Patrick "Dutchy" Holland was an unremittingly evil man from a respectable family background who made it his life's work to commit crime and attack the State and its justice system.

Garda Marianne Cusack almost put an end to Paddy Holland's career as a murderer and drug dealer. She was on duty at Store Street Station, doing night duty on April 8-9 1997, when she and several of her colleagues were asked to go to cover the exits of Dublin port on the expectation that Holland would be passing through.

Police in England, at the behest of Tony Hickey's team of detectives based in Lucan, had tipped the gardai off that a car Holland had access to was travelling to Ireland on the early evening sailing from Holyhead. The Lucan team, backed up by the uniformed officers from another unit in Store Street, were waiting but Holland never came off. He had missed the sailing but boarded the later ferry which arrived in at around 2am. The guards waited for it too.

Garda Cusack was monitoring cars coming out of the exit to the port and became suspicious of a small car containing a young woman and child and a man too old to be her boyfriend. She stopped the car and recognised Holland. He had slipped past the team of detectives and other gardai who had been monitoring the ferry as it docked.

It was later, giving evidence in court, that Garda Cusack was asked under cross examination why she had arrested Holland.

She replied: "I had formed the opinion that Patrick Holland was the man who shot dead Veronica Guerin on June 26, 1996."

There was a visible stir in the Green Street Court. Holland had been staring without expression at the attractive, dark-haired young garda. His expression changed and now you could see the true face of the brutally ugly man who had fired six high-velocity magnum bullets into a young wife and mother. Four of the shots that Holland fired into Veronica at around 1pm on June 26, 1996, were fatal. He knew that. He knew he could have walked away after firing two shots and that the job would have been done.

He fired the extra three out of sheer evil, to satisfy the equally evil little criminal, John Gilligan, who feared that Veronica's evidence against him over his vicious assault on her would send him to jail for just six months, maybe a year.

Holland charged £20,000 for a murder and may have killed at least five people, including publican Tom Nevin three months before he murdered Veronica.

It was the £20,000-stare that Holland had fixed on the smart young garda in the witness box. She, as much as the tremendously hard-working and clever detectives under Tony Hickey, was his undoing.

Gilligan had hired Holland's services but instructed him that he wanted to send out a message with the murder, not simply to kill the investigative reporter, but to make a statement -- empty the chamber into the defenceless victim. Holland leaned down into the driver's side window of the Calibra sports saloon and coldly carried out Gilligan's wishes.

If Veronica had given evidence and Gilligan had been jailed, his gang would have been without the drug suppliers in the Netherlands who fed his network. He trusted none of his gang with the name of his Lebanese contact in Amsterdam.

Holland had been a useful adjunct to Gilligan's gang as he had previously been to other gangsters and the IRA and INLA in Dublin. The Gilligan gang member who turned State's evidence against them, Charlie Bowden, had testified that he supplied Holland with 35kg of cannabis a month.

Holland was also receiving wholesale supplies of cocaine and was selling both drugs through a retail outlet in Harold's Cross. While it was under garda surveillance the detectives noticed some fairly well-known figures in the media and other professions coming and going. They had no idea they were buying drugs supplied by some of the most evil gangsters ever to have crawled out of a sewer on this island.

Holland was an unusual character on the Dublin gang scene. He came from a respectable family in St Laurence Road, Chapelizod, and one of his friends growing up was Pat Culhane, the son of a garda who would himself join the force.

Holland's first job was on the floor in Donnelly's Sausages in Inchicore. There, he impressed management and within two years was head floorman. He was not, however, satisfied with working.

With Culhane, he travelled to America where they joined the US Marines in the mid-Sixties. Culhane did not like the life of the Marines and left to come home and join the Garda, rising to the rank of Chief Superintendent before dying three years ago.

Holland went on to serve in Vietnam where little is known of his experience as he was not known to have ever talked about it. Whatever happened, he returned to Ireland and a life of crime.

His first conviction was in 1965 for possession of stolen goods, two fur coats which gardai found in the boot of his car. He pleaded innocent but was convicted and received a two-month sentence.

He moved up a notch on the ladder and began a life as an armed robber. Bald since his late teens, he wore wigs when carrying out robberies, becoming known within his circle of criminal associates as "Wiggy", his nickname before the "Dutchy" moniker later coined by the media.

Holland was also, possibly, a transvestite with strange sexual leanings. He carried out at least one robbery in the mid-Seventies dressed as a woman. Years later, when the detectives from Tony Hickey's team raided his holiday home in Brittas -- not far from Tom Nevin's pub -- they found a young British man dressed in woman's clothing in the house with Holland's wife, Angela. Holland had been associating with the young, half-Asian man in England at around that time.

After being caught for robbing the Carlton Cinema on O'Connell Street of £13,500 in takings in 1976, Holland fled to America with Angela. He later told associates that he settled in Chicago where he worked as a hitman for the Mafia.

He returned to Ireland in 1981 where he immediately began his career as a solo armed robber. He robbed the Ulster Bank on College Green -- on his own -- followed by the Berkeley Court Hotel, where he took £13,000, and the Department of Posts and Telegraphs office in Hawkins Street, where he escaped with £22,000. A high-profile lone robber was an unusual character at the time and he was quickly identified and arrested as he attempted to board the Rosslare to Cherbourg ferry. He was again convicted of the three armed robberies and received a seven-year sentence.

He was released in 1986 and returned to his profession, associating with a relation of Martin Cahill, the infamous south Dublin gangster.

In 1989 he and two associates stole half a tonne of TNT explosive from the Arigna Coal Mine in Leitrim, intent on striking a deal with the Provisional IRA, exchanging the explosives for handguns, then very difficult to source for Irish criminals.

By coincidence, one of the detectives who nabbed him was the Kerryman Tony Hickey. Holland received another six-year sentence, emerging from prison in 1993, aged 53 but still fit and lethally dangerous. Shortly after his release he is believed to have murdered former bank robber Paddy Shanahan, who had become a successful property developer but had crossed one of Dublin's big criminals, a northsider now in his late 60s and still one of the biggest drug traffickers in the State.

During this spell in Portlaoise Holland met and became attached to John Gilligan, who was in the jail at the same time. Among their other associates were the former INLA boss Dessie O'Hare from south Armagh.

In 2007, during his brief period of release after serving 10 years for possession of drugs, Holland maintained his association with the now-released O'Hare, meeting him occasionally at Foley's Pub a few yards from the back of Government Buildings on the corner of Merrion Street and Merrion Row. O'Hare, a mass killer for the IRA and later the INLA, and kidnapper of dentist John O'Grady, was, it seems, one of the very few other men that Holland had any close association with. The two sat quietly chatting in the pub, attracting no attention from the other clientele.

Gardai who came across Holland share the same opinion that he was evil and had never been stricken with conscience. In 1997, when Garda Cusack arrested him, he had embarked on a strategy to both undermine the gardai and to use parts of the media in Ireland to promote himself.

It was a remarkable plot. Agents on his behalf had lined up a slot on the Late Late Show and a number of journalists were lining up for "exclusive" interviews in which he would claim he had not murdered Veronica.

When he was arrested, gardai discovered he had tiny transmitters in the heel of his shoe, in a belt buckle and sewn into his jacket. Electronic listening stations had been set up in two apartments opposite Tallaght and Lucan garda stations, the locations he expected he would most likely be taken once he offered himself up for arrest. His intention was to induce interrogating gardai to make untoward remarks during questioning and bring these with him for broadcast on RTE. It was part of an elaborate plot to undermine the work of Tony Hickey's team and help spring Gilligan and the other associates. His arrest coming out of Dublin Port undermined that.

In early 2007, while he was involved with the convicted fraudster who passes himself off as a lawyer, Giovanni de Stefano, again attempting to undermine the gardai and justice system in Ireland, he linked up with two other Irish criminals based in London. They plotted to kidnap and, if necessary, murder the businessman Nasir Zahid, a plot which was monitored from the outset and led to his re-arrest in May that year. He was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment last year, with Judge Henry Blacksell saying: "I have no doubt at all about your important role in the commission of this offence. You are a man who has been associated with serious crime over a long period of time and have served long periods of imprisonment. You are reaching the end of your life and it may be that you end it in prison. I know not."

Holland died, aged 70, of a heart attack in his sleep on Friday morning in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, joining a long and infamous line of British gangsters who also expired there. Holland spent almost half his life in prison and the other half fighting the law. The law won.

One of the officers, now retired, who tracked him down for the murder of Veronica Guerin had only this to say on the news of Holland's death in Parkhurst: "No harm. If Gilligan dies in jail too, it would be a good job."

- Jim Cusack