John Gilligan was never one to mince
his words. When I met him many years ago, he couldn't help but brag about how much
money he had amassed from drug dealing, hijackings and contraband smuggling. He was organised crime personified.
"I have just moved IR£15m (€19m) out of the country where the gardai
will never get their hands on it," Gilligan told me in an interview in London.
It was August 1996, barely six weeks after Veronica Guerin, a
37-year-old crime reporter with the Sunday Independent, was shot dead in her
car while stopped at a traffic junction on the Naas Road, near Clondalkin, at
lunchtime on June 26.
Her murder had shocked the world.
Even by the vicious Dublin gangland standards of the mid-1990s, Guerin's
murder was cold-blooded. Her killers had discreetly followed the young mother
from Naas district court in Co Kildare, where she had appeared on a speeding
charge.
When Guerin stopped at the intersection, a powerful motorcycle with two
men pulled up. The pillion passenger dismounted, strode towards her car, and fired shots at
point-blank range with a Magnum revolver, killing the journalist instantly as
she left a message on a friend's phone. It was a brutal killing.
Gilligan was the prime suspect for ordering
a murder which convulsed Ireland and the world. Yet he seemed more concerned about his
appearance as pictures of him began to appear in newspapers. Power and wealth seemed to
have gone to his head. The five-foot-nothing criminal was almost enjoying the
attention.
"Do you think I looked good?" Gilligan asked me in a strong Dublin accent,
as he ate his fast food. "Everyone said I looked cool. Some of the fellas
from home even rang. They thought I looked cool. Like a guy from the Mafia — a
real gangster."
During that conversation,
Gilligan
freely admitted to being ruthless, including attacking Guerin when she
confronted him outside his home the previous September.
He also admitted to calling her mobile phone and issuing threats to kidnap and rape her
six-year-old son, Cathal, in order to deter her inquiries into the source of
his wealth.
"I knew she didn't fear for herself. It was only a tactic I used to
try to frighten her off," he remarked of the threat to Cathal.
While Gilligan
denied ordering the journalist's murder, he made no secret of his wealth, his
position in the underworld or his knowledge of organised crime.
"Let me tell you this: anyone can get anyone killed if they have
the money," he said. "You don't have to be a criminal. I could have
ordered Veronica Guerin's death, but I didn't. I had no hand, act or part in
it. That's the truth."
Those words would prove to be his last as a free man. In October 1996,
he was arrested by the British police at Heathrow Airport in London as he tried
to board a flight to Amsterdam with IR£330,000 in cash, stuffed in a suitcase.
Gilligan fought his extradition to Ireland
from Britain but lost and eventually stood trial in Dublin in 2001. He was
eventually acquitted of Guerin's murder but found guilty of drug trafficking.
He was released from custody after serving 17 years in jail in October
2013.
So who was John Gilligan. He was born on March 29, 1952. The eldest
of nine children, he left school at 14 and got a job as a cabin boy on Irish Ferries.
The gangster had his first brush with the law when he was charged with larceny
at the age of 15.
He grew up on Lough Conn Road in Ballyfermot,
a working-class suburb in west Dublin. He married Geraldine Matilda Dunne, a
childhood friend, when he was 20. Their first child, Tracy, was born six months
later.
Martin Donnellan, a retired assistant garda commissioner, remembers him
as a common thief.
"I was stationed as a young garda in Ballyfermot in the 1970s. Gilligan was just
another local hood. I never considered him to be anything extraordinary,"
he said.
"Many of his contemporaries left crime behind when they settled
down and married.
You could say children and
married life took the wind out of their sails, but Gilligan stuck with crime. He got involved in
hijacking trucks and
started to develop a reputation."
Gilligan made the transition from petty
thief to organised crime figure initially through involvement in hijackings and warehouse robberies.
In the 1980s, his gang specialised in breaking into warehouses and stealing freight
containers which were intended to bring goods to supermarkets and factories. His
outfit became known as the Factory Gang.
"In the 1970s and
1980s, he wasn't any worse than the others," Donnellan said. "He
actually got away with a lot of his crimes because the criminal justice system
was different back then. There was no use of DNA. If he were starting off now,
he wouldn't last long."
Gilligan's career as a robber was brought to
an end in 1987 when he was caught stealing from the Rose Confectionery premises
on the outskirts of Dublin. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for
stealing sweets. In 1990 he was again convicted of robbery, and this time sentenced
to four years. He was released in 1993, having served three, and promptly moved into
the burgeoning drugs trade.
Within six months of his release from Portlaoise prison, Gilligan's first
shipment of drugs arrived. It was 75kg of cannabis resin, packed by a Dutch
criminal into two wooden boxes. In the following two years, Gilligan imported
21,000kg of cannabis resin using a freight company in Cork.
The cannabis was sold to Brian Meehan, a Dublin criminal later convicted
for Guerin's murder, for €2,530 a kilo, netting Gilligan a gross profit of about €20m. More
income was earned via the sale of contraband cigarettes, fraud and arms smuggling —
possibly as much as €30m, say gardai.
During this period, Gilligan posed as a respectable businessman and professional
gambler.
He dressed in suits and sports jackets, and bought so many first-class flights to Amsterdam he was given a
gold card by Are Lingus, the Irish airline.
His family wanted for nothing. He bought four-wheel-drives, Jessbrook
equestrian centre, houses and
cars for his children.
Austin McNally, a retired detective chief superintendent who led
Operation Pineapple, a garda offensive against Gilligan which commenced in early 1996 before
Guerin was murdered, remembers being astonished by the sheer volume of money
that Gilligan's
gang was generating.
"It was mind-blowing — that's the only way of describing it. Gilligan and his men
literally had so much money they didn't know what to do with it. They couldn't
spend it fast enough," he recalled.
"They were smuggling cannabis
into the state by the container load. It was a cash-rich business with good
profits."
Gilligan amassed so much money that at one
point he was forced to employ people to count it. Sums of up to IR£100,000 were
tallied each week by a family from south Dublin. Despite all his wealth, a tax
slip sent at the end of 1994 asking Gilligan to predict his earnings for the year was sent back with a
note scrawled in red crayon: "I'm just out of prison, I have no f******
money for you, leave me alone."
McNally said the scale of Gilligan's operation first began to emerge in March 1996, when
Dutch police alerted Interpol
to attempts by Irish nationals to launder money. Investigations revealed Gilligan and his
associates had laundered millions through bureaux de change in Amsterdam.
The British authorities seized tens of thousands in cash from an
associate of Gilligan's,
prompting an inquiry as to its origins. In Ireland, the banks filed
confidential reports which revealed that hundreds of thousands were passing
through accounts controlled by Gilligan.
Pat Byrne, the former garda commissioner, said gardai had never
encountered anything like this before.
"One can understand how it happened," he said. "[Gilligan] had been
involved in criminality for some time, and emerged from prison when there was a huge demand for drugs. He
cornered the market and
generated huge profits.
"At the time there was a huge problem in terms of proving where
finance came from. The argument made before the advent of the Criminal Assets
Bureau (CAB) was that someone could be found with a large amount of cash but,
unless one could prove it came from nefarious purposes, it had to be handed
back.
"The investigation into Veronica's killing, what had occurred,
changed all that. It lead to the legislation to seize such assets.
"Looking back on it, I just think Gilligan and the gang lost the run of
themselves and
thought they could do anything. When you think of it, what a stupid thing to
do. Did they not imagine what the consequences would be?"
Like others, Byrne described Guerin's murder as a seismic event in
modern Irish life.
"It wasn't just politicians and the policing world — the public couldn't believe this had
happened," he recalled.
"Not just that Veronica was a journalist; she was a woman and a mother. People
asked how we had come to this situation. How had this happened and what is going to be
done?"
But Gilligan's ill-gotten gains have never been
found. He spent €1.94m on the Jessbrook complex, which has since been seized by
CAB and sold. It had been developed from a derelict house on five acres in Co
Kildare to a world-class equestrian centre.
Some money was spent buying adjoining land. In August 1994, Gilligan bought 30 acres
for €63,000, then another 15 acres for €35,000, and another eight acres for €20,000. In all,
he spent €214,000 on extra land on which to graze horses.
He laundered some money by gambling, including backing every horse in a
particular race. The winnings would be paid by cheque, which could then be
deposited in a bank. Between 1994 and October 1996, he placed bets totalling €6.7m and won back €6.09m —
effectively laundering the cash at a cost of about €610,000.
The gardai believe funds were smuggled to Amsterdam, where at least
€3.42m was changed into Dutch guilders at a bureau de change before being
lodged in offshore accounts. It vanished without trace.
A garda investigation into his finances also found other cash amounts
being converted into various currencies and deposited in bank accounts in Spain, Tunisia, Greece, Belgium,
Austria, Morocco and
Switzerland. It has never been located.
Gilligan is also said to have buried money and guns in a bunker on his
Kildare estate. He allegedly told his gang that he created a bunker when the
Jessbrook equestrian centre was being built. If so, it has never been found.
After Guerin was murdered, bank accounts controlled by Gilligan were emptied,
but some of this money was intercepted and seized. Intelligence gathered by the team which investigated
Guerin's murder, and
later by CAB, concluded that Gilligan had smuggled large amounts of cash to Spain using Liam
Judge, a criminal from Kildare who has since died.
Judge, who acted as a garda informant, invested some money on Gilligan's behalf in
holiday apartments, properties and a bar, but also lined his own pockets.
Many believe part of the missing fortune was laundered by Terry
Wingrove, a British associate of Gilligan's who deposited millions in Hanover Bank Ltd, an offshore
depositary registered in Antigua but operated from Dublin.
It was run by Anthony Fitzpatrick, a former Irish government press
secretary, who ran it singlehandedly from his south Dublin home. A US Senate report into
Hanover in 2001 implicated it in money laundering after part of $100m (€74m)
stolen from the Casio electronics company in Japan was deposited in
Fitzpatrick's offshore bank. Fitzpatrick believed Wingrove to be a wealthy art
dealer.
Michael Finnegan, a retired chief superintendent who had responsibility
for the Louth/Meath division, believes only a small amount of Gilligan's fortune has
been found.
"It's fair to assume millions were never accounted for. I always
believed it was lodged offshore," he said.
"I've no doubt he still has access to it. None of the major money
was seized. That money is salted away somewhere. Maybe some of it will be dug
up in Jessbrook when it's sold, but I would have my doubts. I just couldn't see
Gilligan burying
it. Maybe some day it will be found."
When Gilligan was released in October 2013, both Byrne and Finnegan guessed that he would probably emigrate
soon after.
"His name wouldn't mean a lot to many of the young criminals who
have taken over since he was sent to prison," said Finnegan.
"Ireland is a different country now," said Byrne. "I
think Gilligan
will find it a changed place. He's no longer riding the crest of a wave in
terms of criminality."
The retired police officers were correct., Gilligan did flee after
two attempts on his life. He is now living
in Birmingham in Britain. The whereabouts of the missing millions is still a
mystery.
John Mooney is one of Ireland's leading journalists and an expert on crime and terrorism. He currently reports on crime for the Sunday Times and regularly contributes to BBC, RTE, CBS and Channel 4 news programmes.
His is the author of several books including Black Operations: The Secret War Against the Real IRA (2003), Rough Justice (2004) and The Torso in the Canal (2007). Gangster, his critically acclaimed biography of John Gilligan, the biggest drugs trafficker to emerge from the Irish underworld, was published in 2001.
