John Gilligan has been fleeced of more than €100,000 by one of his closest associates, it has been claimed.
Underworld sources have told the Irish Mirror a former key ally of the pint-sized criminal took the cash from him in his Spanish bolthole in recent weeks – and left the veteran gangster furious.
A source told the Irish Mirror: “He is hopping mad about it.”
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Underworld sources have told us the Gilligan associate used the money to buy drugs, adding: “He has done a runner and is spending the cash on heroin.”
Sources said the disappearance of the associate is a hammer blow for Dubliner Gilligan, 70, who had been relying on the man more and more in recent years.
Our source said: “They were close. This has really got to Gilligan. He is beside himself.”
News of his ally’s disappearance comes just weeks before Gilligan – whose gang murdered crime reporter Veronica Guerin in 1996 – heads back to a court in Spain to face drugs charges.
Gilligan, who was acquitted of Ms Guerin’s murder but was jailed for 17 years on cannabis importation charges, is accused of sending drugs to Ireland by post. He stands to be locked up for three years if he is convicted when he appears in court in April in Torrevieja, near Alicante on the Costa Blanca.
The threat of a prison sentence of more than eight years still hangs over Gilligan’s head following the failure to strike a deal late last year that would have reduced the trial to a mere formality.
State prosecutors are also demanding an 18-month prison sentence for unlawful weapons possession for Gilligan after cops found a gun buried in the garden of his expat home in Torrevieja in 2020.
Detectives said when he was arrested in October 2020 the gun was a rare Colt Python .357 Magnum and described it as the “same make and model” as the one used to kill the reporter in an ambush at a red light on the outskirts of Dublin in June 1996.
However, the Irish Mirror later established that the gun was not used to murder Ms Guerin.
Despite that, he is still facing charges over the pistol – as well as for allegedly sending drugs via courier deliveries in boxes containing flip-flops and children’s towels.
Police sources said at the time of
Gilligan’s October 2020 arrest that the raid on the drug baron’s villa crucially took place as he was preparing a delivery to Ireland of marijuana and sleeping pills which heroin addicts use to help them numb pain.
A Spanish National Police spokesman did not name Gilligan in a force statement at the time but said: “Investigators managed to intercept four postal deliveries in Spain in which four kilos of marijuana and 15,000 pills had been hidden.
“The well-known Irish criminal who allegedly headed the organisation was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2001 in Ireland and served 17 years. Irish investigators linked his organisation to the murder of an Irish journalist.”
In June 2021 after Gilligan was released from prison on bail after his arrest, the Irish Mirror tracked him down to his Spanish bolthole – where he scuttled away from us when he was confronted.
We approached him as he got out of a Black Nissan Micra driven by his son Darren – and told him we wanted to talk to him about the murder, for which he was prosecuted but acquitted.
Gilligan was entering the driveway of the villa when we caught up with him after a four-day surveillance operation in which we repeatedly photographed him enjoying his freedom on the Costa Blanca.
We told him we were from the Irish Mirror, and he simply said: “Pardon”, before Darren grabbed his arm and turned him away from us – as we asked John if he regretted the murder of Ms Guerin.
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