Mitchell starts as a driver for Jacob’s but gets involved in robberies with associates of Martin Cahill.
In 1988, Mitchell is convicted of stealing a large amount of cattle drench and is jailed for five years. While in prison he becomes interested in the illegal drug trade and within a few years of his release he is the largest supplier of illicit drugs in the country.
In the 1990s Mitchell is arrested in Luton, Bedfordshire, England, by British police while in the possession of £575,000, a downpayment for drugs. The money is seized but he is released. In 1995, the Garda drug squad raids a house in Lucan, Dublin, and discovers an ecstasy processing plant believed to have been set up by Mitchell. In 1996, his associate, Johnny Doran, is caught with £500,000 worth of cannabis at M50 at Castleknock, Dublin. His gunman, Michael Boyle, is caught after a botched murder attempt in London, leaving him feeling vulnerable. Concerned that the Gardaí are focusing on him, he moves the centre of his operations to Amsterdam. Rumors surface that he had fled the country after being placed on an Irish Republican Army (IRA) death list, though this claim is later refuted.
Mitchell is arrested by Dutch police on March 5, 1998, after £5 million worth of computer equipment originating from Hewlett Packard in Kildare, County Kildare, is stolen from a lorry near Schiphol Airport. He is later sentenced to 30 months in prison after Dutch authorities rule he is the ringleader in the robbery. He claims in court that he is the victim of a “set up” by Irish police, who had tipped off Dutch authorities about the robbery, after he had refused to become an informant.
In 2015, Mitchell approaches Herman-Johan Xennt about setting up an encrypted phone business. He has known Xennt since at least 1998, when he was arrested for handling the stolen computer parts. Xennt had been accused of buying stolen computer parts from Mitchell. It is also claimed during a 2020 German court case that Mitchell loaned Xennt the equivalent of €700,000 in 1995 to buy a 20,000-square-foot former NATObunker on the outskirts of the southern Netherlands town of Kloetinge, which was then used to host the CyberBunkerInternet service provider (ISP).
Byrne is born on November 23, 1900, in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, Dublin, the elder among one son and one daughter of Vincent Byrne, carpenter, of 33 Denzille Street (now Fenian Street), and his wife Margaret (née White). By 1911 the family is living with maternal relatives at 1 Anne’s Lane. Educated at St. Andrew’s national school, Westland Row, he is apprenticed as a cabinet maker under Thomas Weafer, a company captain in the Irish Volunteers, who is subsequently killed in the 1916 Easter Rising. At the age of fourteen, he joins the Irish Volunteers in January 1915, and is posted to the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade. His training includes lectures on street fighting by James Connolly. During the 1916 rising he serves with the 2nd Battalion in Jacob’s biscuit factory under Thomas MacDonagh. At the surrender he is slipped out a factory window to safety by a priest who is acting as an intermediary. Arrested in his home a week later, he is held in Richmond Barracks with other youngsters, all of whom are released after an additional week. Active in the post-rising reorganisation of the Dublin Brigade, he claims to have voted twenty times for Sinn Féin candidates in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland.
In November 1919, Byrne is recruited to an elite counter-intelligence squad of the Dublin Brigade, whose primary mission is the assassination of plainclothes detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s (DMP) political (‘G’) division. He participates in the attempted ambush of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, John French, at Ashtown, Dublin, on December 19, 1919, a combined operation of the Dublin and the 3rd Tipperary brigades. In March 1920, he leaves his civilian employment with the Irish Woodworkers, Crow Street, when the squad is constituted as a full-time, paid, GHQ guard, under direct orders from Michael Collins. Dubbed “The Twelve Apostles,” the squad also includes James Slattery, a workmate of Byrne since their apprenticeships. For the duration of the Irish War of Independence, Byrne takes part in the stakeouts and killings of police detectives and military intelligence agents. His witness statement to the Bureau of Military History recounts his participation in some fifteen such operations. On Bloody Sunday he commands an IRA detail that kills two of the “Cairo Gang“ agents in their boarding house at 38 Upper Mount Street on November 21, 1920. He takes part in The Custom House raid on May 25, 1921.
Owing largely to his devoted allegiance to Collins, Byrne supports the Anglo–Irish Treaty of December 1921, regarding it as a stepping stone to complete independence. Enlisting in the National Army, he serves in the Dublin Guard. Promoted five times from January 1922 to February 1923, he rises in rank from company sergeant to commandant. He is OC of the guard at the handover of Dublin Castle from British to Irish authority on January 16, 1922. During ensuing months he commands guard details at government buildings and the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. In March 1922, he foils an attempt by Anti-Treaty forces to seize the bank with the aid of mutinous soldiers within the building’s guard. Having displayed courage and presence of mind throughout the incident, he is promoted captain in the field. Resenting the role given to ex-British-army officers in the National Army, and feeling that the political elite of the Free State are betraying the national interest, he is among the group of officers involved in the failed army mutiny of 1924, and accordingly is forced to resign his commission on March 21. He then works as a carpenter on the industrial staff of the Office of Public Works (OPW), and in the post office stores, St. John’s Road, Kilmainham, Dublin, until his retirement.
Byrne is a founding member of both the Association of Dublin Brigades and the 1916–1921 Club. Long lived, and a willing raconteur with a colourful turn of phrase, he becomes probably the best known of Collins’s squad (of which he is the last surviving member), granting many interviews to journalists and historians. He expresses no misgivings about his role as a revolutionary hit man, arguing the necessity of the ruthless methods employed, which deterred potential informers, and eventually won the struggle by crippling British intelligence.
Byrne lives in Dublin at 59 Blessington Street, and later at 227 Errigal Road, Drimnagh. His last address is 25 Lein Road, Artane. His wife Eileen predeceases him. He dies on December 13, 1992, survived by two daughters and one son. He is buried at Balgriffin Cemetery, Balgriffin, County Dublin.
(From: “Byrne, Vincent (‘Vinnie’)” by Lawrence William White and Pauric J. Dempsey, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
seamus dubhghaill 