. Forensic tests carried out on the bullet removed from her thigh showed it was an old piece of ammunition, primed for use. It was a dead lead slug.

Cryan did not need anyone to tell him that Guerin was now in clear danger. He wrote off the first shooting as a warning, but this was the real thing. He focused his inquiries on Traynor. But the truth was that no one knew. The investigation team made routine inquiries, all of which gleaned nothing new. Criminal informants knew nothing.

Guerin in the meantime had been released from Beaumont and put under police protection by Chief Superintendent Jim McHugh of Coolock. But determined not to give in to intimidation, she decided to personally visit each of the major gangland figures she knew. It was not a particularly sensible move but, nevertheless, she felt compelled to face down her fears.

She was still on crutches at the time.

‘When I came out of hospital, I said, “This is it, I’m going to let those bastards see they didn’t get to me.” I went to them all, just to let them see me and let them know I wasn’t intimidated. On the way to see the guy I thought had organised the shooting, I had to get Graham, who was driving the car, to stop twice, because I was physically sick at the thought of seeing him. But I felt I had to do it. I couldn’t let them know they had frightened me.’

The next Sunday, she wrote an article for the
Sunday Independent.
‘I have already said, and I will say it again now, that I have no intention of stopping my work. I shall continue as an investigative reporter, the job I believe I do best. My employers have offered me alternatives . . . any area I wish to write about seems to be open to me . . . but somehow I cannot see myself reporting from the fashion catwalks or preparing a gardening column. I do not consider myself a brave woman. In deciding to continue, I am merely doing the same job as any of my journalistic colleagues . . . I am simply doing my job. I am letting the public know exactly how society operates.’

Traynor was arrested and brought to Coolock for questioning three weeks later by Cryan. He said he didn’t know anything about the attack and gave an alibi. ‘What else would he have done? We expected him to have at least that because we knew he hadn’t pulled the trigger,’ said the detective.

Guerin had made a mistake meeting Traynor, but her errors of judgement continued. Her fatal mistake was her decision to keep in contact with him, not only keeping the lines of communication open, but affording him a degree of trust. She continued to place trust in him even after she learned he had ordered the shooting. They would meet for lunch in Fan’s Chinese Restaurant on Dame Street in central Dublin. Traynor would later recall that she seemed completely fascinated and obsessed by crime and police work. He provided her with information that she turned into exclusives.

She believed Traynor to be something he wasn’t. He was a gangster, but not the significant player she made him out to be. Not any more. There were bigger fish in the pond. It became a quid pro quo agreement. He helped Guerin because she heightened his profile and standing in the underworld. After all, how many criminals were close friends with respected journalists?

The agreement worked well until Traynor started talking about one John Gilligan. ‘You think I’m big. He’s fucking huge,’ he told her. In the coming months he would tell her a great deal about Gilligan. Little did he know she would go straight to him.

By January 1995, the Gilligans had opened the Jessbrook Equestrian Centre. The secret to Gilligan’s success was the way he ran his operation. Everything was run on a need-to-know basis. His gang was structured along the same lines as a paramilitary organisation. Gilligan appointed himself chief of staff, Meehan acted as his director of operations, Traynor his director of intelligence and confidant. He dealt with these one to one. No one else was allowed meet him, nor see his face. Like all good businessmen, he didn’t invest all his cash in one single area of crime. The enterprise was divided into three separate units. One smuggled tobacco and contraband cigarettes, another smuggled cannabis, a third collected and laundered the cash proceeds.

The burgeoning drugs culture sweeping through Ireland lent itself to the gangster. He simply couldn’t import enough cannabis to supply the demand. Meehan recruited ‘reputable’ criminals. Reputable because they had convictions that ensured they were not informants or because they had proved themselves as true criminals. In other words, they were under constant harassment by the law. Gilligan wanted to front the largest criminal gang in Ireland. But he knew the larger it became, the more vulnerable he would be.

He spent most of his time laundering cash before lodging it in offshore accounts in Gibraltar, Morocco, Austria, England and the Netherlands. Baltus helped him in this endeavour. But while laundering his profits, he also invested more cash into the equestrian centre.

On 20 January 1995, he bought a Land Rover Discovery 5-door for IR£29,500. He registered this to Jessbrook Equestrian Centre. Three weeks later, on 13 February, Geraldine, using her maiden name, bought a Land Rover for IR£5,290 from the same garage. This was also registered to Jessbrook Equestrian Centre. Gilligan spoiled those around him—especially his children. He paid cash for houses for them. In November 1994, he bought a house on Willsbrook View in Lucan for IR£73,000 as a present for Tracy. He paid IR£4,000 in cash for a deposit, followed up by another IR£3,000 in cash. The balance—IR£66,000—was paid with a bank draft. He didn’t bother taking out a mortgage on the house. In December 1995, it was Darren’s turn. He got a spacious residence on Weston Green, Western Park, in Lucan. They also got their own cars. Darren was fond of jeeps. Gilligan bought him a RAV-4 Toyota. Tracy got a Toyota Carina 1.6 GLI. Gilligan paid for both cars with hard cash.

As proprietor of the Jessbrook Equestrian Centre, he assumed the persona of a businessman. He no longer travelled economy class: instead he became a card-carrying member of Aer Lingus, flying first class, mixing with the business elite. His Aer Lingus Gold Card number was 569210. The airline treated him as a VIP passenger and with good reason. He spent IR£27,091 flying between Dublin and Amsterdam. He flew 39 times on the Dublin to Amsterdam route and 33 times the opposite way, and from Heathrow to Dublin four times. His spare change was lodged in 16 accounts held by Geraldine, Tracy and Darren in Dublin. Seven were opened in Geraldine’s name, two in her maiden name, four in Darren’s name, two in Tracy’s and one under the name Jessbrook Equestrian Centre. The amount of money that passed through the accounts was huge by anyone’s standards.

Geraldine controlled one of the accounts opened on 9 March 1995 at Bank of Ireland in Lucan. This account was used for the day-to-day running of Jessbrook. The total lodgements into this amounted to IR£338,484.60. Total payments out of the account were IR£373,595.15.

Another account, opened under the name of Matilda Dunne, A/C No. 52791983 at Bank of Ireland in Lucan, was used to carry out business. Lodgements into this totalled IR£839,689.73, the bulk made up of bookmakers’ cheques. She instructed the bank to allow Gilligan to conduct transactions through it. They worked this account by transferring vast sums of cash, IR£286,939 in total, into the Jessbrook fund. Payments of IR£165,450 were also made to Gilligan himself, while Geraldine withdrew IR£193,641 in cash over a period. The bulk of the money was lodged into the accounts in cheques made out to Gilligan, bookmakers’ cheques.