Initial filming for our two-part documentary series on Gerry The Monk Hutch took place last Summer. Little did we know it at the time, but within a few months the notorious gangland figure would become one of the stories of the general election, writes director John Downes of RTÉ's Documentary Unit.
Watch Gerry Hutch: AKA The Monk now via RTÉ Player
There’s a story that the distinguished broadcaster Leo Enright tells for the first time in the opening episode of our two-part documentary series about a memorable encounter he had with a young Gerry Hutch in 1978.
Back then, a gang of youths known as the Bugsies - named for the musical gangster film Bugsy Malone - were terrorising the city by stealing cars, robbing handbags, and staging "jumpovers" to relieve shopowners of the cash in their tills.
Enright, who would go on to work for both RTÉ and the BBC as its Ireland correspondent, was a mere teenager himself when he was asked to decamp to Summerhill and ingratiate himself with the gang by moving into a tenement.
of the murder of David Byrne (Pic: Collins Courts)
Initially he was treated with suspicion by the Bugsies. This was to be expected. When his stuff was robbed, he did not report it to the Gardai. He knew it was a test - in Bugsy territory, the worst thing you could be was a "rat." So he said nothing. Eventually, some of the other children brought him to their acknowledged leader: Gerard Hutch.
At the time, a teenage Hutch was living on the top floor of a tenement with his girlfriend. Enright recalls how he was invited to dinner by candlelight, which was "beautifully" cooked and consisted of pig's trotters. While they spoke about Hutch's life, below them he could see squad cars chasing stolen vehicles around the city streets.
It is perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Gerry Hutch’s life and career to date.
A feature of our early research for this series, which has been in production for almost a year, was the sheer volume of archive material that surrounds Gerry Hutch, stretching right back to his days in the Bugsies. For decades, he has been known to the public at large for his exploits, including his so-called "Limo years" when he drove celebrities and hen parties around the city in a Hummer van owned by his company which he imaginatively titled "Carry Anybody"- or CAB for short.
But to really understand Gerry Hutch, you need to first understand just how much his reputation in his native community of north inner city Dublin means to him. It is a place he left behind decades ago, buying a home in the more affluent suburb of Clontarf to raise his family. In later years, he split his time between there and his numerous properties in the south of Spain and elsewhere.
Yet as he tells it, the streets of Summerhill have never left him. Those same streets would years later become the location for the deadly Hutch-Kinahan feud, which in time would leave Gerry mourning the deaths of some of those closest to him, including his own brother Eddie Hutch and many other relatives and friends.
For Gerry Hutch story is everything. The story he tells about his love for the north inner city streets he grew up in, a community he stood up for during the depths of the heroin crisis of the 1980's.Some of those who counted on his support tell us about what this meant to them at the time.
How he made his reputed millions not as a result of violent crime and armed robbery as the gardai suspect - his last criminal conviction dates back to 1983 - but he says due to shrewd property investment on foot of several personal injury claims.
How money from the Marino Mart robbery was found in a Northern Ireland account opened on his behalf, but was, he says not from the Marino Mart robbery, but belonging to him.
How he was wrongly accused of the murder of David Byrne at the Regency Hotel, a fact acknowledged by the judgment of the three-judge Special Criminal Court when it announced he should walk free .
And how the State and its agents, such as the Criminal Assets Bureau and even RTÉ itself, are quite simply out to get him after he reluctantly got drawn in to a deadly row between his late nephew Gary Hutch and the Kinahan Organised Crime Group.
These and many other stories have helped sustain the myth of Gerry The Monk Hutch for decades. Before Christmas, he told another story, of how the people wanted him to run for election because they wanted change - without ever really clarifying what this change would actually look like.
As others in our documentary series point out, it was an approach which very nearly allowed him to defy the odds once again by becoming the country's least likely TD.
Gerry Hutch: AKA The Monk begins this coming Monday, February 10th at 9.35pm on RTÉ One - catch up afterwards via RTÉ Player
