THE SECURICOR driver used in a €2.28 million robbery four years ago has said his armed captors knew the company’s security features and call codes.
Paul Richardson described how one of the raiders who had burst into his Raheny home with guns and had taken his family captive, said to him in private: “You give a 10/11”.
Mr Richardson told prosecuting counsel Dominic McGinn in Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, that a 10/11 was a Securicor call code to let the control centre know that all crew, walkie-talkies and the “smokie”, or cash-box, were in the van before it started its ATM rounds. He said the “smokie” refers to a security device inside the cash box, which explodes in smoke when the box is moved a certain distance from the van or crew and soils the money with coloured ink.
Mr Richardson said the raider also knew about the Securicor van’s “buster-buttons”, or panic buttons; his usual crew members, the registration of the van he normally drove and the route he had taken the previous day.
He was returned to the living room and made to sit on a couch with his family while the raider took a Polaroid snapshot of two colleagues pointing guns at their heads. Mr Richardson said the raider took a photo of him on his own once his wife and two children had been taken to Cloon Wood near the Wicklow mountains in the back of a stolen vehicle.
David Byrne (36), Knocksedan, Swords; Niall Byrne (27), Aughavanagh Road, Crumlin; Mark Farrelly (37), Moatview Court, Priorswood; Christopher Corcoran (61), Bayside Boulevard North, Sutton; and Jason Kavanagh (34), Parslickstown Court, Ladyswell, have all pleaded not guilty to falsely imprisoning the Richardson family in March 2005. They have also pleaded not guilty to robbing Mr Richardson and Securicor.
Mr Richardson said the first raider guarded him in the living room all night with a “fat” man carrying a machine gun and instructed him to pick up his friend on the way to work as usual, to act normally and keep calm, to tell his van passenger to turn off his phone and not to alert gardaí.
The raider warned that his “boss wouldn’t like it” if any of his armed colleagues got hurt.
Mr Richardson said the raiders, whom he believed had tuned into Garda radio frequencies using a scanner, told him he had been one of six people targeted in their operation but that he “drew the short straw”. “If you want to see your family again, you’ll do what we want you to do.”
He told Mr McGinn he drove the van past a Garda checkpoint near the pub, but otherwise traffic was light towards the Angler’s Rest pub destination outside Lucan.
He said one of the raiders, who had a Northern Irish accent, had originally instructed him over the phone to drive into the pub’s car park and hand the money to two waiting raiders, but then told him to deposit the money bags behind a red container.
Mr Richardson unloaded the cash during his last conversation with the man and asked him twice about his family.
The man eventually answered: “I have a Securicor WT [walkie-talkie] and I will let you know where to go to meet your family.”
Mr Richardson said the man had used his company’s terminology for the walkie-talkie and that he expected him to contact him if he stayed within range.
He left the money, the photos and the lunch box and drove west to give the raiders their demanded 50 minute-window to pick it up.
He said one of his colleagues, Paddy O’Callaghan, told Securicor’s control centre that the crew were at The Square, Tallaght, when officers contacted the van shortly after the drop-off.
Mr Richardson said he had pains in his chest and thought he would never see his family again because the raider hadn’t contacted him and the line had rung out when Mr O’Callaghan rang his house using his mobile phone.