In 1979, a young detective named Willie McGee found himself standing outside a well-to-do address in Dublin pushing a “relatively rotund man” back through a window he was trying to crawl out of.
It was the bizarre culmination of an already unusual investigation into a sophisticated fraud perpetrated on a rural Bank of Ireland branch some weeks earlier. Behind the crime was a highly intelligent criminal who had been a thorn in the side of the fraud squad for many years, and another man who would go on to become well known in the Irish entertainment industry.
At that stage McGee had been on the force for a decade and a fraud squad detective for about half that. In the days leading up to the scam, officials in the bank, which was located in the village of Taghmon, Co Wexford, noticed their phone lines acting strangely.
They were reassured when a man claiming to be from Telecom Éireann rang up to say the disruption was being caused by technical problems they were trying to fix and not to be alarmed if the lines went down over the next few days.
A week later, the same man rang the bank again and said the lines would be going down for half an hour while they tested for the problem. No problem, responded a bank official.
At that moment, 160 kilometres away, five men were preparing to enter five different Bank of Ireland branches in Dublin.
At exact six-minute intervals, the men entered the branches, each carrying a bank draft for £5,000. The drafts, which had been stolen from Smurfit print works, were filled out with a fake name and the name of the branch in Taghmon.
Back then, standard procedure when cashing a draft was for the manager to ring the customer’s local bank branch to make sure they were on the level. This is what happened when all five men presented the drafts, which were worth a total of £25,000 (about €125,000 in today’s money).
Except the calls did not go to Taghmon Bank of Ireland. The gang behind the fraud, who clearly had a good deal of engineering knowledge, had rerouted the bank’s phone lines so when someone called Taghmon, it was one of them who picked up the phone.
“One by one, the bag men entered their assigned branches in Dublin, and one by one the calls started coming through to this fella waiting in a shed,” according to McGee.
The cashier asked if he knew the man named on the bank draft, and the man at the other end would reply that he did, even offering a physical description to seal the deal.
“The ruse worked like clockwork,” says McGee. Each man walked out with the full £5,000. The gang then reconnected the Taghmon bank’s phone lines and called to say the problem had been solved.
It was only several days later when the drafts arrived at Taghmon for processing that the scam was discovered. “The criminals must have had a good laugh among themselves over how perfectly they had suckered the poor unsuspecting manager in his office,” says McGee.
When the report landed on the detective’s desk, he and his colleagues determined there was only one person in that part of the country with the intelligence to pull off such a sophisticated scam. This person, who was also involved in Republican paramilitary activity and who McGee calls “Mr Saor Éire”, had been picked up several times by gardaí, but they were usually unable to make any serious charges stick.
Legislation regarding fraud and forgery at the time was outdated and weak, McGee says. “You had to find people in the process of committing the act to be able to arrest them.”
The main pieces of legislation they relied on dated back to 1913 and 1916. “And if you found someone with a forged passport you had to go back to the forgery act of 1853,” he says.
Updated
Fraud legislation was eventually updated for the modern world in 2001, shortly before McGee left the force. But in the 1970s and 1980s, it still made the fraud squad’s job very difficult.
Despite knowing who was likely behind the Taghmon ruse, the detectives hit a brick wall in their investigation.
That was until two weeks later, when a call was put through to McGee as he sat at his desk in Dublin Castle. The caller, who wouldn’t give his name and was trying to muffle his voice, said he had information on one of the bagmen, and directed gardaí to a house in Dublin 2.
The next day McGee and two other detectives knocked on the front door. “There was a long pause on the other side of the door. After several more seconds and no sign of the door being opened, I dashed around to the rear and, lo and behold, there was a man squeezing himself out through a window at the back of the mews.
“But it was a small window and he was relatively rotund and he was struggling to squeeze himself through. He was red in the face and obviously panic-stricken. He got an awful land when he saw me, especially when I let out a few shouts at him.”
McGee pushed the man back in the window where he was arrested by gardaí. Down at the station, the suspect "cried like a baby", recalls McGee. He admitted to his role in the fraud and identified Mr Saor Eire as the ringleader. However, under no circumstances would he identify him in court, he said.
The arrested man, who is still alive, would go on to have a very successful career in entertainment, McGee said. But at the time, he was simply a lackey who needed to earn some cash any way he could.
Meanwhile, the detectives would have to be satisfied with their catch; Mr Saor Éire had escaped justice yet again. McGee later determined it was Mr Saor Éire himself who had tipped him off about the bagman in Dublin 2, apparently in retaliation for the budding entertainer attempting to pull his own scam on the gang’s ringleader. In his entire career, it was the only case McGee saw of someone “conning the conman”, he says.
Foot-and-mouth disease
It was not McGee’s last tussle with Mr Saor Éire. That same year, the criminal was believed to be the brains behind an attempt to extort £5 million from the Department of Agriculture by threatening to introduce foot-and-mouth disease to Ireland and devastate the farming economy.
McGee’s main role in the investigation was placing personnel ads in The Irish Times’ small ads section in order to communicate with the blackmailers, one of whom was a successful barrister.
The fraud, which was detailed in this newspaper last year, ended somewhat anticlimactically. Gardaí set up an elaborate sting to catch the criminals as they went to pick up the ransom. But they never made contact again and Mr Saor Éire remained at large.
“They must have twigged we were involved and didn’t go through with it. But we had them very well covered if they did,” McGee recalls.
The incidents are some of the many investigations McGee details in his new book, Tales from the Fraud Squad. It also recalls McGee's successful career as a full-forward with the Mayo senior football team and his recovery from a stroke seven years ago. "I still have trouble with the knife and fork but I can hit a golf ball," he says. All royalties from the book will go to the Irish Heart Foundation, who McGee worked closely with following his illness.
McGee retired from the Garda Síochána in 2002 as a detective superintendent and second-in-command of the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation. Before he left, he was assigned what might have been the biggest case of his career, if it hadn't been for then tánaiste Mary Harney.
Secret payments
In 1997, the McCracken tribunal concluded its investigation into secret payments received by former taoiseach Charles Haughey from businessman Ben Dunne. The tribunal determined that Haughey had lied to it, raising the possibility he had committed a criminal offence.
McGee was assigned to undertake a criminal investigation which involved taking a sworn statement from the former taoiseach at his Kinsealy home.
“I can recall Charlie himself pouring out cups of coffee for us from his silver coffee pot and drinking from beautiful china mugs.”
Charges were filed and Haughey elected for a jury trial. However, following comments by Harney that he should be jailed, a judge determined Haughey could not receive a fair trial and adjourned the matter indefinitely.
“I don’t think I was too harsh on him in the book,” McGee says, adding that Haughey was very cordial to him and his colleagues. However, he thinks he should have faced trial “rather than slipping out the back door”.
And what of the entertainer involved in the Taghmon fraud? McGee says he received probation for his role and within weeks his file went missing from the fraud squad offices. “Just vanished into thin air,” McGee says. “Almost certainly, someone inside was bribed to remove the file.”
It didn’t sit well with McGee and his colleagues to see the man become a lauded figure in the Irish entertainment industry.
“We had a different take on him. And I still have a different take on him. He was a thief and a liar – and a leopard doesn’t change his spots as far as I am concerned.”
So, will he disclose who he is? “That’s a question everyone has. The answer would shock you. But I’d have to hide the deeds of my house if I was to tell you.”
Tales from the Fraud Squad by Willie McGee is published by Merrion Press
