Gangster by John Mooney Read Free Book Online Page B

his satchel. He hesitated, but fearing for his life, the courier handed over the pouch.
    By 11.20 a.m. that morning, investors, banks and stock traders across the world were made aware of what had happened. Goddard’s assailant had escaped with 301 bills, many of which were made out for IR£1 million each. Immediately after the mugging took place, the Bank of England notified financial institutions across the world, warning them not to accept the bonds in business transactions. The serial numbers of the bonds were circulated. The Bank of England purposely released inaccurate information through spokesmen who announced the bonds couldn’t be cashed and were useless—this was propaganda. The bonds were as good as cash.
    Such was the fear among the international financial community that Sheppard’s felt compelled to take out an insurance policy with Lloyd’s should the thief try to cash the bonds. The premium cost the courier company IR£750,000. The detective squad at Bishopsgate in London was given the unenviable task of locating the stolen goods. They hoped against hope that the theft was just the work of a mugger, and the bonds would be found thrown away. Within the space of a few days, they realised this was not the case, and Operation Starling was born.
    Some ten days later, they got their first break when a faxed copy of a stolen bond arrived from a source in Northern Ireland. Then one of the bonds was lodged in a branch of the NatWest bank in Glasgow. The person who lodged it was deemed an innocent pawn.
    The Operation Starling team traced the source of the bond back to a small syndicate of criminals who had come together for the theft and had planned to launder the stolen bearer bonds in Liechtenstein. But the thieves decided against this plan for various reasons. Operation Starling was making inroads into their organisation and investigators hired by Lloyd’s were also searching for the bonds, whilst the Bank of England was using its influence to have the bonds returned. Those behind the theft resorted to plan B; this involved Gilligan. Details of his involvement in the conspiracy have remained a well-guarded secret to this day.

    Gilligan’s involvement in the biggest robbery in the world happened through his association with Thomas Coyle, a mastermind criminal who lived in Drogheda in County Louth. Coyle was a fence, someone Gilligan used to sell stolen goods. He was reliable, managed to avoid the gardaí and ran a smooth criminal organisation, although no one has ever been sure how. He mixed with loyalist paramilitaries in the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) north of the border whilst managing to maintain contacts with the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and, to a lesser extent, the Provisional IRA.
    Anyone else would have been murdered for mixing in rival circles, but not Coyle. No one in the Irish underworld expected anything else of him. He had connections everywhere and was regarded as being good at his job. Therefore, it came as no surprise that he acquired 80 of the bonds to fence within weeks of the theft. Coyle was shrewd enough to know that he wasn’t capable of laundering the bonds single-handedly, so he enlisted Gilligan.
    ‘They didn’t really understand what they had. The whole thing was a non-starter. But Gilligan had what he believed was stolen gear worth IR£80 million, and he went around trying to get anyone to buy one of the bonds,’ explained an IRA source.
    Laundering such valuable documents into the international banking system was a crime Gilligan simply didn’t have the intelligence to carry out. Instead, he tried to sell them to fellow criminals, fraudsters and the like.
    ‘He came to me with a photocopy of one of the bonds. That was proof that he had them. He wanted IR£10,000 cash for each one, then 10% of whatever they fetched when they were fenced. These things were for a million. No one could fence something like that, so no one did the business with him,’ recalled