Hitman’s chilling email
Gardaí found ex-Estonian soldier held details of top gang target’s movements
THE detailed daily movements of Hutch gang associate James Mago Gately were emailed to the Estonian hitman who has admitted conspiring to murder Gately on the day of his arrest, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The email was sent on April 4, 2017, and included details of where Gately lived, his car and where he went to the gym. Former Estonian soldier Imre Arakas pleaded guilty to conspiracy to murder Gately in the Special Criminal Court on Monday. The email read: ‘The car exits the rear of the building which is *** from a shutter which opens up and down and from a buzzer, there’s a ball camera above the entrance.
‘Champange colour toyota avensis reg number **** ’
The document also detailed where Gately, 31, parked his car, the name of the gym he used, and said he drove to Newry ‘most days’. It was seized by gardaí on the day of his arrest and formed part of the evidence compiled on Arakas before he was charged.
The MoS can also reveal a picture of Arakas taken in Estonia in 1979 following his arrest at a shooting club.
The black-and-white photo was taken on July 30, 1979, at a Soviet police shooting club in Tallinn which Arakas robbed five months earlier, taking 13 handguns and a ammunition. The photograph was taken by Soviet police at the time of his arrest.
Arakas, who is very well known in his native Estonia, also featured in an advertising campaign run by Estonian weekly newspaper, the Eesti Ekspress in November 2016. The paper ran a picture of him taken by photographer Tiit Blaat with the tagline, ‘You are afraid to speak with some people. We will do it for you.’ The billboard campaign won a national award as one of the best advertisements for that year. Earlier this year we revealed how Arakas gave a wideranging interview to the Eesti Ekspress while awaiting his nonjury trial in Dublin.
According to prison sources at the time it is a serious breach of rules for prisoners on remand to conduct press interviews. But the interview was published in the Eesti Ekspress on February 7, and featured a full and frank discussion about the charges he faces.
It was accompanied by a computerised drawing of him in an imagining of his Mountjoy prison cell.
The story was written by Estonian journalist Tarmo Vahter, who posted his questions to Arakas who answered them through his wife over the course of a number of telephone calls.
In the interview Arakas referred to communications between him and the Kinahans as a ‘cruel fairy tale’ and claimed the ‘stakes were of course a lot higher [than the
‘The stakes were a lot higher (than €100k)’
reported €100,000], but it wasn’t cash and in reality it didn’t involve a murder’. ‘The story about murdering someone names James Gately was basically a spoon bait for a fish,’ he said. ‘Personally I don’t know James Gately and never would have met him.’
Arakas described the Book of Evidence in his case as reading like a ‘manuscript of Monthy Python’.
‘Utterly surreal. Especially for the profane newspaper reader,’ he said. ‘With nine hours of sleeping, I had been in Ireland barely for 18 hours when the police broke in.’
Arakas was served with the Book of Evidence last September. At the time, the court heard gardaí from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau raided a premises in west Dublin on April 4, 2017, as part of an investigation into the Hutch-Kinahan feud. Mr Arakas, with an address at Sopruse, Tallinn, Estonia, was charged on April 6.
He was accused of conspiring with others, not before the courts, to murder James Gately in Northern Ireland between April 3 and April 4.
In another huge success for gardaí in the ongoing Hutch-Kinahan feud, Arakas pleaded guilty to the charge on Monday. Mr Justice Tony Hunt, remanded him in custody until November 30 for sentencing.
The High Court endorsed a European arrest warrant from Lithuania in February in relation to serious charges Arakas will face there once his jail term is completed in Ireland.