Gardai investigate leak of European arrest warrant for Gerry ‘Monk’ Hutch (2024)

Gardai have launched an internal investigation into the leaking of secret information about the issuance of a European arrest warrant (EAW) for Gerry Hutch, the Dublin gangland figure known as the Monk.

Hutch vanished from an address where he was living in Spain in April as gardai and the Spanish police were preparing to arrest and extradite him back to Ireland. It was intended that he would stand trial at the juryless Special Criminal Court on charges relating to the 2016 gun attack on a boxing weigh-in at the Regency Hotel in Dublin.

The Dublin criminal is the focus of an international manhunt involving Europol and police forces across Europe. Garda sources say the details and progress of the search are being organised on a “need to know basis” to avoid it being compromised.

Hutch had been living openly until gardai moved to arrest him. There are grave concerns that he was tipped off about the existence of the EAW, or somehow learnt of its existence, which enabled him to evade capture.

A special team of detectives is trying to establish if information on the warrant was inadvertently leaked, or if it was passed to Hutch, perhaps through one of his associates. Details of the warrant were circulated on the Schengen police database which is accessible to all European police agencies.

After Hutch disappeared, three other suspects were arrested and charged in connection with the attack.

Hutch left Dublin in May 2016 after he was publicly identified as a suspect for organising the Regency ambush in which David Byrne was shot dead at point-blank range as he lay on the floor of the hotel’s lobby. This greatly exacerbated the so-called Hutch-Kinahan feud, which has claimed 18 lives.

The Dublin criminal disappeared after it emerged that he had been the target of a covert surveillance operation by gardai, who bugged a van that Hutch had used in the days after the Regency attack. He was allegedly recorded discussing the incident.

Hutch, whose family home is in Dublin’s Clontarf, is considered by gardai to be one of the most active criminals in the country, although he claimed to have turned his back on a life of crime when he agreed to pay €1.5 million to the Criminal Assets Bureau in 2000 after Operation Alpha, an inquiry into the source of his wealth.

Hutch maintained that his wealth was derived from compensation claims that allowed him to make shrewd business investments, but he eventually reached a settlement with the bureau, which had accused him of organising armed robberies. He then reinvented himself as a limo driver, and enjoyed a degree of celebrity status, often featuring in the tabloid press. His limo company was called Carry Any Body, or CAB, supposedly a reference to the Criminal Assets Bureau.

Gardai believe he continued to amass millions by remaining involved in serious organised crime in Ireland, Britain and Spain using trusted third parties, and may have cultivated relationships with as yet unidentified gardai. Senior gardai suspect that Hutch may have developed contacts with officers who received “tidbits” of information on rival criminal gangs, in order to draw attention away from his own activities.

“There are actually gardai out there who convinced themselves that he was some type of ordinary decent criminal or Robin Hood figure,” one garda source said last week. “The Hutch feud with the Kinahan cartel is not a confrontation between two gangs, but a schism within a single criminal gang. No one seemed to notice what he was doing.”

For nearly three decades, detectives have been trying to obtain evidence to prosecute Hutch for involvement in some of the country’s biggest bank robberies. Among them is the 1987 Marino Mart armoured van heist that netted a gang of armed raiders €1.5 million.

Hutch was also suspected of organising the theft of €3.6 million from a Brinks Allied security depot in north Dublin in January 1995. That robbery was organised in conjunction with the Dublin brigade of the Provisional IRA.

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