SOLVED: Veronica Guerin 1, Exposing A Heroin Empire

Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy, real quick before today's episode of Murder True Crime Stories.

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This is Crime House.

Every journalist has a moment in their career when they have to decide how far they're willing to go to uncover the truth.

Many aren't prepared to put themselves in danger.

They cover city council meetings, corporate mergers or political scandals.

The stories where the biggest risk is getting a detail wrong or missing a deadline.

But other reporters aren't scared to put themselves in the line of fire.

In 1996, Veronica Garen was one of Ireland's most recognizable journalists.

She'd spent her career digging into the darkest corners of society, exposing the country's criminal underworld.

She investigated the drug dealers and gang bosses who operated with impunity while entire communities crumbled around them.

Veronica was threatened, beaten and even shot.

But every single time she went back to work, she believed that showing the world the truth about these men was the only way forward.

Veronica was right about that.

But she would also come to learn that some criminals don't hide when you shine a light on them.

They come for you instead.

People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, middle, and an end.

But you don't always know which part you're on.

Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending.

Uncarta Roy. And this is murder, true crime.

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This is the first of two episodes on the murder of 37-year-old Irish journalist, Veronica Guerin.

In the lead up to the summer of 1996, the Irish drug gang she'd been investigating repeatedly tried to scare her into silence.

When Veronica refused to back down, they escalated their tactics.

Today, I'll introduce you to Veronica and take you on her windy path toward journalism.

Once she found her true calling, there was no turning back.

She relentlessly pursued stories of the criminal underworld in Dublin, no matter the cost.

Next time, I'll walk you through Veronica's final days.

In the moments her life came to a tragic end.

I'll detail the investigation that followed and explain the questions that still remain.

Pull that in more, coming up.

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Long before Veronica Garen's name was spoken with reverence and sorrow across Ireland,

she was simply Ronnie, a girl from the Dublin suburbs who could outrun, outplay, and outshine just about anyone.

Born on July 5, 1958, Veronica was one of five children.

Her father, Christopher, was an accountant, while her mother, Bernadette, was a homemaker.

The large Irish family lived in Artein, about four miles from Dublin City Center.

Young Ronnie attended Catholic school, where the nuns quickly discovered they had an athletic force of nature on their hands.

Ronnie was exceptional at every sport she tried.

Basketball, soccer, even Kamogi, an Irish sport that's like a mix between field hockey, the cross, and baseball.

But the sport itself didn't matter.

If it involved a team and competition, Veronica excelled.

She would eventually go on to represent Ireland internationally in both women's soccer and basketball.

When she wasn't on the field herself, she was cheering for Manchester United, her beloved football club,

with the same fierce passion she brought to everything in her life.

Eventually, Ronnie grew up and shed the nickname, as an adult, she was known as Veronica.

She followed in her father's footsteps and went to Trinity College in Dublin to study accounting.

After graduating in the mid-70s, she spent a year working for the Irish League of Credit Unions before joining her father's accounting firm.

But then, her father died suddenly in 1981.

Veronica was only 23, and the loss was devastating.

It seemed like after that, she lost interest in accounting.

It wasn't the same without her dad to share it with.

Thankfully, she had another outlet to distract her.

And by the 1980s, Veronica had found her way into politics.

When she was 20, she joined the youth organization of Vienna Foil, Ireland's Republican Party.

And they were fiscally and socially conservative.

And they believed in the strong nationalist states, especially when it came to Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland had been in a decades-long conflict since the 1960s, known as the Troubles.

It all centered around one question.

Should the country become independent or remain a part of the UK?

Nationalist groups like the Irish Republican Army, or the IRA, wanted independence,

while many other groups were fiercely opposed.

But this wasn't the fight waged in the halls of parliament.

It was more like a civil war in the streets, with constant bombings, shootings, and killings.

Despite the chaos, Veronica poured herself into politics, and within a year of joining the party,

Veronica became the chair of the Dublin North Central Branch.

In 1983, at 25 years old, she began working as a researcher and public relations adviser for the party.

The following year, she served as secretary to the group during the New Ireland Forum,

an attempt at peace talks amongst parties during some of the worst of the Troubles.

The forum met more than 40 times.

Unfortunately, when its report came out in May of 1984,

it didn't do much to unite the many factions in Ireland and Northern Ireland,

and after the forum, Veronica's role as secretary came to an end.

So she had a choice to make.

Did she double down on politics and commit to finding another role in the party?

Or should she try her hand at something else?

Veronica chose the latter option.

She realized she had no interest in running for office herself, so in her mind,

there was no point in trying to climb the ladder.

Instead, she struck out on her own, taking what she'd learned as a public relations adviser.

26-year-old Veronica founded Garen Public Relations Limited.

Unfortunately, the company never quite took off.

Veronica spent most of her time throwing parties instead of handling scandals.

Someone once described it as more of a catering firm than a real PR company.

So it wasn't her calling. That was fine.

But she did walk away with some very important connections.

Ones that would come in handy in the future,

plus her personal life was going a lot better than her career.

On September 21, 1985, 27-year-old Veronica married her best friend and partner, Graham Turley.

And they met while both working for Fiona Foil.

After tying the knots, they settled down in Dublin while Veronica figured out what to do next.

When the PR business fizzled out,

Veronica pivoted slightly to consulting work in the travel sector.

It was a practical move, but for someone with her energy and ambition,

it must have felt like treading water.

During that time, she also went back to school to study marketing management.

She got her diploma in 1988, but never seemed to do much with it.

It was clear that Veronica was searching for something.

She just didn't know what exactly that was.

In 1990, she and Graham welcomed their first and only child, a boy named Kahul.

For some, becoming a mom provides a sense of purpose that you can't find anywhere else.

That wasn't the case for Veronica.

She loved her son very, very much, but she also knew she would never feel fulfilled if she stayed home forever.

At some point around the time of Kahul's birth,

Veronica started submitting articles to a satirical gossip magazine called Phoenix.

It wasn't much, but she loved writing and she kept at it.

By 1992, she transitioned into writing business stories.

She was a freelancer, but she had a good relationship with the Sunday business post.

She mainly covered corporate scandals,

although she sometimes branched out into politics.

On one occasion, she managed to intercept an incriminating phone conversation between two politicians.

Then she published it.

That landed her in court in July 1993.

She was fined 400 pounds for publishing the call.

It was a slap on the wrist and Veronica felt it was worth it.

She was willing to push boundaries to get a story,

especially if it meant making the government more transparent.

Veronica kept that ethos as she transitioned to the Sunday Tribune,

and that was when people really started to take notice of her skills as a journalist.

In November of 1993, she landed an exclusive interview with Bishop Amin Casey,

a disgraced former Bishop from Galway, Ireland.

He resigned and left the country after it came out that he had had an affair.

Fathered a son and used church funds to pay for child support.

Veronica managed to track him down in Ecuador.

How did she get him to talk?

The same way she got anyone to talk. She wore him down.

Veronica believed that if she was persistent and asked enough times,

eventually people would say yes, and they did.

Veronica knew how to work a room, how to make people trust her,

and how to turn any conversation into an article.

She kept multiple stories on the back burner at once,

redrafting as new information came in,

always hunting for that last little detail.

She described herself as an insatiable news-hound,

but it wasn't just her tenacity that made her successful.

She also had a decades worth of contacts from her years in politics and public relations,

a rolodex that other journalists simply didn't have,

that all culminated in Veronica landing her dream job.

In January 1994, the 35-year-old joined the Sunday Independent,

the best-selling newspaper in Ireland at the time.

That's where she would become a household name as an investigative journalist.

But not for the business scandals she'd previously covered.

Once she was at the Sunday Independent,

Veronica would begin waiting into Dublin's nefarious underworld.

Her crime reporting would come to define her career

and seal her fate.

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For years, Veronica Garen bounced from one job

to the next searching for her calling.

By the early 90s, she'd found it in journalism.

And in January 1994, 35-year-old Veronica

officially joined Ireland's most popular newspaper,

The Sunday Independent.

Veronica quickly made a name for herself

as one of the country's foremost investigative reporters.

She carried two cell phones with her at all times

and fielded between 50 and 60 calls a day.

She wrote a slew of high-profile investigative pieces.

It covered everything from business dealings

to IRA activity to clergy scandals.

When a Catholic bishop mishandled a sexual abuse case,

she went after him without hesitation.

Critics called her anti-church and blasted her

for writing the story.

She assured the public she had nothing against the church.

She was just a reporter calling out hypocrisy

where she saw it.

The Sunday Independent had a group of celebrity journalists

and Veronica quickly joined their ranks.

But not everyone was thrilled about it.

More established journalists look down on her.

They had spent years climbing the ladder

and then here she came, bulldozing her way in

after only a few years on the job.

Some called her reckless.

Others said she was a self-promoting sensationalist.

Those with a bit more empathy suggested Veronica

may have felt like she had something to prove.

She'd come to journalism late,

outside the traditional newsroom structures.

Part of her might have felt like she needed to show

she truly belonged amongst her peers.

And whatever was driving her, it worked.

Her editor said he'd never met a reporter so unrelenting.

Veronica would fly to South Africa,

London or Nigeria at a moment's notice

if it meant tracking down a witness

or getting to the bottom of a story.

She cultivated sources everywhere she went

in Ireland's National Police Force,

the Gardee with four authorities

and perhaps most dangerously

in Dublin's criminal underworld itself.

Veronica was becoming more and more interested

in the drug gangs that were plaguing the city.

But she didn't just write about criminals from a safe distance.

She met them face to face and talked to them.

Everyone from organized crime families

went to major heroin dealers.

She approached them directly,

looked them dead in the eye

and asked for comment

on the not-so-flattering story she was reporting.

It was a strategy that set her apart

from her colleagues

and put a target on her back.

To understand what Veronica Guerin was walking into,

you need to have a sense of Dublin's criminal underworld

in the early 1990s.

And to understand that world,

you need to know Martin Caho.

Veronica and the media knew him as the general.

A nickname his own man gave him.

Martin was born in 1949

in Dublin's north inner city,

a second of 12 surviving children.

His parents struggled to feed the huge family

so once Martin was old enough,

he and one of his brothers started stealing food.

Martin was eight when he first got involved in petty crime.

12 when he got his first conviction

and 16 when he spent his first time in Juvie for burglary.

And by the time he was in his 20s,

Martin was a full-time burglar

in and out of prison for various offenses.

From there, it was on to bigger crimes,

stealing cars, armed robbery,

arson, planting bombs, the list went on.

In July 1983,

Martin was leading a gang

that robbed a jewelry factory.

The hall was worth millions.

After losing so much product,

the factory was forced to close

and let go of its employees.

Meanwhile, Martin and his gang

sold the jewelry for a fraction of its value

without a care in the world.

Martin was eventually charged with the robbery

but got acquitted on a technicality

and then came the heist

that would make him a legend.

Three years later in May 1986,

37-year-old Martin planned to break into a mansion

in County, Wicklow,

about 45 minutes outside of Dublin.

He wanted to steal some paintings

from a private art collection.

This included works by Vermeer,

Goya, Rubens, and Gainesboro,

some of the most valuable art in Ireland.

Martin's crew quietly broke in at 2 a.m.

cutting out a paint of glass

from one of the mansion's French doors.

When the alarm sounded,

they fled and hid behind thick bushes outside.

Once security had cleared out

and an hour later, they entered again.

This time, they were in and out in just six minutes.

No alarm.

They took 18 paintings

worth an estimated 30 million pounds.

But famous paintings are nearly impossible to sell.

They're too recognizable,

which makes it easy for authorities

to track them once they resurface,

so Martin had trouble offloading them.

Seven of the paintings were found

almost immediately in a ditch.

Others passed between various criminals,

used his bargaining chips

since they couldn't actually be sold on the market.

Authorities carried out a slew of police things

in Belgium, Turkey,

and England to track down the paintings.

Eventually, most were recovered,

but to this day,

two by Francesco Guardi remain missing.

Martin was a careful,

measured, criminal.

Whenever he had a court appearance,

he would cover his face with his hands

to hide from the cameras.

It only added to his mystique.

Most people in Dublin agreed

that Martin was the crime,

kingpin.

In reality, he was just one

of many rival gang leaders.

All of them were vying for their place

at the top of the food chain.

And by the mid-1990s,

Veronica Garen had set her sights

on all of them.

Veronica Xerodian,

on Dublin's drug gangs,

at exactly the right moment,

or maybe the worst moment,

depending on how you look at it.

Heroin and cannabis

were flooding the inner-sitting neighborhoods,

tearing communities apart.

Veronica wanted to figure out

how these criminals were turning their drug money

into legitimate-looking businesses.

So she followed the cash.

Her accounting background

turned out to be her secret weapon.

She could trace the paper trail

in ways most journalists couldn't,

and what she discovered made her furious.

The sheer scale of the drug trade

and the fact that these gang leaders

seemed completely untouchable

ate at her.

Not only were these drug lords

bringing dangerous substances into Ireland,

but they were also responsible

for much of the violence plaguing the nation.

Veronica thought too many people

dismissed the shootings with a shrug.

She worried that cavalier attitude

was going to backfire spectacularly.

But for the moment,

all she could do was shed light on the issue.

One way she did that was

by going after Ireland's libel laws,

which were so strict that journalists

couldn't even name criminals

without risking lawsuits.

The system protected the very people

it should have been stopping.

But Veronica couldn't afford to get sued either,

so she did what other reporters did.

She gave all the criminals nicknames.

The general, the monk, the coach,

and then she wrote about them

in such vivid specific detail

that anyone paying attention

could figure out exactly who she was talking about.

It was a smart move,

but on August 18th, 1994,

Dublin's criminal underworld

changed dramatically.

That day, 45-year-old Martin Caughall,

aka, the general was shot and killed.

The provisional Irish Republican Army

took responsibility for his murder,

but no one was ever arrested or formally charged.

In the aftermath,

some people wondered if things might get better in Dublin.

Caughall was dead,

and maybe his empire would die with him.

It didn't.

And Veronica was going to make sure

everyone understood why.

Like a dog with a bone,

Veronica refused to back down or let go.

She went to great lengths

to get inside scoops for her stories,

but the strength of her approach

that hunger for firsthand detail,

that willingness to walk right up

to dangerous men and ask them questions,

was also her greatest vulnerability.

She showed little regard for her own safety.

She believed, perhaps naively,

that the closer she got to criminals,

the more difficult it would be for them to attack her.

She was wrong.

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Are you ready to dive into the unknown?

Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark,

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Into the Dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown.

By the fall of 1994,

36-year-old Veronica Garen had made a name for herself

at the Sunday Independent Newspaper.

But that increased visibility also came

with some serious risks.

Veronica was constantly threatened

by the criminals she profiled.

Phone calls in the middle of the night,

anonymous warnings.

Then, on October 7th, 1994, at 9.40pm,

Veronica was home with her four-year-old son

when gunshots exploded through the windows

of her cottage north of Dublin.

Miraculously, no one was hurt,

but the message was clear.

Veronica needed to stop reporting

or else she heard the message

and ignored it.

Three months later, on January 24th, 1995,

two jeeps smashed the fence

of the Brinks Allied Cash Holding Depot

in Northern Dublin.

Five masked men walked out

with $4.2 million.

Five days later,

Veronica published an article about the monk.

A.K.A. Jerry Hutch,

another Irish crime boss,

she suspected he was the mastermind

behind the whole thing.

The next evening, January 30th,

her doorbell rang at 6.45pm.

She opened the door to find a hooded

gunman standing on her doorstep.

He raised the gun and named it at her head.

Then, at the last second,

he lowered it and shot her in the thigh instead.

Veronica collapsed, barely conscious,

as the gunman disappeared on a motorcycle.

When the guardee eventually recovered the weapon,

they confirmed it was the same gun used

in the October attack on her home.

Someone was clearly targeting Veronica

and the threats were escalating.

From her hospital bed,

Veronica did what she always did.

She wrote,

she filed a report for the Sunday Independent.

She also put out a public statement.

She said,

quote,

I vow that the eyes of justice,

the eyes of this journalist,

will not be shut again.

No hand can deter me from my battle for the truth.

Her boss installed a high-end security system in her home.

The guardee also assigned her a 24-hour protective detail.

Although Veronica got rid of it almost immediately,

she couldn't interview criminals with cops shadowing her every move.

And she made it clear that was exactly what she planned on doing.

Once she got out of the hospital,

still on crutches,

she made her husband Graham driver to every known criminal

hang out in Dublin.

She was there to prove a point.

They hadn't scared her off.

They'd have to kill her before that ever happened.

That October,

Veronica received a National Media Award for her courage and tenacity.

The society praised her for covering the dangerous stories of criminal violence in Dublin

and the New York Committee to protect journalists

also gave her the International Press Freedom Award.

By then, Veronica wasn't just a reporter.

She was a symbol.

She'd proven that these so-called untouchable drug dealers and gangbosses

could be named, challenged, and exposed.

She'd shown that someone was willing to stand up to them.

That made her one of the most dangerous people in Ireland.

But she wasn't working alone.

Every journalist has sources

and whether they're in law enforcement or the criminal world itself.

For Veronica,

one of her most important sources was John Trainer.

Born in 1948,

Trainer climbed the ranks of Dublin's organized crime scene by being smarter than most of the muscle around him.

He'd worked with Martin Cahol's gang as an advisor of sorts.

He was the brains behind some of the general's biggest scores in the 1980s,

including that massive jewelry factory robbery in 1983.

When Cahol was killed in 1994,

Trainer didn't miss a beat.

He shifted his loyalty to John Gilligan,

another former Cahol associate.

Trainer got involved in a whole host of activities for Gilligan,

armed robberies, drugs muggling,

embezzlement, prostitution, you name it.

And somewhere along the way,

he became a source for Veronica.

She called him the coach in her articles.

They first met at a coffee shop after she called called him.

After that, they'd get together at various bars and clubs around town.

But here's the thing you need to understand about John Trainer.

He was never on anyone's side, but his own.

Information was currency,

and Trainer was a trader.

He'd feed Veronica real intelligence about Dublin's criminal networks,

help her connect the dots and give her leads.

But he'd also slip in misinformation when it suited him.

He was playing her, manipulating what she knew and when she knew it.

Veronica must have been aware that she needed to take what he said with a grain of salt,

but it's not clear whether she was aware just how much he was playing her.

At the same time,

there had to be a part of Veronica that was playing Trainer.

She was using him, just like he was using her.

Only she was trying to get to his boss, John Gilligan.

If Martin, the general cahole, was a ghost who hid from cameras,

John Gilligan was the opposite, loud, flashy, impossible to miss.

He'd built a massive cannabis smuggling operation with suppliers in mainland Europe.

His people in the Netherlands would pack cannabis resin into boxes labeled spare parts

and ship them to Ireland.

From there, Gilligan's cronies would distribute the product across Dublin.

The going rate was 2000 pounds per kilogram.

Today, that'd be about $5,700.

Later, Irish authorities said Gilligan had imported over 20,000 kilograms of cannabis resin into Ireland

between July 1994 and October 1996.

Its estimated street value would be almost $600 million today.

But Gilligan couldn't run an operation that big without some help.

Brian, the tosser, me and was Gilligan's enforcer and right hand man.

He was suspected of carrying out multiple assassination attempts.

Paul Hippo Ward handled distribution in collections.

Charles, the army man Bowden, was a karate black belt,

and former Irish army corporal who'd been dishonorably discharged for beating up a recruit.

He managed wholesale distribution and the gang's weapons stockpile.

Patrick Duchy Holland was a master forger and suspected contract killer.

He also moved drugs for the crew.

There were more men involved in the operation,

but those four plus Gilligan were at the center of Veronica's investigation.

Veronica dove into Gilligan's world and his tax returns.

She wanted to know how Gilligan, who'd recently gotten out of prison, had so much money.

She'd been trying to get him to talk for months, but he wouldn't budge.

So on September 14, 1995, she drove out to his estate,

walked up to his front door and rang the doorbell.

When he answered, Veronica didn't beat around the bush.

She asked him straight up where the money had come from.

In response, Gilligan assaulted her, viciously beating her and leaving her with a black eye.

The next day, he called her.

Veronica's lawyer, Felix McElroy, was sitting beside her when the call came through.

He heard Gilligan's voice clearly through the line threatening Veronica.

Gilligan said that if she wrote a word about him,

he would kidnap her son and sexually assault him, then kill her.

The call shook Veronica to her core.

She was terrified for her son more than herself, but she knew she couldn't back down now.

So she filed an assault complaint and Gilligan was officially charged.

And that's when the clock started ticking.

The assault case threatened Gilligan's entire organization.

He was the only one with direct connections to their European suppliers.

If he went to prison, the whole operation could collapse.

Once again, the guardee gave Veronica around the clock protection.

And once again, she ditched it almost immediately.

She gave the same reason as before.

She couldn't interview criminals with cops trailing her everywhere.

And despite all the threats and attacks, she refused to quit.

Then something absolutely mundane happened that would set the stage for Veronica's untimely end.

On December 13, 1995, Veronica was speeding in her car when she got pulled over.

She handed over her license and insurance and the officer wrote her up.

She was issued a summons to appear in court in a few months.

It was a totally minor traffic violation.

The kind of thing that could happen to anyone.

Except someone in Gilligan's gang was now tracking Veronica's every move.

And the court date meant something very specific.

A time and a place where she'd definitely be.

They just had to wait for that day.

Then they could strike.

And Veronica Garen would no longer be a problem they had to deal with.

Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder, True Crime Stories.

I'm back next time for part two on the murder of Veronica Garen and all the people that affected.

Murder, True Crime Stories is a crime house original powered by paved studios.

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We'll be back on Thursday.

Murder, True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a crime house original powered by paved studios.

This episode was brought to life by the Murder, True Crime Stories team.

Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pratowski, Sarah Camp, Alex Burns, Hania Saeed, and Russell Nash.

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