Gangster (28 page)

Gilligan looked as if he had prepared for the worst, trying not to allow the judge’s scathing remarks about Warren, Bowden and Dunne to lift his spirits. ‘The Court recognises the danger of convicting an accused person on the uncorroborated evidence of an accomplice, and that principle has been to the forefront of the mind of the Court when considering the evidence tendered by Messrs Dunne, Bowden and Warren,’ he read.

Gilligan hadn’t anticipated that his case would be assisted by the strict application of the law. But as Judge O’Donovan continued to read the verdict, the unbearable realisation that nothing was going according to plan began to dawn on the police. As the judge continued to read, the gaping holes that were the hallmarks of the prosecution’s case were exposed. The judge criticised the return of cash seized from the supergrass witnesses. Bowden and Warren, the star witnesses who had milked the gardaí for all they could get, became liabilities. The court described them both as liars.

Then, in a kind of apocalyptic message from the court, Gilligan was found guilty of the drug-related charges because Dunne’s evidence had been corroborated.

By now, Gilligan was staring at a fake skylight affixed to the ceiling in an act of defiance against the verdict which Judge O’Donovan continued to read aloud. Then he heard he was acquitted of importing weapons. He looked around to see if his mind was playing tricks on him. It wasn’t; he had beaten the weapons charge because the gardaí had not documented evidence found in the office unit at Harold’s Cross when they first raided it. If Baltus had testified, this outcome may have been different.

Now he waited to hear whether he was a murderer, which just about everyone listening presumed he was.

The judge continued to read the verdict, which further highlighted the glaring disparities in Warren’s evidence. In reality, Gilligan knew he was already going to jail once the verdict was delivered, but beating the murder charge was personal. The drama continued to unfold.

The judges correctly proclaimed that the finger of suspicion could easily be pointed at Traynor. ‘The only evidence which could possibly implicate John Gilligan in the murder of the late Veronica Guerin was that of Russell Warren,’ the judge said. Then the judge announced that this evidence was simply unreliable: ‘He contradicted evidence which he had previously given at the trial of Brian Meehan. In the light of the foregoing, bearing in mind that at all stages during a criminal trial an accused person has, at law, the presumption of innocence and remains at all times throughout an innocent person unless and until that presumption is displaced at the end of the trial by a finding based on evidence which is either reliable testimony, circumstantial evidence or a reasonable inference drawn from established facts that person is, indeed, guilty as charged beyond any reasonable doubt; while this Court has grave suspicions that John Gilligan was complicit in the murder of the late Veronica Guerin, the Court has not been persuaded beyond all reasonable doubt by the evidence which has been adduced by the prosecution that that is so and, therefore, the Court is required by law to acquit the accused on that charge.’

No sooner had Judge O’Donovan finished delivering his verdict than the entire court turned and looked directly at Gilligan, waiting for him to say something. Nobody could tell if he was upset or elated. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he could think of nothing to say.

The prison guards brought him back to his senses when they asked him to walk back down to his cell for ten minutes, while the court adjourned to deliver an appropriate sentence.

By the time he returned, he had grasped the importance of the decision. He now addressed the court as a drug dealer and not a convicted murderer or, as he had dreaded, Veronica Guerin’s murderer. And he had Russell Warren to thank for it. What neither Gilligan nor anyone else could have foreseen was that Warren, one of Gilligan’s collaborators, would secure his acquittal because he lived in a state of self-delusion. By trying to convince the court that he didn’t know Guerin was going to be murdered, he invariably lied and further implicated himself, while distancing Gilligan from the conspiracy. In the end, it boiled down to his version of what Gilligan had said when he called immediately after the murder. Its contents had not been corroborated.

Judge O’Donovan spoke in a much sterner voice when he returned. He looked Gilligan directly in the eye, saying he had ‘grave suspicions’ that he was involved in the murder.

Gilligan, however, took no notice as the judge attacked him for causing a haemorrhage of harm, saying he had shown insatiable greed and no remorse. ‘Never in the history of the State has one person been responsible for so much wretchedness to so many,’ the judge declared.

Gilligan himself looked chuffed. He turned to me, winked and then smiled. Seconds later he was momentarily taken aback when the judge imposed a 28-year sentence, but he soon regained his composure and was led away.

Epilogue

Although Gilligan was acquitted of Guerin’s murder and the firearms charge, his conviction on the drug-trafficking charge sealed his fate. He probably took some comfort in the fact that having beaten the murder charge, he had become the ultimate anti-hero. Yet there was no escaping the reality that he would probably spend most of his remaining life behind bars in the maximum-security wing of Portlaoise Prison.

Gilligan may have smiled when the court delivered its sentence, as if he didn’t care, but the truth was that he did. The imposition of a 28-year sentence meant life. He understood the reality of his situation better than anyone. It was this belated realisation, more than anything else, that he found impossible to accept or comprehend.

When he returned to his cell in Portlaoise Prison after the trial had ended, he returned not just as a convicted prisoner but as someone facing life. Although he was greeted by a round of applause from some of the inmates, inside he was falling apart. How would he cope?

To this end, he devised a strategy to give his life purpose. It involved mounting every conceivable type of legal challenge against the State. His first move, and one which proved to be of the utmost importance, was an immediate appeal against his conviction and another against the severity of his sentence. He also vowed to fight the Criminal Assets Bureau on every point of law imaginable.

His entire life, Gilligan had been a committed criminal, someone who fought the criminal justice system at every turn and with every weapon available to him. According to those who know him, this plan was as much to keep him mentally occupied as it was to secure his freedom. Gilligan needed to believe that there was hope; that he could somehow win his freedom. Challenging the State and its agents in the gardaí, the CAB and the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions would give him focus, something to keep his mind occupied, while he settled into a long sentence.

It didn’t take long for the inevitable to happen. Although Gilligan had committed himself to fighting his case in a legal manner, he found it almost impossible to comprehend the sentence that had been imposed on him. This anger manifested itself in an attack on two prison officers whom he threatened to kill after he asked if he could use the prison tuck shop. In accordance with procedure, Gilligan was immediately moved from his own cell and held for three days in solitary confinement. As punishment, he lost two months’ privileges and 14 days of remission. He was later charged with this offence and sentenced to a further two years behind bars. It was, by any standards, a bad start to his new life in Portlaoise Prison.

When his prison regime returned to normal, he recommitted himself to challenging his convictions as well as moves by the State to strip him of his wealth once again.

He believed the most important of these challenges was his appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeal against his conviction and the severity of his sentence. If he could identify a point of law which the judges in the Special Criminal Court had failed to take recognition of, he believed it might be possible to secure a retrial. If this were to happen, Gilligan knew his chances of beating all the charges against him would be good. He had seen the State’s case and knew its weaknesses.

The two cases were heard separately and the first to come before the Court of Criminal Appeal was the challenge against his conviction, which was heard in August 2003.

It came as a surprise to few that his argument was not accepted, however, he was more fortunate when his legal team argued against the 28-year sentence the Special Criminal Court had imposed the following November. The appeal court agreed with many of Gilligan’s claims and expressed its concern that when imposing the sentence, the judges who presided over his trial had erred in principle ‘in not restricting itself to the individual charges which were proved’. In other words, Gilligan had been sentenced for a murder that he had been acquitted of. The appeal court ruled the sentence was disproportionate and reduced it by eight years. This was a mammoth victory and Gilligan could not help but smile when the appeal court delivered its verdict. Having spent two years in prison, this was welcome news.

The drama didn’t stop there, however. Michael O’Higgins, his barrister, said he would be making an application to have points of law arising from the case referred to the Supreme Court on grounds that they raised points of law of exceptional public importance. This case was heard in July 2006 by the Supreme Court but this time Gilligan’s argument was rejected.

While the appeal may have cut eight years off his sentence, it still left him with 12-18 years to serve. But this was better than 28 years behind bars. For the moment, Gilligan had no choice but to deal with the situation in which he found himself.

Gilligan wasn’t the only one to appeal his conviction. Some of those convicted as part of the Guerin murder investigation lodged and successfully won their appeals. The most notable of these was the case of Paul Ward, who had been convicted of Guerin’s murder in 1998 after the Special Criminal Court accepted evidence that he had disposed of the pistol and the motorcycle used in the killing. That evidence would, however, prove to be unreliable and his conviction was accordingly quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal. Ward had always protested his innocence of the murder.

Eugene Patrick ‘Dutchy’ Holland, the aging drug dealer whom a garda had named in court as the man responsible for firing the shots that killed Guerin, was released from prison in April 2006 after serving 9 years of his 12-year sentence for drug dealing. Holland’s release from prison became something of a media circus. He was invited to appear on an Irish television chat show but his appearance was later cancelled.

The day after his release, he flew to Italy from where he gave interviews in an effort to prove that he was not the killer. But Holland didn’t manage to stay out of trouble for long after his release. In May 2008, he was sentenced to eight years in prison by Blackfriars Crown Court in London for his role in a plot to kidnap a businessman and hold him to ransom for IR£10 million.

Brian Meehan, the man whose loyalty to Gilligan was absolute, was deservedly less fortunate. His appeal against his conviction for Guerin’s murder failed. He remains a convicted killer and is being held in Portlaoise Prison.

It could be argued that the supergrass witnesses fared the best. Charles Bowden, the former soldier with training in firearms, was released from Arbour Hill prison in 2001 after his duties as a protected witness were discharged. He was given a new name and relocated abroad. He was never heard from again. Russell Warren and John Dunne received the same treatment. Warren was released from prison in 2001 after giving evidence against Gilligan. Like Bowden, he was given money and a new identity to build a life abroad upon his release.

Gilligan never really lost hope that he might discover a legal technicality on which to mount a successful appeal. Although he enjoyed success in the Court of Criminal Appeal, his tussles with the Criminal Assets Bureau were more complex and protracted. Gilligan literally fought the bureau on every conceivable ground. His attempts to retain what was left of his wealth knew no bounds.

In July 2007, his enemies in Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in Britain finally seized the £296,000 they had found in his case as he was attempting to leave London for Amsterdam in October 1996. Eleven years after this money was seized, a judge sitting at Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court in London finally ordered its confiscation.

Gilligan fared much better in his attempts to confront the one unit that had become his nemesis, the Criminal Assets Bureau. Since his incarceration, the two sides had been engaged in a prolonged battle, which culminated in a court case in the High Court in Dublin in January 2008. The CAB moved to appoint a receiver to the Jessbrook Equestrian Centre, the two houses his children owned in Lucan and the original family home in Corduff Avenue in Blanchardstown. The High Court had previously found that the properties had been bought with the proceeds of crime but this was appealed.

On the occasion of the court case, Gilligan decided to address the court himself. At first, the decision appeared to be a foolish one, but it did allow Gilligan to say what he wanted to the court. And never one to miss an opportunity in front of an audience, Gilligan did something uncharacteristic. He used the opportunity to say that Traynor ‘had Veronica Guerin murdered’ but he had ‘nothing to do with it’. In an hour-long address to the High Court, Gilligan said the only reason he was facing the receivership action by the bureau was because of Guerin’s murder, which he described as ‘horrible’. The case was heard by Justice Kevin Feeney, who repeatedly asked Gilligan to stick to the case before the court, but Gilligan wouldn’t remain silent.

‘John Traynor had Veronica Guerin murdered. He [Traynor] said to me he stole Brian Meehan’s telephone . . .’

Gilligan had never speculated on who killed Veronica or why. His proclamation that Traynor could have been the killer took many by surprise. Even though it was clear that Traynor had some type of relationship with the gardaí, Gilligan had never commented on the rumour. Naming Traynor as the likely killer in court also bolstered Meehan’s chances of a second appeal because he was the only person who remains convicted of the journalist’s murder and the location of his mobile phone on the day of the killing had been crucial to his conviction.

By representing himself at the trial, Gilligan had once again engineered a situation where he could say what he wanted, this time about his former partner Traynor, who is still at large.

What does the future hold for Gilligan? The gangster remains the biggest drug trafficker to emerge from the Irish underworld. The mention of his name still carries influence with criminals and the big crime families in almost every part of Ireland. There is no doubt that Gilligan is still a force to be reckoned with.

What few people realise is that his release date is fast approaching. Gilligan is likely to be released back into society around 2013 unless he is convicted of another crime. He has said that he plans to return to the council house in Blanchardstown in west Dublin upon his release and spend the rest of his days there. But few believe him. There is no doubt that Gilligan remains a millionaire and will have access to a fortune when he is eventually freed. The whereabouts of his hidden fortune is probably known only to him but few doubt its existence.

As for the memory of the late Veronica Guerin, her legacy remains very much alive to this day. The journalist’s death had a powerful impact on the people of Ireland, who remember her as the journalist who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth. For this, Veronica Guerin will never be forgotten.