The General: Irish Mob Boss - Softcover
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Paul Williams is Ireland's most respected crime journalist and true crime author. A qualified criminologist he has won a number of major journalism awards for his investigative work for The Sunday World. He has been responsible for a string of major exposes about John Gilligan, his gang and the murder of Veronica Guerin. Williams is the international bestselling author of Gangland and The General which was made into a major motion picture by director John Boorman.
One
BIRTH OF A GENERAL
Martin Cahill was never destined to die in his sleep. It would not have been a fitting end to a man who was the indisputable godfather of the Irish criminal underworld. He lived by the gun and died by it--despatched in the cold-blooded fashion of the gangland he once dominated. Cahill lived on a knife-edge for most of his criminal career. On that fateful afternoon in August he finally succumbed to what he knew was the inevitable.
Martin Cahill, Tango One, the General, Public Enemy Number One, did not conform to the psychological profile of a criminal mind. That was the way the underworld's hooded bogeyman wanted it. He was a man of many contradictions--from devoted father, loyal friend, prolific lover, absurd joker, to hated outlaw, feared gangster, sadistic fiend, meticulous planner. He was obsessive, conniving and extremely clever; sometimes cruel, sometimes compassionate; secretive with a malicious streak. The General was a complex character.
In appearance Martin Cahill looked anything but a crime boss. Short, rotund and balding, in well-worn jeans and stained tee-shirt, he could be mistaken for a down-at-heel handbag snatcher. He was no Ronnie Kray. He lived a frugal life between crimes and he did not drink, smoke or take drugs. His passions were pigeons, motorbikes, cakes and curries. The only less orthodox passions in his life were his love affairs with his wife and her sister. Outwardly Cahill seemed gentle, soft-spoken with a flat Dublin brogue. But behind the ordinary appearance lurked a colourful crook.
It was his crimes that had panache and style. From the slums of Dublin the General worked his way up from a small-time burglar to a major-league criminal, earning himself a reputation equivalent in stature to that of a high-profile politician or TV star. He came to epitomise the ultimate anti-hero, the one who satisfied the public's ambivalent, morbid fascination with the underworld. More than any other criminal icon, Cahill had a profound effect on the national psyche. His willingness to show off his Mickey Mouse underwear while hiding his face behind sinister balaclavas made him the subject of intense curiosity.
The day before his funeral, the Sunday World ran the first, full-colour picture of the grinning General. There he was, beaming out from the front page in an ill-fitting old leather jacket and tee-shirt. With strands of hair scattered across his bald pate, he stood proudly beside a little girl in a First Communion dress, outside the church where his Requiem Mass would be held. The newspaper sold out within hours. Everyone wanted to see what the man in the mask looked like.
The story of the life and crimes of Martin Cahill is an extraordinary one. In 1969, the year he turned twenty, Ireland was still a country where indictable crime was extremely rare and a much smaller police force boasted an almost hundred percent detection rate. But Martin Cahill and his contemporaries were about to change all that. He was one of the prime movers in the new generation of hoodlums that emerged from the confusion and panic accompanying the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. The General was the brains behind one of the country's most ruthless and successful armed crime gangs. Over two decades Cahill organised the theft of art, jewels and cash worth well in excess of £40 million in the biggest and most audacious robberies in Irish history. And he preserved his position of untouchable gang boss with a string of brutal crimes against his enemies, bombing, torturing or shooting those who irritated or challenged him. He was egalitarian in his choice of victim; they were from both sides of the fine crime-line. The name of the General was synonymous with violence, fear and intimidation.
Unlike most criminals who tend to avoid, as much as possible, conflict with the authorities, Martin Cahill launched his own revolt against the state. He waged an unrelenting war of wits against the Gardaí he hated with a venom--a feeling reciprocated by the men and women in blue. Getting one over on the police was sometimes the sole motivation for his more mischievous "strokes." But his contempt for the cops contained a contradiction. In a strange way he actually had a grudging respect for them.
He turned down requests from other Dublin hoods to take part in lucrative robberies in England in association with gangs in London and Manchester. He believed the English police were much more likely than the Irish to doctor the evidence and stitch him up. He often told his fellow gangsters that there were two things which made the Irish cop more honest than others. One, he said, was their Catholic rural background (the Garda force is largely made up of country people) and a deep-rooted sense of self-righteousness which would not allow them to tinker with the evidence. The other was their cutthroat rivalry, in which the least bit of dirt thrown by a disgruntled underling could jeopardise an officer's promotion.
But the well-hidden respect went no further than Cahill not leaving the country to do jobs. At every opportunity he tried to exploit weaknesses in the police force and make them look stupid. He even equipped his extensive arsenal by robbing the depot where the Gardaí stored confiscated illegal weapons. When the police got too close for comfort he bombed their top forensic expert and on another occasion stole the most sensitive criminal files in the land. He set fire to one of Dublin's law courts when the Gardaí tried to prosecute him on the last serious charge he would ever be tried on. And whenever the General was taken in for questioning there was an outbreak of tyre-slashing in middle-class neighbourhoods to embarrass the police. Cahill even dug holes in their prized golf club at Stackstown in Co Dublin and then made jokes about the act to their faces.
Cahill sometimes left clues at the scene of well-planned jobs, just to antagonise the investigating detectives who knew him best. He covered his tracks so well there was little hope of catching him. Cahill described it as a "game" or "grudge match" in which he was an adroit player. But it was a dangerous game with only one rule: don't get caught. The stakes were high, so high that he couldn't afford to lose. For if he lost the game, the result was either a prison cell or the morgue.
* * *
It all began on 23 May, 1949, when Agnes and Patrick Cahill had their second child, Martin Joseph. Patrick, a labourer who later became a lighthouse keeper, married Agnes Sheehan, a small, quiet-spoken woman, shortly after the end of World War Two. They set up their home in the heart of Dublin's inner-city slums at No. 6, Grenville Street, on the northside of the river Liffey.
The post-war years in Ireland were dark days of poverty and deprivation for those who found themselves trapped in the ghettos. In fact from the turn of the century Dublin was blighted with some of the worst slum conditions in Europe. A chronic lack of education, combined with the Catholic Church's denunciation of birth control as the Devil's work, resulted in large families over-crowding the already insanitary, dilapidated tenements. The Grenville Street the Cahills moved into had changed little since 1898 when a newspaper report described it as "Hell Street" where "drunken brawls, stone throwing and filthy practices" were its main characteristics. The report reflected the attitude of the society which, more than fifty years later, would alienate people like the General. From the moment of his birth Martin Cahill was on the wrong side of the tracks.
Patrick Cahill's meagre wages as a lighthouse keeper could not support his growing family. He was also fond of drink, which he indulged in at the expense of his wife and children. Often there wasn't enough food to put on the table. Patrick Cahill's drinking habits sickened young Martin who never drank in his life. He would later recall, in a bitter tone, that his father had little to show for a life as an honest man. Agnes Cahill was pregnant a total of eighteen times. She miscarried on six occasions and one toddler was killed when she was hit by an ice cream van.
In 1960 the Cahill family moved to No. 210, Captain's Road in Crumlin, one of thousands of newly-built Corporation houses. The area formed part of the Irish government's ambitious programme to clear the slums of inner-city Dublin, giving people decent living conditions in the suburbs. But, while well-intentioned, the overall effect was a breakdown in social cohesion with the dispersal of whole neighbourhoods. The new estates were dreary and impersonal with no sense of community. Poverty followed the former slum dwellers. By the time he was eight, Martin and his older brother, John, who was ten, were robbing food to supplement the family's income. Martin was often sent to the local convent with his go-cart to collect a pot of stew from the nuns to feed the family. The lack of food was to have a profound effect on Cahill. One of the hallmarks of his burglaries in later life was that, apart from robbing cash and valuables, he always stole meat and other food from the fridge. It was not unusual for him to make off with £50,000 worth of valuables and a few pounds of steak.
The young Cahills were sent to school in nearby Kimmage. At first Martin liked school but his natural bent for rebelling against authority soon put an end to that. One day after school he was playing around a dump where old school books were burned along with other rubbish. A nun demanded to know what he was doing and he told her it was none of her business. A few days later the nun took Martin, kicking and screaming, out of his class and put him in her own where she exacted revenge for his earlier recalcitrance. The nun, Cahill recalled, held him up as an object of ridicule in the class. She warned the other students that they could turn out to be like Martin Cahill, as if the child before them was some kind of imbecile.
He felt humiliated and began developing his own method for dealing with authority. He decided not to learn to spite the teacher. He began mit...
BIRTH OF A GENERAL
Martin Cahill was never destined to die in his sleep. It would not have been a fitting end to a man who was the indisputable godfather of the Irish criminal underworld. He lived by the gun and died by it--despatched in the cold-blooded fashion of the gangland he once dominated. Cahill lived on a knife-edge for most of his criminal career. On that fateful afternoon in August he finally succumbed to what he knew was the inevitable.
Martin Cahill, Tango One, the General, Public Enemy Number One, did not conform to the psychological profile of a criminal mind. That was the way the underworld's hooded bogeyman wanted it. He was a man of many contradictions--from devoted father, loyal friend, prolific lover, absurd joker, to hated outlaw, feared gangster, sadistic fiend, meticulous planner. He was obsessive, conniving and extremely clever; sometimes cruel, sometimes compassionate; secretive with a malicious streak. The General was a complex character.
In appearance Martin Cahill looked anything but a crime boss. Short, rotund and balding, in well-worn jeans and stained tee-shirt, he could be mistaken for a down-at-heel handbag snatcher. He was no Ronnie Kray. He lived a frugal life between crimes and he did not drink, smoke or take drugs. His passions were pigeons, motorbikes, cakes and curries. The only less orthodox passions in his life were his love affairs with his wife and her sister. Outwardly Cahill seemed gentle, soft-spoken with a flat Dublin brogue. But behind the ordinary appearance lurked a colourful crook.
It was his crimes that had panache and style. From the slums of Dublin the General worked his way up from a small-time burglar to a major-league criminal, earning himself a reputation equivalent in stature to that of a high-profile politician or TV star. He came to epitomise the ultimate anti-hero, the one who satisfied the public's ambivalent, morbid fascination with the underworld. More than any other criminal icon, Cahill had a profound effect on the national psyche. His willingness to show off his Mickey Mouse underwear while hiding his face behind sinister balaclavas made him the subject of intense curiosity.
The day before his funeral, the Sunday World ran the first, full-colour picture of the grinning General. There he was, beaming out from the front page in an ill-fitting old leather jacket and tee-shirt. With strands of hair scattered across his bald pate, he stood proudly beside a little girl in a First Communion dress, outside the church where his Requiem Mass would be held. The newspaper sold out within hours. Everyone wanted to see what the man in the mask looked like.
The story of the life and crimes of Martin Cahill is an extraordinary one. In 1969, the year he turned twenty, Ireland was still a country where indictable crime was extremely rare and a much smaller police force boasted an almost hundred percent detection rate. But Martin Cahill and his contemporaries were about to change all that. He was one of the prime movers in the new generation of hoodlums that emerged from the confusion and panic accompanying the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. The General was the brains behind one of the country's most ruthless and successful armed crime gangs. Over two decades Cahill organised the theft of art, jewels and cash worth well in excess of £40 million in the biggest and most audacious robberies in Irish history. And he preserved his position of untouchable gang boss with a string of brutal crimes against his enemies, bombing, torturing or shooting those who irritated or challenged him. He was egalitarian in his choice of victim; they were from both sides of the fine crime-line. The name of the General was synonymous with violence, fear and intimidation.
Unlike most criminals who tend to avoid, as much as possible, conflict with the authorities, Martin Cahill launched his own revolt against the state. He waged an unrelenting war of wits against the Gardaí he hated with a venom--a feeling reciprocated by the men and women in blue. Getting one over on the police was sometimes the sole motivation for his more mischievous "strokes." But his contempt for the cops contained a contradiction. In a strange way he actually had a grudging respect for them.
He turned down requests from other Dublin hoods to take part in lucrative robberies in England in association with gangs in London and Manchester. He believed the English police were much more likely than the Irish to doctor the evidence and stitch him up. He often told his fellow gangsters that there were two things which made the Irish cop more honest than others. One, he said, was their Catholic rural background (the Garda force is largely made up of country people) and a deep-rooted sense of self-righteousness which would not allow them to tinker with the evidence. The other was their cutthroat rivalry, in which the least bit of dirt thrown by a disgruntled underling could jeopardise an officer's promotion.
But the well-hidden respect went no further than Cahill not leaving the country to do jobs. At every opportunity he tried to exploit weaknesses in the police force and make them look stupid. He even equipped his extensive arsenal by robbing the depot where the Gardaí stored confiscated illegal weapons. When the police got too close for comfort he bombed their top forensic expert and on another occasion stole the most sensitive criminal files in the land. He set fire to one of Dublin's law courts when the Gardaí tried to prosecute him on the last serious charge he would ever be tried on. And whenever the General was taken in for questioning there was an outbreak of tyre-slashing in middle-class neighbourhoods to embarrass the police. Cahill even dug holes in their prized golf club at Stackstown in Co Dublin and then made jokes about the act to their faces.
Cahill sometimes left clues at the scene of well-planned jobs, just to antagonise the investigating detectives who knew him best. He covered his tracks so well there was little hope of catching him. Cahill described it as a "game" or "grudge match" in which he was an adroit player. But it was a dangerous game with only one rule: don't get caught. The stakes were high, so high that he couldn't afford to lose. For if he lost the game, the result was either a prison cell or the morgue.
* * *
It all began on 23 May, 1949, when Agnes and Patrick Cahill had their second child, Martin Joseph. Patrick, a labourer who later became a lighthouse keeper, married Agnes Sheehan, a small, quiet-spoken woman, shortly after the end of World War Two. They set up their home in the heart of Dublin's inner-city slums at No. 6, Grenville Street, on the northside of the river Liffey.
The post-war years in Ireland were dark days of poverty and deprivation for those who found themselves trapped in the ghettos. In fact from the turn of the century Dublin was blighted with some of the worst slum conditions in Europe. A chronic lack of education, combined with the Catholic Church's denunciation of birth control as the Devil's work, resulted in large families over-crowding the already insanitary, dilapidated tenements. The Grenville Street the Cahills moved into had changed little since 1898 when a newspaper report described it as "Hell Street" where "drunken brawls, stone throwing and filthy practices" were its main characteristics. The report reflected the attitude of the society which, more than fifty years later, would alienate people like the General. From the moment of his birth Martin Cahill was on the wrong side of the tracks.
Patrick Cahill's meagre wages as a lighthouse keeper could not support his growing family. He was also fond of drink, which he indulged in at the expense of his wife and children. Often there wasn't enough food to put on the table. Patrick Cahill's drinking habits sickened young Martin who never drank in his life. He would later recall, in a bitter tone, that his father had little to show for a life as an honest man. Agnes Cahill was pregnant a total of eighteen times. She miscarried on six occasions and one toddler was killed when she was hit by an ice cream van.
In 1960 the Cahill family moved to No. 210, Captain's Road in Crumlin, one of thousands of newly-built Corporation houses. The area formed part of the Irish government's ambitious programme to clear the slums of inner-city Dublin, giving people decent living conditions in the suburbs. But, while well-intentioned, the overall effect was a breakdown in social cohesion with the dispersal of whole neighbourhoods. The new estates were dreary and impersonal with no sense of community. Poverty followed the former slum dwellers. By the time he was eight, Martin and his older brother, John, who was ten, were robbing food to supplement the family's income. Martin was often sent to the local convent with his go-cart to collect a pot of stew from the nuns to feed the family. The lack of food was to have a profound effect on Cahill. One of the hallmarks of his burglaries in later life was that, apart from robbing cash and valuables, he always stole meat and other food from the fridge. It was not unusual for him to make off with £50,000 worth of valuables and a few pounds of steak.
The young Cahills were sent to school in nearby Kimmage. At first Martin liked school but his natural bent for rebelling against authority soon put an end to that. One day after school he was playing around a dump where old school books were burned along with other rubbish. A nun demanded to know what he was doing and he told her it was none of her business. A few days later the nun took Martin, kicking and screaming, out of his class and put him in her own where she exacted revenge for his earlier recalcitrance. The nun, Cahill recalled, held him up as an object of ridicule in the class. She warned the other students that they could turn out to be like Martin Cahill, as if the child before them was some kind of imbecile.
He felt humiliated and began developing his own method for dealing with authority. He decided not to learn to spite the teacher. He began mit...
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- Publication date2004
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