The General E-Book

Paul Williams

• Herausgeber: The O'Brien Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The extraordinary life and crimes of Martin Cahill, gangster, criminal mastermind, MOST WANTED MAN In a twenty-year career marked by obsessive secrecy, brutality and meticulous planning, Cahill netted over £40 million. He was untouchable - until a bullet from an IRA hitman ended it all. The General tells the inside story of - The Beit robbery - one of the world's biggest art heists - The attempted assassination of a top forensic scientist - The O'Connor Jewellers robbery, netting £3m - The tyre-slashing and intimidation - The crucifixion of a suspected 'grass' - The millions still missing The book reveals Cahill's bizarre personality and the activities of the Tango Squad, the special police unit which targetted him with tactics used on the infamous Kray Gang. Now a major film from John Boorman starring Brendan Gleeson and John Voight.

Leseprobe

The General won Best Director Award for John Boorman at Cannes International Film Festival 1998

‘If you try to harm me, I’ll say, “Can he get me?” And you can’t. I’m not afraid. There’s nothing that you can do to get me. I’ll go down the lowest. I’ll go down so low that the only way left is back up. The only thing is, I can’t bow down to you. I’d rather be dead, so I’ll make fun of you. If you annoy me, I’ll make fun of you. I’ll react, but I won’t attack. And I’ll keep on smiling.’

MARTIN CAHILL, INTERVIEW IN GQ MAGAZINE, 1991

‘Without this book all that might have been left would have been the folk memory of a Robin Hood figure and we might have forgotten the terror and misery this man brought to those who were in his way. Paul Williams’ book reminds us of why we should say “Good Riddance”.’ THEIRISHTIMES

‘a riveting good read’ IRISHINDEPENDENT

‘a terrifically readable account…in the very best tradition of investigative journalism…ourdemocracy needs more journalism like this’

THESUNDAYTRINUNE

THE GENERAL

GODFATHER OF CRIME

PAUL WILLIAMS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This story could not have been told without the help of a great many people, from all walks of life, who generously endured long, exhausting hours of interviews. The kind advice, support and encouragement of many others also gave me the impetus to complete this difficult book.

I would like to thank the large number of Gardaí of all ranks who generously gave me their time and information. The members of the Dublin underworld were equally generous and gave the other side of the extraordinary man they called ‘the General’. To both groups I would like to express my deepest gratitude. For professional and other reasons they wish to remain anonymous. I respect that.

I would also like to thank journalist Padraig Yeates of the Irish Times and co-author of the book Smack, for his invaluable assistance and first-hand knowledge of the man himself. Thanks also to Brendan O’Brien of RTE and Neil McCormick of GQ magazine in London; retired detectives Ned Ryan and Frank Madden; journalists Stephen Rae, Evening Herald, Jim Cusack, Irish Times, Feargal Keane, RTE, Tom McPhail and Diarmuid McDermott of the Ireland International News-Feature Agency; the library and photographic staff of the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Tribune, Star, Sunday World and Irish Press.

My gratitude is also due to my editor at the Sunday World, Colm MacGinty, for giving me the space and the time to complete this project. My special thanks also goes to barrister Hugh Mohan.

Thanks to my parents, Bernard and Patricia, for putting up with me for the first time since Leaving Cert; my close friend and confidant Gay Prior; computer genius Sharon Donnelly.

My gratitude and congratulations to an English gentleman called John Boorman who did me the honour of using this book as the basis for his controversial award-winning movie The General. John has scripted, directed and produced a powerful interpretation of the life of Martin Cahill. My thanks also to Kieran Corrigan, John Boorman’s partner at Merlin Films, one of the most important men in the Irish film industry who too often is forgotten when the bouquets are thrown.

Most importantly of all, my heartfelt gratitude goes to my partner Anne Sweeney, the woman who sacrificed so much so that I could fulfill my obsession, and to Jake and Irena for their love.

PAUL WILLIAMS, APRIL 1998

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Prologue

Birth of a General

The Anthill

The Club

Donovan Assassination Bid

The Heist and Crucifixion

Shadow of the Gunmen

The Beit Paintings Robbery

The Untouchables

The Tango Squad

Confrontation

The Jinx

The Dole Man

Year of the Gun

The Hot-dog War

Incest Case

The Lacey Kidnap

On the Edge

The Sisters

The Hit

Epilogue

Glossary

About the Author

Copyright

Dedicated to my friendThe Sheriff

Prologue

‘Tango One is down … Tango One is down.’ The message crackled frantically across the Garda radio network. ‘Control, can you repeat that last message?’ asked a disbelieving voice over the wailing of a squad car siren. ‘The Number One man is down. Get everyone down here … All other alarm calls to be put on hold. Priority for Tango One.’ It was 3.20 on the afternoon of 18 August, 1994, and Ireland’s most notorious gangster, Martin Cahill, the General, had just been shot dead.

Less than six minutes earlier the forty-five-year-old gangster – code-named Tango One by the Gardaí he had eluded during two decades of organised and brutal crime – had become the last victim of the Provisional IRA. Soon the IRA would announce their historic ceasefire, but before they set out on the road to peace there had been some unfinished business to be taken care of. And it wasn’t an outstanding debt which an enemy – some British agent or Loyalist killer – had incurred during the Long War. The business involved an enigmatic Dublin criminal of little consequence to events in the North. The IRA had bestowed upon the General the dubious honour of being its last victim. In death, as in life, Martin Cahill had made his mark on history.

The assassin had waited beside the Stop sign at the junction of Oxford Road and Charleston Road in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh for most of that sun-drenched Thursday afternoon. The people out soaking up the rare spell of sunshine on the steps of the Georgian houses along Charleston Road took no notice of the hitman as he watched for his victim. Dressed as a Corporation worker, he pretended to conduct a traffic census with a clipboard in his hand. His accomplice was on a motorcycle, posing as a courier. He drove up and down Oxford Road for most of the afternoon, stalking Cahill. At regular intervals he turned into Swan Grove, the small cluster of Corporation houses where Cahill lived by night.

At 3.10 pm Martin Cahill finally emerged into the sunlight. He had a busy afternoon planned. First he had to leave a videotape back to the store – a Robert De Niro movie called Bronx Tale about a New York father’s attempts to keep his kid out of the clutches of the local mobsters. Then he was due to meet his associates to discuss plans for another major crime and a possible shooting to sort out an ongoing problem with a former paramilitary. Tango One, a master of counter-surveillance, may have noticed the ‘courier’ consulting a map at the end of the cul de sac when he climbed into his black Renault 5. He probably assumed it was just another Garda stake-out. There had been a team watching his house earlier that day and it wasn’t unusual to see replacements arriving by motorbike. After all the police had been watching Martin Cahill for the past twenty years, waiting for him to step out of line. No doubt he would have felt lonely without his Garda watchers around to play his favourite game of cat and mouse. He probably chuckled to himself at the thought of yet another ambitious cop hoping to make his name by nabbing the big bad General. A lot of grey-haired detectives had once shared the same aspiration. Anyway he would lose them on the way to his conference. Before Cahill turned the ignition key the ‘courier’ had vanished.

Less than five hundred yards away the hitman braced himself for the kill as his accomplice on the motorbike raced down Oxford Road, turned onto Charleston Road and stopped. That was the signal the hitman had waited for so patiently – the target was on his way. The modest car drove at no more than fifteen miles per hour as it cruised the short distance between Swan Grove and the Stop sign. As the General slowed down to stop at the junction the hitman dropped the clipboard and stepped over to the driver’s door of the car. He reached into his jacket and produced a ‘Dirty Harry’ .357 silver-plated Magnum revolver – one of the deadliest and most powerful handguns in the world.

For a split second Cahill stared into his killer’s eyes. Then the window exploded into a thousand tiny shards as the lethal weapon was fired once at point-blank range. The large bullet ripped through Cahill’s shoulder and head, smashing bone and tearing tissue. The force of the blast pushed the General to one side. His car chugged across Charleston Road as if he had it in gear but was unable to put his foot on the accelerator. The hitman ran alongside and pumped another three shots into his victim. The car collided with the railings at the gateway to No 45, beneath a large horse chestnut tree.

As Cahill gasped his last breath, the gunman calmly reached in and pumped another round into his head. The General slumped lifeless to the left, still harnessed in the safety belt, his head touching the passenger’s seat. His eyes and mouth were closed; his hands hung limply in his lap. Blood began to flow in a crimson stream from a hole the size of a golf ball in the left side of his neck. A string of dark blood flowed from his nose onto his shirt and denim jacket. The few strands of hair he once combed across his head to hide his baldness were matted and dangling over his drooped shoulder.

The cold-blooded killer was in no panic to get away. He put his head through the smashed driver’s window to make sure that Ireland’s most wanted man was terminated. Having satisfied himself that his mission was accomplished, the hitman – according to eye witnesses – began to grin. He was still grinning as he jumped on the back of the waiting motorcycle and vanished into the city traffic.

CHAPTER 1

Birth of a General

Martin Cahill was never destined to die in his sleep. It would not have been a fitting end to a man who was the indisputable godfather of the Irish criminal underworld. He lived by the gun and died by it – despatched in the cold-blooded fashion of the gangland he once dominated. Cahill lived on a knife-edge for most of his criminal career. On that fateful afternoon in August he finally succumbed to what he knew was the inevitable.

Martin Cahill, Tango One, the General, Public Enemy Number One, did not conform to the psychological profile of a criminal mind. That was the way the underworld’s hooded bogeyman wanted it. He was a man of many contradictions – from devoted father, loyal friend, prolific lover, absurd joker, to hated outlaw, feared gangster, sadistic fiend, meticulous planner. He was obsessive, conniving and extremely clever; sometimes cruel, sometimes compassionate; secretive with a malicious streak. The General was a complex character.

In appearance Martin Cahill looked anything but a crime boss. Short, rotund and balding, in well-worn jeans and stained tee-shirt, he could be mistaken for a down-at-heel handbag snatcher. He was no Ronnie Kray. He lived a frugal life between crimes and he did not drink, smoke or take drugs. His passions were pigeons, motorbikes, cakes and curries. The only less orthodox passions in his life were his love affairs with his wife and her sister. Outwardly Cahill seemed gentle, soft-spoken with a flat Dublin brogue. But behind the ordinary appearance lurked a colourful crook.

It was his crimes that had panache and style. From the slums of Dublin the General worked his way up from a small-time burglar to a major-league criminal, earning himself a reputation equivalent in stature to that of a high-profile politician or TV star. He came to epitomise the ultimate anti-hero, the one who satisfied the public’s ambivalent, morbid fascination with the underworld. More than any other criminal icon, Cahill had a profound effect on the national psyche. His willingness to show off his Mickey Mouse underwear while hiding his face behind sinister balaclavas made him the subject of intense curiosity.

The day before his funeral, the Sunday World ran the first, full-colour picture of the grinning General. There he was, beaming out from the front page in an ill-fitting old leather jacket and tee-shirt. With strands of hair scattered across his bald pate, he stood proudly beside a little girl in a First Communion dress, outside the church where his Requiem Mass would be held. The newspaper sold out within hours. Everyone wanted to see what the man in the mask looked like.

The story of the life and crimes of Martin Cahill is an extraordinary one. In 1969, the year he turned twenty, Ireland was still a country where indictable crime was extremely rare and a much smaller police force boasted an almost hundred percent detection rate. But Martin Cahill and his contemporaries were about to change all that. He was one of the prime movers in the new generation of hoodlum that emerged from the confusion and panic accompanying the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. The General was the brains behind one of the country’s most ruthless and successful armed crime gangs. Over two decades Cahill organised the theft of art, jewels and cash worth well in excess of £40 million in the biggest and most audacious robberies in Irish history. And he preserved his position of untouchable gang boss with a string of brutal crimes against his enemies, bombing, torturing or shooting those who irritated or challenged him. He was egalitarian in his choice of victim; they were from both sides of the fine crime-line. The name of the General was synonymous with violence, fear and intimidation.

Unlike most criminals who tend to avoid, as much as possible, conflict with the authorities, Martin Cahill launched his own revolt against the state. He waged an unrelenting war of wits against the Gardaí he hated with a venom – a feeling reciprocated by the men and women in blue. Getting one over on the police was sometimes the sole motivation for his more mischievous ‘strokes’. But his contempt for the cops contained a contradiction. In a strange way he actually had a grudging respect for them.

He turned down requests from other Dublin hoods to take part in lucrative robberies in England in association with gangs in London and Manchester. He believed the English police were much more likely than the Irish to doctor the evidence and stitch him up. He often told his fellow gangsters that there were two things which made the Irish cop more honest than others. One, he said, was their Catholic rural background (the Garda force is largely made up of country people) and a deep-rooted sense of self-righteousness which would not allow them to tinker with the evidence. The other was their cut-throat rivalry, in which the least bit of dirt thrown by a disgruntled underling could jeopardise an officer’s promotion.

But the well-hidden respect went no further than Cahill not leaving the country to do jobs. At every opportunity he tried to exploit weaknesses in the police force and make them look stupid. He even equipped his extensive arsenal by robbing the depot where the Gardaí stored confiscated illegal weapons. When the police got too close for comfort he bombed their top forensic expert and on another occasion stole the most sensitive criminal files in the land. He set fire to one of Dublin’s law courts when the Gardaí tried to prosecute him on the last serious charge he would ever be tried on. And whenever the General was taken in for questioning there was an outbreak of tyre-slashing in middle-class neighbourhoods to embarrass the police. Cahill even dug holes in their prized golf club at Stackstown in Co Dublin and then made jokes about the act to their faces.

Cahill sometimes left clues at the scene of well-planned jobs, just to antagonise the investigating detectives who knew him best. He covered his tracks so well there was little hope of catching him. Cahill described it as a ‘game’ or ‘grudge match’ in which he was an adroit player. But it was a dangerous game with only one rule: don’t get caught. The stakes were high, so high that he couldn’t afford to lose. For if he lost the game, the result was either a prison cell or the morgue.

It all began on 23 May, 1949, when Agnes and Patrick Cahill had their second child, Martin Joseph. Patrick, a labourer who later became a lighthouse keeper, married Agnes Sheehan, a small, quiet-spoken woman, shortly after the end of World War Two. They set up their home in the heart of Dublin’s inner-city slums at No 6, Grenville Street, on the northside of the river Liffey.

The post-war years in Ireland were dark days of poverty and deprivation for those who found themselves trapped in the ghettos. In fact from the turn of the century Dublin was blighted with some of the worst slum conditions in Europe. A chronic lack of education, combined with the Catholic Church’s denunciation of birth control as the Devil’s work, resulted in large families overcrowding the already insanitary, dilapidated tenements. The Grenville Street the Cahills moved into had changed little since 1898 when a newspaper report described it as ‘Hell Street’ where ‘drunken brawls, stone throwing and filthy practices’ were its main characteristics. The report reflected the attitude of the society which, more than fifty years later, would alienate people like the General. From the moment of his birth Martin Cahill was on the wrong side of the tracks.

Patrick Cahill’s meagre wages as a lighthouse keeper could not support his growing family. He was also fond of drink, which he indulged in at the expense of his wife and children. Often there wasn’t enough food to put on the table. Patrick Cahill’s drinking habits sickened young Martin who never drank in his life. He would later recall, in a bitter tone, that his father had little to show for a life as an honest man. Agnes Cahill was pregnant a total of eighteen times. She miscarried on six occasions and one toddler was killed when she was hit by an ice cream van.

In 1960 the Cahill family moved to No 210, Captain’s Road in Crumlin, one of thousands of newly-built Corporation houses. The area formed part of the Irish government’s ambitious programme to clear the slums of inner-city Dublin, giving people decent living conditions in the suburbs. But, while well-intentioned, the overall effect was a breakdown in social cohesion with the dispersal of whole neighbourhoods. The new estates were dreary and impersonal with no sense of community. Poverty followed the former slum dwellers. By the time he was eight, Martin and his older brother, John, who was ten, were robbing food to supplement the family’s income. Martin was often sent to the local convent with his go-kart to collect a pot of stew from the nuns to feed the family. The lack of food was to have a profound effect on Cahill. One of the hallmarks of his burglaries in later life was that, apart from robbing cash and valuables, he always stole meat and other food from the fridge. It was not unusual for him to make off with £50,000 worth of valuables and a few pounds of steak.

The young Cahills were sent to school in nearby Kimmage. At first Martin liked school but his natural bent for rebelling against authority soon put an end to that. One day after school he was playing around a dump where old school books were burned along with other rubbish. A nun demanded to know what he was doing and he told her it was none of her business. A few days later the nun took Martin, kicking and screaming, out of his class and put him in her own where she exacted revenge for his earlier recalcitrance. The nun, Cahill recalled, held him up as an object of ridicule in the class. She warned the other students that they could turn out to be like Martin Cahill, as if the child before them was some kind of imbecile.

He felt humiliated and began developing his own method for dealing with authority. He decided not to learn to spite the teacher. He began mitching from school and was brought before the juvenile courts dozens of times under the School Attendance Acts. These were also his first encounters with the police who would play such a major role in his life. The antiquated criminal justice system was to take over the education of young Martin. He once remarked: ‘Reform school was my primary school, St Patrick’s Institution my secondary school and Mountjoy my university – they taught me everything I know.’

One summer he and his friends were out playing in the GAA pitch at the back of his home in Crumlin. The grass had been cut and baled. Cahill and his pals cut up the bales, remade them into haystacks and began jumping onto them from a wall. The police arrived and Martin was arrested and charged. The youth was brought before the courts and fined five shillings – a fortune for a family that was already finding it difficult to live.

Meanwhile some of the Cahill brothers were becoming experienced burglars and major thorns in the sides of the police. On 15 September, 1961, at the age of twelve, Martin had his first criminal conviction recorded against him. It was for larceny. He got the Probation of Offenders Act – a caution. Two years later he was back before the Metropolitan Children’s Court where he was again convicted of larceny. This time he was fined one pound. Two months later he was up again, this time for two counts of larceny and house-breaking. He received one year which was suspended. On 20 September, 1963, Cahill was given one month’s detention in Marlboro House in Glasnevin on two charges for burglary. He was locked up in a small room for most of the day.

Martin’s parents decided to help their son get a decent career which might keep him out of trouble. Before the Troubles in the North, scores of unemployed young Dublin men went off to join the British armed forces. Martin’s father heard that the Royal Navy was recruiting in Belfast. In 1964, at the age of fifteen, Martin travelled to Belfast on the train for an interview. Before the interview, applicants were handed a leaflet listing in alphabetical order the trades and specialised areas of training in the Navy. Each applicant was invited to pick out a trade to which he felt suited. Martin chose the position of bugler. Unfortunately, due to his difficulties in school, he misread the word as ‘burglar’. He reckoned that breaking into houses for the Royal Navy and being paid for it was a grand job. The officers sitting on the interview board in their well-pressed uniforms looked stunned when they asked the young Dublin chap to explain why he had picked this particular trade. He didn’t get the job and took the train back to Dublin where he continued his chosen profession.

Cahill, like most of the lads he grew up with, did not see the error of his ways. A year later, at the age of sixteen, he was arrested by a young detective called Dick Murphy. While in custody Cahill, after been given cakes and fizzy drinks, confessed to two burglaries and made a statement. He was convicted in the children’s court and got two years in industrial school in Daingean, Co Offaly. The experience would have a major effect on the rest of his life. He and Murphy developed an intense dislike for each other and remained sworn enemies until the latter’s death. It was the last time that Cahill would ever confess to a crime.

The industrial schools were established under the 1908 Children’s Act and were intended to feed and teach young offenders. In fact, the existence of these ten schools around the country was a monumental indictment of the successive governments who relinquished their responsibilities to the well-meaning, although unqualified, religious orders. The schools were tough institutions, used as dumping grounds for the country’s orphaned and illegitimate children. In some cases the boys were regularly rounded up in what were called ‘hobbles’, the aim of which was to hunt out boys suspected of being homosexual. Often the boys didn’t even understand what the brothers were looking for. Before bedtime the youngsters would be lined up in their nightshirts, ordered to bend over and beaten across their bare bottoms with a two-foot piece of leather strap, appropriately named the ‘impurity strap’. Former inmates have always claimed that so-called ‘nancy boys’, the ones suspected of being sexually abused by some brothers, were often excused such punishments. Martin Cahill was never a victim of a ‘hobble’, but he was certainly no ‘nancy boy’ either.

The Oblate order which ran Daingean pursued the reformation of its young charges with a crusading zeal – and an iron fist. But Martin Cahill was their match. He was quiet, cautious and shrewd, sizing up every situation as it arose and making the most of a bad lot. Compared with the other hot-headed boys around him he came across as mature. Those who taught him recall that Cahill was a strong silent character with a ‘hardness in his face’. It was a demeanour that would be evident in his criminal career.

If he saw a piece of paper on the ground Cahill would pick it up rather than suffer the indignity of being ordered to do so. He never made eye contact with his captors because to do so would mean acknowledging their presence and their authority. Once, as he walked along a corridor, a brother pounced on him and, as Cahill said later, ‘burst his jaw with a punch’. The frustrated brother knew no other way of communicating with a withdrawn sixteen-year-old. Cahill claimed that was the only occasion on which he suffered corporal punishment.

One kindly priest who tried to break through the protective barrier around young Martin was gently rebuffed. The priest recalled how, whenever he tried to help Cahill, he was viewed with suspicion. Martin’s younger brother Eddie, who was thirteen and also doing time for house-breaking, had his own way of dealing with the brothers and later the prison authorities. If he was told to do something he would tell the brother or prison warder to shove off and do it himself.

Martin Cahill was put working on the bog which provided the large school with its turf harvest. Other boys were allocated to the farm, the metal workshop or the carpenters’ shop. Despite his non-confrontational stance, Cahill did not receive a single day’s remission on his two-year sentence. When he was leaving in 1967 he asked why. The brothers told him that it was because he would not open up and talk to them. After he left Daingean Cahill recalled bitterly: ‘If anyone corrupted me it was those mad monks down in the bog.’

The year that Martin Cahill was released from Daingean a special Dáil committee was set up to investigate the system of custodial care. The Kennedy Commission in its report two years later condemned the industrial school system as ‘evolving in a haphazard and amateurish way’ and said that it ‘has not altered radically down through the years’. The Commission found that the children sent to Daingean were ‘educationally sub-normal’, although it exonerated the Oblate Fathers, many of whom had dedicated their lives to the place. Martin Cahill could barely read or write.

While Martin had been away the rest of the Cahill family had been experiencing hard times. They had fallen hopelessly into rent arrears on the house on Captain’s Road and they were dumped in a dilapidated tenement in Rathmines, called Hollyfield Buildings. A year after he left Daingean, Martin planned to get married to Frances Lawless, the girl next door in his new Rathmines home.

Despite his feelings about Daingean and his antipathy to authority, Cahill was fond of some of the brothers at the school. In a rare letter, written just two weeks before his marriage, Cahill was uncharacteristically open and, for probably the only time in his life, talked about going straight. The letter, printed here as Cahill wrote it, read:

Dear Brother,

Sorry for not writing sooner, I just wanted to let you know how Im getting on, for a start it took me long enuf to get a job but I got one, my flat wages are £11. Some weeks I earn £16 to £17 a week but its hard work, and its okay.

I am geting over weight and pale, all I need up here is clean fresh bog air, and bog work to get my weight down. Anyway the money I got on the bog I put it into prise bonds and I still have it, and with a bit of luck, I might win a £100 this week I have a great chance, well who knows.

I kept out of trouble so far, please god I stay like that, you know I did [not] for get what you done for me, you made me feel as do I was free, in other words needed, I just want to let you know how greatful I am you made my time fly in.

I have met some of the lads some of them seem to be doing well, but I cant tell, I don’t pal with any lads. You know I don’t mix much, out straight I dont trust them, I tink that I get better along on my own so far, Im not stuck up or any thing like that. Im going with a girl a very nice girl and I am very happy the way I am. I met Frances two years ago and I lover her very much and we are getting married on 16th March next week.

I know it is very soon and you might tink that I should weight, but I tot very seriously about it, and its the only thing we want. I know there will be hard times and easy times, but please god that we will be happy and I will go about it the way you would want me to go about it, thats what I want to tell you.

I hope yurself is okay, some of the lads there need a good bashing and dont give into them bercause you dont hear them talking, as you say you have to be cruel to be kind, and let some of the loud mouths beat you in a cople of games of handball on till it goes to there heads and then beat them and take them down a peg or to, when they need it.

I will close now, sorry about my writing, wright soon. I want you to know that we are saving money since I came out as well as my bonds.

(Its not much but you know what to do).

I remaine,

sincerey yours,

Martin Cahill

Within a short time Martin Cahill had given up all aspirations to a life of honest work – he had worked briefly making boxes for Smurfit’s and cloth sacks for Goodbody’s. But soon he was on the road to being a big-time criminal. Two years later he would be in prison. The General was about to be born.

CHAPTER 2

The Anthill

Hollyfield Buildings in Rathmines was a semi-derelict complex of flats. It was the last step before homelessness for some of the Corporation’s tenants who either could not pay their rents in other places or were deemed to be trouble-makers. Conditions were appalling. One former resident recalled: ‘It was the worst, poorest, smelliest, rat-ridden scum-pit in Dublin.’ A policeman who regularly had reason to visit Hollyfield gave the same verdict: ‘You wouldn’t put a dog into the place … It was a hovel, a filthy dump.’ To Martin Cahill, however, Hollyfield was both home and kingdom. There was nowhere else he would rather be.

Hollyfield Buildings was situated on Upper Rathmines Road in upmarket Dublin 6. The dwellings consisted of 120 one-and two-bedroom flats, built in two-storey blocks in 1911, and resembling a military barracks. By the time the Cahills moved into Nos 9 and 10 the place was in a state of chronic neglect. Accustomed to squalor and overcrowding they had little difficulty settling in.

Once, when Eddie Cahill ran away from Daingean, a priest came to Hollyfield looking for him. Rebellious by nature, Martin’s younger brother incurred many beatings in the harsh industrial school. When the priest, who was known for his compassion to the youngsters, called into No 9 he was taken aback. He got a rare insight into the deprived background of one of his charges. In the middle of the room was a large table with all the family’s food laid out. Mrs Cahill, who was surrounded by children, was courteous and chatty to the clergyman. She paid no heed to a contented toddler who sat on the table making a mess by putting its hands in the butter, then in the jam and the sugar, and licking its fingers. There were no presses or cupboards. In the corner was a large bed and nothing more. But to the Cahills Hollyfield was home and they made the most of it. ‘What [the authorities] never counted on was that we’d like it. Everyone knew everyone else and we all looked out for one another,’ Cahill fondly recalled long after the place had been demolished.

The inhabitants were treated as social outcasts – ignored by an uninterested outside world. Out of this imposed isolation grew a clannish community and a lot of the families, like Martin Cahill’s, married into each other. The people of Hollyfield were bound together by a sense of loyalty and an utter contempt for authority – the ingredients that moulded Martin Cahill’s complex personality. He was happy in this strange underworld and had no desire to conform to the ways of the society beyond the walls that surrounded his domain. He often advised his people never to forget where they came from and to be proud of their roots.

Hollyfield was a breeding ground for outlaws. For most families crime was the principal source of income from which food and clothes were purchased for the children and porter bought in the few pubs that would serve the menfolk. By the end of the 1960s the Cahills and some of their neighbours were notorious. There was a constant stream of local boys being carted off to industrial schools or prison. By the time Martin came out of Daingean in 1967, he and his brothers, John, Eddie, Anthony, Michael and Paddy, had amassed a string of convictions.

The brothers became professional burglars and plagued the large houses in neighbouring districts. They were rarely seen out during the day. Cahill once compared Hollyfield at night to an anthill. ‘If you were looking down into Hollyfield from above at night you would see the ants moving out in all directions in search of the honey-pot.’ When Cahill looked across the table at the Royal Navy interview board and told them he was a very good burglar he was not lying. In fact he was one of the busiest ‘creepers’ ever to emerge in the Dublin underworld. Even when he hit the big time and began pulling multi-million-pound jobs he would still go out burgling or ‘mooching’.

In many ways Cahill was also a glorified Peeping Tom who liked rummaging around in people’s personal effects and watching what couples got up to when they forgot to draw the bedroom curtains. He often returned from a night foray grinning from ear to ear to relate to his pals the goings-on in the bedrooms of the big houses around Rathgar and Terenure. Cahill’s prurience almost cost him his life once when he decided to take a peek through the window of a down-town massage parlour. He shinned skilfully up a drainpipe to a second-floor window where he got a bird’s eye view of a client being entertained by a ‘masseuse’. Just before the climax of the show the rusted drainpipe crumpled under his weight. He was fortunate enough to tumble down onto a bundle of refuse sacks.

Cahill had an uncanny ability to fade into the background and sense danger. He could sit in a tree or lie under a bush watching his chosen house for hours before moving. He once advised an associate: ‘If you think that you can see everyone but they can’t see you, then you will be invisible.’ Cahill was often compared to an alley cat who knew every short cut and back lane on the southside of the city. Within a square mile of Hollyfield Buildings he had four houses which he used as landmarks. After a night of creeping he knew he was safe when he saw one of his ‘lighthouses’. Once inside the square-mile radius he would have no problem disappearing.

After a burglary Cahill invariably buried his loot. There was the story told about how he once went back to recover stuff he had hidden in a ditch in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham. The local detectives had got a whisper about where Cahill’s stash was and they lay in hiding, waiting for him to return. Cahill appeared and began walking towards the loot. A few yards from his haul he suddenly stopped as if he sensed the presence of the police. He began hissing, ‘Rats. I smell rats,’ and walked briskly away. The cops could only watch in amazement. Cahill decided to forget about the stash.

Like a squirrel, he sometimes forgot where he buried stuff. According to his former associates there is still fifteen stone in weight of silver hidden somewhere in the Dublin mountains. Cahill couldn’t remember where he buried it and spent months digging holes under bushes. On another occasion he buried jewellery on a site near Tallaght. When he eventually came back for it, the Council had begun building a dual carriageway on the spot. In a fit of rage Cahill robbed a digger and went to retrieve his loot. But, with the fields cleared, one end of a road looked the same as the other. He gave up in disgust.

At some time during the early eighties, when he was still living in Hollyfield, Cahill even burgled the Garda Technical Bureau at St John’s Road in Kilmainham, where confiscated illegal firearms were stored. He took a large number of handguns, grenades and a few machine-guns. The burglary was not discovered until much later, in September 1983, when the Bureau was in the process of moving to more secure premises in the Phoenix Park. According to Cahill’s associates he had paid a number of visits to the ‘gun store’.

The police authorities have never officially revealed what was taken, although it is known that some of the weapons were recovered by detectives after crimes committed by Cahill’s gang. In 1984 Cahill conjured up a bizarre plot to embarrass the police by attempting to plant some of the stolen guns in the homes of journalists Vincent Browne and Colm Toibín, both of whom were involved in Magill magazine. At the time the two journalists had impressive reputations for uncovering injustice and corruption in the upper echelons of society. In an interview with the Irish Times Cahill had openly accused the cops of trying to plant weapons on him. He reckoned that if guns were then found by the police in Browne’s and Toibín’s houses the media would believe that the two men had been set up by the cops in a bid to silence them. Cahill even went so far as to tip-off the cops anonymously. He thought that he would be believed and the police totally discredited. The absurd plan flopped and the guns were never planted. Cahill later had one of his associates hand over two of the weapons he stole to Irish Independent security correspondent Tom Brady. The associate claimed that the guns had been given to him by detectives who wanted him to plant them on Cahill.

In 1970 Cahill received a four-year sentence after he was found in possession of a haul of cigarettes which were part of a truckload stolen in Portlaoise and discovered in a lock-up garage in Rathmines. In jail he was a model prisoner and got on well with the warders. He decided that that was the only way to make his time bearable. When there was trouble on the landings he would go quietly into his cell and shut the door. He found making trouble inside pointless. Cahill told other hoods how he prepared himself psychologically for being locked up in a cell: ‘When the screws lock the door at night, remember that they are not locking you in, you are locking them out.’ Three years later he was released.

In those three years armed robberies had become widespread. In Dublin, robberies jumped from just five in 1969 to over 150 a year in the early seventies. The outbreak of the Northern troubles had seen a big increase in the availability of firearms. One of the city’s most formidable armed robbery gangs were the Dunnes, another large family of tearaway brothers from Crumlin. The Dunnes and the Cahills had got to know each other during stints in industrial schools and prison.

Henry Dunne was considered the most cold-blooded and efficient of all the ‘blaggers’, street slang for armed robbers. He had a talent for planning jobs. It was Henry who first began hitting security vans carrying large amounts of cash. There was little point in robbing one bank, he reasoned, when you could get the cash from ten in the back of a Ford van. All you had to do was watch, wait and then pounce. Crime was becoming a much more organised affair. In Martin Cahill, Dunne found a willing and able partner. The Dunnes were about to introduce the house-breakers from Hollyfield Buildings to armed crime.

The two groups provided the nucleus for a potent gang of robbers. On the Dunne side were Henry, Larry, Shamie and Christy ‘Bronco’, the head of the family; on the Cahill side, Martin, Eddie, Anthony, Paddy and John. The Dunnes were flash criminals who loved splashing out in nightclubs around town. The Cahills, especially Martin, were quiet and not fond of socialising. Cahill preferred to stay in his flat with his wife, Frances, and went out only to burgle houses. The arrangement between the two groups was purely business.

The Dunne-Cahill partnership did not last. After about a year, it split up over a row about the proceeds of a jewellery robbery. Some of the Dunne brothers were to retire from armed crime and move full time into drugs. The General and his brothers decided to go out on their own.

On 18 November, 1974, a security van collecting cash from the Quinnsworth store in Rathfarnham was hit. During the heist a security man was beaten over the head. The robbers got away with over £92,000 – the equivalent of almost £2.5 million in today’s money.

Within twenty-four hours, teams of detectives swooped in an early-morning raid on Hollyfield. They had warrants for the arrest of three residents – Martin and Eddie Cahill and their neighbour and future brother-in-law, Hughie Delaney. The man that arrested them was Detective Inspector Ned Ryan who had been appointed to the Rathmines district a year earlier. Ryan was determined to stamp out the crime epidemic emanating from Hollyfield Buildings. He and Martin Cahill had met during the investigation of another armed payroll robbery from a sign-making factory in Ranelagh and the two men had taken an instant dislike to each other. Ryan, a tough country cop, told Cahill that his days as an up-and-coming criminal were over and he would be ‘reduced to robbing grannies’ handbags’. He was the first policeman to identify Cahill’s potential to be a major gangster. The two men would remain sworn enemies for over sixteen years.