Irish Mob in the United States
Irish American organized crime is a phenomenon that predates the Italian American organized criminal society, La Cosa Nostra. It is the oldest criminal group in the United States, with traceable history in almost every major city in the country. Evolving from exclusively Irish street gangs within the Northeast during the 19th century, the Irish mob flourished in the pre-Prohibition and Prohibition eras. Irish mobsters with great know-how and business savvy developed ingenious ways to smuggle alcohol from Ireland into the Northeast coast of the United States, thereby leading to an unprecedented period of wealth and growth. The majority of Irish street gangs and criminal organizations had fizzled out by the 1940s. Stark competition from the Italian gangs and crime families had put them out of business. Reduced to ragtag groups of enforcers, many gangs chose to side with their Italian counterparts, rather than oppose them.
After this period of decline, the Irish gangs along the Northeast coast of the country faced an invigoration in the 1950s and 1960s. This invigoration saw the rise of the Winter Hill gang, The Westies and the Charlestown Mob. All of these criminal organizations became prominent figures in the criminal underworld of the American Northeast for decades. These criminal gangs entrenched themselves within the Irish communities of major American cities and maintained tight partnerships with the Five Families. At one point, owing to their higher levels of sophistication, police speculated that the gangs were connected to the Provisional IRA during The Troubles. This period would only last for 4 decades at most, with organized crime police task forces largely dismantling the groups before the turn of the 1990s.
Irish American organized crime in Los Santos dates back to the Prohibition era in approximately 1925. Irish American alcohol smugglers from San Fierro sent men to Southern San Andreas in the late 1920s in order to sell bootlegged alcohol in impoverished rural and urban areas. Most of the alcohol was sold off to residents of Irish, Italian and Greek communities in Los Santos, but a considerable amount was dealt to whites and Latinos inhabiting poor agricultural lands.
After the Great Depression of 1929, some Irish American gangsters broke off from the San Fierro mobs and formed their own criminal organizations in the Eastside district of Los Santos. These criminal organizations participated in turf wars with their Italian and Greek American counterparts over bootlegged alcohol distribution.
By the end of the 1930s, several dozen of these Irish American gangsters remained in the poor areas of the city and established themselves long-term. A number of these gangsters formed groups that still exist in Los Santos today, although they do not nearly have the power and influence that they once did.
While contemporary Irish American criminal organizations in the Northeast were being decimated by the police in the 1990s, things were just getting started for the Irish on the west coast. The East Beach Mob's origins began in the late 1990s and fully came to fruition by the early 2000s. They quickly became infamous for their narcotics trafficking in East Beach and their street wars with Balkan and Chinese criminal organizations. At one point, it was alleged by the Los Santos police and FBI that the East Beach Mob, and other Irish American gangsters, were in communication with the Provisional IRA in Ireland. Eventually, the East Beach Mob itself was largely obliterated by various law enforcement in San Andreas and federal agencies such as the FBI and ATF. After the numerous turf wars and extremely effective law enforcement action, Irish American organized crime in Los Santos became largely dormant.
Most Irish American gangsters that reside and criminally operate within Los Santos nowadays have arrived only just recently, typically from the Northeast or Midwest regions of the country. They have tight connections to Irish mobs back in major cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia and Boston. Many are not there on their free will, but have instead been sent by the upper echelons of their organizations to commit crime in the city on its behalf.
Because they are loosely organized in Los Santos, and are not inclined to interact with one another, local police are mostly unaware of their presences and criminal acts. This has allowed them to turn a considerable amount of profit in an extremely lucrative part of the country without the authorities and general public knowing much about it.
Van Ness Gang
The Van Ness Gang, headed by Charles "Chuck" Killeen, is an exception to this rule.
Charles Killeen was born in Las Venturas, San Andreas to multi-generational Irish American parents in 1978. He was initially raised in the quiet and unassuming lower middle class suburbs, but his family's financial decline forced them to move elsewhere. In 1984, aged 6, he moved to the South Johnson neighborhood of Las Venturas with his family. South Johnson is a low income neighborhood, originally named Little Dublin, that is the city's only historic Irish enclave. Growing up in a largely Irish area of the city, his father became a morphine and later heroin addict, following a workplace accident at a construction site. With his father addicted to various hard drugs, and his mother helpless in the situation, he turned to crime at a young age to provide for himself. Starting as young as 14, he worked for criminals who were subordinate to the remnants of the nefarious Cummingham Gang. He participated in numerous late-night stickups, armed robberies and eventually drug deals for the criminal organization. These activities progressed and went on for a couple of years. His father often stole the money made from his crimes in order to get his heroin from the streets, which was a direct source of tension in the family.
In 1994, when Killeen was 16, his father died from a heroin overdose in the family's high rise housing project in South Johnson. Charles himself found his father's dead body in his residential floor's elevator lobby. The same year, he moved with his mother to Los Santos, San Andreas in order to be closer with her side of the family. While living in the East Beach district, he got involved with various Irish American criminal gangs and organizations, most of which actually operated out of the Eastside slums. Within time, he became a violent enforcer for numerous prominent Irish American gangsters shortly after he turned 19.
Charles Killeen remained active with the Irish criminal gangs in Los Santos throughout the 2000s. He did so while living a seemingly normal and apparently unremarkable life in East Beach. But this was nothing more than a front put up in order to deceive civilians and the police. He was legitimately employed in the security sector and later, in the construction industry. His dual connections to his employers and the Irish mob, however, served as a gateway for racketeering and corruption activities. All of Charles's employers eventually became infiltrated by criminals who belonged to Irish criminal gangs. Almost all of these companies and businesses were eventually used to launder money on behalf of the gangs.
Within the Irish gangs, he worked as a violent debt collector and later, a hitman for a number of upper echelon Irish gangsters. By 2006, he was one of the most trusted and depended upon hitmen by the Irish gangs of East Beach. Around the same year, he began getting flown out-of-state in order to assassinate and murder rival gangsters. The majority of these rival gangsters were in fact dropouts or police informants who fled San Andreas in order to go into hiding. Charles murdered a dozen underworld rivals over a period that spanned roughly 5 years. His travels took him to 16 different U.S. states that were concentrated in the Pacific, Midwest and Northeast coast. His victims were murdered inside the comfort of their own homes or were simply shot to death in the streets.
Killeen was incarcerated in 2013 for the 2011 attempted murder of John Laverty, an Irish American mobster with loose ties to the Juniper Avenue Gang of East Los Santos. The attempted killing was botched. The attempted murder took the form of a gangland shooting, in which Laverty was repeatedly shot at while sat in his sedan outside of a sports bar in Jefferson. Laverty survived the shooting, and several months later, his bodyguard Michael Kelly become an informant for the Los Santos police.
For his role in the shooting, Killeen was sentenced to 10 years in state prison. He was ineligible for parole until he served 5 years behind bars.
While living out of numerous halfway houses across the slums of Eastside Los, it has been alleged that Killeen established very strong ties with Los Santos Crime Family rising star, Anthony Navarra. Charles would go on to serve as Navarra's personal enforcer throughout the latter's tenure as the Eastmoor Crew chief. In early 2018, it was rumored that relations between the two gangsters had boiled over. Killeen re-located to San Fierro, where his trail in the criminal underworld went cold for well over six months. He would later re-appear in Los Santos in that same summer. Thrust back in the underworld with strengthened relations with Tony Navarra, now serving as the Los Santos Crime Family figurehead, it is speculated that the renowned mob enforcer rallied freelance Irish American criminals under one umbrella. This was said to have happened after fellow Irish gangster Mark Coonan was suddenly incapacitated by a heart attack.
Two years after Killeen's release, and months into Mark Coonan's subsequent health battle, Killeen consolidated power through trusted enforcers Daniel Burke and Mark Connolly. The trio met on the security circuit and kept in touch while Killeen was behind bars.
It is speculated by police that Daniel Burke and Mark Connolly were members of the "Blueberry Five", along with Mickey Robinson, a group responsible for a number of armed robberies in the mid - late 1990s. Based out of the town of Blueberry, a medium sized farming community in Los Santos County, they were distinguished by their use of shotguns and flamboyant masks. They targeted gas stations, 7/11 stores and farmers markets along the county highway system. In 1999, the group abruptly went dormant and is presumed to have disbanded. Their armed robberies and six connected homicides, remain to this day, the subject of multiple cold case investigations by the state police.
No longer in the bad graces of the Los Santos Crime Family, Killeen's new group settled in Van Ness, a small neighbourhood contained within the Commerce district. Van Ness was previously thought to be under Los Santos Crime Family control, however, the neighborhood's demographics were historically Irish. The landgrab was made possible by Killeen's close ties to then acting boss, Anthony Navarra. After having a dispute a year prior, the duo seemed to dispel all rumours of tension by being seen in Van Ness together in early April. James Genna, a Los Santos Crime Family captain, was a longtime friend of Killeen and an old associate of The Van Ness Gang, the name it's become to be known. Genna worked closely with the gang, selling stolen goods on the black market and arranging security jobs for Connolly's security firm. Connolly's security firm featured both Genna and Killeen on the roster of employees. As a result of Genna's success, Killeen secured himself an introduction to Anthony Navarra, which facilitated Genna's rise in the Eastside Crew. Genna became the subsequent crew chief, having been personally appointed by Navarra. He had been inducted into the crime family, only several months prior.
In late April, tensions once again begun to boil over and Killeen was dispatched in a Mulholland car park. His body was found with two bullets to the back and one bullet to the head, with many in the underworld believing James "Jimmy" Genna to be the perpetrator. Chuck and Jimmy were allegedly in a dispute over a debt that had been collected by members of Jimmy's crew without authorisation, acting on his behalf. This action enraged the hot-headed Chuck and was considered egregious. Sit-downs were arranged, in vain, to avoid hostilities with the group's upper echelon that was repeatedly proven to not to be receptive. This mostly led by a defiant and confrontational Killeen. After a string of unsuccessful sit-downs, the order was given and Chuck was put to rest.
Killeen's body was found by first responders, roughly 45 minutes after the shooting. A local inhabitant of a nearby apartment complex had phoned the 911 dispatch about multiple shots being fired, nearby to their residence. Police and paramedics were dispatched to the general area, and during their preliminary investigation, they found Killeen, unresponsive and face down in a pool of his own blood. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The police later discovered that the CCTV cameras in the car park had been physically obscured, if not, outright disabled. His homicide is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by the Los Santos police, and state prison authorities are also involved to a limited extent.
Mickey Robinson, a Killeen loyalist and second-in-charge, ended all prospects of retaliation for Killeen's killing. This was done in order to preserve the group's business and criminal interests in Van Ness. Outmanned, outmatched and outgunned, retaliations were deemed to be reckless and rash. He begun to violently punish mere murmurs of revenge, and communications for retaliation against the Los Santos Crime Family were permanently put on hold.
The Rise and Fall of the Killeen Mob
In Los Santos, one Irish criminal group rose in the dust of the Westies, Winter Hill Gang and The Murray Syndicate. This criminal group was referred to as The Killeen Mob by the police and federal authorities. Founded by the late Charles Killeen and spearheaded by childhood partners in crime Nick Robinson and Luke Dillon, it soon became a staple in the Los Santos underworld. Contrasting deeply to the ways of yesteryear and pre-Prohibition, The Killeen Mob took a page out of the Westie's book and descended into a regime of profound ruthlessness and violence. Known for their abhorrent executions, violence and internal conflicts, they ruled over multiple Central and South Los Santos locations with a iron grip all the way up to late 2019.
Mickey Robinson oversaw the Killeen Mob's operations from the shadows, allowing his son Nick Robinson to follow in his footsteps and call the shots. Luke Dillon was a key figure in the expansion of the Killeen Mob's extensive criminal network, with James "The Conman" Conlon, Frank Lanahan, and Ryan Campbell working alongside him to establish a large-scale heroin and weapon trafficking ring, supplying street gangs and organised crime groups across Los Santos. The Killeen Mob maintained a reputation for being a ruthless force that were never afraid to get their hands dirty. Despite being a much smaller scale entity compared to the vast amount of organised crime groups that dominated Los Santos at the time, the group survived through a number of conflicts with much larger organisations such as Motorcycle Clubs and Serbian Crime Syndicates. Assasinations, kidnappings, and extortion are a few of the many activities to name which specific members of the Mob were known for.
The Killeen Mob operated for many months using businesses in the South Los Santos area to launder money and base their operations in, but inevitably crumbled due to deep internal struggles. There had been bad blood boiling between members for many years ever since the internal assasination of Mark Connolly, the former shotcaller, carried out by Luke Dillon and The Conman by order of Mickey Robinson. Mark's corpse was found late at night in a Downtown pub by a passerby, his head and chest riddled with bullets. This led to Mark's right hand man, Danny Burke, fleeing the state in fear for his life, and allowing Luke to claim their positions as a shotcaller. Since Mark's death, the Killeen Mob under Luke and Nick's leadership went through a number of additional internal strifes where most of the remaining pockets of the group found themselves either incarcerated, dead, or on the run. Decimated by police, and with no real hierarchy and intense infighting, the Irish had seen better days.
As of now, Luke Dillon, Nick Robinson, The Conman, and Frank Lanahan are among the few remaining members of the Killeen Mob who have retreated from the South to operate in silence, and have opened the door to a sparce group of new faces to take charge of their operations in Los Santos.
