After being released from prison in October 2013, John Gilligan soon found himself in the crosshairs of more dangerous, and better resourced, criminals. It quickly became clear he was not going to seamlessly slot back into the Dublin underworld after 17 years in jail for drug dealing, despite having previously climbed to its apex.
Several attempts were made to shoot him dead. He was targeted by Dublin-based criminals, who apparently believed Gilligan posed a threat to them and wanted him gone.
Just two months after being freed from Portlaoise Prison, Gilligan was drinking in the Hole in the Wall pub on Blackhorse Avenue beside Phoenix Park when two armed men arrived at the Halfway House in Ashtown less than 1km away. The would-be assassins were unable to find him because they had gone to the wrong pub, and left on a motorbike.
In March the following year Gilligan was not so lucky. He was hit in a burst of gunfire after being targeted at his brother’s home on the Greenfort Estate, Clondalkin, west Dublin. Though he was wounded multiple times, he survived. Once his recovery allowed he fled to Britain and eventually southern Spain.
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On the Costa Blanca he pressed the reset button on his criminal career. He was then into his 60s, and is now aged 71. His advancing years did nothing to diminish his appetite for crime and money, and he was determined in his efforts to regain his place as a senior drugs trafficker.
In October 2020 news broke offering insight into what shape those efforts had taken in the preceding five or six years. The Dubliner and five other people were arrested in the Alicante region as part of a pre-planned operation by the Spanish National Police, supported by the Garda and the UK’s National Crime Agency. Spanish officers found 8kg of cannabis, 26,000 pills and a gun, which was buried in the garden of a large villa Gilligan was staying in in Torrevieja.
The gang, headed by Gilligan, had been selling drugs online, delivering small batches to customers, mainly in Ireland and Britain, via the postal service hidden in toys and other items. A number of loaded firearms found by the Garda in September 2020, in Co Roscommon, were also believed to have originated with Gilligan.
On the face of it, the operation he had begun in Spain, selling cannabis and sleeping pills via the postal service, was crude and high risk. While once he was a major drugs wholesaler in Ireland – leading the gang that shot dead Veronica Guerin in 1996 – now he was reduced to the role of small retailer sending parcels through the post.
However, Garda sources said it is likely he was making tidy profits from the enterprise, the proceeds of which were to be used to help him climb once more to a senior position in the drugs trade. The same sources said the fact he was supplying guns into the Irish market was evidence of the progress he was making, and the contacts he had access to.
A Spanish court on Monday spared him prison, instead imposing a suspended sentence for his role in the Torrevieja-based gang.
A new three-part TV series about Gilligan, Confessions of a Crime Boss, also began airing on Virgin Media TV on Monday night.
Garda sources doubted his latest brush with Spanish law enforcement would prove the last chapter in the story of habitual criminal Gilligan.