Gangster Page 17

  Meehan drove straight to Greenmount where he rendezvoused with Bowden. The moment Bowden walked in the door, he noticed the Magnum. It was placed on a shelf with six individual pieces of ammunition. The gun looked dirty. Bowden picked it up, wiped it clean, rubbing off excess oil from the polishing he had given it before hiding it away in the grave. ‘I loaded it with six rounds and left it on the table with six other rounds.’ He didn’t need anyone to tell him Guerin was going to be shot.

  Meehan woke the next day at 7 a.m. The morning was bright and sunny with little cloud cover. The sky was a clear, bright blue.

  Mitchell collected him around 8 a.m. at his apartment and drove him to Terenure to collect the motorcycle. He was due to rendezvous with Warren at 9 a.m. Warren was already waiting to meet them when they arrived at the rear of St Enda’s Road.

  ‘As far as I can remember I got a telephone call on my mobile telephone from Brian saying that he was delayed and would ring later. I went into Stephen’s house and I had a cup of coffee.’ McGrath had no idea what the gang was planning.

  Meehan arrived between 9.20 a.m. and 9.45 a.m. He looked at the bike. It was in perfect running order, just as he’d left it the night before. He said he’d be back later for it. Meehan then ordered Warren to drive to Naas. Without asking Meehan himself, what happened next can only be surmised. After he drove away from St Enda’s Road, he either went and collected the gunman chosen to pull the trigger or returned on his own, then met with the hired killer.

  The caretaker at Naas District Court, John Kelly, had, like Meehan, risen early that day. He arrived for work at 9 a.m. The caretaker for more years than he cared to remember, he made his usual rounds, opening the relevant offices and doors. One of his chores was to erect the tricolour that flies from the top of the court structure; 26 June 1996 was just another day.

  Guerin had risen early that morning in preparation for her court appearance. She arrived at the courthouse around 9.45 a.m., giving her plenty of time to get her story right for the judge. She parked outside a hotel next door to the courthouse.

  Traynor had also known about the plan. He didn’t care one way or the other. He too had had enough. Whether Guerin died or not was irrelevant to him now. At that moment he was racing at Mondello racetrack. Always mindful of giving himself an unquestionable alibi, he decided to stage a crash. Minutes after 11 a.m. he overturned his car. When rescuers ran to the scene, he asked that an ambulance collect him. He was rushed to Naas General Hospital. Warren set off for Naas. He drove down the Long Mile Road and turned off on to the Naas dual carriageway. He arrived in the town about 10.30 a.m. ‘I drove through the town and parked up near the centre of the town. I got out and walked looking for the courthouse and the red sports car.’

  Meehan called him, wanting to know if he had found Guerin’s car. The calls lasted only a few seconds. Warren shouted into his mobile phone, which was conspicuous by its large size. A passer-by noticed him making the call. The size of his mobile phone caught her eye. It seemed strange to her that anyone would carry such a clumsy device. As she continued about her business, Warren walked off in the direction of the Newbridge Road. He parked his vehicle in a position that allowed him to monitor the journalist’s Calibra.

  Her case was called around noon and by 12.30 p.m. it was over. She was fined IR£120. She walked out of the building elated, for the prospect of losing her driving license would have been too much to bear.

  ‘I then rang Brian Meehan on his mobile. He asked me who was in the car. I told him there was only one person. He told me to follow the car,’ Warren said. When Guerin pulled away, he picked up her trail. Minutes later he called Meehan, who by this stage was parked on a lay-by on Blackchurch Road, outside the village of Rathcoole. ‘She’s on the way,’ he said.

  Warren followed the car as it headed towards Dublin city, along a route that cut short her trip by avoiding traffic lights and traffic. Warren noticed that she drove at a steady speed, making telephone calls along the way. But he was more interested in ingratiating himself with Gilligan’s gang. He pressed his redial key as she passed the Airmotive complex on the Naas dual carriageway. ‘She’s at Airmotive, passing now,’ he said, his voice raised to compensate for the lack of volume.

  Meehan, catching his first glimpse of Guerin’s car, said: ‘I see it.’ He sped off.

  Meehan followed Guerin for about four miles from Rathcoole to Clondalkin.

  Warren maintained a discreet distance behind Guerin’s car, following at the same speed in the same lane but keeping a distance of four cars. A red light appeared at the junction to the Boot Road in Clondalkin, forcing the traffic to stop. When it did, he saw Meehan drive past. The bike pulled up alongside Guerin’s car and the pillion-rider produced a gun. What happened next was a bloody carnage.

  Although it all happened in the space of a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity for Warren. ‘I froze. I went to get out as if I could help. I just stopped. It was like slow motion. I realised what we were after doing.’ He drove away at speed. Witnesses mistook this for blind fear.

  Gilligan called him minutes later from Amsterdam where he was with Rooney. She overheard the conversation, which lasted no more than ten seconds.

  Warren went home, then arranged to meet a friend for a drink to give himself an alibi. Meehan, in the meantime, made quick his escape, driving up the Belgard Road, on to the M50 roundabout and down a slipway which brought him to a safe house in south Dublin.

  Meehan is said to have started boasting seconds after he walked in the door. He threw the Magnum into the bathroom sink. He didn’t waste time with conversation—speed was of the essence in order to establish an alibi.

  Peter Mitchell and Shay Ward were waiting at the house. The latter was given the job of driving Meehan into Dublin. Mitchell had a similar role, but he was charged with getting the killer to safety. The news was still not on the airwaves. Trying to stick to their original plan, which had so far been carried out with military-like precision, they left.

  Mitchell, although no one thought it, was in shock. Nerves caused him to drive with the skill of a lunatic, overtaking cars and honking his horn. Some minutes later, at 1.25 p.m., he was seen by an off-duty policeman who spotted his car heading towards Walkinstown. The garda gave chase but could not keep up without endangering the lives of fellow motorists. He took note of the time and driver.

  Shay Ward delivered Meehan into Dublin city in quick time, dropping him off on Aungier Street at 1.30 p.m. By chance, Detective Sergeant John O’Driscoll, the head of the North Central Drugs Squad, was sitting in a car parked across the street waiting for a colleague. When he saw Meehan jump out of a small van driven by Shay Ward, his first instinct was to reach for his notebook. He took note of the registration and of the fact that Meehan was talking into his mobile.

  Mitchell made his way into the city where he regrouped with Meehan. They made straight for Bowden’s hair salon on Moore Street and, according to plan, were seen by a garda patrol.

  News of the murder hadn’t reached the general public, and so life inside the hairdresser’s was normal, with no talk of the murder among the women inside. Meehan knocked on the window through which he could see Juliet Bacon working. The time was now 1.40 p.m. She stepped out through the door. He asked where Bowden was. She didn’t know, but said he shouldn’t be long. Meehan smiled and said he’d be in Fallon’s restaurant and to tell Bowden.

  He had just sat down when Bowden arrived. They ate nothing, just sipped tea and coffee. The aftershock of the adrenaline caused by the shooting was still affecting them. Meehan was excited. ‘It was a good job this morning,’ he told Bowden. ‘I thought he was only going to fire one or two shots at her but he emptied it into her. Fair play to him. We legged it up the Belgard Road on the bike.’ To evade prosecution, it was essential that each showed no emotion, especially when the subject of Guerin’s murder surfaced.

 
As one might expect, the details of Guerin’s ghastly execution impacted hard on the staff at Naas Court. John Kelly was particularly reminiscent. Guerin’s murder preoccupied his mind as he untied the tricolour and pulled it down for the night. ‘Who would do such a thing?’ he thought to himself while he carefully folded the flag. Turning to walk back into the court, he noticed through the corner of his eye that someone had been on the roof—the slates were disturbed. There had been a second person monitoring Guerin’s movements.

  That night, Meehan, Mitchell, Bowden and his girlfriend Juliet Bacon assembled in the Hole in the Wall pub on Blackhorse Avenue in Dublin. The European Championship games were playing on the television. Meehan was in particularly jovial form. The beer flowed and Meehan took some cocaine to sedate any anxieties he possessed.

  Meehan, however, was putting on a brave face. He was worried. When he went to the toilet, he got into a fight with one of the bar’s other patrons. They all left and went to the Turnstile pub, located a short walk away. The pub lies adjacent to the Phoenix Park and was situated a short distance away from Bowden’s home in the Paddocks. They stayed until closing time and headed for the POD nightclub, coincidentally located across the road from Garda headquarters.

  After the club had closed, they went on to Bowden’s home. The party got into full swing. Senan Moloney lived next door to Bowden. He was the crime correspondent for The Star newspaper and had spent the day writing about the murder. He had seen his colleague’s limp body and felt physically sick. The day had proved too much for him. So he finished early and made his way home. As he was walking through his front door, he noticed Bowden lugging trays of beer into his house.

  ‘I formed the opinion there was going to be more booze and music that night,’ he later said. And he was proved correct.

  That night the music blared and the beer and cocaine flowed. In one corner, Meehan sat drinking a can of beer, his eyes glazed from the cocaine in his bloodstream. Bowden and Bacon danced. Gilligan had called earlier, telling them to have a good night. Away from the outrage that was quickly enveloping Ireland, he felt relieved. That was the end of her, or so he thought. What Guerin couldn’t do to him in life, she certainly wouldn’t be able to in death.

  Chapter 13

  Public Enemy Number One

  ‘I’m finished in Ireland. They’re saying the Provos will get me.’

  JOHN GILLIGAN

  The gangster’s name was catapulted into the national consciousness within 24 hours of the murder. Gilligan had predicted a public outcry but postulated that any outrage would soon subside—that Guerin’s murder would become nothing more than another statistic. But this was no more than an arrogant hope. The next morning the storm broke when his photograph was published alongside lengthy articles which made no attempt to disguise the fact that he was the prime suspect.

  The Government and the police had not a minute’s peace, as it became clear the public had lost all faith in their ability to tackle organised crime. Radio programmes were inundated with calls, and the letters’ pages in the morning newspapers were saturated with angry correspondence.

  The killing had huge ramifications for the Government, especially for Owen, who found herself defending her stewardship as society vented its anger. She was in no frame of mind to deal with the onslaught, distraught at having lost a close friend. The frenzy reached fever pitch in the Dáil where the feeling of malevolence towards organised crime was now firmly a political issue. Owen’s trustworthiness was not being gauged on her notable initiatives to streamline the judicial system but on the absolute disregard drug dealers held for the law, which had now made the headlines across the English-speaking world. Therefore, it was only natural that the opposition capitalised on the public unrest. They demanded action against the now famous drug barons; the ones who had Mafioso status through Gilligan’s action.

  John O’Donoghue, the Fianna Fáil opposition spokesman on justice, was Owen’s nemesis. During the previous year, he had carved out a career for himself highlighting the various faults in the criminal justice system in a highly vocal manner. He didn’t hold any personal animosity towards the minister; it was just the way Fianna Fáil did business. He did, however, see that Ireland required new laws to tackle criminals like Gilligan. With great political acumen, he had months earlier drafted novel legislation with a barrister friend Eamonn Leahy. He called it the Organised Crime (Restraint and Disposal of Illicit Assets) Bill 1996. The legislation was rudimentary in that it reduced the standard of proof required to seize the proceeds of crime. Instead, it tied the offences to the assets, as against an individual’s liberty. The idea had been conceived with a burst of inspirational genius the previous Easter in a place called Cuascrom: ‘A beautiful place overlooking the Blasket Islands off the Kerry coast. It came to me there,’ O’Donoghue would later say. The law was modelled on a case he remembered when funds collected by Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, were seized. A subsequent challenge in the High Court found the seizure was within the constitutional parameters.

  Fianna Fáil had published the bill but decided to withhold pressing for its enactment until an election was announced. The time was right. O’Donoghue had reason to believe the Government would have no other option but to accept the bill, which would represent a political goal. He went to one of his colleagues, Mary O’Rourke. Because she was a senior party member, who had a fearsome reputation for smiling while denouncing her opponents (an art she probably learned from her days as a school teacher), he believed she would be instrumental in persuading Bertie Ahern, the opposition leader, to move the bill. She agreed with his assessment of the situation.

  The two went immediately to the party leader’s office on the fifth floor in Government Buildings. Here, O’Donoghue outlined his case. Ahern didn’t need convincing and without haste ordered his officials to withdraw another piece of legislation on contempt the party had planned to move. This effectively gave O’Donoghue free rein.

  ‘Looking at it from the perspective of democratic accountability, I felt that when the stage had been reached in any society that they could now gun down an investigative journalist in the streets, then there was something rotten in that society which had to be rooted out.’ He presented the legislation to the Government on the evening of Thursday, 27 June. Jim Higgins, the Government Chief Whip, accepted the bill with a degree of caution. He sent a copy to the Attorney General, Dermot Gleeson, for examination.

  For her part, Owen was fighting an impossible war. Not only had she lost a close friend, but she was effectively being blamed for allowing crime to get out of control. Most of the criticism was blissful ignorance, but it affected her personally. She would remember that week as one of the hardest of her life. The experience, however, left her resolute. She pressed ahead with her plans to create a multi-agency unit to target crime. She formally unveiled her plans on 2 July to a packed press conference in Government Buildings. Accompanying her proposal was a comprehensive package of anti-crime measures. Drug dealers, she said, were not invincible. The Government would hold a special debate on organised crime on 25 July. That gave her four weeks.

  Those entirely familiar with the story all agreed that Gilligan was the most likely culprit, but none could understand his senseless logic. The motive was too obvious; he was the only person that would benefit from her death. Traynor’s hand in the slaying was another distinct probability. This was a view shared by the police officers tasked with bringing charges against the killers.

  Tony Hickey was the chief superintendent in charge of the Serious Crime Squad. He was on holiday in the Portuguese village of Alvor when the gunman struck. Standing in a shopping queue, he overheard a conversation between two Irish tourists standing in the same line. They were talking about Guerin’s murder. He said nothing. But when he returned to his apartment, he rang Lucan Station and asked if the unthinkable had happened. He took command of t
he inquiry when he returned home that weekend.

  Hickey was a proficient murder investigator, a man who had spent much of his career chasing villains and who possessed all the accompanying mannerisms—he chain-smoked and always looked expressionless. He surrounded himself with a coterie of officers he trusted emphatically, and consulted with no one, not even officers attached to other units. Hence he spoke about the investigation only when he needed to. He had joined the gardaí in 1965 and since that time had avoided the media at all costs, believing that much of what was written about drugs was exaggeration and conjecture.

  The problem he faced was how to link Gilligan to the assassination when he was in Amsterdam at the time of the killing. There was also the possibility that Gilligan was not responsible, which was a real prospect. To solve the case he hand-picked a team of detectives he trusted. Most were drawn from the Serious Crime Squad, though at the beginning of the inquiry over 100 officers from all divisions in the city got involved.

  What Gilligan could never have known was that the police had a head start on him. The Operation Pineapple squad had gathered a mass of intelligence on the gangster. This was shared with the Guerin investigation in accordance with orders from Carty, who learned of the murder whilst standing in the offices of the National Surveillance Unit in Garda headquarters. Privately, he concurred with Hickey’s view that Gilligan might be innocent. ‘No one could be that stupid,’ Carty said. Working from this information, which was big enough to fill several crates, the Guerin team got to work collecting statements from witnesses. Police informants were grilled for anything that would lead to the assassin. The dragnet started.