Gardai stationed in USA and Bogota in crime war
A GOVERNMENT decision to locate garda liaison officers in Washington and Bogota, Colombia marks the latest phase in a Garda policy to go global in the fight against organised crime and terrorism, arising from the murder of Sunday Independent journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996.
The investigation into her death highlighted how organised crime networks had become professional in their operartions here and the international dimensions that had been built up by the main gangs in the mid-1990s
The first specialist garda group to recognise the importance of placing personnel overseas was the national drugs unit. In 1998, a senior member of the re-organised unit, set up under Kevin Carty and Ted Murphy, remarked that they were likely to have more members working overseas than down the country.
Overseas gangs were using Ireland as a back door into Europe, while homegrown criminals had built up contacts outside the country.
Members were sent regularly on exchange courses to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland and other countries, while liaison officers were approved for Madrid and The Hague, vital links in the chain of co-operation to tackle drug gangs.
Many of the big suppliers had moved to the Netherlands, including main players like George “The Penguin” Mitchell. Suspects for the Veronica Guerin murder fled abroad, some never to return.
Contacts on the ground were cemented further as Operation Shovel was set up to tackle the Kinahan cartel.
Now-retired senior officer Rob Smyth and others in the drugs unit aimed to use personal relationships to speed co-operation rather than relying on bureaucratic channels.
The Bogota move underlines the connections established by the Kinahans in South America — a link that became clear in the WikiLeaks papers, published by the Irish Independent in 2011, which showed that a diplomatic cable from the US Embassy there to the Pentagon had named Daniel Kinahan as a major suspect in international drugs trafficking.