REGENCY suspect James ‘Mago’ Gately and others laid low in an apartment linked to Jonathan Dowdall in the weeks that followed the murder of David Byrne, the former Sinn Fein councillor told cops.
The men are understood to have wrecked the flat on Dublin’s northside in the weeks that followed the shocking hotel hit.
But while Dowdall helped arrange the apartment prior to the shooting, he has always maintained he knew nothing about the attack beforehand.
Gately was named by the State witness at Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch’s trial for Byrne’s murder as a member of the hit team who carried out the violent attack at the Dublin hotel on February 5, 2016.
Dowdall also told officers he helped The Monk’s nephew Patrick Hutch Jr find somewhere to stay after he shot innocent boxer Jamie Moore in Spain on August 3, 2014 when he intended to shoot Daniel Kinahan.
He said he just wanted to help Patrick “who he perceived as an innocent victim”.
Rival gang boss Kinahan then shot Patrick in the leg in a punishment shooting two weeks later on August 15.
Kinahan was supposed to give him a flesh wound but shot him in the bone and he spent three weeks in hospital, Dowdall revealed.
The ex-politician also claimed Patrick was driven to the planned punishment in Drumcondra by Nathan Coakley-Hutch and that Gately was also present.
Patsy Hutch’s son was previously accused of being the man dressed as a woman who was part of the hit team that assassinated Byrne.
Patrick went on trial in 2018 for the murder of the Kinahan thug after pleading not guilty.
But his case was indefinitely suspended after lead investigator Detective Superintendent Colm Fox took his own life. The DPP later dropped the charge against him and he walked free in February 2019.
Dowdall is currently serving a four-year jail term having pleaded guilty to facilitating a criminal organisation in carrying out the Regency murder by booking a hotel room used by the killers.
He repeatedly told the Special Criminal Court during Hutch’s trial that he knew nothing about the attack before it took place.
At Dowdall’s own sentencing hearing last October, his barrister told the court he was not aware of the purpose for which the room in the Regency that his father had booked was to be used and he had not used the hotel room.
INTERVIEW DETAILS
Dowdall divulged the details to gardai when senior officers interviewed him in Dublin Airport Garda Station in secret last May after his release from jail.
He’d been freed a month earlier after serving time for falsely imprisoning and torturing Alexander Hurley in his home on the Navan Road.
Dowdall had been serving his sentence on the same landing in Wheatfield Prison as the Hutches and their associates.
They included The Monk who was on remand for Byrne’s murder.
At this point Dowdall had also been charged with Byrne’s murder but his solicitor Jenny McGeever wrote to cops in November, 2021 indicating that he wished to speak to them about the Regency.
Gardai were wary of any meeting taking place with Dowdall while he was effectively incarcerated with members of the Hutch gang in case they were alerted to it.
They waited until he was out on bail before interviewing him and chose that particular Garda station because top investigator Det Sgt Patrick O’Toole trusted the sergeant in charge.
IDEAL LOCATION
It was also picked as it contained an interview room with a back door where no one would see him come and go. Accompanied by his wife Trisha, Dowdall was brought to the station at 8pm on May 18, 2022.
Over the course of the next three hours, he gave details about the Regency attack, which were taken down in bullet-point form by Detective Garda Cathal Connolly.
It was during this meeting that he first made the claims that he handed the key cards from the hotel room in the Regency to Gerry Hutch on Dublin’s Richmond Road.
And that The Monk personally told him he murdered Byrne when they held a secret meeting in a park in Whitehall days later.
The Special Criminal Court completely rejected these claims and said Dowdall was “acting in his own self-interest” by testifying.
Last week we also revealed that during the Dublin Airport cop shop chat Dowdall told officers he got involved to save Patsy. He said he understood the Kinahan cartel planned to murder him in the months that followed the 2015 murder of Patsy’s son Gary in Marbella.
