Mo Gilligan said police tailed him with six cars and a helicopter after mistaking him for someone else. He discussed the stop on The Louis Theroux Podcast on Tuesday, 4 August, and said the episode felt like something out of Grand Theft Auto.
Gilligan said he would “never forget” the moment and described the helicopter arrival as, “Ooh, wow, this is a little bit exciting.” He added, “when the helicopter came, it was weird because obviously I hadn’t done anything,” which is the part that turns the story from an over-the-top stop into a bad assumption with real consequences for the person inside the vehicle.
Louis Theroux Podcast account
The account came from Gilligan’s own recollection, not a police statement. That matters because the story is built around how a routine suspicion escalated into six cars and a helicopter before the officers had the right person.
Gilligan said officers told him they believed his vehicle had been previously stolen. That belief proved incorrect, and some of the officers began to recognise him after he was pulled over.
Six cars and a helicopter
Once the officers knew who he was, Gilligan said, “And once they knew, everyone just scattered.” That is the sharpest operational detail in the story: the response collapsed as soon as the mistaken identity issue was cleared up.
The episode leaves one practical question hanging over the whole stop: what led officers to think the vehicle had been stolen in the first place? Gilligan has given the outcome and the correction, but not the trigger, and that missing step is what still defines the incident.
For Gilligan, the oddity is not just the scale of the response. It is that a helicopter was in the air while he was still processing what officers thought they had found, and the misunderstanding only ended when recognition replaced suspicion.
