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| Criminal Mastermind - Paul 'Top Tout' Williams |
The Foraging
Ireland can now exclusively reveal the vicious thug responsible for
Ireland's current wave of gangland crime – Paul 'Top Tout'
Williams. Gardaí have long suspected that an unknown kingpin was
pulling the strings in Gangland but The Irish Sun journalist's role was only recently
uncovered after a thorough and courageous investigation carried out by this writer.
In a case of
fact being stranger fiction, Williams' story is not unlike that of
the film The Departed. Back in the early 90s the prolific
Dublin criminal Martin 'The General' Cahill recognised the power of
the media and recruited Williams, then a low-level street thug, to
attend a couple of journalism courses before getting him a job, through
torture and intimidation, at the Sunday World.
Cahill
intended to use Williams to misdirect the Gardaí and rival gangs by
planting false stories in the national newspaper. The crime columns
were also used to promote Cahill's image of being an “ordinary
decent criminal”. But when The General was slaughtered in a hail of
bullets in 1994 Williams found himself trapped in his job as a
journalist because no one but Cahill knew Top Tout's true identity.
However,
Williams soon realised how profitable crime-writing could be in its
own right and successfully kept his criminal persona a secret while
he expertly played criminal factions against each other using his
regular crime columns and subsequent books. It is believed that
journalist Veronica Guerin was close to revealing Top Tout's identity
in 1996 when she was brutally murdered by John Gilligan's gang after
Williams gave them accurate details of her diary and movements.
Williams swiftly replaced Guerin as top dog at the Sunday World and set about creating the cult of Gangland by
giving Ireland's criminals the one thing they craved the most but
couldn't buy or steal: notoriety. Using his columns he built up the
profiles of various lowlifes and drug dealers, knowing that the more
he wrote about them the bigger a target they would become. This
cunning tactic resulted in a high turnover rate of gangland figures
as jealous gang rivals murderously scrambled to get their names in
the headlines. Top Tout had hit the big time.
In a bizarre twist, Williams' true identity was revealed not by the
Gardaí that he so closely associated with but by the vigilence of this writer. I
had noticed discrepancies in Williams' writing – frequent
misspellings, poor syntax, indiscriminate punctuation – that
suggested he couldn't possibly be a professional writer. When
this writer bravely confronted Williams with the overwhelming evidence against him Top Tout broke down
and admitted his guilt but fled the country before he could be
apprehended by the Gardaí. The grisly reign of Paul 'Top Tout' Williams was over.
*At
the time of writing it is believed that Paul Williams is living in
Spain and is currently working on one last big heist before he
disappears for good: He's writing his memoirs.
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