Cocaine Wars (20 page)

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On the same day as the note was recovered, Joey O'Brien went to Sundrive Road Garda Station at around 11.00 p.m., and said that two cars pulled up alongside him on nearby Keeper Road. He recognised the occupants of the cars as Aidan Gavin, Darren Geoghegan, Freddie Thompson and Thompson's cousin Eoin O'Connor. Also present, O'Brien claimed, were brothers David and Liam Byrne from Raleigh Square in Crumlin. When O'Brien saw some of the men get out of the cars, he ran away and hid in the front gardens of houses that backed onto Sundrive Road Garda Station. He told Gardaí that while he was hiding in a bush, he looked out and saw Freddie Thompson standing nearby, carrying a handgun. Thompson and some of the others searched for O'Brien, but couldn't find him and drove off. When he was satisfied that the coast was clear, O'Brien headed to the Garda station to report the incident. It was the second time in five months that O'Brien had managed to get away from Thompson and his cronies.

On 19 August, the day after Freddie Thompson had allegedly come looking for Joey O'Brien, he was again keeping busy. Freddie's partner, Vicky Dempsey, had been friendly with a man from Crumlin while Thompson had been serving a jail sentence in 2003 and 2004. When he got out of prison in late 2004, Thompson had stabbed the man in the back with a knife, leaving the injured man needing twenty-seven stitches. He did not report the incident to Gardaí because he believed that he and ‘Fat' Freddie had sorted out their differences. However, at around 1.00 a.m. on 19 August, while he was in the Texaco garage on the Crumlin Road, the man saw a silver BMW car pass by him. Freddie Thompson was sitting in the front passenger seat. The BMW suddenly did a handbrake turn and sped after him. The man managed to jump into a car being driven by a friend and made it home safely. He spotted the BMW driving past his house on several occasions immediately after he escaped. While he was in his house, he received a call on his mobile from Freddie Thompson. He asked Thompson what he had done wrong, and was told that he was going to have his throat slit. The following week, the man was again attacked by Freddie Thompson, this time with a baseball bat. He had done nothing wrong, but Thompson obviously still held a grudge over the man's friendship with Vicky Dempsey.

B
Y LATE
2005, the Thompson gang was making so much money from drug dealing that it literally did not know what to do with it. Gardaí estimate that the gang was making in excess of €250,000 some weeks, although that would be when a major shipment arrived. Other weeks the gang might have been low on supply, and would only be taking home €20,000 or €30,000, while they awaited the arrival of another shipment. Also, if Gardaí intercepted drugs that were destined for the Thompson mob, it would have a major effect on their profit – because the supplier would have to be paid anyway. When there were lots of drugs on the market, the price would drop and profit would be down. If Freddie's gang had most of the product that was on sale in Dublin, they could pretty much charge what they liked and would make serious money. So some weeks were better than others. Being strictly a ‘cash only' business, drug dealing can pose major problems in what to do with the profits. A senior gang member cannot go around buying top of the range cars and luxury apartments with used notes, because the authorities will soon cop on and seize them if they cannot be legitimately explained. Any large criminal organisation therefore has people to launder its money. These senior figures use a network of dodgy solicitors and accountants to rinse the dirty money and legitimise it, so that when it comes back into the hands of the gang, it is clean and untraceable. Even in a bad week there would be lots of cash that needed to be looked after. According to Gardaí, it was twenty-seven-year-old Darren Geoghegan's responsibility to take care of the Thompson gang's loot.

Geoghegan, from Galtymore Drive in Drimnagh, had grown up with Brian Rattigan and Declan Gavin, but had been closer to Declan Gavin. So, after Gavin's murder he pledged his allegiance to Freddie Thompson. He had developed into one of the most senior, trusted and, arguably, most important members of the gang. Geoghegan was highly intelligent and had a good head for figures. Indeed, if his life had been different, Gardaí say he could easily have worked for one of the country's top accountancy firms, such was his grasp of complicated numbers. Sources describe Darren Geoghegan as purely a businessman who was not involved in the day-today business of running the drugs gang. He would have been far more comfortable with a pen than a gun. Although he had been arrested as part of the John Roche murder investigation, Geoghegan was not suspected of actually pulling the trigger.

Being the money man for a major drugs gang is one of the most sought after criminal jobs because it means that you are indispensable. It is the money man who knows how much each dealer makes per week and where the cash has been sent to be cleaned and made legitimate. He has the direct line to the crooked accountants and the unscrupulous solicitors; he controls the properties and investments that have been bought with the clean money. He basically knows where all the metaphorical bodies are buried – leaving the dangerous matter of disposing of the real bodies to other minions. He enjoys the rewards of the trade, without handling the drugs and without any of the risks that more ‘hands-on' gangsters take.

Gardaí only have a basic idea about how Darren Geoghegan laundered his group's money. This information has been gleaned from intelligence, and because the CAB never looked into his activities, we do not know many details of the complicated web used by Geoghegan to cover his tracks. It is suspected that Darren Geoghegan established a property company under the name of a person with no criminal record, and used the clean company to purchase dozens of apartments and several large commercial premises around Dublin for the gang. The properties would be rented out, and the income would be used to buy more drugs from Spain and the Netherlands. Then the profits would be used to expand the gang's property portfolio. Some sources have estimated that he had bought scores of apartments with the drugs money in places as far away as Bulgaria, Latvia and other Eastern European countries, where the authorities do not ask too many questions when foreign business transactions are being conducted. A solicitor, who is based in Walkinstown, and a number of accountants in Dublin are currently being investigated by CAB on suspicion of facilitating property deals for several criminal gangs in Dublin. Gardaí are confident that when the probe is finished, they will be able to link these individuals, especially the solicitor, to Darren Geoghegan and will have a clear picture of exactly how much money he laundered and what he used the money to buy.

Gardaí also believe that Geoghegan had a business relationship with Walkinstown-based car dealer Brian Downes, a smalltime criminal with major gangland connections. They believe he gave Downes large sums of money to launder through his dodgy second-hand car firm. Downes was in business with several other criminal car dealers. He hatched a money laundering scam for drug gangs, whereby a wide range of high-powered cars were imported into the country but were presented to Revenue officials as lower-specification cars, with fake paperwork vouching for the vehicles, so Downes would get away with paying lower rates of Vehicle Registration Tax and VAT. The scam was a lucrative one, and profits of up to €25,000 could be made on each car. Downes was also suspected of providing the Thompson gang with cars that were used as getaway vehicles in several murders, and cars in which to transport drugs. He was shot dead at his dealership in Walkinstown in October 2007, along with his innocent associate Eddie Ward. Like Darren Geoghegan, Downes had been arrested for questioning about the murder of John Roche, on suspicion of giving the Thompson mob the Saab that the killers had escaped in.

Having access to all that cash meant that the Rattigan mob regarded Geoghegan as a key player, and as a result he was one of their top murder targets. Geoghegan had been targeted on several previous occasions. A drive-by shooting on his family home on Galtymore Drive, back in June 2001, was one of the first feud-related incidents documented by Gardaí. The Geoghegan family home was shot up again in November of the same year. Darren Geoghegan rarely returned there after that because he wanted to send out the message that he no longer lived there, so his family would not be targeted.

People who knew Darren Geoghegan point out that he was no thug or lowlife. They say that he was quick to step in and break up fights. And that he looked out for his friends and neighbours, and was incredibly loyal. If he saw people taking drugs in the local park, he would make sure that young kids were moved along to ensure their safety. He was big into swimming and going to the gym; he was naturally well toned and never used steroids or hard drugs. The closest he ever got to drug use was smoking the odd joint. While there was no doubt that there was some good in Geoghegan, he also had a darker side and began to get involved in criminality. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact time when this happened, but when he was twenty he grew tired of his job as a painter and decorator. So he quit and went on the dole. It was probably then that he started to get involved in crime with his other mates, and the gang, then united, started dealing drugs and grew to be a large organisation quite quickly. In early 2001, when he was twenty-one, Geoghegan moved out of the family home. Soon after that, the feud kicked off in a big way, and because of the threat from the other side, Geoghegan moved around a lot and did not call any one place home. He stayed away from Drimnagh and Crumlin as much as possible, and mainly stayed in rented houses and apartments around South Dublin.

Geoghegan had managed to stay under the Gardaí's radar and had only amassed a handful of criminal convictions for road traffic offences. He was suspended from driving for eighteen months in September 2001 for dangerous driving, which was the most serious sentence he had received.

Gavin Byrne was Geoghegan's assistant when it came to looking after the drug money. Originally from Windmill Road in Crumlin, Gavin Byrne moved to Clonsilla to try and ensure his safety. Byrne had also grown up with Brian Rattigan and Declan Gavin, but he was not as intelligent as Geoghegan and was never treated with the same level of respect by his own gang. Gavin Byrne had made it to his thirtieth birthday, which is very unusual for somebody so involved in gangland crime. He was always one step ahead of the law, and didn't have any criminal convictions. He had been in court three times to contest parking fines, and had always left the courthouse vindicated, with the charges being struck out. The fact that he hadn't been caught didn't mean he wasn't involved in serious crime though, and Byrne was a regular target of Gardaí from Crumlin and Sundrive Road. He had been arrested as part of the Joey Rattigan murder investigation in late 2002, when he was linked to a car in which the revolver that had been used to shoot Rattigan was found. He submitted his DNA to Gardaí, obviously knowing that he had never been near the abandoned silver Volvo. That arrest was part of a Garda exercise to ‘round up the usual suspects' because most of his mates, Darren Geoghegan, Paddy Doyle, Freddie Thompson and Aidan Gavin had been arrested, to see if their DNA could be linked to the car, but in the end it was a fruitless exercise for the Gardaí.

Gavin Byrne was never in the frame for the Rattigan murder, but he was able to use violence when the occasion called for it. On 13 June 2002, he was arrested along with Aidan Gavin, after the front door of a house at Park Terrace in Dublin 8 was kicked in, and five shots from a .38 Smith and Wesson were discharged randomly. There were five people in the house at the time. Freddie Thompson's cousin, David Byrne, was the intended target. There was not enough evidence to charge either man, but it would later be determined that the .38 used in that attack was the same gun used to murder Joey Rattigan. So although there is no suggestion that Byrne was involved deep down and dirty in Joey Rattigan's murder, he was certainly no innocent.

Geoghegan and Byrne were very close and were rarely seen without each other. Because of their tightness and the fact that they had access to vast amounts of money, serious tensions began to develop within the gang in early 2005. It is believed that some of the other gang members felt that the pair had become too big. They voiced the opinion that they didn't trust them with the cash, and felt that they were squirreling away money for themselves. There is no evidence at all to suggest that either Geoghegan or Byrne were creaming money off their own side, but gangland is dominated by paranoia, and the unfounded and unprovensuspicions of one man can often turn into accepted fact.

On 21 October 2005, both Byrne and Geoghegan were arrested during a joint Garda and Customs operation at Rosslare Harbour in Wexford. The pair had just got off a car ferry and the black Volkswagen Golf belonging to Byrne was stopped and searched. A high-powered Beretta pellet gun and ammunition was found in the boot of the car. Byrne took full responsibility for it and said he had recently bought it in Spain and had it for his own protection. The pellet gun was seized. The incident illustrated that Gavin Byrne probably knew that his life was in danger and he was taking steps to protect himself. It was probable that the two friends were aware that they were under suspicion within their own gang. Geoghegan routinely wore a bulletproof vest when driving around the city, and when he was stopped by Gardaí, they discovered that he was wearing protective clothing. Even though both men probably feared the rumblings of discontent from within their own ranks, it is probably safe to say that the last thing they expected was Freddie Thompson sanctioning their murders.

On Sunday 13 November, Darren Geoghegan and Gavin Byrne drove to the Carrickwood estate in Firhouse, near Tallaght in South Dublin, at around 9.30 p.m. The men were in a silver Lexus, which had been imported from Northern Ireland. Gardaí believe that they had been told to meet a senior member of the gang to take part in some sort of job on an unknown target on the opposite side of the feud. This is the assumption because the two men were only wearing track-suits and runners and had no socks on. There were two sets of clothing in a plastic bag in the boot of the Lexus. (Changes of clothes are often brought by criminals when they are carrying out shootings. They usually strip off the first set after carrying out the shooting and burn them, often along with the getaway car.) The fact that both men were wearing bulletproof vests also indicated that they had taken precautions to ensure that they would return safely from whatever job they were going to carry out. Less than two minutes after the Lexus parked in the quiet housing estate, a silver BMW 5 Series, which had been stolen in Northern Ireland the previous week, pulled up alongside the car. Geoghegan and Byrne saw somebody they knew emerge from the BMW. Byrne clicked open the central locking, and the man got into the back seat of the Lexus, leaving the two men in front of him in very vulnerable positions. The fact that the man was allowed to get into the back seat without Geoghegan and Byrne being suspicious leads to the conclusion that the person was well known to them and absolutely trusted. Neither Byrne nor Geoghegan were armed, which suggests that they were not expecting a confrontation. The man was in the car only a matter of seconds before he pulled out a Sig Sauer pistol and opened fire. Darren Geoghegan was shot twice in the back of the head. Before he had time to react, Byrne also had two bullets fired into the back of his head. Both men died instantly. They would not have been alive long enough to know what was happening. The gunman got out of the Lexus and walked to the waiting BMW, which sped off towards Clondalkin. The gunman was dropped off and made his escape in another vehicle, while the driver went to Glenvara Park in Templeogue, where he set the vehicle alight causing it to explode, thereby eliminating the possibility of any forensic clues being left behind. The scene of the burning of the getaway car was literally a minute away from Carrickwood. The driver then ran through a field and jumped over a railing onto the main Ballycullen Road, where he was picked up and left the area in a Volkswagen Golf that had been stolen in Bray.