Pubdate: Sun, 03 Apr 2005
Source: Sunday Business Post (Ireland)
Copyright: 2005 The Sunday Business Post
Contact:  http://www.sbpost.ie/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/577
Author: Barry O'Kelly

DRUG CRIMINALS CASH IN

It is a sign of the changing face of organised crime that the three gangs 
heading the list of suspects for last Tuesday's 2.7 million euro Brinks 
Allied robbery previously made their money from the drugs trade. Top of the 
list is a man with three houses who, detectives believe, is the leading 
cocaine dealer in Dublin. The other suspects run multi-million euro 
cannabis operations.

Up until three years ago, the perceived wisdom among detectives was that 
these criminals represented the future of professional crime, dealing 
exclusively in drugs and contraband with 500 per cent profit margins.

Armed bank robberies, that other staple of the underworld, were a thing of 
the past. The last major heist was back in 1995 when the Monk, Gerard 
Hutch, organised the elaborate 4 million pound raid at the Brinks Allied 
security depot in Clonshaugh in Coolock, north Co Dublin. A total of 171 
armed robberies were recorded that year.

In the aftermath of that robbery, the banks radically overhauled their 
security systems, making it virtually impossible to carry out a direct hit 
on an institution.

And with the advent of electronic banking, criminals soon lost heart when 
the value of a typical haul plummeted to just 2,000 to 3,000 euro. The 
annual number of armed hold-ups fell by 50 per cent within two years.

When the Monk later repaid his cut - around 500,000 pounds, plus interest - 
to the Criminal Assets Bureau, it seemed like the closing chapter to a 
bygone era. But slowly, with little fanfare, new armed robbery teams 
started up, specialising in hitting the cash delivery vans rather than banks.

The first major gang was led by Stephen Sugg and Shane Coates, of the 
notorious Dublin gang, the Westies. The activities of Coates, 32, and Sugg, 
28, both of whom are believed to have been murdered while on the run in 
Spain, sparked a wave of copy-cat hold-ups in 2003 when 37 raids were recorded.

Unlike the non-drinking, anti-drugs campaigner Hutch - or the equally 
abstemious Martin Cahill - the new breed of heist specialists were dope 
dealers who spotted a new, more lucrative line of business.

Sugg and Coates ran the biggest heroin network in west Dublin.

They featured on a list of 18 suspects identified by gardai as the leading 
players in the spate of cash delivery heists. Almost all of the people on 
the list were previously associated with the trade in either recreational 
or hard drugs. All but two of those named in the intelligence document are 
aged between 21 and 31.

Last Tuesday's hold-up illustrates why a millionaire dealer, such as the 
leading suspect, would be tempted to move into the armed robbery game. The 
Brinks van that was held up at the start of its rounds at 7am last Tuesday 
morning could in fact have been targeted at around the same time on any 
given Tuesday of the year.

"You could almost set your clock by them - and you could be guaranteed 
there would be no armed escort at that point," a detective said.

While the delivery team offered a spectacular opportunity by calling in for 
a coffee at the Killester Road Maxol station, the scene of the heist, even 
this was not unusual.

Coffee breaks, according to detectives, are a regular feature of some of 
the early morning security van runs.

That 2.7 million euro was on board the van was somewhat unusual - most 
delivery vans carry significantly smaller cash loads - but it was not an 
unusually large amount on this particular route, an informed source told 
The Sunday Business Post. A gang was just waiting to pick the van off, the 
source said.

Martin Cahill might look at all of this in shock, and perhaps a little 
envy, if alive today. The three raiders stole more in 15 minutes last week 
than Cahill made on any of his meticulously-planned jobs in the 1980s and 
1990s.They also outshone the record-setting Hutch, who had to share his 
master stroke - ironically from the same cash warehouse in Clonshaugh - 
with seven others.

Detectives admit that they are far from clear about who was responsible for 
the latest security van hold-up. Their chief suspect, the cocaine dealer, 
has been linked by circumstantial evidence and loose information from touts.

He is a life-long criminal who carried out his first hold-up when he was 
15, shot a man before he was 21, later served a long prison sentence for 
robbery, moved into drugs when he got out, and is now, in hismid-30s, 
considered to be one of the city's biggest criminals.

It says something about the reliability of criminal intelligence that two 
other gangs, with a cross-over in membership, have also been implicated in 
the robbery. One of these groups is led by a man in his early 30s from 
Finglas in north Dublin who was previously thought to have retired.

Detectives said that information from informants suggests that he may have 
organised the heist and sub-contracted it out to younger associates. This 
was the template for his last big job, a 1.3 million euro robbery from a 
Brinks van in Co Meath last May.

Also in the frame, according to detectives, is a gang with a modus operandi 
straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie: all of them wearing two-piece 
suits, in a similar vein to the team from Tarantino's gangster film, 
Reservoir Dogs. To add a further Hollywood touch, the gang employs a woman 
(a rare figure in an armed robbery of any kind in Dublin) as a getaway driver.

The suits were donned in a number of recent van raids, notably hold-ups in 
Arklow, Co Wicklow and Clane, Co Kildare. The woman was arrested and 
questioned, and a file on the gang is being prepared for the DPP.

Confirming that the gardai are still seriously short of definite clues 
about the identity of the Brinks robbers, Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy 
admitted that it was still too early to rule out a link with the 2.6million 
euro raid on a Securicor delivery van two weeks ago.

The likelihood of a connection is remote, according to detectives, but 
Conroy was forced to concede that "it's too early at this stage" to rule 
out the involvement of the gang behind the Securicor job.

Amid the blame game that followed last week's robbery, the gardai emerged 
unscathed. The security companies, it was pointed out, had decided not to 
employ the services of the gardai when the raiders struck. And the private 
companies' training, delivery systems and overall professionalism - most 
notably the infamous 2.7 million euro coffee break - were exposed as shambolic.

The security companies could learn a thing or two from the gardai, 
particularly on the public relations front. As a number of veteran 
detectives pointed out, the success of the raiders this year - there have 
been 15 - also reflects badly on the efforts of the gardai to target the 
specialist heist gangs.

The dedicated garda unit dealing with the gangs is part of the much-vaunted 
Operation Delivery, which was set up three years ago, but was later scaled 
down late last year. The numbers involved are relatively small: 20 
rank-and-file officers and two sergeants.

The Sunday Business Post understands that garda management agreed to beef 
up the unit again last week by deciding to hire 20 more officers. The 
invitations to join were sent out to Dublin garda divisions 24 hours after 
the latest heist.

"The unit has been managed extremely well when it's been given a run, but 
then the numbers are cut back as soon as they make any kind of inroads and 
the problem dies down," a detective said. "The heavy surveillance and the 
constant attention have got results for us, but you can't keep that up 
without sufficient resources."

A retired senior detective, who has spent 11 years advising private 
security companies, said: "When the armed robbers were no longer on the 
streets of Dublin, and moved into dealing drugs, we all took our eye off 
the ball.

"A lot of the big security carriers are a disgrace. They pay their men 
buttons. The level of training - and I watched them close up - is 
appalling. Bear in mind that even Martin Cahill set up his own security 
company for awhile.

"There is no vetting system whatsoever. They're penny-pinching to an 
unbelievable degree. One company is going on a shoestring. Their margins 
are very tight.

"It says everything about the opportunities available when you see big-time 
drug dealers getting into armed robberies. It's as easy as stealing candy 
at the moment."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D