Gerry Hutch joked to a Garda who swooped on him with Spanish police in a restaurant by saying: “The jacket, you must be roastin’ in that.”
RTE Prime Time tonight revealed new details on the operation which led to the arrest of The Monk in Fuengirola in August 2021.
It came over five years after he left Ireland following the murder of his brother Eddie, which happened three days after the Hutch gang orchestrated the Regency Hotel attack that claimed the life of David Byrne in February 2016.
In fresh footage of his arrest in the Limoncello Restaurant, plain clothes Spanish police, members of the Guardia Civil and an Irish officer wearing a garda jacket bring Hutch to a toilet in the eatery to search him.
But despite finally being captured, Hutch never lost his composure.
Speaking to the Garda, he said: “The jacket, you must be roastin’ in that.”
He then made reference to a veteran crime journalist and added: “Is this all for Paul Williams, is it?”
He also makes references to the cuffs that had been placed on him, and said: “Too tight, but ok.”
Before the arrest, 12 undercover officers had watched him strolling to the restaurant from the Plaza de la Constitucion - where he was based - alongside his wife but both had no idea of the surveillance.
It was that area where the Spanish Fugitive Action Task Force [FAST] had got intelligence that Hutch was living in the area.
The Dubliner was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant at the time, which had been issued from Dublin’s High Court five months earlier.
And in March 2021, the FAST team had waited at Malaga airport where Hutch had booked a flight from to Lanzarote but he never showed.
The gardai and police there were concerned that he may have been tipped off about the warrant.
The Guardia Civil’s UCO team - which is a central operative unit - led the search on Hutch, which the FAST team are a part of.
Intelligence led them to a specific apartment block in Fuengirola where they spent two days of surveillance before they got their man.
One of the FAST members, ‘Mando’ was interviewed by RTE Prime Time’s Security Correspondent Barry Cummins and he said: “It was step by step how we got where he was hidden.”
He explained: “We saw a man at a balcony.
“The photo we had from before showed The Monk with long hair. This man (at the balcony) had short hair, but looked like him.
“We took a secret photo of the man from here in this Plaza. We shared it with the Garda, and they confirmed it was Gerard Hutch, nicknamed The Monk.”
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