The well-known Irish capo, John Gilligan, had the world come crashing down when in October 2020 three national police officers, as big as built-in wardrobes, cornered him in the kitchen of his house in Torrevieja and ordered him to get on the ground while pointing their weapons at him. their weapons. Gilligan, who was 68 years old at the time, could pass as just another foreigner residing in the Orihuela Costa area, willing to end his days with tapas, paellas and sangria, with flip-flops and socks, and with a face as red as a crab from the sun taken badly, like a good British foreigner.
But despite having that appearance of an endearing retiree, John Gilligan is one of the Irish drug lords who controlled drug trafficking in his country during the eighties, nineties and early two thousand. One of his main setbacks occurred in 2001, when he was arrested by the Police for leading an organization that imported large amounts of hashish into Ireland. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison, of which he served 17 after appealing the sentence. Years later, he was shot four times when he was at his brother’s house, but the shots didn’t kill good old Gilligan.
But the case that continues to haunt him is the suspicion that has hovered over him for 27 years for being the instigator of the shooting death of journalist Veronica Guerin in June 1996. Irish investigators link him to her murder on the outskirts of Dublin, where she was shot by two individuals who were following her on a motorcycle. It so happens that in one of the searches carried out at his house in Torrevieja, when he was arrested in 2020, a Colt Python revolver was located, buried in his garden, the model that matches the one used to end the life of the journalist. That finding opened a window to the hope of determining who commissioned the murder. But, after the forensic analyzes carried out by the National Police, it was determined that the results to determine if it was the weapon used to shoot Guerin were inconclusive, according to police sources consulted by LA VERDAD.
The fall of the Gillligan gang has returned to the present day after the decision of the capo’s son, Darren Gilligan, to accept his extradition to Spain before an Irish court last Wednesday. The offspring of the alleged drug trafficker was arrested along with his father in Torrevieja three years ago. He was released with the withdrawal of his passport and the prohibition to leave the national territory, but that order was canceled after a year and Darren flew to his country. The Criminal Court 2 of Orihuela that is handling the case tried to locate him for the trial to be held together with the rest of the defendants in October of last year, in which an agreement was expected, with the assumption of a five-year prison sentence. , but the hearing had to be suspended when he found himself unlocatable. Faced with this situation, the court formalized an international search and arrest warrant for the Irish citizen in October last year.
Gilligan was intercepted by agents of the Police of the Republic of Ireland last April and was arrested when the European alert was active through the Schengen information system.
‘Operation Godfather’
The origin of the ‘Godfather’ operation –Godfather, in reference to the Irish capo– in which John Gilligan, his son and five other people were arrested, who formed “a violent group of drug and arms traffickers”, as as the National Police described them, it is in Los Alcázares. There, investigators from the Udyco Narcotics Group followed and monitored a clan settled in this Marmenoran municipality dedicated to the sale of marijuana that they grew in houses, garages, warehouses and greenhouses in Campo de Cartagena and the Comarca del Río Mula.
In one of the police surveillance they detected several meetings with Irish citizens, residents in the Alicante town of Torrevieja. This was one of the ramifications of a subsequent international investigation into which John Gilligan and his son Darren, his right hand man, fell.
«We received information from an organization based in the Vega Baja, Orihuela Costa and Torrevieja area, which was dedicated to the acquisition of drugs, mainly marijuana, from growers here in the Region, to then send it to the United Kingdom through of post office, hidden between boxes of toys”, affirms one of the inspectors who was in charge of the investigations.
The investigation of the Gilligan gang had aroused the interest of the Irish Police and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA), who gave their full cooperation to dismantle the group. After intercepting four postal shipments loaded with four kilos of marijuana and 15,000 sleeping pills, the big boss was arrested in October 2020 in his Torrevieja duplex, and traded the sun on the beach for the shade of a cell.
The murder of journalist Veronica Guerin remains unsolved
The shooting murder of the Irish journalist Veronica Guerin, in 1996, maintains, 27 years later, the halo of mystery about who was the perpetrator, or rather, who was the person who commissioned that death. The journalist from the newspaper ‘The Sunday Independent’ sought to find out the truth about the drug lords operating in the capital of the Republic of Ireland, Dublin. Her personal campaign put her in the crosshairs of the country’s top drug lords. According to Irish media reports, on June 25, 1996, members of Gilligan’s gang met secretly at their facilities in an industrial estate and one of them, MB, handed over a Colt Python revolver to one of the members of the cartel with which he Guerin was shot. This was the same model of pistol as the one found buried in Gilligan’s Torrevieja house in 2020. «The murder of Veronica Guerin meant a reversal in the war on drugs, as it galvanized Ireland in the fight. Thousands of people took to the streets in weekly marches to protest against drugs that forced dealers out of Dublin. Within a week of her death, Parliament, in emergency session, amended the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland to allow the High Court to freeze the assets of drug suspects.” With this text concludes a film that recounted Guerin’s struggle and its tragic end entitled ‘Verónica Guerin. In search of the truth’, released in 2003.
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