How we caught ‘the untouchables’
Former Assistant Garda Commissioner Tony Hickey tells Willie Kealy how his team built their case against the Gilligan gang
TONY Hickey was Assistant Garda Commissioner for almost 10 years. He is known affectionately among those who worked with him as ‘the Lost Leader’. He was also the head of the 100-strong team of detectives who investigated the murder, 20 years ago this weekend, of Veronica Guerin.
Looking back, he takes issue with the idea that the gang which murdered Veronica Guerin were “untouchables”.
“Probably it was media-driven and the public believed it and probably there was some truth in it as [the gang] had reached the stage where they were starting to believe it themselves. But of course the reality is that all the people, the main players that were involved in Veronica’s murder had long strings of convictions. The main players were people who had within the previous few years been released from Portlaoise prison where they had done long sentences. So they weren’t people who had never been caught and couldn’t be touched.”
It was in Portlaoise prison that the John Gilligan gang began in earnest.
“When people are in prison doing long sentences or doing any sentences they’ve nothing else to think about but crime and more crime and that was really the genesis of that particular gang. Then having been released and having got some seed money, they certainly became organised in quick time. The advantage I suppose that this particular gang had was the international drugs contacts.”
The other thing which distinguished them, he says, was their viciousness, brought about by a combination of power, greed and money. “They were handling more money than they could ever have believed in their wildest expectations. They weren’t very sophisticated anyway in relation to the amounts they were dealing with.”
In 1996, Tony Hickey was a Detective Chief Superintendent in the Central Detective Unit. The gardai were targeting Gilligan and John Traynor and several others. There were obvious signs of their activities. Gilligan had been released from prison and he was building what Hickey calls “this monstrosity out in Jessbrook Equestrian Centre which was state-of-the-art and that was all costing money”.
Gilligan drew attention to himself in his new environment also by trying to intimidate anyone in the area who got in his way.
Tony Hickey remembers where he was when he heard that Veronica had been murdered. “I was on holiday in the Algarve and I was in a supermarket and overheard some ladies say in the early afternoon that Veronica Guerin had been shot in Dublin.
“I suppose even though you had the background of the two previous shootings it was hard to take on board that anybody would do something so brazen. She was a wife, she was a mother, she had a family. The sheer callousness of this in broad daylight on a busy dual carriageway. This lady was so well known nationally and indeed internationally and I suppose it was seen almost immediately as an attack virtually on the institutions of the State and certainly on the freedom of the press.
“You couldn’t exaggerate how callous it was but in hindsight it probably wasn’t as sinister as was thought at the time. I would say this was something the people involved in hadn’t thought through, the natural consequences of what they were doing and maybe there wasn’t a reality there. A lot of serious crimes were being solved but there was a feeling out there that maybe the guards had lost control and there was a belief certainly about untouchables and uncatchables and godfathers.”
Veronica was gunned down on a Wednesday. By the following Sunday Tony Hickey was back in Ireland and in charge of the investigation in Lucan Garda station, heading up what he still describes as “the best team of detectives anyone could wish for”.
“In the first 10 days or so we had intelligence from three different sources indicating the main players but the trick then is to convert intelligence into evidence. It was different to any case I had ever worked on from the point of view that there was such abhorrence against this crime, even within the criminal fraternity. Criminals saw it as a step too far, uncalled for and unnecessary.
“There is a certain kind of ethic — I don’t think it’s morality — within the criminal fraternity. If you’re a player and you’re out there, you’re at risk. But there is a line, a Rubicon, you don’t cross and there was a strong feeling among the criminal and subversive fraternity — where there is a big crossover — that this was a step too far.
“Criminals and people we arrested would normally not provide alibis. They would just avail of their right to silence. But in this case they provided alibis and they were only too happy to distance themselves completely and to account for their movements on the day.”
By the end of September the Lucan team, as Veronica’s mother, Bernie, had christened them, had seized around 100 firearms, as well as drugs, stolen cars, and solved several outstanding crimes, such was the broad sweep of their intensive investigation. It made the whole general criminal fraternity very nervous.
But it had a different effect on the killer gang. They let it be known that anyone helping the gardai would be dealt with. And, if necessary, the gardai would be dealt with.
“As we were getting closer to the main players quite a lot of intimidation went on of the witnesses and we got intelligence that they were going to burn down Lucan station and any exhibits we had, which included, at that stage, the motorbike which had been located in the Liffey. There were threats [to witnesses] of ‘we’re going to kill you’ and they had done it already in the most outrageous circumstances; there was no reason to think they wouldn’t do it again. So we had armed protection on Lucan station incident room.”
On October 6, 1996 — a Sunday — Hickey’s team made a number of crucial arrests. These were the second-string members of the Gilligan gang, including Charles Bowden and Russell Warren.
“I suppose it was a dream from an investigation point of view because you can have all the intelligence you like and all the surveillance, but what you need is, in an ideal world, somebody from within the gang who will tell you what has actually happened and what’s going to happen.
“We got that on that Sunday morning when Charles Bowden, who knew quite a lot, decided to come on board. He had already made certain admissions which incriminated himself and which would put him in the frame for firearms and drugs trafficking and very, very close to a murder charge.”
At the same time John Gilligan was arrested in London. After Veronica was murdered the gang had continued business as usual.
“They didn’t even bat an eyelid, they continued trafficking in drugs as if nothing had happened and they expected, I suppose, that the investigation would run out of steam and the plug would be pulled and that there’d be no headway. They definitely had this idea even though it wasn’t very rational because they’d all been caught before, and caught red-handed, some of them, and there was no reason to suspect that they wouldn’t be caught again.”
Another factor in their downfall, Hickey believes, was their lifestyle. Drinking continuously and using drugs, they were almost certainly divorced from reality. One of the unrealities in John Gilligan’s life was that he imagined it was safe for him to travel abroad carrying £300,000 in drugs money in a holdall.
“It’s a myth that the Godfather never gets involved himself,” says Hickey. “Of course they have minions to do the dirty work and to take the risks. But with huge amounts of cash or cocaine or cannabis there isn’t that much honour among thieves. There’s always the risk that the courier will do a bunk.”
Russell Warren was a good ex-
ample of this type of bagman. He was “terrified out of his wits” by Gilligan because almost every time Gilligan came in contact with him he told him he was going to kill him and kill everybody belonging to him.
This kind of paranoia about being ripped off led Gilligan to handle the cash himself and led to his arrest in Heathrow airport.
“He could have walked away that day, they couldn’t hold him if he had got on to the flight, but he insisted on staying with his money.”
Instead, he stayed long enough to be taken into custody. Gilligan fought his incarceration and then his extradition right up to the House of Lords, but eventually he was sent back to Ireland.
Meanwhile, other members of the gang had been arrested — Brian Meehan in Amsterdam and Paul Ward in Dublin. The gang was obviously suspicious about Charlie Bowden and his house was burned down. At that stage about 20 people, some of them criminals, had made statements.
“But they were so terrified that every single one of them told us that there’s no way they were going to court because they knew they’d be killed, they had been told so.”
Patrick Holland had also been arrested in London and back in Dublin he appeared on drugs charges. Because Gilligan had been returned to Ireland on extradition warrants, the gardai were precluded from asking him to account for his movements on the day Veronica was murdered, or indeed from conducting any interrogation.
One criticism of the investigation was in relation to what Tony Hickey calls “the morals or ethics of deciding to use protected witnesses” — a decision made jointly with the DPP.
“Russell Warren and Bowden admitted their part. That’s one of the things that people who are going to be star witnesses have to do. They can’t afford to have any skeletons in the cupboard. Then, it’s a case of using a trout to catch a shark — not the other way round. It’s a strategy that’s used in relation to organised crime internationally. It is a legitimate tactic. Some people don’t like the sound of it because they feel that people who have done awful things are getting off scot-free, but they’re not.
“They have to admit their part in whatever crime it is and they then go before the courts and take their chances in open court. The prosecution explains to the judge who these people are, what they’ve done, and they may get sentences more lenient than normal but there are no guarantees and they don’t know if that’s going to happen.
“We never said that these people were angels. Peter Charlton [counsel for the State] said in the first case that they weren’t choir boys and the reality is that any of these people are not in the Legion of Mary. If they’re not involved in the gangs to some degree they don’t know what’s happening. You take them as you find them. If they were honest citizens, they wouldn’t have been involved in the first place.
“We did a lot of agonising about this before and we were absolutely sure. We looked at the overall picture of all the evidence and all the information we had accumulatedand we were convinced that these people were telling the truth in relation to their involvement.”
There was criticism of Bowden in particular because he loaded the gun that was used to kill Veronica.
Hickey explains that Bowden was forever hearing different gang members saying they were going to kill someone, but they never had.
“They couldn’t go for a drink or a meal but someone was saying, ‘I’m going to kill that f **** r.’ It was something they said all the time. So when they said they were going to kill Veronica, Bowden claimed he had no reason to really believe it would happen.”
When Tony Hickey reflects on what became the biggest case of his career, he says that the abiding thing about Veronica was her courage.
“She had been the subject of two very vicious attacks and I think most other people would be getting out of the game at that stage — the very fact that she drove out to Jessbrook and pressed the bell and arrived up at the front door and did what she did and got hammered and then pursued the case.
“The sad reality is that Gilligan had decided that he would never go to prison again, which is ironic .... he was only at risk of six months or maybe 12 months maximum on foot of the allegations Veronica made.” Looking at the legacy of that shocking murder, Hickey reckons that Veronica’s death was a catalyst. “Coming in the same month as Jerry McCabe had been shot in Adare, it was like a double whammy. Since the mid-Sixties we had been dealing with probably the most sophisticated terrorist group in the world — the Provisional IRA — and there was always a certain crossover between paramilitaries and crime. Maybe this country became immune to a certain degree because of the awful atrocities that were happening. Belfast is nearer than Limerick to Dublin.
“At the time of Veronica’s murder we were definitely at the bottom of the league in relation to legislation to deal with seizure of assets and money laundering. Certainly what flowed immediately afterwards — the Criminal Assets Bureau and Witness Security Programme — has been used to good effect since.
“Anyone who thinks you can wipe out crime is living in cuckoo land because unless society changes dramatically — which is not on the horizon — you’re always going to have crime and serious criminals, and once you have a market for drugs you’re going to have people who’ll supply the market. I don’t have the answers to it and nobody else has anywhere. I just know it’s not ever going to be utopia in our lifetime.”
Hickey thinks one of the reasons the murder of Veronica was so shocking is that on June 25 1996, the day before her death, “nobody could have visualised that these people would be that vicious and brazen, you couldn’t take it on board”.
“I think that everyone remembers where they were when they heard Veronica was shot, like when Kennedy was shot or the Pope. There aren’t that many more events that are so vivid in the public imagination and I suppose now it’s hard to recall the whole shock, but it was absolute horror, tsunami stuff for the whole population.”