| 词条 | Draft:Blood Feud - Kinahan Vs. Hutch (book) |
| 释义 |
BLOOD FEUDBlood Feud - Kinahan Vs. Hutch is the book written by Anonymous about the Irish Kinahan and Hutch gangs. The book was released online with the support of Anonymous Denmark and Anonymous UK, and contains the full storyline of the events happened between August 2014 and early 2018. BOOK STORYLINE2014On August 3rd 2014, former champion boxer and Sky Sports pundit Jamie Moore* was attacked and shot as he walked through the garden of the Spanish home of boxing promoter Daniel Kinahan* where he was staying for a few days. Moore* was shot at five times and hit twice. Although almost all media sources claim that Moore* was leaving a party being held at the house, this is inaccurate. Moore* and Daniel Kinahan* had attended a birthday party of a close colleague at a venue a few miles away. Kinahan* had left early and returned home. By a curious twist of fate, he was accidently dropped off a couple of houses away from his own address and after a short walk, entered quietly through a side entrance. He went to bed almost immediately. It is probable that this unintended return saved his life. Moore* himself left the party a few hours later and also got a taxi back to the house. He put in the code for the security gate and went into the garden. What happened next will stay with him forever. He described the terrifying events in his autobiography, entitled Mooresy: The Fighter´s Fighter: ‘As I started to walk along the garden path, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone moving from behind my parked car. I turned to see who it was and this guy was stood there wearing a scary rubber mask… He also had a gun pointed at me’ (Jamie Moore) Moore* rang 911 and the operator was able to use his phone to trace his whereabouts as he had no idea at all of the address as he was only a recent guest. He fell in and out of consciousness during the next few minutes until the lights and sound of an ambulance siren woke him up. He started to shout for help. Daniel Kinahan* heard the commotion from inside and came out to find his friend badly injured in the garden. He ran to open the gate and allow the ambulance to enter. Moore* finally passed out and was rushed to hospital where he underwent life-saving surgery. Meanwhile, the shooter had fled the scene in a black BMW. By another strange twist of fate, there was a police check point on the road because of a spate of burglaries that had recently occurred in the area. The BMW drove through the police check point without stopping and the police gave chase. The police even shot at the car a number of times but it was bullet-proofed. Eventually the BMW crashed into a mound and the hitman and his getaway driver fled on foot. After running up a hill they were picked up in a Volkswagen Passat and successfully escaped. The surveillance tapes and the use of this particular BMW is alleged to have quickly alerted the Kinahan faction to both who the alleged perpetrators were and who had been their actual target, because it certainly wasn’t the likable Sky Sports pundit Jamie Moore*. While the international media scrambled around trying to make sense of the shooting, both the Spanish and Irish police were almost immediately certain that the target had in fact been the home-owner Daniel Kinahan*. Clearly the hitman had been hiding in the garden and waiting for Daniel Kinahan* to return from the party he was attending. But unbeknownst to the gunman Kinahan* had left the party early and was already asleep in bed. When Jamie Moore* returned two hours later the gunman, in the darkness, mistook him for Daniel Kinahan* and shot him. It was only when the gunman stepped up for the coup-des-gras that he realised that Moore* wasn´t Kinahan*. It would seem that he then waited for a short time to see if Kinahan* might still appear. He apparently then texted someone and tried to decide whether he should finish Moore* off. In the end, because he was wearing a mask, there was no real reason to kill Moore*. And as there was no sign of Daniel Kinahan*, he simply left after sending a final message on his phone. The black bullet-proof BMW used for the getaway was in fact owned by a Dutch criminal named Robert Mink Kok and was actually at that time in the possession of someone very closely associated with the Kinahan faction. Mink Kok is an infamous criminal with alleged ties to various intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, and the Mossad. According to intelligence sources he allegedly worked with DEA operative Robert Nieves to covertly supply weapons to various European Gladio units, and other anti-socialist militants. With clear and obvious parallels to the Kieran Boylan Scandal in Ireland although on a much larger scale, and the earlier Iran-Contra Affair in the U.S, in return for his various services and cooperation, Kok was allegedly allowed ship an estimated 15,000kg worth of cocaine into the Netherlands, with the covert help and support of some elite European police units. This scandal is referred to as the IRT Affair in Holland and involved the police units claiming that Kok was a paid informer who had permission to smuggle and sell vast quantities of cocaine in return for helping the police ‘penetrate the top echelons of the international drugs trade’. However, Kok´s real value to the European elite was his anti-socialist activities. These activities are why he was allowed to smuggle and sell such vast quantities of cocaine. This situation will have striking parallels with the events that eventually resulted in the murder of David Byrne* during the Regency Hotel Atrocity in 2016. Mink Kok was eventually arrested in the Lebanon in 2011 for possession of 53kg of cocaine. When he was arrested he was with a man who was found to be in possession of a fake Irish passport. The passport was eventually traced back to a heroin addict from Tallaght in Dublin City, although the passport picture was that of the foreign national who was arrested with Kok. It’s worth noting that the Lebanese police arrested Kok and his fake ‘Irish’ partner after a ‘tip-off’ from an informer. This possibility of a paid informer within the highest ranks of the Kinahan faction is absolutely crucial to this investigation and will be explored in depth as the work progresses. According to author and Irish media personality Paul Williams, Kok had ‘done business’ with the Kinahan faction since the early 1990s. Whether this is true or not what is certain is that in 2011 Kok had left some belongings in Spain with people associated with the Kinahan faction before travelling on his ill-fated trip to the Lebanon. These belongings included the black BMW that would eventually be used as the getaway after the attempted assassination of Daniel Kinahan* on August 3rd 2014. Allegedly, only one person had access to both the car and its keys at that particular time, and that person was a man named Gary Hutch. Gary Hutch was a career criminal who had fled Ireland over seven years earlier after being strongly linked to the murder of a gay drug-dealer named Derek Duffy. But perhaps his main claim to fame was that Gary Hutch was a nephew of Ireland´s most famous criminal, Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch. Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch is a legendary Irish criminal regarded as a criminal mastermind by many. He earned his nickname by supposedly living a disciplined lifestyle. This made him stand out from other ordinary criminals. The Monk had started out as a thief and burglar. In a TV interview with the national broadcaster when he was just a teenager he said that if he saw a car with anything of value in it, he was unable to resist smashing the window and stealing it. When he was older he was famously linked to two massive armed robberies. In the end, he was never convicted for any role in these two robberies although he was forced to pay a considerable sum to the Irish tax office as if he had earned several million euros. After this, the Monk became something of a celebrity gangland figure with a number of important and high-profile contacts in the media. In return for sharing gangland gossip and secrets with these media contacts, they wrote stories that portrayed Hutch and his associates in a favourable way. One of these favourable portrayals was that the Monk steered clear of drug dealing. However, his nephew Gary Hutch couldn´t possibly be portrayed as steering clear of drug-dealing as he was suspected of being one of Ireland´s leading drug traffickers. He was also known to be in possession of the getaway car that was used during the botched attempt to assassinate Daniel Kinahan*. However, GARY HUTCH WAS IN KINAHAN´S* HOUSE WHEN JAMIE MOORE WAS SHOT. Like Moore*, Gary Hutch was staying with Daniel Kinahan*! This meant that Gary Hutch could not have been the shooter. However, some very close associates of his had recently arrived from Ireland, almost at the same time that the local mansions had begun to be burgled. This, coupled with information allegedly provided by Spanish police sources, meant that within a few hours the Kinahan faction allegedly knew just who had tried unsuccessfully to murder Daniel Kinahan* and who had ordered that assassination attempt. According to underworld sources, the Kinahan faction’s alleged reaction to this assassination attempt was swift but strangely untypical, because of a peculiar twist to the story that has not yet been made public. The alleged shooter, the getaway driver, and the secondary getaway driver who had driven the Passat had quickly fled back to Dublin. A meeting was alleged to have been arranged between ‘Hutch faction leaders’ and individuals allegedly associated with the Kinahan faction. A deal was allegedly trashed out, where the alleged secondary getaway driver would ‘get a pass’, the alleged shooter and the driver would be both shot in the leg, and the Hutch faction would be given time to collect up €200,000 to eventually reimburse people for the costs of Jamie Moore’s* medical bills. It is worth noting, however, that everybody agrees that Jamie Moore* was completely unaware of and also completely uninvolved in any of this deal making. Irish media sources that are close to the Hutch faction claim this money was eventually paid over but Kinahan faction sources insist it was never paid. What is certain however is that the alleged shooter was shot in the leg just over a week after the alleged deal was made and hospitalised on August 15th 2014. It wasn´t until March 2017 that someone eventually caught up with the primary getaway driver. While virtually all police and media sources accept that Gary Hutch was a top-ranking member of the Kinahan Cartel and that he had used other Hutch gang members to try and assassinate his supposed close friend Daniel Kinahan*, there is a great deal of misinformation and confusion as to why he and those close to him chose to set in motion events that would eventually lead to the most violent Feud in Irish criminal history. A fact probably unknown to most and mentioned earlier was that Gary Hutch was staying in Daniel Kinahan´s* home on the night Hutch had tried to have his friend murdered. Writing in the Irish Independent, crime personality Paul Williams repeated the Hutch version of events. However, it is worth noting that Williams has long been associated with the Hutch gang. In return for printing and broadcasting Hutch claims, they give Williams information about gangland activities and secrets. Williams openly states that he gets his information from:
As such, any narrative supplied by the Hutches will portray themselves as positively as possible and their enemies as negatively as possible. We can expect nothing less. So, according to the Hutch version of events, as relayed through their media contact, Paul Williams:
Williams´ claim that the murder of Gary Hutch was the ‘spark that lit the fuse’ for the Feud is clearly nonsensical and is obviously Hutch-biased propaganda. Williams goes on to write, in the very same article, that a few months before Gary Hutch was murdered he had tried to have his friend Daniel Kinahan* assassinated:
Obviously trying to have a close friend, and a reputed mob boss, assassinated will ‘light a fuse’. And without any question, the Hutches trying to assassinate Kinahan* in 2014 was the ‘spark that lit the Feud fuse’. However, Williams continued the Hutch version of events by trying to claim that the ‘real’ root of the Feud was financial, and that again Daniel Kinahan* was to blame:
On February 26/27th a Bank of Ireland employee named Shane Travers, his girlfriend, her mother, and her five-year old nephew were taken hostage by six armed and masked men in a house in County Kildare. Travers was told that the women would have ‘their heads blown off’, and the five-year old would be ‘knee-capped’ if he notified the police and didn’t follow the instructions of the gang. He was instructed to go to his job in Bank of Ireland College Green cash depot and steal as much money as he could for the kidnappers and in return his girlfriend and her family would be released unharmed. Travers did as he was told and the gang escaped with €7.66million. His girlfriend and her family were subsequently released unharmed. However, there was a massive storm of controversy in the ranks of privileged Ireland over the subsequent days as government ministers, senior police officers, and some media personalities lambasted and attempted to shame Travers and his Bank of Ireland colleagues for following the kidnappers the instructions. Apparently, Travers and his colleagues should have ignored the threat to the two ladies and the five-year old child and instead immediately notified the police! Because some of Ireland´s most powerful people were angry, and because of the storm of controversy created by their minions in the media, huge pressure was put on paid informers by their police handlers to give someone up as quickly as possible. As such some police officers had a potentially great opportunity to advance their careers and please their political masters. And sure enough, on the very afternoon of the robbery itself, February 27th 2009, a paid informant gave a tip-off that at least some of the money that Travers had been forced to steal earlier that morning ‘was gonna be parked off in a gaff over in Phibsboro’. Hidden police officers dispatched to the address observed a man arriving at the premises in a silver BMW and entering the house with a large hold-all bag. The same man then left the house shortly after without the bag. Not long after that another man arrived, entered the house, and emerged with the same hold-all and left the scene, all of this under the watchful eye of hidden police officers. While Paul Williams and his Hutch sources insist that Gary Hutch was part of the €7.66million Tiger Kidnapping team, other underworld sources are adamant that Hutch played absolutely no part at all in that robbery. These sources claim that Hutch was owed a sum of money by one of the Tiger Kidnappers, and that an individual had actually brought Hutch to one of the safe houses, were the stolen money was being bagged, to pay hutch the money he was owed. Journalist Sonya McLean, writing for the INM owned Independent reported that:
However, this is inaccurate. The silver BMW was not driven by Darren ‘Roddy’ O´Brien. It was owned and driven by another individual who is central to events under investigation in this study. The BMW owner that day in 2009 was a man who would later go on to be strongly suspected of being one of the three Regency Hotel killers who were disguised as police officers. ‘Roddy’ O´Brien was a passenger in the car, as was Gary Hutch. After entering the house alone to get the money owed to Hutch, O´Brien then left with Hutch and the owner of the BMW. Not long after, another man, Mark Donoghue, arrived and entered the house. As he was leaving the police moved in and arrested him. Elsewhere another team of police officers stopped the BMW. O´Brien was arrested and Gary Hutch and the BMW driver were released without charge. €1.7million of the stolen €7.66millon was recovered by the police during these arrests. O´Brien was eventually jailed for seven years for handling stolen money, while Donoghue was jailed for five years for attempted money laundering. As Hutch had genuinely played no actual role in the bank robbery, his release without charge was perhaps understandable. Although, if he was part of the robbery, as Paul Williams claims, his release without charge would have to be one of the most suspicious releases in Irish criminal history! Either way, suspicions were immediately raised over who had ratted out the safehouse address to the police. Only a very small number of people knew the address. Some members of the Tiger-Kidnapping gang became convinced that Gary Hutch or someone very close to him must have been the paid informer. However, at that time Hutch was allegedly a prominent member of the Kinahan Cartel and a leading figure in the Hutch gang, allegedly the two most dangerous outfits in Ireland. Despite being convinced he was the paid informer members of the gang were reluctant to confront Hutch considering the level of back-up he reputedly had. Williams continued in the same articles:
As noted already, crime personality Paul Williams admits his underworld source is a senior Hutch gang member. So, we can expect his claims to be biased or even flat-out lies. Firstly, it is clearly inaccurate to claim that Gary Hutch ‘moved to live in the Costa del Sol with the rest of the gang’ after the robbery. Gary Hutch had already moved to and based himself in Spain TWO YEARS EARLIER, directly after the murder of gay drug-dealer Derek Duffy. In fact, Gary Hutch had been arrested and questioned about the murder of Duffy on February 20th 2009, LESS THAN ONE WEEK BEFORE the events of the Tiger Kidnapping. According to the Irish Times:
The ‘family… known for their involvement in gun attacks, armed robbery, and drug dealing’ is the Hutch family and the major gangland figure referred to is Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch. The man arrested was Gary Hutch. The Duffy murder will be examined in more detail a bit further into this chapter, but for now we can say with absolute certainty that Gary Hutch had been based in Spain since 2007. However, perhaps the most telling problem with Paul Williams claims is that the Hutches themselves allege that immediately after his release from prison Darren ‘Roddy’ O´Brien allegedly went to work for the Kinahan Cartel AGAINST the Hutch gang. The so-called ‘Whistleblower’ originally claimed on his Twitter bio that his brother was killed by the Kinahans. As such, most people including the police and media, believe that the account is run by a Hutch gang member lie Patsy Hutch, whose brother Edward Hutch was allegedly killed by Kinahan associated mobsters in revenge for the murder of David Byrne* during the attack on the Regency Hotel. However, it could be run by any of Patsy´s brothers, one of whom is the Monk or his remaining sons, who are the brothers of Gary Hutch. As noted elsewhere the Twitter account is virulently and violently anti-Kinahan. As already shown the account openly threatens people that have any alleged connection to the Kinahans. MTK boxers, coaches, cutmen, medics, and their families, and gyms associated with people believed to be friendly with the Kinahans, PR firms, family friends, everybody and anybody with any supposed connection has been targeted and threatened, even actors and athletes from other sports who attend boxing events that are simply hosting MTK fighters. As shown earlier, in the weeks and months leading up to the murder of Bobby Messett in Bray Boxing Club, boxing coach Peter Taylor was threatened repeatedly. And at 6:44pm September 6th 2018 the ‘Whistleblower’ account tweeted:
The tweet is accompanied by three laughing face emojis and a video clip of the infamous scene from the movie Deliverance where a man is raped by other men and made to squeal like a pig. A few days earlier, at 11:37am, September 4th, 2018 the ‘Whistleblower’ tweeted:
The same Twitter handle and associated accounts also targeted O´Brien´s loved ones in a similar fashion, with similar slurs. That O´Brien was a major enemy of the Hutches would seem to be an emphatically clear indicator of who O´Brien believes was the rat who put him behind bars for seven years! Just as a final aside, to set context the Tweet posted directly before the one above, at 1:41pm on September 3rd 2018 stated that:
The writing is atrocious, but what the Hutch gang member is trying to say is: ‘Daniel Kinahan* stop trying to play it down. The attack on Bray Boxing Club was an attack on MTK. Stop telling people it wasn´t. Anybody involved with MTK don´t be shocked when these events happen’. Terrible spelling and grammar aside, it can´t get much more threatening or clearer than that! As already noted, the Main Stream Media have, as late as September 2018, were trying to claim that the Bray Boxing Club attack was over a localised drugs feud in Bray. They have even tried to say it was an attack ordered by the Kinahans themselves! Almost all journalists have, as late as September 2018, all completely ignored the continued threats made by the Hutch associated Twitter accounts against Pete Taylor and the obvious motive for the Hutch gang to lash out at a man who coaches MTK sponsored boxers. Again, this is another thundering clear example of the very strange Hutch bias obvious in sections of the Irish media. Anyway, to continue, crime personality Paul Williams further claimed that:
So, here Williams seems to confirm that Gary Hutch is an informer who threatened to reveal alleged Kinahan dealings. However, all of these ‘soured relations’ and supposed bad blood between Gary Hutch and Daniel Kinahan* must have been surprising news to Kinahan* himself because in 2014, when Gary Hutch tried to have Kinahan* murdered, Hutch was regarded as one of his closest friends, was staying in Kinahan’s* house, and was acting as his driver! And all of this was 5 YEARS AFTER Hutch´s supposed role in the Tiger Kidnapping. It would seem, considering all of this, that Williams claims are again completely inaccurate. However, WHAT WAS about to happen toward the end of 2014 was that Darren ‘Roddy’ O’Brien, who had been imprisoned after someone ratted him out to the police five years earlier, was coming toward the end of his custodial sentence! Paul Williams claimed that prior to trying to have Daniel Kinahan* murdered Gary Hutch was also ratting that Daniel* had murdered Mink Kok´s bagman and stolen his drug supplier! Kok must be a very forgiving guy then, almost as forgiving as ‘Roddy’ O´Brien, because after his release from Lebanese prison he went to stay as a guest of the Kinahans and is regarded as a very close friend of senior members of the Kinahan faction. This would obviously suggest that Williams claims are, again, at the very least wildly inaccurate or at worst straight-forward Propaganda. The whole story that, in 2014, a full 5 years after the Tiger robbery, there was bad blood between Gary Hutch and Daniel Kinahan* and Hutch had tried to have Kinahan* assassinated over money ‘he was owed’ is clearly very, very dodgy. Hutch was at that time considered a trusted friend of Daniel Kinahan* and was even STAYING IN HIS HOUSE ON THE NIGHT OF THE ASSASSINATION. This was crucial as it had allowed Hutch to lock up Kinahan´s* guard dogs, which was an essential part of the assassination plan. Gary Hutch´s close associate could never have hidden in the garden if the dogs had not been locked up. There is also lots of confusion in the Irish media over the alleged €200,000 that the Hutch faction was supposedly meant to pay over to compensate the people who paid Jamie Moore´s* medical bill. As previously noted, Moore* almost died after being mistakenly shot during the first of three Hutch assassination attempts against Daniel Kinahan*. Firstly, Hutch sources insist the €200,000 was paid. Kinahan sources insist it wasn´t paid. According to Owen Conlon in an article in the Irish Sun:
Conlon would go on to author a best-selling book about the Kinahan and Hutch Feud. His information, unlike the seemingly crazy claims made by Williams, in this instance at least, is reasonably accurate. However, the actually money that was meant to be stolen that night was not €1milion, but instead allegedly almost double that. A cool €2million… So, the base storyline for the first Hutch gang murder attempt against Daniel Kinahan* on August 2014 is that Gary Hutch hired a very close associate to burst into Daniel Kinahan´s* home, stage a robbery during which Daniel* would be deliberately assassinated, and then steal a very large sum of cash. The primary mission of the intruder was the assassination of Daniel Kinahan*, and the stolen money was to be part of the pay-off. Subsequently the Hutches were allegedly ‘fined’ €200,000 for this failed assassination/robbery. This would also make a mockery of the claim that Daniel Kinahan* stole money that Gary Hutch had supposedly tried to invest after the Tiger robbery 5 years earlier. If Kinahan* had stolen Gary Hutch´s money, then in Gangland terms a hit attempt by Gary Hutch would have been seen as legitimate and there´d have been no chance that Hutch leaders would have agreed to pay €200,000 in ‘compensation’! At the time the story broke, some journalists claimed that the Hutches were ‘fined’ because Gary Hutch had run afoul of extremely dangerous Russian gangsters. A €200,000 ‘fine’ was supposedly imposed and an alleged Hutch associate was shot in the leg! Pat Flanagan, writing in the Irish Mirror claimed:
Again, there is a report of a deal involving payment of €200,000 by the Hutches and the non-fatal shooting of a Hutch faction member, but this time apparently linked to the Russian mafia! It of course doesn’t make any sense at all that the Russian mafia wanted ‘a Hutch gang member’ shot if that member wasn’t actually Gary Hutch specifically. If it was Gary who allegedly shot one of theirs, it’d be Gary who they’d want to shoot in any punishment reprisal. Clearly Flanagan´s source gave him the essential elements of the story but disguised the Kinahans as ‘Russians’. Perhaps the source did this deliberately so as not to implicate any Kinahan associates, as the Kinahan Cartel, unlike the Hutch gang, have traditionally been notoriously uncooperative with both police and media. But perhaps Flanagan´s source was confusing two stories. The murder of Paddy ‘Whack’ Doyle in Spain in 2008 had also involved Gary Hutch, an informer, and a row with Russian mobsters. Perhaps Flanagan´s source erroneously conflated the two stories. Flanagan continued by reporting that:
It’s perhaps worth noting that Flanagan wrote this article in June 2016, FIVE MONTHS AFTER the attack on the Regency Hotel! This is another perfect example of the peculiar treatment of the Hutches in the Irish media. By June 2016 basically everyone else on the island of Ireland and possibly every sentient creature in the known Universe believed that Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch was responsible for planning and executing the Regency Hotel Atrocity, allegedly with members of his close family, and one perhaps two hired guns from a dissident republican drug-dealing gang. Generally speaking, in broad terms, sending heavily armed men disguised as a police swat team to murder people at a public event attended by women and children is usually regarded as a criminal act. Obviously, Gerard Hutch has never been convicted of planning and executing the Regency Hotel attack. However, Daniel Kinahan* has never been convicted of any crime at all! Yet, the Irish media continually label Kinahan* a drug-lord, a crime kingpin, a mob boss etc. So, Flanagan´s assertion, almost six months after the murder of David Byrne*, that Gerard the Monk Hutch is no longer involved in crime seems to be another example of that extremely puzzling pro-Hutch bias in sections of the Irish media. Also, without being too pedantic, wouldn’t a supposedly law-abiding citizen be legally obliged to report Gary Hutch for allegedly shooting a Russian, or even report Gary Hutch for trying to have Daniel Kinahan* assassinated? Of course, Gerard Hutch wasn’t going to rat out his own nephews, but it does put the constantly repeated ‘no longer involved in criminality’ claim in further context and again highlights the very strange pattern evident in reporting of the Kinahan/Hutch Feud in some sections of the Irish media. Clearly, it is at best very unbalanced and at worst criminally complicit. Anyway, not to be deterred Flanagan continued, by immediately implicating Gerry ‘No Longer Involved in Crime’ Hutch in a number of criminal acts:
Allegedly paying a €200,000 ‘ransom’ to Russian mafia to get a nephew off the hook for ‘blasting’ one of them, and arranging a ‘punishment’ shooting, and not reporting any of this to the appropriate authorities are all, of course, criminal acts! Obviously, the question that arises here is why did the Kinahan faction allegedly need to be compensated if Gary Hutch had allegedly shot a Russian? It must be kept firmly in mind that at this stage everybody agrees that Gary Hutch was a leading member of the so-called ‘Kinahan Cartel’. Why would they need to be compensated by one of their own gang for something he’d allegedly done to another supposed foreign gang? Flanagan´s claims don’t make much sense. He finished off with some more nonsense and another example of that peculiar pro-Hutch bias in sections of the Irish media:
This of course ignores the fact that Gary Hutch was himself a leading member of the alleged ‘drug-dealing Kinahan’ gang, and also ignores all the numerous sources within sections of the media and within the police force who claim that the Hutches control part of Dublin and Belfast’s extremely lucrative heroin trade! To further highlight these biased pro-Hutch claims, it’s worth noting the somewhat more lucid claims of journalist Ken Foy:
Obviously if Gary Hutch was a leading drug dealer the claims made above by Flanagan are absurd. Allegedly, when the Kinahan faction eventually discovered what was happening in the summer of 2014 they warned Gary off from dealing with and helping a rival gang. Obviously, if any of the above is accurate, it would seem clear that Gary Hutch was a major drug supplier/dealer and a high-level gangster. On top of his alleged attempt to murder Daniel Kinahan* and steal €2million, there was apparent suspicion that Gary was also working with a rival gang. And to top it all off there was growing suspicion, confirmed by Paul Williams and even the Hutch controlled Whistleblower Twitter account, that Gary Hutch was betraying alleged Kinahan Cartel secrets. Unfortunately for Gary there was also growing suspicion that he was the highly placed informer who had sent so many of his own friends and associates to jail. So, who exactly was Gary Hutch? Born in 1980, Gary Hutch was related to or closely associated with almost all the central players in the Feud narrative. His father is Patsy Hutch*, who would go on to have a number of attempts made on his life for his alleged pivotal role in the Regency Hotel Atrocity. In fact, Patsy* is so seemingly central to the Feud that alleged Kinahan faction associates have, on at least eight occasions, placed prominent graffiti messages in Dublin City claiming that:
This graffiti would even go on to feature as part of a front page Daily Star story on Easter Monday, 2018. This alleged Kinahan claim is regarded as very puzzling by the more lucid crime investigators and journalists, as it was allegedly his brother Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch who planned and executed the Regency Hotel Atrocity! So why would the Feud end with the death of the Monk´s almost completely unknown brother Patsy*? If it wasn´t for the fact that three of his sons are very well-known criminals and the attempts on his life, Patsy would be almost unknown to anyone outside Dublin´s North Inner-City. Unlike his sons, and his infamous brother, Patsy* has never been convicted of a serious crime. As noted, Gary Hutch was of course also a nephew of Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch. Gary also has two brothers that are central to the Feud. His older brother Derek ‘Del-boy’ Hutch is currently in prison for stabbing a man to death at a party, and for an armed robbery in which one of his accomplices was shot dead by police. A paid informer had tipped-off the police about the robbery BEFORE it happened and armed police were lying in wait. There have been two murder attempts on Del-Boy Hutch in prison since the Feud began, and it has even been claimed he was given poisoned heroin. Gary’s younger brother, Patrick Hutch, is allegedly even more central to the developing Feud plot. He is currently in prison charged with involvement in the Regency Hotel Atrocity and the murder of alleged Kinahan faction member, David Byrne*. He is also believed to have played a major role in at least one other extremely pivotal event that led directly to the deadly escalation between the two factions! So, it’s fair to say that Gary, his father Patsy* and his family are a major part of the Hutch faction. Yet Gary Hutch was, for a time at least, as stated above, also a very high-level member of the Kinahan faction. Gary Hutch allegedly began his earliest association with drug dealing in the mid-1990s during the explosion of interest in ecstasy tablets, raving, and clubbing in Dublin. Ecstasy introduced a whole new sub-population to the world of illicit and banned drugs. During the late 1990s it seemed that almost every Dublin teenager was dabbling with E and hitting the Dublin rave scene. And although Cannabis has been called the ‘gateway drug’, definitely during this period in Dublin E was the de facto gateway drug. People who might never have even smoked weed began smoking it at all-night drug ‘sessions’ that were fuelled by E. In the same way, people who would probably never have done cocaine started to dabble when they were ‘whacked on yokes’. At this stage Gary Hutch was allegedly already selling drugs. In 2001 he was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for his role in an armed robbery at the family home of a business man named Jeremy Byrne in July 2000. By the time he was convicted for the armed robbery, he was already serving a four-year sentence for stealing a motorbike. After his release Hutch was involved in a number of alleged ‘brushes with the law’ including in December 2006 a bizarre court case where he was acquitted of a shooting one of his close associates after. Hutch was arrested and charged with shooting a man named Paul Reilly twice, once in the back and once in the chest. However, when it came to the trial the victim suddenly changed his testimony in court. Reilly claimed he had falsely accused Gary Hutch of being the shooter and Hutch was acquitted. No other shooter has ever been identified! The following year Gary Hutch was also allegedly a major suspect for the murder of drug-dealer Derek Duffy, on September 23rd 2007. Duffy was a gay drug-dealer who was shot a number of times in the head in his own car in Finglas, Dublin at 4am in the morning:
Police are certain that Duffy knew his murderer and had arranged to meet him after he had been seduced by a well-known criminal closely associated with Gary Hutch. Duffy was gay and the criminal had used this to seduce him and arrange a late-night meeting in a quiet and deserted location. However, before leaving to meet this criminal, Duffy boasted about the liaison to a number of associates. Duffy drove to meet his killer in his own car and was told to slide across to the passenger seat. As Duffy turned his head the shooter shot him five times in the back of the head from point blank range, killing him instantly. The killer and an accomplice had brought flammable liquid, clearly indicating that the murder was premeditated, and as is customary during these types of murders, they set fire to both Duffy and the car to destroy any DNA evidence before fleeing the scene in a different vehicle. However, as noted, Duffy had made it clear who he was going to meet so the police received intelligence very quickly that Gary Hutch was allegedly one of the two men involved in the murder. According to Ken Foy, in an article publish in the Irish Independent on March 30th 2016:
Once there, he teamed up with his ‘best pal’ from when they were kids in the Inner-City, Paddy ‘Whack’ Doyle. Foy writes that:
As reported by Ken Foy, ‘Whack’ Doyle, like Gary Hutch, had himself allegedly fled Ireland because he was suspected of involvement in at least four murders related to the so-called Crumlin/Drimnagh feud, a feud in which almost twenty people have died. In Spain, Doyle was friendly with some people who were closely associated with alleged Kinahan faction members. This meant that Gary Hutch, through his association with Doyle, was soon to become close to the alleged Kinahan faction inner circle. However, just a few months later Paddy ‘Whack’ Doyle was dead. On February 4th 2008, almost exactly 8 years to the day before the murder of David Byrne*, Gary Hutch was driving a car on the outskirts of Estepona, near Marbella, with Paddy ‘Whack’ Doyle as a front seat passenger. According to reports Hutch supposedly lost control and crashed into a lamp-post, leaving Doyle literally a sitting duck for his assassin. The hitman was able to murder Doyle with two shots point blank to the head as he tried to exit the crashed vehicle. There are two major theories regarding why Doyle was murdered. The first is that he beat up the son of a Russian mafia boss shortly after Christmas at the end of 2007, and he was killed in retaliation. The second theory is that he was killed by Turkish heroin dealers. According to Sunday Tribune Security Editor Mick McCaffery, in the months prior to his murder, Irish police had:
Unfortunately for Doyle, he had been unable to pay the Turks because he had had a number of major drug shipments intercepted by Irish police as they were smuggled into the country – ‘[the police had] had considerable success in intercepting drugs shipments’ to Ireland that had allegedly been organised by Doyle over the previous months. Finally, ‘a further shipment was seized near Dublin docklands late last year’. Obviously, Doyle was suspicious that someone very close to him was a paid rat and that was why the police were so successfully intercepting his drug shipments. Doyle was supposedly given a final warning by the Turkish heroin suppliers just two weeks before his murder but he laughed and apparently said that ‘he would personally kill anyone who threatened him’. Unfortunately for Doyle that wasn´t how it played out. As for Gary Hutch, Guardian journalist Henry McDonald wrote that:
Clearly Hutch wasn’t a target. Experienced investigators who examined the crime scene and car would also claim that the assassin actually made sure not to accidently shoot Hutch. This of course led to suspicion that Gary Hutch had been paid by the Turkish heroin traffickers to set-up and facilitate the murder of his close friend Paddy ‘Whack’ Doyle. The very next day, on February 5th 2008 over €9million worth of cocaine was seized by Spanish police close to the scene of the Doyle shooting and eight people were arrested. Again, there had been a tip-off, this time to Spanish police. The following day, on February 6th 2008, there was another ‘intelligence led’ seizure of €10.5million cannabis in Kildare by Irish police. ‘Intelligence led’ means the police had received another tip-off from a paid informant. According to Owen Conlon in his book The Cartel:
In all 1,500kg of cannabis was discovered and four men were arrested. The latest two tip-offs from the highly placed informer had led to almost €20million of drugs been seized in just two days! More importantly for the police and the top echelons of the Kinahan faction, documents were also seized that allegedly linked back to a close associate of a senior Kinahan faction member. And this became the catalyst for what would eventually become a massive Europe wide investigation into the Kinahan faction’s businesses and affairs that would tie the gang up for years to come. On July 7th 2008 police representatives from Ireland, Belgium, Holland, and Spain ‘held a top-level meeting in The Hague’ to discuss the growth of the ‘Kinahan crime gang’, setting in motion a European-wide police investigation that would eventually be called Operation Shovel. On May 25th 2010 Spanish police raided the homes of a number of people alleged to be associated with the Kinahan faction and arrested twenty-two people. Gary Hutch escaped arrest because he happened to be in Holland that day. However, according to Owen Conlon this was:
In Dublin, Irish police simultaneously carried out forty-five raids but only carried out one arrest, supposedly of a close associate of Gary Hutch! In all twenty-three people allegedly associated with the Kinahan faction were arrested during the first phase of Operation Shovel, twelve of whom were Irish. At least seven hundred and fifty police officers from three different countries were involved in the raids and subsequent arrests. However, all those arrested would eventually be released without charge. Throughout 2010 more ‘Intelligence led operations’ (meaning tip-offs from an informant) led to a number of large drug seizures and numerous arrests in Ireland. However, as is inevitable in the illegal drug trade, it was nevertheless business as usual. The drug trade is driven by demand, and while criminals had been targeted and arrested and drug shipments had been seized, the demand for drugs remained the same. To apply an overly simplistic understanding on the situation, some poor and dispossessed people still wanted their heroin, some middle-classes and wealthy people still wanted their cocaine, and some of the youth still wanted their ecstasy and weed. Owen Conlon explained it this way:
However, the Kinahan faction were allegedly in a very heightened state of awareness and fully convinced that they had an informer somewhere high up in their ranks, someone involved in both their alleged Irish and Spanish dealings. Subsequent events would continue to convince them that they had a rat in their house, and that would become the catalyst for much of the events that would follow. One final major event in Ireland that may relate to Gary Hutch is worth noting. Derek ‘Del-Boy’ Hutch and Gareth Hutch took part in an armed robbery in Lucan with Keith ‘Smokie’ Murtagh, Garrett Molloy, John Boylan, and Darren Keane. An article in the Irish Times, by journalist Conor Lally, from 2009 reported that:
So, although Gary Hutch was not part of the alleged ‘six-man’ team of armed robbers, he was regarded as the leader and organiser of the raid, at least according to journalist Connor Lally! And Lally claims Gary was arrested and questioned along with his cousin Derek Hutch. The article above says two Hutch cousins were arrested, one of whom was the chief suspect in a stabbing murder and who had been arrested for shooting at a worker during a previous armed robbery. Without question, this is a reference to Derek Del-Boy Hutch, who would eventual be sentenced to a long custodial sentence for the stabbing. The other cousin is described as having been arrested and questioned about the murder of Derek Duffy and being associated with ‘Irish drug dealers’ based in southern Spain. This is also without question a reference to GARY Hutch. It is possible that journalist Connor Lally or his source has confused Gary and Gareth Hutch. Either way, an informant had tipped the police off that the robbery was going to take place and armed police officers were lying in wait. Keith Murtagh was shot and seriously wounded and Garrett Molloy was shot dead. Neither Derek nor Gareth Hutch were shot. Along with the badly injured Murtagh, Derek and Gareth Hutch were arrested. After a lengthy stay in hospital, Murtagh received 10 years in prison for his part in the attempted robbery. Derek Hutch received 16 years. However, this prison sentence would run concurrently with another sentence he would receive for stabbing a man to death at a party in Ashbourne. Gareth Hutch initially fled Ireland to Holland, and then had the charges against him simply dropped when he returned to Ireland! Both John Boylan and Darren Keane also had the charges against them dropped. Neither had been caught with a weapon and, like both Hutches, neither had approached the armoured van that was the target of the robbery Some underworld sources believe that a Hutch was the source of the tip-off to the police. Derek Hutch was going to be imprisoned anyway for stabbing a man to death in Ashbourne and firing a shot at an employee in a previous armed robbery. A deal was made with police handlers that neither Hutch would be shot, and only Derek would be convicted, and any sentence would run concurrently with his sentence for stabbing a man to death and other crimes. As such, only Molloy and Murtagh were shot as they ran to the van, and all charges against Gareth Hutch were dropped. In return, the police got to portray themselves as tough on armed robbers, on ‘top of their game’, and got a death and two convictions from the tip-off. If any of this is accurate it again highlights the extremely close cooperation between the Hutch gang and a handful of senior police officers. The ‘tip-offs’ kept occurring but as is typical the drugs kept coming in. Then in February 2014 another ‘tip-off’ from a highly placed informant led to the seizure of €10million worth of cannabis and ketamine in Cheshire, England. Owen Conlon writes:
On May 6th 2014 many members of the Kinahan faction were back in Dublin for the funeral of a close family member. On that same morning, in another church close to the church where the funeral was being held, someone had spray-painted two messages, in huge graffiti, which read:
Apparently, whoever wrote the graffiti was meant to target the actual church where the funeral was to take place, and which Gary Hutch was attending, but mistakenly targeted a nearby one instead. This was of course a very, very serious claim to made so publicly, and immediately put a great deal of pressure on Gary Hutch. Later, when the Feud was in full murderous swing members of the Hutch faction would claim that it was the Kinahan faction that wrote the graffiti. However, as has already been explained Gary Hutch was still a leading member of the Kinahan faction at this stage, over a year before his murder in late 2015. If they had been responsible for the graffiti they would have been broadcasting to their own customer base and business associates that they had a paid informer at the very highest level of their organisation! Also, as the funeral was for a close family member the Kinahan faction definitely knew the correct address of the church, something that the graffiti sprayers did not. At the time, the graffiti was a massive source of gossip not least because people wondered rightly who’d had the courage to put it up! Hutch was, after all, allegedly a main player in the alleged most powerful criminal gang in Ireland, and also a leading family member in arguably the most feared family in Ireland. Who had had ‘the stones’ to cross both the Kinahans and the Hutches, and on a morning that they were burying a close family member? Subsequently, underworld sources would claim that it was Gary Hutch’s police handlers who had had the graffiti done in an effort to force him to divulge more information on his associates. Apparently, the suspicion that there was a paid informer in their upper ranks had led to stricter security within the Kinahan faction, and the level and rate of information forthcoming from the alleged informer had dropped off accordingly. Either way, it clearly showed that at least some people believed Gary Hutch was a police informer. The graffiti was a major problem for Gary Hutch and had seriously increased the suspicion he was already under. Literally speaking, the writing was on the wall for Gary Hutch. Underworld sources said that at the time everybody was sure that something big was about to happen, but probably no one expected what did eventually happen. Just a few months later, on August 3rd, as already described in detail earlier in the chapter, Sky news commentator and former boxing champion Jamie Moore was shot after being mistaken for Daniel Kinahan* in the grounds of the latter´s home in Spain. The attempted hit in Estepona on August 3rd 2014 was the first of three assassination attempts alleged to have been made on Daniel Kinahan* by the Hutch gang. The night that Sky Sports pundit Jamie Moore left dying on the ground after being inadvertently shot at the home of Daniel Kinahan* would undoubtedly forever alter the relationship between the Kinahan and Hutch factions and would be the CATALYST for the violent blood Feud that would eventually follow. 2015On September 24th 2015 Gary Hutch was murdered in Spain. Just over a year after he had allegedly tried and failed to have Daniel Kinahan* assassinated, he was himself shot dead as he prepared to go on a morning run. Almost immediately police and media sources alleged that the killing had been order by the Kinahan faction leadership because Hutch was believed by them to be a police informant. According to Irish Mirror journalist Pat Flanagan:
Interestingly, despite being continuously identified as one of the leading heroin dealers in Ireland and also being a major suspect in at least three murders (Derek Duffy, Christy Gilroy, and Paddy ‘Wack’ Doyle) Gary Hutch´s funeral was attended by former Lord Mayor of Dublin and Independent politician Christy Burke, Labour politician Joe Costello, and high-profile police officer Paul Caffery! This alone perfectly exemplified the power and clout the Hutch faction exerted over some Inner-City politicians and police officers. The reader should keep these police and political connections firmly in mind throughout the rest of this study. Gary Hutch was suspected of being an international police informant, and providing information not just to the Irish police but other police forces as well. Irish Independent journalist Jim Cusack wrote that:
So, police complained that judicial reviews of the use of paid informants had impacted on the safety of those informants. Irish police believed that stricter rules put in place to prevent paid informants committing serious crimes had helped the Kinahan Cartel to uncover Gary Hutch as an informant. As previously discussed there had been a number of very high-profile scandals in both the US, Europe, and Ireland where police forces were both protecting informants and allowing them to commit very serious crimes in return for information that could advance the careers, not just of police officers but also of politicians and journalists. In the immediate aftermath of the killing of Gary Hutch media, police, and underworld sources predicted a violent retaliatory response from the Hutch gang. As explained by author Owen Conlon:
A RUBICON HAD BEEN CROSSED. No member of the Hutch family had ever previously been murdered by gangland rivals. The Hutch gang were known to have powerful built powerful police, media, and political connections, and the gang also had strong ties to some republicans who engaged in drug-dealing and other forms of criminality. Underworld sources claim that the close association between the Hutch gang, drug-dealing, criminal republican began and developed with the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) movement. That movement had begun as an anti-drugs campaign to force heroin dealers from the Inner-City flats but before long it had developed in a front for drug pushers and criminal republicans who could ‘tax’ the dealers, for protection from police, politicians, and the genuine anti-drugs people involved in the wider movement. Some police officers and politicians made good money from bribes received from the organised criminal network that developed from the CPAD. Some Police officers also built their whole careers out of information supplied by drug-dealers and paid informants that they were allied with. This information would target rival drug dealers who were not paying protection money to the dodgy elements hidden within CPAD. Some police would turn a blind-eye to the activities of some drug-dealers will constantly targeting rival drug dealers who wouldn´t pay up. Some journalists and politicians were also able to capitalise in a similar manner. They allied themselves with criminal elements to gain advantage over their rival political and media colleagues. Some journalists would run stories about one drug dealer while turning a blind-eye to another who was passing them information, and in some cases supplying them with drugs and prostitutes. Underworld sources claim it was Veronica Guerin´s determination to treat all criminals equally, whether they were poor drug-dealers, middle-class police officers, or wealthy politicians, that eventually got her killed. She refused to ‘play the game’ like some of her well-known colleagues still do to this day, and it cost her life. She was indeed a truly courageous woman, and an inspiring investigative journalist. However, others preyed on the hysteria and misery caused by the heroin epidemic in Dublin to fuel their own shabby and shameful careers. You know who you are! The whole enterprise turned into a nice earner for a number of people, not just the heroin dealers. And while they have a veneer of pseudo-respectability amongst the chattering classes, the people of the Inner-City know who you are, and what you´ve done. The untouchable status developed by the Hutch gang had allowed them to literally rule over parts of the Dublin underworld and parts of the North Inner-City, hence Conlon´s reference to Gary Hutch being ‘criminal royalty’. Suddenly, with Gary´s murder in Spain, the Hutches were no longer untouchable. The Hutches whole power-base was centred on their status as ‘untouchable criminal royalty’. But now there was a seismic change about to take place in Irish gangland. A violent blood Feud was now inevitable according to both police, media, and underworld sources. On one side, was an alleged international drug smuggling ‘cartel’ with alleged connections to Russian, South American, Dutch, and Spanish resources. On the other was a Dublin based crime family with powerful local police, political, and media support, with alleged back-up from various criminal republican figures who were linked to drug-dealing and profiteering. The biggest story in Irish criminal history was about to go mainstream, exactly one century after the 1916 Uprising. The next alleged Feud related event happened extremely quickly, just over two weeks after Gary Hutch was murdered. On October 9th 2015 Hutch’s brother, Derek ‘Del-Boy’ Hutch, was attacked in prison and allegedly would have been stabbed to death if he hadn’t been rescued by prison officers. Underworld sources claim that Del-Boy had been openly vowing revenge against the Kinahan Cartel since his brother’s murder. The speed of the alleged Kinahan response and the fact that they were actually able to get people to attack a Hutch so quickly again emphatically illustrated that while the Hutch gang was extremely dangerous, extremely violent, and heavily connected to powerful people in politics, the police, and the media, they were no longer untouchable. As Irish Mirror journalist Emma McMenamy wrote two days later on October 11th:
Emma wrote this just a few short months before the Regency Hotel Atrocity. During this period underworld and media sources allege that the Kinahan Cartel was trying to reach out to Gerry ‘the Monk’ Hutch for a ‘sit down’. But the Monk is alleged to have flat refused to enter any kind of negotiations because he believed that the Kinahan faction had allegedly reneged on the previous peace deal. As such the Hutch faction released a statement to their Irish media contacts stating that:
However, the Kinahan faction claims that the €200,000 that was supposed to be paid was for medical bills and that the deal not to retaliate against both the shooter and getaway driver from the August 2014 attempt to assassinate Daniel Kinahan* in Spain was 100% kept. Both are still alive as of mid-2018, and despite the previous deal at least one of the two allegedly made another attempt to kill Daniel Kinahan*! According to underworld sources Gary Hutch was allegedly killed because he was a paid informant, and not because of the attempted assassination. Police, media, and underworld sources were absolutely certain that the Hutches would mount a retaliatory strike and an obvious time and place was evident almost immediately. According to Irish Examiner Security Correspondent Cormac O’Keefe in an article written on October 7th 2015:
Sure enough, on November 6th, just as predicted by police, underworld sources, and numerous crime journalists, a hitman was discovered lying in wait at the Red Cow Hotel at a boxing fundraising event linked to the following night’s boxing show. Allegedly, sharp-eyed members of the Kinahan faction spotted a car parked suspiciously in the carpark of the Red Cow Hotel. The driver was wearing only one glove and a cap and scarf to disguise his features. Deciding that it wasn´t very likely that the man was just a Michael Jackson impersonator having a night out in a carpark, the driver of the car was challenged. In response another occupant, who was armed with a handgun and who had been lying down unseen on the back seats, sat up and pointed the gun at those men approaching the car. Knowing their ‘cover was blown’ the two hitmen quickly drove from the carpark. A short time later the car´s two occupants were picked up in an English registration white polo and driven from the area. The Kinahan associates allegedly recognised both the driver and the armed passenger, and the secondary getaway driver who were all well known to them. The Kinahan faction were in absolutely no doubt that this was another hit-team sent specifically to murder Daniel Kinahan*. According to Irish Independent journalist Ken Foy, in an article published on November 9th 2015:
As is customary for Kinahan faction associates, no statement about the alleged assassination attempt was ever made to the police. In the immediate aftermath both police and media sources would claim that the hitman and his driver were two closely related Hutch family members who are both now in prison and who both played very significant roles in all the major events that shaped the blood feud, and who were allegedly determined to get revenge for the murder of their close relative Gary Hutch. However, some months later, sections of the media would claim that the hitman and his getaway driver were actually David ‘Daithi’ Douglas and Darren Kearns. Kearns and Douglas were drug dealers who were closely associated with each other, having served time in prison together. Both would eventually be murdered. However, it was not until after both their murders that media sources began claiming their deaths were Feud related. According to Daily Independent journalist Jim Cusack:
However, journalist Ken Foy claims that Douglas had been ‘booted out of IRA over drugs’:
According to journalist Michael Doyle, Douglas was also heavily involved in illegal dog fighting:
The first attempt to kill Douglas came on November 8th 2015, just two nights after the second attempt to assassinate Daniel Kinahan* at the Red Cow Hotel. He was shot three times as he walked a pit-bull terrier near his home on a chilly Sunday evening. However, he manged to survive after being rushed to the Mater hospital for life-saving surgery. Unfortunately for Douglas, he didn´t survive the second attempt on his life. On July 1st 2016 he was shot and killed at the shoe shop owned by his wife while eating a curry. The reader should make careful note of the alleged link between David Douglas, the so-called Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD) movement, former Republicans, drug-dealers, and tobacco and fuel smugglers because their ‘Unholy Alliance’ is of central importance to this current study. Darren Kearns was a close associate of David Douglas and like Douglas also a convicted drug-dealer. And according to underworld sources Kearns was one of the best ‘pilots’ in Dublin City. A ‘pilot’ is Dublin underworld slang for a getaway driver. He was shot dead on December 30th 2015 after enjoying a curry with his wife. Kearns had only recently been freed from prison after serving time for a €1.7million drug bust. According to almost all media sources he had immediately returned to drug dealing on his release. According to Daily Independent journalist Robin Schiller:
Originally there were a number of different claims made in the media about why Kearns had been gunned down and who was responsible. For example, according to Irish Sun crime editor Stephen Breen:
It wasn´t until May 2016 that some media sources started claiming that Kearns was murdered in December 2015 because he had been involved in the second failed assassination attempt made against Daniel Kinahan* at the Red Cow Hotel a couple of months earlier. The media even struggled to identify the target of the attempted assassination at the Red Cow Hotel. As early as November 9th 2015, just three days after the assassination attempt at the boxing event journalists were claiming that the target had been Liam ‘Bop’ Roe. For example, journalist Ken Foy wrote in the Evening Herald that:
However, Liam Roe was definitely not even in attendance at the boxing event held at the Red Cow, so the story that he was the target of the assassination team is completely bogus. It is understood by underworld sources that a close family member of the secondary getaway driver, who drove the English registered white polo mentioned earlier, began spreading the false rumour that Roe was the target almost as soon as the second hit against Daniel Kinahan* failed. It is also understood that the would-be assassin immediately went to a near-by club to give himself an alibi. However, he was seen entering the club only AFTER the events at the Red Cow Hotel. It is claimed by underworld sources that a close relative of Gary Hutch currently serving a long prison sentence hired the hitman and driver for the attempted assassination at the Red Cow and used a cousin to broker the deal. Both men were promised a very substantial payment if Daniel Kinahan* was murdered. On December 11th another alleged attempt was made to murder Gary Hutch´s brother, Derek ‘Del-Boy’ Hutch, in prison. He was again rescued in mid-attack, this time by two other prisoners. So, by the last day of 2015 there had already been two assassination attempts made against Daniel Kinahan*, one in Spain and an another at a boxing event in Dublin, Gary Hutch had been murdered in Spain, Darren Kearns had been murdered, David Douglas had been shot and badly injured, and Del-Boy Hutch had survived two separate murder attempts in a Dublin prison. All these events coupled with the Hutch faction’s flat refusal to have any kind of ‘sit-down’ left absolutely no one in any doubt whatsoever that the two groups were now most definitely at war and it was kill or be killed. As noted above underworld sources close to the Hutch faction had made it clear to their media contacts that anybody close to the Kinahan faction would be targeted. The feud was already in full swing and almost every police and media source predicted that the situation was going to get much worse before it could possibly get better. There seemed little hope that the bloodshed could or would end any time soon. An upcoming professional boxing event was set for the first week of February was already being referred to by the Irish boxing media as potentially one of the biggest nights in recent Dublin Boxing history. Called Clash of the Clans a number of Irish crowd favourites were due to fight. Jamie Kavanagh and Stephen Ormond were both lined up for big fights, and Declan Geraghty, Philip Sutcliffe Jnr, Gary Sweeney, Anthony Fitzgerald, Sean Creagh, and Craig O’Brien were all matched to fight in the National Boxing Stadium on the MGM promoted event. There was an excited buzz through-out the boxing community at the thoughts of a show featuring such quality up-and-coming Irish boxing talent. However, there was also a palpable undercurrent of unease, and even fear, because a number of Kinahan faction members would undoubtedly fly into Dublin for the show from their Spanish base. As noted, there had already been two assassination attempts against Daniel Kinahan*, two attempts to murder Del-Boy Hutch in prison, Daithi Douglas had been shot, and Gary Hutch and Darren Kearns had been killed. Numerous media and police sources expected another retaliatory strike from the Hutch faction as soon as Kinahan* and his associates were back in Ireland. The up-coming boxing event was only a month away and almost everybody felt something would happen if the police didn´t get their prevention plan right. But there was one more extremely important event still to unfold in 2015. On New Year’s Eve in Lanzarote in Spain it is alleged that a hitman attempted to murder Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch himself. Numerous media sources claim that he was drinking in one of his favourite Spanish pubs. Allegedly, he noticed ‘an Irish spotter’ in the pub who he immediately felt was looking for him. He waited for the spotter to leave, and then quickly left the establishment through a back exit. A minute later two masked gunmen entered the pub, and after a quick search left without firing a shot. Allegedly, the Monk returned some time later and examined CCTV footage of the gunmen. It is reported that he had no problems recognising just who these alleged gunmen were. Both police and media sources claimed that the gunmen had been sent by the Kinahan faction. In the weeks that followed, the underworld and media was awash with stories about the attempted assassination and its ramifications. Paul William´s, who has boasted of having a source with a direct line of communication to Gerard Hutch, broke the story of the assassination attempt on January 5th 2016, exactly a month before the Regency Hotel event:
The alleged attempt to murder Gerard Hutch caused major ramifications in Dublin, according to Irish Mirror journalist Emma McMenamy, on January 10th 2016, just three weeks before the Regency Hotel event:
So clearly the Dublin underworld was in absolute uproar over the attempted hit on the Monk. Every underworld soldier and gang-leader even remotely involved with either faction was aware that they’d probably be forced to commit to one side or the other now that an all-out war was inevitable. Unconnected gangs and gangsters could also start expecting to be hired or coerced by one or even both factions. Police informants and media sources were frantically passing around both rumours and information. For example, less than three weeks before the regency hotel Atrocity, in an article dated to January 10th 2016, entitled ‘Named: The Major Players’ nine alleged Kinahan faction members were specifically named as Hutch faction targets, with Daniel Kinahan* and David Byrne* both being listed as primary targets:
Seven other men allegedly associated with the Kinahan faction were also named in the article. So, on January 10th, just three weeks BEFORE the Regency Hotel attack, the media in Ireland was reporting that the potential for violence between the two factions loomed larger than ever and that it was only a matter of time before the next murder. It was even claimed that the murders had already been planned, and the key targets were identified! And then on January 22nd 2016, less than two weeks before the murder of David Byrne*, another article appeared specifically naming Byrne* as a target for the Hutch faction! The piece was even accompanied by a photo of him in a jeep:
So, Hutch was claiming through his media contacts that ‘senior’ republicans close to him gave the go-ahead to assassinate Kinahan faction associates and would back the Hutch faction in the coming ‘war’! This claim was in the mainstream media less than two weeks before the murderous Regency Hotel attack. And the police, the media and the underworld, and the Hutch faction, were all fully aware that many of these mostly Spanish based, specifically named targets would be together in Dublin for a rare visit in just under two weeks. Clearly, everybody as aware that this boxing weekend would be a major potential flashpoint. There had already been two murders and four attempted murders, and a frenzy of reporting in the press as Ireland´s two ‘most violent gangs went to war’, with apparent ‘republican’ backing for the Hutch faction. A precedent had also been set by the attempt to murder Kinahan* at a previous boxing related Dublin event just a few months previously. It would need careful policing if the situation was to be kept under some semblance of control. As such, a special policing plan was set up for the boxing events. Evening Herald Crime Correspondent Ken Foy wrote on January 30th 2016, just a few short days before the Regency Hotel weigh-in that:
Almost everybody with any knowledge of the events of the Feud would immediately recognise the two Hutch faction members that Foy was referring to. Foy is forced to refer to them in this way because of libel laws. One of the men is currently on trial for the murder of David Byrne* and the other is believed to have been one of the three Regency Hotel attackers who were disguised as police SWAT team members. So, just a few days before the Regency Hotel weigh-in Ken Foy and other journalists literally pinpointed who would most likely lead the attack against Kinahan faction targets, named specifically as Daniel Kinahan* and David Byrne*, and even when this attack was most likely to occur. Regency HotelAccording to underworld sources the very first thing that Kinahan faction associates noticed when they arrived at the Clash of the Clans weigh-ins was that there wasn’t even a single visible police officer at the Regency Hotel, either outside in the car park or inside at the event itself! This was a major surprise and immediately put people on edge. These guys were used to having their every move shadowed by police when they were in Dublin during even a ‘normal’ period. Considering everything that had happened during the build up to the boxing event, and all the media stories highlighting this particular weekend specifically as a potentially violent flashpoint, the Kinahan faction expected a large and very visible police presence. Yet there wasn’t even the standard uniformed police officer for crowd control. And while there was no visible police presence, there were plenty of journalists and photographers. Considering the magnitude of the boxing event a number of sports journalists and photographers were to be expected, but there was also a full complement of crime and security media both out in the car park and inside the venue looking for photos of Kinahan faction associates and primed for any potential trouble! And something which seems sometimes over looked, there was also upwards of three hundred boxing fans, including women and children. And sure enough, just as predicted by everybody an attack was indeed launched against the Kinahan faction members who were attending the Clash of the Clans boxing event at the Regency Hotel. All of the following was recorded on various CCTV cameras and has been confirmed by independent witnesses during the trial of Patrick Hutch for the murder of David Byrne* and the shooting of Sean McGovern* and one other: Regency Hotel Atrocity Chronology (all times approximate): 2pm A number of cars, including taxis, arrive at the carpark of Saint Vincent’s GAA club, located approximately a kilometre to the rear of the Regency Hotel car park… 2:05pm Clash of the Clans weigh-in starts… 2:19pm A silver van drives up to the Regency Hotel Gracepark Manor gate… 2:21pm Wig-man (Patrick Hutch?) and Flat-cap (Kevin Murray) exit the van, walk across to the hotel and enter by its laundry entrance… 2:23pm Wig-man (Patrick Hutch?) and Flat-cap (Kevin Murray) ask staff members for directions to the boxing weigh-in function room… 2:27pm Wig-man and Flat-cap do a full lap of the function room. People start leaving the Hotel because of the appearance of Wig-man and Flat-cap in the function room… 2:28pm the silver van moves and parks directly outside the hotel main entrance… 2:29pm Commotion begins at rear of weigh-in function room caused by people becoming suspicious of Wig-man. Wig-man draws a handgun and attempts to cock it, but it was already cocked, causing it to jam. A member of the public strikes Wig-man with a glass bottle. People begin fleeing the function room. Wig-man fires some shots, regarded as a signal to the rest of the hit-team outside in the van… 2:29pm Fake swat team (Tac1, Tac2, Tac3) exit van and enter hotel lobby. Van does a U-turn and waits with its side door open. Unanswered 999 calls are made… 2:29pm Swat team start shooting people. Sean McGovern* and Aaron Bolger* are both shot and wounded but manage to escape… 2:30pm David Byrne* runs back into lobby and is shot firstly by Tac1, and then shot and killed by Tac2… 2:30-2:35pm Hit team search the hotel unsuccessfully for Daniel Kinahan*, searching through groups of people and under tables as members of the public cowered in fear on the ground… 2:36pm All five members of the hit team enter the still waiting getaway van and leave through the supposedly secure Gracepark Manor gate… 2:38pm A crowd of angry people gathers near a shop close to the hotel. They immediately start claiming police collusion with the assassination team… 2:43pm First police units begin to arrive at the crime scene, and claim to be unaware of the shootings, approximately twenty-three minutes after armed men first entered the Regency Hotel… So, at approximately 2pm various CCTV cameras filmed six cars pulling into the carpark of Saint Vincent’s GAA grounds. The grounds are just over a kilometre away from the Regency Hotel and are approximately a five-minute drive away but are also separated by two large electric security gates through the Gracepark Manor estate that requires a pass code or a fob to open. The main entrance/exit to the Regency Hotel grounds is at the other end of the Hotel car park and leads out onto Whitehall and the airport road. On a busy Friday afternoon traffic in the area would have been bumper to bumper, so having access to the supposedly secured back gates would be essential if the killers hoped to have any chance of escaping after the attack. The six cars parked and simply waited. No drivers are seen to get out from these vehicles. Then, at approximately 2:19pm a silver van pulled into the Regency Hotel carpark and parked near the Gracepark Manor gate, which is connected to the carpark at the rear of the Regency Hotel. It is understood that after being contacted by spotters who were inside the venue, two members of the hit team exited the van. One was disguised as a woman, wearing a black dress and blond wig, and the other was not disguised at all. He simply wore a trademark paddy cap with absolutely no attempt made to conceal his appearance! Hereafter these two hitmen will be referred to as Wig-man and Flat-cap. At the time of writing Patrick Hutch has been charged with being Wig-man, and Flat-cap has been identified as the now deceased Kevin Murray. The two hitmen illegally entered the Hotel through its non-public laundry entrance and moved through the hotel searching for the Clash of the Clans function room. It has been claimed that the function room that held the weigh-in was changed at the last moment, because there was a Six Nations rugby international being held in Dublin that weekend and the hotel received a large influx of Welsh rugby fans. The original function room supposedly had only one main entrance/exit that led directly out into the lobby, whereas the new function room had a number of other exits. Survivors of the Regency Hotel attack believe that this supposed change of function room prevented many more deaths. It´s claimed that Wig-man and Flat-cap entered the room originally due to host the weigh-in and searched amongst the Welsh rugby fans for their targets. In the end Wig-man was forced to ask a member of staff where the weigh-in was being held. This member of staff told them where it was, but immediately noted that Wig-man was a man disguised as a woman and began to alert other members of staff. When Wig-man and Flat-cap finally found the weigh-in function room it is reported that they did a full lap of the room, perhaps checking for exits and re-orientating themselves because of the change mentioned above. They searched through the crowd for their targets, who the spotters had said were there only minutes earlier. However, their primary target Daniel Kinahan* was no longer present. The lack of police and the presence of a number of known Hutch faction associates acting as spotters in the crowd had alerted his bodyguards to the impending attack and he and his close associates had been ushered away from the function room. David Byrne* was however not with this group because he had only decided to attend the event at the last moment. He had his two young children with him earlier that day and had decided against bringing them to the weigh-in because of the numerous threats that had been made. However, at the last moment he changed his mind, left the children with his mother instead, and made his way across to the Regency Hotel a short time before the weigh-in began. He was mixing with other friends when the bloody attack commenced. The total lack of a visible police presence at such an obvious flashpoint had caused a great deal of suspicion in some members of the public attending the event. The appearance of Wig-man and Flat-cap in the function room was the final straw. Alert members of the already paranoid public realised ´that shit was about to get heavy´, and the lack of police was indeed exactly what it seemed to be. Some people started to leave the function room at this stage. One of these people even commented to staff as he left that “It´s all gonna kick off in there”! Outside, the silver van drove up to the hotel and parked directly in front of the hotel entrance. ‘Luckily’ for the hit team, there wasn’t a single visible police officer present. Obviously if there had been even a standard policing crowd control presence the van wouldn’t have been able to park there without being moved on and drawing major attention and suspicion. The hit squad also knew that no one associated with the Kinahan faction would be armed, because they would have assumed that the place would be swarming with police. They are used to being stopped and searched so being caught with a firearm would mean a substantial prison sentence. So, the hitmen knew their targets would be ‘soft’ and completely defenceless. Meanwhile, in the weigh-in function room, people were continuing to be very suspicious of Wig-man and Flat-cap. Some people began to verbally challenge the disguised man and his older accomplice. Suddenly they both drew handguns. Wig-man attempted to cock his weapon but it was already cocked, and this caused it to jam. A brave member of the public hit Wig-man with a glass bottle and then pandemonium broke out. People started shouting ‘gun, gun’. Some people started running, others hit the ground and cowered down hoping they wouldn´t be targets. It was only then that Wig-man started shooting. It was a signal to the occupants of the van to enter the hotel. BBC reporter Kevin McAnena was in the hotel lobby when people started to run from the boxing weigh-in area:
Clearly the crowd were aware of the danger they were in before any shots were fired. Outside the hotel three more members of the Hutch murder team exited the van and quickly entered the hotel. They were each dressed as police swat team members, with full face masks that completely concealed their appearance (hereafter referred to Tac1, Tac2, and Tac3). All three entered the lobby entrance. Almost immediately, however, some of the people standing around recognised that they were not a real police swat team because they were carrying old variants of the AK-47 assault rifle! With all the stories that had appeared in the papers during the weeks before people immediately realised what was really happening. They started shouting ‘It’s a hit team. They’re not real pigs’. The crime and security photographers who had been told beforehand to position themselves in strategic positions around the hotel managed to get almost perfect photographs of the masked assassination squad as they made their way into the hotel, AKM assault rifles perfectly position for great crime photos. These photographs and others taken during the murderous raid would forever go down in True Crime annals and would be shown all over the world over the coming days. As Paul Williams reported:
It will be shown that these photos and the events associated with the Regency Hotel Atrocity would create a media and political frenzy that would forever alter the political landscape of Irish politics. Obviously and without question if, like almost everyone expected, there had been a police presence at the weigh-in, a ‘hot and heavy’ attack like this could not have worked, as real police would have immediately challenged the bogus hit team as they entered the hotel. The assassins would then have had to presumably shoot the police officers to continue their mission. And if a criminal faction like the Hutches had executed police officers that day there would be no Hutch faction left today! If you don’t understand why that is, put this book down now. There is absolutely nothing more here for you. Without any doubt, whoever planned and executed the Regency Hotel Atrocity was working under the assumption that there would be no police present. And ‘luckily’ for them that’s exactly how it played out! The only ‘police officers’ to be seen anywhere was the hit team itself, all-be-it carrying variants of the AK-47 assault rifle made famous during the Vietnam War. BBC reporter Kevin McAnena continued his testimony
The man who was shot was Kinahan faction member David Byrne*. He was shot twice by Tac1 and hit twice in the stomach. He collapsed immediately at the reception desk. Tac2 then jumped up on the reception desk and pointed his assault rifle at McAnena. They exchanged a few words before the shooter shot David Byrne* four more times in the head and chest, killing him instantly. All three men who were shot that day allegedly had some connection to the Kinahan faction. This clearly indicated that the assassins were familiar with their targets and knew them personally, because they were able to pick them out from a crowd of fleeing people. They knew exactly who they were looking for, and it was an attack that was clearly specifically targeted against the Kinahan faction, just as had been predicted by police, media, and underworld sources in the weeks immediately prior to the event. However as already noted, Daniel Kinahan* had already left the scene moments before because the lack of a police presence had tipped off him that an attack was imminent. Daniel Kinahan* had now survived three alleged assassination attempts by the Hutch faction in just under eighteen months. As noted earlier, unfortunately for David Byrne* he was not with the main Kinahan group that made it´s way to safety prior to the attack commencing. He was socialising with other associates. CCTV footage shows that he had even managed to escape but fearful for the safety of others he made a fateful decision to return to the hotel function area. Once there however he was almost immediately spotted by two of the assassins who recognised him at once and he was shot dead. BBC journalist Kevin McAnena claims he hid there for about ONE HOUR before police came to the scene of the shooting! If there was any chance that David* could have been saved, that delay of at least an hour from the security services needs to be examined. The hit team then began to search the hotel for their primary target, who everyone agrees was Daniel Kinahan*. They searched under tables in the function rooms, and through groups of prostrate and terrified people. After searching unsuccessfully for upwards of FIVE minutes all five shooters left the hotel and returned to the still waiting getaway van. At this stage the getaway van had been parked at the crime scene for almost FIFTEEN MINUTES. As the hit-team left the hotel Wig-man, who police claim is Patrick Hutch, was heard frantically shouting ‘I can’t find him, I can’t fucking find him. He’s not fucking here’. As they ran back to the van the numerous INM journalists and photographers stationed around the car park took photographs that would be shown in the world’s media over the coming days. Four of the assassins were in disguise, but one was totally exposed with no attempt at all made to conceal his features. As such his identity was known within minutes of the attack! The five shooters jumped into the van and it slowly left the car park through the supposedly secure back entrance that they had parked close to earlier. This part of the ‘getaway’ took more than a minute as the van waited for the security gate to slowly open. The van then drove through Gracepark Manor to a second security gate that led out to the main road. Here, the van drove a kilometre to the Charlemont Estate at the rear of Saint Vincent´s GAA club. The five hitmen and the driver left the van and set it on fire on a residential street. The large murder squad had by then removed their disguises and now carried bags presumably containing those disguises. Wig-man dragged a wheeled case which presumably held the three assault rifles used in the attacks. Each of the attackers then left the scene in one of SIX SECONDARY GETAWAY VEHICLES driven by SIX MORE ACCOMPLICES. A number of these secondary getaway vehicles were taxis. Irish Independent journalist Ken Foy reported on February 24th 2016 (three weeks after the attack) that:
However, TWO AND A HALF YEARS LATER there has only been one arrest, and not a single conviction! Police even recovered one of the taxis and two of the secondary getaway cars. Ken Foy reported that:
Police have also ascertained that two failed attempts were made to shut down the Regency Hotel CCTV system in days immediately prior to the murder of David Byrne*, on Monday February 1st and Thursday February 4th! The whole timing of the attack is pretty incredible. The hit-team arrived just before 2:20pm and finally disappeared at approximately 2:40pm! The actual attack itself went on for over six minutes, and the hit-team were at the crime scene for approximately TWENTY-THREE MINUTES without any police response. As soon as the shooters arrived witnesses started ringing the police but simply put, nobody came. The 999 calls were not even answered. The extremely spectacular and publicity seeking nature of the attack on the Regency Hotel was also a very first for Gangland Ireland. Republican paramilitaries had staged similar attacks in the Occupied Six Counties in the north-east of Ireland but they were staged as spectacularly as possible DELIBERATELY to make the biggest impact possible on both the occupying forces and in the media. If the primary goal of the Regency Hotel attack was to assassinate Daniel Kinahan* a stealth assassin would have been undoubtedly the better choice. Numerous underworld and police sources have commented that if Kevin Murray had simply walked up to Daniel Kinahan* he would have had a much better chance of successfully killing the latter as he wasn´t well known to the Kinahan faction. Or a gunman as a pillion passenger on a high-powered motorbike ready to pounce as the targets left the venue car park. This is doubly so if the alleged Hutch gang were aware that there would be no visible police presence. Why did the Hutch gang needlessly turn the attack into publicity attracting ‘spectacular’? Why complicate the murder attempt so badly that the mission almost completely failed? Knowing the close relationship between some senior police officers and the Hutch gang, the inexplicable lack of even a single visible police officer left senior Kinahan faction members extremely suspicious that something was terrible was about to happen at the venue. They were aware an attack might be imminent. The very nature of the spectacular attack itself caused it to fail in its primary objectives. Although David Byrne* was murdered, and Sean `Macker´ McGovern* and Aaron `Bugsy´ Bolger* were both shot, the attackers had hoped to also murder Daniel Kinahan* and presumably other allegedly high-ranking members of the so-called Cartel. The attack was meant to decimate the leadership of the alleged Kinahan Cartel and put an end to it as an operational crew. In this, the Hutch failure was as spectacular as the attack itself. The operational capacity of the Kinahan Cartel was left essentially unaffected by the almost complete failure of the primary aims of the inexplicably and needlessly complicated attack. The police and media have claimed that as a direct consequence of this spectacular failure, Gerard the Monk Hutch has lost a brother, two nephews, two of his closest friends, and the Hutch gang has lost a number of its leading foot-soldiers. So why stage a murder attempt that was so unprecedentedly spectacular that it tipped off the targets before the attack and would BE EXPECTED to bring about the greatest police and media ‘heat’ in Irish gangland history. It has already been shown that police generally only become involved in gangland investigations that make ‘big waves’ in political circles or in the media, or for something that effects members of the police force itself. So why did the Regency Hotel murder team make their mission so much more difficult and create a seemingly unneeded media frenzy? Dr Tom Clonan, former Irish army captain and current security analyst at DIT, writing as early as February 8th stated unequivocally that:
Yes indeed, these pictures of the gunmen carrying Kalashnikov weapons are very, very significant and much of the subsequent sequence of events would be linked inextricably to these weapons. This major issue will be examined as this work proceeds. Dr Clonan also makes the point that:
Since the Kinahan faction claimed to know the identity of each of the shooters within hours of the attack, and therefore knew they were neither military trained or genuine paramilitaries, they knew that the calm, unhurried confidence that the attackers exhibited was due to two things. Firstly, they knew their targets were completely unarmed and would be completely unable to defend themselves against attackers with heavy assault rifles. And secondly, THE HUTCH GANG KNEW NO POLICE WOULD ARRIVE UNTIL AFTER THE GANG HAD LEFT THE CRIME SCENE! The obvious question is how did the Hutch gang know that there would be know police at such a major flashpoint event, and how did they know no police would interfere during the attack? So, to recap, all in all, there were at least five shooters, seven getaway drivers, and seven getaway vehicles involved in the attack itself on the Regency Hotel. And there had been spotters who had mingled in with the crowd! In the end police said that there were SIXTEEN PEOPLE directly involved in the Regency Hotel Atrocity! Two and a half years later and only ONE PERSON of these alleged SIXTEEN participants has so far been charged with a violent attack on a public event and the murder of father of two, David Byrne*. The arrested man is Patrick Hutch, younger brother of Gary Hutch and son of Patsy Hutch. And no doubt there were other people involved in the planning and execution of the attack. According to underworld sources the Kinahan faction believe that at least twenty people allegedly aligned with the Hutch faction were directly involved in the planning and execution of the attack at the Regency Hotel. When the first police units eventually arrived a few minutes after the assassination team had been allowed to escape, they reported that they were meet by a crowd outside the venue that ‘were angry, upset, and uncooperative’. Eye-witness testimony reports that the first police on the scene were apparently unaware that there had been a shooting and were there because a woman had reported that a crowd of men were kicking passing cars outside the Regency Hotel. This is extremely significant because it means that no all-point-bulletin had yet gone out on police radios, despite the numerous calls that had been made to 999, directly to police stations, and even directly to the personal phones of a number of police officers! One police officer saw Sean McGovern*, who was one of the men who had been shot and injured. When he approached McGovern* and asked him what had happened McGovern told him to ‘fuck off’. McGovern* was so convinced that the police were colluding with the Hutch faction he, despite his severe injuries, discharged himself from hospital. Because the hospital was full of police officers he felt was in extreme danger even there. A second police officer testified that Kinahan gunshot victims and witnesses were uncooperative and that they remain so to this day, even the gunshot victims refusing to make any statement to police. Another police officer reported that:
Within minutes of the end of the attack the Kinahan faction was convinced that Hutch allies within the police force had colluded with the Hutch faction to facilitate the murder, shooting, and attempted assassination of senior Kinahan faction members. And while it has been shown earlier that many Irish people are happy to see ‘scumbags wiping each other out’ it should be noted that Article 20 of the European Charter of Human Rights declares that all people are equal in the eyes of the law, even people who others claim are criminals. If a person is subject to the law, if they can be arrested, tried, imprisoned and have their valuables confiscated by the law, then they are also protected by those same laws. So, if police officers allied themselves with one criminal faction to facilitate the murder of members of another criminal faction then those police officers are themselves criminals and should presumably be subject to the same laws as every other Irish citizen. The Hutch family´s failed attempt to murder Daniel Kinahan* in August 2014 was the catalyst for what would eventually develop into the blood Feud between the two gangs. However, it was the spectacular but failed attack at the Regency Hotel in February 2016, and the belief that senior police officers colluded with their long-time allies in the Hutch gang, that was directly responsible for the unprecedented wave of bloodshed that followed. As one underworld source put it on the night after the attack, ‘After a hit like that, there´ll be all out war. A fight to the death! They´ll never stop…’ According to numerous media reports and police sources Patrick Hutch was identified as one of the alleged murderers within just a few days by at least two senior police officers. Certainly, underworld sources were convinced Patrick was the man dressed as a woman because the waiting press photographers had taken a number of photographs that showed both Wig-man and Flat-cap very clearly. Flat-cap had worn no disguise at all and had been identified as a dissident republican named Kevin Murray within minutes of the infamous photos of the attack going ‘viral’ on social media! Murray would be given the nickname ‘Flat-cap’ by the world’s media from that moment forwards. Daniel Kinahan* had survived a third assassination attempt in less than a year and a half, all of which were allegedly orchestrated by the Hutch faction. But David Byrne* had been murdered during a spectacular attack by heavily armed men posing as police officers during a major public event. The alleged Hutch attack had been predicted by both police and media sources in the weeks before. Even some of the alleged assassination team had been identified prior to the attack yet not a single police officer was posted to the event. And it was approximately ten minutes before the first police car arrived at the Regency Hotel in response to the first shots being fired and twenty minutes after the assassination team had arrived at the crime scene. All over social media posters were asking why was there no police presence at the event when there had been another assassination attempt at the previous event just a couple of months earlier? Even main stream media sports journalists ‘begged the obvious question’ – why was the original policing plan removed when almost everybody knew this event would be such a potential flash point? For example, the Irish Examiner Political Reporter Elaine Loughlin wrote an article entitled:
It certainly does indeed beg the question! As noted, even sports journalists were ‘begging the question’. Gavan Casey wrote:
Opposition politicians also questioned the sanity of preventing a police presence from securing the Regency Hotel during the weigh-in. Dublin politician Finian McGrath:
An article in the Independent highlighted another extremely peculiar aspect of the Regency Hotel Atrocity:
Hotel manager John Glynn was also continually unable to contact emergency services. So, he too rang a detective he knew personally:
So, no police presence despite all the numerous media and underworld warnings, and despite the earlier attack at the previous boxing event. 999 calls that went unanswered and no emergency response for 23 minutes. It’s perhaps not too difficult to understand why the Kinahan faction felt that they had been set up. The real question they were asking wasn’t IF they´d been set-up, it was WHY they’d been set-up? According to Kinahan faction and other underworld sources some members of the Hutch faction had had a long term ongoing mutually beneficial alliance with some police officers. Considering the major status of the Hutch faction in the criminal underworld those officers who handled Hutch informants, and presumably their superiors, would have had great potential for career advancement and other associated benefits. As has been shown, the Hutch faction also had powerful political and media connections. Paul Williams has boasted that Gerard Hutch is one of his key sources, just as Hutch had been a key source for Veronica Guerin. Dublin Lord Mayor Christy Burke and Labour politician Joe Costello had even attended Gary Hutch´s funeral. Celebrity police officer and Dublin GAA coach Paul Gaffney had also attended the funeral. If this is any indication it would suggest that some members of the Hutch faction do indeed have powerful police, political, and media leverage. However, the Kinahan faction remained confused. While they were in no doubt about the collusion between senior elements within the police force and the Hutch faction, they struggled to understand just why the police would ally themselves in such a spectacular attack. Although the senior police officers involved could expect cover from their media and political allies, the plan still involved massive risk. If a child had been hit by a stray bullet or a number of members of the public killed, it would have been difficult even for the likes of Paul Williams and Nicola Tallant to ignore or explain away the lack of police at the event or the lack of a police response during the attack itself. So just how had the Hutches got senior police officers to collude in the Regency Hotel attack? Why did a small group of senior police officers facilitate the most epic failure of policing in Irish history? When all is said and done the real power on the streets in Ireland isn’t the criminal gangs, it’s the police themselves. This is something the IRA discovered when one of its volunteers accidently shot police officer Gerry McCabe! Even if the Hutches had some leverage on some police officers the faction could never, ever bully the police. If some police had colluded with the Hutches then they had colluded because they chose to. But why? The Kinahan faction had no particular beef with Irish police that went further than the law and its day to day dealings with crime. Simply put, there was no obvious reason for senior police officers to break the law and aid the Hutches in executing such an unprecedented, high profile, and murderous attack! As already discussed senior police officers had positively identified at least one of the five shooters within hours of the attack. The Regency Hotel attacker known as Kevin Murray had made no attempt at all to disguise his appearance and had been photographed by the crime photo-journalists who had been waiting in the Regency Hotel carpark for something to happen. Murray was from Strabane and a well known member of Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), a group based in the north of Ireland in the Occupied Six Counties. They claimed to be a ‘vigilante’ group intent on the prevention of drug dealing in Derry and parts of Donegal. The group have claimed responsibility for over thirty bomb attacks and over twenty shootings against people they claimed were drug dealers. Murray had been charged with the shooting of alleged drug dealers in 2012. It would seem extremely puzzling then for him to be involved in a revenge shooting on behalf of Gary Hutch, a man who is alleged to have been one of Ireland´s major heroin suppliers! RAAD joined with the Real IRA, and other smaller alleged dissident Republican groups in 2012 to create a dissident IRA splinter group, called the New IRA. One notable exception to this amalgamation of so-called Republican groups was the Continuity IRA. They would play no part in the New IRA. This will become extremely relevant as this study continues. Even two sample media articles are enough to adequately highlight the seemingly puzzling association between members of the supposedly ‘anti-drug’ RAAD and the Hutch gang. Journalist Garreth MacNamee reports that:
The Hutch heroin operation in Belfast is led by one of the Regency Hotel attackers who fled north to escape the Kinahan faction. It is also claimed that this same Regency Hotel attacker rang the family of David Byrne* to taunt them about the murder. Why would `Republican Action Against Drugs´ (RAAD) members align themselves with people who are reportedly flooding Belfast with heroin? Perhaps the RAAD members are only ‘anti-drugs’ when it comes to Derry, and ok about drugs in Belfast. It is perhaps worth noting that along with the Regency Hotel killer hiding out in Belfast, the latest underworld ‘intel’ on the whereabouts of Gerard Hutch is that he too spent some time hiding in the Occupied Six Counties and is being protected by ‘a ring of republican steel’. The Monk has apparently allied himself with Ireland´s most high profile Neo-Nazi and reputedly hired one of the IRA´s most prolific killers to assassinate a leading Kinahan faction member in Spain. It does seem puzzling that so many republicans have chosen to ally themselves with the Hutches. Although as we all know many people will do anything for money. However, it would seem puzzling for RAAD activists to align themselves with a criminal gang allegedly responsible for so much drug misery in Dublin and Belfast! However, senior police officers have stated that many members of RAAD are simply drug dealers who use Republicanism as a cover for their criminal activities. They are reported to `confiscate´ drugs from dealers in the Occupied Six Counties and then sell them on to Hutch dealers to sell in Dublin and Belfast. One of Kevin Murray´s closest associates was a man named Michael Barr. At the time of the Regency Hotel attack, Barr was the manager of a Dublin pub that was ‘controlled’ by members of the Hutch gang. According to underworld sources, Hutch faction members allegedly hired Barr in December 2015 to help them in their Feud against the Kinahan´s after their original hired guns, David Douglas and Darren Kearns failed to kill Daniel Kinahan* at a boxing event held at the Red Cow Hotel in November 2015. Barr in turn reputedly hired his close friend Kevin Murray to join the operation. At this stage Murray was already well aware that he was terminally ill and hadn´t long to live. As well as allegedly supplying both the AKM assault rifles used to murder David Byrne* and providing the training needed to use them, it is alleged that Barr´s fingerprints were found at the scene of David Byrne´s* murder. Some underworld sources claim that these rifles were used without the knowledge of the dissident republican leadership and were secretly rented out by the republican quartermaster, while others are suspicious that the weapons were hired out with the full knowledge of the dissident leadership. In either case, Barr was shot dead in Dublin on April 25th 2016, about six weeks after the murder of David Byrne*. According to Martina Devlin, writing in the Irish Mirror:
It is also worth noting that Michael Barr was heavily involved in drug dealing. This perhaps explains the seemingly puzzling alliance between Barr and Murray, and the Hutch faction. According to journalist Ciaran Barnes, as reported in the Belfast Telegraph:
During the raid, cash equivalent to €80,000 was also found. This Unholy Alliance between heroin dealers, supposedly ‘anti-drug’ vigilantes, and criminals posing as republicans should be noted by the reader as it will become pivotal to the current study. Eye witnesses to the Regency Hotel Atrocity have stated that aside from Kevin Murray the other four gunmen spoke with heavy north Dublin accents. As already noted, at least two senior police officers identified the attacker who was disguised as a woman as Patrick Hutch. However, other senior police officers such as Paul Gaffney claimed that they didn’t recognise the shooter as Patrick Hutch. As noted earlier, Paul Gaffney was a prominent mourner at the funeral of Gary Hutch and has publically stated that he is a close associate of the Hutch family. Patrick Hutch’s legal team would use this close association between Gaffney and the Hutch family as a key element in his defence. If someone as close to the Hutch family as Paul Gaffney didn’t recognise Patrick Hutch as the shooter disguised as a woman then the claim should be dismissed, the legal team argued. However, the three judges of the non-jury Special Criminal Court dismissed the defence team’s argument and the trial continues. Regardless of the claims of police officers and legal teams it is alleged that the Kinahan faction itself was in absolutely no doubt who had murdered David Byrne*, and attempted to assassinate his brother Liam, and Daniel Kinahan* amongst others. As noted above, it is rumoured that the killers rang and taunted the victim’s family after the murder. The caller is rumoured to have claimed that David* ‘wiggled like a worm when I blew his head off’. ommissioner O´Sullivan next claimed that police are ‘deployed on intelligence and risk assessed’. Well, let us consider the risk of an attack at the Regency Hotel:
Considering all of the above it would seem extremely obvious, in fact a complete no-brainer, that the boxing event to be held in Dublin in the Regency Hotel was the MOST likely place for the predicted Hutch revenge attack and should have been assessed as potentially in the VERY HIGHEST RISK category! So, WHO exactly carried out the Regency Hotel police risk assessment? Because without a shadow of a doubt, considering the attack that took place and the bloody spiral of violence that the failure unleased, it must go down as the most thunderingly epic risk assessment failure in Irish policing history! And WHO decided to withdraw the policing plan that was originally set to be put in place? This policing plan was spoken about by a number of police sources and journalists in the weeks leading up to the Regency Hotel Atrocity. When eventually there is an inquiry into the events surrounding the Regency Hotel Atrocity it will be extremely enlightening to hear the reasoning behind this epic risk assessment failure and the withdrawal of the original policing plan. Perhaps as many as twenty dangerous criminals, some disguised as police officers and armed with heavy assault rifles, played a part in either planning or attacking a public event attended by innocent members of the public, including numerous women and children, and the police hierarchy completely failed in its intelligence, risk assessment, and its duty to protect and serve. And apparently despite so many people being involved, nothing at all leaked back to the police through their legions of paid informers, who are usually so forthcoming with information. Journalist Pat Flanagan used some tongue-in-cheek commentary to highlight the utter absurdity of the claims by Commissioner O´Sullivan
All of this would perhaps be hilarious if it wasn´t for the loss of so many lives and the subsequent violence unleashed by this grossly spectacular ‘failure of police intelligence’. Police Commissioner O´Sullivan also claimed that ‘we need to be careful how we divide police hours’. Pat Flanagan had some tongue-in-cheek commentary regarding this claim too. Although the following might seem like parody it is in fact what actually happened under the current Fine Gael government:
God help this country indeed with politicians like Noel Noonan elected to public office! ISIS is a violently fundamentalist Muslim terrorist group that have been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, hundreds of terrorist attacks in both Europe and the Middle-East, the sexual enslavement of whole ethnic groups, and some of the most horrific crimes of the 21st century, particularly against women and homosexuals. That Fine Gael politician Noel Coonan views water protesters as comparable to ISIS terrorists speaks volumes about his party and how they view the working-class people they ‘rule over’. But it is also indicative of something perhaps more sinister, and Flanagan laid it out as thickly as he could:
Again, it is important to remind the reader that this is not parody but is actually what happened. As noted, Police Commissioner O´Sullivan claimed ‘we need to be careful how we divide police hours’, yet there seemed unlimited hours available to her husband’s water protester special police unit! As Flanagan explained:
So, in truth it would seem clear that there are actually mountains of police hours available. And to further highlight the absurdity of former Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan position, what follows is a breakdown of the police response specifically caused by the epic failure to police the Regency Hotel and prevent the murder of father of two, David Byrne*. Under Operation Hybrid, apparently set-up directly as a consequence of the murder of David Byrne*, as of July 4th 2018 there had been:
Puzzlingly however, people identified by both police and numerous media outlets as ‘senior Kinahan Cartel lieutenants’ have not received any such messages, nor have they received the round-the-clock armed police protection that members of the Hutch faction, and crime celebrity Paul Williams, are still receiving! To put that in context, it must be kept firmly in mind that police themselves have identified at least 16 Hutch faction members who were involved in the murderous attack on the Kinahan faction that was the catalyst for the spiral of violence that has followed. Since only Patrick Hutch has been charged with the murder of David Byrne*, most of the rest of the dangerously violent Regency Hotel Atrocity gang are presumably still at large and free to carry out further murderous attacks against Kinahan faction members. The Twitter account run by the Hutch gang tweeted at 1:52pm on August 18th, 2018 the famous photograph of two of its members entering the lobby of the Regency Hotel, moments before they murdered unarmed father of two, David Byrne*. Both are disguised as police officers but carrying the famous AKM assault rifles that will become so central to this investigation. The photograph is accompanied with the words
Tagged in the tweet are four named professional boxers associated with MTK, and two MTK gyms. Pete Taylor* was threatened numerous times by this same Hutch linked account BEFORE he was shot, and BEFORE his gym was shot-up during a public boxercise class, leading to the murder of granddad Bobby Messett*. Yet, it is only the Hutch faction members that are receiving armed round-the-clock protection from the police, at huge financial cost to the Irish tax-payer. And despite 522 GIM messages being sent out, almost all went to Hutch gang members and their associates. Pete Taylor* was only sent one AFTER he had been shot, despite the public threats he was receiving on a Twitter account followed by NEARLY 5000 people including almost every crime reporter in Ireland! Again, when there is eventually an enquiry into the Regency Hotel attack, it will extremely interesting to see what the reasoning behind this very peculiar situation was. So, a quick recap of Commissioner O’Sullivan’s claim regarding the lack of even a single visible police officer at the Regency Hotel that `There was no specific intelligence indicating any threat last Friday at the Regency Hotel’. I think it`s important to say that [police] are deployed on intelligence and risk assessed. We also have to be very careful how we divide [police] hours. Last Friday was a sporting event and we cannot have [police] going to every single event just because criminals may be there´. As has been shown, there was so much intelligence that the Regency Hotel event would be a major flashpoint that ‘a whole posse’ of crime reporters attended the event. Gary Hutch had been shot in Spain and the Hutch faction had allegedly vowed revenge, had allegedly already attempted an attack at the previous boxing event attended by alleged Kinahan faction leaders, and the media and underworld were rampant with rumours of an impending attack, all of which would suggest that the Regency Hotel event was a massive security ‘risk’. Whoever made the police risk assessment that left the Regency without even a single visible police officer should probably be asked what her or his reasoning was! And considering the amount of police hours available both before and after the Regency Hotel attack, for the water charge protesters and then Operation Hybrid, it would seem that the claim that there weren’t enough resources to send a couple of police officers to the Regency Hotel that fateful day is a complete fabrication. The last pitiful excuse proffered by Commissioner O’Sullivan that ‘Last Friday was a sporting event and we cannot have [police] going to every single event just because criminals may be there’ is perhaps the most absurd of all. While it is true that there are no doubt criminals everywhere throughout society, at sporting events, in the government, in the police force, in the banks, in the corporations, in the Church institutions, and on the streets, in this particular instance it was clear that this specific sporting event was EXTREMELY HIGH RISK because a particular group of alleged criminals, who were based outside of Ireland, were flying into the city during a time when another group of violent Dublin based criminals had vowed to attack them! Quite frankly, there can be no more obvious place to send police officers than the Regency Hotel on February 5th 2016. Policing incompetence of such epic proportions is truly staggering. The sections of the media who at least asked question about the most epic policing failure in Irish state history didn´t just limit their questions to Police Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan. The then Minister for Justice, Fianna Gael politician Frances Fitzgerald was also asked to explain why no policing plan had been put in place, with such tragic consequences. In response, she claimed that:
The reader should reflect on this claim for a moment and perhaps even read it again. ‘Obviously nobody there would have expected this kind of event’! Well, nobody apart from the SIXTEEN strong attack team, the targets themselves, the shooting victims, the underworld, any interested observer, and a whole posse of journalists and photographers! And many of the three hundred brave souls who showed up for the event were justifiably edgy from the start. When people realised there was no police presence many people got even more nervous. This completely absurd claim from Fianna Gael´s Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald is arguably one of the most inaccurate statements ever made publicly by an Irish politician. Both media and underworld sources were full of warnings that an attack was extremely likely to take place at the boxing event. Was Fitzgerald simply covering up incompetence under her watch or was it something else? Could the lack of a police presence, the lack of an emergency response, the unanswered 999 calls, the attacker´s clear knowledge beforehand that there would be no police at the event, and then no emergency response during the attack be put down to incompetence. Not a single police unit responded during a prolonged, armed, and murderously violent attack on a hotel close to the very heart of the capital city of Ireland! To some, it is inconceivable that there could have been such incompetence at the highest level of Irish policing. Allegedly, as far as the Kinahan faction was concerned the whole set-up was the opposite of incompetence. It was well organised and expertly controlled by someone within the police force to facilitate the murder of members of the Kinahan faction. They allegedly became convinced within minutes of the Regency Hotel attack that sections of the Irish police force were colluding with specific Hutch faction criminals in an attempt to have people associated with the Kinahan faction assassinated. As if to further confirm the Kinahan faction suspicion that elements within the police force were colluding with criminals, almost everything about the subsequent police investigation into the Regency Hotel Atrocity, for them at least, would seem to have confirmed their suspicions. According to police and journalistic sources, it was known within days that at least SIXTTEN people had played direct roles in the attack on the Regency Hotel, the murder of David Byrne*, and the shootings of Sean McGovern* and Aaron Bolger*. Most of these attackers were also identified within days of the attack! As reported by Maeve Sheehan in the Irish Independent:
So, within days of the Regency Hotel Atrocity police had apparently identified almost all the attackers. Yet over TWO AND A HALF YEARS later only one man, Patrick Hutch, has been charged in relation to the attack. How can this be adequately explained? When combined with the lack of a police presence at the Regency Hotel, the failure of police to respond during the attack, the mystery of the numerous unanswered calls to police stations and 999, and the absurd and nonsensical excuses given afterward by Fine Gael Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald and Police Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan, it is perhaps understandable that the Kinahan faction would feel that they were being criminally targeted by an element within the police force, and perhaps even in the government! And again, to further the suspicion amongst Kinahan faction members that some form of collusion was occurring between the Hutch faction and some police officers, and perhaps even some members of the Fine Gael government, an unprecedented series of police raids was launched against people associated with the VICTIMS of the Regency Hotel attack! At 6am on March 9th, 2016, just over three weeks after the funeral of David Byrne*, teams from the Revenue Customs Service, the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), and six separate police units, including the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, the Special Detective Unit, the Garda Technical Bureau, the Emergency Response Unit, with a force of over 60 additional police officers, many of whom were heavily armed with MP7 machine guns, launched a series of coordinated raids, referred to as Operation Lamb, against supposed members of the so-called ‘Kinahan Cartel’. Liam Byrne, the brother of the man murdered during the Regency Hotel Atrocity, was the principal target of the dawn raids, although the family house of the Regency Hotel murder victim David Byrne* was also raided. In all, 18 locations, including 12 homes and 6 businesses, were raided and 35 vehicles confiscated, along with as much cash and jewellery as the raiders could find. No weapons were discovered, and subsequently no arrests were made. Operation Lamb also targeted the home of Regency Hotel attack victim Sean McGovern*, who was still in recovery after being shot by one of the hitmen who was disguised as a police officer. As expected, the Operation Lamb raids against individuals suspected of being in the so-called ‘Kinahan Cartel’ ‘dominated the headlines as both the media and the public still tried to come to terms with the Regency attack’. Although the chief suspects for the Regency Hotel Atrocity were thought to be heavily armed Hutch family/gang members posing as police officers, with the support of at least one freelancing mercenary dissident republican, the police continued to focus almost all their attention on so-called ‘Kinahan Cartel’ members and associates. This somewhat confusing state of affairs was justified by the media as ‘the State’s response to the wealth displayed at David Byrne’s funeral’! According Hutch contact and crime celebrity Paul Williams:
These members of the public who ‘expressed outrage’ are not named by Paul Williams, however. Byrne’s funeral cortege included 11 limousines, outriders from the Chosen Few motorcycle club, horse-drawn carriages, a lone piper, and an apparently ‘expensive coffin’, and was attended by over a thousand mourners. Considering that the Byrne family are heavily involved in the luxury car business, the presence of so many limousines is perhaps not too surprising. Another journalist and crime author Owen Conlon, in his best-selling book about the Regency Hotel Atrocity and the subsequent blood feud, wrote:
The media, led by Paul Williams, variously described Edward as a ‘soft’ target, as ‘innocent’, and ‘not involved with crime’, while describing David Byrne* as a ‘thug’. However, it is probably reasonable to point out that almost all targets in Ireland are ‘soft’ because their killers know they will be unarmed. The Regency Hotel killers knew that everyone at the boxing event would be unarmed and completely defenceless against attackers armed with AKM assault rifles. Regency Hotel victims David Byrne* and Sean McGovern* were ‘soft’ targets, just as were David Douglas and Darren Kearns, and almost everybody else who has been shot. All were shot by armed men while they themselves were unarmed. Such is the nature of gangland murder in modern Ireland. Kinahan faction members who had known Edward Hutch for many decades strongly dispute these media claims. The contrasting style of the media articles about the murders of David Byrne* and Edward Hutch, and their subsequent funerals, led to even further suspicion amongst the Kinahan faction that some members of the police were using their media outlets to target them specifically. For example, just like Daniel Kinahan*, David Byrne* had absolutely no criminal convictions. This does not mean that he wasn´t involved in criminality, but certainly he hadn´t been convicted of serious crimes. By contrast Edward Hutch was a convicted criminal. He had served prison time for breaching a domestic abuse barring order and had convictions for both fraud and larceny. In fact, Edward Hutch was the very first target and successful victim of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). In a targeted investigation codenamed Operation Alpha approximately €160,000 was found in his bank account that he could not account for. However, by 2016 it might be fair to say that Edward Hutch was no longer a major player in Irish gangland activity Unfortunately for Edward, much more relevantly it is understood that within days of the murder of David Byrne* it leaked from police sources that Edward’s taxi had played some type of role in the Regency Hotel Atrocity. Specifically, it is claimed that at the very least the assault rifles used to murder David Byrne* and shoot Sean McGovern* and Aaron Bolger* were transported in his taxi. This claim undoubtedly cost Edward his life. However, it is worth noting that perhaps somebody else may have used Edward’s taxi during its role in the murder of David Byrne*. Certainly, there has been major tension and even violence amongst members of Edward´s close family since his death. One of his close relatives, who was in prison at the time of Regency Hotel attack, has twice violently attacked another close relative, even stabbing his sibling. The same close relative is known to have also violently attacked another relative in prison, resulting in the latter losing some teeth. This relative is currently on trial for murdering David Byrne*. Less well known to the general public is the claim that Edward Hutch played a part in the peace negotiations that were initiated by the Kinahan faction shortly before the Regency Hotel attack. These negotiations were an attempt to prevent an escalation between the two factions after the attempted murder of Daniel Kinahan* and the murder of Gary Hutch. According to numerous underworld sources the last of these supposed negotiations happened just a few days before the murder of David Byrne*. Two very close associates of Edward Hutch flew into Madrid airport and allegedly met with senior Kinahan faction members to negotiate a truce. According to Kinahan sources the Hutch participants falsely accepted the terms of the truce, while being fully aware of the impending attack planned for the Regency Hotel just a few days later. In fact, Kinahan sources claim that in a phone conversation less than an hour before the murder of David Byrne* a senior Hutch faction member assured those Kinahan faction members attending the Regency Hotel event that the truce was legitimate and would be honoured by the Hutch faction. However, the total lack of a visible police presence at the Hotel had made Kinahan faction members very suspicious and that had prompted the phone call to seek reassurance that the truce was still in place. The Regency Hotel assassination team would literally have been taking up position close to the weigh-in as the phone conversation was taking place. So, perhaps understandably the Kinahan faction looked with incredulity at the media claims that Edward Hutch was ‘innocent’ and ‘not involved with crime’. By contrast, despite the fact that David Byrne* had never been convicted of a crime and was therefore, in the eyes of the law at least, actually ‘innocent’, some sections of the Irish media had absolutely no hesitation in claiming that he was a criminal. For example, on Saturday February 6th, the day after David Byrne was murdered, the INM Denis O´Brien owned Independent newspaper wrote that:
By contrast, journalist Conor Lally writing in the rival Irish Times reported:
So, while Edward Hutch was a convicted criminal whose taxi is alleged to have carried the assault weapons used to murder David Byrne* and shoot two other men, some sections of the media consistently refer to him as ‘innocent’ and ‘not involved in crime’. The same media consistently refer to David Byrne* as a notorious criminal, this despite the fact that he had never been convicted of a crime! As noted, while perhaps Edward Hutch´s taxi was used without his knowledge, and perhaps despite his extremely prominent position in the Hutch faction he was unaware the attack was being planned during the ‘peace’ negotiations despite the murder gang being made up of over a dozen of his close relatives and friends, it does again seem like there are very clear double standards in the media. Certainly, the Kinahan faction believe there is a clear and criminally complicate bias in favour of the Hutch faction in some sections of the Irish media. The Kinahan faction believe that this media bias comes in part at least from the close relationship that the Hutch faction have always had with some police officers, politicians, and journalists. Its already been noted that senior politicians and police officers attended the funeral of Gary Hutch. For example, former Dublin Lord Mayor and Inner-City politician Christy Burke was a prominent mourner at the funeral of Gary Hutch. Burke has created his political career as a supposedly fierce and uncompromising anti-drugs campaigner. Yet, Gary Hutch was reputedly a major drug supplier to the North Inner-City, where his family are alleged to control the heroin trade. Journalist Padraig O’Reilly reports that:
Photographs of the Hutch gang dealers openly selling drugs accompany the article! However, it is worth pointing out that Burke´s connection to the Hutch family is not just a recent development. He has been closely associated with the Hutch family for many decades. It has been claimed that Burke´s very first political office was above a fruit and veg shop owned by no less a figure than Edward Hutch, on Killarney Street in Dublin City. Christy Burke is also closely associated with Jonathan Dowdall, a figure who is central to the main premise of this work, and who will be examined more fully in the next chapter. In June 2015, journalist Hugh O´Connell wrote that:
As such, Christy Burke and Mary-Lou McDonald were direct rivals in the run up to the 2016 election, to be held at the end of February 2016, the same month that David Byrne* was murdered during the Regency Hotel Atrocity. In the end, even with the help of Jonathan Dowdell, Christy Burke posed no political threat at all during the election. Mary-Lou McDonald romped home with a massive tally of first choice vote while Burke was not even re-elected. A close relative of Christy Burke´s would go on to be arrested and charged with possession of explosives and membership of a dissident republican group. According to an Irish Sun article:
Irish Mirror journalist David Coleman linked the explosives to a potential attack on the Kinahan faction in the North Inner-City:
Another young relative of Christy Burke was also charged with membership of a dissident republican group and possession of a firearm in 2012. He was eventually sentenced to five years in prison after a trial in the special Criminal Court. Incredibly however, the Christy Burke relative who was believed to have being preparing to blow up some Kinahan faction members was released on bail, despite being charged with IRA membership and being found in possession of enough explosive to blow up a block of flats. As reported by Alison O´Riordan:
It would seem very strange for someone carrying so much explosives in our capital city to be given bail. Considering that the RDG33 hand grenade head was with the ten 400-gram blocks of explosives it is arguable that this bomb was going to be put to immediate use. The grenade head would have been used as an initiator (fuse) in the Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Generally, unless the device is to be used soon, fuses or kept separate to explosives for obvious reasons! By another one of those very strange twists of fate that continually drive this story, Christy Burke was out canvassing for votes with an INM journalist and photographer on his team when he received word that Edward Hutch had been gunned down at his North Inner-City home. As already noted, Burke rented his first office above a fruit and veg shopped owned by Edward Hutch. They were close friends going back many decades. Burke told the Irish Independent journalist Niall O´Connor, who was travelling with him, that:
The former Dublin Lord Mayor´s use of ‘we’ makes it very clear where his allegiance lay and again highlights how the Hutch gang had powerful political patronage, as well as highly placed allies in the police force and INM media. Perhaps Christy Burke´s most outwardly visible role in the events of the Kinahan-Hutch Feud was his request that armed police escort Hutch children to school! As reported by Patricia Devlin, under a the extremely misleading and sensationalist heading ‘HUTCH KIDS ARE UNDER POLICE PROTECTION AT SCHOOLS’:
Perhaps it could also be viewed as very, very serious when a supposedly ‘anti-drugs’ activist politician such as Burke attends the funeral of someone like Gary Hutch! And again, it is worth noting that Daniel Kinahan* has never been convicted of any crime. Underworld sources are also absolutely adamant that Burke´s request for protection for Hutch school kids is a propaganda piece designed for sensationalist headlines in media outlets owned by Denis O´Brien:
Christy Burke wasn´t the only one planting stories in the media. As already outlined earlier, Gerard `the Monk´ Hutch has had a ‘love/hate’ working relationship with many journalists, such as Paul Williams and Veronica Guerin. Gerard Hutch gave his first media interview when he was just sixteen. He told an RTE News crew that he couldn´t resist breaking into cars and stealing other people´s money and valuables. The Monk first began communicating with Veronica Guerin in 1995. She wrote that:
It is even believed by some that Guerin was shot in the leg, a year before her murder, on the Monk´s orders because she had claimed in print that he and his family controlled the heroin trade in north Dublin. However, most sources claim the first shooting was ordered by associates of the General, Martin Cahill. In either case, the Monk had a personal relationship with the extremely prominent journalist. The Monk is also in direct communication with crime personality Paul Williams. Williams has made oodles of cash writing about ‘scumbags’ for the last two decades and many believe that Gerard hutch is one of his primary sources. Williams claims that he has:
So, it can be assumed then that some of what Williams claims is planted by Hutch himself. However, it is clear that some of these stories about Hutch and others are little more than propaganda pieces. As such, Williams is considered by underworld sources as little more than a mouth-piece and not a serious crime reporter. Many of the same underworld sources believe that this Hutch connection to high profile media personalities goes hand in hand with their long-standing alliance with a number of important police officers and politicians. This kind of powerful political, police, and media support essentially making the Hutch gang almost untouchables from the mid-90s onwards. As previously examined, it was a decade earlier during the mid-80s that the so-called ‘drug vigilantes’ began operating in Dublin. Partly led by politician Christy Burke, and a Catholic priest called Jim Smyth, the drug vigilante group was made up of relatives of drug addicts, concerned parents & citizens from Inner-City Dublin, some genuine republicans, and a number of criminals posing as republicans. Christy Burke is the aforementioned ‘anti-drugs’ politician who attended the funeral of Gary Hutch, began his political career in an office above a shop owned by Edward Hutch, and who petitioned the police for protection for Hutch school children! The ‘anti-drugs’ groups began in Hardwicke Street flats and Fatima Mansions before spreading across both the North and South Inner-City. The social movement eventually began calling itself Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD). According to an article publish in the Independent in 2010:
The activists would gather together in large groups and march to the homes of suspected or alleged drug dealers, force suspected or alleged drug dealers from the area, and put up posters warning suspected or alleged drug dealers that they would be beaten or shot. After a decade of marches and threats of violence, a terminally ill heroin dealer/addict named Josie Dwyer was beaten to death by a vigilante mob and then a witness to that killing, heroin addict Alan Byrne, was shot three times in the back after he agreed to testify against the killers. This had the effect of turning many hearts and minds against the CPAD movement, which was portrayed in the media as a front for criminals masquerading as republicans. Even from the earliest period it was claimed that some CPAD activists were taking bribes from drug dealers. The drug dealers would pay the CPAD members so they would be allowed to continue dealing. These CPAD activists would also influence the larger CPAD movement to only target rival dealers. In later years this practice became endemic to the CPAD movement and became a serious money-maker for the criminals who were masquerading as community activists. As previously discussed, the illegal drug market is driven by the demand for drugs. Killing and even jailing drug dealers rarely if ever effects that demand, and new dealers simply step up to take their place. By the mid-1990s it is estimated that Dublin had around 13,000 regular heroin users, whom police believe were responsible for 80% of the capital´s crime! Addicts committed 85% of burglaries and 82% of muggings to pay for their habit. Many of the heroin addicts were spending at least €40-€50 a day to feed their habit. This meant as much as HALF A MILLION EUROS A DAY was changing in hands in an area about of just about 4 square miles in Ireland´s capital city! Stop for a moment and let that figure sink in. Obviously, that was an extremely lucrative market for the drug dealers with serious money to be made. So, despite all the efforts of the genuine people involved with CPAD, there was simply no stopping the epidemic of heroin use in the deprived areas of Inner-City Dublin. What CPAD did at least was highlight the awful devastation caused by heroin addiction, and this almost certainly convinced some people growing up in the Inner-City to steer clear of heroin. Prior to the stand taken by the concerned parents of Hardwicke Street, Fatima Mansions, Oliver Bond, Theresa Gardens and elsewhere, nobody cared about what was happening to the poor youth from these areas. In truth, most of the elite still don´t care, but at least the government could no longer turn a blind eye. In April 2005, world kickboxing champion Jim Curran was attending a karaoke in a pub close to his home in Dublin´s Inner-City. A group of ‘republican anti-drug activists’ tried to intimidate Curran and force him from the pub but were unable to do so because Curran was physically too tough for them and refused to be intimidated by their threats. There was bad blood between the ‘anti-drug activists’ and Curran because he had openly and publicly ridiculed them for taking bribes from well-known heroin dealers, while they falsely and hypocritically masqueraded as anti-drugs activists. The leader of the ‘anti-drug activist’ group sent for a handgun. When he eventually got it he casually walked over behind Curran and shot him three times in the back of the head, killing him instantly. The killer then simply walked out of the pub, convinced that all the local people in the area would be too fearful to make any kind of statement to police. However, in the end, the killer´s own sister gave evidence against him and he was convicted of the murder of Jim Curran. Another prominent member of the CPAD was Noel ‘Duck Egg’ Kirwan. Kirwan was shot dead on December 22nd 2016. Almost all media sources claim that he was killed as part of the Kinahan-Hutch feud. He was famously photographed standing with Gerard Hutch at the funeral of Edward Hutch just a few days after the murder of David Byrne*. The murder of Noel Kirwan again highlights the strange situation in the Irish media in relation to the Kinahan-Hutch feud. According to INM journalist Conor Feehan in an Irish Independent newspaper article:
According to another INM sourced article, but with no journalist named:
An extortion racket is where criminals threaten to destroy local businesses and harm their owners unless the owners pay the criminals ‘protection’ money every week! In contrast to the INM claims that Kirwan´s days as an extortionist were over, Stephen Breen in an article in the rival Irish Sun newspaper, claimed that:
So, according to an INM ‘source’, reputedly from the Inner-City and most likely Christy Burke or Patsy Hutch or someone close to Gerard Hutch himself, Kirwan was no longer involved in crime. But according to the police, Kirwan was still running extortion rackets in 2016! Running extortion from the 1980s all the way through to 2016, and like Burke part of the CPAD ‘anti-drugs’ racket as well. A picture is beginning to emerge that links the Hutch faction with some former republicans and ‘anti-drug’ vigilantes from both Dublin and the Occupied Six Counties. David Douglas, Kevin Murray, Michael Barr, Noel Kirwan, Jonathan Dowdell, and Christy Burke were all former republicans and/or part of the so-called ‘anti-drug’ vigilante movement, and all were closely associated with the Hutch faction. Both David Douglas and Christy Burke had served time in prison for IRA membership. Kevin Murray had also served time in the Occupied Six Counties for IRA membership. However, both Douglas and Murray had ben expelled from the mainstream Republican movement because of their involvement in drug dealing. Jonathan Dowdell and Christy Burke had both also fallen out with mainstream Republicanism and had left Sinn Fein on bad terms. Noel Kirwan and Michael Barr were both criminals, who were closely associated with dissident republicans as part of those criminal activities. It is claimed that Douglas was hired by the Hutch faction to murder Daniel Kinahan* at the Red Cow Hotel. Police claim that both Michael Barr and his close associate Kevin Murray were directly involved in the murder of David Byrne* and the attempt to murder Daniel Kinahan* at the Regency Hotel. Jonathan Dowdall was arrested and questioned over his role in the Regency Hotel attack before he was eventually imprisoned for a substantial period for the torture of a man he believed was planning on ‘conning him’. Just over a week before the Regency Hotel Atrocity an article in the country´s leading newspaper predicted that the Hutch gang would attack the Kinahan faction, and that they would have ‘senior’ republican backing when they did. Certainly, it would seem that the Hutch faction had, at the very least, hired dissident republicans, and also had the backing of some former republicans, republicans that had previously been expelled from the mainstream Republican movement for criminality. Christy Burke and Noel Kirwan had been part of the much-tainted Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement from the very start, and portrayed themselves as fiercely anti-drugs, yet both were extremely close to the Hutch faction! Underworld, police, and media sources all claim that the Hutch faction controls the heroin trade in Dublin´s North Inner-City and have even taken part control of the heroin trade in Belfast in the Occupied Six Counties. As early as 1995, Veronica Guerin reputedly put her life in danger by claiming that the Hutch faction ‘controlled the capital´s heroin trade’. Michael Barr and Kevin Murray also posed as ‘anti-drug’ vigilantes while being heavily involved in the drug trade. There is a clear and consistent peculiar bias in some sections of the Irish media, where convicted criminals involved with the Hutch faction are repeatedly referred to as ‘former criminals’, ‘innocent’, and ‘soft targets’, while Kinahan faction associates who currently have no criminal convictions are repeatedly referred to as ‘drug lords’, ‘notorious gangsters’ and ‘career criminals’. These types of Unholy Alliances, between community politicians, heroin dealers, ‘anti-drug vigilantes’ and criminals masquerading as republicans, and even puzzlingly sympathetic journalists became the norm from the 1980s all the way through to the 2010s. By then, these alliances had been in operation for decades, and the politicians, the dealers and the ‘anti-drug activists’ had long criminal histories together. They had also laundered money together and moved into other criminal enterprises, such as pimping, extortion from both local businesses and petty criminals, and smuggling. The large sums of money earned allowed these organised criminal gangs to both easily influence and ‘buy’ more politicians, police, and media personalities. These organised criminal gangs also provided information to police that could target rival gangs, and could help certain police officers, politicians, and media personalities to advance their careers. These same criminal gangs also reputedly provided drugs and prostitutes to some politicians, police officers, and media personalities, further increasing their leverage and the strength of Unholy Alliance between them all. It is the premise of this current work, that one specific ‘Unholy Alliance’ was at the heart of the Regency Hotel murder of David Byrne* and the shooting of two others, and that the activities of that ‘Unholy Alliance’ and subsequent events have done much to shape the current Irish political landscape. The murder of David Byrne and 2016The murder of David Byrne* and the shooting of two others at the Regency Hotel, and the events that led up to the attack occurred during an extremely crucial period for Irish politics. From around January 1st 2016, the Fine Gael/Labour government were in debate about what date to set for a new general election. As has been shown, during this very same period the media was rife with stories about the ‘escalating war’ between Ireland´s ‘two most dangerous gangs’ and the likelihood that the boxing events to be held in Dublin on the first weekend in February were a potential flashpoint. After a cabinet meeting on February 2nd the Taoiseach (Irish political leader) Enda Kenny announced that he would dissolve the government the following day, on February 3rd, and the newly elected officials would begin negotiating a new government on March 10th. The general election to select these elected officials was set for February 26th 2016. The Regency Hotel murder of David Byrne* occurred just two days after the government was dissolved. And the massive media furore that followed became politically loaded within hours. Ireland had its very own ‘October Surprise’! An ‘October Surprise’ is a news event late in a political campaign that has the potential to influence the outcome of an election. The term was first used in the US, and as US elections are held on the first Tuesday of November, news events that can affect the outcome of an election generally occur during October in US politics, hence the name:
Examples of ‘October Surprise’ events are numerous. During the 1972 American presidential election, the US was in critical negotiations to end the hugely unpopular Vietnam War. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger gave a press conference on October 26th 1972 and announced that he ‘believed peace [was] at hand’. This news proved extremely beneficial for President Nixon and he went on to win every US state apart from Massachusetts in the forthcoming election. On March 3rd 2004, three days before the Spanish general election a series of coordinated Islamist terrorist bombings in Madrid killed 192 people and injured approximately 2,000. Immediately after the bombings the then conservative government claimed that Basque separatists were responsible for the bombings. The Basque are a genetically and culturally distinct population, with their own distinct language, who live in the north-east of Spain. A majority of the Basque people want a homeland independent from Spain. The Spanish government have refused to allow this separation. As such, a minority of Basques had taken up arms in a guerrilla war against Spain. The Spanish government falsely blamed Basque separatists for the Madrid bombings because the government had supported the invasion of Iraq against the will of the majority of Spanish people, and didn´t want their support for President Bush and his unjust war to be blamed as the cause of the bombings:
So, a classic ‘October Surprise’. In the same year, on October 29th 2004, just four days before the Presidential election, reputed Muslim terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, who was apparently hiding in a big mansion on a Pakistani military base, supposedly released a videotape, where-in he claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attack, condemned the Bush government, and threatened more attacks on the US if the American people re-elected Bush in the upcoming election! If the tape was an attempt to frighten the American people from voting for Bush, it of course had the complete opposite effect! US journalist Ron Suskind wrote:
Although the averagely naïve person, who understands little about the reality of world politics, might think that the CIA were crazy for thinking that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda wanted Bush to remain in power, the reasoning is very straight-forward. American foreign policy is the destruction of the Arab secular and socialist nations such as Iraq, Syria, and Libya. As such the US has always been naturally allied to the Sunni Muslim fundamentalism exported by their major regional partner, Saudi Arabia. Terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Nusra Front, and the White Helmets are now openly working with the US and its partners, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UK, and France to destroy Arab secular socialism and replace it with Saudi Arabian style fundamentalist theocracy. The reasons for all this are very, very straight forward. Saudi Arabia is the spiritual centre of Islamic fundamentalism and where Mecca is located. Its clerics have massive influence in fundamentalist Arab countries, but much less in secularist and socialist Arab countries. Fundamentalist Muslim Arab countries are also fundamentally opposed to Soviet style socialism, and its atheism and secularism. The US and it allies in their ongoing cold war with Russia and China prefer fundamentalist religious Arab governments allied with Saudi Arabia, rather than secular Arab socialist governments allied with Russia. Hence the invasion and destruction of Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Events that can be linked to ‘terrorism’ would seem prime material for the ‘October Surprise’ strategy. As noted, the Regency Hotel attack and the murder of David Byrne* came at a very crucial period for Irish politics. The incumbent government had been dissolved and a general election was announced on February 3rd, just two days before Byrne* was murdered. The election was set for February 26th. Major newsworthy events during the following few days and weeks were each a potential October Surprise. One surprising detail that is perhaps worth noting before we start considering the events subsequent to the Regency Hotel Atrocity was an article written by journalist Ken Foy on January 4th 2016, one month before the Regency Hotel attack:
As previously noted the illegal drug business is driven by the demand for drugs. When one set of drug dealers die or are imprisoned, another set step up to take their place. As Larry Dunne, reputed to be the first major Irish drug dealer, had predicted:
When the gang reputed to be led by ‘Factory’ John Gilligan allegedly murdered the journalist Veronica Guerin in 1996 there was a massive storm of controversy as journalists closed ranks around their dead colleague. The police were forced to pull out all the stops and the Gilligan gang was smashed. Although only one man was convicted of her murder, the rest of the gang were imprisoned for other unrelated offences and given particularly harsh sentences. The investigation into her murder led to an unprecedented number of arrests, at least 150. It also led to the creation of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) which allows the government to seize the wealth of those alleged to be criminals. However, despite the arrests and the redistribution of drug dealer wealth to the police and government, the DEMAND for drugs remained almost identical. Organised gangs such as the Hutch and Kinahan factions moved into the vacuum created by the demise of the previous apex gang, and it was business as usual, allegedly. However, undoubtedly some gangs are more violent than others, some gangs are more intelligent, some gangs are more cosmopolitan. Some prefer to work in the shadows and keep a low profile. Others feel a need to flaunt their wealth. Some think unnecessary violence is bad for business, while others love the power they get from ordering killings and having a frightening reputation. In Mexico for example the depths of depravity that some of the drug cartels have reached are unparalleled. The level of depraved violence unleashed by the Cali Cartel was much, much worse than anything witnessed during the reign of the Medellin Cartel. In Ireland, the reign of Eamon ‘the Don’ Dunne saw a huge spiral in violent deaths. In the end it is believed that this propensity for violence led directly to his murder, as he was seen to be too volatile and dangerously bad for business. For a time, as alluded to by Ken Foy and other journalists it seemed as if the growing control of the Kinahan Cartel might usher in a time of relatively less violence. But then a dozen members of the Hutch faction were allowed to attack the Regency Hotel and murder David Byrne*, and Dublin toppled into an unprecedented period of violent crime, including the deaths of two completely innocent men. By another seemingly strange twist of fate, just day after journalist Ken Foy had noted the low level of murders in Dublin, crime celebrity Paul Williams predicted an all-out war between the Hutch gang and Kinahan faction in an article publish on January 5th 2016. Of course, despite this extremely high-profile story, Police Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald claimed ‘nobody expected an attack at the Regency Hotel’! And then by an even stranger twist of fate the Irish police held a press conference the very next day, on January 6th 2016 which claimed that dissident republican activity was on the increase. Seemingly, no major republican linked event preceded the press conference. It literally seemed to come out of nowhere. According to Irish Mirror reporter James Ward:
So, although O´Mahony stated that the attacks rarely happen in Ireland he still claimed that dissident republicans posed a ‘real threat’ and asked the public to be extra vigilant because the police ‘cannot do without the assistance of the public’! Accompanying the Assistant Commissioner was a display of apparently confiscated dissident weapons. Prominent in this display were various AKM assault rifles that were almost identical to the ones that would be used by the Regency Hotel attackers just over a month later. By a crazy coincidence, these very same weapons would be photographed by a ‘strategically placed’ photographer as the killers entered the Regency Hotel during the attack itself. When these photos went viral almost immediately after the murder of David Byrne*, hundreds of people recognised that the weapons used by the Regency Hotel killers were the same type as those prominently displayed by Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahoney just a month earlier at a press conference about the dangers of dissident republicans. And in fact, the police had even tasked the public with reporting any suspicious activity. As such, social media was almost immediately awash with people opining that the Regency Hotel attack was a republican terrorist attack, despite the overwhelming evidence that it was the much-predicted revenge attack by the Hutch faction! As examined extensively in earlier chapters, despite a massive media furore regarding the likelihood of a revenge attack by the Hutch faction while their rivals paid a rare public visit to Dublin, someone with the Irish police hierarchy decided to withdraw a visible police presence from the event, literally clearing the way for an attack. And sure enough, an attack was launched, allegedly by the Hutch faction. David Byrne* was murdered and Sean McGovern* and one other was shot. While no police were apparently present, a whole ‘posse’ of crime reporters and their photographers were there waiting for something to happen. These photographers managed to catch crystal clear images of the attackers entering to the Hotel, brandishing the very same type of assault rifle that Assistant Police Commissioner O´Mahony had exhibited only a month earlier and linked directly to dissident republican activity. And then they were also able to photograph the attackers as they left the crime scene over SIX MINUTES later. Only one of them had made no attempt to disguise himself. As already discussed, this was Kevin Murray, a well-known member of a group called Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), a supposedly dissident republican group. So, on the Saturday morning after the Friday afternoon attack on the Regency Hotel only three things were known for sure. Firstly, that at least five gunmen and a getaway driver had been involved in the murder of David Byrne*, the shooting of Sean McGovern* and Aaron Bolger*, and the attempt to kill Daniel Kinahan*. Secondly that at least one of the gunmen, Kevin Murray, was a well-known republican ‘anti-drugs vigilante’. And thirdly, that three of the five killers had used a type of assault rifle that was known to be in the possession of republican paramilitaries. Photos of two of these assault rifles, and Kevin Murray, had gone viral shortly after the shooting. Both were extremely distinctive because of a wooden vertical foregrip. This foregrip marked both weapons as the Romanian AIM PM63 assault rifle. Manufacture of these distinctive weapons began in Romania in 1963 and continued until 1994. A large number of these were exported to the Middle-East. Colonel Gaddafi´s Libya bought a sizeable amount, some of which ended up in the hands of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). US warplanes, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, bombed Libya, including Gaddafi´s personal residence, in April 1986. However, Gaddafi was personally warned by the then Italian Prime-Minister Bettino Craxi by phone, and he and his family managed to evacuate the compound moments before it was bombed. Gaddafi claimed his infant daughter Hana was one of at least sixty peopled killed during the attack. US sponsored sources disputed this and claim that Hana survived and was thereafter raised secretly, or that she never actually even existed! As always, the battle for hearts and minds dominates the headlines in the mainstream media. Gaddafi swore vengeance against both the US and UK for Hana´s murder and thus rekindled the relationship between Libya and the Provisional IRA. Beginning in October 1986 at least four shipments of Libyan weapons and explosives, included Semtex explosive material, RPGs, SAM missiles, and PM63 assault rifles, were successfully smuggled into Ireland. When what was reputed to be the fifth shipment was intercepted it contained 2 tons of Semtex, 1000 PM63 assault rifles, 1,000 mortars, 600 Soviet F1 grenades, 120 RPG-7s, 20 SAM-7s, 2,000 detonators, and 4,700 fuses! When the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire on July 20th 1997, some IRA quartermasters rejected the peace initiative and switched allegiances to other republican groups. As such, dissident republican groups came into possession of a number of the very distinctive PM63 assault rifles. When photographs of the Regency Hotel attackers went viral, members of the public already primed by the John O´Mahoney press conference held just a month earlier outlining the new danger from dissident republicanism, instantly recognised the distinctive weapons as being from the former republican arsenal. On Sunday, February 7th, two days after the murder of David Byrne*, Sinn Féin party leader Gerry Adams made what many claimed was a very serious politic gaffe in the context of the 2016 general election, which was less than three weeks away. According to the INM owned Irish Independent, under a headline stating ‘GANGLAND DOES NOT EXIST, SAYS ADAMS AS HE DEFENDS SF PLAN’:
Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin have long campaigned for the end of juryless trials in Ireland. The Special Criminal Courts were set-up because of the potential for jurors to be intimidated or threatened by republicans during high-profile trials. As such, the Special Court system uses three judges instead of a jury. However, Sinn Féin have argued that it is a basic human right to be tried by an impartial jury of one´s peers:
Fine Gael in particular were thoroughly against the abolition of the Special Criminal Court and extremely critical of the Sinn Féin opposition to the juryless trials. Then on the afternoon of Monday, February 8th, a man claiming to represent the dissident republican group known as the Continuity IRA approached the BBC correspondent in Belfast, Vincent Kearney, and verbally claimed responsibility for the Regency Hotel shooting. The man was unable to supply a recognised Continuity IRA codeword, but Kearney accepted the statement because the man was a ‘source he would regard as credible’. According to the INM Independent newspaper:
This bogus claim falsely attributed to the CIRA will be examined more fully in the next chapter. For now it will suffice to note that, despite massive scepticism from both police and republican sources about the credibility of the CIRA claim, the Fine Gael government pounced on it. In a televised press conference called directly after the story of the supposed ‘CIRA’ claim was made public, the Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald immediately attempted to drag Sinn Féin and its leader Gerry Adams into the furore. Enda Kenny stated:
Kenny claimed, as hysterically as he could, that ‘The security of your state, the security of your community, the security of our society is at stake here because those who conduct business in the way that we saw in the Regency Hotel in the last few days have no regard for either law and order, or life and limb’! It´s puzzling then that well over two and a half years later not a single person has been convicted for their role in the Regency Hotel Atrocity, and the government authorised the police to target the victims of the attack launched that day. And while Kenny did his utmost to link Sinn Féin to the attack by pointing out that the assault rifles used might have originally been Provisional IRA weapons, he ignored the fact that the Continuity IRA leadership had recently threatened to kill both Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and deputy leader Martin McGuinness. The Fine Gael press conference was without question a fine piece of October Surprise political propaganda. As one cynical republican hack noted:
At the same press conference Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald, who´d just presided over the most epic failure in Irish policing history, accepted absolutely no responsibility and offered no accountability. According to the INM Irish Independent newspaper:
Can any of that be described as anything more than nonsensical gibberish? An impending war between the two most dangerous criminal gangs in the country wasn´t worthy of police attention! And it´s probably worth having a look at what Gerry Adams actually said about ‘gangland’ before it got spun by the Fine Gael & Denis O´Brien´s INM propaganda machine:
Clearly what Adams said was completely accurate and INM media and the Fine Gael government spun it as hard as they could. Ireland had its very own October Surprise. A spectacular and violent attack at a public event by a criminal gang was cleverly and deceitfully spun by the Fine Gael government and their INM allies to appear as a terrorist attack by republicans. As the party of mainstream Republicanism this reflected negatively on Sinn Fein and its leadership. From a high of 19% at the time of the savage attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne*, Sinn Féin´s popularity dipped to just 14%, a loss of 5% in just under three weeks! In the end, Sinn Féin still managed a whopping 65% increase, winning an extra 9 seats in the Dáil. They went from 14 seats to 23, making it a historic achievement for the Republican party who had clearly moved from ‘only’ representing Irish Republicanism to being the representative party for Irish left leaning and social-minded voters. And this is crucial, because the fallout from the Regency Hotel attack, where Fine Gael and sections of the media tried to tarnish Sinn Féin by unfounded association undoubtedly effected how some people voted. The hardcore Sinn Féin electorate would have been relatively unaffected by the Fine Gael/INM attempts to link Gerry Adams and Mary-Lou McDonald to the Regency Hotel killers. Everybody knowledgeable about republicanism, and anyone paying any attention to the media in the run up to the murder of David Byrne*, knew who had carried out the murder of father of two David Byrne*. They knew too, that Fine Gael and their media allies were flogging their Irish October Surprise for every vote they could steal. And it was a good plan, because undoubtedly voters who had thought of voting for Sinn Féin because of their social policies, and who weren´t republicans, were suddenly reminded in the most hysterical terms possible that Sinn Féin had its roots in violent resistance to a foreign occupying force. Despite the dip in their popularity after they were falsely associated with the Regency Hotel Atrocity, Sinn Féin still had a very successful election. It would have been interesting to see just how well they would have performed without the damage done by INM propaganda machine and the lies of the Fine Gael party leadership. In contrast to Sinn Féin, the ruling Fine Gael/Labour party got absolutely decimated by the electorate, dropping from 113 seats to just 57, losing almost 50% of their seats! Fine Gael had stunning electorial successes in the 2011 general election, largely due to the almost complete collapse of the then ruling Fianna Fáil party, after the Irish electorate showed its anger at the banksters and the destruction of the Irish economy. However, it took Fine Gael and Labour just one governing period to squander half of that success. When the Irish people voted on February 26th 2016 Fine Gael fell from 76 seats to 50, and their government partners Labour fell from 33 seats to just 7! Fianna Fáil climbed from 21 seats to 44, and Sinn Féin climbed from 14 seats to 23. There was a total of 34 other seats divided between minor parties like the Greens and Independent politicians. The election on February 26th was just the first part to forming a new Dáil. A government had to be formed by creating a majority coalition from the elected politicians. This process would begin on March 10th 2016. But the Finn Gael/INM spin team weren´t finished exploiting the murder of David Byrne* yet. The Regency Hotel false flag operationAs previously shown throughout this study, the failure to have a visible police presence at the Regency Hotel was without any doubt the most stunningly epic failure in the Irish policing history. The subsequent murder of David Byrne* has led to an unprecedented wave of violent crime on the streets of our capital city. The lack of a police response during an attack that lasted between six and twenty-three minutes was also a failure of epic proportions. The failure of operators to answer 999 calls, and the failure of the police and state to convict even one of the dozen plus Regency Hotel attackers over the last two and a half years has to rank as the most serious example of policing incompetence in the history of the Irish state. Yet, no heads rolled. No one was held accountable. In fact, despite being the Justice Minister accountable for the Regency Hotel Atrocity, Frances Fitzgerald was REWARDED BY BEING PROMOTED TO TÁNAISTE, the deputy leader of the Irish government, just a few short months later. And Noreen O´Sullivan, who was the Police Commissioner at the time of the Regency Hotel policing failure, she was already the top police officer in the land, so she couldn´t be promoted, but her husband, police officer Jim McGowan of Ballymun police station, was coincidently promoted to Chief Superintendent in the same month Fitzgerald was promoted to Tánaiste. So, it would seem that failure, to police the Regency Hotel at least, does pay, and pays quite handsomely… BUT WHAT IF… Frances Fitzgerald and Noreen O´Sullivan are not simply the most incompetent Justice Minister and Police Commissioner to have failed the Irish people and disgraced the Irish police force? Is there an alternative scenario that might explain why there were no police at the flashpoint Regency Hotel, why no police responded during the attack, why 999 calls went unanswered, and why there has been no convictions in the two and a half years since the most pivotal event in Irish criminal history? It has already been shown that on the day of the Regency Hotel attack, the complete lack of a visible police presence immediately alerted attendees at the boxing weigh-in that an attack by the Hutch faction was probably imminent. In the aftermath, Kinahan faction members were in absolutely no doubt that the close relationship between senior police officers and the Hutch faction had led to ordinary police officers being deliberately kept away from the Regency Hotel to allow the Hutch faction to carry out their murderous attack. What the Kinahan faction didn´t understand was why some police officers had aided the Hutch attack. The very first thing to be examined was the operational nature of the attack itself. An attack that involved using/hiring five armed attackers, and seven getaway drivers and seven getaway vehicles, and three assault rifles, needs a certain amount of time to plan and prepare. The reader is asked to ponder how long it would take to hire the killers, acquire the seven getaway vehicles, and become familiar with using the assault rifles. Underworld sources claim that the killers travelled north at least three times to familiarise themselves with the use of the AKM assault rifles. The Hutch faction leaders are alleged to have approached Michael Barr and offered him a substantial payment for his help in the ‘war against the Kinahan faction’ in late December 2015. Barr allegedly accepted the contract, rented the three AKM assault rifles off a dissident quartermaster, and hired the dying Kevin Murray. They then hatched a plan to attack the Kinahan faction when they would be in Dublin for the ironically named Clash of the Clans boxing event at the start of February. Almost everybody involved is certain that Gerard ‘The Monk Hutch’ at least partly planned the Regency Hotel attack, although it is possible that he had a lesser role. His crimes have usually been defined by their exemplary success and the Regency Hotel was an abject failure for the Hutch gang, if not for the Hutch gang´s shadow partners. It could be that Gerard Hutch only allegedly became fully involved in the Feud directly after hitmen allegedly tried to kill him on New Year´s Eve 2015 after his continued refusal to agree to a sit-down. This was five weeks before the Regency Hotel attack. During the ensuing weeks some of the getaway vehicles were purchased and the killers learned how to handle the AKM assault rifles. Straight away, three things present themselves about this scenario:
The style and size of the assassination squad was always going to bring massive attention to the murderers. Why create a media storm where seemingly none was needed, and why use a plan that made the operational mission less likely to succeed? It simply doesn´t make any sense at all. It has already been demonstrated just how common-place gangster on gangster slayings are in Ireland and how rarely anyone is ever prosecuted for these murders. However, dressing up as police officers and storming a public event with heavy assault rifles is what is known in intelligence circles as ‘a spectacular’ and is a tactic used, for example, by the likes of ISIS and other terrorist groups. It is deliberately designed to get as much media attention as possible! As already noted, former Irish army captain, and leading Irish security expert, Dr Tom Clonan stated categorically that:
The Lord mayor of Dublin put it even more clearly:
So, why did the planners of the Regency Hotel attack set up to be so unnecessarily blatant, and so needlessly theatrical and choreographed? Way plan and execute the operation in a way that made it less likely to succeed and would create a massive media tsunami? Coming in all ‘hot and heavy’ like that actually decreased operational and tactical chances of a successful mission. Also, and this is absolutely crucial, the use of AKM assault rifles blew any chance that the targets would believe that the three attackers dressed as SWAT were real police officers. Simply put, Irish police do not use variants of the world-famous AK-47 assault rifle, ever! Using them blew the police disguise almost immediately. This prevented the assassination team from gaining any advantage their police uniforms might have presented them, apart from the obvious advantage that the masks disguised their identities. Concealing their identities in this way was very necessary because INM reporters and photographers were standing around in the carpark waiting for something to happen, and something surely did. An INM photographer was able to take almost perfect close-range photographs of the bogus SWAT team, with their Romanian made AKM assault rifles prominently displayed AS THEY ENTERED THE REGENCY HOTEL. By a strange coincidence identical weapons had been prominently displayed at an impromptu press conference in Police Headquarters less than a month earlier. As already described, these type of AK-47/AKM assault rifles are very distinctive because of a vertical wooden front-grip. This unlikely coincidence allowed hundreds of members of the public to report to the police that the weapons used by the Regency killers were the very same as the ones shown at the press conference by Assistant Police Commissioner John O´Mahoney. O´Mahoney was Police Commissioner for Crime and Security, meaning he was over-all head of policing for organised criminal gangs and dissident republicans. It would presumably have been O´Mahoney who made the intelligence risk assessment about policing, or lack of policing, at the Regency Hotel, that was signed off on by Noreen O´Sullivan. He is perhaps most famous for his role in clearing ALL of the police officers accused of corruption by Police Sergeant Maurice MacCabe. As already demonstrated, MacCabe was eventually exonerated and it was shown that his claims were legitimate. Where exactly that leaves O´Mahoney, who had earlier cleared EVERYONE, is anyone´s guess. Ireland´s police hierarchy is, as journalist Pat Flanagan raged:
Anyway, Assistant Commissioner O´Mahoney during the press conference about dissident weapons had also asked the public to be vigilant and to watch out for any evidence of dissident activity involving the weapons. Incredibly, just under a month later the very same type of weapons, very prominently displayed, were used to murder David Byrne* and injure Sean McGovern*. This of course immediately led to a quickly spreading rumour that the Regency Hotel Attack had been carried out by republicans. The strength and spread of this rumour was also substantially increased by the obvious presence of a very well-known dissident republican on the hit team. Dissident republican Kevin Murray was photographed running around, openly armed and completely undisguised during the attack! When fleeing the hotel, Murray made absolutely no attempt to hide face, or his gun, from the INM photographers who were standing around waiting to take the pictures that would go down forever in the annals of crime history. As already noted, Murray had even stayed in the hotel the night before the attack, a situation so absurd for a would-be hitman that Daily Mirror journalist Rory Tevlin reported that:
Of course it wasn´t a big job to identify him! He wore no disguise, ran around in front of a camera crew with a gun, and stayed in the hotel! He wanted to get caught. And he knew he was close to death so it didn’t matter if he was caught. The most important thing was that each of the other murderers were disguised, meaning of course that the only attacker who was easily identified immediately after the attach was a well/known dissident republican. So, according to Crime and Security expert, Dr Tom Clonan, ‘The Regency Hotel shooting was CHOREOGRAPHED to send a clear and explicit message… the operation bore the classic characteristics of a terrorist attack’. The unmistakable presence of a well-known dissident republican and the use of three distinctive assault rifles that are known to be used by the Irish Republican Army, that were helpfully displayed as such by Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahoney less than a month earlier, meant that the attack was undoubtedly meant to be seen as a republican terrorist attack. And luckily, for the killers, there wasn´t a single visible police officer there to interfere with the charade! However, unfortunately for the attackers, the media weren´t really falling for the charade. The two previous attempts to assassinate Daniel Kinahan*, the murder of Gary Hutch, the two attempts to murder Del-Boy Hutch, and finally the attempted hit on criminal mastermind Gerard ‘The Monk’ Hutch just a month earlier had left almost no-one in any doubts who had murdered David Byrne* and attempted to murder Sean McGovern* during the Regency Hotel Atrocity. But the ‘charaders’ weren´t done yet. One of the group physically approached the BBC Belfast correspondent Vincent Kearney and claimed verbally that the attack had been carried out by a small IRA splinter group called the Continuity IRA:
Obviously, there were serious problems with these claims. Firstly, this supposed member of the Continuity IRA did not even know the codeword that these guys use to prove that their claims are legitimate! So, that´s a pretty terrible start. Obviously, as soon as he was unable to give a recognised codeword the claim should have been dismissed as illegitimate, but this is not what happened. Instead, it was portrayed as legitimate by some sections of the media and as we have seen, used by Fine Gael to tarnish the reputation of mainstream Republicanism just prior to the 2016 election. The bogus ‘CIRA’ man also claimed the Regency Hotel attack was in revenge for the murder of volunteer Alan Ryan back in 2012. However, Ryan was a high-ranking member of a RIVAL republican organisation that was/is in conflict with the Continuity IRA. Also, the gang that killed Ryan had no association at that time with the Kinahan faction, so why murder David Byrne* and attempt to assassinate Daniel Kinahan*! The bogus ‘Continuity IRA’ man also claimed that they were targeting ‘drug-dealers’. Well then, perhaps they should have started by killing Kevin Murray and Michael Barr, both of whom were drug-dealers and both of whom were on the hit team! Both Murray or Barr claimed to be dissident republicans, but neither were associated with the Continuity IRA. Instead, they were part of Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD), a drug dealing gang based in the Occupied Six Counties that posed as republicans and pretended to be anti-drug vigilantes. And finally, the other attacks they claimed would follow obviously never actually materialised. According to journalist Gerry Moriarty, writing immediately after the claim was made:
So, every part of the bogus claim could be seen to be complete nonsense right from the very start. Security advisors on all sides immediately saw the supposed Continuity IRA claim as extremely dodgy right from the get-go. As reported above the Continuity IRA was heavily infiltrated by police informers. The Regency Hotel attackers numbered at least a dozen people, and with spotters probably up to sixteen. It would be inconceivable for an organisation so heavily infiltrated by police informers to do an operation with the involvement of over a dozen members and not have it leak to the police. This was of course another reason that the legitimacy of the CIRA claim should have been dismissed. It is arguably just as inconceivable that the plan didn´t leak to the police from the Hutch faction itself, considering the sheer number of active participants! But we´ll come back to that. And then to top it all off, literally WITHIN HOURS of the fake claim being made to BBC correspondent Vincent Kearney, a legitimate CIRA communication, using the appropriate codeword, was phoned into the Irish Mirror and other media outlets
Yet despite all of this, as outlined in the previous chapter, the Fine Gael leadership, namely Enda Kenny and Frances ‘False Flag’ Fitzgerald, with the obvious collusion of Police Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan and Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahoney, and with the help of INM Editor-in-Chief Stephen Rae immediately used the obviously bogus claim to attack Sinn Féin and Gerry Adams, by associating the dissident republican fake news with the mainstream Republican movement. This precipitated a drop in Sinn Fein´s popularity right before the general election. So, it would seem very clear that the Regency Hotel killers from the outset deliberately posed as republican ‘terrorists’. This is why they used the extremely distinctive AKM assault rifles that were known to be used by the IRA. This is why Kevin Murray made no attempt to disguise himself at all, and even stayed openly in the Hotel the night before David Byrne* was murdered. And this is why one of their number physically approached BBC correspondent Vincent Kearney in Belfast and falsely attributed the Regency Hotel Atrocity to the Continuity Irish Republican Army. As Dr Tom Clonan stated, the Regency Hotel attack was, right from the get-go, CHOREOGRAPHED to look like an Irish Republican terrorist attack. This is why they made the operation to murder Daniel Kinahan* more complicated than it needed to be. But why? Why did the Regency Hotel killers attempt to disguise their attack as a Republican terrorist attack? One obvious answer is that perhaps the attackers wanted to fool the police for the subsequent murder investigation. Perhaps they even wanted the Kinahan faction to believe that the attack was carried out by dissident republicans. However, there are very, very serious problems with this theory. Firstly, the police force was fully aware who had carried out the attack. While police leaders, such as Noreen O´Sullivan and John O´Mahoney, facilitated attempts by the Fine Gael leadership to smear Sinn Féin and mainstream Irish Republicanism by association, the ordinary police rank and file knew that the Regency Hotel attack had been carried out by associates of Gary Hutch. The Kinahan faction completely ignored the bogus CIRA ‘claim’. Edward Hutch, whose taxi was allegedly used to transfer the assault rifles, was murdered directly after the fake CIRA claim was made. One of the Regency Hotel killers allegedly rang a close relative of murdered David Byrne* and gloated about the killing. So clearly the killers didn´t expect honest police officers or the Kinahan faction to swallow the fake Continuity IRA claim. But more importantly, it simply does not make any sense on an operational level. It has already been shown that the police generally spend very little time, effort, or resources on seeking convictions for ‘gangster-on-gangster’ killings. And it has already been shown that the ‘spectacular’ style of the attack made it harder to murder Daniel Kinahan*. The ‘spectacular’ attention catching style would also undoubtedly lead to an unprecedented international media frenzy for at least a few days. All of this would usually be that exact opposite to what killers would want. A media frenzy almost always means the police will do everything they can for convictions, unlike when it´s just another ‘scumbag killing a scumbag’. The only thing that makes sense here is that the Regency Hotel attack planners deliberately planned it, just as Dr Tom Clonan has stated, to create as much of a media impact as possible. It has also already been shown that the operation was deliberately staged to look like a republican terrorist attack! They used weapons that had been highlighted as IRA linked weapons less than a month earlier at a police press conference, well-known dissident republican Kevin Murray took part in the attack but made no effort to disguise himself, and then a fake claim was made to the BBC Belfast correspondence falsely linking the Continuity IRA to the attack. Why did the Regency attack planners decide that staging a massively high-profile fake ‘Republican’ terrorist attack on a packed public event would be good for them? Was it to try throw off the subsequent police investigation? Obviously that didn´t work at all, as everybody already knew who had carried out the attack. And it has already been shown that the police don´t give a fuck when gangsters kill gangsters. If all the previous years were anything to go by, if a single assassin had simply walked up and shot Daniel Kinahan* there was 90% chance that the killer wouldn´t be convicted either way! Was it to throw off the Kinahan faction? Obviously that didn´t work at all either, because someone murdered Edward Hutch within a few hours of the fake attempt to link the murder of David Byrne* to the Continuity IRA. It is also reported that one of the Regency Hotel killers rang a member of David Byrne´s* family to taunt them about the killing! All of this has to be understood in the context of the masses of media stories in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the attack which predicted an upcoming war between the Hutch faction and the Kinahan faction, and a revenge attack led by close associates of the murdered Gary Hutch. It would seem that the only people who pretended to ‘believe’ that the attack was a Republican terrorist attack rather than a Hutch faction revenge attack were the Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Justice Minister Frances ‘False Flag’ Fitzgerald, Police Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan, Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahoney, and their Stephen Rae controlled prostitutes in the mainstream media. And by an incredible ‘coincidence’ a republican terrorist attack accompanied by a hysterical media storm was just what the Fine Gael government needed as its popularity plummeted. Fine Gael immediately dragged Sinn Féin into the Regency Hotel attack media storm despite it having no association at all with the attack. It is possible that this false ‘guilt by association’ attack on Sinn Féin and mainstream Republicanism by Fine Gael and their lackeys and prostitutes in the media did affect the outcome of the general election. And fair enough, that´s politics. Fine Gael saw an opportunity to gain political capital against their Sinn Fein opponents and grabbed it with both hands, creating Ireland´s very own October Surprise. But here´s the thing! If there had been a visible police presence at the Regency Hotel that style of attack could simply never have happened, and Fine Gael wouldn´t have their much-needed October Surprise event. If there had been even the standard uniformed police that normally do crowd control at public events, the fake police officers using the alleged IRA weapons would have been challenged immediately on leaving the van. The police officers present would have radioed for back-up and there would have been police everywhere within minutes. Instead, there wasn´t a single visible police officer there and the killers were allowed to spend another SIX MINUTES AFTER THE FIRST SHOOTING searching the Hotel for Daniel Kinahan*. ‘Coincidently’ during this period 999 calls would not go through and the very first police officers on the scene, who arrived twenty-three minutes after the attackers first entered the hotel, still had no idea what was going on. It has been examined ad nauseum about just how utterly absurd it was that someone assessed the Regency Hotel as no risk despite the massive amount of available intelligence that indicated the exact opposite and that an attack by the Hutch faction was imminent. It was presumably that very same intelligence that meant that some perfectly placed Stephen Rae INM journalists and photographers were able to get those perfectly posed pictures that would fuel Fine Gael´s attack on Sinn Féin and mainstream Republicanism! It gets even worse! Whoever planned the Regency Hotel attack had to have KNOWN IN ADVANCE THAT THERE WOULD BE NO POLICE AT THE EVENT. The style of attack, designed to look like a republican terrorist attack, needed to be planned weeks in advance, and planned in a way that assumed there would be no police presence, and also choreographed in way that looked like a Republican terrorist attack. As discussed earlier, Michael Barr sourced the very distinctive AKM assault rifles at almost the same time that Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahoney held a press conference asking the public to be vigilant and to be on the lookout for the use of such weapons and ‘terrorist’ activity. It is understood that the killers than trained in the use of the weapons over the following weeks. Also, for the killers to spend so long at the hotel searching for Daniel Kinahan* AFTER they had murdered David Byrne* strongly indicates that they also knew that no police officers would be permitted to respond! The killers were heard to shout ‘I can´t find him. He´s not fucking here’ as they left the scene after failing again, for the third time, to murder Daniel Kinahan*. So, the obvious question presents itself. Was the lack of a police presence or a police response at the Regency Hotel due to the most epic incompetence in Irish policing history or was it due to COLLUSION between a very small group of senior police officers and the Hutch criminal gang? It is the premise of this investigation that the Hutch criminal gang agreed to disguise their planned attack against the Kinahan faction as a Republican terrorist attack, in return for an assurance that there would be no police at the Regency Hotel either before or during the attack. This was done to deliberately to create on October Surprise designed to damage Sinn Féin in the upcoming elections. To ensure all of this, somebody within the police force simply decided that there would be no policing plan for the Regency Hotel, and a senior officer signed off on it. The long-term and on-going association between certain police officers and members of the Hutch criminal gang would have created the opportunity for this unholy alliance. It is the premise of this investigation that the murder of David Byrne* was the result of collusion between the Hutch crime gang and a very small group of senior police officers, and that some members of the Fine Gael government were fully aware of this murderous collusion and indeed actively encouraged it. Considering the unprecedent violence unleashed in response to the Regency Hotel attack and the subsequent deaths, this October Surprise false flag must be regarded as the one of the most pivotal political and criminal events in the history of the Irish state. Without the October Surprise, would Fine Gael have still managed to get 50 seats. How many more seats than 23 would Sinn Féin have picked up if Fine Gael had not falsely associated mainstream Republicanism with the Regency Hotel attack? Did Fine Gael achieve their very first Second Term off the back of the staged ‘Republican terrorist’ attack on the packed public event held at the Regency Hotel? Founded in 1933, Fine Gael has never before been elected by the Irish people to serve two consecutive terms as government. It has also never managed enough votes to govern without the coalition support of smaller parties. It became the largest party in the Dáil for the very first time in 2011, 74 years after it was founded. As shown in an early chapter Fine Gael´s roots are with the Pro-Treaty parties who voted for the partition of Ireland and the surrender of the Occupied Six Counties to British Rule. During the Irish Civil War, the Pro-Treaty side was armed and supported by the British. As such, Fine Gael and its activists are ideologically fiercely opposed to Irish Republicanism, although it´s also fair to say that Fine Gael politicians have shown that they´ll ‘get into bed’ with anyone that can keep them where the money is! Ireland is presently in the grip of a Policing Crisis, a Housing Crisis, a Homelessness Crisis, a Hospital Crisis, a HSE Crisis, the Cervical Smear Test Scandal, the Vulture Fund Scandal, the Tracker Mortgage Scandal, the Jobpath Scandal, the Irish News & Media (INM) Scandal, the Whistleblowers Scandal, and so on. Fine Gael also chose to effectively end Ireland´s century old neutrality by expelling a Russian diplomat for the most tenuous of reasons. How different would the country be if the Regency Hotel attack hadn´t been falsely associated with Sinn Féin and Republicanism? Did the media outlets that presented the Regency Hotel attack as a republican terror attack affect the election of the Irish government of 2016? These are very, very serious questions, and they deserve to be answered. A full State Inquiry is needed as soon as possible. An inquiry into why there was no police plan for the Regency Hotel event, why there was no police response, why there was a failure of 999 calls, why sections of the media and Finn Gael actively promoted the false CIRA claim, and why there has been no convictions against any Hutch faction members in over two years since the most pivotal event in Irish criminal histor February 2016On February 26th 2016 the Irish electorate voted for the Irish political delegates who would form the 32nd Irish government. 158 ‘seats’ were up for grabs across 40 constituencies. In the end, approximately 65% of the Irish electorate voted. In the 2011 general election Fine Gael won 76 seats, but ended up with only 50 in February 2016. Fianna Fáil had a catastrophic election in 2011 winning only 20 seats, but in February 2016 won 44. Labour won a massive 37 seats in 2011 but got completely decimated in 2016, retaining only 7 seats. Sinn Fein won 14 seats in 2011 and improved to 23 in 2016. An alliance of Socialists won 6 seats, a different alliance of Socialist won 4 seats, the Social Democrats won 3 seats, and the Greens won 2 seats. The remaining 19 seats were won by politicians who claim to be ‘Independent’. It is beyond the scope of this present study to examine the nature of Irish politics, but for a very basic understanding: The earliest leaders of what would eventually become Fine Gael were people like W.T. Cosgrave and Kevin O´Higgins, wealthy Catholics who had attended expensive private schools, such as Clongowes Wood College, and were loyal to their own personal wealth rather than their country. Even by 1926, graduates of Clongowes already outnumbered veterans of the 1916 Rising in the Irish government cabinet. These politicians initiated policies that saw the executions of socialist inclined Republican prisoners and used the army and police to crush social movements designed to ease the plight of poor. When Eamon de Valera split from Sinn Féin and formed the new Fianna Fáil party to participate in Free State elections, senior figures from the Pro-Treaty camp formed a secret society called the Army Comrades Association to prevent Republicans from reaching power. The organisation was led by Eoin O´Duffy, a leading fascist, and Pro-Treaty General and Police Commissioner. He formed the National Guard, who wore a blue shirted uniform and adopted the Nazi salute. Fine Gael were there after referred to as the ‘Blueshirts’ by their enemies in Ireland. The Blueshirts were racist and anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic. One of their leaders, Ned Cronin declared that:
O´Duffy modelled the Blueshirts on the Nazi Brownshirts and limited membership to Irish Christians. He declared that De Valera was a ‘communist Jewish agent’. Fine Gael was/is joined by the wealthy elite, the rich farmers, and the urban middle classes, the bankers, and the civil servants. Fine Gael is inherently anti-Socialist because Socialism can mean a redistribution of wealth, and since the supporters of Fine Gael are already wealthy they view any redistribution as ‘bad’ for them. The modern Finn Gael party tries to disguise it´s Fascist/Nazi roots and presents itself as a modern ‘centre-right’ party, who believe in big tax-cuts for wealthy people and businesses, which pretty much translates as tax cuts for themselves. They love billionaires and hate unmarried mothers, sick people, the handicapped, and other ‘spongers’. They can be seen as the party of the wealthy and the employers. As such, they get the support of people like Denis O´Brien, the billionaire owner of Irish News & Media (INM), and therefore will be generally supported in his media outlets and by his journalists. They believe in low taxes which they fund with even lower social expenditure. What this means is that they lower taxes for everybody, but this means that there is much less money available to run the hospitals, or the schools, or the police force, for example. So, if you´re an average working-class person, earning €400 a week, you might get an extra €20 in your weekly wage from the lowered taxes. Sure that´s two packets of smokes, or even three pints. Or maybe it´s little Jonny´s football fees. Unfortunately, however, if you or a loved one ends up in a public hospital you´ll be shocked at how desperate the situations is, your children will be in classes of thirty students or more, and don´t expect the police to be able to respond too quickly if you´re in an emergency. However, if you earn €90,000 plus a year like all of the Fine Gael politicians do, this low tax regime translates as substantial extra earnings per week. All fifty currently sitting Fine Gael politicians are officially listed as millionaires. So, they probably don´t use public health services or public schools. Unlike other right-wing parties around Europe, however, Fine Gael have generally been less conservative regarding civil rights in very recent years and have generally supported gay rights, immigration, and other socially progressive positions. The current leader of Fine Gael, Leo Varadkar, is himself a homosexual of Indian heritage. His main contribution to Irish politics so far has been to create a media campaign designed to demonise those people who are in receipt of social welfare, such as unmarried mothers, the handicapped, and the unemployed. Fianna Fáil is the modern descendent of the Sinn Fein ‘Anti-Treaty’ side during the Irish Civil War. That is, they rejected the partition of Ireland and the surrender of the Occupied Six Counties to British rule and supported the Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War. However, they split from Sinn Fein in 1926 and entered the Irish Free State political system, thereby politically legitimising the partition of Ireland and the surrender of the Occupied Six Counties in the north of Ireland. Like Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil also present themselves as a ‘centre-right’ party. However, they are a little bit less openly supportive of the wealthy and a little more publicly supportive of working class people. This is because much of their voter base is based in Dublin working class communities. However, Fianna Fáil have also traditionally been seen as very close to the Catholic Church hierarchy, and the Irish banker class. As such, they might be a little more financially supportive of unmarried mothers than Fine Gael would, while at the same time probably wishing they could take the children from the unmarried mothers to give to nuns who could sell them on to nice wealthy American couples. When the Irish economy was destroyed by the bankers and their wealthy clients many Irish people blamed Fianna Fáil because it happened under their ‘watch’. As such, after decades of being the dominant party in Ireland, they were destroyed by the Denis O´Brien owned media and were subsequently decimated in the 2011 election, allowing Fine Gael to become the biggest Irish party for the very first time in their history. As a major supporter of Fine Gael, Denis O´Brien and the Fianna Fáil leadership do not like each other. Therefore, INM news outlets and journalists generally portray Fianna Fáil as negatively as they can get away with, without seeming to be too obviously biased. The majority of Fianna Fáil politicians campaigned for a No vote in the recent Abortion Referendum, betraying their socially conservative outlook. Sinn Féin is the modern descendent of the ‘Anti-Treaty’ side that fought during the Irish Civil War. That is, they rejected the partition of Ireland and the surrender of the Occupied Six Counties to British rule and supported the Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War. After the Civil War they, unlike Fianna Fáil, refused to recognise the Irish Free State, or the surrender of the Occupied Six Counties to British rule, so rejected engaging with the Irish political process. They were always regarded as the political wing of the IRA, and later specifically the mainstream Provisional IRA. This refusal to be part of the Irish political process lasted until 1986, when under the influence of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin decided that a United Ireland would have to be won by democratic processes as well a military campaign. This decision caused another split in Sinn Féin, with some delegates continuing to reject any recognition of the legitimacy of the Irish Free State. The roots of modern dissident republicanism can be traced to this split, and this saw the founding of the Continuity IRA. Sinn Féin eventually completely abandoned the military campaign for a United Ireland and the Provisional IRA called a ceasefire in 1998. This resulted in a number of splits and the founding of the Real IRA. The modern Sinn Féin party would see itself as a left-wing progressive party. They ‘love the working classes’ and campaigned passionately for a Yes vote in the recent Abortion Referendum. As such, they are hated by the wealthy and the employers, and will always be portrayed negatively by most media outlets. Denis O´Brien´s INM is particularly anti-Sinn Féin, as is RTE. High-profile RTE TV personality Marian Finucane is infamous for her extremely biased anti-Sinn Féin reporting, but she is fine with this because Sinn Féin were the political wing of the IRA and the IRA are bad as far as she is concerned. Marian is very proud of her anti-Sinn Féin bias. As a huge earner whose wages are paid for by the public under threat of imprisonment, she is fiercely against any redistribution of wealth, and she and her loved ones´ don´t ever use public hospitals. Labour are supposedly the party of the working-class people of Ireland. However, they have always been the pseudo ‘left-wing’ party that have propped up Fine Gael and allowed them to create minority governments. And as we have seen Fine Gael, and in particular Leo Varadkar, really hate poor people, especially the really poor on social welfare. They´ll claim they don´t but Varadkar made it clear as he could. The problem wasn´t the mega rich racketeers and all the billions of euros that they stole, it was the greedy unmarried mothers and people on welfare who destroyed the economy, when the banking bubble imploded. Wait, that doesn´t make any sense! So, for Labour to be the ones that basically put Fine Gael, with all their right-wing anti-working class and anti-poor policies, into power is the ultimate betrayal of everything that James Connelly and Big Jim Larkin stood for. Labour are an utter disgrace to Irish politics. As such, the electorate obliterated them at the last election. Under the ‘leadership’ of Joan Brutal they dropped from 37 seats to just 7. But she´ll still get an absolutely whopper pension after her time spent as Tanaiste, which was why she sold out in the first place. Hopefully, the electorate won´t ever be fooled again, and the Labour party will be completely obliterated at the next election and consigned to the garbage pile of Irish political history. The last election saw at least 10 openly Socialist politicians elected! Generally socialist have only been elected in Ireland because they were republican first, but these 10 have no overt republican politics and perhaps even pride themselves on a rejection of republicanism. This is a significant shift and is a reaction to the hugely unfair austerity program forced on the whole Irish population to pay for the monies stolen by a very small group of very wealthy supporters of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. With Labour utterly betraying its roots, the electorate looked to other left-wing parties and these Socialists benefited. Even the Green party managed to win two seats and the Social Democrats won three seats. These left-wing politicians and particularly the socialists want to end the austerity program, and force those who stole the money to repay it, and even be imprisoned. As such, they are completely ignored by the mainstream media outlets that are owned by the same people that stole the money in the first place! Denis O´Brien thoroughly hates socialists, and thoroughly hates any redistribution of wealth, so his media outlets and INM either never mention the socialist politicians, or portray them as negatively as possible, such as when some of these politicians were falsely portrayed as ‘kidnapping’ the leader of Labour, Joan ‘Hide Your Phone’ Brutal! As well as the politicians aligned to specific parties, there were also 19 delegates elected who claimed to be independent of any party, although many had formerly been part of one of the mainstream parties. From these 158 delegates, a new government had to be formed. To have a majority government, a coalition would need 79 delegates. So, on February 27th the 65% of the Irish electorate that bothered to vote had spoken thusly: the two right wing parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil had 49.8% of vote between them, and the left-wing parties, led by Sinn Fein, had 31.5% of the vote. The remaining 18.7% of voters elected Independents, some of whom are ideologically right-wing and some of whom are left-wing. On February 3rd, just two days before the fake ‘Republican terrorist’ attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne*, the previous government had been dissolved. It was decided then, by Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, that the Dáil would reconvene in just over 5 weeks to begin the process of creating a new government from the 158 elected delegates. The date chosen to begin these negotiations was March 10th. By yet another one of these staggeringly well timed ‘coincidences’ that continue to so profoundly effect this ongoing story, on Wednesday, March 9th 2016, a man from Donegal, named as Shane Rowan, was arrested by the Police Special Detective Unit while driving near Slane, County Meath. He is alleged to have had in his possession three AK47-type assault rifles and ammunition, described as a Zastava M70 machine gun, a Chinese Type 56 assault rifle, and a Romanian PM63 assault rifle, and a large number of rounds of ammunition. According to crime personality, Paul Williams, in an INM Irish Independent article:
Is this another example of stunningly incompetent journalism or is it an example of blatant propaganda by Williams? Reread it in the style of the Team America skit. Williams states, AS FACT, that the recovered weapons ‘were brought back to the warehouse shortly after the [Regency attack]’. Williams also states, again AS FACTUAL, ‘The weapons… were loaned by the IRA to the Hutch gang’. However, he then goes on to state that tests were under way to see if the recovered weapons were the same weapons as those used in the Regency attack! So even though the police hadn´t determined for certain that the recovered weapons were the Regency weapons, Williams was stating with certainty that they were, and that they were ‘loaned to the Hutch gang by the IRA’. Which IRA? Was it a dissident group, or was it the Provisional IRA? If it was the Provisional IRA, then it would have some association with Sinn Féin and be relevant for the following day´s political negotiations. If it was a dissident IRA, then it wouldn´t involve Sinn Féin or mainstream Republicanism at all and would instead probably involve drug-dealers who pose as republicans. Williams must be at least semi-intelligent, so it is ‘surprising’ that he chose to word his article as he did. He also deliberately chose his repeated use of ‘Military-style attack’ and ‘terrorist’. Is this Propaganda 101, Paul Williams style? These false statements of fact could be viewed as legally prejudicial, because no one from the ‘Hutch gang’ has yet been convicted of the Regency Hotel attack or even of receiving weapons from ‘the IRA’! One other obvious problem with this new attempt to link Republicanism to the fake terrorist attack at the Regency Hotel was the description of the weapons seized. At least two of the weapons used for the murder of David Byrne* were distinctive Romanian AKMs. Only one of the weapons allegedly found with Shane Rowan was of this type. However, three AKM type weapons were used at during the Regency Hotel attack, and three AKM type weapons were allegedly found in the possession of ‘an IRA’ man, and Paul Williams stated unequivocally that they were the same weapons. This was enough, of course, to drag mainstream Republicanism negatively back into the limelight just before negotiations for a new government began! Over the next two days while the crucial governmental negotiations were ongoing, the Shane Rowan arrest continued the theme falsely linking Republicanism to the Regency Hotel attack and the murder of David Byrne*:
Why did the Special Criminal Court feel the need to rush in and open up in the middle of the night?! What function did that serve? Rowan was in custody. The weapons had been seized. Why couldn´t it wait until the morning, or wait months and years like almost all the others? Was it so that the story linking three assault rifles supposedly used in the Regency Hotel with the IRA could hit the front of the morning newspapers as the elected delegates negotiated a new government? And, of course, like most of the propaganda Williams gets paid to write, the story did indeed turn out to completely inaccurate. On Sunday, July 31st, 2016 another INM source stated:
What? We might have to reread that one. So, Shane Rowan WAS NOT CONVICTED FOR ANYTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH THE REGENCY HOTEL ATTACK and there is absolutely no mention that the weapons he was allegedly transporting were used at the Regency Hotel! He was apparently caught with weapons and convicted of IRA membership by police supposedly looking for the Regency Hotel weapons, but there is no confirmation or charge that these are the same weapons. What´s going on here? And there would seem very little doubt that poor old Shane Rowan was handed up by someone, to help to continue the charade that the fake terrorist attack on the Regency Hotel was linked to Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA. Being used like that was harsh! It is also perhaps worth noting that despite the hysteria about the ‘republican terrorist attack’ on a packed public event in Dublin, it was the Regency Hotel VICTIMS that the police leadership began targeting. On the very same night as Shane Rowan was set up as a patsy by someone, the police chiefs in Dublin ordered the launch of Operation Lamb, to target the family and associates of the Regency Hotel murder victim David Byrne*. As already noted police raided the Byrnes and their associates and snatched any valuables they could find. Apparently, this was because ‘the public’ was disgusted at ‘the wealth on show’ when David Byrne* was buried. So, as the negotiations to create a new government commenced, the morning newspapers were dominated by the arrest of ‘IRA man’ Shane Rowan with three assault rifles that Paul Williams falsely stated were used in the Regency Hotel attack, thus continuing the ‘republican terror attack’ false flag. The other major story was the raids against the Kinahan faction, and just how ‘evil’ and ‘wealthy’ their empire really was! Then, another massive ‘coincidence’ that followed exactly the same pattern. On the very next night, March 10th, the police made one of their very first high-profile raids on suspects allegedly involved in actually perpetrating the Regency Hotel Atrocity and, lo-and-behold, it too continued the Republican theme, only this time it wasn’t just adding dissident flavouring, with a suspicion of Provisional involvement. This time it had the potential to go right to the very heart of Sinn Féin itself! The home of a former Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Dowdall was raided by over a dozen heavily armed police and specialist officers. According to Paul Williams, again writing for INM Irish Independent and under a heading that screamed POLICE RAID HOME OF MARY LOU´S FORMER POLITICAL ALLY:
One wonders if Christy Burke was also the source of the ‘welfare of the fish’ quote! Certainly, Burke was the ‘anonymous’ and major source for many of the Denis O´Brien Irish News & Media (INM) quotes that claimed that everybody on the Hutch faction side was an ‘innocent’ ‘soft target’ ‘not involved with crime’. At least we can be fairly sure that the fish in the fish tank were probably innocent. Although is it possible that the whole Water Unit/Fish Tank thing was really a ploy for some great photos for the dozens of journalists and photographers that arrived for the event? The police stayed searching the property for almost twenty-four hours, and the police Water Unit came in a big truck and put on their flippers and diving helmets out where all the many gathered spectators could watch. Of course, as is obvious from the INM headline above, the major focus of the dozens of articles in the press was the relationship between Jonathan Dowdall and Mary-Lou McDonald. Mary-Lou is now the leader of Sinn Féin and in March 2016 was the Deputy Leader, and the parties biggest rising star. The length that the high-profile search went on for meant pictures of the search in progress made almost all the newspapers during this crucial political period. Dowdall had been a confidant and ally of Sinn Féin´s Mary Lou McDonald before he left the party, claiming that he had been bullied by some elements within. Numerous pictures of Dowdall and McDonald together were published across the print and digital media. The police never did find any weapons or explosives during the search but they took any money and valuables that they could snatch, and confiscated Dowdall’s €85,000 BMW and his €35,000 motor-bike. They also confiscated his phone, and this would have serious repercussions for both him and his family over the coming months. Just to make sure anyone who had missed the paper stories linking Dowdall, and by association Mary-Lou McDonald and Sinn Fein, with the regency Hotel attack, Dowdall was invited onto the Joe Duffy show the following day to declare he was extremely surprised that his house had been raided, and that he was not involved in the murder of David Byrne*, or the shooting of Sean McGovern*. He said that he was, however, a very close friend of Patsy Hutch and he felt that was probably why his house had been raided! It is perhaps worth noting that Patrick Hutch almost served his time as an electrician working for Dowdall, but unfortunately just a few months before he was due to qualify he was dragged into very serious criminality by his close family. He was then eventually charged with the murder of David Byrne*. And then ‘on the third day’, on March 11th, the forces of ‘law and order did a second round of raids against Kinahan faction associates. 80 police officers raided 10 different addresses across the South Inner-City, with support from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, the Special Detective Unit, the Criminal Assets Bureau, the Dog Unit, and detectives from Pearse Street and Donnybrook. Again, the raiders took all the cash, jewellery, or valuables they could lay their hands on and any documentation that they felt could shed any light on alleged money laundering. Without any doubt, whoever planned and executed the Regency Hotel Atrocity wanted it to appear to the public to be an act of Republican terrorism rather than a revenge attack over the murder of Gary Hutch. That is why a well-known dissident republican, Kevin Murray, was hired, and why he allowed himself to be seen and photographed so clearly during the assassination. In fact, it was essential that he was seen and photographed. However, anyone else engaging in such a strategy would, at best, be committing themselves to life imprisonment and at worst signing their own death warrant. But as previously noted, Murray had discovered that he was already terminally ill, and hadn’t long to live. So, the threat of life in prison or any revenge attempt on his life was meaningless! Whatever deal he made, he kept up his side of the bargain. His picture was plastered all over the western world’s media over the next few months, and the bogus republican terror attack story was portrayed as legitimate in some sections of the press. However, it would seem clear from subsequent events that the attempt to discredit Sinn Féin went further than just the Regency Hotel attack itself and was carried on during the election and the subsequent negotiations to form a government. The three consecutive days in March made sure of that. The extremely high-profile raid on the home of former Sinn Féin councillor Jonathan Dowdall and the subsequent arrest and charging of Shane Rowan with alleged IRA membership and alleged possession of the Regency Hotel Atrocity murder weapons was to be the so-called ‘icing on the cake’. Although Rowan was not charged with involvement in the Regency attack itself, allegedly being in possession of the alleged murder weapons, and being charged with IRA membership would certainly ‘paint the desired picture’. Whichever way the police were ‘tipped off’, or whoever ‘tipped them off’ to the imminent transfer of these weapons knew exactly what they were trying to achieve, and the Republican terrorist attack narrative was given even more life at an extremely crucial period in Irish political history. On March 2nd 2016, Irish Examiner political reporter Elaine Loughlin had reported that:
And Gerry Adams did indeed step down soon afterwards and Mary-Lou McDonald became leader of Sinn Féin. However, a coalition between Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil, the party that had split from them many decades previously, never even got off the ground. While the Fianna Fáil MEMBERSHIP wanted nothing at all to do with Fine Gael, the Fianna Fáil LEADERSHIP wanted nothing at all to do with Sinn Féin! The Fianna Fáil ‘strategists’ used the ongoing fallout from the fake Republican terrorist attack on the Regency Hotel to instead support a minority coalition with their great rivals in Fine Gael. The unthinkable had suddenly happened in Irish politics. Fianna Fáil joined with Fine Gael, their Civil War enemies, and a Fine Gael leader was re-elected as Taoiseach for the very first time. As planned, the false flag October Surprise attack on the Regency Hotel forever changed the Irish political landscape. On April 29th a Fine Gael-led minority government with provisional support from Fianna Fáil was agreed and Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny was re-elected as Taoiseach on May 6th 2016. Despite her massive failure as Justice Minister, Frances Fitzgerald was PROMOTED TO TANAISTE, the deputy leader of the Irish State! And despite her massive policing failure Noreen O´Sullivan was not held accountable or demoted. As she was already Police Commissioner there was nowhere for her to be promoted to, so her husband, Jim McGowan, was promoted instead, to police Chief Super-Intendent on May 23rd 2016, a decision that ‘raised some eyebrows’. Both Fitzgerald and O´Sullivan would eventually be forced to step-down from their positions because of ongoing controversies regarding corruption and their alleged attempts to silence police whistle-blowers. The whistle-blowers have alleged major corruption in the police force, and collusion between senior police officers, police informants, media & journalists, and some politicians. Perhaps the reader should reread that claim. However, Noreen did eventually get promoted to the esteemed former Chief Police League, who seem unfazed by her catastrophic failure at the Regency Hotel and her inability to prosecute anyone for the Irish crime of the century! Stephen Rae, Editor-in-Chief of INM was promoted to European Commission High Level Expert on Fake News! The previous sentence is not a joke. Clearly the outstanding work done by Rae during the general election of 2016 did not go unnoticed. The ‘High Level expertise’ of the man most responsible for creating the fake news reports that spun the Regency Hotel Atrocity into an Irish Republican terrorist attack was recognised and rewarded. Rae is the former editor of the internal Irish Police Journal and placed himself directly in charge of all Regency Hotel Atrocity stories and subsequent Kinahan-Hutch Feud related articles. Rae´s main propagandist, Paul Williams, has gone from strength to strength too and has become a major media personality over the last couple of years. He, like Patsey Hutch, also costs the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of euros every year as he demands armed police protection 24/7 after all the stories he has told for his pay masters. The only one of the Regency Backstage Gang that didn´t seem to get a big promotion was poor old Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahoney. Perhaps whatever he was promised is still on the way. During the non-jury trial of alleged Kinahan faction associate Freddie Thompson the prosecutor said that it is NOT the State´s claim that is was Thompson who shot drug-dealing, dog-fighting fanatic, hitman David Douglas. It is also NOT the State´s claim that Thompson was a driver of the getaway vehicle, or even the alleged secondary getaway vehicle, but it is the State´s claim that Thompson drove a car that was seen close to those alleged cars earlier on the day Douglas was shot. Recognising that this evidence is extremely tenuous and would never lead to a conviction in a jury court the prosecutor stated that:
The Aftermath and the book releaseAs noted earlier former Lord Mayor of Dublin, Christy Burke, had given his usual glowing character reference for anyone involved with the Hutch faction, but his claims of ‘innocence’ were again torn apart when Jonathan Dowdall and his father were jailed for torturing a man they believed was trying to ‘scam’ them:
Anyway, during the media event/police raid on Dowdall´s house and fish-tank, the police confiscated a phone and it was on this phone that they discovered a video recording of Dowdall and his father torturing the ‘scam artist’. And it was during the torturing trial that the next Feud related bombshell was made public. Apparently, the reason the police raided Dowdall´s house and his fish-tank was that they had received a ‘tip-off’ that led to them bugging his car. And by another one of those crazy coincidences that run throughout the heart of this story, Dowdall was then supposedly recorded driving criminal mastermind Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch up into the Occupied Six Counties to meet ‘New IRA chiefs’ to discuss how to get the assault rifles used during the Regency Hotel attack ‘back over the border’. The media also mumbled something about a ‘weapons warehouse’ and Gerard Hutch ‘opening up his heart’! The implication is that whatever was said during this supposedly taped ‘heart-to-heart’ between Dowdall and the Monk led to the raid on Jonathan Dowdall´s house and fish tank. However, this secretly recorded conversation also supposedly led to the surveillance of a warehouse where three AKM assault weapons were allegedly stored. And then by another crazy coincidence sections of the media made it seem like alleged dissident IRA member Shane Rowan was caught moving these three AKM assault rifles from that very warehouse. And all on the night before the negotiations for a new government began on march 10th. As has been shown in the previous chapter Paul ‘Propaganda’ Williams inaccurately portrayed those assault rifles as being those used during in the Regency Hotel Atrocity. However, as has been shown in the previous chapter, the three weapons being transported by Rowan were not those used during the Regency Hotel attack! So why did Gerry Hutch care about this second batch of weapons? There is very obviously something very dodgy about this whole story… According to Ruairi Cotter, writing for the Irish Sun:
Maeve Sheehan of INM, with an accompanying helpful picture of Dowdall with Sinn Féin leaders Mary-Lou McDonald and Gerry Adams, and under the title ‘WHAT THE MONK AND MARY-LOU MCDONALD HAVE IN COMMON’, reported that:
There is so much here that makes absolutely no sense at all. The narrative here is that the police got a tip-off in early March that they should bug Jonathan Dowdall´s car. And then, as if by magic, Gerard Hutch was recorded having a ‘heart-to-heart’ with the former Mary-Lou McDonald aid, Jonny Dowdall, and mumble, mumble something about a weapons warehouse. Obviously, the implication here is that the lock-up that Shane Rowan moved the assault weapons from was Dowdalls, and the police had it under surveillance because of the ‘heart-to-heart’ they supposedly secretly recorded when Gerry opened up to Jonny. And also, the reason the police raided Dowdall´s house and fish-tank. Seems kind of straightforward, but is it? Or is it another big slice of propaganda? Because as we have already seen, despite the claims of Paul Williams and the misleading headlines in INM media sources, Shane Rowan WAS NOT convicted of possession of the Regency Hotel Atrocity assault rifles, so it is probably safe to assume that is because the weapons he had were NOT the weapons used to murder David Byrne* and shoot Sean McGovern*! So, what is going on here? We have seen that subterfuge was being used in the media to try and imply that Rowan got done for the Regency weapons but that´s not what happened. So, did Dowdall have other weapons in his lock-up? Why were these unrelated weapons so important to criminal mastermind Gerard Hutch that he risked driving to the Occupied Six Counties to discuss having them moved north. And at that, why not just get Dowdall to send a coded text:
Why the need to make such a risky journey at all? And look how risky it was. Apparently, the police managed to bug the car and secretly record a ‘heart-to-heart’ that ‘sealed’ not only Gerard´s ‘own fate but also that of the hapless Dowdall’. The journalist wonders whether Dowdall knew what the journey was about. Well, he must have, if these mysterious assault rifles were stashed in his lock-up! But perhaps the most puzzling part of this is why anyone at all anywhere in the Universe could imagine that the ‘Real IRA chiefs in Newry’ would be so desperate for weapons that they want to take back possession of the Regency Hotel Atrocity assault rifles. Because, it must be recalled that some perfectly placed INM journalist had taken perfect photos of these weapons and the images had gone viral internationally and had even been the centre piece of Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny´s fake news attack that falsely linked Sinn Féin and mainstream Republicanism to the murder of David Byrne*. Surely, no matter how needy, how desperate, an organisation was for weapons, they wouldn´t want weapons back that had gone viral internationally after being used in the most epic ‘failure’ of policing intelligence in Irish criminal history? And sure, hadn´t Assistant Commissioner John O´Mahony, less than one month before the murder of David Byrne*, even called a press conference to state just how well armed dissident republicans supposedly were. He even displayed the exact model of assault rifles that would be used in the Regency Hotel Atrocity a few weeks later and asked the public to be vigilant! No, no, no! Nobody would want those weapons back. They should have been bleached, burned, and smashed to pieces before being moved. And then the smashed pieces needed to be buried or sunk in the sea. If a person was stopped while moving the pieces, the police might know what they were, but they could never prove what they were. It is absurd beyond belief to claim that Gerard Hutch personally needed to travel to the Occupied Six Counties to discuss with ‘Real IRA chiefs in Newry’ the return of the most red-hot weapons in the known Universe! Lads, seriously, that´s a farcically bad cover story. It may have fooled the average Joe Soap casually browsing the newspapers at the time, but it won´t hold up under legal scrutiny during a State Inquiry at all, at all. And then to top it all off, neither the poor patsy Shane Rowan or the ‘hapless Dowdall’ were even convicted for being in possession of the Regency weapons, presumably because they weren´t actually the same weapons. Wait now, hang-on a second! So, we are meant to believe that Gerard Hutch was actually travelling to the Occupied Six Counties to talk to ‘Real IRA chiefs in Newry’ about moving completely unrelated guns that were conveniently being stored in the lock-up of former Mary-Lou McDonald aid, Jonathan Dowdall? Poor old Dowdall got shafted so hard, that whoever did the shafting actually managed to get so deep inside him that he penetrated his father as well! Poor old Patrick Dowdall got eight years in the blow-back from that fake news set-up. So, if this is accurate, Gerard Hutch was allegedly secretly recorded by the police in early March 2016, within a month of the Regency Hotel Atrocity, apparently ‘opening up’ and having a ‘heart-to-heart’ about the attack, and his alleged role in it. Well over two and a half years later, and the contents of this recording are still classified and Gerard Hutch has yet to be even questioned about the murder of David Byrne* and the shooting of Sean McGovern*. However, despite the absolutely absurdity of this piece of INM propaganda nonsense, all of this, of course, did continue the theme that the Regency Hotel atrocity, and the murder of David Byrne*, was a Republican terrorist attack rather than a revenge attack by violent Dublin criminals colluding with a very small group of corrupt senior police officers. It was also designed to explain how and why the police were watching Dowdall´s supposed ‘weapons warehouse’. However, it is never made clear that this ‘weapon´s warehouse’ belonged to Dowdall, it is simply implied, and as noted, it is never made clear that it ever stored the Regency Hotel Atrocity murder weapons, although media outlets tried to imply that too. Yet neither Dowdall or Shane Rowan have yet been charged with possession of these weapons. It would be interesting to know if the Irish police notified their British colleagues in the Occupied Six Counties that Gerard Hutch was about to meet with ‘dissident republicans chiefs in Newry’, and if the latter have any further information about the supposed meeting. As has been shown, the Regency Hotel attack was deliberately planned and executed in a way that it could be portrayed as a Republican terrorist attack. Almost everybody claims that criminal mastermind Gerard Hutch planned the Regency Hotel assassination attempt on Daniel Kinahan* in revenge for the murder of his nephew Gary Hutch, who had himself been killed because of a widely held belief in international criminal circles that he was an extremely high-level paid informer in Ireland, England, Spain, and Holland. Considering all of that, and the supposed existence of a surveillance tape recording a Regency Hotel ‘heart-to-heart’ that led to the arrests of the patsies Rowan and Dowdall, it is extremely puzzling that no European Arrest Warrant has been issued for Gerard Hutch and he can travel freely around the Occupied Six Counties and abroad. Although, considering the lack of police at the Regency, the failed 999 calls, the lack of police responders during the prolonged attack, the lack of a single conviction so far, and the ongoing media propaganda campaign, it perhaps isn´t too surprising that Gerard Hutch has never even been questioned about the murder of David Byrne*. The most likely scenario is that it was Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch himself or a close associate who sent the ‘tip off’ to the police that they should bug poor Dowdall´s car. If Gerard Hutch was aware that the police were listening he will have shaped the recorded conversation in a way that set-up Dowdall and Rowan, but also gave maximum protection to himself and his loved ones. The Dowdall element was the key element, as he had formerly been a close associate of Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary-Lou McDonald and the INM media could use that and photographs of McDonald and Dowdall together to associate the staged republican terrorist attack at the Regency Hotel with mainstream Republicanism. The easiest way for the Monk to protect himself and his loved ones would have been for him to imply or mention the collusion between the Regency Hotel attackers and a small number of senior police officers. This would effectively prevent the surveillance tape from ever being played in an Irish court of law and create an added impetus for senior police officers to keep Gerard Hutch free and away from the investigation. As Gerard Hutch has never even been questioned about the Regency Hotel Atrocity, despite being universally acknowledged as the man who planned it, it would seem that the plan using the surveillance recording has worked extremely well. Former Sinn Féin councillor Dowdall and IRA volunteer Rowan were both linked to the Regency Hotel attack during the crucial negotiations for a new government. In the end, both received long jail terms but neither was convicted of involvement with the murder of David Byrne* or even association with the actual Regency Hotel assault rifles! Dowdall got twelve years for torture and false imprisonment and Rowan got seven years for possession of weapons and a further four years for IRA membership. So, by May 2016, two major political firsts had occurred to alter Ireland´s modern history. Fianna Fáil had utterly betrayed their roots and their voters by creating a government with Fine Gael for the very first time in their political history. And Fine Gael managed to hold on to power for a second term for the very first time in their political history. It is extremely likely that the Unholy Alliance that manufactured these history-altering events was already in operation when Assistant Police Commissioner John O´Mahony ‘coincidently’ called an impromptu press conference just a few weeks before the Regency Hotel attack to highlight the ongoing danger of dissident republicanism in Ireland, despite also admitting that dissident activity outside the Occupied Six Counties was very low level. He also very helpfully and ‘coincidently’ displayed the very distinctive AKM rifles that would be used a few weeks later by three members of the 12-strong hit team who took party in the murder of David Byrne*. And O´Mahony also very helpfully asked that the public be on the lookout for dissident activity. In fact, some members of the public questioned whether the assault rifles used for the murder of David Byrne* during the assault on a public event by the Hutch faction were ACTUALLY THE SAME WEAPONS as those put-on display by O´Mahony. However, it is extremely unlikely that they would have been foolish enough to use the exact same weapons for the police press conference and the murder of David Byrne*. The enquiring members of the public were able to wonder about these things because a number of INM journalists had been ‘coincidently’ perfectly placed to photograph the Hutch gang members entering the Regency Hotel moments before they murdered David Byrne*. The AKM assault rifles were prominently displayed by the attackers as they casually walked past the INM journalists. The Hutch gang killers were able to walk casually into the Regency Hotel and murder David Byrne* because ‘coincidently’ there was not a single uniformed police officer at the public event because ‘coincidently’ senior Irish police officers had chosen to make the most epic failure in Irish policing history on this particular election special Friday afternoon. This, despite the overwhelming evidence that this weigh-in was potentially a major flashpoint with massive potential for violence and bloodshed. Then ‘coincidently’ the 999-service failed and no police arrived during the extended period that the Hutch gang searched for members of the Kinahan faction. It has been estimated that the Hutch killers remained in the hotel for 6 MINUTES after the first shot was fired, that it took 23 minutes for the first police to arrive on the scene, and perhaps as long as 40 minutes for the first ambulance to arrive at the scene. Then, ‘coincidently’ the only member of the Hutch team who wore no disguise was Kevin Murray, a very well-known member of a dissident republican drug-dealing gang from the Occupied Six Counties, known as Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD). This, and the use of the prominently displayed and photographed AKM assault rifles, allowed the INM and mainstream media to begin to ask whether the attack had been a republican terrorist attack. Then, ‘coincidently’ someone pretending to represent the Continuity IRA made a completely bogus claim, without a recognised codeword, that the attack had been carried out by its members as revenge for the murder of Real IRA volunteer Alan Ryan, and because of its supposed anti-drugs stance. Of course, the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA are rivals, so it was absurd to claim that it was acting to avenge volunteer Alan Ryan. It is also well known who murdered Alan Ryan and it certainly wasn´t the Kinahan faction. Finally, if the Continuity IRA had a problem with drug dealers why would it be working with the Hutch faction and RAAD? Both are prolific drug dealing gangs. Anyway, within hours of the bogus claim, the real Continuity IRA leadership, with real codeword, denied any involvement with the attack. Despite all of this, the mainstream media gave the bogus fake news claim prominent exposure during the weeks leading up to the election. Enda Kenny and Frances Fitzgerald of Fine Gael used this fake news to attack Sinn Fein throughout the weeks leading to the 2016 election, just a few short weeks after the murder of David Byrne*. Then, after the election, during the crucial government creation phase, a dissident member of the IRA was discovered ‘transferring’ 3 AKM assault rifles, ‘coincidently’ the night before negotiations began. INM media lead by Paul ‘Propaganda’ Williams then ‘coincidently’ inaccurately claimed that these weapons were those used by the Hutch gang during the murder of David Byrne* and the attack on the publicly attended event held at the Regency Hotel. Also ‘coincidently’, it was implied that these weapons had been hidden in a warehouse owned by Jonathan Dowdall, ‘coincidently’ a former close aid of Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary-Lou McDonald. These inaccuracies ‘coincidently’ allowed the mainstream media, and INM in particular, to falsely link mainstream Republicanism to the attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne*. By May, Fine Gael had their very first second term and Fianna Fáil were supporting them for the very first time. The Unholy Alliance´s work was done and it was just left to reward those who had made the plan work so smoothly. Promotions, awards, and money was dished out to the appropriate conspirators during May 2016. May 2016 was not just a pivotal month for the Unholy Alliance of corrupt police officers, press propagandists, and crooked politicians who were involved in the murder of David Byrne*. It was also a pivotal month in the ongoing Kinahan-Hutch feud. Now that Fine Gael had been returned to power and a new government had been formed, the police could target Hutches if they needed to. Prior to this the conspirators needed by necessity to be much more careful in case the Hutches had evidence of the deal that had been built around d the Regency Hotel attack. It is worth noting that Jonathan and Patrick Dowdall weren´t the only father and son team arrested during the month of May. Jonathan Dowdall´s home had been raided on March 10th, the night before negotiations began to create a new government. This date was chosen so as to maximise the damage that could be done to Sinn Féin. However, he wasn´t arrested until May 17th 2016 as he tried to board a plan to Dubai. Four days earlier, on May 13th, Dowdall had received a warning from the police claiming that his life was in danger, prompting him to try ‘get offside’, although obviously he didn’t succeed. He was instead arrested by the same people who had warned him his life was under threat. His father Patrick Dowdall was also arrested at their home. On the very same day that Dowdall received the warning that his life was supposedly under threat, Patrick Hutch was arrested. He was apparently traveling with James ‘Mago’ Gateley in a car that rolled up unexpectedly on a police check point. ‘Mago’ Gately turned the car and tried to the leave the scene. The police gave chase without being aware who was in the vehicle and after a high-speed chase and crash, Patrick was arrested. Journalist Ken Foy, writing on May 14th, 2016, reported that:
So, literally less than a week after Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny had been sworn in as Taoiseach, the police started to arrest people allegedly involved in the attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne*. However, over two years later the trial of Patrick Hutch, the only man ever brought to trial for the murder of David Byrne*, has suffered delay after delay and no one has yet been convicted for the Regency Hotel attack. A few days later, on May 17th, Patrick´s father, Patsy Hutch*, was also arrested for questioning about the Regency Hotel Atrocity. However, unlike poor old Patrick Dowdall, Patsy* was eventually released without charge. Patsy* would go on to take an extremely pivotal role in subsequent events. In fact, Patsy is so seemingly central to the feud that alleged Kinahan faction associates have, on at least eight occasions, placed prominent graffiti messages in central Dublin claiming that:
This graffiti would even go on to feature as part of a front page Daily Star story on Easter Monday, 2018. Other graffiti dubbed across the Inner-City claiming that Patsy* was a police informer. So, apparently the Feud itself would end only with his death! Since it is almost universally believed that the Regency attack was allegedly planned and executed by Gerard ‘the Monk’ Hutch, it was confusing to the mainstream media as to why Patsy Hutch* was so seemingly important to those intent on revenge for the murder of David Byrne* and the shooting of Sean McGovern*. That the threat to Patsy* is extremely legitimate there is not a shadow of doubt. There have been at least 3 and perhaps as many as 5 attempts on his life since the murder of David Byrne*. However, Patsy* has had 24-hour police protection since very early in 2016. Why would the Kinahan faction allegedly want to kill Patsy* so badly and why would the Feud supposedly end with his death instead of Gerard Hutch’s death? Almost universally, the Irish media refers to Patsy* as ‘innocent’ or as an ‘innocent taxi driver’, while Gerry Hutch is regarded as the alleged mastermind behind the Regency attack. So, who exactly is Patsy Hutch*? Firstly, Patsy* has no criminal record. So, he is perhaps the only member of the extended Hutch faction that IMN propagandists could justifiably claim is ‘innocent’ and ‘not involved with crime’. However, Patsy* is the father of three extremely well-known criminals. He is the father of Gary Hutch, whose attempt to have Daniel Kinahan* assassinated in Spain on August 3rd 2014 caused the Feud. He was allegedly killed by the Kinahan faction because many in the criminal underworld believed he was a long-time and high level criminal informer. Patsy* is also the father of Patrick Hutch, who is currently in prison charged with the murder of Derek Byrne*, and is also the father of Derek ‘Del-boy’ Hutch, who is also currently serving a long prison sentence for stabbing a man to death at a Christmas party, and for his involvement in a number of violent armed robberies. The word on the street is that the Kinahan Cartel allegedly blame Patsy Hutch* directly for the Feud. It is believed that it is Patsy* who passes information on to the various police forces, information that he would receive from his criminal sons, and extended family. It is believed on the street and supported by a number of journalistic and police sources that Patsy* convinced his reluctant sons to try and kill Daniel Kinahan* in Spain in 2014, and in the process steal €2million in cash. However, as has already been shown in chapter 5, the plan failed and an innocent man was shot instead. That failed assassination attempt on Daniel Kinahan* in Spain led directly to the Feud and the tragic bloodshed that has torn apart so many families and destroyed so many former friendships in Dublin´s Inner-City. And it was the blowback from that assassination attempt that allegedly dragged both Gerry the Monk Hutch and Christy Kinahan Sr. out of retirement and set Ireland´s two most dangerous outfits on a collision course that has allegedly left over twenty people dead. It is extremely important to note that, when all is said and done, the Unholy Alliance of senior police officers, media propagandists, and crooked politicians who played a role in the murder of David Byrne* and the attack on the Regency Hotel simply used of the Kinahan-Hutch feud to further their own financial and political objectives. And while these ‘People of Influence’ were happily receiving their promotions and rewards, dining out and celebrating their continued success, the Hutch half of the Regency Hotel conspirators were about to suffer terribly, despite their alliance with the police. Just three days after the murder of David Byrne* in February, the brother of Gerard Hutch, Edward Hutch, was murdered at his home by men claiming that it was revenge for the murder of David Byrne*. As has been reported sections of the media allege that Edward´s taxi was involved in the Regency Hotel attack and specifically the transportation of the infamous AKM assault rifles that became so central to the fake news campaign to tarnish Sinn Féin and mainstream Republicanism. Then in March, one of Gerard Hutch´s close associates, Noel ‘Kingsize’ Duggan was murdered. Media sources claim that Duggan was targeted simply because he was a close friend of Gerard Hutch. However, some underworld sources link the murder of Duggan to high-profile media stories that were published in the weeks directly BEFORE the murder of David Byrne*. These articles threatened that the Hutches were about to murder members of the Kinahan faction and had significant ‘republican backing’. Some underworld sources believe that it was Duggan that was providing this ‘significant republican backing’ because of his long-term association with republicans who control the cigarette and fuel smuggling along the border to the Occupied Six Counties. However, other underworld sources believe that Duggan may even have been murdered by an opportunistic rival who knew the death would be blamed on the Feud. A well-known major criminal not associated with the Kinahan faction is known to have very publicly celebrated Duggan´s murder. Duggan had begun his criminal career as a burglar and car thief before moving into fraud and smuggling. One of his closest associates was criminal godfather Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne, who he owned property with. Duggan and Dunne were jointly hit with a €4million fine by CAB in 2003. Less than three weeks later, a homeless drug addict was murdered on Sheriff Street in Dublin´s North Inner-City. The media claimed that poor Martin O´Rourke was shot dead in a case of mistaken identity by a lone assassin who cycled up on him in a busy city centre street in the middle of the day. The actual target was supposedly Keith Murtagh. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, in 2009 Murtagh was shot and badly injured by armed police officers during an attempted robbery, along with Derek and Gareth Hutch. Another man, Garrett Molloy, was shot and killed by the police. As noted earlier, someone had tipped the police off about the robbery, and armed officers were lying in wait for the would-be robbers. Murtagh and Molloy ran to the van first and were immediately shot by armed police officers who lying in wait but hidden. Murtagh has always insisted that the police had shot them in cold-blood and were operating a no warning, shoot-to-kill policy. He declared this during his trial. He was eventual jailed for ten years. Despite claims by the media that O´Rourke was shot by mistaken identity some underworld sources believe that the hitman deliberately shot O´Rourke instead of Murtagh in an attempt to get paid while not becoming an enemy of the Hutches. And this is an important aspect of the Feud. According to underworld sources it is generally believed across gangland that there are large ‘contracts’ out on all those who were involved in the murder of David Byrne* and all those who have actively participated in the Feud against the Kinahan faction. As such, numerous ‘freelancers’, mostly junkies with big drug debts, have decided to try their luck and claim the contract they believe exists. These people have never been involved with the Kinahan Cartel and have had no contact with any senior members of the Kinahan faction! For example, one of the ‘hit teams’ that was intercepted in a hugely high-profile arrest on its way to kill a senior Hutch had spent the previous night ‘on the sess’ telling everybody at the packed party what they were supposedly going to do the next morning. Obviously, the police were waiting for them. Some of the ‘hit teams’ were also clearly made up of mentally challenged fantasists. Other ‘hit teams’ were no such thing and were simply criminals moving weapons from one safe house to another. The police and media have vastly inflated the numbers of hit attempts to create a climate of fear, and to falsely appear to be doing a great job. There needs to be a reason for all that police overtime. So, each new headline that screams ‘Massive Blow to the Kinahan Cartel’ is usually nothing of the sort. The intercepted hit team is nothing more than a group of freelancers that are trying to collect a payday that might not even exist. Or just some ordinary criminals moving or carrying a weapon, and falsely charged with involvement in the Feud. A similar falsehood is attached to the dozens of stories that appear weekly claiming that ‘In another stunning blow, the Cartel lose blah blah worth of drugs to the police’. Almost every drug bust in Ireland is linked by the media to the Kinahan Cartel and is portrayed as another ‘savage blow’ against the Cartel by the police. Yet, it is utterly absurd to claim that every drug coming into the country was smuggled here by the Kinahan faction. Underworld sources claim there are at least two other major drug smuggling groups operating within the Irish market, and dozens of smaller networks! And the continuing theme of ‘another major blow’ is just more bollocks. The Kinahans allegedly smuggle cocaine and cannabis. Once they smuggle the drugs into Ireland the drugs become the property of the drug dealing gangs who have order those drugs. Most times the drugs have been already paid for when the police intercepted them. And as always, the police hierarchy and media bosses massively inflate the financial value of these interceptions again to appear to be doing a great job, and to make attention grabbing headlines. Even the most innocent of people know the police and media do this. When all is said and done, the general media narrative about the ‘War on the Kinahan Cartel’ is mostly fake news. The hundreds of ‘savage blows’ the Cartel has supposedly received as reported by the Irish media simply didn´t happen as portrayed. The Cartel has probably received no more than three or four ‘savage blows’ over the course of the Feud. Even the Feud itself, and the lists of deaths related to it, have been distorted by the media and senior police officers. At least two other violent feuds have been portrayed as being linked to the Kinahan-Hutch Feud but are essentially separate feuds. One is a financial beef between the ‘New INLA’ and the ‘New IRA’. At least three of the deaths portrayed as Feud related are actually part of this dissident republican financial feud, although many of the same individuals are involved for one reason or another. Another set of murders that have been falsely linked to the Feud are in fact revenge attacks related to the murder of two people in Ballymun. Yet all these murders have been attributed by the media to the Kinahan Cartel as part of the Feud. So, along with the medias ongoing portrayal of almost everybody in the Hutch gang as an innocent, not involved crime, we also have a grossly inflated number of hit attempts, a grossly inflated number of drug busts, and an inaccurate list of Feud related murders. For example, sections of the media have even tried to claim that the attempt to kill Pete Taylor*, that also resulted in the murder of granddad Bobby Messett*, was ordered by the Kinahan Faction. This despite the ongoing threats against Taylor and his club by the Hutch gang associated Twitter account prior to the shooting, and the continued threats afterwards! Senior Hutch faction leaders have even claimed responsibility for the attack and have threatened to do the same to other people associated with MTK! For just one example amongst dozens of similar threats, the same Hutch associated Twitter handle posted on August 20th 2018 that:
All spelling mistakes are from original poster. One of the named individuals is associated through boxing with one of Patsy Hutch´s sons and runs a boxing class from the gym in question. Obviously, he must have said the gym owner seemed like a nice guy. And this was enough for his life to be threatened. He took this threat seriously enough to leave the gym in question. That these threats are continually allowed on Twitter is staggering. Pete Taylor was running a boxercise class for ordinary members of the public. A junkie hitman, supposedly hired by the Hutch gang, entered the premises and indiscriminately shot into a publicly attended class. As already mentioned he shot and murdered grandad Bobby Messett and shot and injured two others before Pete Taylor could wrestle the gunman out the door. If it wasn´t for Pete´s bravery many more people might have been killed. Some sections of the Irish media even implied that because Pete trains fighters sponsored by MTK, his club was a legitimate target! Does that mean grandad Bobby Messett was a legitimate target as well? Bray Boxing Club and the Living I gym had and have numerous children´s classes. Are the children legitimate targets for the next junkie hitman dispatched by the Hutch gang? According to underworld sources, everybody on ‘the street’ knows who the killer was who attacked Bray Boxing Club. The journey from Bray to Ringsend where the killer abandoned the distinctive British registration getaway van he drove on the morning of the killing takes about 45 minutes, and this was in early morning rush-hour traffic! Yet he was not intercepted by police, despite a description of the van been given almost immediately after the attack. The killer didn´t even bother to burn-out the getaway van, which is absolutely standard practice for crimes such as his. He simply took a pushbike from the back of the van and cycled-off! Police recovered both the van and the bike, so without any doubt they know who the killer is too. They have ample DNA evidence from both the van and the bike. This guy shot up a publicly attended boxercise in early June but no one was arrested FOR FOUR MONTHS. This lack of police action implies that Hutch guns-for-hire who attack publicly attended gyms or businesses associated in any way with MTK can almost act with impunity and immunity. This will of course encourage more criminals to attack and puts the lives of innocent members of the public in very grave danger. And these guys are actually openly making those threats on a continuous basis on social media! The Hutch gang tried to kill Daniel Kinahan* in Spain in 2014 and missed and shot a Sky TV pundit by mistake. There have been no convictions for that attack. They tried to kill Daniel Kinahan* again in 2015 at the Red Cow Inn and missed. There have been no convictions for that attack. They tried to kill Daniel Kinahan* at the Regency Hotel and missed but killed David Byrne* instead. There have been no convictions for that attack. They killed Michael Keogh in 2017 because they believed his brother was involved in the murder of Gareth Hutch, and because he was believed to have damaged some cars belonging to Hutch gang associates. There have been no convictions for that attack. They tried to kill Derek Devoy in 2017 and missed. They killed his sister Antoinette Corbally and locksmith Clinton Shannon instead. There have been no convictions for that attack. They tried to kill Pete Taylor in 2018 and missed. They killed grandad Bobby Messett instead. There have been no convictions for that attack. The Hutch gang have been behind at least 5 murders and 5 other feud related attempted murders, but not a single member of the gang has been convicted for any of these crimes! As already noted, by contrast however, according to the Irish media the prison system is full of supposed members of the ‘Kinahan Cartel’! according to INM journalist Nicola Tallant:
Typically, Tallant´s piece is full of spin! The only ‘top tier’ member of the Kinahan faction to be ‘wiped out’ was David Byrne*, and that was during the Regency Hotel attack. And all of the ‘top tier’ had been living abroad, mostly in Spain and Holland, from nearly A DECADE EARLIER, so hadn´t been forced to ‘flee the country’. The Kinahan faction ‘top-tier’ had relocated from Ireland after a rival criminal gang had murdered Tallant´s genuinely DARING crime journalist colleague, Veronica Guerin. It is telling that Tallant refers to the murder of David Byrne* as a ‘DARING attempt to murder’ Daniel Kinahan*. The heavily armed Hutch gang who attacked the public event at the Regency Hotel knew their targets would be unarmed and knew that there would be no police interference during the attack, so there was arguably nothing daring about the attack at all. Tallant might just as readily described it as a CALLOUS attack or even a COWARDLY attack, but as has been the premise of this study, the media is extremely biased in their reporting of these events. Anyway, what Tallant is accurate about is that the dozens of people currently arrested for alleged Feud activity are from the Kinahan side! Tallant reported that since the Regency Hotel attack, ‘the Government´s commitment to fund the police fight against organised crime has seen the top tier of the cartel WIPED OUT or flee the country’. It is puzzling that that supposed commitment to fight organised crime hasn´t extended to the Hutch gang, twelve of whom were involved in the attack on the Regency Hotel and the murder of David Byrne*. And while all his attention is focused on just one gang other gangs have been growing their power base, such as Albanian sex slave and heroin trafficking gangs, and the Eastern European gang that recently attacked a police officer with acid. As noted, the media and the police claim that they have prevented over FIFTY MORE MURDERS by the Kinahan gang, by intercepting hitmen on their way to murder members of the Hutch faction! Apparently, they have prevented these murders by intercepting the hit teams on their way to kill members of the Hutch gang:
54 alleged hit teams intercepted ad arrested, along with those people already arrested, charged and convicted in the non-jury Special Criminal Court for the alleged murders of Gary Hutch, Michael Barr, David Douglas, and Gareth Hutch adequately illustrates just how hard the State and police security apparatus has hit what they portray as the Kinahan Cartel. But no Hutch gang member has yet been convicted for any murder or shooting during the same period! Instead Patsy Hutch, and Paul Williams, and others are given 24-hour armed police protection. Frederick Thompson was most recently convicted of being part of a conspiracy to murder David Douglas. Thompson was sentenced to life in prison by the juryless Special Criminal Court. The victim, David Douglas was a former member of the IRA who had been expelled from the movement because of his involvement in drug dealing. He was jailed previously for twelve years for attempting to murder a police officer. He was later also jailed for ten years for drug dealing. Douglas was also a dog-fighting fanatic who was found in possession of dug fighting DVDs and paraphernalia, and dog fight training equipment. Continuing INMs propaganda laced reporting of the Feud, Nicola Tallant described Douglas as an easy target:
So, according to Tallant the murder of the unarmed David Byrne* at a public event by five heavily armed attackers who had protection from senior police, was ‘daring’ while convicted criminal David Douglas was an ‘easy’ target. Douglas was known to regularly carry a firearm, and according to underworld sources had a firearm in his shop the day he was murdered. Regardless of what anyone tries to claim, describing the murder of David Byrne* as ‘daring’ and David Douglas as an ‘easy’ target is unquestionably an attempt to influence the understanding of events in way that is biased against the Kinahan faction. The only legitimate question is why does this obvious bias exist at all? David Douglas was an extremely violent criminal who had taken on a contract to assassinate Daniel Kinahan* and other Kinahan faction members at a boxing event held at the Red Cow Inn in November 2015. According to numerous media reports if his gun hadn´t jammed Douglas would have murdered Freddie Thompson´s cousin Liam Roe, who was according to media reports having a cigarette outside the venue. It would seem then that perhaps Douglas he was killed in retaliation for his failed attempts to murder others. Why does Nicola Tallant think that the cold-blooded murder of father-of-two David Byrne* is daring, while the murder of police attacker and convicted drug dealing dog fight fanatic and hit-man David Douglas was less so? Perhaps if there is a public inquiry she can explain here reasoning. Personally, in the opinion of this author, she doesn´t actually think David Douglas was any better than David Byrne*. She is merely following orders, and her orders are to vilify the Kinahan gang at much as possible, even if it means being soft on a dog fighting hitman with convictions for drug dealing and attempting to murder a police officer! As has been shown previously, the State prosecutor does not claim that Frederick Thompson pulled the trigger or was even there when David Douglas was shot. However, the State claims it has evidence that Thompson was near a car that was seen driving close to a car that was allegedly involved in the killing of Douglas. Apparently, Thompson´s DNA was found on the wing mirror of a car that was seen near to one of the getaway cars and that same car was seen driving by Douglas shop some time before the murder. Thompson was also seen breaking up a mobile phone sometime after the murder. Pretty much, this was the totality of the ‘direct’ evidence allegedly linking Frederick Thompson to the murder of David Douglas. While there is little doubt that Frederick Thompson is a criminal, and very likely involved in the Feud, is it extremely unlikely that any jury would have convicted him on that evidence alone. Chief INM and police propagandist Paul Williams recognised that Thompson would only have been convicted in the Special Criminal Court:
And there is EQUALLY NO JURY TO CONVINCE! This means that Frederick Thompson was not tried by a jury of their peers, but instead tried by judges appointed by the same State apparatus that is prosecuting them! This is, of course, illegal under European Human Rights laws for obvious reasons. The media and the police also claim that they have prevented over FIFTY MORE MURDERS by the Kinahan gang, by intercepting hitmen on their way to murder members of the Hutch faction! Apparently, they have prevented these murders by intercepting the hit teams on their way to kill members of the Hutch gang:
54 alleged hit teams intercepted ad arrested, along with those people already arrested, charged and convicted in the non-jury Special Criminal Court for the alleged murders of Gary Hutch, Michael Barr, David Douglas, and Gareth Hutch adequately illustrates just how hard the State and police security apparatus has hit what they portray as the Kinahan Cartel. But no Hutch gang member has yet been convicted for any murder or shooting during the same period! Instead Patsy Hutch, and Paul Williams, and others are given 24-hour armed police protection. No Hutch gang member has yet been convicted of any Feud related crime despite that fact that a TEAM OF TWELVE MEN, THREE OF WHOM WERE ARMED WITH HEAVY ASSAULT RIFLES AND DISGUISED AS POLICE OFFICERS, ATTACKED AND MURDERED PEOPLE AT A PACKED PUBLIC EVENT. Yet journalists such as Nicola Tallant boast that the Kinahan gang has been ‘wiped out’ and the prisons are full of supposed members of the Kinahan gang. Tallant is on record that she found the alleged Kinahan gang response more frightening than the ‘daring’ attack on the Regency Hotel. Perhaps if she had been a member of the public at the Regency Hotel she might have a different pretend opinion. And without question, as has been shown throughout this work, sections of the media have portrayed the Feud in an astonishingly blatantly biased manner. Throughout the Kinahan´s are portrayed as criminals of the most heinous kind, while the Hutch gang are almost all portrayed as ‘innocent’ former criminals who are loved by their families! This bias can be followed all the way through, from when Paul Williams declared dismissively that murdered father-of-two David Byrne* was nothing but a thug on RTE a few days after he was murdered, to October 2018 when front page articles declared that David Douglas and Noel Kirwan were innocent victims who were loved by their families. It is perhaps fair to say that David Byrne* was also loved by his family. And in what way was Byrne* and more ‘thuggish’ than David Douglas? The point here isn´t to claim Kinahan associates are angels, it´s to question why sections of the media are so intent on portraying Hutch gang members as angels! It is the opinion of this author that the journalist don´t actually think that the Hutch gang members are either innocent or no longer involved in crime. However, the journalist´s editors have told them that the Kinahan gang must be painted in the darkest way possible at all times. Why is this? It is the belief of this author that this media campaign is merely a continuation of the campaign put in place to affect the election in 2016. The Hutch gang made a deal with a handful of corrupt senior police officers. They agreed to stage their attack against the Kinahan gang to look like a republican terrorist attack. In return the senior police officers agreed to keep police officers from the Regency Hotel both before and during the attack. And obviously there must have been an agreement to limit the prosecutions after the event. Considering that the media was swamped with stories about the Feud and how it was about to escalate into all out war, the fact that some senior police officer decided that no police were needed at the Regency Hotel defies all logic. Equally, that the killers SPENT SIX MINUTES at the crime scene AFTER the first shots were fired is absolutely staggering. The reader should let that sink in. Both the style of the operation, going in all hot and heavy and so highly visible, and then staying on the premises for so long after the first shots were fired, depended on foreknowledge that no police would be at the event or would respond during the attack. How did the Hutch gang know that there would be no police at the event when they were planning the attack a month earlier? Because that style of attack only works with no police. It is the belief of this author that the Hutch gang were guaranteed no police presence weeks before the murder of David Byrne*. Finally, it seems incredible to this author that Twitter has allowed the so-called Whistleblower account to stay online. Amongst other things, it´s mocked supposed sexual abuse victims, travellers, the families of murder victims, and it has claimed and named various people for committing specific crimes. As such, it would seem to be continuing the tradition of Hutches informing on members of the underworld. It was the belief that Gary Hutch was an informer that caused his death, and played a major part in the events that led to the Feud. At one point, on June 13th 2018, the Whistleblower tweeted that:
The claim that none of the ‘Kinahan crew’ were allowed to earn is in complete contrast to the constant media stories and CAB investigations linking men like Liam Byrne, Sean McGovern, Ross Browning to huge fortunes. However, the above post obviously suggests that ‘the Whistleblower’ was a close associate of Gary Hutch because whoever the writer is supposedly knows that Gary only earned ‘300k’ in ten years as a drug dealer and killer. The writer also confirms that Gary Hutch was betraying his gang´s secrets. There are two competing theories in the underworld regarding Gary Hutch. While no one doubts that he was responsible for the leaking of information that saw numerous associates arrested and sent to prison, and the interception of millions of euros worth of drugs, there is debate over his exact role. Some people believe that the police had powerful evidence that Gary was directly involved in the murder of Derek Duffy, and because of that he had to become ‘a rat’. And his position close to members of the Kinahan faction meant he was an extremely valuable police asset. However, some underworld figures are convinced that another Hutch, a close associate of Gary, sucked the information from him, and then sold it to the police. And it was this that got Gary killed. But most importantly with regard to ‘the Whistleblower’ Tweeter and in the context of this study, the account has continually made threats against people it believes are even remotely associated with Daniel Kinahan, including the children of those people simply employed in businesses tenuously linked to Kinahan. And both the media and the police are fully aware of the account and the threats it has made and continues to make. Yet, despite repeated requests to Twitter Dublin to do something about the dangerous nature of the tweets being posted publicly, nothing has been done and the account has over 5000 followers as of November 2018. This is particularly puzzling, because it cannot be that the people at Twitter are simply unaware of the danger that ‘the Whistleblower’ are being put in. As noted, both the police and media are fully aware of the danger nature of the account, and it has been reported numerous times. But more importantly, the head of both European Twitter and Dublin Twitter is Sinead McSweeney. McSweeney was recently referred to by a top Irish journalist as ‘the Irish police´s most important spook’! Before becoming the head of Twitter Europe she was head of the Irish police´s Media and Public Relations. She also a special advisor at the Department of Justice and a barrister in the Attorney General´s office. So, she would undoubtedly be fully aware of the implications of the Whistleblower account. Perhaps as relevant she is also the wife of barrister and columnist Noel Whelan, who represents former Police Commissioner Noreen O´Sullivan during the recent investigation into corruption at the highest level of the Irish police force. It was of course O´Sullivan who would have decided that no police were needed at the Regency Hotel on the day that David Byrne* was murdered. While that policing failure has simply been dismissed as a truly epic level of incompetence, it is the premise of this investigation that the police cover was taken away to allow the Hutches to launch an attack that was disguised as a Republican attack. If that is the case, O´Sullivan was directly complicit in the events that led to the murder of David Byrne*. When there is an inquiry into these history changing events, perhaps Sinead McSweeney can explain why she allowed the Whistleblower Twitter account to continue to run despite the threats to Pete Taylor, the bomb threats, the threats to families. ReferencesKen Foy, Crime Journalist November 9th 2015 Sunday World, January 22nd 2016 Ken Foy, Crime Journalist January 30th 2016 Elaine McLoughlin, crime journalist. Paul Williams, crime Journalist (January 5th 2016) Noreen O´Sullivan, Police Commissioner (February 8th 2016) Dr Tom Clonan, former Irish Army Captain, Security Expert Ready for publishing |
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