Original subtitles

This programme contains very strong language from the outset

and throughout.

'Veronica Guerin on Dublin's new young criminals,

high on champagne and cocaine.'

'In the past two years,

Dublin's Drug Squad has identified a new breed

within the established order of the narcotics hierarchy.

The new dealers are young and flashy

and make no attempt to hide their lavish lifestyles.'

'Cocaine is held in special affection.'

'The dealers believe its high price and exclusivity

proves they are part of a criminal elite.

As their trade increases,

the yuppies are becoming more confident.'

♪ Hit it! ♪

Whoo!

The finest Bolivian flake.

Just got a few bricks in through the docks. No hassle.

Go on, give it a whack.

Ooh! Fuck me! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

Whoo!

All right, John. Give us a smile.

Get that fucking thing off me.

I don't want the fucking Guards knocking down me fucking door!

Little cocky shite.

Lads. A toast to Dublin...

...and our friends overseas. And the importation business.

Slainte.

And to little Johnny, fresh out of jail.

Good to have you back, pal.

Who the fuck does he think he's calling small? Cheeky !

♪ Here I go, falling down, down, down

♪ My mind is a blank

♪ My head is spinning around and around

♪ As I go deep into the funnel of love ♪

"The Irish economy is certainly racing ahead.

Ireland's been dubbed the "Celtic Tiger".

Its economic growth is on a par with the Asian tigers.

New buildings are being thrown up all the time.

They can't build hotels fast enough.

Traders are rubbing their hands in glee."

All of a sudden, people spoke about money

like everybody was a millionaire.

You know, people are talking about private planes, helicopters.

But I remember nights in the club

where there'd be six, seven cars with chauffeurs sitting in them,

waiting for their people to come out of the club.

We opened a club called Renards

and became very successful.

Cocaine at the time was everywhere in Dublin.

I remember some people coming to the club

who were what we would have called visiting VIPs,

but openly asking me where they could get it.

So that was the first time I really, you know,

realised that it was all around me.

In the mid-'90s, we had these laws that shut down raves.

People were being encouraged to run clubs where there was drinking.

But if you've just come from ten years of raving,

drinking isn't gonna cut it.

So, walk in cocaine. "Hi, I'm cocaine."

And you can sit in a pub coked off your tits.

You know what I mean? It's hard to sit in a pub full of ecstasy.

And... it's very lucrative.

'Heroin thrived when times were bad,

and coke thrived when times were good.'

You could call up a courier and have it couriered to where you were.

You didn't have to go down a dark alleyway

and talk to horrible people anymore. It was a sanitised operation.

If anything was branded absolutely brilliantly, it was cocaine.

It's clean, it's white, it's pure.

The models use it, the rock stars use it.

It's gonna give you great sex,

give you the best night of your life.

I was at a house party.

There's a bloke from the north of the city in there,

and I was up talking to him about the dogs and stuff like that,

and he just whacked out line.

And I said, "That tastes funny. Is that speed?"

And he goes, "No, that's cocaine."

I was just floating.

Every colour was brighter.

Everything was sweeter.

When you found out it was coke, did that put you off?

No. It was, "Where's another one?"

But there is a downside to coke.

You have a gorilla on your back.

Like a big, white albino gorilla saying, "Get more! Get more!"

Both my parents died when I was young.

I was a little brat.

I was getting into scraps and that.

Robbing orchards and getting in trouble with the Guards.

But I started lifting weights. I was training with powerlifters.

And by the time I was 20, I was entering Mr Ireland competitions.

My nickname in one of the gyms was Tarzan,

cos I had a 21" neck

Back then, I was a henchman,

collecting money for drug dealers.

And around that time in Dublin,

coke really exploded.

So I started selling.

I knew about 30 suppliers, because I was collecting for them.

So I had that network...

...and then I had transport.

Once you have that, you're streets ahead of everyone else,

because you can go to a cheaper source abroad.

How did you bring the stuff in?

We had a pick-up truck, and you'd have, like, all the equipment,

as if you were going to fix a road. And they'd be like a drum,

and there might be 2Ks of coke in that. And then you'd put that

on the back of this pick-up

and you'd put a load of hot tarmac on to it.

There'd be steam coming off the tarmac.

It was big style.

So you'd get a chemical truck with a big drum on the back,

a big motherfucker, and you'd fill it with mercury.

When they X-ray it, mercury's metal, they can't see through it,

so you'd sail through.

It was easy.

If I wanted to, I could have brought in a fucking elephant.

At that time, a lot of people

were spending money on cocaine and partying.

And there was a gang that heard about me driving skills.

They offered me a bit of work with them as a driver...

...moving drugs.

I got me first car when I was 12. 12?!12, yeah.

I saved up Holy Communion money.

So I started off driving very young.

I always pushed the car to the real limits.

When I was couriering the drugs,

it involved me transporting all sorts.

I loved driving and I loved cars,

so it really was my dream job

Weekends was the busiest.

And then I just meet different dealers all about the place.

Driving fast, it would be just a feeling of euphoria.

The Guards could never, ever catch me.

I actually said to them if a Guard was able to catch me driving,

I would shake his hand, because I felt that unstoppable.

In the 1990s, the Guards just didn't have the knowledge

how to actually go about bringing these guys down.

So they were fairly untouchable at the time.

'This was the very thing that Veronica saw

and realised that something had to be done.

I first met Veronica in the newsroom of the Sunday Independent.

We just clicked straightaway.

We bonded over our love for Manchester United.'

And I think the only time I ever saw her genuinely stymied

was when Eric Cantona, who we both worshipped,

walked in and I said, "Do you want a photograph with him?"

'And she was just starstruck.

Veronica was one of those people that never stopped moving.

She was a one-woman band.

She had her phone, she had her car, and that was it.'

She would only come into the office for meetings

and just to kind of blaze through like a force of nature.

'Everything about her was quite unique.

She just was an unlikely journalist

and she was even a more unlikely heroine.

Drugs really took hold of Dublin City throughout the '80s.'

And it went from small family-run units...

...into much more highly organised and very ruthless gangs,

and they ran the streets.

'Veronica had a strong crusading streak in her

and a real sense of social justice.'

She felt very strongly about the depredations

caused to her local community by drugs,

and just felt that the story really wasn't being dealt with properly.

'So she decided to go after these guys.'

"A traditional assumption, all in aspiring journalists needs

is a nose for news, a notebook and ambition."

'For a small country, we produce a lot of big criminals,

But in Dublin in the '90s,

there was a massive investment in good investigative journalism.'

'From a really young age I was always interested

in sort of nailing the bad guy, for want of a better word.

A job came up on the Sunday World in 1987.

I was a photographer, I was 20 years of age,

this was just like a whole new world.

Heroin had gripped the city by the time I arrived,

and a lot of us had seen the damage around Dublin

that the drugs were causing.

So when we found out who was running it, we'd go after 'em.

These drug lords, they were bringing the rot into the country.

But that meant we had to be very careful.

'They're some of the most dangerous people

the country has to offer, so you approached them slowly.

You learnt to watch them, survey them.

You had three or four cameras at your disposal,

usually in the footwell of the passenger seat, always ready to go,

cos it was a split second.

There was other crime journalists on daily newspapers and, yeah,

there was great rivalry, but good friendship between them all.

You know, we'd go for a pint.'

And Veronica Guerin was writing for the Sunday Independent,

which was the Sunday World's sister paper,

and we respected Veronica hugely as a journalist.

There's so much money in the whole drugs industry,

and it really is a multimillion pound industry,

and, therefore, you've got people at all levels

within this drug industry getting into to try and make money.

They're motivated by avarice and therefore nothing else matters.

Veronica introduced the notion of follow the money.

A bit like in the States. You know,

Al Capone was brought down over his taxes.

She suddenly realised that this was the vulnerability

of these high-ranking criminals.

You know, if there is a money trail to be found,

that's the way of proving that it's ill-gotten gains.

And at that time, there was this cabal of people

who just seemed to have unlimited funds, that were driving flash cars,

that owned huge properties off the back of the proceeds

of crime and drugs.

Everything you touched was turning into money.

At the peak, it was probably 30 grand every ten days.

The coke that I'd bring in, it was always good quality.

You could cut it with glucose and people still would be happy.

You'd get 100 grams and you could make 500 grams out of it.

I was just buying everything.

...that used to drive me round,

and if I would see any homeless people,

I opened the glove box,

it was full of fucking 50s,

and I'd give the homeless person 50.

I was mad. I just used to give it away.

I remember flying into London, I had me son with me.

We went to Harrods.

I dropped about five grand in one afternoon.

You never think it's gonna end. You know what I mean?

Because you have other twist coming and another one coming,

so you just blew the money.

In the '90s, it was certainly a bit of a Wild West out there.

You had a dual economy.

You had the black economy as well as the legitimate economy.

And the black economy was really cash changing hands.

There was a lot of people who were outside the system.

And I think the police at the time were demoralised,

because criminals were being caught, but because they had money,

they had access to good barristers and solicitors,

and they were out on the street almost before detectives

got back to the Garda station.

In 1994, I was a Detective Inspector

in charge of the Money Laundering Investigation Unit.

At that time we were seeing huge amounts of wealth

moving through the Irish financial system.

And people who had been a petty criminal,

all of a sudden were moving in different circles.

And there was huge signs of wealth in Dublin

among people who had never worked.

It was plain to see that the drug business was increasing.

And we found from our investigations

that a lot of money was being made by John Gilligan and his associates.

All right, John. Give us a smile.

John Gilligan, nicknamed "Factory John"

for his love of robbing factories,

often holding security men or truck drivers hostage

and beating them up badly.

He then soon went from that... to drug smuggling.

It's estimated that over about a three year period

the street value they brought in

about 180 million euros worth of hashish.

John Gilligan came to our notice

because of his involvement in cannabis.

We had specific intelligence some of it was coming from Lebanon,

some of it was coming from Morocco into Ireland,

and then broken into smaller shipments to be distributed

either around the country here or there were shipments into the UK.

But he always remained removed from it.

Why cannabis rather than harder drugs?

So it may have been a business decision.

He didn't have to compete with some of the criminal gangs

that were actually importing heroin and cocaine,

but he expected to make considerable wealth from it,

and he was very determined that that was what he was going to do.

At that time, the banks

were reporting suspicious transactions to us

in relation to monies that were moving to the Jessbrook facility.

Gilligan and his wife Geraldine

had bought this massive equestrian centre,

valued at something like £4 million...

and they had begun to become upwardly mobile,

hold equestrian events, get to know the local dignitaries...

...and had really begun to integrate themselves into polite society.

These were people who would not have...

...and showed no means of earning this money.

So we started to focus our attention on where did the money come from?

And that's when we set up an an operation.

But we could clearly see that we had an uphill battle

linking it to the drug trafficking trade.

The sad part of it is that the Guards and the journalists

and the dogs in the street know who, more often than not,

who is responsible for carrying out the crimes,

and yet nothing can be done.

Being a journalist, Veronica had realised the libel laws in Ireland

are incredibly strict, so she devised this way

of bringing these people out of the darkness into the light

by giving them nicknames.

We couldn't use the names at the time because there was no

major criminal convictions against the country's biggest crime bosses.

But such names started appearing like the Coach, the Zombie,

the Penguin, the Viper.

In a way, silly type... comic book names, but make no mistake,

these were dangerous, violent criminals.

Ireland is the land of myth and story.

And we love stories, and we love,

you know, when the hero becomes the villain

and goes back and the lines are blurred.

So probably the most notorious one in this country was the General.

Why are you wearing a balaclava - over your face? - Wouldn't you,

with all the things they're saying about ya? Mickey Mouse!

He was like a Robin Hood.

You know, rob from the rich give to the poor.

He famously robbed a big posh gaff.

"Gardai allege the General had a hand

in the theft of £20 million worth of paintings.

It was the world's biggest ever art robbery.

Only a few of the paintings have so far been recovered."

Martin Cahill, otherwise known as the General.

He was an armed robber, he did deal in drugs.

There would be a number of us following him. Like, I personally

on and off was on him for two years.

The picture of his face was a golden nugget.

It became a bit of a running joke around the country.

"He was also known to have organised sprees of tyres slashing

in the vicinity of Garda stations,

and on one occasion to have had his lieutenants

dig up the greens at the Garda club in Stackstown

in the Dublin Mountains."

A lot of the criminals at some stage had worked with him,

had done a factory job with him or a bank.

For example, John Gilligan and the General

would have together going back to the mid-'70s into the '80s.

He liked to give this impression that he was one of these ODCs,

Ordinary Decent Criminal, you know.

He would help out the poor or his family,

but behind it... he dished out some real, real violence.

He was against murder, it would just bring too much heat...

...but you might get nailed to a table.

His favourite trick was to pin people to pool tables

if he felt that they had snitched on him.

I think it's fair to say he was a psychopath.

I was an acting news editor at the Sunday Independent...

...and I remember Veronica was determined to talk to him.

She had that kind of steely determination.

She was doing a story about the General,

and she dropped letters in his letterbox asking for an interview

five times in one week.

'Criminal A is 47 from the Rathmines/Ranelagh area of Dublin.

He's believed to have been responsible

for some of Ireland's major crimes.

Former associates have suffered the most barbaric punishments.

He is understood to be financing the younger members of his family

involved in the Dublin drugs market.'

We do know that he funded

John Gilligan's first big shipment of drugs into Ireland

back in February '94 of about 300,000 euros,

and he was due that money back.

"The ambush happened shortly after three o'clock in Ranelagh,

a well-known bedsitter suburb on the south side of the city."

In August 1994...

the General was assassinated.

He was going to a video store when a motorbike pulled up beside him

and pumped him full of bullets.

The car came around the corner

and the guy ran along at the driver's side... shouting.

It was clear that the younger crowd coming up,

they were going to be far more ruthless than he had ever been.

'The Gardai are aware that Cahill's associates

intend to avenge his death.

Dublin City is currently like a tinderbox just waiting to explode.'

So when the General is murdered,

very quickly Dublin becomes more violent.

You start to see the emergence of the gangland hits.

There's an extraordinary explosion of gangland killings.

Before Martin Cahill was murdered,

there seemed to be a code of conduct...

...but that stops.

Paranoia sets in because they're using their own drug.

And a lot of them had this awful thirst for blood.

There's this lack of trust.

And these are gangs that could have come up as childhood friends.

All right, Pat?

No.

Someone's been stealing from me.

What?

Fucking shite hawk!

The new element now is the openness of the killing.

There are people in this city prepared to go knock on the door

and shoot someone dead? But that is what's happening.

They have no respect at all

for either... for individuals or for property.

The week before last, there were two shootings in North Dublin.

One guy has nearly lost a leg and another guy was kneecapped.

'Since Cahill's murder, detectives have received information

that other people are at risk...

...including me.'

Veronica had rang me.

She was alone in the house at the time.

Uh-huh.

And she went, "Oh, someone's at the door."I'll call you back.

Oh, Christ!

"The shooting happened shortly after seven o'clock this evening.

It was presumed to be a warning from a crime gang

not to push her investigations too far."

I can really still hear the sound of the shot...

and, er ...a stinging sensation in my...

just a sting in my leg.

When she was brought to hospital, they said it was a miracle

that she hadn't bled out on the floor.

It really wasn't clear who had ordered that shooting...

...because around that time she had actually done a few pieces

on fairly high profile figures.

It's a massive trauma being shot,

but she was absolutely determined to go on.

I think what she really wanted to do was try and make the authorities see

what was going on under their noses.

These were the high ranking members of the criminal underworld,

people who had never been written about before.

And it's hard to emphasise just how much freedom

that these people, you know, had to operate in.

♪ PORTISHEAD: Numb

The trouble is you were dealing with dangerous, often unstable people.

Don't make war, make friends

and make everyone loads of fucking money.

That was my philosophy.

But in the '90s, you had crews ripping each other off,

and that's when the violence would start.

And the papers, they could get you whacked like that.

Never mind the police, if you were

in the limelight of the media, you're fucked.

I had a ground rule where I'd eat three meals before I'd do a line,

but that could be 11 o'clock. A banana, that's one.

You know, a grape, there's another one. "Right, give me a line."

In this game, you had to be sharp.

And a little bit of paranoia's a good thing,

but with coke, once it's surrounding you,

you start seeing things, you start hearing things.

- Run! - Like, if you got a phone call off someone

and they was a bit cheeky, you'd start twisting it and twisting it.

And before you know where you are there's an assassin coming,

and he's flying in on a helicopter.

And the Guards,

they'd start hearing about what I was doing.

And they got this member of the Drug Squad

up from down the country. He was a really good driver.

Caught me straightaway, he turned around after me and...

Usually, I'd lose the Guards in two minutes,

but the chase went on for just over an hour.

I knew the car would actually do 125mph.

And I was going round the bends at that speed, that's how I lost them.

But most of me money went up ne nose.

And as me addiction with cocaine went on,

it started to interfere with my mind a lot.

When I was driving, I was that paranoid,

I was looking in the mirror thinking the Guards was after me.

I remember one time I had cocaine,

it was the best cocaine on the market,

I buried it in the ground, went back to get it,

and couldn't find it in the area at all.

Went and got a fella with a digger to dig around the whole area

to find it and we still never found it.

That's when I just said,

"Flip this! I can't continue this life anymore."

How long did it take you to decide, "I'm a crime reporter,

I'm going to keep on doing it"?

I decided that... I went through a whole series of emotions. I mean,

I did consider getting out of it,

and then I just realised that that would probably be more of a strain

than staying in it. And it's my job, it's what I do,

and somebody has to do it. I'm not the only crime reporter

that does this. And I think that the regrettable thing

is that we're all probably targets, unfortunately.

Veronica, thank you very much for - coming in. - Thank you.

The feeling was she was getting very close to someone very big.

And then we heard through the newspapers that it was Gilligan

that she was edging towards.

♪ And it's no, nay, never... ♪

Until Veronica Guerin pinpointed him,

a lot of people had never heard of him.

He was a more mysterious figure than the General,

but he really was coining it.

I mean, he employed two people full time just counting the cash.

In some ways,

he was almost like a childish type character,

the pint-sized John, as some people would call him.

But again, he was the furthest

from an ordinary decent criminal that we've ever seen.

All his gang had to revolve around him all his family.

Anyone connected to him had to revolve around him,

tell him he was great.

John Gilligan, more than anybody, ran his gang on fear.

And these were really dangerous people, like Brian Meehan.

Little cocky shite!

Very violent criminals.

Gilligan was known to be a very volatile individual,

and he was somebody who was particularly paranoid

about appearing in print.

'Criminal B is 43

and lives in the Rathfarnham area of Dublin.

He travels regularly to the continent and the Far East

to arrange his drug deals but never carries it himself.

Over the past ten years, he has diverted his activities

from armed robberies into the more lucrative drug market.

He is now regarded as Dublin's leading drug baron.'

Veronica had been chasing a few stories on him...

and this absolutely enraged him.

The fact that somebody was threatening to peel off

those very thin layers of respectability from his life

and expose who he really was.

She was on a story outside Dublin and suddenly realised

that she was quite close to the equestrian centre.

So she decided to pay a call.

This is quite normal in journalism, it's called "door stepping".

Mr Gilligan, my name is Veronica Guerin.

I'd like to ask you some questions.

I know who you are.

You've some balls in ya coming to my house,

you nosey fucking bitch!

I was in the office when she came back from Jessbrook.

She was in a pretty bad state.

We got her to go to hospital.

And she was very shook up, her clothes were torn.

She was beaten black and blue.

I mean, I saw the bruises.

He punched her in the head,

he punched her in the stomach, punched her in the breasts,

and rained down threats

that he would "fucking kill everybody in her family."

She made a statement to the Guards

and wanted to press charges against him.

But she just for the first time, I think, really understood

the dangers of what she was doing.

And everybody around her was kind of saying,

"Yeah, look, maybe it is time to get out of it."!

But she wanted to see this through.

You know, she had a mission.

'The past 12 months have brought us images we might have expected to see

only in reportage from America's down-at-heel ghettos

or the drug-riddled streets of Colombia.

In 1995...it happened here.

As 1996 begins, has the Irish underworld

taken another step towards its ultimate goal

of becoming the new untouchables?'

The media were poking a hornet's nest.

Once you got to the Sunday papers,

your career... you're over, you're finished.

That's the last thing you want is that kind of attention.

At that time, you're looking over your shoulder

for the police all the time.

They'd raid the house.

They'd be hoping I'd have drugs on me

or I'd have a weapon on me or something.

So they bring me in and he'd hold me for as long as they could.

But because they couldn't charge you, they were pissed off.

They'd make life really awkward for ya.

At that point, if I coulda checked out, I woulda checked out.

I would have just cashed in and just... you know what I mean,

lived the simple life.

At the time that Veronica was writing in the papers,

we were working very hard behind the scenes,

looking at the money trail and the Gilligan empire.

We could clearly see that there was a lot of money

coming in from the casinos in Europe,

and John Gilligan and his associates were claiming

that they had won their money from betting.

So I and one of my colleagues who worked in the drugs field,

we both went to Holland... to look at these casinos...

...and we realised that

there was a lot of money lodged to the casinos,

lodged in cash, but they weren't winning.

The money was just being passed to the casinos in Europe

and then coming back into the banking system.

So we knew that the money smelled.

We could see that it was moving through channels

in order to legitimise us,

but we still couldn't link it back to crime.

It was clear that the police needed new legislation

to deal with the proceeds of crime.

And Veronica Guerin at the time was turning a light on all of this.

The extent of the crime in Dublin City particularly is just alarming.

And the the inability of the Guards, because of the legislation,

to really do anything about it is...

is something that has to be publicised.

When we do it, we're effectively bringing pressure onto the criminals

and they just don't like it.

Would you hurry up, ya slow cunt.

Let's get it done.

I was in the office of the Sunday Independent

and the news editor called from the desk and said,

"I'm putting Veronica onto you."

- No, no, I bet. That's great. - I knew she had been up in court,

answering, unsurprisingly, a gaggle of speeding fines,

and she was fairly sure that they might take her licence away.

Yeah, the hearing went OK. I didn't get banned.

She was returning to Dublin and we said we'd see her for a coffee.

OK, bye.

I went out to lunch and I was returning to the office to meet her,

but I saw a crowd around the newsstand.

And there was just a headline on it.

And it had "Veronica Guerin shot dead".

So I think I just went numb.

Veronica Guerin was shot to death

on the dual carriageway on the outskirts of Dublin,

a murder believed to have been commissioned

by a major Dublin criminal and carried out

by two gunmen on a motorcycle.

I remember poor Lise Hand screaming in anguish.

Nobody could believe that this... could happen.

It was a watershed moment in kind of Irish life.

It was the murder of a young mother and a journalist,

but it was also a direct challenge to civil society and to the state

"One o'clock exactly, work stopped at factories, shops,

offices and on the streets.

Gardia of all ranks also stood in silence,

as did officials in banking houses around the country.

The saddest place was Independent House in Dublin."

We lost our innocence, I think, to a certain extent that day.

The sort of rosy image we had that Ireland was all good and all safe

and not that many bad people lived here, you know, it was shattered.

We kinda went from being naive to, "This shit's real."

This is really real. Someone like Veronica Guerin

is... disposable.

That's the front page the Sunday after Veronica was assassinated.

Her young son looking into the grave.

He was only six years of age at the time.

And then at the top here's,

"John Gilligan admits: 'I'm the prime suspect.'

Turn to pages four and five.

Face to face with Factory John. 'I didn't do it,'

he tells our crime reporter."

I think the politicians being exposed to that raw grief,

they just realised what they did in the aftermath would be remembered.

- Nobody is untouchable. - And let us freeze the assets of the drug barons

who are known to us all.

The authorities realised that they needed

to hit the criminal fraternity where it hurt the most,

that's by taking away the proceeds of crime.

And that led to the establishment of the Criminal Assets Bureau.

We came together and worked with the Minister for Justice,

and the burden of proof changed.

So if there's no visible sign of income,

then Criminal Assets Bureau

were able to seize the properties and the money.

And Jessbrook was one of the first cases that was taken to the courts

and where the property was seized.

Not only will we deprive you of your liberty...

...but we will also take all of your ill-gotten gains

off of you for good.

The people they couldn't get at before, they could now.

If a criminal put an extension on his house,

where did he get the money? Unexplainable? Take the house...

...the cars, the watches. Incredible.

A guy with a Rolex one time was coming through the airport,

they just, "Come here. Thank you."

And that was it, like, 15 grand gone, you know.

It made the opposition's team a lot stronger.

It was like League of Ireland playing the Galacticos with Messi,

and they brought back fucking Pele from the dead.

They'd rush in brand new laws.

More Guards, more cars.

The Criminal Assets Bureau,

which every criminal on the planet now has to deal with,

because the Irish model is now every-fucking-where.

Immediately after, some of the members of the Gilligan gang

basically went on the run. Costa del Sol

was their favourite spots,

so we went after them.

Unfortunately, we always seemed to be one step behind them,

in one case missing 'em by hours.

But they'd been in a nightclub and broke it up and legs of a deejay

that wouldn't play their music or something ridiculous.

They were that violent.

And they were using the cocaine themselves at that stage?

But eventually the Gilligan gang was arrested.

This is John Gilligan being extradited back from the UK.

They decided to leave their Belmarsh prison uniform on,

mainly as sort of an embarrassment.

He was charged with the murder of Veronica Guerin,

and with drug importation, of which he initially got 28 years,

which was reduced on appeal.

But he was found not guilty of the murder of Veronica Guerin.

Detectives investigating the murder of Veronica Guerin

brought Meehan back to Dublin from the Netherlands.

Brian Meehan was convicted of the murder of Veronica Guerin...

for driving the bike... on that fatal day.

In total, he has served 24 years in prison for the murder.

No one... to this day has ever been convicted

of actually pulling the trigger that killed Veronica.

It'd be lovely to say, you know,

this sad story does have a happy ending. All the criminals went away

and never came back.

Drugs all left the country.

But, of course, you know, that never is going to happen.

Where does all this end?

It doesn't bleeding end.

Coke, heroin, ecstasy,

just pick your medicine.

As long as people demand drugs... smugglers'll smuggle them...

...dealers'll deal them...

...and the Guards'll keep on investigating

and arresting people.

And it rolls on, business as usual.

AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk