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One
 
BIRTH OF A GENERAL
 
 
Martin Cahill was never destined to die in his sleep. It would not have been a fitting end to a man who was the indisputable godfather of the Irish criminal underworld. He lived by the gun and died by it—despatched in the cold-blooded fashion of the gangland he once dominated. Cahill lived on a knife-edge for most of his criminal career. On that fateful afternoon in August he finally succumbed to what he knew was the inevitable.
Martin Cahill, Tango One, the General, Public Enemy Number One, did not conform to the psychological profile of a criminal mind. That was the way the underworld’s hooded bogeyman wanted it. He was a man of many contradictions—from devoted father, loyal friend, prolific lover, absurd joker, to hated outlaw, feared gangster, sadistic fiend, meticulous planner. He was obsessive, conniving and extremely clever; sometimes cruel, sometimes compassionate; secretive with a malicious streak. The General was a complex character.
In appearance Martin Cahill looked anything but a crime boss. Short, rotund and balding, in well-worn jeans and stained tee-shirt, he could be mistaken for a down-at-heel handbag snatcher. He was no Ronnie Kray. He lived a frugal life between crimes and he did not drink, smoke or take drugs. His passions were pigeons, motorbikes, cakes and curries. The only less orthodox passions in his life were his love affairs with his wife and her sister. Outwardly Cahill seemed gentle, soft-spoken with a flat Dublin brogue. But behind the ordinary appearance lurked a colourful crook.
It was his crimes that had panache and style. From theslums of Dublin the General worked his way up from a small-time burglar to a major-league criminal, earning himself a reputation equivalent in stature to that of a high-profile politician or TV star. He came to epitomise the ultimate anti-hero, the one who satisfied the public’s ambivalent, morbid fascination with the underworld. More than any other criminal icon, Cahill had a profound effect on the national psyche. His willingness to show off his Mickey Mouse underwear while hiding his face behind sinister balaclavas made him the subject of intense curiosity.
The day before his funeral, the Sunday World ran the first, full-colour picture of the grinning General. There he was, beaming out from the front page in an ill-fitting old leather jacket and tee-shirt. With strands of hair scattered across his bald pate, he stood proudly beside a little girl in a First Communion dress, outside the church where his Requiem Mass would be held. The newspaper sold out within hours. Everyone wanted to see what the man in the mask looked like.
The story of the life and crimes of Martin Cahill is an extraordinary one. In 1969, the year he turned twenty, Ireland was still a country where indictable crime was extremely rare and a much smaller police force boasted an almost hundred percent detection rate. But Martin Cahill and his contemporaries were about to change all that. He was one of the prime movers in the new generation of hoodlums that emerged from the confusion and panic accompanying the outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. The General was the brains behind one of the country’s most ruthless and successful armed crime gangs. Over two decades Cahill organised the theft of art, jewels and cash worth well in excess of £40 million in the biggest and most audacious robberies in Irish history. And he preserved his position of untouchable gang boss with a string of brutal crimes against his enemies, bombing, torturing or shooting those who irritated or challenged him. He was egalitarian in his choice of victim; they were from both sides of the fine crime-line. The name of the General was synonymous with violence, fear and intimidation.
Unlike most criminals who tend to avoid, as much as possible, conflict with the authorities, Martin Cahill launched his own revolt against the state. He waged an unrelenting war of wits against the Gardaí he hated with a venom—a feeling reciprocated by the men and women in blue. Getting one over on the police was sometimes the sole motivation for his more mischievous “strokes.” But his contempt for the cops contained a contradiction. In a strange way he actually had a grudging respect for them.
He turned down requests from other Dublin hoods to take part in lucrative robberies in England in association with gangs in London and Manchester. He believed the English police were much more likely than the Irish to doctor the evidence and stitch him up. He often told his fellow gangsters that there were two things which made the Irish cop more honest than others. One, he said, was their Catholic rural background (the Garda force is largely made up of country people) and a deep-rooted sense of self-righteousness which would not allow them to tinker with the evidence. The other was their cutthroat rivalry, in which the least bit of dirt thrown by a disgruntled underling could jeopardise an officer’s promotion.
But the well-hidden respect went no further than Cahill not leaving the country to do jobs. At every opportunity he tried to exploit weaknesses in the police force and make them look stupid. He even equipped his extensive arsenal by robbing the depot where the Gardaí stored confiscated illegal weapons. When the police got too close for comfort he bombed their top forensic expert and on another occasion stole the most sensitive criminal files in the land. He set fire to one of Dublin’s law courts when the Gardaí tried to prosecute him on the last serious charge he would ever be tried on. And whenever the General was taken in for questioning there was an outbreak of tyre-slashing in middle-class neighbourhoods to embarrass the police. Cahill even dug holes in their prized golf club at Stackstown in Co Dublin and then made jokes about the act to their faces.
Cahill sometimes left clues at the scene of well-planned jobs, just to antagonise the investigating detectives who knew him best. He covered his tracks so well there was little hope of catching him. Cahill described it as a “game” or “grudge match” in which he was an adroit player. But it was a dangerous game with only one rule: don’t get caught. The stakes were high, so high that he couldn’t afford to lose. For if he lost the game, the result was either a prison cell or the morgue.
* * *
It all began on 23 May, 1949, when Agnes and Patrick Cahill had their second child, Martin Joseph. Patrick, a labourer who later became a lighthouse keeper, married Agnes Sheehan, a small, quiet-spoken woman, shortly after the end of World War Two. They set up their home in the heart of Dublin’s inner-city slums at No. 6, Grenville Street, on the northside of the river Liffey.
The post-war years in Ireland were dark days of poverty and deprivation for those who found themselves trapped in the ghettos. In fact from the turn of the century Dublin was blighted with some of the worst slum conditions in Europe. A chronic lack of education, combined with the Catholic Church’s denunciation of birth control as the Devil’s work, resulted in large families over-crowding the already insanitary, dilapidated tenements. The Grenville Street the Cahills moved into had changed little since 1898 when a newspaper report described it as “Hell Street” where “drunken brawls, stone throwing and filthy practices” were its main characteristics. The report reflected the attitude of the society which, more than fifty years later, would alienate people like the General. From the moment of his birth Martin Cahill was on the wrong side of the tracks.
Patrick Cahill’s meagre wages as a lighthouse keeper could not support his growing family. He was also fond of drink, which he indulged in at the expense of his wife and children. Often there wasn’t enough food to put on the table. Patrick Cahill’s drinking habits sickened young Martin who never drank in his life. He would later recall, in a bitter tone, that his father had little to show for a life as an honest man. Agnes Cahill was pregnant a total of eighteen times. She miscarried on six occasions and one toddler was killed when she was hit by an ice cream van.
In 1960 the Cahill family moved to No. 210, Captain’s Road in Crumlin, one of thousands of newly-built Corporation houses. The area formed part of the Irish government’s ambitious programme to clear the slums of inner-city Dublin, giving people decent living conditions in the suburbs. But, while well-intentioned, the overall effect was a breakdown in social cohesion with the dispersal of whole neighbourhoods. The new estates were dreary and impersonal with no sense of community. Poverty followed the former slum dwellers. By the time he was eight, Martin and his older brother, John, who was ten, were robbing food to supplement the family’s income. Martin was often sent to the local convent with his go-cart to collect a pot of stew from the nuns to feed the family. The lack of food was to have a profound effect on Cahill. One of the hallmarks of his burglaries in later life was that, apart from robbing cash and valuables, he always stole meat and other food from the fridge. It was not unusual for him to make off with £50,000 worth of valuables and a few pounds of steak.
The young Cahills were sent to school in nearby Kimmage. At first Martin liked school but his natural bent for rebelling against authority soon put an end to that. One day after school he was playing around a dump where old school books were burned along with other rubbish. A nun demanded to know what he was doing and he told her it was none of her business. A few days later the nun took Martin, kicking and screaming, out of his class and put him in her own where she exacted revenge for his earlier recalcitrance. The nun, Cahill recalled, held him up as an object of ridicule in the class. She warned the other students that they could turn out to be like Martin Cahill, as if the child before them was some kind of imbecile.
He felt humiliated and began developing his own method for dealing with authority. He decided not to learn to spite the teacher. He began mitching from school and was brought before the juvenile courts dozens of times under the School Attendance Acts. These were also his first encounters with the police who would play such a major role in his life. The antiquated criminal justice system was to take over the education of young Martin. He once remarked: “Reform school was my primary school, St. Patrick’s Institution my secondary school and Mountjoy my university—they taught me everything I know.”
One summer he and his friends were out playing in the GAA pitch at the back of his home in Crumlin. The grass had been cut and baled. Cahill and his pals cut up the bales, remade them into haystacks and began jumping onto them from a wall. The police arrived and Martin was arrested and charged. The youth was brought before the courts and fined five shillings—a fortune for a family that was already finding it difficult to live.
Meanwhile some of the Cahill brothers were becoming experienced burglars and major thorns in the sides of the police. On 15 September, 1961, at the age of twelve, Martin had his first criminal conviction recorded against him. It was for larceny. He got the Probation of Offenders Act—a caution. Two years later he was back before the Metropolitan Children’s Court where he was again convicted of larceny. This time he was fined one pound. Two months later he was up again, this time for two counts of larceny and housebreaking. He received one year which was suspended. On 20 September, 1963, Cahill was given one month’s detention in Marlboro House in Glasnevin on two charges for burglary. He was locked up in a small room for most of the day.
Martin’s parents decided to help their son get a decent career which might keep him out of trouble. Before the Troubles in the North, scores of unemployed young Dublin men went off to join the British armed forces. Martin’s father heard that the Royal Navy was recruiting in Belfast. In 1964, at the age of fifteen, Martin travelled to Belfast on the train for an interview. Before the interview, applicants were handed a leaflet listing in alphabetical order the trades and specialised areas of training in the Navy. Each applicant was invited to pick out a trade to which he felt suited. Martin chose the position of bugler. Unfortunately, due to his difficulties in school, he misread the word as “burglar.” He reckoned that breaking into houses for the Royal Navy and being paid for it was a grand job. The officers sitting on the interview board in their well-pressed uniforms looked stunned when they asked the young Dublin chap to explain why he had picked this particular trade. He didn’t get the job and took the train back to Dublin where he continued his chosen profession.
Cahill, like most of the lads he grew up with, did not see the error of his ways. A year later, at the age of sixteen, he was arrested by a young detective called Dick Murphy. While in custody Cahill, after been given cakes and fizzy drinks, confessed to two burglaries and made a statement. He was convicted in the children’s court and got two years in industrial school in Daingean, Co Offaly. The experience would have a major effect on the rest of his life. He and Murphy developed an intense dislike for each other and remained sworn enemies until the latter’s death. It was the last time that Cahill would ever confess to a crime.
The industrial schools were established under the 1908 Children’s Act and were intended to feed and teach young offenders. In fact, the existence of these ten schools around the country was a monumental indictment of the successive governments who relinquished their responsibilities to the well-meaning, although unqualified, religious orders. The schools were tough institutions, used as dumping grounds for the country’s orphaned and illegitimate children. In some cases the boys were regularly rounded up in what were called “hobbles,” the aim of which was to hunt out boys suspected of being homosexual. Often the boys didn’t even understand what the brothers were looking for. Before bedtime the youngsters would be lined up in their nightshirts, ordered to bend over and beaten across their bare bottoms with a two-foot piece of leather strap, appropriately named the “impurity strap.” Former inmates have always claimed that so-called “nancy boys,” the ones suspected of being sexually abused by some brothers, were often excused such punishments. Martin Cahill was never a victim of a “hobble,” but he was certainly no “nancy boy” either.
The Oblate order which ran Daingean pursued the reformation of its young charges with a crusading zeal—and an iron fist. But Martin Cahill was their match. He was quiet, cautious and shrewd, sizing up every situation as it arose and making the most of a bad lot. Compared with the other hotheaded boys around him he came across as mature. Those who taught him recall that Cahill was a strong silent character with a “hardness in his face.” It was a demeanour that would be evident in his criminal career.
If he saw a piece of paper on the ground Cahill would pick it up rather than suffer the indignity of being ordered to do so. He never made eye contact with his captors because to do so would mean acknowledging their presence and their authority. Once, as he walked along a corridor, a brother pounced on him and, as Cahill said later, “burst his jaw with a punch.” The frustrated brother knew no other way of communicating with a withdrawn sixteen-year-old. Cahill claimed that was the only occasion on which he suffered corporal punishment.
One kindly priest who tried to break through the protective barrier around young Martin was gently rebuffed. The priest recalled how whenever he tried to help Cahill, he was viewed with suspicion. Martin’s younger brother Eddie, who was thirteen and also doing time for housebreaking, had his own way of dealing with the brothers and later the prison authorities. If he was told to do something he would tell the brother or prison warder to shove off and do it himself.
Martin Cahill was put working on the bog which provided the large school with its turf harvest. Other boys were allocated to the farm, the metal workshop or the carpenter’s shop. Despite his non-confrontational stance, Cahill did not receive a single day’s remission on his two-year sentence. When he was leaving in 1967 he asked why. The brothers told him that it was because he would not open up and talk to them. After he left Daingean Cahill recalled bitterly: “If anyone corrupted me it was those mad monks down in the bog.”
The year that Martin Cahill was released from Daingean a special Dáil committee was set up to investigate the system of custodial care. The Kennedy Commission in its report two years later condemned the industrial school system as “evolving in a haphazard and amateurish way” and said that it “has not altered radically down through the years.” The Commission found that the children sent to Daingean were “educationally sub-normal,” although it exonerated the Oblate Fathers, many of whom had dedicated their lives to the place. Martin Cahill could barely read or write.
While Martin had been away the rest of the Cahill family had been experiencing hard times. They had fallen hopelessly into rent arrears on the house on Captain’s Road and they were dumped in a dilapidated tenement in Rathmines, called Hollyfield Buildings. A year after he left Daingean, Martin planned to get married to Frances Lawless, the girl next door in his new Rathmines home.
Despite his feelings about Daingean and his antipathy to authority, Cahill was fond of some of the brothers at the school. In a rare letter, written just two weeks before his marriage, Cahill was uncharacteristically open and, for probably the only time in his life, talked about going straight. The letter, printed here as Cahill wrote it, read:
* * *
Dear Brother,
Sorry for not writing sooner, I just wanted to let you know how Im getting on, for a start it took me long enuf to get a job but I got one, my flat wages are £11. Some weeks I earn £16 to £17 a week but its hard work, and its okay.
I am geting over weight and pale, all I need up here is clean fresh bog air, and bog work to get my weight down. Anyway the money I got on the bog I put it into prise bonds and I still have it, and with a bit of luck, I might win a £100 this week I have a great chance, well who knows.
I kept out of trouble so far, please god I stay like that, you know I did [not] for get what you done for me, you made me feel as do I was free, in other words needed, I just want to let you know how greatful I am you made my time fly in.
I have met some of the lads some of them seem to be doing well, but I cant tell, I don’t pal with any lads. You know I don’t mix much, out straight I dont trust them, I tink that I get better along on my own so far, Im not stuck up or any thing like that. Im going with a girl a very nice girl and I am very happy the way I am. I met Frances two years ago and I lover her very much and we are getting married on 16th March next week.
I know it is very soon and you might tink that I should weight, but I tot very seriously about it, and its the only thing we want. I know there will be hard times and easy times, but please god that we will be happy and I will go about it the way you would want me to go about it, thats what I want to tell you.
I hope yurself is okay, some of the lads there need a good bashing and dont give into them bercause you dont hear them talking, as you say you have to be cruel to be kind, and let some of the loud mouths beat you in a cople of games of handball on till it goes to there heads and then beat them and take them down a peg or to, when they need it.
I will close now, sorry about my writing, wright soon. I want you to know that we are saving money since I came out as well as my bonds.
(Its not much but you know what to do).
 
I remaine,
sincerey yours,
Martin Cahill
 
Within a short time Martin Cahill had given up all aspirations to a life of honest work—he had worked briefly making boxes for Smurfit’s and cloth sacks for Goodbody’s. But soon he was on the road to being a big-time criminal. Two years later he would be in prison. The General was about to be born.
Copyright © 1995, 1998 by Paul Williams