A Shocking Shortt story

Police fabrication of evidence in Ireland (The Garda are the Irish police). It's not only in Ireland that police can just make things up and be believed


The summer of 1992 was a strange time in north Donegal. The rural backwater was in the throes of a new cultural phenomenon: rave, and the ravers' drug of choice, ecstasy. Clubbers from all over the north-west, from Derry to Tyrone, converged on the county's nightspots for the new techno music. Donegal was, for a while at least, hip, and nowhere more so than the Point Inn on the Inishowen Peninsula, the country's biggest nightclub. Local parents, gardai, politicians and the owner of the Point Inn, Frank Shortt, were all agreed: the drug dealing would have to be stamped out. In April of that year, Shortt, a chartered accountant and restaurateur, then in his late 50s, approached a senior garda and asked that undercover officers be deployed inside the club to catch the dealers. "We knew we were being hit by this tidal wave of drugs sweeping the country. But I suppose we were a bit naive about the guards at the time," he said.

The gardai declined to fulfil Shortt's request, but launched an undercover operation the following July without his knowledge. Inspector Kevin Lennon, a rising star in the force who was later promoted to superintendent, and his most trusted officer, Detective Noel McMahon, organised three visits to the Point Inn, culminating in a highly publicised raid on the night of August 2. Lennon, then attached to Buncrana Station, declared proudly to a local paper two days later that their clampdown on the drug barons had gone down with military-style precision. "It was very major. The lads who took on the operation in question responded magnificently. No batons were used during the operation," Lennon told The Derry Journal.

Frank Shortt, millionaire pillar of the local community, now found himself charged with knowingly allowing drugs to be sold inside his nightclub. A deal, a plea bargain of sorts, was reportedly offered in return for Shortt pleading guilty in the local district court. Shortt pleaded not guilty and was sent forward for trial by jury in Dublin's Circuit Criminal Court. Shortt's lawyers at the time, it has since emerged, were confident the prosecution would fail. But between the district and circuit courts new evidence began to emerge from the gardai. Detective McMahon supplied an additional statement, detailing how he observed the nightclub boss personally witnessing drug deals going on in the Point Inn.

"Even on the eighth day of the trial, I was being told I wouldn't be going to jail," Frank Shortt told The Sunday Business Post. "And then an hour later I was being led off in handcuffs to prison." Shortt, an innocent man, whose innocence eventually would be established as fact in the appeal courts, was sentenced to three years in prison. The first six months in Mountjoy was a living hell. "He was put on antidepressants which he should never have been on and he immediately went downhill," said his wife Sally this weekend. "He went from 12 stone to nine and half stone. He was just shuffling around, his brain was in a useless state. When I visited him he was like a zombie, the drugs, the antidepressants they gave him, had left him cuckoo. I'd go into to see him, and he'd mutter, `Is that you, Sally?' I thought `he's not going to survive six months"'.

Frank Shortt would later stage a remarkable personal recovery in Mountjoy, while the detectives who pursued him would suffer an extraordinary fall from grace. On the face of it, the case they took against Shortt was cast iron, built on layers of eyewitness statements, and corroborated by circumstantial evidence. At the trial, in 1994, Detective McMahon recalled witnessing a rave in full flow, with "lots of furious dancing and people going about openly dealing in what appeared to be drugs". A former member of the Emergency Response Unit, with 20 years experience as a garda, McMahon, working undercover, said he himself bought drugs in full view of Frank Shortt. Superintendent Kevin Lennon organised for marked 10 pound notes to be used for buying the ecstasy. McMahon, the chief witness at the trial, gave evidence about recovering these notes from one of the drug dealers, a youth known as Fringe. Fringe made a statement confirming he had been selling ecstasy. And garda technical experts confirmed that drugs were indeed found in the nightclub.

Lennon and McMahon went to great lengths to record everything. McMahon in particular was a compulsive note taker, with a Nixonesque passion for recording the minutiae of his operations. And like the former US president, he made the fatal mistake of holding on to the records.

Within two years of Frank Shortt's conviction, rumours began to circulate within and outside the Garda Siochana about the activities of Lennon and McMahon. Kevin Lennon was sufficiently scared to try to get his once trusted colleague to sign a statement, declaring: "I do not have anything whatsoever against Superintendent K Lennon . . . I do not know anything that would endanger his career or that I could say about him to endanger his career. I have never known Superintendent Lennon to act illegally while participating in any operation." Lennon would later describe this as an insurance policy in the event of his colleague making allegations about him. Alongside this bizarre letter of satisfaction, Detective McMahon kept other files, one of which was headed, "Lennon shafting me."

The formerly close relationship between the two Buncrana detectives had descended into one of fear and loathing. McMahon not only refused to sign the letter, he also confided to his wife Sheenagh that "he would never let that out of his hands". "He said to me that this was the biggest mistake that Kevin Lennon made and he said that piece of paper was so important to him". This admission was also one of Noel McMahon's biggest mistakes. Three years later Sheenagh McMahon formally ended their marriage and took with her some of the incriminating memos.

When Frank Shortt finally had his day in court last May, the paper trail left by the two gardai had widened to encompass some of the wildest allegations ever levelled at members of the Garda.

Shortt's new legal team, Eoin McGonnigle SC, Des Murphy BL and solicitor John Kelly, pieced together a much wider tale of alleged corruption than merely the alleged framing of an innocent man. They did this forensically, with documents obtained on discovery and new witness statements. Sheenagh McMahon and her husband's chief informant, Adrienne McGlinchey, told the court that evidence was concocted to convict Shortt; that Det McMahon plotted to plant drugs in the Point Inn and that both he and Lennon set up bogus arms finds.

Alcohol was a recurring theme in the story. McGlinchey said she had drunk with the two gardai in Buncrana Garda Station, at a garda's home, at her home, in garda cars and one night when McMahon was so drunk that she had to drive him home. According to McGlinchey, she, along with McMahon and Lennon had driven a Garda surveillance van loaded with explosives to a disused shed in Rossnowlagh and placed the explosives there. An "arms cache" was discovered in Rossnowlagh the following day.

McGlinchey said she was given cash by McMahon to buy drugs and told to plant them in the Point Inn in Quigley's Point, Inishowen. However, she got very drunk in Lifford and failed to contact him. Sheena McMahon recalled seeing her husband, Kevin Lennon and two other officers, Tina Fowley and Brendan Joyce at their home not long before the Shortt case. Her husband told her they were doing a statement for Shortt's trial. She said Joyce was typing at the computer and Lennon was reading from her husband's notebook, saying "Leave that in" or "Take that out". A draft statement, recovered on discovery by Shortt's legal team, appeared to corroborate this story.

The judges found that this was work-in-progress on the final statement composed in McMahon's household. This statement put Shortt in the picture for the first time. Other notes, written earlier by McMahon, had failed to indicate that Shortt was present when the drug deals were happening. One of the revised statements by the detective contained a handwritten note on the back, stating, "if giving evidence -- nasty."

When pressed about this, McMahon said: "I am renown [sic] and laughed at by people that live with me for making notes. I have to make a note of everything or I will forget something. It is a habit I have." It was, in retrospect, a very bad habit. Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman scathingly noted that during the detective's three visits to the Point Inn, McMahon, the self-proclaimed compulsive note taker, had not once made a record in his notes about seeing Frank Shortt witnessing drug deals.

So why did he hold on to these highly incriminating notes? Hardiman suggested that Lennon and McMahon's mutual suspicion of one another led them down this dangerous path of compulsive record keeping. "The statement annotated by the superintendent, and the Advice on Proofs which throws light on the annotations, were in the nature of insurance for McMahon if it were ever suggested that he had invented the additional evidence `of his own motion'. It implicated his superior as well as himself," Hardiman said.

The account of the two marked 10 pound notes was found to be patently spurious. Fringe, the drug dealer allegedly found with the notes and drugs, was searched by gardai outside the nightclub and no drugs or money were found at that stage. He was not questioned about the marked notes in Buncrana Garda Station. The marked notes were later found in his jacket the next day. In his statement to gardai, he said he was given two 10 pound notes from what turned out to be an undercover garda and then paid this money to another dealer to obtain the drugs. So it made no sense that he still had the cash in his possession. The custody record for the night that Fringe was detained in Buncrana Garda Station has gone missing. He was never charged with any offence.

The most dramatic and damning evidence of all about garda conduct during the Shortt investigation did not emerge until day four of the hearing in the Court of Criminal Appeal in May. Unknown to the lawyers for the state, Sheenagh McMahon revealed to the court that she had told the gardai in 2000 that her husband Noel had admitted to her that he had perjured himself at the original Frank Shortt trial. A statement to this effect should have been contained in the garda documents obtained on discovery by Shortt's legal team, but there was no record of it. In fact, the garda investigation team, headed by Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty, had not asked her to include this in her three statements.

Hardiman asked the state lawyers: "The question now is a very simple one; is there in any shape or form a signed or unsigned note or a mention of perjury by Mr McMahon?" Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions replied: "Not any material we have from the Carty Inquiry." Later that day, Gardai discovered that such a memo about the perjury claim did exist. This was taken from an interview on September 15, 2000 which read: "Sheenagh McMahon then spoke about the Frank Shortt case. She stated that her husband had told her that Tina Fowley nearly ruined the case in court. Noel told her that he had committed perjury in the Court. "She stated Kevin Lennon put Noel up to telling lies in the case. Sheenagh said that Tina Fowley could fill us in more on this matter. Noel told her that Frank Shortt did not deserve the sentence that he had received. "She said that Frank Shortt had gone to Superintendent Brian Kenny in Buncrana and had requested him to put gardai into the Point Inn in order to clear the place of drugs." The memorandum added: "Sheenagh McMahon stated that it was probably because of the false evidence given in the Frank Shortt case that Tina Fowley blew the whistle on the McBrearty case."

Sheenagh McMahon's evidence was corroborated by the informant Adrienne McGlinchey who said that Detective McMahon had told her that Shortt was set up, that he had told lies about the case and that he had got someone else to plant the drugs. A sister of the informant Adrienne McGlinchey told the court that Assistant Commissioner Kevin Carty had told her they believed Adrienne had manipulated Det McMahon and Supt Lennon. She said Carty had also told her their allegations could never become public because of the damage it would cause the garda. "They just wanted to bury it," she told the court.

Frank Shortt said: "Nothing shocks me any more." He fears that Lennon, McMahon and Fowley -- all now suspended -- will become the fall guys in the saga, and that "a number of other gardai" will escape sanction. He and his wife Sally believe there was a political dimension to what happened, but they insist they are not bitter. "I take no pleasure in them being suspended, they have families too," said Shortt.

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