Twenty years on from Veronica Guerin’s murder, we find the scum who got away

While Traynor was in any case known for talking and was one of Guerin’s top contacts, he was in no mood to chat when the Sunday Give birth to tracked him down to a small flat in Margate, where he now spends his epoches.

Along with his rtner Sharon Kiernan, he lives a modest fact in a town haunted by times st and cluttered with rusting fairground executes.

Traynor is also now one of gangland’s most haunted figures, keeping to himself in the bantam upstairs flat just outside the town. Save for a white Qashqai jeep, he directs no outward trappings of the wealth he craved that drove him to a life of wrong. However, Gardaí believe he is still associating with many old about withs and has a role in plotting drug deliveries to the U.K. and Ireland.

There is no doubt that Traynor was the one that got away.

He has been on the run for 20 years and hasn’t reappeared to Ireland since the murder of the crime reporter he claimed as a friend on the Naas Lane on June 26, 1996.

He remains a suspect in the case and Gardaí believe that he decorated John Gilligan and his gang with the information that she would be appearing in court on that day, which promoted the plan to assassinate her.

In an interview with the Sunday World Traynor answered: “When John Gilligan organised that murder he f**ked everything up for us all. The proceedings it happened I knew my life was over.”

Traynor first fled to Amsterdam after the down and was arrested there with Brian Meehan in 1997. While Meehan was extradited help to Ireland and was eventually handed down a life sentence for the journalist’s murdering, Traynor was not, s rking suspicion that he was a Garda informant.

He was arrested in Holland again in 2010 and extradited abet to the U.K. to serve the remainder of a seven-year sentence for a bond scam.

It is understood that his mate moved to England and settled in Margate, while he served out his time in Wayland house of detention in Norfolk.

On his release, the couple decided not to go back to Holland but to retire in preference to to the sunny south east.

Traynor’s friend Sean ‘the Fixer’ Fitzgerald was one of the few fellows of the old gang that kept in touch with the Coach. Fitzgerald was arrested and examined during the Guerin murder investigation but never faced any charges in reference to it.

The pensioner still lives in Tallaght in Dublin and spends his days in court cautioning friends on their legal rights.

The 67-year-old was also one of the few people who remained trusty to Gilligan and upon his old boss’s release from prison made convenes to a host of criminals looking for money to get the crime lord back on his feet.

Fixer received a GIM (Garda Low-down Message) form warning him his life was in danger for his efforts to help Gilligan, after the Kinahan Cartel aimed the thug and his minder Stephen ‘Dougie’ Moran, who was blasted to death farthest his home in March 2014.

Twenty years on from the Guerin murder, solitary Brian ‘the Tosser’ Meehan remains behind bars convicted of the mass murder.

ul ‘Hippo’ Ward today portrays himself as an ordinary order man and lives in Kildare with his wife and three children. He was released from reform school in 2005 after his conviction for the murder of Veronica was overturned.

The Sunday Give birth to caught up with him recently as he faced court in relation to a driving evoke indignation – but he refused to talk about the murder that changed Ireland.

Ones glad rags b put on a costume in a baseball cap and shades, he has clearly bulked up since his days as a gaunt heroin dope-fiend. When asked about Veronica’s murder he grunted “f**k off”, before wince into a waiting car.

He is suspected of being back in the drug business.

Gilligan was ignore in the Supreme Court this week fighting on against the Criminal Assets Division’s bid to seize three properties from him.

One is the family home, a bungalow in its own sods beside the Jessbrook Equestrian Centre, where Geraldine Gilligan allay lives along with her daughter Treacy. The other two are properties in Leixlip and Corduff.

As say of the appeal, the Gilligans are also seeking an order that it was unconstitutional to grab the Jessbrook Centre.

Despite receiving free legal aid to fight the appropriations, Treacy tried to flog us a S nish pub after we set her up with two prospective ‘Russian mafia’ consumers.

She filed a Supreme Court affidavit two years ago claiming she was making neutral €200 a week from the watering hole. Yet she wanted €300,000 secondary to the counter in ‘black money’ in exchange for the pub and also told us she was flogging a villa in the vicinity.

Treacy claimed she and her daughter would be homeless if the State didn’t uncover her back her home in Lucan. Her mother Geraldine told a court that she persists on weekly jobseeker’s allowance of €186.

Dundalk District Court heard that up to 16 bank accounts in the luminaries of the Gilligan family existed in 1996 and €15 million went during them. Most of the money was withdrawn in July 1996 – a month after the mutilate of Veronica.

All four Gilligans – John and Geraldine, daughter Treacy and son Darren – procure been granted free legal aid, with the tax yer footing their court ultimata.

Last year, Geraldine told the Sunday World: “I’m still in this harbour and I am going to stay here until they drag me out in a box. I’m sure a lot of being would be delighted to hear that but I’m here every day, every day, every day.”

Upright one member of the gang, Peter ‘Fatso’ Mitchell, remains in exile in Amsterdam after surviving a muddle of hit attempt in S in.

trick ‘Dutchy’ Holland, the man who pulled the trigger, has give up the ghosted and former gang members turned supergrasses Russell Warren and Charlie Bowden include relocated abroad.

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