The global dealer’s association with the IRA and Ireland came in the person of James Joseph McCann, an incorrigible, publicity-hungry con artist from Belfast. McCann, who was in many ways not dissimilar in character to Christy ‘Bronco’ Dunne, projected the public image of a revolutionary folk hero. ‘Just call me the Shamrock Pimpernel,’ he once commented in a magazine interview. But unlike Christy Dunne, McCann had managed to hoodwink the media, governments, police, courts, customs and intelligence agencies around the world.
Jim McCann hit the headlines in 1971 when he was the first inmate to escape from the Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast. He’d been imprisoned because he was caught throwing petrol bombs at Queen’s University for the benefit of the hippie magazine Friends. It was all part of a bizarre scam to con ex-Beatle John Lennon out of millions, by convincing him to support McCann’s ‘struggle’ for Irish freedom.
One of Marks’s associates, who worked at the magazine, reckoned McCann would be perfect for their plans to expand their hash business. Marks was introduced to McCann, who enthusiastically agreed to get involved. McCann helped Marks smuggle an estimated 15 tons of cannabis through Shannon Airport at various stages during the 1970s. The unpredictable ‘IRA’ man organized the collection of air freight carrying the hash, which he referred to as ‘nordle’, and Marks and his friends transported it back to England, hidden in cars and camper-vans.
No one suspected a thing until the early hours of the morning of 25 August 1979. Two uniformed Gardaí got a call about men acting suspiciously, at a lay-by near Kill, County Kildare. When the officers arrived to investigate, they found McCann and three others transferring boxes full of cans from a van into a container truck. During a scuffle McCann threatened the two cops at gunpoint. He was later arrested following a high-speed chase. At first the police assumed they had found a load of explosives and called in the bomb squad to carry out a controlled explosion on one of the cans. When it blew up, the air was filled with high quality, herbal cannabis. In all they found 890 lbs of Thai sticks. The Gardaí had just stumbled on to the biggest drug seizure in Irish history, and the arrest of the Shamrock Pimpernel made international headlines.
Drug Squad detectives recognized McCann from his many media interviews, although he wouldn’t give them his name. ‘My name is Mr Nobody, my address is the world, now fuck off,’ he replied with typical bravado. McCann and the other three men were charged with possession of drugs with intent to supply. The ‘Shamrock Pimpernel’ was also charged with possession of a handgun. McCann’s notorious reputation backfired on him when the court refused bail. Instead he was sent to Portlaoise Prison, as a high-risk remand prisoner. The ‘IRA’ man was naturally sent to the Provos wing of the prison, where he was at first warmly welcomed by his old comrades. But once the chancer had settled in, he was severely beaten by the Provos, using socks filled with billiard balls, for bringing the ‘good’ name of the organization into disrepute.
While awaiting his trial, McCann received a visit from one of his biggest fans, Christy Dunne. McCann was all Bronco wanted to be – a hell-raising international man of mystery. Bronco offered the Shamrock Pimpernel the services of his own international criminal organization, back in Dublin. But McCann, an accomplished con artist, spotted Dunne a mile off and politely turned down the offer. On the return journey to Dublin Dunne crashed his car and later contacted McCann, demanding that he pay for the damage. There was no further communication between the two villains.
In March 1980 McCann and two other defendants were acquitted, following legal argument about what constituted ‘possession’ of drugs under the existing legislation. McCann’s counsel also argued that no evidence had been produced to prove he’d had the gun. He left the court a free man and promptly vanished.
The huge publicity surrounding the McCann bust indirectly led to the discovery of another major international drug enterprise based in sleepy Ireland. Residents in the village of Knocklong, County Tipperary were shocked at the news that Ireland had become a ‘drug haven’. With so much talk about drugs, it was inevitable that people suddenly got suspicious about a number of Englishmen who’d moved into a rented farm house a year earlier. When they shared their suspicions with the local Gardaí, the Drug Squad in Dublin was called in to investigate. As a result they uncovered one of the biggest amphetamine manufacturing plants in Europe. They seized 160 kilos of the drug, known as ‘speed’, valued at £2.5 million. It was discovered that several consignments of the mind-altering drug had already been manufactured and smuggled back to London.
The operation was the brainchild of Londoner James Humphreys, who had once owned a sex empire in London’s Soho. Dubbed ‘the Emperor of Porn’, he was at the centre of a massive anti-corruption purge at Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad in 1977. Humphreys had agreed to testify against corrupt officers to whom he had been paying bribes, in return for his early release from prison, where he was serving seven years for GBH. As a result of his testimony, 48 senior policemen were jailed or forced to resign. When Humphreys finished cleaning up the ‘Met’ he decided to become a drug-trafficker. On 27 March 1977, just before his release from prison, the Thames Valley police Drug Squad had busted the most sophisticated drug manufacturing and distribution operation ever uncovered. In total ‘Operation Julie’ led to the seizure of 180 million ‘dots’ of LSD. The crime syndicate involved had been churning out an average of £20 million worth of ‘acid’ every year since 1970. As a direct result of Operation Julie there was a series of follow-up operations in several other countries and the worldwide supply of LSD was practically eliminated. Another synthetic substance, amphetamine, began to replace LSD on the streets and there was a huge, ready market for the stuff.
All Humphreys needed were a few good chemists, a laboratory and somewhere quiet to make the pills. He picked Knocklong because he reckoned no one would suss what he was up to, but then McCann and Marks indirectly scuppered his multi-million-pound plan. Three people were arrested and charged by the Drug Squad in 1979, including two English criminals who had been hired to make the drugs. The two Brits were tried and found not guilty by a jury. Local auctioneer Donie Ryan was the only person convicted in relation to the Tipperary operation. He got three years for aiding and abetting in the production and supply of a controlled substance. Humphries was never caught.
The McCann/Marks and Humphreys groups illustrated how easy it was to use Ireland as a major hub for international drug-trafficking and how, due to the ongoing turmoil, it was seen as a soft touch. The responsibility for the enforcement of the country’s outdated drug laws initially fell within the remit of the Special Branch. Apart from terrorism and subversion, the Branch dealt with immigration and aliens – and because drugs were associated with foreigners they got the job. At this stage, the Garda Síochána as an organization did not consider drugs to be a matter for criminal investigation, and abuse was universally seen as a health problem.
In the late 1960s, however, one young Special Branch detective, the legendary Dennis ‘Dinny’ Mullins, took a particular interest in the new phenomenon of drug abuse. While the Justice Minister of the day was confidently declaring that there was no drugs problem in the country, Mullins knew better. The Limerick man possessed a deep social conscience and would rather bring a young addict to hospital for help than to a Garda station on a drug charge.
Mullins, a Detective Sergeant since 1965, lobbied his bosses in the Special Branch for a unit to exclusively focus on drugs. He was eventually given three detectives and the unit later became the Drug Squad, situated in Dublin Castle. The Squad was then transferred to the Central Detective Unit (CDU) in the mid-1970s. The fact that the highest operational officer in the Drug Squad held the rank of Detective Sergeant and, in later years, Detective Inspector, was an illustration of where it stood in the pecking order of An Garda Síochána. The Garda Band and the Press Office each had a Garda Superintendent at the helm. A Detective Superintendent was not appointed to the Squad until the late 1980s.
The fact that the main players in both the McCann/Marks and Humphreys cases had managed to get away was a bitter experience for the small Garda Drug Squad, and in particular for their leader. Mullins could see the slow, inexorable drift towards widespread drug abuse from the late 1960s onwards, and warned anyone who would listen of the looming social catastrophe. The response from his superiors was largely one of indifference and he was the butt of jokes among colleagues. When callers phoned CDU looking for him they were often told ‘ould Dinny’s out looking for a bucket of morphine’. Before the 1980s no one in the police wanted to know about drugs, and the Drug Squad didn’t even have enough basic resources to operate properly.
When the Dunnes discovered heroin, everything changed; Mullins and his successor, John McGroarty, were given the job of putting them out of business. McGroarty replaced Dinny Mullins as the officer in charge of the Drug Squad in 1983. Former Chief Superintendent McGroarty retired from the Gardaí in 2000. He recently recalled how the drug problem took hold: ‘The Drug Squad was set up in response to community concerns after the media highlighted how individuals, who came back from England with addiction problems, started breaking into pharmacies and chemist shops stealing drugs to supply their habits. When these people were arrested they were often found to be in the possession of other controlled substances as well, not necessarily substances supplied by chemists but other illegal substances such as heroin and cocaine. In the beginning the drugs problem was harmless enough in Ireland and was largely ignored. Special Branch got the job because drugs were deemed to be something foreign, nothing to do with Ireland or Irish society. For several years all investigations were carried out under the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1934, an ancient piece of legislation, which was very cumbersome and not suited for modern policing.’
Drafting new legislation to deal with the drug problem was also one of the casualties of the Government’s preoccupation with subversion. A new Misuse of Drugs Act which was drafted in 1977 was not made law until 1979. By the time heroin hit the streets it was too late for the Irish authorities to do anything other than play catch up.
It was against this bleak backdrop of terrorism, social and economic problems and the authorities’ indifference that the second decade of organized crime was about to dawn. According to a newspaper article at the time, crime was the boom industry of the 1970s. Gross turnover was up by 500 per cent; productivity in operational terms was up 300 per cent; operational failure rates had dropped from 70 per cent to 40 per cent. These statistics would have been welcomed with delight if Gangland Inc. had had the equivalent of a corporate board.
Official Garda figures had recorded upwards of 2,000 incidents involving the use of firearms during the decade and that did not include shooting incidents in Border areas. In a special news feature in the Irish Times, in December 1979, the paper’s security correspondent and future editor, Conor Brady, asked a question that is still being asked in 2011 – why had it happened? He gave three reasons: the spill over of crime from the North, with crimes committed by republicans on the run in the South; a strong ‘imitative trend’ as local criminals adopted the methods of the ‘people from the North’; and the ‘substantial reduction of Garda strength and effort’ in the South, as attentions were switched to the Border.
Conor Brady rather prophetically wrote: ‘As we face into the 1980s one of the challenges facing the community is what it will do about crime and violence. The belief, widely held in some circles, that the problem will abate if and when the North settles down, is ill-founded. It is only partially a product of problems across the border and much more substantially one of our own making here in the South.’
PART TWO
The 1980s
7. The Human Wasteland
James ‘Jem’ Dixon stared blankly out from two dark caverns in a withered, jaundiced face, etched with pain. A mutilated stump was all that remained of his right leg and the index finger of his left hand was missing. The decaying shell of a once tall, fit man sat slumped in an armchair, in a corner of his inner-city flat, waiting for death – and a release from his living hell. Dixon, like thousands of others, had fallen victim to the heroin plague unleashed by the Dunnes. The family’s discovery of an easier, more profitable way of making dirty money had cost Jem his life. It was the summer of 1994 and the 41-year-old heroin addict and former pusher was dying from AIDS.
The story of Jem Dixon’s life epitomizes the legacy of the underworld’s move into hard drugs. He agreed to be interviewed for a newspaper feature which focused on the heroin scourge, 14 years after it had first taken hold. Jem was one of the last surviving members of a family wiped out by the ‘smack’ epidemic which struck Dublin like a tidal wave as the new decade dawned. The deadly drug first took a stranglehold on inner-city communities on the south-side of Dublin.
In the Liberties, South Dublin’s oldest area, Eddie Naughton got involved in anti-drug campaigns when the heroin plague came to his door and claimed his daughter: ‘When one of your children becomes a heroin addict the family just implodes, it isn’t as if it’s a sickness like cancer. People feeding a heroin habit get up in the morning and all they think about for the rest of the day is where are they going to get a fix. The world then just becomes a resource. The family is another resource for how they’re going to get that fix. Nothing is safe in the house, pockets are picked, jewellery is stolen, and anything of value that can’t be nailed down is taken and sold. We went through that hell with her for eight years but thank God our girl got through and turned her life around. But we were the fortunate ones; a lot of other families weren’t so lucky.’
Just over a year later, in 1981, the drug-pushers hit the streets of the north side of the River Liffey, and heroin addiction took over with the same incredible speed. It feasted on the ingrained misery of high unemployment and a lack of opportunity, in a section of society that had been left to its own devices and conveniently forgotten by the Establishment. It was more than a coincidence that, fifty years earlier, ground zero for this new social calamity was also home to the worst tenement squalor in Europe.
In 1972, Father Paul Lavelle had been ordained as a priest and sent as a curate to Our Lady of Lourdes parish church in Sean McDermott Street. Fr Lavelle had no doubt why the inner-city was an ideal breeding ground for the plague: ‘There was little opportunity for education and the standard of the local primary school, which was called the red brick slaughter house, was just awful, in spite of some wonderful teachers. So the children didn’t get an opportunity to go further than primary school. Secondary school or university was just out of the question.’
The heroin epidemic brought devastation and despair on a scale never seen before in Ireland. It led to an unprecedented wave of crime, disease and death, creating a human wasteland, strewn with the debris of young, broken lives. Its tentacles then spread out to infect the poorly planned, working-class sprawls on the city’s edge, places like the grim Ballymun tower blocks. And then the aftershock arrived – in the form of HIV/AIDS from the sharing of dirty, blood-filled needles. While there was a chance of surviving heroin addiction, AIDS was a death sentence.
Jem Dixon and his family were among the Dunnes’ first clients. They were quickly addicted and, in order to feed their voracious habits, became notorious pushers. Jem and his brothers openly plied their trade on the streets of the north inner-city. In the early 1980s his brother Michael, nicknamed ‘Snake’, was exposed on the front page of a Sunday newspaper. He had been photographed selling heroin to two undercover reporters. The deal was done in the middle of the day, outside the GPO in Dublin’s O’Connell Street – the building synonymous with the fight for a free, better Ireland. The story caused a temporary public outcry, but the authorities continued to ignore the problem. By 1994, Jem Dixon’s family had long since been surpassed by a new generation of drug-pushers trying to feed their habits.
Dixon’s harrowing story reflected the life of thousands of other young addicts. Jem became involved in petty crime at a very y
oung age and was punished with sentences in the industrial/reform schools. He was a 27-year-old thief when he first tried ‘smack’ in 1981.
‘My brother Noel was injecting himself, along with a mate upstairs in a house in Matt Talbot Court and I said: “Give us a try at that to see what it does.” I was hooked almost immediately and have been using ever since then. I felt like I hadn’t a worry in the world when I took it. I was robbing at the time I took the heroin so I had plenty of money to buy stuff for a while. None of us knew fuck all about what smack could do to us and we shared needles with no worries about HIV,’ he recalled, dragging on the butt of a rolled-up cigarette, held between skeletal fingers.
In 1985 he was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS – or ‘the virus’: ‘Even then we didn’t know much about what could happen to us when we got the virus. I knew of one bloke up in Mountjoy who got a syringe-full of blood from another bloke who had it. He injected it into himself so that he would be diagnosed [HIV positive] and then put in the segregation unit and probably get early release … the poor gobshite is now dying as well.’
To make matters worse Dixon used a dirty needle on the wrong blood vein and gangrene set in. Surgeons cut 20 inches off his right leg. Then he injected himself with a dirty needle in the hand and doctors had to amputate his left index finger. Every part of his arms, leg and groin were marked with black and blue sores where practically every vein had broken down from continuously injecting himself. When we met Jem he was taking the medically prescribed heroin substitute physeptone to feed his maniacal craving. But even then, despite all he had been through, he was still injecting the odd fix of heroin through a vein he’d managed to find in the stump of his leg. By then, heroin and AIDS had already wiped out the rest of his family.
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