The conviction of Brian Meehan yesterday marks another major victory for the team of detectives based at Lucan Garda Station which investigated the murder.
Meehan was a key figure in a gang that was so concerned about being exposed by Veronica Guerin that it decided to kill her - the first assassination of a journalist in the history of the State.
The gang made a huge mistake in killing Ms Guerin. Its members, inured to the effects of violence, seriously underestimated the national reaction to the murder of the journalist and young mother.
Coming only a month after the IRA's murder of Det Garda Jerry McCabe, the public was in no mood for the head-in-the-sand approach to organised crime which had characterised the State's criminal justice policies of the previous decade.
The gang guessed wrongly when it figured there would be an outcry over the murder that would last no more than a couple of weeks before things returned to normal.
The new Garda Commissioner, Pat Byrne, had different ideas. He assembled the largest team of detectives in the history of the force, put his top investigating officer, Chief Supt (now Assistant Commissioner) Tony Hickey in charge and gave them virtually unlimited resources to track down Ms Guerin's killers.
Meehan grew up in the Crumlin area and was involved in crime from a young age. He has a string of minor convictions charting a career of increasing involvement in crime up to 1989, when he was sentenced to six years jail for robbing an AIB branch in Grafton Street. He frequently threatened and attempted to abuse gardai - he earned his tabloid newspaper nickname, the "Tosser", from an incident in which he masturbated in front of a woman garda while being held in a cell in the Bridewell Station.
His imprisonment from 1989 to 1994 coincided with the imprisonment of some of Dublin's worst criminals. While in Portlaoise, they shared accommodation with the Irish National Liberation Army prisoners.
Meehan and his associates referred to the INLA as "the politicals", a term which cropped up several times during his trial, exposing the dangerous symbiosis that developed between the two groups in prison which was used to further both groups' criminal aims on the outside.
Meehan emerged from Portlaoise at about the same time as the leader of his gang and began building an extremely lucrative drugs business. According to gardai who watched the development of this group, they made contacts in the cannabis trade in the Netherlands through two Dublin criminals who had previously been INLA members and who supplied much of the drugs trade in north and west Dublin.
Meehan and his gang were based in south Dublin, mainly in Crumlin and Ballyfermot, then the stamping ground of the criminal Martin Cahill. After being released from Portlaoise, Meehan and his associates made overtures to Cahill and proposed setting up the cannabis supply route. Cahill, who was ill at the time, was attracted to the idea of being financier to drugs dealers as it appeared to provide considerable income for little risk.
It is understood Cahill put up the money (thought to be several hundred thousand pounds) for the gang's first major shipment of cannabis in early 1994, apparently seeking a return of three times his investment. Cahill seemed confident his inflated reputation as Dublin's leading criminal, based mainly on self-publicity, was such that the gang he was financing would pay up. It did in a way he had apparently not anticipated.
In August 1994, while still pressing for his money, Cahill was shot dead as he drove from his house in Ranelagh to a local video shop. His killing was at first claimed by the INLA and then, almost two days later, by the Provisional IRA.
In fact, gardai say he was killed by the leader of the INLA group in Dublin a number of occasions about the Cahill murder being carried out by "the politicals".
It appears the INLA figure was able to convince his contacts in the south Dublin IRA that they could claim credit for the murder, citing Cahill's alleged associations with Northern loyalists who had earlier that year killed a Dublin IRA member in an attack at the Widow Scallan's bar in Pearse Street.
Although Meehan apparently held a senior position in this gang, he was certainly not one of its "brains". He was what, in underworld fiction, is referred to as an "enforcer", a person who could be relied on to mete out punishment to opponents in the Dublin criminal world.
He was fascinated with firearms and amassed a large collection which he stored at the gang's warehouse in Harold's Cross, Dublin, and at the Jewish cemetery, Terenure.
After Cahill's murder, Meehan and his associates had a running dispute with some of Cahill's associates, including Martin Foley, another of the south city's violent criminal figures. Foley, it appears, held a grudge against the gang which had killed his former boss and now threatened to control all the drug supply in the south of Dublin
It emerged during his trial that Meehan tried to kill Foley twice in the space of two months in the winter of 1995/1996.
Meehan shot Foley on the first occasion with a powerful revolver - very like the weapon used to kill Ms Guerin - in a bar in south Dublin. Foley was not seriously hurt, however, and was quickly back on the streets. At the end of January 1996, Meehan approached Foley in the Liberties and fired a full sub-machinegun magazine at him at point blank range.
Foley was hit five times but again, was not badly injured. Despite a speedy recovery, he appears to have got the message and dropped out of the drugs trade in the south central area.
Meehan's poor marksmanship was the reason his gang leader chose another gunman to kill Ms Guerin. Meehan's job was to drive the motorcycle carrying the pillion passenger assassin. The assassin, referred to in Meehan's trial as "Mr E", was an associate of Meehan who bought cannabis from the gang and sold it to his own sources. He, too, had associations of his own with the INLA in the past and is serving a long sentence for possession of drugs.
This man, and two or three other gang members who were central to the conspiracy that led to the murder of Ms Guerin, are expected eventually to be charged with her murder.