Gangland rivalry has exploded on to our streets over the past decade. What changed and can it be stopped, asks Conor Lally, Crime Correspondent
A man lay dead, face down in a ditch. His hands were tied behind his back; his feet bound. He had been shot in the back of the head and once more in the buttock.
There were signs he had suffered terribly before the fatal shots rang out from his assassin's gun. There were stab wounds, 10 in all, in clusters on his back and chest. A post mortem revealed they had been inflicted in quick succession and were not deep enough to have been fatal. Whoever wielded the knife was intent on causing pain, not death; the unmistakable characteristic of torture.
But the deceased was not some American gangster butchered and dumped on the mean streets of LA's Compton neighbourhood or the Bronx in New York. The dead man was Michael Campbell-McNamara, a 23-year-old petty criminal from Limerick's Southill estate. On a cold morning in October 2003, his body was discovered by a man walking his dog in a field on the outskirts of the city.
Limerick's feud had claimed another victim.
It later emerged that the dead man knew his life was in danger. He had told friends he was planning to pay €700 for an automatic machine gun to protect himself. Indeed, he had been lured to his murder by a criminal associate on the promise of that very gun.
Campbell-McNamara's savage killing was, at the time, the fourth in a series of connected gangland feud-related gun murders in Limerick. There have since been another four. For every killing there have been scores of feud-related, non-fatal drive-by shootings, petrol bombings and stabbings. Nobody anticipates an end to the bloodletting.
The (almost exclusively Dublin-based) media often points its finger in the direction of Limerick and, tut-tutting, wonders aloud where it all went wrong. Limerick's feud erupted in 2000 with the murder by the city's Keane gang of its arch-enemy Eddie Ryan. Since then, the feuding factions have increasingly turned to powerful automatic and semi-automatic firearms. Pipe bombs have been acquired from former IRA men turned common criminals. The gangs have even made efforts to buy sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. The Limerick feud is, in journalistic parlance, "a great yarn".
But since the beginning of the current decade, gangland criminality across the country has begun to change in nature and, like Limerick's gang-based feuding, now mirrors that of the US.
Simply being a member of one grouping is now enough to get you killed by another. Personal rivalries are at the centre of the much of the killing, unlike the more pragmatic and controlled turf-war murders of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, people were more often murdered if they had lost drugs, sold drugs on another's territory or if it was suspected they were informing to the Garda. Those doing the killing rarely took a life without having what they considered to be a real reason.
But unlike more seasoned operators, the young criminals now joining gangland's ranks are more anxious to get one over on their enemies in the shape of gun attacks than maximise their profits from drug dealing.
Protracted patterns of tit-for-tat gun murders have now become established, between relatively minor criminals in their late teens and early 20s. The massive growth in the €1 billion-plus annual drugs trade has seen an explosion in the number of small-time dealers involved in sustaining that industry. It means a generation of young men, who in previous eras would not have graduated to serious criminality until their late 20s or early 30s, are now immersed in drug dealing from a very early age. They have access to the ever increasing array of firearms. And many of them are drug-users, a habit that increases the chances of erratic behaviour.
It is a case of too much too young. The results have been devastating.
A NEW SIX-PART television series entitled Feud, which begins on RTÉ1 on Monday night, tells the bloody stories of five continuing gangland feuds. The combined body count since 2000 has reached 32.
Of these, just one killing - that of Kieran Keane - has resulted in a conviction for murder.
In Limerick there have been eight feud- related killings in the last six years, as two rival factions vie for control of the city's modest drugs trade. Personal animosity between the main players - and their wives and children - ensures any occasional lull in hostilities is short-lived.
The Ryan family has lost two brothers - Eddie and John - to feud-related gangland executions. The Keanes have been similarly affected: Kieran Keane is dead, while his brother Christy is serving 10 years for drugs offences. The Dundon-McCarthy gang, perhaps Limerick's most dangerous gang, has seen a large number of its men imprisoned for feud-related violence, up to and including murder.
In the adjoining south Dublin suburbs of Crumlin and Drimnagh, a dispute between local teenagers over a burnt-out motorbike has spiralled out of control, resulting in 10 deaths since 2001 as some of those involved have become major drug dealers.
Appeals for a ceasefire have been ignored.
The Roche family has lost two brothers, John and Noel, both gunned down. Another family has had one son murdered while a second is in jail awaiting trial for a related killing.
In Blanchardstown, the violence that characterised the implosion of the once all-powerful Westies gang has seen seven men executed. The Sugg and Glennon families have both lost two men in gun attacks linked to the feud.
As in Limerick, the Westies killing spree was accompanied by gratuitous violence as the gang's leaders, Shane Coates and Stephen Sugg, ran their drugs empire through fear. Drug users who bought from anybody else were severely dealt with. A similar fate befell any street dealers who agreed to sell for other gangs. In 1999, heroin addict Derek "Smiley" McGuinness couldn't pay a few hundred pounds of debt, so was beaten and had his face sliced open with a Stanley blade. A middle-aged addict who owed money she didn't have had her breasts cut with a knife and cigarettes stubbed out on her body. Another addict was thrown off a balcony in the Ballymun flats.
In Finglas, five people have paid with their lives as the major drugs gang led by Martin "Marlo" Hyland collapsed on itself last year after an intense Garda investigation saw more than €20 million of the gang's drugs intercepted. One of the dead was an innocent 20-year-old plumber, Anthony Campbell, who was shot because he was a witness to the murder of Hyland last December.
In Dublin's north inner city two men have lost their lives in a feud sparked when a leading criminal from Sheriff Street, Christy Griffin, was accused of sexually abusing and raping his partner's young daughter. Griffin, a major armed robber and drug dealer, was jailed for life in April for that offence but not before serious feuding erupted between two factions from Sheriff Street; one that stood by its gang leader and one that was sickened by his actions and formed an opposing group.
In 2005 and last year there were a series of drive-by shootings and grenade attacks before two men were shot dead last December just weeks before Griffin's January trial.
Gardaí have flooded the area with highly visible, armed patrols in what is arguably the biggest gang feud containment operation ever seen in the capital. A list of 32 men has been drawn up by gardaí - 16 on each side of the feud - who are classed as being at immediate risk of being shot dead.
The body count thus far is low compared with some of the other ongoing feuds. But given the highly volatile nature of those involved and the fact that all of the main players live within a couple of streets of each other, gardaí fear Sheriff Street will remain a tinderbox for years. Matters are not helped by the fact that some former IRA members are supplying both sides with guns and grenades.
THOSE WHO HAVE observed the changing nature of gangland criminality in recent years have differing views on why feuding is now claiming so many lives. While most senior gardaí concede the detection rate for gangland murders is far too low, they point out that, despite a very high number of convictions for drug dealing in recent years, the courts rarely impose the so-called mandatory 10-year sentence.
"If they did, at least more of these guys would be taken out of circulation for longer," says one Garda source.
According to another: "Once a gangland killing is planned it's almost impossible to solve. Any bit of luck you might have getting a witness to identify somebody at the scene or a girlfriend who might make a statement against an ex is often wiped out by intimidation from the murderer. So . . . when these guys are caught dealing, they need to be locked up for as long as possible."
Dr Ian O'Donnell, the head of UCD's Institute of Criminology believes the low number of gangland cases being solved or even reaching the courts makes it very difficult to understand what is stoking particular feuds.
"A generation ago, most of these [gangland killings] were solved, so you had a court case and it was all aired - you knew exactly what had been going on." He believes the lack of convictions bolsters the confidence of those doing the killing and leads to an atmosphere in which armed gangs feel they can kill with impunity.
"Often it starts with an original insult, which is quickly lost sight of as the killing continues. There are a lot of firearms around and clearly people are carrying them around in ways that they didn't before. And there is clearly a lot of drug dealing going on. The gangs are feeding a national demand, but we don't often like to acknowledge that."
O'Donnell believes the feuding now raging in Limerick and Dublin since the beginning of the decade definitely represents a new chapter in gangland violence. Of the 10 murders in the Drimnagh-Crumlin feud he says: "That would have been the same for total number of killings per year in the 1960s and 1970s." He is not convinced by the argument that harsher penalties will act as a deterrent.
"If you are not bothered by the thought that your enemy's bullet is on the way or you may end up at the end of their knife you are not going to be concerned about what penalties you'll face in the highly unlikely event you are caught after killing somebody."
One of the most senior detectives in the force says he believes feuding is beginning to spiral out of control because of the sheer numbers now involved in the drugs trade and the nature of many of those people.
"In some areas the crime figures show things like burglaries and larceny are down," the source says.
"A lot of fellas are not learning the ropes with more minor crime and then graduating into drug-dealing, they're actually jumping straight into it, because a huge number of dealers are needed to shift the quantity of stuff now going around. A lot of them are young, inexperienced and hot-headed. They're not as disciplined, and when they get access to guns through their dealing they're not controlled enough not to use a gun to settle a personal score. So somebody gets shot and somebody else then wants revenge. That's how easy it starts."
• Conor Lally is an editorial consultant on Feud, which begins on Mon, 9.30pm, RTÉ1