€2m tiger kidnapping gang had racked up 33 previous convictions
A GANG who held a family at gunpoint during a tiger kidnapping had 33 previous convictions between them, including 25 for their leader, it was revealed in court yesterday.
The four men were jailed for a total of 53 years for holding the family hostage during the €2.08million cash-in-transit robbery.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that ringleader Mark Farrelly had 25 previous convictions – including for robbery and theft. It was his idea to kidnap the family of security worker Paul Richardson in a bid to get cash.
Farrelly, 47, was jailed for 17and-a-half years. His co-accused Christopher Corcoran, 71, had five convictions for intoxication and driving offences.
Last May, Farrelly, of Priorswood, Coolock; Corcoran
Family’s joy was replaced by fear
and David Byrne, 45, were convicted of robbery and false imprisonment. Former Securicor worker Niall Byrne, 36 – believed to be the inside man – was found guilty of conspiracy to rob after the jury failed to reach a ruling on a kidnapping charge.
Judge Melanie Greally said the family, who were held while Mr Richardson was forced to collect more than €2million for the gang, were deserving of ‘enormous respect’ for their ‘uncommon and unbending faith in the criminal justice system’.
The trial had heard the men ‘burst in’ to the Richardsons’ home on Sunday, March 13, 2005, and threatened the family at gunpoint. They forced Mr Richardson to go to work the next day while his wife Marie and their young teenage sons, Ian and Kevin, were held at gunpoint in the Dublin mountains until he had delivered the cash to a car park in west Dublin.
The judge added Mr Richardson complied with all the gang’s instructions and was relying on a walkie-talkie system with the robbers to confirm that his family were safe. And she noted that a phone call between Paul and Marie Richardson, while she and their sons were being driven to the mountains, was ‘a critical starting point in the garda investigation’.
However, it was ‘a fortuitous twist of faith that secured the family’s freedom’, she said, after they used a small knife on one of the boys’ keyrings to break the cable ties that bound them together in the remote location.
Referring to the victim impact reports, Judge Greally said: ‘It is clear to me that this normal and happy family had their lives upended by the actions of the accused. All sense of normality, security and joy was replaced by fear, anxiety, anger and frustration.’ She added that the five trials the family has been required to re-live has made their recovery ‘excessively difficult’.
Byrne, of Crumlin Road Flats, Dublin, was jailed for 10 years. The judge said he provided inside information while working for Securicor and was ‘the man on the ground on the day’. She observed that he would have a difficult time behind bars as his two brothers are prison officers. Corcoran, of Rosedale, Raheny, who acted as scout, was given 12 years, with the last five suspended, and David Byrne, of Knocksedan, Swords, Co. Dublin, who guarded Mrs Richardson and her two sons in the mountains before tying them up and leaving, was jailed for 13.5 years.
In his victim impact statement Mr Richardson described the family’s ordeal as ‘heinous and inhumane’ committed for ‘one reason only, greed’.
His son Kevin, who was 13 at the time, said that night had followed him ‘like the plague’ and had disrupted his life.