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Martin ‘Viper’ Foley and CAB target Jonathan Gill join forces as deb

t collectors

The duo who are extremely well known to gardai were observed together last week at a location in the midlands.

Today at 20:39

Veteran gangster Martin Foley and former CAB target Jonathan Gill have joined forces in an apparent debt collection enterprise.

The duo, who are extremely well known to gardai, were observed together last week at a location in the midlands.

They had called to a property and Gill can be seen holding a clipboard while standing outside the property as Martin Foley stands beside him wearing a jaintimidation cket with his company’s logo on it.

Two other men can be seen calling to the door of the property in the company of Gill and Foley.

It is understood that gardai in the Midlands are investigating an alleged incident of intimidation in relation to the matter

“It was not previously known that these two individuals were in business together but all the indications are they are now,” a source said.

Gill from Dublin’s Malahide Road was previously acquitted of tiger kidnapping charges. He has been advertising his services as a ‘mediator’ and negotiator for the past two years while Foley has been involved in a debt collection business for two decades.

For a fee, Jonathan Gill (44) is offering to help step in to resolve disputes between two parties which “may have reached a dangerous and potentially violent level.”

In July of this year, Foley (71) from Crumlin pleaded guilty to engaging in threatening and abusive behaviour during an incident in which a ‘heavy’ for Viper Debt Recovery threatened to slit a man’s throat over a €4,000 debt.

He faces a maximum sentence of three months in prison when he appears again before Wexford Circuit Court in the coming weeks.

The count alleged that Foley, on June 17, 2020 at 20 Holly Walk, Cromwellsfort Grove, Wexford engaged in threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with an intent to provoke a breach of the peace or being reckless as to whether such a breach of the peace occurred.’

Nicknamed ‘The Viper’, Foley has more than 40 convictions for offences including assault, robbery and possession of threatening weapons.

In 2020, he was ordered to pay €738,449 in tax, interest and penalties after losing a Supreme Court appeal against a Criminal Assets Bureau tax bill.

He came to prominence in the 1980’s when he was a member of the gang which was led by slain mobster Martin ‘The General’ Cahill and as a spokesman for a gang which clashed with the Concerned Parents antidrug movement.

He was kidnapped by the IRA in 1984 but was freed after a shoot-out between the terrorists and gardai in Phoenix Park.

Foley’s life has been under threat since the late 1980’s with different criminal enterprises intent on murdering him.

In the last major attack on his life, he was shot numerous times in broad daylight in Dublin in January 2008 by the Kinahan cartel.

Although the attacker escaped in a white Ford van, Foley whispered his name to the first garda who arrived on the scene. The white van was later discovered at Wainsford Road, Terenure.

It is also suspected that Jonathan Gill has been the target of assassination plots including by the Real IRA who were led by gangster Alan Ryan at the time in Dublin.

Gill had been accused of the 2011 kidnapping of a postal worker, his partner and their 10-week-old baby daughter before robbing €660,000 from the man’s workplace. He denied all the charges.

In 2019, the State entered a ‘nolle prosequi’ – a legal term which translates as ‘will no longer prosecute’ – on the charges that he had been facing since November 2013.

While he has no major convictions, Gill was described by an investigating Garda sergeant in the Drogheda tiger kidnapping case as one of the “top criminals in Ireland”.

Gill lived in a “bulletproof house” in north Dublin and when members of the Emergency Response Unit raided it, sparks flew as their pickaxe bounced off the patio door, Sergeant Fearghal O’Toole stated at that hearing.

Sergeant O’Toole said he believed Gill to be a member of an organised crime group.

“He is part of an organised crime group and he would be one of the top criminals in this country,” Sergeant O’Toole said.

Gill was never arrested, charged or convicted of any offences linked to Ryan’s death or the wider dispute.