30 years of the Criminal Asset Bureau

Now, prior to this, uh, uh, Paul, the, the guards would be doing their best, and they'd be chasing down these, uh, criminals and finding them driving, you know, remarkably nice cars and living in remarkably nice homes, and they had no way of kind of dealing with this.

Meantime, the revenue commissioners who might have asked the question, "Where'd you get the money? You're on the dole.

How come you're living in a house like this? How come you have, you know, a massive telly? How come you have a nice car?" They weren't asking those questions.

No, they weren't, and in fact, there was a reason for that as well.

Uh, I, I always talk about the, you know, the halcyon days of organized crime, which again, people who are listening to this show of a certain age will find astonishing, is that, you know, gangsters could go and rob banks and sell drugs, and as long as they weren't, as they weren't caught in the act of actually handling the money and could hang on to it and go around.

There was a famous story of a one-armed robber I covered years ago.

Um, he went around robbing banks, and he, he, he was charged with several robberies at the same time, but he continued robbing the banks.

But what they knew was he was going into another branch of this particular group of banks and lodging his money in his personal deposit account-

[laughs]

...

so that he had a little nest egg for when he got out of prison.

But the reason why the state, Pat, were so-- there was a chilling effect amongst the, the agencies of state was that you have to remember that Martin Cahill, the General, he was the first person that the state took on in terms, he was claiming social welfare, dole money, and this was at the height of a major investigation into him back in 1987, '88.

And his dole money was stopped, and the st- the, the social welfare inspector who was in charge of his case, a man called Brian Purcell, he was abducted from his house one night, taken to a railway line in South Dublin, and where Martin Cahill turned up, um, [clears throat] and produced a gun and shot him in the legs.

Now, Brian Purcell, of course, uh, uh, as another side of the forest here, is one of the unsung heroes in the story because he later became w- a member of CAB.

He joined CAB as, on behalf of the Department of Social Welfare when it was formed, and later became the, the Secretary General of the Department of Justice.

Around this time as well, John Gilligan, um, in, in the build-up to Veronica's murder Um, he had threatened social welfare people on, on the phone when they threatened to take away his daughter's, um, unmarried mother's allowance.

And he, literally, I found it when I wrote a book about this at the time, it, it, it, there was a comment on his file where it said, "This man is extremely dangerous.

No more action to be taken." Um, and then he, the Revenue wrote to him, because the guards were trying to talk to everybody they could, including also us journalists, and particularly Veronica.

They said, "Somebody's got to expose this." And the Revenue wrote to him, and, uh, you know, the, this is a famous anecdote.

He got the letter from Revenue Gilligan, and he wrote the words "F off" on it, and put it back in the post box and sent it back to them.

And they F-ed off, Pat.

They were never seen again.

They never came near him again.

And it was only when Veronica was bor- murdered, and it was only then that it created the conditions, you know, and the clear-headedness, uh, and the cop on to basically produce the legislation, the powerful raft of legislation, which, you know, created this extraordinary entity, which became one of the most respected, uh, and finest law enforcement agencies in the world.

And that was acknowledged right across the world as that.