What really did happen that day, when crime reporter Veronica Guerin called to the stud farm that John Gilligan owned with his wife Geraldine?

Gilligan says he’d forgotten all about the Guerin “incident” until the Gardai called out to Jessbrook looking for him. At the time, Gilligan was in Amsterdam, on one of his frequent ‘business’ excursions to the city – from where he was operating his lucrative operation, smuggling cigarettes and cannabis. After his wife Geraldine contacted him with the detective’s phone number, Gilligan contacted him to discover that he was wanted for questioning about an alleged assault on the reporter. He says he was dumfounded – that he couldn’t believe that the reporter was trying to have him charged with assault.
According to Gilligan, the phone conversation took a bizarre twist. The detective was surprised he was in Amsterdam because he’d only just then received a complaint that – almost as they spoke – Gilligan was in the act of following Guerin on a motorbike. This accusation has irked Gilligan ever since. He brought it up in the opening of the murder trial. Gilligan is adamant that the complaint was made to compound the assault charges. But surely the Sunday Independent journalist – in an understandably heightened sense of paranoia – might have been convinced that she was being followed by him?
“Wait till I tell you,” he says. “I was in Holland. I heard the police wanted to serve summonses on me and I came home from Holland to put my hand out to take the summonses. If I’d never come home from Holland to take the summonses – and I know the law – it would have been out of time if they served them on me in another few months. But I did come home. That’s a fact. That’s in the transcripts of my case. The truth is, I was set up big time. I’m either stone mad or the biggest fool on the planet to try and tell you that. But I’m not being thick. It doesn’t really matter to me. I know what was done on me.”
Gilligan voluntarily returned to Ireland for the assault charge hearing in Kilcock. “On the first day of court I demanded the case to go on there and then,” points out Gilligan. “They got a remand order and I wouldn’t accept a long remand – such as a month’s remand – and the judge agreed with me. He gave two weeks and the superintendent said in my Special Criminal Court hearing, ‘Mr Gilligan wanted his case to go on’. And I went back the next time and they weren’t ready and I was remanded and the next time I went back the judge was after seeing – reading the paper – a copy of... actually gave the whole file into the judge and lo and behold the judge seen my conviction and said, ‘I’m going to have to disbar myself from this’. We said. ‘It doesn’t matter. We want this case over today’. And the judge said OK and then he said, ‘No, no. I won’t. We’ll get another judge’.
“He was told that I was going away, and he said that I didn’t have to appear the next time. They were all down the next time – I think she was killed on the 26th June and I think it was up a few weeks later – and everybody was there looking to see if I’d turn up. But I was actually exempt from being at the court that day, because I was supposed to be out of the country.”
Gilligan insists that reports that he phoned Guerin and threatened to kidnap and sodomise her son were a fabrication. “I’ll answer that. If I did, there’s a phone call there, isn’t there? If I did ring her, there’s a record of a phone call. I know I didn’t ring her and my phone didn’t ring her and nobody on my phone rang her. There’s no record of my phone ringing her. I didn’t even have her phone number. I could have got it off John Traynor, sure – but why would I not want to talk to somebody and then want to ring her?”
It’s been suggested that you offered her a substantial bribe to drop the assault charges?
“No. That’s complete rubbish. Traynor – the way he was with drink, he’d just make up stories. The story he said, which is a big mistake was that he said, ‘Gilligan said he’d give you an open cheque’. An open cheque? I couldn’t give her a closed cheque! I never had a chequebook. I never had a bank account. CAB hasn’t found one penny in any bank account belonging to me.”
But that could just be an expression?
“It could be. But why would he not say I’d give her five grand or ten grand or twenty grand. And if that would be the case, why would I be standing in the court saying to the judge, ‘I want my case to go on now’?
“People said that Veronica Guerin was always writing about me and I said to a journalist at the time, ‘I’ll give a million pounds to the first man who can get an article with more than one line in it, or a half a line in it, that she’s wrote about me’. I had no money but I said I’d give it because I didn’t have to have it – I’d win the bet. Look, if you researched her articles for the last 12 months – the 52 weeks – before she was murdered, she basically wrote fuck all.”
But she was about to publish an article, Gilligan insists, that would implicate Traynor in smuggling heroin into Ireland, in co-operation with a Liverpool-based drugs gang. On June 26, 1996, Guerin was murdered. When she stopped her red Opel Calibra at traffic lights on the Naas Dual Carriageway, a motorcycle pulled up beside her and the pillion passenger fired six shots, killing her instantly. All the clichés fit: it was cold-blooded, brutal, bloody. At the same moment precisely, Traynor was in a crash at Mondello, Ireland’s only international motor racing circuit.
“Why kill her? What’s that going to gain? What was the gain in that for anybody?” says Gilligan, shaking his head. “Putting her out of the way, what was that going to achieve for any criminal on the planet? What was the sense in it? I still can’t get it into my head. Yes, it would stop a prosecution – but not my prosecution because I was screaming for my one to go on. You’d only get six months for assault – so why take the risk of murdering someone just for that?! It’s nonsense.
“I’d understand if she was a witness in a murder trial – and the only witness – and there was a great chance that somebody’s brother was going down or whatever. I could see somebody murdering somebody for that reason. If they were printing the fucking truth about, like, you were doing something wrong, then don’t fucking do it. That would mean you’ll get caught and you’re going to be in court, so the police are going to know all about it. You’ll be charged with it.”
There has been much speculation as to the exact whereabouts of Gilligan when Guerin was murdered. “I haven’t said this publicly before, but I was in Amsterdam that day,” he reveals. When the news was broken to him, Gilligan remembers his initial reaction. “It was ‘Fuck off! She’s not fucking dead, is she?’”
But she was.
All hell broke loose. This was the ‘biggest’ crime in Ireland in years – a murder that would open the door to draconian new anti-crime legislation. Whoever was responsible, for the criminal fraternity in general, it was a very bad move indeed. John Gilligan recalls becoming angry after receiving several phone calls from colleagues informing him that the media were implicating him in the murder.
“They started – I don’t know whether it was that day or the next day – saying, ‘It was because you were going to court’. I was screaming. I was arguing with the fucking judge and everything for my case – I had been trying to get my case done earlier. I said, ‘No. There is no fucking way’. If I had been afraid I wouldn’t have travelled. I had come back into Ireland and everything. I was in Ireland, I think, on the 18th of September for Geraldine’s birthday. I didn’t go to her birthday party but a journalist wrote in the paper that I was dancing with her and when she mentioned my girlfriend I gave her two black eyes and bounced her up and down, I think, in the Spa in Lucan.
“Everybody was there. The journalists and cops where there. But Johnny wasn’t there,” he says pointing to himself. “And then her sister believed it because she read it in the paper – and she was sitting in the seat that I should’ve been in!”

In the intervening years since his acquittal on charges relating to Guerin’s murder, Gilligan has remained silent on the issue. But earlier this year, on January 28, he made a sensational outburst on the subject when he was in court to represent himself against the Criminal Assets Bureau’s (CAB) attempts to confiscate the equestrian centre. Standing in front of the judge, Gilligan stunned the court when he accused Traynor of the murder. He claims that Traynor phoned him, shortly after the murder, to confess everything.
“He was after ringing me – bad, bad drunk. I think he was actually in Spain. I wasn’t sure where he was. And he rambled on and rambled on and he goes, ‘You’re down for it, John! It’s all over the paper’. I said, ‘What’s going on? How did you conveniently have a crash down in Mondello? And you go to Naas General hospital? What was that about John? Was it an alibi?’” recalls Gilligan.
“And he went, ‘She was going to ruin me and I told her – and I begged her. I gave her loads of stories. I gave her everything that has ever occurred. And she knew I was talking to (Paul) Williams? I went, ‘You were talking to Williams? Jaysus, what sort of a fuckin’ eejit are you?’ We had an argument, but he was mad drunk. Then he tells me, ‘I was going to try and set you up for it’. I said, ‘You were going to try set me fuckin’ up?’ And he said, ‘Yeah. I was trying to get your telephone off you for Warren (Russell). And you didn’t go for it’. He was trying to get me telephone, to have her shot at the house – and drop my phone in the garden.
“That’s what he told me when he was drunk. Traynor only done all these things with drink taken. That’s what I found out in the end. It was always drink... drink, drink, drink. Vodka... vodka... vodka. The cops used to fill him full of drink and he’d then spill the beans. He won’t change.. We got up to some skulduggery, but he was never a close mate of mine.”
Do you know where John Traynor is now?
“I heard he’s in Spain. Some place in Alicante. You will probably never believe this, but do you know that I was never in Spain? But I don’t know what he does now. I don’t know if he still drinks or whatever. I know people that could come in contact with him but I don’t bother to ask about him because I wouldn’t have him thinking – even for a second – that I was asking about him... and I don’t even ask if he is enquiring after me. I haven’t talked about him to anybody in years.”
Changing the subject Gilligan asks me, “I bet you think I went on loads and loads of holidays? Did you?”
Well, according to the newspapers, John Gilligan was living a flash lifestyle.
“The only one in Ireland who didn’t have a flash lifestyle was me,” he laughs. “I never went on holidays. When I came out of prison the last time, I promised Geraldine that I would go on holidays. I was out about a year-and-a-half and she kept saying, ‘You promised to go on a holiday’. So she booked one with a friend of ours who works in a travel agent.
“I’ve only had three holidays in my life. I went to the French Alps and it was not enjoyable because Geraldine was after falling and breaking her wrist before we went. I couldn’t really ski. I was in kindergarten over there trying to learn how to ski. Then we came home and decided to go to the Caribbean but it was actually a disaster because our marriage was finished – and neither one of us wanted to be there. It was just a stupid thing to do, but we’d been talked into going. Then, three or four months later, I was invited to a wedding and I didn’t really want to go – but they had the tickets, so I went. That’s the three holidays I had in my whole life, and I’m 56 years of age. It’s nothing. It was all in the space of a few months.”
It’s been alleged in the newspapers that Gilligan has built up a €30 million property empire in Spain, amassed for him by P.J. ‘Liam’ Judge, who was in a relationship with his daughter Tracy and owned The Judge’s Chamber pub in Alicante. Judge was later gunned down in Finglas.
“That’s a load of bollix. They can have anything that’s connected to me in another country. I don’t have anything – but if they find it they won’t even have to fight for it. They can have it. I didn’t know the man from Adam. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Nobody seems to believe that. From what I’m told, he was a lovely, lovely fella to my daughter and my granddaughter. He was a decent enough fella. But then I didn’t know him. When I was in prison, my daughter was going out with him. Tracy started going out with Liam when I was locked up, I think, for about two years. I never set eyes on him. Nobody can ever say that we met or had a phone call or were seen together – in any country in the world. I challenge anybody to say otherwise.”

For several years now, Traynor has reportedly been travelling back and forward between Ireland and Spain with impunity. Last year in a Hot Press interview, Di Stefano described Traynor as the number one suspect in the murder case – and stated that it “beggars belief” that he hasn’t been extradited and questioned in relation to the murder of Veronica Guerin. “I’ll tell you what I think the answer is: that John Traynor is holding an ace. But I cannot say any more than that,” stated Di Stefano, somewhat cryptically, late last November.
There were whispers of Traynor holding embarrassing photographs that had been taken at one of Traynor’s brothels of a prominent politician in compromising positions with a prostitute. In fact, it has been suggested that Traynor had photographs of influential pillars of Irish society who’d frequent his brothels, including one that was only a few minutes’ walk away from the Dail. Could there be any truth in this?
“Traynor has documents and photographs of politicians and judiciary in compromising positions,” believes Di Stefano. “He also has copies of embarrassing documents taken from Charlie Haughey’s office, which he managed to get from Veronica Guerin.”
In the criminal world, it can seem like a hall of mirrors at times. You never know what to believe or who can be trusted. Gilligan has his own theories. He points out that Traynor was caught in the possession of stolen property in the UK in 1990 and given a seven-year sentence. Giligan says that Traynor was allowed to walk from prison after two years. He was officially given “compassionate” leave for a weekend, but he never returned. He never received a jail term again.
Gilligan claims to have the answer to that riddle. He says that The General had stolen sensitive files from the Office of the Director of the Public Prosecution (DPP) and would only return them on condition that Traynor was released. “When Traynor came back he told the government, ‘Here’s the files back but I’ve made 20 photocopies of everything. And if I’m ever arrested again they’ll be leaked’. If the files were made public it would have been very embarrassing for the government. They had files on stuff like that priest – what do you call him? – who died in strange circumstances? Fr Niall Molloy. The only reason he wasn’t charged is because he got the files and he gave them back when he got out of prison. He and Martin Cahill were working together. That’s a fact. He told me that himself,” reveals Gilligan.
Within two years of Traynor’s release, The General was gunned down at a road junction near his home in the leafy suburb of Ranelagh in Dublin South, on August 18, 1994. The IRA later claimed that they’d hit Cahill for his apparent involvement with a loyalist paramilitary group, the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) with whom he was attempting to sell stolen paintings from Russborough House. IRA intelligence learnt that the paintings were used to purchase weaponry from a source in South Africa.
However, a new theory has since been published – one that claims Gilligan ordered the murder of The General. Some newspaper reports claim that Cahill had agreed, at Traynor’s behest, to loan Gilligan between £500,000 and £800,000 to finance the expansion of his cannabis trafficking business. In exchange, Cahill would double his money plus receive a percentage of all future profits from Gilligan’s smuggling operations. The theory that has increasingly been bandied about is that Gilligan decided to renege on the deal and had The General assassinated. But there is no substance to this. A senior IRA source confirmed this week to Hot Press that there is no truth in this allegation about Gilligan ordering Cahill’s murder. “I can guarantee you that John Gilligan was not involved in the murder. That’s 100 percent certain,” confirmed the high-level source.
But what does Gilligan make of it all?
“This thing about Cahill giving me 800 grand is nonsense. They are trying to throw mud at me – and if enough is thrown, some of it is surely going to stick, right?” says Gilligan. “There is nobody who’d give you that type of money. What criminal would give another criminal that type of money? Cahill never even seen 800 grand in his life, or anything near it. The most Cahill ever seen in one go in his life – if he did see it – was £243,000 and I think that was in £5 and £50 notes from one particular job. As far as I know, to this day, he never paid the fella for the coal yard he got. I don’t believe the shop he had in Dolphins Barn was worth £10,000. That house he bought – they were after getting a few post offices at that time.
“They were good strokers, but it was easy to rob a post office. You’d come out with the money and you could nearly run in next door and lodge it (laughs). If there was two banks beside each other, you could rob one and then run in and rob the next one. You could do stuff like that back in them days in the ‘70s. Loads of people did two banks – they’d run out of the Allied Irish and run across the street to the Bank of Ireland. I’ve often pulled 12 strokes – one after the other – with the money still on me!
“Martin Cahill was never an enemy of mine. He had fantastic bottle. He had good principles up a to point. I didn’t like the fact that Cahill wanted to ‘back up’ a fella that had done wrong. This fella had raped his own daughter – and that’s why I fell out with him. He had bottle but he wasn’t a great stroker. It’s a myth that Martin Cahill had money because every big stroke that he’d done didn’t bring in much cash. He’d done the Russborrough House and he got nothing out of that. And he’d done O’Connor’s Jewellers. But they only got 20-odd grand out of that per man. That wouldn’t keep you going. If you take that over a 10 or 15 year span, that’s all he got.
“Sure, the police said he was going out breaking into houses. If he was, I don’t know, but I was told he was. If you take the money from breaking into houses and bring it home, you wouldn’t get that much. He had no money. How could Cahill have even around two or three or four hundred thousand pound? Sure, he hadn’t a pot to piss in – that’s the truth of God. We helped him out. I gave him some money.”
There were also allegations that Gilligan was smuggling guns into the country for the INLA. Again, an IRA source says there’s no substance to this. Gilligan acknowledges that he did smuggle weapons into the country during his time at sea when he worked on the boats, but he flatly denies dealing with paramilitaries. “It’s crap. Political people have no time for criminals. It is the most dangerous thing in the world to sell political groups guns,” says Gilligan.

Numerous underworld sources have told me that Gilligan is known for his sense of humour. One thing he isn’t is dour. Or self-pitying. “They’ll never take the smile off this face,” he says, grinning.
Gilligan recounts the scene the first time he robbed a bank. After bursting through the doors, he fumbled his attempt at the famous phrase: “Move and I’ll shoot”.
“I was nervous. I said, ‘Shoot and I’ll move?’,” he laughs. He lightens up considerably when the conversation veers off the hard questions. Next thing, the infamous John Gilligan is cracking jokes, while the prison officer sits, with legs stretched out, on a plastic chair in the corner. “Here’s a good one: a guy once says to me, ‘Are you religious?’ I said, ‘No, but I believe in the ‘hereafter’. He said, ‘Why do you believe in the hereafter?’ ‘Well, when I used to go into the factory, I used to say, I’m here after this!’ That’s the ‘here after’ I believe in.”
Gilligan then recounts several funny anecdotes about robbing factories. “We were doing a factory in the country. We were using walkie-talkies. The driver was called Mick and one of the fellas on the stroke was called Mick. I used to have the lorry driver parked down the town, until we got everything into the loading bay of the factory. There was no point in having the lorry outside for three or four hours and then somebody would come along and you’d have to run away and you’d lose the lorry and the whole lot.
“I was just putting everything into the loading bay. Say, I’d have three fellas with me and the fella down in the truck in the town would be watching for any police activity and he’d tell me if the police was coming up that road. So, we got everything into the loading bay and I said to one of the fellas who was called Mick, funny enough, ‘Will you tell Mick to come up with the truck?’ Now, the town would be a mile away. He said, ‘OK’. In the end, we all used to get a bit to take home for our homes, you know that way? A bit of this, a bit of that – whatever you’d need for the house. Everybody would get their own little parcel. What we’d take home would be untraceable, with no serial numbers on it.
“So, the next thing I’m looking around and saying, ‘Where’s Mick? I can’t find him’. I looked around for the walkie-talkie and I found it up on top of some boxes we were getting ready to load. I picked it up and I said, ‘Mick?’ and he said, ‘Yeah’, and I said, ‘who’s with you?’ He said, ‘Mick?’ I said, ‘The other Mick? Put him on, and then I said, ‘What are you doing down with him?’ He says, ‘John, you told me to go down and get him!’ I said, ‘What do you think the fuckin’ walkie-talkie is for?’ May my mother turn in her grave – that happened.”
He cracks up. After the laughter has died down, I ask Gilligan for his views on the new breed of dangerous young gangsters out there that are operating now, and who he thinks might be behind the huge spate of gang-related deaths over the last 18 months.
“Nine times out of ten, most of them feuds start over a couple of women fighting,” he says. “I’m not going to name any feuds now, but a few of the feuds that I know is going on over the last two years have all started with two women fighting. That’s what I was told. It had nothing to do with me. I’ve heard that a lot of them criminals are taking coke.”
Gilligan also maintains that many of the younger criminals today are simply not cut out for it. He also reckons that most of the crimes committed today are conducted by those high on drugs.
“It’s my belief that there are plenty of strokers out there now who are not strokers as such. They are kind of robbing because they have a drug habit. They are taking ideas from the movies and all the violence seems normal to them,” he says.
“Here’s another way to answer that question: with a woman 20 years ago, there’s a chance she might have had two or three lovers in her life. But in the last ten years, a 20-year-old girl is probably after having her hole on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night – by different fellas – if she’s not going steady with a fella. That’s 150 fellas a year. That’s normal. And even if a fella falls in love with her, it’s kind of, ‘Well accept it. That was then, this is now’. It’s the same with strokers. Shooting people is normal now. And it’s not going to get any better. It’ll get worse because fellas that are 15 or 16 now, in five or six years they’re going to 20 to 22 – and whatever’s going on today or tomorrow, that’s then going to be normal and they’re just going to go one further.”

He may have been a stroker. He may have carried arms. But what John Gilligan is trying to say is that he was never the vicious, murdering thug he’s been stereotyped as. He is still bitter over the handling of his conviction for smuggling drugs. At the time, Gilligan was in London where he was arrested. “I was not fleeing, as the papers claim,” he maintains. “I had gone from Amsterdam to London to invest money in a mobile phone business.”
Gilligan was arrested and extradited back to Dublin, on three charges. The murder of Veronica Guerin; weaponry smuggling; and over a dozen cannabis charges – most of them stating that on a “date unknown” he unlawfully imported cannabis resin into the country. Gilligan beat the first two charges, but he was sentenced to 28 years in prison – which on appeal was reduced to 20 years – for possession of 20,000 kilograms of cannabis.
Gilligan was never found in possession of any cannabis. Gardai discovered 37 kilos of cannabis at a warehouse at Greenmount Industrial Estate in South Dublin. They also found dozens of empty boxes, which they believed may have been packed with cannabis, as well as bookkeeping evidence. “It’s a presumption of guilt. A technicality,” says Giovanni Di Stefano. “There could have been fucking condoms in those boxes. Did you know that they found the 37 kilos of cannabis some six months after Gilligan had been arrested? It was an intellectually dishonest sentence based upon political bias and political influence for the ‘good’ of Ireland. That’s the reason why the Supreme Court is heavily in favour of the prosecution because the prosecution represents ‘society’. It is not independent. My view is that it is not independent, in the true meaning of the word. It represents the thoughts and the morals and the applications of society.”
The State managed to convict Gilligan on the back of evidence from two criminals, Charlie Bowden and Warren Russell, who are now in the Witness Protection Programme. Both men pointed the finger at Gilligan as the mastermind behind the drug smuggling operation. At the time, it was stated that Bowden was working for Gilligan as his accountant and bagman; Russell, according to the prosecution, was Gilligan’s courier in the drugs operation. However, Gilligan is adamant that he never even met Bowden and states that he barely knew Russell.
“There was a list found and Charlie gave the names of all the people on that list and 14 people got arrested. And the 14 were held for two days and they all said, ‘No, I never done drugs. I never got drugs off Charlie Bowden’. And they never charged anybody on the list in Greenmount,” Gilligan says. It clearly rankles. “Why weren’t they charged? It was the same with Paddy Holland. Charlie turned around and said, ‘I used to give Paddy Holland drugs’. And he said it about 14 other people and they didn’t get charged, but Paddy did; in the Special Criminal Court they said, ‘Yeah, we believe you got drugs off him’. And the bit of drugs that they found, Charlie said, ‘I don’t know how they got there’.”
Rumour has it that both of these men are now living in fear of being hit. But Gilligan is adamant that they wouldn’t suffer any repercussions for their actions against him.
“Yes, I am pissed off with Charlie Bowden – but I would love him to come back and tell the truth. I would love Charlie Bowden and Russell Warren to come back and say exactly what they were forced to say. There’s 3,600 statements – multiplied by five or six statements because there’s A, B, C and D statements – and there’s not one bit of evidence that me and Charlie Bowden were in a pub or restaurant or in a car anywhere together. He said he met a fella in the Gresham Hotel and gave him a bag with 10 grand in it or something. And then he found out later that that was me. I didn’t know him from Adam. He said he met me in O’Connell Street for 10 seconds and found out later that that was John Gilligan – and even if he’s telling the truth it wasn’t evidence at my trial because it wasn’t independently corroborated by anything else. I never met Charlie Bowden – full stop. I would love, from the bottom of my heart, to sit down and have a drink with Charlie Bowden."
I’m sure you wouldn’t have a drink with John Traynor?
He roars laughing before answering, “I’d pour it all over him!”
I get the distinct impression that Gilligan would probably do more than merely pour a pint over Traynor if they were to meet again.
Di Stefano is adamant that, even if he was guilty, Gilligan should have received only six years maximum for importing cannabis. “It is absolute bullshit. He may be the biggest scallywag in Ireland, but he has to be treated fairly. When you have another person charged with a similar crime they can now decide, ‘We can treat him unfairly because we’ve got the Gilligan sentence’. This is where the trouble lies. It escalates and you have a domino effect. The jurisprudence in Ireland, in my view, shouldn’t permit that. He should have definitely had his sentence reduced – without a doubt. But if you do, then what are the consequences of that? Does that mean the Special Criminal Court got it so wrong three times? Are they all completely bloody stupid? The answer is yes.”
As Hot Press went to print, Di Stefano says Gilligan was refused a request for remission, which was made three months ago to the previous Minister for Justice, Brian Lenihan. He is now set to write to new the Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern, to request that Gilligan be given remission of a third of the sentence – in which event the most hated man in Ireland could be out this year. “I’m not giving up. Mr Gilligan could have been doing this interview over a pint with you, instead of you having to visit him in prison. According to the new Irish Criminal Justice Act, you can, at the discretion of the Minister for Justice, be given a third remission on your sentence,” states Di Stefano.
John Gilligan now wants to take a lie detector test to prove that he had nothing to do with either the assault or murder of Veronica Guerin.
“I want to take the test to establish once and for all that I’m an innocent man,” he states.
Adds Di Stefano: “He’ll even take this test to prove that he had nothing to do with the drug charges. I’m arranging for John Gilligan to take a lie detector test, as did Patrick Holland – who passed. The question will be if he had anything remotely to do with her murder. I know the answer is no! The test will prove it.”

A prison officer knocks on the door to indicate that our time is up. I’ve only one question left. What will you do when you get out? Will you stay in Ireland?
“I couldn’t answer that question for myself. What I can answer honestly and fairly – I’m not answering you, I’m going to answer me – is that I’m going to be in Ireland because I wouldn’t want any papers to have a chance to say, ‘He was ran out of the country’. Nobody will run me anywhere. I have no fear of nobody because I haven’t double-crossed anybody. I haven’t done anything wrong. Nothing. I’ve never ripped anybody off and I’ve never done anything bad on anybody. I don’t believe I have any enemies, bar a few muppets that go, ‘Oh, because of him my mate has to pay 50 grand tax!’ You know that way? If you have money, you have to pay tax – end of story.”
He gets up and shakes my hand. As he’s leaving, Gilligan looks back and says: “Come back and see me sometime again. You know where to find me – it’s not as if I’m going anywhere.”
All else aside, you have to hand him this much at least: the man has managed to retain his sense of humour.