THE GENERAL WANTED ME TO SMUGGLE AK47S
Crime boss claims he turned down Cahill bid to buy Bosnian guns
JOHN Gilligan has told how he refused to import a consignment of AK47S for Martin “The General” Cahill. The ex-drug lord mocked the murdered gangster for thinking he could buy three assault rifles from Bosnia for £240 after the war in the former Yugoslavia. But Gilligan said he “fell out” with Cahill who didn’t understand the guns would have to be smuggled across Europe.
JOHN Gilligan has told how Martin Cahill wanted him to buy AK47 assault rifles for his gang. The General had heard they could be bought cheaply on the streets of Bosnia after the civil war that tore the former Yugoslavia apart. Gilligan said: “I was after getting out of prison and was over in the continent and was going to start bringing in fake jeans, counterfeit jeans. “Other stuff came in at the time, tapes, and CDS, you’d get all these things on the continent. “I was over there with John Traynor [one of the General’s lieutenants].” Both Gilligan and Traynor, who later joined the former’s gang after Cahill was whacked, were both in Amsterdam doing deals with Dutch criminals. They met up with a number of the city’s underworld figures on the trip which took place in the early 1990s. Gilligan said: “There were two people who asked if we wanted weapons. “I said, ‘No, we don’t want any weapons at all – just jeans and all the other stuff’ I knew I could sell from me days of being able to sell stuff. “The next thing is they said, in the Bosnia war, the rebels are throwing away AK47S on the streets and the kids are picking them up. “And they’re selling them for £80. But the offer just faded away. We didn’t want to know. “So about two weeks later, John Traynor comes up to says. ‘Martin Cahill is after coming up to see me’. “And I says, ‘What’s it got to do with me?’ And he said you know the way the lads were after telling us over there in Amsterdam that they could get AK47S for £80. “And I said, ‘They didn’t say they could get them. They said there were in Yugoslavia. “You’d have to get them from Yugoslavia to wherever you wanted to get them – and get a couple of grand for them in the end. And Traynor said, ‘No, I think they said £80’. And I said, ‘That’s what the kids are selling them for’. “So he says Cahill ‘is after coming around and giving me £240 and he wanted me to get three’. “I said to Traynor ‘there’s nobody putting AKS in my boxes of jeans. I had a kinda falling out with Cahill over that. “He thought you could get them for £80. I said to him ‘Martin, you can’t get them for £80. “In Yugoslavia the kids are throwing them on the streets – it was on the television there that they are throwing away heaps of guns. It [the war] is over
You would have to get them from Yugoslavia to where you wanted JOHN GILLIGAN ON HOW PLAN WOULD WORK
and the people are selling them. But you have got to get them from over there. “How are you going to get them over here, because I certainly won’t be dealing guns for anybody. “I called down to see him [Cahill]. And he wouldn’t answer the door, because Traynor was after telling him he could get the guns – and that it was in his jeans boxes they would be coming in. “He wouldn’t open the door and then opened the door a little bit and he had his shoulder and his foot to it. “‘You mind your own f***ing business’, he said, ‘John is getting them for me’.” But Gilligan told Cahill the jeans had nothing do with Traynor – he was the one smuggling them. He told The General: “John is getting nothing in – it was nothing to do with him. I’m bringing in the boxes of jeans. “The boxes of jeans is coming in and there’s no f***ing guns. “I said it was nothing do with f***ing Traynor, the f***ing muppet.” Shortly afterwards Gilligan said Cahill said sorry for the misunderstanding. He said: “A few days later he came up and apologised.” Gilligan claimed Traynor was “always licking up to Martin” who was the biggest criminal in Ireland at the time. He said: “He’d tell him anything. But Martin one on one was a decent enough guy. “Traynor would be saying he’d get this and get that. “And Martin Cahill then thought Traynor had all sorts of brilliant friends, that he was loved and all this.”