Cocaine Wars (18 page)

Twelve people were arrested in the course of the investigation into the Roche murder, including former Thompson associate Michael Frazer. Two of those detained were car dealers Sean McMahon from Tallaght and Brian Downes from Greenhills Road in Walkinstown. The pair were best friends and were involved in laundering drugs cash for criminals; ‘clocking' cars, which is reducing the number of miles shown on the clock; and ‘ringing' cars, which involves changing the number plates and filing down the identification numbers on the chassis. They also imported vehicles from the UK, didn't pay the Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT) and sold them on to unsuspecting owners. They were suspected of supplying the Saab that was used as the getaway car in the Roche murder, and which was later found burnt out near the murder scene. Both men would later be murdered in separate gangland incidents.

Gardaí believe that three members of the Thompson gang were involved in planning and carrying out the murder. The suspect for pulling the trigger is a twenty-nine-year-old from Dublin 12. This man subsequently fled the country. He has not returned since, and there is a warrant out for his arrest in relation to the Roche murder. Darren Geoghegan is suspected of being the getaway driver, while the third main suspect is Freddie Thompson himself, although he is suspected of planning the murder, not actually carrying it out. Aidan Gavin was also arrested as part of the murder investigation, although he was released without charge, due to a lack of evidence against him.

John Roche's murder resulted in serious political pressure being put on Minister for Justice Michael McDowell. In November 2004, a criminal from Blanchardstown, twenty-three-year-old Paul Cunningham, had been gunned down, while his young child and girlfriend slept next to him. Following the savage murder, McDowell told journalists that he didn't believe that gangland crime in the capital was getting out of control. He infamously went on to call the murder: ‘The sting of the dying wasp'. This ill-advised statement came back to haunt him and would regularly be used as a stick with which to beat him. For exactly one year after he uttered the statement, seventeen people had been murdered in gangland-style killings. Crime went to the top of the political agenda, and after Roche's shooting, Fine Gael's spokesman on Justice, Jim O'Keefe, said: ‘This is a worrying recurrence of gangland-style killings in which summary justice is being meted out on our streets.' In response to the political pressure after Roche's killing and other similar slayings, Michael McDowell announced a special Garda operation, codenamed ‘Anvil', which was designed to tackle Dublin's rising gun-crime rates. Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy was given 15,000 extra hours of overtime each week, so that his force could ‘strike at the heart' of crime gangs, such as the two that were causing death and mayhem in Drimnagh and Crumlin.

McDowell told Dáil Éireann that ‘a feature of the gun culture which has emerged is the apparent belief on the part of some criminals that they are not bound by or subject to the laws of the land. Operation Anvil is intended to supplement existing operations so as to ensure that lawlessness does not prevail, that the threat which these criminals pose is met sternly and effectively, and, above all, that human life is respected.' He added that Anvil would be ‘focused, sustained, targeted and relentless'. Commissioner Conroy said that the primary focus of Anvil would be ‘extensive additional overt patrolling and static checkpoints by uniform mobile and foot patrols, supported by armed plain-clothes patrols'. In addition, he said, ‘Intelligence-driven covert operations are also being undertaken, involving Dublin units and national Garda investigative units.' As well as Anvil, Michael McDowell also announced several proposed amendments to the Criminal Justice Act, including minimum sentences for membership of gangs and for modifying shotguns to make them more lethal. Basically, Anvil resulted in Gardaí pounding the pavements and harassing known criminals. Roadblocks were set up outside the homes of gangsters, and they were followed wherever they went. It was a ‘get in the face of criminals' operation and would prove to be very successful. The two main areas that Anvil initially targeted were Finglas and Crumlin-Drimnagh. After the Roche murder, the extra Garda patrols were more than welcomed, because the area was incredibly tense in the days and weeks after the slaying.

It wasn't just the criminals that were on tenterhooks. Gardaí stopped a BMW car on Sperrin Road in Drimnagh at around 4.40 a.m. four days after the murder. Shane Maloney and three of his friends were in it. In the Gardaí's opinion, the four men were acting extremely nervously, so the Gardaí called for armed back-up. None was available, so the uniformed officers, fearful for their own safety, let the car leave the scene. It subsequently emerged that the BMW had a false number plate. In the early hours of 16 March, Ritchie Rattigan and Karl Kavanagh were arrested in a car, in possession of swords and baseball bats. There had been an incident earlier in the night when one of their friends had allegedly been assaulted by bouncers at a pub in Tallaght, and Gardaí believed that the men were going to seek revenge. They were released without charge, but it just illustrated how tense things were. On 30 March, a shot was fired into the home of a close associate of Freddie Thompson in Dublin 8. On the same night a unit from the Garda Traffic Corps stopped an Opel Vectra on Kildare Street, close to Dáil Éireann. Darren Geoghegan was driving and Freddie Thompson was the front-seat passenger. When they learned who the men were, they were taken to Sundrive Road Garda Station for a drugs search. Freddie Thompson had been wearing a wig that made him resemble Noel Gallagher from the band Oasis, and he also wore a bulletproof vest. He appeared to be very nervous and agitated. Geoghegan was wearing a stab-proof vest. Geoghegan was charged with a minor road traffic offence, while Thompson was released. The car had been rented from an agency on the Long Mile Road under a false name. It was seized and taken to the Garda compound in Santry. A few days later, gang member Gavin Byrne unsuccessfully tried to claim it. The following day, a squad car from Tallaght Garda Station stopped a Ford Focus being driven by Aidan Gavin. Freddie Thompson's thirty-five-year-old brother, Ritchie, was a passenger in the front seat. Both were wearing bulletproof vests and both had a set of fresh clothes in the car. The men were arrested, and €5,000 in cash was seized, although they were later released without charge.

On 2 April 2005, three Gardaí stopped Joey Redmond's girlfriend's Volkswagen Bora in Crumlin, which was being driven by Joey Redmond. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and was carrying a concealed Bowie knife. The vehicle was seized and taken to a pound in Parkgate Street. At the same time, Mrs Frazer, the mother of Michael Frazer, who was a former associate of Thompson, went to Sundrive Road Garda Station and alleged that Joey Redmond had threatened her daughter. She said that Joey Redmond had been driving a Volkswagen, and the incident happened just minutes before Joey Redmond was stopped and searched by Gardaí. While Mrs Frazer was making a complaint in the station, Redmond's girlfriend arrived demanding the return of her car. A row ensued, and Gardaí had to separate both parties. Outside the station, Joey Redmond made threats to Mrs Frazer in the presence of Gardaí. Detective Superintendent Denis Donegan and Detective Inspector Brian Sutton had adopted a carrot and stick approach in dealing with the feud. On one hand the parents of gang members, local clergy and representatives of both factions regularly met to negotiate peace deals and see if they could find a solution to the feud that was now more entrenched than ever. Donegan and Sutton gave an undertaking that Gardaí would fully support any peace efforts, but warned the criminals that if they were caught engaging in law-breaking they would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The two senior officers also made it clear that the tit-for-tat killings had to stop. Running parallel with this peace-brokering effort were extensive anti-gang operations by members of Operation Anvil, the Special Detective Unit and local Gardaí, which involved targeted, intelligence-led operations, dozens of searches and proactive ‘in your face' policing. The officer in charge of the Dublin Metropolitan Region, Assistant Commissioner Al McHugh, personally approved and supported the type of policing being implemented on the streets of Crumlin and Drimnagh. The policy of supporting peace brokering, while having zero tolerance of crime, was thought up by Brian Sutton, who was one of the few trained negotiators in An Garda Síochána. His negotiating skills would be used on several occasions in the feud over the next few years.

On 14 April, twenty-six-year-old drug dealer Terry Dunleavy arrived at the Croke Villas flats complex in Ballybough, at around 10.00 p.m. He parked his white Volvo and made his way up the stairwell towards his girlfriend's flat. When he got up the first few stairs, a gunman confronted him and fired five shots from a pistol, with a bullet striking him in the chest. Dunleavy desperately tried to escape up the stairwell, but he was pursued and shot again. He fell to the ground as he reached the top. As he lay helpless, the assassin fired three more shots at his head, killing him instantly. The gunman escaped on a motorbike that was driven by an accomplice. When Gardaí searched Dunleavy's car, it was found to contain several blocks of cannabis, worth close to €110,000, and detectives immediately suspected that Dunleavy had been set up by other criminals. The motorbike was discovered in the hours after the murder. It was burnt out at nearby Whitworth Road. The murder investigation was led by detectives from Fitzgibbon Street Garda Station, under the supervision of Detective Inspector Christy Mangan. Mangan had been involved in the arrest of Declan Gavin at Ballymount Cross in August 1999. He was the founding sergeant in charge of the Drugs Unit at Sundrive Road and still had a good knowledge of the feud and the main players. He had since been promoted and transferred to the Dublin Metropolitan North-Central Region.

Terry Dunleavy took pride in the fact that he was regarded as a hard man. He was extremely volatile and inflicted needless violence on hopeless drug addicts if they were late paying him. His fellow criminals regarded him with disdain. He had frequent disputes over drugs and had built up a lot of enemies. Dunleavy sold cannabis and cocaine in and around the north inner city, but had recently expanded his operation and was now dealing cocaine in several popular nightclubs and bars in the trendy Temple Bar area. He was starting to make a serious amount of money, but was stepping on a lot of toes while he was doing it. A native of Marino, but with an address at Lower Drumcondra Road, Dunleavy had amassed a significant number of criminal convictions for armed robbery and arson, after he burnt down a secondary school. In 2002, Dunleavy went on trial for shooting a man in Fairview Park in 1998, only for the trial to collapse because a newspaper had printed a photograph of him being led back to a prison van in handcuffs after appearing in court. Dunleavy had used firearms on three separate occasions in the weeks before his murder to threaten separate rival drug dealers. He was fond of guns and once threatened a neighbour with a pistol after breaking into his home. It was clear that whoever killed Dunleavy had probably been watching him for some time and was aware that he often went to visit his girlfriend in the evenings. The initial line of inquiry that Gardaí in the investigation took was that Dunleavy had been murdered by a well-known criminal from the north inner city over a long-running feud between himself and Dunleavy. However, as the investigation progressed, Gardaí ascertained that the getaway bike used in the murder had been owned by Albert Doyle. Doyle, a twenty-one-year-old from Errigal Road in Drimnagh, was Freddie Thompson's first cousin. Doyle was interviewed by Gardaí and said that he had owned the bike up to approximately three weeks prior to the shooting. Detectives then received intelligence that Doyle had handed the bike over to his cousin as part payment for an outstanding debt. This new information led Gardaí to look at Freddie Thompson's gang to see if it might have been responsible. It didn't take much digging before Gardaí discovered that the Thompson gang had indeed been behind Dunleavy's murder. Dunleavy had been supplied with his cannabis by the Thompson gang and owed them €26,000 for a consignment that had been seized just five weeks before his murder. Dunleavy had paid just €14,000 up front for the €40,000 worth of drugs, and had been given the rest on credit. Paddy Doyle went to see Dunleavy on a number of occasions, but he refused to pay up. He made the fatal mistake of ‘slagging off ‘ Doyle and ‘Fat' Freddie, and told them that they would not be getting a cent of the cash, and that he would shoot them if he saw Doyle near Ballybough again. Paddy Doyle gave Dunleavy one more chance to pay the cash he owed, and when he refused, Doyle told him that there would be serious consequences. Dunleavy's rise up the drug-dealing ladder had obviously affected his brain, because threatening an enforcer from one of the most feared gangs in the country is bound to have a negative effect on your health.

Gardaí have not solved the Dunleavy murder, but Paddy Doyle is certainly high up on the list of suspects. It is not known who drove the motorbike, and the case remains open. Sources say that Dunleavy was killed to send a message to other criminals being supplied with drugs by the Thompson gang that if you did not pay your bills, you would be shot without mercy. The fact that Dunleavy had been foolish enough to threaten Doyle had sealed his fate. The murder was the first time that the feud had left a person dead who was not directly connected to Crumlin or Drimnagh. It would not be the last time that somebody indirectly involved would be murdered though. The Dunleavy murder illustrates how the Thompson gang had become much bigger and had started to act as a wholesaler to middle-sized dealers across Dublin. With their increased size and influence, they were also becoming increasingly violent and ruthless. John Roche and Terry Dunleavy were murdered within little over a month of each other. The feud had now become so big that its tentacles had spread far and wide. It was becoming harder and harder for Gardaí to determine what was feud-related and what was not, especially because there were now so many personalities involved in doing business with both the Rattigan and Thompson gangs.