Cocaine Wars (26 page)
Authors: Mick McCaffrey
With little prospect of building a case against the actual gunman and the getaway driver for Bryan's murder, detectives pinned their hopes on getting a conviction against Graham Whelan. They were confident that they had built up a decent case against him, and outlined their case in correspondence to the DPP's office. At around 4.45 p.m. on the day of the murder at Old Country Road, Dublin 12, Garda Ciaran Nunan and DS John Walsh were on a routine patrol and stopped a 04 D blue Volkswagen Golf. The car was stopped because the driver was speaking on his mobile phone while driving. The driver turned out to be Graham Whelan. Gardaà believe that this sighting was significant because it placed Whelan in the Crumlin area two hours before the murder. Old Country Road is only half a mile from where Gary Bryan was shot dead. Gardaà argued that Valerie White's statement that Gary Bryan had seen Graham Whelan driving by Margaret White's house twenty minutes before his murder was also significant. Two days later, on 28 September 2006, Graham Whelan was arrested at Liffey Street for the purpose of a search under the Misuse of Drugs Acts 1977 and 1984. He was taken to Store Street Garda Station for the search. He was released without charge, after it was found that he was not carrying anything illegal. However, Gardaà seized Whelan's Nokia 1600 âready-to-go' mobile phone. They analysed it in order to determine what calls Whelan both made and received on the day of Gary Bryan's murder, and to ascertain where those calls had been made from. From 2.32 p.m. to 4.57 p.m., Whelan's calls were processed through five different phone masts in the Crumlin village area. From 4.57 p.m. to 5.55 p.m., his calls went through masts situated in Dublin 8, away from Crumlin and the murder scene. From 5.58 p.m. to 6.46 p.m., his calls were processed through phone masts in the immediate vicinity of the murder scene at Bunting Road. The four masts were located at the Ashleaf Shopping centre, Star Bingo on Kildare Road, Spar in Walkinstown and Crumlin Taxi in Crumlin village. From 6.47 p.m. to 7.25 p.m., Whelan's calls went through masts at the Long Mile Road, Red Cow Hotel, Firhouse and Rathfarnham Golf Club. Gardaà argued with the DPP that this phone site analysis proved that Graham Whelan was in the vicinity of the murder scene before, during and after Gary Bryan's murder. When he was arrested for questioning about the murder, he refused to account for his movements around Bunting Road.
On 9 February 2007, Graham Whelan was again arrested and he declined to take part in a formal identification parade. Gardaà wanted a witness who had seen Whelan driving on Bunting Road before the murder to see if they could pick him out of a line up. The witness had never seen Graham Whelan before the day of the murder and did not know anything about him. At around 1.00 p.m. that afternoon, Sergeant Peter McBrien accompanied the witness to the radio workshop office at Crumlin Garda Station from which they had an unobstructed view of the station yard. Eight volunteers plus Graham Whelan had been lined up to take part in the informal parade. Four of the volunteers walked out in single file, and the witness said that the man they saw on the day of the murder was not any of them. When the fifth man, Graham Whelan, walked into the yard, the witness stated: âThat's him, that's the man.' Sergeant McBrien asked if the witness was certain. The witness answered: âYes.'
Gardaà wrote to the DPP's office requesting that Graham Whelan be charged with Gary Bryan's murder. They wrote, âGraham Whelan is a ruthless criminal. Mr Whelan is heavily involved in the Freddie Thompson/Paddy Doyle gang. He has amassed a total of fifteen previous convictions at twenty-four years of age. It is suspected that Mr Whelan organised the brutal murder of Gary Bryan along with several other suspects. Due to the nature of the evidence, I would recommend that Graham Whelan be charged with the Murder of Gary Bryan at Bunting Road, Dublin 12, on 26/09/06, contrary to common law.'
Gardaà were confident that they had enough evidence to at least put to a jury for consideration against Whelan. Phone evidence and an eyewitness had put him at the scene of the murder minutes before it happened, and although there was no suggestion that he had actually pulled the trigger, detectives felt that the murder would not have happened had Graham Whelan not driven past Gary Bryan when he did. However, it was not to be. After several months the DPP came back and said there was not enough evidence to charge him. It was a blow to Gardaà who had worked tirelessly to try to get justice for Bryan. The case still remains open, but in the absence of new information, it seems unlikely that anybody will have to answer for Gary Bryan's murder.
Gary âTipper' Bryan was a tragic figure who was controlled by his drug addiction. Just before he was freed from Mountjoy, after serving his drugs sentence, he had applied for a passport. Detective Garda Terry McHugh, who was the liaison officer attached to the prison, signed the application for him. Bryan told him that he wanted to leave Ireland permanently with Valerie White because he feared for his life. He was only out of jail for a little over three weeks when it is believed that he murdered Wayne Zambra. For all his good intentions, Gary Bryan was a cold-hearted gun for hire who thought nothing of looking a man square in the eye and blowing his brains out. When he was using drugs, Bryan was a changed man. While he was soft-spoken, gentle and never violent when he was sober, he became a different person when he was injecting heroin. Although he did not look like a gangster, he certainly behaved like one, and once the twenty-nine-year-old had murdered Paul Warren and Wayne Zambra, it was clear that it was a matter of when, rather than if, Bryan himself would fall victim to a gangland assassination.
Bryan was the ultimate loose cannon, and sources say that he would have shot literally anybody for as little as â¬2,000. Because he was so addicted to drugs, Bryan had no loyalty and was happy to freelance for anyone who would pay him. That unpredictability and ability to turn on anyone at the drop of a hat is what made him so dangerous. Detectives have described Gary Bryan as a âruthless killing machine' who would murder anybody who got in his way, without conscience or a moment's thought. It is likely that both sides of the feud breathed a sigh of relief when he died. Valerie knew that Bryan was far from an angel. He stopped telling her what he was involved in when he was released from prison, so she never knew for certain whether he had murdered Wayne Zambra. He understood why she felt she had to make a statement to Gardaà about the Warren murder, and he never gave her a hard time over it. Friends of White say she blames herself for Gary's death. She feels that if she had gone ahead and given evidence in court, then he would be alive today, albeit in jail. They were together for six years; Gary was behind bars for twenty-seven months of their relationship.
The couple planned to move away to England and start a new life together. It was not to be. Gary Bryan was murdered before the plans came to fruition. His new passport arrived in the post two weeks after his murder. He never got to use it.
Making New Friends
P
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UTHORITIES TOOK
the decision to house Brian Rattigan at the highest security jail in the state â Portlaoise. This decision was made because of his notoriety and the fact that people were being murdered as part of a feud he was directing from behind bars.
Portlaoise Prison was once used to house IRA prisoners, with army snipers on the roof to make sure that nobody attempted to escape. It is still home to convicted members of the Real and Continuity IRA, but today it is not renegade republicans that the Irish Prison Service has to be concerned about. It is the coterie of the country's most serious criminals who are on the notorious E1 landing. E1 reads like a who's who of the criminal underworld. Its thirty-four residents are the most dangerous and feared criminals in the country. Its most infamous inhabitant is probably John Gilligan, the Don of drug dealing before his empire came crumbling down after Veronica Guerin's murder. Because Brian Rattigan had started out working for âFactory' John, the pair had a good relationship. Rattigan would have regarded Gilligan as yesterday's man, because he was in prison for so long and was well out of the loop when it came to importing drugs. Gilligan's partner in crime, Brian Meehan, was also an inmate on E1. He had driven the motorbike that was used to transport the hit man to murder the
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journalist Veronica Guerin, and was given a life sentence for his role. Sources say that forty-four-year-old Meehan and Brian Rattigan do not get on well. There is tension between them, and as a result, both men keep their distance from each other. Harry Melia was another inmate who Brian Rattigan would have heard stories about when he was growing up. Melia was one of âThe General', Martin Cahill's, top henchmen and is notoriously violent. He once cut the tips of Seamus âShavo' Hogan's ears off to make him resemble a rat, because there were suspicions that Hogan was an informer. Melia has since been released and his drugs conviction quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Karl Breen was another major criminal housed at Portlaoise. Breen, the so-called âChampagne Killer', was the boss of a Clondalkin-based drugs gang. He was convicted of the manslaughter of one of his best friends, Martin McLaughlin, on New Year's Day 2006, at Jurys Inn in Croke Park. Breen was given a nine-year term. He had spent the night drinking with McLaughlin and others. During a drunken brawl, Breen stabbed his friend McLaughlin three times in the chest. A witness in the case had to leave Ireland after being warned he would be murdered if he testified against twenty-nine-year-old Breen in court. His home was shot at twice, so he moved to Spain following the threats from Breen's associates. Breen has nearly a hundred previous convictions and is loosely aligned with the Freddie Thompson gang. Gardaà believe that the â¬11 million worth of heroin seized in the apartment in Clondalkin in October 2006 was partly funded by Breen and Thompson. Drug dealers are nothing if not pragmatic though, and despite Breen's business deals with Rattigan's arch enemy, Rattigan and Breen were on good terms and there did not seem to be much animosity between them. At the end of the day, they were both businessmen who were in serving lengthy stretches, so there was no point in creating more headaches and making things worse by fighting.
One of the biggest modern-day gangsters on E1 was forty-eight-year-old Limerick gangland boss Christy Keane. Keane is head of the Keane-Collopy crime syndicate who are at war with the rival McCarthy-Dundon group in Limerick. He was the undisputed head of organised crime in the city until he was arrested in August 2001. Keane was caught walking across waste ground with â¬240,000 worth of cannabis in a coal bag on his back. The following year he was jailed for ten years and sent to Portlaoise, where he continued to run his drugs gang and oversee murders from behind bars. His own brother, Kieran, was murdered as part of the Limerick feud in 2003. In many ways he was similar to Rattigan, who had also lost a brother because of gangland feuding, and the pair identified with each other.
Christy Keane's son Liam was also a major player in organised crime. The twenty-five-year-old came to national prominence in October 2003, when he made a two finger salute to a press photographer after his murder trial collapsed. The trial collapsed when all the witnesses developed âcollective amnesia', having obviously been threatened and intimidated. Keane was charged with the murder of nineteen-year-old Eric Leamy in 2001. Because of the reluctance of witnesses to speak in open court, Keane literally got away with murder, and was then free to run his father's drug business. Christy Keane and Brian Rattigan were very friendly in Portlaoise. They decided that their two gangs should co-operate in any way that they could. This involved splitting the money to buy drugs shipments, and even supplying the other side with gunmen, should a sensitive murder need to be carried out. Christy put his son Liam in touch with the Rattigan gang. Rattigan designated Anthony Cannon as his point man in dealing with the Limerick mob, and ordered him to co-operate in any way possible. Cannon was fast becoming one of Rattigan's most trusted lieutenants and was acting as the gang's chief enforcer â keeping dealers in line and making sure they paid on time. Keane and Rattigan enjoyed daily chats in each other's cells, and despite the age gap, the pair developed a strong bond and friendship. Liam Keane and Anthony Cannon wasted no time in putting their two gangs to work together. After Keane's life was threatened in late 2006, he moved to Crumlin, where he was put up at a variety of safe houses controlled by the Rattigan gang. Because Anthony Cannon was one of the gang's most feared enforcers, he spent almost every hour of the day with Keane, watching his back and generally dreaming up schemes to break the law and make money. The two men were both hotheads and were a bad influence on each other. On 21 April 2007, Natasha McEnroe, Brian Rattigan's girlfriend, was on a night out at the Village Inn pub in Crumlin village, with about half a dozen of her girlfriends. Keane and Cannon and a couple of other heavies were drinking with the women. McEnroe, Keane and Cannon were outside smoking, when two men in their early twenties pulled up in a car across the road and started to wolf whistle at Brian Rattigan's girlfriend. McEnroe wasn't really bothered, but Keane and Cannon lost the plot, and the Limerick criminal pulled out a Glock 9mm pistol and ran over to the parked car. Cannon started banging on the window and told the two occupants that they were dead men. Natasha McEnroe, who didn't know that Keane had a gun, ran over and told the pair to stop and go back into the pub. The men in the car apologised profusely and sped off, not realising that Keane and Cannon would have had no problem shooting them. Several bystanders witnessed the incident and Gardaà were called. Cannon and Keane drove to a house nearby and changed clothes, got rid of the firearm and went back to the pub. When Gardaà arrived, they arrested the pair for questioning, but the two men in the car were too afraid to make a formal complaint, so there were no charges over the incident. Nevertheless, it showed just how close the Rattigan and Keane gangs had become. There were rumours that McEnroe and Keane had become a little too close, and graffiti appeared on walls around Crumlin claiming that the pair were sleeping together. There was no truth in this however, and it was a crude ploy by the Thompson gang to infuriate Brian Rattigan, so he would end his relationship with the Keanes. However, he did not believe it, so there was no problem.