Three years on from his release from prison, it can be said with certainty that John Gilligan’s efforts to retake his place in the underworld have ended in abject failure. He is reduced to living on the charity of family members and is shunned or hated by the new, younger kings of the crime scene he used to rule.
Once the godfather of the Irish drugs scene, Gilligan is now its grandfather. Worse still, he is a nuisance that nobody wants.
Gilligan emerged from prison in October 2013 after serving 17 years. Most of that time was served on a drug-dealing sentence, with a short period added for threatening to kill a prison officer.
He came through the gates at Portlaoise Prison on the morning of October 15th, his trademark sneer painted on as a large media scrum gathered outside. He was whisked away in the back of a car by family members.
But as Gilligan sped past the journalists, he pushed his face up to the car window, still sneering, for the cameras. The message was clear; he was out and he wasn’t hiding.
And he, literally, came out the gates of the jail still fighting his corner. Just days before his release, he had secured a notice of lis pendens, or suit pending, in relation to the Jessbrook property, which was being readied for auction by the Criminal Assets Bureau.
It effectively amounted to a public notice warning that the estate was subject to litigation. It meant if the estate was sold and Gilligan later won his case, the asset would have to be reinstated to him.
However, the property was eventually sold, apart from a small portion of land and the house where Gilligan’s estranged wife, Geraldine, still lives.
Incredibly, that house and piece of land are still at the centre of litigation between the Cab and Geraldine Gilligan. She has always argued the house is her family home and so should not be treated by the courts as the proceeds of Gilligan's crimes and taken from her.
It is at that house that John Gilligan was recently filmed for TV3's State of Fear series, which aired last week. It his presence there, many justice sources believe, may now undermine Geraldine Gilligan's argument that she should be treated by the courts as a separate legal entity.
A not-so-friendly loan
On release from prison, Gilligan first stayed in his brother’s home on a local authority estate in Clondalkin.
Word quickly emerged that he was looking for a financial loan. He approached some of the new figures in the criminal fraternity, as well as some of the older generation who had grown and become rich while he counted down 17 years in a jail cell.
Among them was Christy Kinahan, a fellow Dublin gang leader of the same generation. Kinahan was completing a prison sentence in Portlaoise for drug dealing while Gilligan was just starting his.
In the near 15 years of liberty Kinahan had enjoyed since sharing the same prison air as Gilligan, he had grown a drugs empire unparalleled in an Irish context in scale and sophistication.
However, Kinahan wasn’t interested in helping Gilligan – and neither was anybody else. Gilligan was too high-profile and perceived as badly damaged goods. His persistence in trying to raise the money he needed to get back into organised crime wasn’t welcomed. Plans to shoot him dead were hatched.
In early December 2013, when Gilligan had been free for six weeks; two gunmen walked into the Halfway House Pub in Ashtown, north Dublin. Gardaí believe they were looking for him.
The veteran gangster was less than 1km away in the Hole in the Wall Pub, and so escaped attack on that occasion. He was formally issued with a warning by the Garda that his life was in danger. And for a period he was driven around by a minder in a bulletproof car.
Just a couple of months later, at the end of February 2014, Gilligan was again targeted. This time he was shot and wounded at his brother’s house in Clondalkin. Photos emerged of him in a wheelchair after the attack and he fled to the UK for a period.
Exactly two weeks after the attack that almost killed Gilligan, Stephen “Dougie” Moran, who had been driving him around in Dublin, was shot dead at his home in Lucan on the evening of March 15th.
Since then, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it has been all quiet on the Gilligan front.
Huddled against the cold
Having grown accustomed to seeing his pumped-up chest puffed out as he was led to and from his endless court appearances while imprisoned, John Gilligan cuts a very different figure on our TV screens these days.
The State of Fear crew from Tile Films happened across the man himself while at the Jessbrook estate that has been (mostly) seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau. Dressed in a hat and gardening clothes, he was wrapped up warm as he cut back the overgrown garden with shears.
The estate in Mucklon, Co Kildare, includes 80 acres of land and a 3,500-seater showjumping arena, stables and related buildings. It had been split into four sections, with three offered for sale by the Cab. Geraldine Gilligan continues to live in a house on the remaining fourth section while the legal battle over it continues.
It wasn’t Gilligan’s appearance that was so completely at odds with the bullish image he has desperately tried to project in recent years; it was the way he handled the incident.
Rather than standing his ground and sneering while firing out derogatory one-liners, as is his wont, Gilligan looked startled and immediately retreated without a word to journalist Paul Williams.
This is not the John Gilligan of old. This is an old John Gilligan, still recovering from being shot and coming to terms with the fact that, outside the prison walls that held him for so long, he is a nobody.
He is rejected by the criminal fraternity he once ruled, friendless and a pariah in civilised Irish society for having orchestrated the shooting dead of Veronica Guerin in June 1996.
Despite all the hype and endless headlines about the nest egg he had squirrelled away to live large on release, the truth is that Gilligan is completely broke. Worse still for him, he is broken.
Trotting away from the camera without a peep is a reflection of Gilligan’s new standing as a nobody with nothing to say.
He emerged from prison into a changed world that didn’t want him and an underworld that neither respected nor feared him.
John Gilligan’s scampering away from the TV cameras was in marked contrasted to the way he sneered and brazenly stared down the lenses while being driven to freedom just three years ago. Freedom is proving a heavy burden after being caged for so long.
