Shot because his name was Hutch: The propaganda war

When the end came for inner city hard man Derek Hutch it was by his own hand. The 44-year-old had grown depressed. He had made a confession to the Garda in the week before his death claiming he had killed a Dublin criminal 18 years earlier.

On February 21st, 2009, he was released from St Vincent’s Hospital in Fairview, not far from his north inner city stomping ground; into the care of his wife Noeleen after a five-day hospital stay.

They returned to their home on Upper Buckingham Street, Dublin 1, Hutch having shown no signs of being suicidal.

But when she left him alone in the house to go out he was near death on her return. He lay bleeding in the hallway of the house, a trail of blood also found in the living room.

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“The door was locked and when I opened it with the key I saw the blood in the sitting room. And I said, ‘what did you do?’” Noeleen Coakley Hutch explained at the time.

Derek Hutch was rushed by ambulance to the Mater Hospital where efforts to save his life failed. A brother of veteran criminal Gerry Hutch, also known as The Monk, he was pronounced dead early on Sunday, February 23rd, 2009.

Emotional appearance

Soon after, his then 19-year-old son, Derek jnr, togged out with his Sheriff YC football club for an emotional appearance. They were on their way to their first ever Leinster FA Cup win and Hutch jnr was determined to continue their run.

The leading role he played in such an impressive sporting first for the inner-city now seems a distant memory.

Derek Coakley Hutch, also known as Derek Hutch jnr, Derek Coakley and "Del", was shot dead at a west Dublin halting site last Saturday, in a well-planned ambush.

It appeared the robbery in June, 2015, had been a turning point in his life

He had stayed in his car as the two men he was with walked across the Bridgeview halting site to the perimeter wall of the adjacent Cloverhill Prison. The two men were on the phone to Nathan Hutch, a prisoner in the jail and a brother of Derek Coakley Hutch.

They were about to throw a parcel of drugs over into an exercise yard and were co-ordinating the throw from one side of the wall with the catch on the other.

But the delivery was interrupted when gunfire rang out.

The two would-be drug suppliers sprinted back to the car to find Derek Coakley Hutch fatally wounded and the gunman being driven away.

The victim was 27 years old and a father of two young children.

In the hours and days after his death, his friends and former team-mates took to social media to express their grief at his murder and to pay tribute to the man they knew.

One friend, who had grown up with him and played with him on the Sheriff YC team, marvelled at how Derek Coakley Hutch played so well through the grief and shock of his father’s death.

He said some of the best days of his life had been spent with his “pal” in primary school and playing on the same soccer teams.

“Especially the time you won the cup . . . just after your da had died,” he said of Coakley Hutch.

The friend recalled how they had met only recently when bringing their children swimming, and Coakley Hutch had remarked how happy he was to have recently “changed” his life.

Some of that change was ventilated in public in November 2017 in the courts. when Coakley Hutch was charged for his role in a robbery at a shop in Clontarf, north Dublin, two years earlier. An imitation firearm had been used.

Coakley Hutch had 10 convictions, and a jail term looked a certainty. However, the judge spoke of how Coakley Hutch had overcome his drugs habit. He had put in “Trojan” efforts to better himself and had received glowing reports from both his drugs rehab centre and the Probation Service.

It appeared the robbery in June, 2015, had been a turning point in his life. So positive were the reports from the criminal justice professional Coakley Hutch dealt with, he was spared jail.

In the near 2½ years between the robbery and his suspended sentence being imposed he had only come to the attention of the Garda on the occasion of being warned his life was at risk because of the feud.

Last Saturday Derek Coakley Hutch became the 14th victim in the so-called Kinahan-Hutch feud.

He was the fourth member of the Hutch family to die in the violence. And his shooting down was the 12th murder by the Kinahan side, whose leadership was based in Spain from the late 1990s and more recently has decamped to Dubai.

Unlikely candidate

Like many of the other victims, Coakley Hutch seemed an unlikely candidate to be murdered in a gun feud. He was a petty criminal and drug user who had engaged in low end crime before apparently mending his ways more than two years ago.

He was no gang kingpin. He was not suspected of any attack on the Kinahans and posed no apparent threat to them, just like almost all of the others shot on the Hutch side of the gun feud.

Like Derek Coakley Hutch, most of the Kinahans’ victims appear to have had no involvement in anything that could be even loosely defined as active organised crime.

Last Thursday night’s vigil in the north inner city, at which around 600 people turned up to march to a monument for dead heroin addicts, is not the kind of event usually organised after the murders of hardened gangland figures for whom being shot dead is an occupational hazard.

Local sources, who did not want to be named because they were fearful, said the vigil demonstrated the feeling in the community that some of the people dying have not lived by the gun.

So what exactly is the Kinahan gang out to achieve? And how many killings will it take to satisfy their hatred of the Hutch family?

Gardaí believe Derek Coakley Hutch was murdered simply because of his name. They point to the attack at the Regency Hotel in north Dublin almost three years ago as the central motivation for the relentless murder campaign by the Kinahan cartel.

A team of gunmen, some dressed in fake Garda tactical-unit uniforms, effectively stormed the hotel and shot and killed Crumlin man David Byrne (34). Byrne was a leading member of the Dublin-based section of the international Kinahan gang.

There is a certain amount of, if you like, gloating going on

In the hotel at the time a boxing tournament weigh-in was under way. Daniel Kinahan, son of cartel boss Christy Kinahan, was there in his capacity as boxing promoter.

Gardaí believe the attack – in February, 2015 – was designed for one purpose; the murder of Kinahan in revenge for the murder of Gary Hutch. Gary Hutch was a onetime Kinahan gang member shot dead in Spain the previous September He had fallen out with the gang and had tried to kill Daniel Kinahan in a botched gun attack.

Daniel Kinahan escaped the scene of the Regency attack uninjured. But David Byrne effectively ran into the arms of the gunmen as he tried to flee from the hotel on foot.

Gardaí believe that in direct response to the Regency attack, the Kinahan gang wants a mounting body count to strike fear into the hearts of anyone else who might challenge them.

The trial of Patrick Hutch for his alleged role in the Regency attack has been ongoing at the juryless Special Criminal Court for the past three weeks. Many gardaí believe it was no coincidence that Derek Hutch Coakley was murdered just days after CCTV video footage of Byrne being gunned down was played in the court.

Direct consequence

They say Coakley Hutch’s killing was a direct consequence of the video being shown in court. “Some of these people can’t be seen to let that go – that one of their own [gang members] is shot dead and a video of it is played for all to see,” says one Garda.

A colleague agrees: “There is a certain amount of, if you like, gloating going on. Byrne’s associates would feel the video being played was a lap of honour for the people who killed Byrne.

The criteria for selecting victims is different in the Kinahan assault on the Hutches

“And Derek [Coakley] Hutch’s murder was, as far as they’re concerned, an attack designed to close down the lap of honour and put them back on top in the gloating battle. It sounds crazy, but this is what they are like.”

The number of killings to date in the Kinahan on Hutch feud is not unprecedented for Irish organised the crime.

In the Limerick and Crumlin-Drimnagh feuds in the 2000s a similarly large number of murders occurred.

And a gang in Finglas, north Dublin, headed by Martin “Marlo” Hyland and later Eamon Dunne also killed a large number of men.

But the criteria for selecting victims is different in the Kinahan assault on the Hutches, argues one veteran retired Garda officer. “With these other feuds, members of the rival gang were killed. There was a motive for the murder of a particular person.

“But with Kinahan-Hutch, anyone around the Hutches can become a victim, just for the sake of having another victim and so people will fear [the Kinahan gang] more.”

It's not important who the victims are as long as there are lots of victims

Another, serving, Garda says the Kinahans were more concerned about the impact of each killing than with focusing on “particular enemies they want dead”, as is normally the case in gangland feuds.

“The message is ‘this is what will happen to you and yours if you even think of challenging us like the Regency’.

“And that’s why we have people getting killed for being linked in a very minor way to the Hutches.

“It’s not important who the victims are as long as there are lots of victims. They are desperate to show that when a group of people dared to attack the Kinahans nobody around them was safe.”

‘Propaganda by deed’

Gary Gannon, a Social Democrat member of Dublin City Council who grew up in the north inner city where the Hutch family are from, agrees with this analysis. He calls the feud "propaganda by deed".

Gannon’s constituency office is on Buckingham St Upper, where Derek Coakley Hutch grew up and lived at the time of his death, where his mother still lives and where Thursday’s vigil took place.

Gannon sees the Kinahan gang’s actions in relentlessly murdering the Hutches and those around them as a tactic to shore up their position as the main supplier into the drugs trade nationally.

“It’s propaganda by deed: you commit an attack, not because of the target, but for the target audience. For example, terrorists blow up a building for the benefit of the people watching on at home.

“What happened in the Regency changed the game. This multimillion-euro [Kinahan] corporation is now sending a message, not just to the Hutches, but to the next gang that might come along, in any of their territories.

“They’re saying ‘if you step up against us, this is what will happen to you’. They’re saying ‘it won’t just be you, it will be your name, your family’.

“They’re crushing the Hutches to send that message. And it all comes down to control of the drugs market.

“It’s scary because the next gang that comes along knows the game has changed. So they need to be as heavily armed, as ruthless, as prepared to kill.

“This doesn’t stop here. What happens next is the real threat. You also have fear that goes with that, ‘if I don’t commit violence against you, you will do it to me and my family’.”

Gannon quotes the words of Larry Dunne, the notorious Dublin heroin dealer of the 1980s, who warned: ‘If you think we were bad, wait till you see what’s coming next’.”

And so we have the Kinahans, says Gannon. “This is it. This is the ‘next’.”