‘Fat Freddie’s hands are soaked in blood’ Paul Williams on the life of the killer gangster
FAT Freddie Thompson certainly earned his universal infamy as one of Ireland’s most pernicious and ruthless criminals.
The gangster’s hands are soaked in the blood of several young men – who were both friend and foe.
Over almost 20 years, Thompson has been a major player in drug trafficking and a suspect for orchestrating or participating in the murder of a string of former associates.
His crimes have represented some of the worst gangland violence in the 50-year history of organised crime in Ireland.
Thompson is the embodiment of pure evil, a classic example of a psychopath for whom there are no behavioural boundaries, no empathy, no remorse. His career to date bears testimony to that fact.
Therefore, it is not hyperbolic to suggest that his jailing this week for the murder of another criminal represents a major victory for gardaí and a source of intense relief for the communities where his presence cast a long shadow of fear.
The family of victim David ‘Daithí’ Douglas have won some closure with the conviction of the man who ordered his murder.
Meanwhile, the fact that Thompson is beginning a life sentence may also bring some small solace to the relatives of the list of victims for whose murders he escaped justice.
Thompson characterises the new breed of young criminals who began to emerge and fill the vacuum left by the likes of John Gilligan in the late 1990s.
Their appearance on the crime landscape coincided with the Celtic Tiger era and the hedonistic excesses of a cash-rich generation with an insatiable appetite for cocaine – which organised crime was ready and willing to satisfy.
By the mid-Noughties, the narcotics trade in Ireland was a ¤1bn industry.
The new gold rush gave birth to dozens of young criminal gangs who vied with each other for market share and a slice of the prodigious profits.
With so much money at stake, these already volatile and reckless thugs were consumed with greed, which sparked a dramatic escalation in gangland violence in the boom years.
From the midst of the mayhem, a number of notorious figures became household names as they stood out from the rest of the rabble as the most ruthless and dangerous: Freddie Thompson was one of them.
There is nothing sophisticated about Thompson. While he possesses the kind of street cunning that kept him alive, he is not particularly bright,
Thompson is pure evil. He is a classic example of a psychopath for whom there are no behavioural boundaries, no empathy, no remorse
depending instead on his propensity for violence.
He was a key protagonist in the notorious Crumlin/Drimnagh feud that raged over the period of a decade.
Thompson was suspected of involvement in a number of killings, either participating in the attack or orchestrating them. Fat Freddie and his cousins Liam and David Byrne – who was shot dead in the 2016 Regency Hotel attack – became the main players of the Kinahan cartel’s drug operations across Ireland.
And everything seemed to be running relatively smoothly for the powerful mob until a falling out between their boss, Daniel Kinahan, and Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch’s nephew Gary Hutch in Spain.
The rest is part of the bloody tale of Ireland’s underworld.
In the wake of the Regency Hotel attack, the Kinahans unleashed an unprecedented onslaught with the clear aim of annihilating the Hutch family and their associates.
So far, that bloodletting has claimed 13 lives – including those of two completely innocent people – practically all of them carried out by the Kinahan mob’s main enforcers, including Thompson.
The unprecedented violence prompted the State to launch a counter-offensive which has proven to be spectacularly successful.
The significance of the Kinahan cartel in the European crime context is underlined by the fact that law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have been working closely with the gardaí in a bid to smash the mob.
On Thursday, the Garda’s implacable efforts finally paid off when one of their most wanted criminals was found guilty in the non-jury Special Criminal Court.
As Thompson now begins his long overdue stretch behind bars as Prisoner 8132, it should be food for thought for the critics and civil libertarians who have been calling for the abolition of the Special Criminal Court.
It has always been a vital weapon in the State’s arsenal against organised crime and terrorism because there is no jury to intimidate.