On our first meeting, John Gilligan’s eyes sparkled with merriment when he walked into my hotel room and spotted two brand-new cameras on tripods worth €4,000.
“I wish I still had it in me to have stolen them for you, to save you the money,” he quipped.
I suppose it was his jokey way of putting me at ease. I would become accustomed to Gilligan constantly cracking childish quips and his self-deprecating manner. It was the start of a long project, secretly meeting up and recording 40 hours of footage between the spring of 2022 and February 2023 for a book, The Gilligan Tapes: Ireland’s Most Notorious Crime Boss in His Own Words, and the Virgin Media TV series Confessions of a Crime Boss
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