Cocaine Wars (32 page)

A number of years ago, Foley was threatened with murder by the IRA if he did not pay them a percentage of the money he received from drug dealing. It is believed that he does pay the Provisionals, although he has always denied this. Martin Foley is a great survivor. Brian Meehan, who was jailed over Veronica Guerin's murder, tried to kill Foley twice. In 1995, Meehan entered a pub and shot him in the arm and stomach, but Foley survived. Three months later, he made a second attempt. As Foley reversed out of his home, Meehan ambushed him and fired five shots from a machine gun, before Foley escaped through back gardens. In an interview in 2003, Foley spoke about Meehan's second assassination attempt. ‘I had read a lot of books about survival. Well, techniques to avoid being assassinated. I had the door unlocked in the car; I kept it open. It would be a bad mistake for anybody to stay in the car, because if the car is put out of action, you're still stuck in the car. I jumped over a nearby back wall, into a house and up the stairs. The back door had been open. I could hear crackling. I later learned that one of the guns had jammed. As I was going up the stairs, I was shot in the back. I had the entry of a .45 bullet in the back and the exit in the stomach, through the lung and so on. I kept going, yes. You're inclined to run a little bit fast when somebody is firing at you. I jumped feet first through a window.' He also spoke of the trauma that being shot had had on him. ‘When you are shot on three different occasions and you have eleven holes in your body, psychologically the thing is never going to leave you and you would react to certain situations where anything bad might happen.'

In September 2000, Foley was shot in the legs when two men approached him as he left the swimming pool at Terenure College. One of the gunmen walked over, as he lay on the ground, and prepared to shoot him in the head, only for the gun to misfire.

In March 1984, he had been abducted by an IRA death squad following a row with the IRA and Foley's boss, Martin Cahill. Foley was snatched by four men who burst into the house where he was staying and beat him with a baton and sawn-off shotgun, before bundling him into a van. A neighbour quickly phoned 999, and the Provisionals shot at unarmed Garda Tony Tighe as he gave chase. A gunfight then ensued, and all the gang were detained and eventually convicted. Foley has been in the news over the last couple of years because of his debt-collecting business, Viper Debt Collection Agency. He has been accused of sending heavies to people who allegedly owe money, and of intimidating people and threatening violence if he wasn't paid in full. Foley has amassed forty-two criminal convictions in the course of his long career in crime.

Christy Kinahan and Foley fell out in the late 1990s after Kinahan accused ‘The Viper' of scamming him out of €100,000. Kinahan despised Martin Foley, but he never tried to reclaim the money or exact revenge on Foley for the alleged con job. However, Kinahan was eager to return to Ireland but knew that he couldn't show his face in Dublin and hold his head high if he did not seek revenge for the missing money. So, he asked Thompson to take out ‘The Viper' as a personal favour to him. It is not believed that money exchanged hands, but Kinahan cancelled a debt that Thompson owed him for a drug shipment that Gardaí had recovered.

On Saturday 26 January 2008, Foley was driving out of the Carlisle Health and Fitness gym, on the Kimmage Road, at around 3.00 p.m. As he stopped at a junction, a gunman walked up to Foley's Audi A6 and opened fire with a Glock 9mm pistol, firing a total of seven shots at ‘The Viper' from close range. Four bullets hit their target striking Foley in the lower chest, shoulder and leg, and one grazed his head. Being an expert in survival, Foley crouched under the steering wheel and managed to continue driving the car until it hit a wall across the road. This act of quick thinking would turn out to save his life. Nevertheless, thinking that he was going to die, Foley shouted out the name of the man who shot him. The name he mentioned was a twenty-four-year-old key member of the Thompson gang. Ironically, the alleged gunman was close to Foley, but once Thompson had given the order he was happy to carry it out. Foley was rushed to St James's Hospital, but miraculously was not seriously injured and was out of hospital after a couple of weeks. He has now been directly hit with a total of fifteen bullets. Gardaí put his remarkable survival down to the fact that he is a fitness fanatic who works out every day and is seriously fit and strong.

Christy Kinahan is said not to have been pleased at all that the hit was botched. To make matters worse, the gunman failed to burn out the getaway car, so Gardaí were able to get a number of DNA samples from it. However, Foley refused to make a statement and has not named the gunman since, although Gardaí are hopeful that they will eventually get charges. The twenty-four-year-old and his brother were both detained for questioning. The men's father is a well-known hit man from West Dublin. Four other men were also arrested and questioned. However, their DNA was not found at the scene, nor was the brothers'. Some sources say that Foley didn't actually see the gunman and named the person most likely to have been responsible, in his eyes anyway. Foley has been around for so long that some Gardaí believe that it could have been any number of suspects, as the list of possibilities is endless, a bit like the famous
Simpsons
episode, ‘Who shot Mr Burns?' It is believed that a peace deal between Foley and Kinahan has since been brokered, although Thompson and ‘the Viper' have permanently fallen out. Although Thompson was concerned that there would be retribution for the Foley hit, he soon had other things to worry about.

On 4 February 2008, Paddy Doyle, Gary Hutch and Freddie Thompson were in Cancelada, sitting in Doyle's BMW jeep. Paddy Doyle was in the front passenger seat of the luxury BMW X5, Gary Hutch was driving and Freddie was in the back seat. Doyle had recently paid an estimated €70,000 for it and was letting Hutch take a spin to see how it drove. Hutch was a nephew of ‘The Monk', Gerry Hutch, an infamous criminal. Gary travelled a lot between Ireland and Spain. The three amigos had just finished working out in the gym in Cancelada, near Doyle's home. They were heading towards Marbella, when another BMW jeep pulled up alongside theirs. It was about 2.00 p.m. and Paddy Doyle turned his head to the right and looked out his window just in time to see a machine pistol being raised by a passenger in the other car. Shots started to rain out with four flying through the windscreen on the passenger side of the jeep and a fifth piercing the door where Doyle was sitting. In an attempt to escape, Gary Hutch smashed the car into a lamppost, around 30 m from where the rival jeep initially approached them, and his jeep ground to a halt. He and Thompson hopped out of the car and started to run away in blind panic, in an attempt to get away from whoever was shooting at them. They fled into an apartment complex close to where the BMW had crashed, and luckily for the two men, the gunmen were obviously not after them and made no attempt to pursue them. Paddy Doyle was the man they wanted, and as he lay wounded in the jeep, the shooter came up and shot him twice in the head from point-blank range, killing him instantly. The killer hadn't even bothered to wear a mask. He must have been confident that the Spanish police would never bring him to justice.

As usual, Freddie was totally unscathed and didn't have as much as a mark on him. Gary Hutch was taken to hospital and given treatment for an arm injury he had sustained in the crash. It was not until an hour after the shooting that both men returned to the scene and presented themselves to Spanish police for questioning, although no charges were ever brought against either man.

The day of the Doyle murder, Spanish police found a consignment of €8 million worth of cocaine in Estepona, but the seizure had nothing to do with Doyle's shooting.

Although it was initially reported that Doyle had been murdered after falling foul of the Russian mafia, it is actually Turkish criminals that are suspected of killing him. In October 2007, Gardaí began to receive information from Spanish police that a dispute had arisen between Patrick Doyle and a Turkish crime syndicate. The gang had been introduced to a major Turkish crime family in London in early 2005 and had been supplied with cheap heroin, which was being imported from Afghanistan, since then. Paddy Doyle was the point man in Spain, and initially things had gone very smoothly, with both sides being very satisfied with their business arrangement. The dispute with ‘Whacker' Duffy had meant that business had to take a back seat to staying alive, so there hadn't been a whole lot of revenue coming in for the previous six months or so, so paying suppliers wasn't Freddie's main priority. Gardaí had also been increasingly successful in intercepting shipments and several seizures had cost the gang millions of euro in profits and hundreds of thousands of euro of original investment. The Turks organised a €2.4 million heroin shipment into Dublin Port in late August 2007, on behalf of the Thompson gang. The drugs were smuggled from Rotterdam to Dublin in a truck that was supposedly carrying ‘Antique-style wood burning ranges'. Customs officials examined the ranges. Lulu, a Revenue drug detection dog, smelled drugs in the ranges. Two ranges revealed 12 kg of heroin, with a street value of €2.4 million, along with cocaine worth €175,000. At the time it was the biggest ever seizure in Dublin Port. It was a serious blow to the gang, because the majority of the drugs had been given on credit, which meant that Thompson and Doyle were seriously out of pocket. Because they were short on cash, Thompson and Doyle had been putting off paying the Turks. Because Freddie Thompson was back and forth between Ireland and Spain the whole time, he also became involved in the growing dispute. Spanish police told Gardaí that Doyle and Thompson had been told that they would both be murdered if they did not pay outstanding bills for a number of sizeable heroin shipments that the Turks had supplied to them. When a messenger was sent to warn the pair, Thompson is said to have given him the two fingers, while Doyle laughed at them. Although the two gangsters put on brave faces, things were not going well for them at all, but they didn't believe that the threats would amount to anything. Two weeks before his murder, Doyle was given a final warning that if he did not settle his bill, action would be taken. Again, it seems he underestimated the sheer ruthlessness of the Turks.

It seems that Paddy Doyle didn't learn the lessons of some of the other young gangsters before him. Doyle tried to use his brawn, instead of using diplomacy like John Cunningham or Christy Kinahan did. Because he was a big fish in a small pond in Ireland, he thought he could go to Spain and push people around. Although he was feared in Dublin, he was considered a nobody in Spain. In reality, Doyle and Thompson were way out of their depth, swimming with the international sharks operating on the Costa del Sol.

Paddy Doyle's family was not happy with the Irish media's coverage of his murder. His father Donal complained to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission that a report on RTÉ's
Six One News
and
Nine O'Clock News
bulletins had breached regulations by causing undue distress or offence to his family. Donal Doyle complained that the news item showed the bullet-ridden car his son had been shot in, and also showed a private family photo of his son. He said that he didn't know how RTÉ had obtained the photo and that RTÉ had not asked permission to use it. Doyle claimed that the family's personal grief had not been considered. The complaint was rejected. Donal Doyle was a prominent anti-drugs campaigner in the north inner city, and his sister is a respected youth worker. The Doyles rushed out to Spain, as soon as the news of Paddy's murder reached them, and went to the scene of his murder, where they laid flowers and other mementos. Doyle was a father of two boys with his partner Melanie Thompson, ‘Fat' Freddie's cousin. Although Paddy Doyle was a ruthless criminal with forty-two convictions, he still left behind him a loving family who will obviously miss him dearly.

Freddie Thompson was rattled after Paddy Doyle's murder. As well as losing a close friend and his international fixer, he had also lost his main enforcer, which meant that he was now very vulnerable. Freddie didn't know if the Turks would come back and look for him, so he decided to leave Spain, head back to Ireland and try to resolve the Declan Duffy row. It didn't help things that the day after the Doyle killing, a Toyota Avensis taxi was stopped by the Crumlin Garda Drugs Unit on Davitt Road in Drimnagh, and the passenger searched. Gary Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old from Monasterboice Road in Crumlin, was found in possession of €198,000 worth of heroin that he was holding for the Thompson gang. Johnston was a former heroin addict who owed a significant amount of money to the Thompson mob, so he was used by the gang to ferry drugs around for them. His arrest and the seizure of the drugs was another bitter blow to Thompson. But double trouble was also coming for Thompson. Declan Duffy soon learned of Freddie's return, and went all out to try to eliminate him and move in on his turf. He is said to have upped the contract on Freddie's head. Gardaí warned Thompson on three occasions that there was a contract out on his life, and Gardaí who spoke to him at the time say that he was incredibly rattled. There was also the Rattigan gang to be concerned about. They had also taken a keen interest in Thompson's change of circumstances and realised that if they could collect themselves a scalp or two, they could redress their recent losses and even out the feud again. So, it really was trouble on two fronts for Thompson.

At lunchtime on 13 March 2008, Freddie Thompson was drinking in a pub on Parnell Street, when members of the Emergency Response Unit swooped on a car as it crossed from the south side of the city across O'Connell Bridge. The two men in the car, aged thirty-two and forty-five, were both from Ballyfermot. They had been under surveillance for several days, after information was received that they had agreed to shoot Freddie. The thirty-two-year-old is regarded as being a hit man, and is the suspect in at least five unsolved gangland murders. He has links to the Rattigan side of the feud, but is very much a gun for hire, so Gardaí did not know whether the contract was being carried out for Duffy or Rattigan, although sources believe that Rattigan was the more likely candidate. The pair of would-be assassins were followed after they left an address in Crumlin and drove towards the city centre. They were in a stolen car that had been fitted with false number plates. Gardaí believe that they were supposed to meet a motorbike on Parnell Street to pick up a handgun, but detectives decided to stop their vehicle before the rendezvous – in order to ensure that the safety of members of the public was not compromised.