Crooks 2, p.1
Crooks 2, page 1
ALSO BY PAUL WILLIAMS
Crooks
Gilligan
The Monk
Almost the Perfect Murder
Murder Inc.
Badfellas
Crime Wars
The Untouchables
Crimelords
Evil Empire
Gangland
Secret Love (ghostwriter)
The General
Paul Williams is Ireland’s leading crime writer and one of its most respected journalists. For over three decades his courageous and ground-breaking investigative work has won him multiple awards. He is the author of thirteen previous bestselling books and has also researched, written and presented a number of major TV crime series. His first book, The General, was adapted for the award-winning movie of the same name by John Boorman. He is a former presenter on Newstalk Breakfast and currently writes for the Irish Independent. Williams holds an MA in Criminology and is a registered member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists based in Washington, DC.
First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2025 by Paul Williams
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To the many extraordinary and inspiring people
who trusted me to tell their stories.
And to my dear friend Joe Duffy, the voice of the
people. The best president Ireland never had.
CONTENTS
Prologue: Grooming a New Generation
CHAPTER ONE:
Shooting the Messengers
CHAPTER TWO:
Exposing the Church’s Dirty Secrets
CHAPTER THREE:
Tracking Down the Pimpernel of International Organized Crime
CHAPTER FOUR:
Revealing ‘Mr Big’
CHAPTER FIVE:
Mikey Kelly – the Gangster Politician
CHAPTER SIX:
Exposing Gangland’s Jimmy Savile
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Accidental Hero and the Terror of Murder Inc.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
Murdering the Innocent, a Hero’s Stand and the Mob’s Downfall
CHAPTER NINE:
The Anglo Tapes and the Crime of the Century
CHAPTER TEN:
An Army Reservist, Training a Terrorist and Joining the Rangers
Epilogue: Full Circle
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
GROOMING A NEW GENERATION
The two detectives stopped and searched the thirteen-year-old boy as he walked through the desolate Limerick ghetto that the gangs had claimed as their territory. The mob had embarked on their version of social engineering, using intimidation and violence to force decent people out of their homes as they turned the area into an open lawless prison for the remaining inhabitants, especially the kids.
I stood in the background with a baseball cap pulled down tight around my head to prevent being spotted and causing all hell to break loose. Other members of the four-member squad, who were covering their colleagues with machine guns, also wore baseball caps so I didn’t stand out. I was there to do a fly-on-the-wall feature as part of my coverage of the longest, most brutal gang war in Irish criminal history.
The heavily armed cops were members of a specialist team sent from Dublin to break the grip of Limerick’s notorious Murder Inc. mob. It was a cold morning in February 2009 at the height of the madness that had engulfed the city.
The cops suspected the young lad was one of the gang’s low level street dealers. He was wearing the uniform of a teenage foot soldier: new designer tracksuit, hoodie and runners. There was no way that his parents could afford to buy the expensive gear for him. He was also supposed to be in school that morning. His parents probably didn’t care about what he was up to.
The search proved negative. The kid had nothing on him.
I watched as the detectives tried to engage with the shifty teenager. Part of the unit’s policing strategy was attempting to reach out to the small army of youngsters the gang groomed and then forced to do their dirty work. The kids were being used to distribute drugs, move guns, carry out arson attacks, throw bombs and even kill.
I was witnessing a microcosm of a sociological disaster, a new phenomenon in the world of organized crime – how throughout Ireland impressionable, vulnerable children, mainly boys, were being groomed and enslaved by dangerous gangsters in much the same way predatory paedophiles select their victims. Since the boom in the drug trade in the late 1990s gangs have realized the value of using kids, some as young as ten. Within the criminal hierarchy immature foot soldiers are at the bottom of the food chain and are exploitable, dispensable assets.
Children living in deprived estates across the country are routinely seduced into crime with the offer of riches and a hedonistic lifestyle. Many of them come from already chaotic, dysfunctional family situations that include drugs, petty crime and mental health issues. They are invariably allowed to run wild and have problems at school. Some suffer from undiagnosed disorders such as ADHD and autism making them particularly vulnerable. Others come from decent families but are lured away from their hard-pressed parents who cannot afford the luxuries on offer in the gangster’s paradise. There is also the immature perception that being part of a gang means that ordinary people are afraid of them. These children are easily manipulated. Once they have been sucked into the vortex and it is too late, they find themselves trapped through drug debts and fear. Like boy soldiers in wars around the world they are indoctrinated by the gang cult.
Traditionally the pathway to crime begins when boys are in their early teens. Practically every criminal I have ever encountered began their career as a youngster. Some worked their way up to become household names. Many, like Daniel Kinahan, follow in their father’s footsteps.
Over the years I have sat with innumerable heartbroken, helpless parents who lost their children to the mobs. The reminders were always there on the mantelpieces: smiling faces of the innocent who became hopeless junkies or died from drug overdoses. Others were beaten, shot or murdered. Some had been driven to suicide to escape the despair. More had ended up in prison serving long sentences after being given no choice but to commit serious crimes including murder.
Then there were the terrified families I met who were forced to borrow money they cannot afford to pay off their children’s drug debts rather than see them maimed or killed. So many lives are destroyed by the virus of the criminal drug culture.
A major academic project conducted over several years by the University of Limerick revealed that up to 1000 children across the State are involved with criminal networks, some of whom are as young as eight years old. Based on my own experiences and from talking to police and social workers I believe that figure to be very conservative.
The most grotesque example of how children can fall prey occurred in Drogheda in 2020 when two local mobs began feuding. In January seventeen-year-old Keane Mulready-Woods was abducted and murdered by a notorious Dublin killer called Robbie Lawlor. The thirty-five-year-old, who already had four murders to his name, was determined to send a chilling message to his enemies.
Together with his cronies Lawlor deliberately dismembered the teenager’s body. Some of the severed limbs were stuffed into a sports bag which was then dumped on a street in Darndale, north Dublin, for young kids to find. Other body parts were discovered in a burnt out car the following day in nearby Drumcondra. A few months later the boy’s torso was found in Drogheda, Co. Louth.
The unconscionable act of mindless barbarism, reminiscent of the Colombian and Mexican narcos, was one of the most shocking incidents ever recorded in the fifty-year history of organized crime in Ireland. Lawlor wanted to send a clear message out with no fear of the consequences, to demonstrate that there were no longer any boundaries beyond which the monsters would not cross.
Like the thirteen-year-ol
Keane wanted to make a name for himself. Instead his name will be forever remembered as the victim of a murder that horrified an entire nation. Lawlor was later assassinated on a street in Belfast. No one shed any tears for the monster. But by then he had left his grisly bloodstained mark on history.
One youngster who found himself in the clutches of the drug gangs bluntly described the type of people who turned teenagers like Keane into victims and killers:
Scumbags to the highest degree – they’re all junked up, they’re all on steroids. . . They’re all fucked up in the head, they’re manic in the head. They’re very dangerous people.
He added that he was living in fear of his life and the lives of his family because ‘they threaten your mother’s house’. He claimed that he had witnessed an ‘awful lot of beatings’ being dished out to customers and dealers who owed money or were being deliberately extorted for money they didn’t owe.
In recent years the Government has introduced legislation and extended social services to curb the phenomenon of young people being groomed for a life of crime. The gardaí launched specialist units to specifically target gangs involved in drug debt intimidation against innocent families. The problem is that Ireland’s administrative infrastructure and its agencies have not kept pace with an expanding population and the demands of an increasingly complex, troubled society. It means that the State will always have to play the game of catch up. Sometimes in my darkest moments I am tempted to think that it is all a bit too late.
In Limerick on that icy February day in 2009 the gardaí examined the teenager’s expensive mobile phone. It was another status symbol for juvenile criminals seduced by the bling lifestyle offered by Murder Inc.
Just then a text popped up. It was from one of the senior figures in the mob, a brutal thug called Jimmy Collins who had already introduced his own children to crime. It read: ‘Where in fuck are ya’. . . move yer arse if you wanna b a drug dealer.’
One of the cops showed me the text without speaking. The message said it all and confirmed their suspicions that the kid was indeed a courier for the mob.
The cop handed the kid back his precious phone and tried in vain to talk some sense into him. He told the aspiring drug peddler that the likes of Collins or his psychotic bosses, the Dundon/McCarthys, had no concern for him or his mates and that he was just being used and abused. ‘You know if you keep down this road it will end in disaster; you’ll end up in prison or be killed. . . or both,’ said the garda, as if he was talking to his own child.
‘We know lads like you are afraid of these boys. They’ll ruin your life like they have a lot of other young lads around this city,’ he continued, as the teenage gangster looked down, kicking stones with his expensive new runners.
Then he asked petulantly: ‘Can I go now?’ Without another word he shrugged his shoulders and laughed before moving his arse as the text demanded.
‘That tells you everything you need to know about this place. . . the kids don’t know any better,’ one of the officers remarked as we went back to the police jeep.
‘That lad is like a lot of them around here. . . he’s beyond saving. . . it is depressing to watch.’
CHAPTER ONE
SHOOTING THE MESSENGERS
The taste of blood swirled around my mouth as one of the most dangerous terrorist crime lords in Ireland came barrelling towards me in a fearsome rage. The strange thing was that there was no blood. It was as if my unconscious brain was anticipating what seemed like the inevitable – a serious beating that might well require me being fed through a tube into the foreseeable future.
I have never experienced such a sensation either before or since. But after all the years of confronting nasty, violent people it seemed to be programmed into my mental hard drive. As the six-foot plus, muscle-bound thug drew within punching range my five-footeight frame tensed up and I braced for the impact.
I remember the incident as if it were yesterday. It was a sunny afternoon in April 2011 and the guy coming at me was one Alan Ryan, the Dublin leader of the dissident republican mob the Real IRA who I had been writing about for over two years. It was little wonder then that he got so angry when I tracked him down to his hideout.
The then thirty-year-old ‘revolutionary’ from Donaghmede in north Dublin was classified by gardaí as one of the top five most dangerous criminals in the country. The self-styled republican hero was an unlikely terrorist. He was only fourteen when the 1994 IRA ceasefire heralded the beginning of the peace process and the end of the Troubles which in any case had not affected him growing up in Dublin. But that hadn’t stopped him getting involved with the Real IRA (RIRA), one of the hybrid republican groups that sprouted up to oppose the peace. The RIRA was formed by members opposed to the Good Friday Agreement when they split from the Provos. Its membership comprised the dregs of the republican movement and opportunistic criminals.
Ryan had been radicalized in his teens and claimed to be fighting for a united Ireland. His ‘brave’ comrades were responsible for the Omagh bombing in 1998 which killed twenty-nine people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn twins, and left hundreds seriously injured. The bombing was the second worst atrocity recorded in the thirty years of the Troubles. The RIRA would carry out over thirty murders and several bomb attacks in the UK as part of their ‘war’.
Ryan was typical of the young thugs who were drawn into terrorism. He first came to the attention of the police around the same time as the Omagh outrage. He was eighteen when the Garda Special Branch caught him with a loaded firearm. A year later he and his older brother Anthony were arrested along with nine others when gardaí raided a RIRA training camp in an underground bunker at Stamullen, County Meath.
In 2001 the Special Criminal Court sentenced them to four years for being found in the terrorist training camp and he also got three years for possession of the firearm. Since his release from prison Ryan had worked his way up to become the leader of the Real IRA in Dublin and had been causing havoc for two years by the time I tasted blood in my mouth.
Ryan was a typical narcissist – an egotistical sociopath – who had more brawn than brains. Tall and handsome he was known as a womanizer who liked his lovers to refer to him as ‘the model’. The non-drinker acted like a mafia boss, surrounding himself with sycophantic followers and admiring women as he held court in a north inner-city pub, the Players Lounge, which served as his base of operations. The pub was owned by fellow republican sympathizer John Stokes, the father of former Celtic F.C. star Anthony Stokes.
As a key figure of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement, the RIRA’s political wing, Ryan’s fight for freedom involved protest marches and several attempts to cause riots and disturbances in Dublin. On one occasion Ryan and his fellow ‘patriots’ hijacked a peaceful student protest against government cutbacks and turned it into a mini riot. They were also involved in the Shell 2 Sea campaign to prevent a gas pipeline being constructed in County Mayo. In 2009 I presented a documentary for TV3 – now Virgin Media – exposing the organization’s sinister involvement in the protest. The Battle for the Gasfield led to several complaints to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) which found the programme to be fair, accurate and balanced.
Ryan once tried to impress an attractive female journalist by claiming that he could trace his republican heritage back to Wolfe Tone and insisted that he was trying to preserve the ideals of generations of dead ‘freedom fighters’ who had given their lives for Ireland. Amongst his heroes, he bragged, was Bobby Sands and the ‘eight’ other hunger strikers who died in 1981. The plucky reporter reminded him that there were in fact ten hunger strikers. She later reported that she had felt intimidated during the encounter.
