The Dublin home of James ‘Mago’ Gately, a member of the Hutch organised crime group, has been seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab).
A team of officers from the bureau, with a crew of workers, moved in on the property in Coolock on Tuesday morning.
The house, which the High Court ruled was overwhelmingly financed with the proceeds of crime, was secured by a crew of work men, with locks changed and steel shutters and gates erected.
The property, which was significantly extended and was renovated to a high specification, will be sold at auction.
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Though the house was said to be in good condition compared to others seized by Cab, the staircase and some internal doors had been taken out.
Some of the security features in the property, including CCTV cameras, had also been removed.
Gately, who survived a number of attempts on his life and was wounded during the Kinahan-Hutch feud lost assets valued at some €600,000 due to the Cab case taken against him, including the property on Glin Drive.
Gately does not appear to have lived at the house for some time and was not present when gardaí arrived and works commenced to secure it.
In Garda evidence during the High Court action that concluded last year, Cab said Gately had been linked to armed robberies, gangland murders and drug dealing.
Mr Justice Alexander Owens concluded the family home of Gately and his partner Charlene Lam, a beautician, was purchased and renovated to a “very high standard” with funds that were “overwhelmingly” crime proceeds.
Gately spent €125,000 on the house in 2013, and the court previously heard he had spent up to €440,000 on improvements. A Volkswagen Golf and a Rolex watch, which Cab seized in 2019, were also probably purchased with crime proceeds, Mr Justice Alexander Owens held.
The judge found the couple, who have two children, were “virtually never in the State”, instead spending their time in airport terminals and on cruises of the South Seas and the Caribbean. He believed all of this was funded with proceeds of crime.
Gately has been linked to three murders and has been a prime target of the Kinahan cartel for almost a decade. The organised crime gang paid an Estonian hitman to murder Gately, flying him into Dublin. When the hitman was caught by gardaí, a young Dubliner, Caolan Smyth, was drafted in to replace him. Smyth shot Gately five times in May 2017 but he survived. Smyth is serving 20 years in prison.
Gately had tried to fabricate an earnings history with fake records of working as a barber and beauty salon owner in an attempt to claim he had funded the property purchase with legitimate income.
Gately and Lam were damned not just by records of their lavish spending, but by the gaping holes in those records.
They went on cruises for lengthy periods to exotic destinations, at times with family members – and there was no record of any spending on their bank cards.
A vast extension and high-spec renovations to their home, which should have cost about €450,000, were completed with almost no records of any spending.
When Cab went through the couple’s finances during the period they worked on the house, just €608 of expenditure could be directly linked to the work on the property.
Some €408 of that was a payment to the ESB Networks, probably to link the rewired property to the power supply system. Another €200 was paid to a kitchen design company.
Cab told the High Court that “a large two-storey extension” was built to the rear “with an apex roof which joined into the main roof”. The ground floor was further extended by a bay window and porch to the front.
The interior of the house was then “radically reconfigured”, including extending the stairs into a new space in the attic. The front and rear gardens were landscaped, with a rear patio laid. The house included a newly renovated open-plan kitchen with an island and dining area.
New bathrooms were installed as well as a high-spec fitted kitchen. New solar panels were installed on the roof and the house was replumbed, rewired and a new heating system installed. Gately claimed he assembled a “squad” of friends to help him carry out the work slowly between 2015 and 2017.
Mr Justice Owens concluded that Gately’s lifestyle was funded by large sums of money from undisclosed sources, a conclusion supported by intelligence gathered by the Garda. This intelligence found that Gately “is a leading member of the Hutch organised crime group”.
The activities of that group included “the importation and distribution of illegal drugs, armed robbery, murder of rivals and theft”.
Gately was linked to three murders: Aidan Byrne (33), who was shot dead in a Dublin gang feud in February 2010; Finglas gang leader Eamon Dunne (34) who was shot dead in a Cabra pub in April 2010 on the orders of the Kinahan cartel; and David Byrne (33), a member of the Kinahan cartel who was shot dead at the attack on the Regency Hotel, north Dublin, in February 2016.
Gately was a pallbearer at the 2015 funeral of Gary Hutch, whose murder by the Kinahan cartel in Spain was the first in the deadly Kinahan-Hutch feud that claimed the lives of 18 people between 2015 and 2018. Hutch and Gately were close friends and both were among a group of Hutch gang members that were originally part of the Kinahan cartel.
When Gary Hutch tried, and failed, in a bid to kill cartel leader Daniel Kinahan in Spain, he and Gately fell foul of the cartel. After Hutch was murdered in Spain, Gately became a main target of the cartel. He has lived under the threat of being shot since 2015.
He spent much of his time in hiding in Northern Ireland, but has also visited and lived in his native Dublin, even at the height of the feud. During one such visit to Dublin he was saved by the bulletproof vest he was wearing when he was shot five times while sitting in his car at a service station in Clonshaugh, north Dublin.
