Paul Williams - The General

Tango One is down Tango One is down. The message crackled frantically across the Garda radio network. Control, can you repeat that last message? asked a disbelieving voice over the wailing of a squad car siren. The Number One man is down. Get everyone down here All other alarm calls to be put on hold. Priority for Tango One. It was 3.20 on the afternoon of 18 August, 1994, and Irelands most notorious gangster, Martin Cahill, the General, had just been shot dead.

Less than six minutes earlier the forty-five-year-old gangster code-named Tango One by the Garda he had eluded during two decades of organised and brutal crime had become the last victim of the Provisional IRA. Soon the IRA would announce their historic ceasefire, but before they set out on the road to peace there had been some unfinished business to be taken care of. And it wasnt an outstanding debt which an enemy some British agent or Loyalist killer had incurred during the Long War. The business involved an enigmatic Dublin criminal of little consequence to events in the North. The IRA had bestowed upon the General the dubious honour of being its last victim. In death, as in life, Martin Cahill had made his mark on history.

The assassin had waited beside the Stop sign at the junction of Oxford Road and Charleston Road in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh for most of that sun-drenched Thursday afternoon. The people out soaking up the rare spell of sunshine on the steps of the Georgian houses along Charleston Road took no notice of the hitman as he watched for his victim. Dressed as a Corporation worker, he pretended to conduct a traffic census with a clipboard in his hand. His accomplice was on a motorcycle, posing as a courier. He drove up and down Oxford Road for most of the afternoon, stalking Cahill. At regular intervals he turned into Swan Grove, the small cluster of Corporation houses where Cahill lived by night.

At 3.10 pm Martin Cahill finally emerged into the sunlight. He had a busy afternoon planned. First he had to leave a videotape back to the store a Robert De Niro movie called Bronx Tale about a New York fathers attempts to keep his kid out of the clutches of the local mobsters. Then he was due to meet his associates to discuss plans for another major crime and a possible shooting to sort out an ongoing problem with a former paramilitary. Tango One, a master of counter-surveillance, may have noticed the courier consulting a map at the end of the cul de sac when he climbed into his black Renault 5. He probably assumed it was just another Garda stake-out. There had been a team watching his house earlier that day and it wasnt unusual to see replacements arriving by motorbike. After all the police had been watching Martin Cahill for the past twenty years, waiting for him to step out of line. No doubt he would have felt lonely without his Garda watchers around to play his favourite game of cat and mouse. He probably chuckled to himself at the thought of yet another ambitious cop hoping to make his name by nabbing the big bad General. A lot of grey-haired detectives had once shared the same aspiration. Anyway he would lose them on the way to his conference. Before Cahill turned the ignition key the courier had vanished.

Less than five hundred yards away the hitman braced himself for the kill as his accomplice on the motorbike raced down Oxford Road, turned onto Charleston Road and stopped. That was the signal the hitman had waited for so patiently the target was on his way. The modest car drove at no more than fifteen miles per hour as it cruised the short distance between Swan Grove and the Stop sign. As the General slowed down to stop at the junction the hitman dropped the clipboard and stepped over to the drivers door of the car. He reached into his jacket and produced a Dirty Harry .357 silver-plated Magnum revolver one of the deadliest and most powerful handguns in the world.

For a split second Cahill stared into his killers eyes. Then the window exploded into a thousand tiny shards as the lethal weapon was fired once at point-blank range. The large bullet ripped through Cahills shoulder and head, smashing bone and tearing tissue. The force of the blast pushed the General to one side. His car chugged across Charleston Road as if he had it in gear but was unable to put his foot on the accelerator. The hitman ran alongside and pumped another three shots into his victim. The car collided with the railings at the gateway to No 45, beneath a large horse chestnut tree.