BY CRIME REPORTER WILLIAM KIDD IN MADRID

THE VERY LIGHT suspended sentence given to convicted Irish criminal John Gilligan in Spain has started tongues wagging that he may have become a grass.

Gilligan, who served 17 years for drugs offences in Ireland, and was acquitted of involvement in the killing of Dublin journalist Veronica Guerin, recently pleaded guilty to drugs and firearms offences in Torrevieja, and avoided custody by way of plea bargain.

“What’s the bargain? That’s what we want to know,” says Whacker, a former gangland hit man, currently serving two life sentences in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison for decapitating his grandparents while high on cocaine.

Gilligan fled to Spain after his release from prison in Ireland, following an unsuccessful attempt on his life. Old associates now fear that, in his old age, and with few resources, he is selling them out in return for favors.

“And then there’s the television documentary he’s done. The one where he says he’s going to hell. I don’t like the sound of that,” says Eskimo Joe, whose underworld job included freezing the body parts of murder victims during a nasty gangland feud in the 1990s. “He’s definitely whispering. He has form. Remember, he fingered his 2ic, John Traynor, for the Guerin hit. Cunt.”

Loyal gangland solider Ignatius Loyola-Limerick, who once shot himself under orders from his then boss, Martin Cahill, the General, refuses to believe Gilligan would sell his old comrades out. “His life wouldn’t be worth shit. Hell would be preferable to what would happen if he grassed. No, John wouldn’t do that.”

Corrupt lawyer turned movie scriptwriter Max De Summer, who helped launder drug money in the 1990s and early 2000s, and was found with two hundred million dollars in cash in the walls of his office, insists that the old Omerta code is a thing of the past. “These bastards would rat out their own mother. Who do you think told the cops about me? Yeah, he’s probably done a deal. And the documentary is a cover for all that he gives police.”