Martin Cahill

Martin "The General" Cahill (23 May 1949 – 18 August 1994) was an Irish crime boss from Dublin.

He masterminded a series of burglaries and armed robberies, and was shot and killed while out on bail for kidnapping charges.

The Provisional Irish Republican Army took responsibility for Cahill's murder but no one was ever arrested or formally charged.

The media referred to him by the sobriquet "The General".

The name was also used by the media to discuss Cahill's activities while avoiding legal problems with libel.

Cahill took particular care to hide his face from the media — he would spread the fingers of one hand and cover his face.

He was born in a slum district in Grenville Street in Dublin's north inner city, the second of twelve surviving children of Patrick Cahill, a lighthouse-keeper, and Agnes Sheehan.

By the time he was in school, Martin and his older brother John were stealing food to supplement the family's income.

In 1960, the family was moved to Captain's Road, Crumlin, as part of the Dublin slum clearances.

Martin was sent to a Christian Brothers School (CBS) on the same road where he lived but was soon playing truant and committing frequent burglaries with his brothers.

At 15, he attempted to join the Royal Navy, but was rejected, allegedly after offering to break into houses for them and because he had a criminal record.

At age 16, he was convicted of two burglaries and sentenced to an industrial school run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate at Daingean, County Offaly.

After his release, he met and married Frances Lawless, a girl from Rathmines, where his family was living.

With his brothers, he continued to commit multiple burglaries in the affluent neighbourhoods nearby, at one point even robbing the Garda Síochána depot for confiscated firearms.

The Cahill brothers soon turned to armed robbery, and by the early 1970s Gardaí at the Dublin Central Detective Unit (CDU) had identified the Cahill brothers as major criminals, when they teamed up with the notorious Dunne gang in Crumlin to rob security vans conveying cash from banks.

In 1978, Dublin Corporation began preparing to demolish Hollyfield Buildings.

Cahill, then serving a four-year suspended prison sentence, fought through the courts to prevent his neighbourhood's destruction.

Even after the tenements were demolished, he continued to live in a pitched tent on the site.

Finally, Lord Mayor of Dublin Ben Briscoe paid a visit to Cahill's tent and persuaded him to move into a new house in a more upscale district of Rathmines.

Cahill and his gang stole gold and diamonds with a value of over IR£2 million (€2.55 million; €6.35 million in 2021, adjusted for inflation) from O'Connor's jewellers in Harolds Cross (1983); the jeweller was subsequently forced to close, with the loss of more than one hundred jobs.

Fearing the increasing role that forensic science could play in detecting his robberies, in May 1982 Cahill had a bomb placed under the car of chief forensic scientist, James O'Donovan, partly disabling him.

He was also involved in stealing some of the world's most valuable paintings from Russborough House (1986) and extorting restaurants and hot dog vendors in Dublin's nightclub district.

In February 1988, a Today Tonight report identified Cahill as the man behind the O'Donovan bomb plot, the 1986 Russborough House robbery and the robbery of O'Connors jewellery depot.

As a result, PD leader Dessie O'Malley raised in the Dáil the revelations that Cahill owned such expensive property in Cowper Downs, despite having never worked, remarking that Cahill must have needed the extra wall space to "hang his artwork by the Dutch masters."

As a result, the Gardaí set up a Special Surveillance Unit (SSU), nicknamed "Tango Squad", to specifically target and monitor Cahill's gang on a permanent, 24/7 basis.

Cahill was given the callsign Tango-1.

The SSU also placed a direct presence on the estate at Cowper Downs, positioning a surveillance unit in the home of developer John Sisk, whose house backed onto Cahill's. Following the arrest of two of Cahill's associates in an attempted robbery, and resentful of the large Garda presence near his home, Cahill retaliated by ordering his men to slash the tyres of 197 cars on the night of 26 February 1988 (including 90 belonging to his neighbours in Cowper Downs).

Cahill returned home to find his own Mercedes-Benz smashed.

In early 1993, John "The Coach" Traynor, met his boss Cahill, to provide him with inside information about the inner workings of the National Irish Bank (NIB) head office and branch at College Green, Dublin.

Traynor told Cahill that the bank regularly held more than €10 million in cash in the building.

The plan was to abduct NIB CEO Jim Lacey, his wife and four children and take them to an isolated hiding place.

There, they would be held with fellow gang member Jo Jo Kavanagh, acting as a "hostage", who would frighten Lacey into handing over every penny stored in the bank's vaults.

On 1 November 1993, Cahill's gang seized Lacey and his wife outside his home in Blackrock.

Whilst they were held at Lacey's home, Kavanagh was brought in and tied up, telling the family that he had been abducted two weeks before.

On 2 November, Kavanagh drove Lacey to College Green to collect the ransom money, with Lacey eventually withdrawing IR£300,000 from an accessible cash machine.

After the cash had been handed over to the gang, Kavanagh told Gardaí that the pair had been kidnapped and forced to take part in a robbery.

With a ransom note requesting payment of €10 million in cash, the Gardaí began investigating.

They quickly found that Kavanagh had claimed child allowance during his two-week "capture", and so arrested him.

Cahill then planned with Kavanagh to "raid" Kavanagh's home, and show intent to kill the Lacey family by shooting Kavanagh in the leg.

Kavanagh was then to call the Irish newspapers from his hospital bed, and claim he was a victim of the Lacey kidnapping gang.