GERRY Hutch’s name has been appearing in Irish newspapers for over 30 years.
It was Veronica Guerin who first started writing about the Monk, who turned 60 last week, in the early 1990s and even gave him his notorious nickname because of his one-time ascetic lifestyle.
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I’ve written about him countless times in my 23 years working in the industry, with the vast majority of those articles being published since February 5, 2016.
So on the day that he was extradited from Spain to Ireland to face a charge of murder in connection to an incident which changed the landscape of Irish gangland forever, it felt like a little bit of history was being made.
That’s certainly what all of us journalists felt like as we sat in the Special Criminal Court on that evening in September 2021, when he was brought in wearing handcuffs, a beige linen shirt and trousers, greying hair and a beard.
It was the first time any of us had laid eyes on him since pictures emerged of him with his long hair and baseball cap attending his brother Eddie’s funeral in the weeks that followed the Regency.
And from then on the countdown to what was always ever going to be one of the most high profile criminal trials this country has ever seen began.
But seeing him found not guilty of that murder, based on the case the prosecution built against him, came as no surprise.
He was due to stand trial on October 3, 2022, alongside Jonathan Dowdall, who was also charged with David Byrne’s murder and his father Patrick Dowdall, who was charged with facilitating Byrne’s mother by booking a room in the north Dublin hotel used by gunman Kevin Murray, who became known as Flat Cap, the night before the attack.
Two other men, Jason Bonney and Paul Murphy, were both standing trial for facilitating the murder by providing cars for a criminal organisation.
But the whole dynamic of the case changed in the days that preceded the trial when word got out that the Dowdalls would plead guilty and Jonathan’s murder charge was to be dropped.
Instead the DPP was accepting a plea to the same charge as his father and we then learned that Dowdall had made a statement implicating Hutch in Byrne’s murder, would testify for the Prosecution during the trial and would be assessed, along with his family, for entry into the Witness Protection Programme.
But the State were adamant that no deal had been made and it was not a ‘quid pro quo’ arrangement in that his acceptance into the programme was not dependent on him giving evidence.
The Dowdalls were given October 17 as a sentence date and Jonathan was ultimately jailed for four years and his father Patrick for two.
This was a bombshell development and when Gerry appeared for the beginning of his trial, this time with ear-pieces to help his failing hearing and his hair down to his shoulders, the defence were obviously left in a position where they’d have to go back to the drawing board and decide how to tackle this major obstacle that was now in front of them.
The trial was put back until October 18, the day after the Dowdall sentencing, to assess if the defence needed more time to pour over the new witness’s statement and his pending appearance in the witness box.
Thankfully they didn’t, knowing that his evidence wouldn’t be required until much later in the trial.
But finally, as prosecutor Sean Gillane opened the trial, we got to hear what exactly their case against Gerry Hutch was.
He focused on the 10 hours of recordings between the Monk and Dowdall as they travelled to Northern Ireland on March 7 to meet dissident republicans they hoped would mediate in the feud.
FAMILY’S WAR
Hutch spoke about the Kinahans, Mr Gillane said, and his family’s war with them, the chances of a truce between both sides and he mentioned the three ‘yokes’, which we know refer to the AK47s used in the attack and that they were gifting them to the IRA members they planned to meet.
And counsel mentioned that the trial would hear Dowdall claim that after he and his father booked the room in the Regency, they planned to deliver the key cards to Patsy Hutch but it was Gerry who turned up and took them from him.
We also heard that Dowdall would say the Monk summoned him to a meeting in a park in Whitehall in the days that followed the Regency and admitted to him that he shot Byrne dead.
So now we knew and after seven years of writing stories about who, what and the where in relation to the attack this was the first time we heard any suggestion that Gerry Hutch was one of the five men that stormed the hotel with the intention of murdering Daniel Kinahan.
It was a dynamite claim but one which had to carry some doubt.
Whether you believed Gerry was part of the planning of the Regency, recruited the team, the various players who carried out key roles in a bid to avenge the death of Gary Hutch and the attempt on his own life in Lanzarote the previous New Year’s Eve, sourced the weapons and later disposed of them – none of that was relevant.
The case the Prosecution made against him was that he was one of the hit team who ran into the hotel disguised as an armed garda and murdered top Kinahan lieutenant David Byrne and that was what they had to prove for him to be found guilty of murder.
The only evidence that this was the case was a claim from Jonathan Dowdall that he told him this – and Judge Tara Burns said the court was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that he was acting out of self-interest.
EVIDENCE WOES
There were no forensics, no DNA, no phone records, no CCTV, no eye-witness account which supported this claim. There was no actual evidence that Hutch was even in the country at the time.
But he didn’t have to prove that he wasn’t. In fact, he had to prove absolutely nothing
What’s more, a European Arrest Warrant had been issued by the High Court in Dublin in April, 2021 simply based on what he said in that car. Was that ever going to be enough?
The Prosecution didn’t have Dowdall’s input until days before the trial was to start.
A few weeks into the hearing we finally got to hear all 10 hours of those recordings and while Gerry clearly expresses knowledge perhaps of the people who were involved, the weapons that were used and certain other aspects of criminality, the Regency and the Kinahan cartel, we never heard him say he did it.
At one point on the tapes Dowdall refers to media speculation that the gardai knew who the six people at the hotel were and Gerry replies: “Sure the six people don’t know who the six people were.”
This was Dowdall’s chance to say “wait a minute, but you told me you were one of the six people?”
But he never did and during the course of that lengthy car journey to and from Northern Ireland not once did he mention this meeting in the park in Whitehall a month earlier.
The defence didn’t want the tapes to be allowed into evidence because much of these conversations took place outside the jurisdiction but while the three judges agreed with the illegality of the recordings, they ruled that they were recorded in good faith and allowed them to be part of the case.
Judge Tara Burns even said she didn’t feel there was anything that significant on the tapes. What? But wait a second, the contents of those tapes was the State’s sole case against Gerry Hutch before Dowdall spoke and here you had the presiding judge stating right in the middle of the trial that there was nothing significant on the tapes?
One thing we did hear was the empathy of Gerry Hutch. He was desperate for the murders to stop and that no more innocent people would be lost in the violent and bloody gangland war.
And eventually we got to Dowdall, just over a week before Christmas and what an eight days we were in store for.
Throughout the trial Gerry had always listened intently through his ear pieces.
He would share a few jokes with his two co-accused, who were both on bail, each morning and always looked relatively relaxed, chatting to his legal team at the start and end of each day.
This didn’t change when Dowdall took the stand.
CROSS-EXAMINATION
After relaying his role in booking the room and the alleged two encounters with Hutch, once before the attack and once after, to the Prosecution we got to his cross-examination, which would go on for six and a half days.
It was clear that it was Hutch’s lawyer Brendan Grehan’s intention to paint Dowdall as a liar, a manipulator, and attacked his credibility from every angle and it worked.
Dowdall was convicted of the shocking torture of a man who wanted to buy a motorbike from him – and had his daughter videoed it.
And he went on Joe Duffy in the days following a search of his home by gardai investigating the Regency and claimed to be persecuted.
Grehan pushed him to his very limits and he got under his skin in a week-long interrogation that nearly broke him.
He made sure it would be impossible to believe a word he had to say.
It was proven, despite what he said to the contrary, that Dowdall could not be regarded as a man of good character.
But he stuck to his story and stuck to his guns so much so that Grehan would even later compare his relationship with the truth to Bart Simpson.
It was a box office number of days and was at the centre of this trial.
Early on in the case Grehan said that the “spectre of Jonathan Dowdall giving evidence hung over this trial from the beginning” and that was the case.
But some interesting and questionable points emerged from Dowdall’s whole role in this case – a senior garda testified that he did not know what the room they booked in the Regency was to be used for and he was not a member of a criminal organisation.
Then why was he ever charged with murder and what exactly did he plead guilty to? Why was he jailed for four years?
He had also claimed that numerous trips he made North prior to the Regency were to seek the IRA’s help to mediate in the feud.
Interestingly, he made 14 visits to Castlerea Prison in the space of a year to visit Jerry McCabe’s killer, evil IRA gunman Pearse McAuley.
He told Mr Grehan at one point that there was no feud until the Regency.
If that was the actual case then what was he going North for?
Why was he seeking the IRA’s help to mediate in a feud that in his own words did not exist?
A phone expert later said there is no chance he could have had a meeting with Gerry in the park on the morning of the February 8, when he thought it took place.
But she didn’t rule out it happening the previous day when his phone was off between 12pm before it pinged off a mast in the Whitehall area at 3.16pm.
It was some way off when he thought it happened though.
The judges basically rubbished everything he had to say based on his character and his history with the truth, to the point of lying in a previous Special Criminal Court.
The court could not accept any of his evidence and didn’t.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
There are still many questions that remained unanswered about the most iconic event in the history of the Irish underworld and a number of suspects still at large.
The murder and mayhem that erupted in its aftermath were some of the darkest days this city has ever seen.
The effects of it are still being felt today, in our legal system and on the streets of our capital.
Will there be more charges in relation to the Regency? That remains to be seen. After all, we know at least a dozen people were involved that day.
Some questions remain for the gardai, not least the use and purpose of their Witness Protection Programme.
That’s three major murder trials since 2001 – John Gilligan, Alan Wilson and Gerry Hutch – which have relied on State witness evidence and in each one of those cases three judges, and in case of Wilson, a jury, has chosen to completely ignore what they had to say.
But one significant chapter of the Kinahan-Hutch feud has now officially come to a close.
The next chapter is bound to involve a once bulging net begin to close on international drug kingpins the KOCG.
We await to see what Gerry Hutch’s next move is. No doubt back to the sunshine of his life in Spain will figure very prominently.
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