Inside the Gerard Hutch PR machine: ‘Whether it was intentional or not, he did very well at marketing himself’

“You think I’m a drug dealer, don’t ya? Well I’m no drug dealer. I’ve seen family and friends dying week in and week out because of them.”

Those were the words of Gerard Hutch – or rather the actor playing Hutch – in the 2003 biopic Veronica Guerin as he’s confronted by the investigative journalist on his doorstep.

Elsewhere in the film, Guerin’s main garda source concurs. Hutch was probably involved in the 1995 Brinks Alliedheist in Clonshaugh, Co Dublin, at the time the biggest robbery in State history, the detective tells Guerin, “but drugs is just not his scene”.

The result is a film that depicts Hutch as almost a Robin Hood figure, a tough but ultimately honourable gangster who stands in contrast to John Gilligan, the malevolent drug dealer who orders Guerin’s murder.

Why was Gerard Hutch tried for murder?

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Gerard Hutch fails in bid to get State to pay legal costs following acquittal in Regency trial

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Inside the Gerard Hutch PR machine: ‘Whether it was intentional or not, he did very well at marketing himself’

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It’s an image not confined to the silver screen. As seen this week in the wake of his acquittal for the murder of David Byrne during the 2016 Regency Hotel attack, many people in Dublin, and farther afield, have a genuine respect or even admiration for Hutch, whose nickname “The Monk” is a reference to his ascetic, plain-living image.

The 60-year-old is viewed variously as a lovable rogue who thumbs his nose at more powerful criminals such as the Kinahans or an innocent man railroaded by the State and the Garda.

“I’ve had people coming up to me in the last few days saying ‘isn’t great that he got off’,” said Independent councillor and former Lord Mayor of Dublin Nial Ring.

“Of course there’s an affection there,” said the councillor who represents the north inner city. “He was a guy who was good to the community, who was loyal to the community. That sort of loyalty was always rewarded with loyalty back.”

Other local figures agree. “He has always genuinely held himself quite well. He was always very pleasant. He would be friendly. That’s not like some of the rest of his family who are absolutely vile,” said another local representative who knows the Hutch family and asked not to be named.

“There’s a perception that because he wasn’t involved with drugs and just banks robberies, that he’s a bit of a Robin Hood,” said a garda with extensive experience of the Hutch family.

For Paul Thornton, a former Bank of Ireland employee, this view is hard to stomach. He was working in the bank’s branch on Fairview Strand in 1985 when three armed men burst in.

One of the raiders stayed in the lobby while the others jumped over the counter and pointed their weapons at staff. When Thornton was unable to open the bank’s safe, the man in the lobby shouted “kneecap him”.

One of the raiders shot Thornton in the leg before they all fled. “In comparison to some of the other guys who were shot [in robberies] at the time, I was lucky,” he recalled this week. “I was quite sporty, I was able to get back to playing football within a year or two.”

As he recovered, gardaí informed Thornton that Hutch was the chief suspect in the robbery, either as the man in the lobby or as the person who ordered it from afar. However no charges were brought. The man who shot him, gardaí suspected, was Thomas O’Driscoll, Hutch’s childhood best friend who it was believed accompanied him on the Brinks Allied job and several other lucrative heists.

O’Driscoll, a gun for hire in the Fairview area, was shot dead by gardaí two years later during a botched robbery of a Dublin Labour exchange.

Thornton’s bank suffered just one of a number of robberies thought to have been carried out by Hutch’s crew in north Dublin in the 1980s. In 1987, the Hutch gang, including O’Driscoll, robbed £1.3 million from a cash-in-transit van at Marino Mart in Fairview, just up the road from the bank. Unsurprisingly, Thornton has a less rose-tinted view of Hutch and his activities during this time: “He was a malign presence around the area.”

Hutch’s reputation as a so-called ordinary decent criminal who spurned the drugs trade was solidified in the 1990s when he became involved in local organisations, led by local Independent TD Tony Gregory, who were fighting back against the heroin scourge devastating the inner city.

In 1996 he raised eyebrows when he attended an anti-drugs meeting organised by the Inner City Organisation Network (Icon). Hutch enthusiastically applauded suggestions from the floor on how to deal with local drug dealers, but remained impassive when Det Sgt John O’Driscoll, who ran the local drugs unit, was introduced. Years later, as assistant commissioner, O’Driscoll would lead the international campaign against both the Hutch and Kinahan criminal gangs.

At the 1996 meeting Hutch repeated his insistence he had no involvement in drugs and questioned the council’s policy of boarding up properties to stop them being used by dealers. “The problem is not the buildings, it’s the dealers who live in them. They’re the people who need to be got out,” he said.

[ Gerard Hutch profile: ‘University of crime’ graduate expected to start new life abroad ]

His reputation as a pillar of the community was solidified when he co-founded the Corinthians Boxing Club in Summerhill in 1998. Hutch bought the building and granted the club a freehold lease for 99 years. He also served as its treasurer.

Through his involvement in the club, Hutch diverted countless youths away from a life of crime or addiction, recalls Ring. “He was literally taking kids off the streets.”

As his wealth grew, thanks to canny investments of his robbery proceeds, Hutch moved out of the inner city to Clontarf but remained a constant presence in the area. “He was always around, always very approachable,” recalls one resident.

“Whether it was intentional or not, he did very well at marketing himself. He was always very good at the public relations side of criminality,” the local representative said. “You don’t see the Kinahans talking to Paul Reynolds on Prime Time,” referring to a 2008 interview Hutch did on RTÉ. “Yeah, I done crimes, some of them I got away with ... [but] I had no choice. You had to get into crime to feed yourself, never mind dress yourself,” he said.

Ring recalls Hutch’s entry into the taxi business after he settled with the Criminal Assets Bureau (Cab) in 2001 for €1.2 million in unpaid taxes on the robbery proceeds.

He called his new company Carry Any Body (Cab) and imported a stretch Hummer limousine worth €150,000 from the US. Over the following years, Hutch appeared regularly in the newspapers, not for his crimes, but on the shoulder of celebrities, such as Mike Tyson, who hired him to ferry them about town.

“I remember the notoriety of him going around in the Hummer and calling it Cab. Him in his little chauffeur hat. That was a bit of craic,” says Ring.

Part of Hutch’s popularity stems from a sense of community in inner city Dublin which outsiders cannot understand, some locals say. This was particularly strong around Foley Street, where many of the Hutches were based.

“They were the essence of inner-city poverty. They looked after each other. Genuinely. The sense of place down there is very hard, even for me, to understand,” the local representative said.

“You have to understand, this is a community which has been entirely ignored and sometimes victimised by the State. It’s an ‘us against the world’ viewpoint and Gerry fit into that,” recalled a community worker involved in the anti-drugs movement. Furthermore, they said, Hutch did not do business where he lived. “He didn’t s**t where he ate. No one had to fear him. Sure there were no banks around there to rob anyway!”

[ ‘Everyone was delighted...He’s a lovely, lovely man’ : Dublin inner city residents on Hutch verdict ]

The affection for Gerard Hutch only became stronger during the Hutch-Kinahan feud, which began in 2015 with the murder of his nephew Gary and dramatically escalated following the Regency Hotel attack.

Part of this support was due to the perception of the Hutch family as underdogs trying to defend themselves against the multinational Kinahan gang, with their Dubai bolt-holes and reported annual turnover of €1 billion.

“They were the old Dublin corner shop going up against Tesco,” said one garda. “So there’s bound to be a level of local support.”

Sympathy for the Hutch side, which bore far more causalities than the Kinahans, also played a role. “They called it a feud. We called it wholesale slaughter. It would be a feature of people in the inner city, we would always root for the underdog,” says Ring.

He recalled Gareth Hutch, Gerard’s nephew, coming into his office the day before he was killed in May 2016 to ask about moving to a more secure flat.

“He said ‘I know they’re going to get me, I just don’t want them to shoot me in front of my son.’ It was typical of the family, they were looking after the younger members.”

The murder of Hutch’s brother in February 2016, Neddy, in revenge for the Regency attack, engendered particular sympathy for the family, particularly as Neddy had no involvement in criminality.

“He was really well-known and liked. Ned would regularly bring auld ones into town and pick them up and make sure they got home safe to their door. That sort of thing,” says Ring.

The support for Gerard Hutch only grew after he was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited back to Ireland to face charges. And it wasn’t confined to inner city Dublin.

An examination of social media shows huge support for Hutch around the country. On Twitter alone the hashtag “Freethemonk” has been shared thousands of times.

Much of this has been led by an account called @DeportDaniel, a reference to Daniel Kinahan. Since the 2021 arrest, the operator, who is believed to be an acquittance of the family, has been tweeting relentlessly in support of Hutch, with some of their posts receiving hundreds of likes.

On the day of the acquittal earlier this week, the account posted a video showing Photoshopped versions of Hutch lip-syncing the song I’m still Standing, including in front of a Brinks cash van. To date it has been viewed over 170,000 times on Twitter and has been widely shared on WhatsApp.

Unlike the PR campaign launched by the Kinahans, which allegedly includes a slick documentary about the Regency attack, a rap song and the hiring of a law firm specialising in brand management, the support for Hutch appears to be more organic.

“There’s no doubt that a lot of the affection for him is real, unlike the support for Kinahan which is fairly shallow, at least in Dublin,” said a Garda source.

However these outpourings of affection often ignore key details, including the view of the Special Criminal Court that while he may not have been personally involved in the Regency attack, the murder was almost certainly organised by the Hutch family and Gerard himself had control over the assault rifles used by the gunmen.

[ The Hutch-Dowdall tapes: The secret recordings of ‘The Monk’ and his ‘ruthless’ associate ]

It also ignores the opinion of many gardaí that, contrary to his public image, Hutch was involved in the drugs trade, just at a greater remove than his criminal colleagues.

After he gave up his armed robbery career, gardaí believe Hutch became an investor in the drugs trade. He was willing to front money to other criminals for shipments in the hope of receiving it back with interest. But he never got directly involved in the logistics, meaning he largely stayed off the Garda radar.

The affection also ignores the many victims of the armed robberies he carried out, says Thornton, the former Bank of Ireland worker.

[ What next for Gerard ‘The Monk’ Hutch? ]

“In some ways when you are at the centre of these things you can be better off. It’s the witnesses who have that feeling of helplessness where the impact seems to be greater.”

One traumatised colleague, Thornton recalls, couldn’t pass through the door to work in the days after the robbery.