Cocaine Wars (36 page)

One of the most serious pipe bomb incidents took place on 27 January 2009, when a viable device was placed under the car belonging to Christina Dempsey, mother of Thompson's partner, Vicky, outside the family home on Stanaway Road in Crumlin.

The army bomb disposal unit was called to the scene and carried out a controlled explosion on the pipe bomb. The incident did not go down at all well with Thompson, who was obviously furious that the unwritten rule about leaving family and friends out of the feud had been broken.

Thompson and Vicky Dempsey have been going out since they were teenagers and have a young son. They have broken up on numerous occasions only to get back together.

People who know twenty-eight-year-old Vicky Dempsey say she is a decent sort who has absolutely no involvement in crime. The same cannot be said of Vicky's brother, Karl, who was jailed for seven years in July 2000, after being caught with over €60,000 worth of heroin in October 1998, when he was just twenty-one years old. Detective Garda Frank O'Neill from the Garda National Drugs Unit – one of the founding members of the Crumlin Drugs Unit – lifted him in The Mill shopping centre in Clondalkin. Dempsey had taken a black plastic bag out of his pocket and thrown it on the floor and attempted to run away. The bag contained 5 oz of heroin. In March 2002, CAB went to court and secured a judgment of €424,987 against Dempsey for failing to declare income tax. It was a serious hit to the pocket of the dealer, who had a number of cars and property throughout the city.

Karl Dempsey had started using his own product and became an addict, although he cleaned up his act when he was in prison and is now involved in the used car business. He is regarded as being quite close to Freddie Thompson. The Dempsey family is very close-knit. They were hit by a terrible tragedy on 19 August 2008, when twenty-six-year-old Lesley Dempsey committed suicide at his apartment in Clondalkin.

Lesley was not involved in crime and was a sensitive young man. His tragic suicide was a massive blow to the whole Dempsey family. Freddie Thompson flew home from Spain to attend the massive funeral. On the first anniversary of his death a big ‘do' took place in Lesley Dempsey's honour at the Green Isle Hotel in Newlands Cross. It was attended by major gangland figures from across the city and whole country, who were all there to pay their respects. Gardaí kept a discreet eye on the party to see if Freddie Thompson would come back from Spain for it. He didn't but is believed to have donated a sizeable sum towards Suicide Awareness. €100,000 is thought to have been raised that night. Gardaí kept a close eye on the party but it passed off peacefully.

Probably the most successful year that Gardaí have had in taking the feuding gangsters off the streets to serve long stretches behind bars was 2009. Eric Wansboro was a case in point. Born on 13 February 1988, Wansboro was a gifted boxer who represented Ireland and had been national amateur champion in his weight division. He was perhaps talented enough to progress to professional level. However, he suffered a hand injury when he turned eighteen, which put an end to his promising career and he started to go off the rails. He quickly slipped into a life of cocaine and alcohol abuse. Although Wansboro became a parent, this wasn't enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. He joined the army as a private after his injury, but the disciplined life of a soldier didn't suit him. Wansboro was constantly in trouble with the Gardaí, and was often absent without leave from the army. Wansboro was brought up in Crumlin and although he lived in Rivervalley in Swords, he socialised in Crumlin. He was a member of the Rattigan gang, though he was really only used to do the gang's dirty work, and was never really a trusted lieutenant. Wansboro really began to feature in the feud in 2008. On 13 March that year, he was arrested on Balfe Road in Walkinstown, after a member of the public reported that two cars were involved in a high-speed chase, and that shots had been fired by the occupants of one vehicle. The witness subsequently found two spent shotgun cartridges, which he handed in to Crumlin Garda Station. It is not known who the intended target was. Wansboro was released without charge. Military Police officials arrested him on 25 March. He was taken into custody at McKee Barracks after being absent without leave for two months. Three days after his arrest, he appeared before a court martial and was fined fifty-nine days' pay. He was then ordered to remain in soldiers' accommodation in the barracks for ten days. He didn't waste much time sneaking out of his room though, and scaled the wall of the barracks to freedom. Gardaí were immediately alerted. Quick-thinking detectives in Crumlin combed Wansboro's known haunts, and arrested him a day after his bid for freedom. He was returned to the custody of the Military Police. In early April 2008, Wansboro paid €300 to buy himself out of his army contract, and there is little doubt that the army was glad to see the back of him, especially considering the public embarrassment he had caused them. Gardaí had serious concerns that army intelligence had failed to note that Wansboro's name was regularly materialising in intelligence reports as being heavily involved in the Crumlin/ Drimnagh feud. Wansboro was not the only soldier who was involved in gangland activity. Gardaí and the Defence Forces are aware of at least five incidents over the last few years, where serving soldiers had been approached by organised crime gangs looking for help in carrying out armed robberies and other criminal acts. The high levels of training in firearms and other military techniques make soldiers particularly attractive for criminals, and Wansboro was a good example. He was only out of the army a matter of days when he was again arrested by Gardaí. On 9 April, he was questioned on suspicion of firing two blasts from a shotgun into a house in Crumlin. Four days later, he was also arrested after allegedly firing shots through the window of an associate of Freddie Thompson after words were exchanged in a pub in Dublin 8. Nobody was injured in either incident, but because he had become such a key player in the feud, Gardaí placed him under constant surveillance. This paid off on 19 August when Detective Inspector Peter O'Boyle, who had been a Detective Sergeant in Crumlin at the time of Declan Gavin's murder but had since been promoted and transferred to Ballyfermot, received confidential information about Eric Wansboro and the proposed delivery of a gun.

Garda Padraig O'Meara stopped a taxi at Ruby Finnegan's pub on Sarsfield Road in Ballyfermot. Wansboro was searched and a 9mm revolver was found hidden in his sock and four rounds of ammunition were found in his jacket pocket. The revolver had originally been a starting gun but had been reconstructed so that it could be fired as a conventional gun. Wansboro had only been holding the gun for the Rattigan mob and was due to hand it over to another gang member when he was nabbed by Gardaí. Gardaí arrested gang member Joey Redmond close to the pub at the same time as Wansboro, but detectives swooped before the handover took place. Joey Redmond was arrested and questioned, but was subsequently released without charge. Wansboro was immediately charged, and because of the seriousness of the offence, was remanded in custody, which was a major boost for Gardaí, because he had been causing them so much trouble over the previous few months. In October 2009, Wansboro appeared before Dublin Circuit Criminal Court and was handed a four-year sentence for possession of the firearm after he pleaded guilty. He was also charged with a serious assault that took place on O'Connell Street in May 2007, in which the victim suffered serious facial injuries. Wansboro had used his boxing skills to knock a man to the ground, after words were exchanged between two groups, and proceeded to kick him while he lay helpless. He was jailed for two years for that assault, but the sentence was to run concurrently with his firearms sentence. It was his twenty-first criminal conviction.

In July 2009, the Rattigan gang was dealt yet another hammer blow when Shane Maloney, a close friend of Rattigan, was jailed for ten years, after being arrested with €1.2 million worth of heroin at the Palmerstown Shopping Centre on 13 August 2008. Maloney, from Drimnagh Road, had driven to Abrakebabra in his own car on the night that Declan Gavin was murdered. Maloney pleaded guilty to the possession of the drugs for sale or supply. He had been caught on the hop by Gardaí, carrying the product, after the person who was meant to pick up the drugs pulled out at the last minute. Members of the Organised Crime Unit, led by former Crumlin Detective Garda Ronan Lafferty, had received a tip-off that drugs were being moved and watched from a discreet distance as Maloney parked his car outside the shopping centre and took a bag from the back seat of a car that was parked nearby. Gardaí swooped when Maloney returned to his own car. The officers saw two brown packages in the passenger seat of his car and more packages in the back. Resigned to his fate, he said: ‘It's only brown,' meaning heroin. When he was arrested the twenty-seven-year-old refused to comment during a series of interviews. At his court appearance his barrister said that Maloney came from a decent family and regretted his involvement. The barrister added that Maloney was making the best of a bad situation and had started studying in prison. The conviction was his eighty-fifth.

Although Gardaí were getting some notable collars, they were still fighting an almost impossible battle, because the new generation of criminals was so prolific in causing mayhem. On 24 February, ‘Mad Dog' and one of his minions were arrested after one of them got out of a car on Sperrin Road in Drimnagh, and fired five shotgun rounds through the front window of a house. Young members of the Rattigan gang were in the house and managed to run out to the back garden and flee without anybody being injured. On the same day, the house that had once belonged to a young relation of Noel and John Roche had windows damaged. The members of the Thompson gang didn't realise that their target hadn't lived in the house for years. Three days later, there was retaliation from the Rattigan side, when the family home of ‘Mad Dog' had windows damaged and a car parked in the front garden was also vandalised. The tit-for-tat petty attacks continued. Later the same day, the house on Sperrin Road that had been shot at a few days before had windows damaged by the Thompson mob, while the home of a Thompson gang member was attacked causing damage to the windows. On 28 February, the same house was shot up and five shotgun cartridges were recovered. ‘Mad Dog' was detained, along with three of his junior cronies, but the homeowner refused to make a statement to Gardaí. There were dozens of petty attacks like this throughout the first three months of 2009. The young criminals were causing a nuisance to Gardaí more than anything else, but nevertheless, they were regularly discharging firearms, which was obviously potentially very dangerous and a massive challenge to Gardaí trying to police Crumlin and Drimnagh.

The older feuding criminals had long since stopped smashing windows – when they struck they meant business and went armed with firearms. The youngsters hadn't been educated to this extent yet. On 7 March, four or five young men from the Rattigan gang tried to break into Graham Whelan's home on Clonard Road in Crumlin. They shouted from outside the front door that they were there to kill the drug dealer. Armed with lump hammers, they smashed glass in the front door and windows, but couldn't force their way into the house – luckily for Whelan. They escaped in a silver Renault Megane. On the same day, a silver Megane pulled up outside a house on Dolphin Road in Drimnagh, and a number of men got out armed with lump hammers. The men proceeded to smash up three cars that were parked in one front garden. They obviously took the fact that they couldn't get to Graham Whelan out on the cars. Over the next two days, the same Renault Megane was seen ferrying young men around the area. Several more vehicles were damaged and four more houses were shot up. Again, it was the next generation of criminals trying to make their mark.

Although Gardaí had their hands full trying to investigate these dozens of relatively minor incidents, detectives would soon have much bigger problems on their hands. Not as big as Brian Rattigan though. By July 2009, his gang would effectively be permanently broken up. Rattigan would be finally facing his day of reckoning over Declan Gavin's murder, over eight years previously. Rattigan's fate was in the hands of a jury of twelve who had the power to decide his future. If they believed that he was responsible for Declan Gavin's murder, he would be facing life in prison. If they didn't, then he would be a free man in just a few short years. It was a prospect that Gardaí in Crumlin didn't even want to contemplate.

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2009, Brian Rattigan's murder trial for the stabbing to death of Declan Gavin in August 2001 finally got under way at Dublin's Central Criminal Court. Rattigan had done everything possible to stop the trial ever going ahead. He was in and out of the High Court and Supreme Court, on dozens of occasions, filing applications to have the charges dismissed because of negative media coverage or the fact that several of the witnesses that he had planned to call had died. It was all to no avail though, and on 13 January, he arrived at the court to face a jury of twelve of his peers who would decide whether or not he was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

From the beginning, Gardaí had severe trouble in trying to get witnesses, who had given statements in 2001, to go to court and repeat in public what they had seen. A lot of the reluctance stemmed from the fact that many witnesses were very young when Declan Gavin was murdered; they had since moved on with their lives and didn't want the past dragged up again. However, in a lot of cases there was a more sinister explanation. There is no doubt that many people scheduled to give evidence were intimidated and threatened that if they turned up in court, there would be repercussions. Several people went to Gardaí and informally told them that they had been approached by associates of Rattigan, but everyone was too scared to make statements. As a result, the long list of good witnesses that Gardaí had – the number of people that could actually be counted on to speak out in open court – started to shrink. The Crime Task Force at Crumlin was tasked with delivering the thirty-seven civilian witness orders. It was a nightmare job with many of the witnesses ducking and diving from the Gardaí and refusing to take possession of the subpoenas. By the first day of the trial, thirty-one orders had been served and six were outstanding. The case was to be heard in front of experienced trial judge Barry White. One of the first things the judge did was to issue six bench warrants for the arrests of the no-show witnesses.

In the course of the trial Gardaí arrested four of the six witnesses for contempt of court and brought them before Judge White. Three of them said that they couldn't remember the events of the night of the Declan Gavin murder because of the length of time that had elapsed and could no longer stand over their original statements. The judge accepted their stories and purged their contempt. The fourth man brought before the court was present outside Abrakebabra before Gavin was stabbed. David Byrne was a cousin of Freddie Thompson and a close friend of ‘Deco' Gavin. He had been arrested in May 2007 as part of the Gary Bryan murder investigation because his phone had been in regular contact with Graham Whelan's mobile just before Bryan was shot dead. Detectives regarded him as being heavily involved in Thompson's gang. He had been the intended target of a shooting in June 2002 for which Aidan Gavin had been arrested but never charged. After the Gavin murder David Byrne had given Gardaí a detailed statement about the events of the night and told them he had been chatting to Gavin just before he was stabbed. When he was arrested and brought before the court, he said he could remember nothing about the night of the murder and was generally very unco-operative. Judge White was less than impressed and said that a spell behind bars might help Byrne remember. It didn't, and after a couple of days in Mountjoy Byrne was back in court, still claiming amnesia regarding his friend's death. He was sent back to prison and remained locked up for contempt for the duration of the trial.

Opening the case for the prosecution, Senior Counsel Edward Comyn called the incident outside Abrakebabra a ‘targeted attack'. He went on to say that a lot of young people had been gathered outside the restaurant and ‘a body of credible evidence will emerge from their descriptions'. He went into detail about Shane Maloney's Nissan Micra pulling up outside with three or four young men inside.

‘A passenger got out of the car. He had a sort of balaclava on his head, had a large knife in one of his hands. It appears that people in the car were shouting “Get him, get the rat,” Comyn said, before adding that the shouting ‘seems to show there was some malice toward somebody outside Abrakebabra. It is the prosecution's case that that person was Declan Gavin.' Comyn said that Brian Rattigan ‘ran at Mr Gavin and attacked him. The evidence will show you that the first blow was to the arm and that the second blow struck the chest, deep enough to reach into his heart, which ultimately proved fatal.' The barrister said that blood found on the front window of Abrakebabra and to the left of the front door would be of ‘particular significance' in the trial.

During the first few days of the trial, several witnesses were called and spoke about their memories of the night in question. Brian Rattigan was present in court and listened intently to the evidence, as did a large number of journalists. Dinah Rattigan attended the trial every day along with her sister. Mark Skerritt, who had hit the person who stabbed Gavin with a golf club, took to the stand on the second day of the trial. He spoke of the original row outside the ‘chipper' and said, ‘There was a lot of tension going on.' He then described how a Nissan Micra pulled up outside Abrakebabra. ‘It looked like there was a few in it. It pulled in like a taxi pulling in to pick someone up.' He then ‘heard a scream' from the Micra, ‘they screamed “rat”', he added. ‘All of a sudden there was a fella running with a balaclava on... He had a knife... It was big. When he got out of the car, everybody scattered. He was running with a knife in his hand. He was running for someone. He was running around like he was looking for someone. He found the fella he was looking for and Declan Gavin was on the ground, stabbed like.' Skerritt continued that the man in the balaclava ‘ran towards him and stabbed him. I don't know where, in the chest I think.'

Skerritt then described how he ‘grabbed a golf club off one of the young fellas and chased the guy. I hit him a couple of times in the shoulders and head as he was getting into the car.' After the Nissan Micra pulled away, Declan Gavin was on the ground. ‘He was pale white, blood all over him.'

A young woman gave evidence about meeting Declan Gavin in the queue in the ‘chipper'. ‘I hadn't seen him in a few years. We talked for about ten minutes. He was in grand form; he was real relaxed.' She added: ‘Declan said he'd pay for the food.'

Another woman, who had gone to the assistance of Gavin in the kitchen of the ‘chipper', swore under oath that she ‘can't remember a thing about that night'. ‘It's all a blur to me,' she said. She said that she knew about what happened to Declan Gavin ‘from the newspapers'. She did manage to get over her amnesia for a time though, and said that she saw Gavin go into Abrakebabra and that people were ‘screaming his name'. She heard that he was hurt and she and a friend assisted him by putting toilet roll on his chest wound. Other witnesses gave evidence about not remembering anything of the events which took place on the night of the murder.

After this, the trial went into legal argument in the absence of the jury for four days. Senior Counsel for the defence, Brendan Grehan, had made an application to have the case dismissed after claiming that there was not enough evidence to sustain the murder charge. This meant that all the evidence in the case had to be heard by the judge before it could be put before the jury. In any event, Judge White agreed that the trial should proceed, but during this legal argument, the Achilles heel of the state's case against Rattigan came out. This was the decision by Gardaí from the Technical Bureau not to take a sample of blood from the fingerprint left by Rattigan on the exterior door of Abrakebabra, instead taking a sample of blood splatter four inches below. With hindsight it was a serious mistake, and left the defence an angle to argue that nobody knew for sure if it was Declan Gavin's blood in the middle of Rattigan's fingermark.

After the trial resumed, Detective Sergeant Joe O'Hara spoke about arresting Brian Rattigan for the murder and of Rattigan saying that he had ‘the wrong person' and that he had done nothing wrong. ‘I am a nobody.' O'Hara also told of how a doctor had examined Rattigan and had found ‘no physical injury of note', which was at odds with what Mark Skerritt had said about hitting the person who stabbed Gavin with a golf club about the shoulders and head. Detective Superintendent Dominic Hayes told of how Rattigan had claimed he was with a married woman whose ‘fella was away' on the night of the murder. When Hayes had asked Rattigan who the woman was, so she could give him an alibi, Rattigan responded: ‘No f***ing way, you can find her for yourself.' Dominic Hayes also spoke about putting it to Rattigan that a lot of people witnessed the stabbing that night and said Rattigan answered him with, ‘They can say what they like, but they will have to say it all in court.' It seems that Brian Rattigan was prophetic in that respect. People were reluctant to speak up when it came to the crunch. Rattigan's defence counsel, Brendan Grehan, also put it to Hayes that his client had ‘no recollection' of saying that he had not been to Abrakebabra for four months before the murder. The Detective Superintendent responded: ‘His replies were noted. He agreed they were correct.'

The trial then moved on to the forensic evidence against the accused. Detective Garda Christopher O'Connor told the court that he had fourteen years' experience with the fingerprint section of the Garda Technical Bureau and noticed ‘a mark in what appeared to be blood' on the exterior of the window to the left of the front door. He used a developing agent of grey powder to develop an area around the mark, which was photographed by Detective Garda Caroline Hughes. Detective Garda O'Connor said that he then compared the mark with a set of fingerprints taken from Brian Rattigan on 22 November 2001, and ‘formed the opinion that the mark found on the window is the same as the set of prints bearing the name Brian Rattigan'. He said that he found ‘twelve features of comparison' in both. He continued his evidence by describing how he compared a mark on the exterior of the door, above the door handles; he had compared it to Brian Rattigan's fingerprints, and formed the opinion that the prints were the same. Of the twenty-one prints found on the door and window that night, all except two had been matched.

On Friday 6 February, the prosecution finished presenting its case, leaving the way clear for the defence to present evidence. Brendan Grehan took to his feet and announced that Brian Rattigan wasn't mounting any defence. Grehan is a master legal operator – maybe the best in the country. Grehan formulated a very unusual and bold strategy by instructing the jury that Brian Rattigan had been in custody since 15 February 2003, and was serving cumulative sentences of thirteen years with one year suspended. It was a remarkable tactic. One can only assume that Grehan and his client were playing the honesty card with the jury by admitting that Rattigan was involved in criminality, and thought that this honesty would make the jury think that, if he willingly told them that he was in prison, maybe he hadn't murdered Declan Gavin. Whatever the reason, it was almost unprecedented, and in many ways it was a masterstroke and really served to muddy the waters. This had senior Gardaí incredibly worried.

On 9 February, both sides began their summing-up evidence for the jury. Senior Counsel Pauline Walley summed up the prosecution's case. She told the jury: ‘The knife-man was Mr Rattigan for very simple reasons. You can be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt because his marks were found on the window beside the door. The marks were found in places central to the movement of the injured man, bleeding, trying to get in the door of Abrakebabra.' She said that after Rattigan was interviewed by Gardaí, eleven days after the murder, he had claimed that he had not been to Abrakebabra for four months. ‘You know that that is a huge and whopping great lie, because, nine days before the alleged murder, the glass of the window was changed. If Mr Rattigan was telling the truth and was not there for four months how could his palm mark be there on the window?' Walley asked.

She said that the mark was found four inches above an area from which a swab of blood was taken, which was later matched to Mr Gavin. ‘Although the swab was taken below the mark, you can infer the blood at the mark was Mr Gavin's.'

Brendan Grehan, in summing up the defence's case, said that ‘the most striking thing about this case... is the lack of evidence. Ms Walley omits the fact that seventeen other prints were found there, never identified. When you look at the evidence in this case, be very sceptical of what has been served up to you.'

Grehan returned to the decision to inform the jury of the fact that Rattigan was currently serving a lengthy prison sentence. He said that this was necessary because Rattigan had been ‘surrounded by three burly prison officers' during the trial and this fact must have ‘struck' the jury. He said that Rattigan displayed ‘a total lack of co-operation or respect for the Gardaí' when he was interviewed about the murder, and added: ‘Mr Rattigan is no angel. I don't pretend he is. Nor does he.'

Grehan also brought up the delay in bringing the case to court, saying his client ‘has been available for charge since February 2003, but here you are told by Ms Walley that they have an open-and-shut case with the benefit of forensic science'. Grehan said that ‘key evidence the prosecution sought to rely on simply collapsed in on itself – the suggestion that the swab of blood taken from the print at the scene matched to Mr Rattigan and the blood DNA matched to Mr Gavin. The swab didn't come from the mark at all. It was taken from somewhere below the mark.' This meant the prosecution ‘cannot prove it is blood'. Grehan said that it could even be ‘tomato sauce', that they simply did not know. He said that this was not evidence on which the jury could be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt, and that the prosecution had failed to forensically link the print to Declan Gavin. Grehan added that this created a reasonable doubt and therefore the jury must find in favour of his client and return a not guilty verdict.'