Taxi-driver Niall Mulvihill had a habit of turning up as a suspect in investigations of Dublin crime. Conor Lally reports
The man murdered in Dublin on Thursday night in the city's latest gangland killing had been well known to the gardaí for over three decades.
Mr Niall Mulvihill (57), was an associate of notorious criminals Martin Cahill ("The General"), and John Traynor.
While never convicted of a serious offence, his career was the stuff of crime novels.
He was a fraudster and suspected drugs dealer; was involved in the attempted sale of stolen artwork; bought at least one exclusive Dublin 4 property for cash; and is believed to have hidden some of his wealth in Swiss bank accounts.
And when it came, his end was just as dramatic. Having been shot at Spencer Dock he managed to flee the scene in his 1997 D mercedes taxi. He somehow made his way across the city to the Big Tree pub on the North Circular Road where he crashed, causing a six-car pile-up. It was believed he was trying to get to the nearby Mater Hospital. He was taken there by ambulance but died shortly after midnight.
Mulvihill first came to the attention of the gardaí as a teenager when he became involved in petty crime. As he grew older he gravitated towards much more serious crimes. But like so many of his generation he always managed to stay just out of reach of the law.
He was involved not only in money-laundering but in suspected drug deals and fraud. He was also involved in handling the stolen Beit paintings - in Antwerp in 1993 he was arrested in connection with the stolen paintings but the case against him collapsed. It was believed he was involved in trying to sell the Beit paintings on behalf of Cahill, whose gang had stolen the artwork from Russborough House, in Co Wicklow.
Mulvihill, a married man with two children, was known to have owned at least two licensed premises in Dublin's inner city in the 1980s. He sold one of the pubs to Cahill and Traynor, each of whom took a 50 per cent share in the business. While gardaí said he was living on New Cabra Road, Dublin 7, he also bought a second property in Dublin 4, near Shrewsbury Road, for which he paid £150,000 in 1990. He is understood to have paid cash. He also had addresses of late in Glasnevin and Sutton.
One Garda source familiar with Mulvihill's activities for a very lengthy period described him as a "Walter Mitty character".
"Whenever we were investigating some of the bigger players, even many years ago, his name would almost always pop up in some way."
For the past year he was being investigated by the Criminal Assets Bureau. CAB were due to go to court next month in an effort to get a settlement from Mulvihill of over €900,000. Most of his money had been traced but the extent of his wealth hidden outside this jurisdiction was not fully known. But it is believed he had money on deposit in Swiss bank accounts.
In recent years he had turned his attention to working with a successful inner-city soccer team and had been driving a taxi since the industry was deregulated.