Godina izdanja: Ostalo
ISBN: Ostalo
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

John Gilligan was never one to mince his words. When I met him many years ago, he couldn’t help but brag about how much money he had amassed from drug dealing, hijackings and contraband smuggling. He was organised crime personified.

“I have just moved IR£15m (€19m) out of the country where the gardai will never get their hands on it,” Gilligan told me in an interview in London.

It was August 1996, barely six weeks after Veronica Guerin, a 37-year-old crime reporter with the Sunday Independent, was shot dead in her car while stopped at a traffic junction on the Naas Road, near Clondalkin, at lunchtime on June 26.

Her murder had shocked the world.

Even by the vicious Dublin gangland standards of the mid-1990s, Guerin’s murder was cold-blooded. Her killers had discreetly followed the young mother from Naas district court in Co Kildare, where she had appeared on a speeding charge.

When Guerin stopped at the intersection, a powerful motorcycle with two men pulled up. The pillion passenger dismounted, strode towards her car, and fired shots at point-blank range with a Magnum revolver, killing the journalist instantly as she left a message on a friend’s phone. It was a brutal killing.

Gilligan was the prime suspect for ordering a murder which convulsed Ireland and the world. Yet he seemed more concerned about his appearance as pictures of him began to appear in newspapers. Power and wealth seemed to have gone to his head. The five-foot-nothing criminal was almost enjoying the attention.

“Do you think I looked good?” Gilligan asked me in a strong Dublin accent, as he ate his fast food. “Everyone said I looked cool. Some of the fellas from home even rang. They thought I looked cool. Like a guy from the Mafia — a real gangster.”

During that conversation, Gilligan freely admitted to being ruthless, including attacking Guerin when she confronted him outside his home the previous September.

He also admitted to calling her mobile phone and issuing threats to kidnap and rape her six-year-old son, Cathal, in order to deter her inquiries into the source of his wealth.

“I knew she didn’t fear for herself. It was only a tactic I used to try to frighten her off,” he remarked of the threat to Cathal.

While Gilligan denied ordering the journalist’s murder, he made no secret of his wealth, his position in the underworld or his knowledge of organised crime.

“Let me tell you this: anyone can get anyone killed if they have the money,” he said. “You don’t have to be a criminal. I could have ordered Veronica Guerin’s death, but I didn’t. I had no hand, act or part in it. That’s the truth.”

Those words would prove to be his last as a free man. In October 1996, he was arrested by the British police at Heathrow Airport in London as he tried to board a flight to Amsterdam with IR£330,000 in cash, stuffed in a suitcase.



Gilligan fought his extradition to Ireland from Britain but lost and eventually stood trial in Dublin in 2001. He was eventually acquitted of Guerin’s murder but found guilty of drug trafficking.

He was released from custody after serving 17 years in jail in October 2013.