Cocaine Wars (27 page)

When Gardaí learnt the extent of the two gangs' business partnership, they became very worried. They were not the only ones. Freddie Thompson didn't want to take on Limerick criminals while he was outnumbered, so he organised his own tie-in with the McCarthy-Dundon faction in early 2006. Freddie travelled to Limerick and met up with senior members of the gang. It was agreed that twenty-one-year-old ‘Fat' Frankie Ryan and thirty-nine-year-old ‘Fat' John McCarthy, who is the reputed head of the McCarthy family, would be the contact men for ‘Fat' Freddie Thompson in Limerick. Freddie and the Limerick mob were only beginning to trust each other when his main contact man, ‘Fat' Frankie, was killed. He was sitting in his car in Delmege Park in Moyross, when Gary Campion walked up and calmly shot him twice in the head. Campion was later found guilty and sentenced to life for the murder. It is believed that another contact man was assigned to Freddie after Ryan's murder.

***

The Rattigan family is not a large one, but Dinah Rattigan, Brian's mother, is very close to her brothers and sisters and there is a tremendous loyalty between them. The vast, vast majority of the extended Rattigan family are hard working, and have nothing at all to do with crime. To them Brian Rattigan's behaviour is a major embarrassment to the family name. However, one cousin shares Rattigan's interest in crime. Timothy Rattigan was behind one of the most shocking and despicable murders of recent times. Coincidently, he is also an inmate of Portlaoise, but is not regarded as any sort of gangland player, but rather as a fool.

On 3 April 2004, Joan Casey, a sixty-five-year-old grandmother, was asleep in her home on Avonbeg Terrace in Tallaght, when two men armed with a shotgun burst in through her front door at around 6.00 a.m. The intruders made their way upstairs to the landing and tried, unsuccessfully, to break into the old woman's bedroom. Timothy Rattigan pulled out the shotgun and fired two shots through the bedroom door. One shot hit the wall opposite the door and the other struck Mrs Casey in the chest. She later died from her injuries.

Witnesses said that after hearing two loud bangs, they saw two men at Mrs Casey's front gate calmly walk away. One was brandishing a shotgun. The shotgun was later found disassembled in three pieces in a blue bag in bushes close to Rattigan's sister's flat. The bag also contained both live and spent cartridges and a firing pistol. Garda forensic experts were able to match a fingerprint on the gun to twenty-six-year-old Timmy Rattigan. He was convicted of the murder and given a mandatory life sentence. Joan Casey had not been the intended target. It is believed that Rattigan set out to shoot her son Gerard. Gerard Casey often stayed at his mother's house. He was married to one of Rattigan's sisters, and the couple had four children together. Rattigan had been drinking on the night of the murder at a pub in Tallaght with his co-accused, Conor Grogan. They had made their way back to Rattigan's sister's house. It is believed that Rattigan then hatched the plan to shoot Gerard Casey, because there was bad blood between them. Rattigan, from St Dominic's Terrace in Tallaght, had two previous convictions for trespassing and a road traffic offence. When he was found guilty, one of his associates was heard to remark to the Casey family, ‘At least we have somebody to visit tomorrow; we won't be visiting a headstone.' Joan Casey's daughter described her as ‘the best mum in the whole world'. In another blood-shedding incident, Timmy Rattigan's father, Timmy Snr, was shot in the head outside a bookmaker's shop on Thomas Street in the summer of 1997. The thirty-nine-year-old had been associating with members of the INLA. No one was ever charged with the murder. Despite being related and both being murderers, Brian Rattigan is said to have little time for his cousin, and does not associate with him in Portlaoise.

Brian Rattigan has quite a chequered disciplinary history in prison and is consistently in trouble. He invariably shows attitude to prison guards, and has been disciplined internally three times for threatening staff. He has one infraction for fighting, just days after he arrived at the jail, and has also been written up for damaging his cell. Sources say that Rattigan rarely gets involved in the frequent internal squabbles between prisoners and prefers to keep his head down than play politics. He does not receive many visitors. Natasha McEnroe regularly goes to see him and has remained loyal to him during his long stint in prison, when many would have been tempted to end the relationship. The years spent in prison have only made Brian's love for his murdered brother grow stronger. Each year on the anniversary of Joey's murder and birthday, Rattigan takes a memorial ad in the
Evening Herald
, along with his mother and other family members. On 24 August 2009, the day that Joey Rattigan would have turned twenty-six, Brian's ad read:

BROTHER

I picture you in Heaven,

With my good friends who have passed on,

But it's still hard to accept,

That you are really gone.

You were just a kid Joey,

And kids aren't supposed to die,

And I can't ever forgive that,

No matter how I try.

It hurts to imagine,

You'd be twenty-six this year,

But there's nowhere to send birthday cards,

And there won't be birthday cheer.

I've plenty of time to think that,

As that is all I do,

I think of ways to let them know,

I'll never forget what happened you.

Happy twenty-sixth birthday baby brother, the heart that truly loves never forgets, love you always and forever your brother Brian and Natasha xxxxxxx

On the seventh anniversary of Joey Rattigan's murder the
Evening Herald
message read:

BROTHER

Did the angels sing amazing grace,

The day you saw the Lord God's face,

Did you know you were not alone,

The day the Lord called you home,

For I was there I watched you go,

the pain I felt no one will ever know,

I thought of you for the past seven years,

And inside I've cried bitter tears,

I sit today and think of you,

But baby brother that's nothing new,

Because I think of you each day and night,

And how it wasn't even your fight,

Though I made you a promise and what I will do,

I will live each day in memory of you,

I will find a way to make sense of your loss,

It doesn't matter what that may cost,

Because my heart is full of sorrow,

That for you there's no tomorrow.

The heart that truly loves never forgets, your loving brother Brian and Natasha XXXXX.

The tender poems that were dictated from Rattigan's prison cell are at odds with his ‘hard man' reputation, but show that he had a talent. A talent that could have been used to help him lead an honest life – had he not chosen to go down the alternative road that leads to death and destruction.

In September 2006, Gardaí received intelligence that Rattigan had a mobile phone in his cell in Portlaoise. Detectives from Crumlin Garda Station accompanied prison officers as they carried out an inch-by-inch search of his cosy living space. Sure enough, it wasn't long before they found the phone hidden in his mattress. Rattigan used to put the Nokia mobile up his anus, when his cell was regularly searched, but this time he was taken by surprise, because there was no warning about this targeted search and no other prisoners were bothered. Investigators couldn't believe their eyes when they studied the footage on the phone. Nobody who had dealt with Rattigan had ever taken him for much of an animal lover but there were several videos of him kissing and hugging his green pet budgie. The gang boss can clearly be heard talking to the bird, which he named ‘Shrek'. Shrek was one of two budgies kept by prisoners on the E1 landing and Rattigan communicates with his feathered friend through whistling. There are even photos of Shrek inside Rattigan's mouth in a scene like Ozzy Osbourne's famous bat-eating antics. Rattigan didn't bite Shrek's head off though, but seemed to have a genuine affection for the bird. There were also photos and videos showing pornographic material and several pictures of his erect penis. Natasha McEnroe also featured prominently on the phone with three or four photos of her, above which he had typed ‘wifey' or ‘I love Natasha.' Spending large amounts of time in a cell alone can do strange things to people, and Rattigan seems to be no different. There were videos of him dancing frantically by himself to rave music, as if he was off his head on ecstasy. A fellow prisoner also used Rattigan's phone to film an impromptu jailhouse party, in which Harry Melia is seen smoking and drinking amid cheers and laughing. Rattigan is a big user of steroids in prison, and works out in the jail's gym each day. He has developed a muscular physique. He is obviously proud of it, because upwards of a dozen photos that were found on his phone are of his own naked body, with the tattoo of Joey Rattigan clearly visible. In one photo above the tattoo of Joey, Rattigan wrote the word ‘brother'.

Rattigan is not very clever when it comes to hiding his mobile phones from the authorities. He has been caught and officially reprimanded on six separate occasions in prison for having a mobile phone in his possession. In theory, a prisoner caught with an illicit mobile can have an extra five years added to their sentence if they are convicted in court, but Rattigan obviously feels that it is worth taking the risk in order to continue to run his gang from behind bars.

Rattigan spends his long days behind bars working out religiously. His day consists of getting up and eating breakfast before going to work out in the gym on the E1 landing. He lifts weights for two hours, having other prisoners ‘spot' for him. He then has some lunch, and goes to the exercise yard, where he is allowed to have two hours of exercise each day and mix with the other prisoners. There are extensive educational courses on offer in the prison, as well as practical classes, such as woodwork and metalwork, but Rattigan has never bothered to better himself in jail and the only interest he shows is in weightlifting. Apart from exercising, the remainder of his day is spent in his cell watching television.

Because Portlaoise predominantly held ‘political prisoners', the regime there was and is different to every other jail in the country. IRA prisoners refused to be treated like criminals, because, as far as they were concerned, they were in jail for their political beliefs. This meant that they received special privileges. Even with the ending of ‘the Troubles', the regime stayed the same. When all of the IRA prisoners were released, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, to be replaced with around fifty renegade Republicans, the regime and special privileges stayed in place and they were given their own landings.

The breakaway Republicans control four landings in Portlaoise, and have been allowed to paint large paramilitary murals of gunmen on the walls. They take part in military drills each day and the custom has developed whereby staff have to withdraw from the landings while these drills take place. Staff in Portlaoise claim that the security cameras on the landings have ‘flaps' around them, so as not to be able to capture what goes on. It has also been claimed that the cells of the fifty or so prisoners are not searched, and that people visiting them do not have to undergo searches, unlike all staff and visitors of other inmates. According to the Prison Officers' Association, this has led to the dissident groups supplying the major criminals on the E1 landing with drugs, phones and other contraband. However, the Irish Prison Service denies many of the claims.

Whatever the reasons, things had been far too easy for too long. It took a controversial phone call from a Portlaoise jail cell to ensure that the daily routines for the likes of Brian Rattigan and John Gilligan, who were effectively running their own affairs on the E1 landing, were over forever.

On 1 May 2007, a journalist from the
Sunday World
was taking part in a discussion on the Joe Duffy radio programme,
Liveline
, about his linking of Republicans to organised crime. Sinn Féin councillor Christy Burke was his opponent on the show, when a well-known criminal from the north side of Dublin came on air. He took issue with the article the journalist had written the previous week, saying that he was involved in a dispute with a serious criminal and armed robber from Finglas called John Daly. John Daly happened to be listening to
Liveline
in Portlaoise. He was incensed by what the journalist had to say, so he went to his cell and used his mobile to phone RTÉ to have his say. This was despite the fact that Portlaoise is the country's most highly secured prison.

John Daly hung up the phone because several prison officers had forcibly entered his cell to end the call, which would prove to be a major embarrassment to the Irish Prison Service and to the embattled Justice Minister, Michael McDowell. McDowell was predictably furious about John Daly's brazen jailhouse phone call, and immediately ordered the Director General of the Prison Service, Brian Purcell, to begin a top-level inquiry into how Daly had managed to pull off the stunt. McDowell said that he was deeply concerned about what he called a ‘brazen and deliberate breach of security,' and said that somebody within the Prison Service would have to be accountable and take responsibility. If he was angry about the
Liveline
phone call, he was furious about what happened next. In a series of searches in the immediate aftermath of the controversial call, every cell on the E1 landing was turned upside down and searched with a fine-tooth comb. Illegal items were found in toilet U-bends, beds and hollowed-out chairs. The public could scarcely believe the results: seventeen mobile phones, five SIM cards, eleven chargers, eight phone batteries, one hundred and fifty ecstasy tablets, traces of cocaine powder and a large quantity of homemade alcohol. Unbelievably, three flat screen plasma televisions were also removed from cells, and the two prison budgies, including Brian Rattigan's beloved Shrek, were also found. It was pure gold for the media, as well as the opposition. Fine Gael's Charlie Flanagan said: ‘Portlaoise Prison is supposed to be our Alcatraz, but with plasma TVs, pet budgies, rampant drug taking and money for tuck, it is more like a holiday camp.' If anybody needed proof that Ireland's most serious criminals were still running their empires from behind bars, then this was the definitive evidence. Michael McDowell said there was never a blind eye turned at an official level to the practice of allowing contraband and even plasma TVs into Portlaoise. However, according to the Prison Officers' Association, this was not the case. It claimed that the televisions were bought by the prisoners with the full consent of the governor of the jail. The Prison Service confirmed this and said a system existed in the prison, whereby inmates were allowed to purchase electrical goods. This ‘tuck-shop' system had been brought in in the 1970s. Prisoners were allowed to order goods through the prison officers, which were then paid for in cash when they arrived at the jail. Prisoners are paid a small daily ‘salary' for working in the jail, and relatives can also lodge money into an inmate's prison account. The system operates in all jails, but Portlaoise is the only prison that allows electrical goods to be bought. Most other jails only permit chocolate, cigarettes and newspapers to be bought from the prison tuck shop.