DERMOT AHERN

Criminals got away with €7m, but bank vault had €300m in CASH

RECENTLY, the purported leader of one of Dublin’s main crime gangs was jailed for 18 years for a €92,000 post office raid in 2014, when three women were tied up and abducted. The circumstances were so distressing for the victims that the presiding judge paid a special tribute to ‘these remarkable women’.

Also, just before Christmas, an elaborate robbery took place in Co. Monaghan. An ATM was stolen from the wall of a bank in the early hours of the morning on Main Street, Ballybay. The perpetrators used a tractor and trailer to tow a massive digger, which they used to rip the ATM out of the wall.

The gardaí have speculated that this was the work of a Northern gang that carried out similar raids over the last number of years in border areas. Proximity to the border was probably a factor in why the raiders in Monaghan took such a risk. Over the last few years, these type of robberies have been a lot less frequent than at end of the last decade.

Epidemic

The events brought back memories of my time, between 2008 and 2011, as justice minister, when there were many so-called tiger kidnappings and robberies of ATMs across the country.

We had something of an epidemic in this regard. The robberies normally saw raiders holding the family of a bank official hostage, sometimes overnight, while the official was made go to the bank and take out as much money as possible. Once the raiders had the money, they would free the traumatised members of the family but those at the receiving end of these heinous crimes were rarely left unscathed.

I recall one of the biggest raids at a major bank branch in Dublin city centre. The official was given two holdalls and told to go to the bank as normal, while his family was held hostage overnight. He did what was asked and handed over €7million to the criminals. What I learned afterwards from the gardaí was the official had pretty much unrestricted sole access to the bank vault, which, at the time, contained over €300million in CASH! He could have taken all of it, except he didn’t have enough arms or bags to carry it.

On the back of this, I called in all the CEOs of the banks in the country to my office, along with the then Garda commissioner and his senior officers. I wanted to discuss what additional measures could be taken to stamp out these terrifying raids. I was told by the gardaí that the gangs who carried out these raids were extremely sophisticated, and were normally ‘six months ahead of the gardaí’, in that they were constantly looking at new avenues to exploit.

Indeed, I was told that on one particular occasion a gang member was delegated to ‘chat up’ a female bank official, and he ended up living with her for a number of months, all designed to use her to gain access to the bank.

I demanded to know from the heads of the banks what additional protocols they were prepared to put in place, especially to protect their staff.

Unions who represented bank officials were extremely vocal regarding the banks’ need to tighten up the procedures under which their officials, who were unlucky enough to be caught up in this, would respond.

I personally questioned the banks’ CEOs as to what type of tracking devices they were using to follow any money stolen from their banks. I was astounded to learn that, at that time, by and large, they didn’t use tracking devices at all.

As a result of that meeting, the banks undertook to look at the possibility of purchasing hundreds of such tracking devices, for use across their major branches. I also suggested that they should insert these tracking devices into ATMs around the country.

The bank officials, in response, stated that they couldn’t put a tracking device in every ATM around the country.

I replied that they needed only to insert these devices in a portion of the ATMs, and that, once the word got out, potential raiders wouldn’t know which ATM carried such a device. And when it came to the tiger kidnapping raids, the protocols were changed to facilitate the use of tracking devices.

From then on, the official who was the subject of a tiger kidnapping knew to use a specific wad of notes with a tracking device inside it.

The criminal gangs quickly realised that the banks were using such devices, and the level of tiger kidnappings and ATM raids consequently dropped significantly.

But at the time, the senior gardaí warned that the criminals would quickly adapt, and change their modus operandi in order to continue their quest for ill-gotten gain.

Indeed, one senior garda cautioned that because the banks tightened up their security, the criminals would merely divert their attention to easier but similar targets, for instance, credit unions and post offices.

Courts

Last week’s court case proves that that forecast was spot on.

Readers are often asked, when they buy provisions in the local groceries, or their chemist, if they want ‘cash back’.

Most people think that this is very generous of the shop owner. However, they are not doing this just for altruistic reasons. Primarily, they are doing it in order to ensure that they do not carry a large amount of cash, at any one time.

I was told by the gardaí that, on any given Friday, hundreds of heavy security vans were criss-crossing the country, bringing money back to banks from major supermarkets and other major retail operators.

I was shown a chart which showed that, apart from the Italians, Ireland, at that time, had the highest proportion of cash circulating in the country.

Publicly, I quoted these figures, only to be roundly criticised by opposition spokespeople. However, there was no getting away from the fact that, as a country, at that time, we hadn’t moved easily towards a cashless society.

While the figures in this respect are probably a lot better nowadays, there is still a lot of cash circulating, and, as the recent court case and the Monaghan ATM raid show, anywhere there is cash, the robbers are not far away.

The brazenness of the recent raid in Monaghan shows what lengths the criminals will go to in order to steal money.

It may very well be that the financial institutions must, yet again, ‘up their game’ with regard to using technology to secure their cash.