Badfellas

by Paul Williams

  In 1986, his brother Snake’s wife died of an overdose, while she cradled her two-month-old baby in her arms. Five years later, Jem’s brother-in-law, Thomas Curran, died from ‘the virus’. The following year his sister Ellen, Curran’s wife, and his brother Snake, both addicts in their early thirties, also succumbed to what the singer Prince referred to as ‘the big disease with a little name’. A month later, another brother, Noel, followed them to the cemetery. He died when his head was smashed open with a hammer in a row over a heroin deal.

  ‘Most of my family and friends are dead … I’ve been to about 30 funerals and I know that I’ll be going to me own soon. If I see 45 then I’ll be doing damn good; but I don’t really care because since the day I was born life has been a pure disaster for me,’ Jem reflected.

  Dixon claimed that he had tried to educate other kids about the dangers of heroin. A picture of his shocking appearance, which accompanied the news feature, was enough to get the point across: ‘I have fuck all sympathy for some of the youngsters who are on the gear today because they know what damage it can do and all about AIDS. But there is nothing for youngsters to do in these places except rob or steal. They get into serious drugs because they are constantly looking for a way out of the depression of the place. Things are going to get a lot worse in this town because there is little hope and no work for anyone … in a way I’m glad I don’t have much longer left.’

  In December 1995 Jem Dixon joined the rest of his family in the graveyard.

  At the junction of Sean McDermott Street and Buckingham Street stands a sculpture of gilded bronze and limestone. It looks like a war memorial, but it is dedicated to the fallen from a different type of struggle. Simply called ‘Home’, it is a poignant reminder of the hundreds of young people from the local area, including the Dixons, who died as a result of the heroin plague.

  The site of the memorial was a centre for drug-dealing in the early 1980s. Larry Dunne’s lackeys used to drop off batches of heroin for the pushers to sell in the warren of surrounding streets. ‘Home’ stands as an eight-foot flame, housed in a limestone structure – a public acknowledgement of the grief still felt by the dead addicts’ surviving loved ones. When the flame was smelted, relatives of the dead dropped cherished little mementoes into the molten metal – confirmation and communion medals and little toys from a distant childhood, a time of innocence before the heroin came. At its base are the simple words dedicating the memorial to ‘Loved ones carried off by the plague’. The sculpture was unveiled in December 2000 by the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, at a deeply emotional ceremony, attended by hundreds of relatives. President McAleese told the gathering that the sculpture was a reminder of the ‘tragic consequences, when a problem such as drugs is neglected’.

  In Dublin’s north inner-city, many of the older generation divide the history of the past fifty years into two distinct periods – life before the heroin came, and the nightmare that followed. Before the drug scourge life was already hard, with high rates of unemployment when the docks closed down. But the drug problem infected and corroded the fabric of the communities where it was sold. The plague had no regard for the traditional values that had held deprived communities together through the worst times of poverty and hardship – especially respect for their neighbours. Criminals had been accepted as part of the community as long as they didn’t rob their own. But when heroin arrived communities were torn apart as young addicts stole anything of value they could find in the home to raise cash to buy drugs. They also targeted relations and neighbours. Violence was regularly used and sometimes people died. The plague spared no one. It caused bitter recriminations between families who had lived in harmony and stuck together during previous hard times.

  As the plague spread door-to-door, soon practically everyone had a relative who was an addict. As younger kids grew up they too were sucked into this dark vortex of despair. And then the young addicts began having children. Hundreds of babies were on a loser from the moment of birth – inheriting HIV and a craving for heroin from their mothers. Once during the late 1980s, this writer interviewed a couple who were heroin addicts. I watched as they helped inject each other in the kitchen, while their three children, including a new-born baby, were left to their own devices in the sparsely furnished living-room. Pushers used their children to hide their drugs and even to deliver them for them. One notorious dealer, Tony Felloni, gave his son a fix to celebrate his fifteenth birthday.

  Heroin created a health crisis across the city, as kids as young as 12 and 13 became enslaved to the elusive buzz. Apart from AIDS, addicts could contract diseases such as hepatitis and other infections, from using and sharing dirty needles. They died as a result of overdoses, contaminated ‘gear’ and suicide, when the sense of despair became too much.

  Less than two years after heroin arrived in the streets of the north inner-city, the rate of drug abuse among teenagers and young adults was proportionately higher than in New York’s notorious heroin wasteland, Harlem. The army of addicts resembled zombies. They were half-dead, mindless creatures with only one reason for living – getting ‘fixed-up’. To feed their habit an addict needed the equivalent of an average industrial week’s wages, each day. This meant a junkie had to steal and rob every day of the year, creating a predictable pattern of life. When a junkie wasn’t stoned he was on the ‘mooch’. Their time was divided between police stations and the courts and broken with spells in prison – where it was easy to get heroin.

  Inevitably the growing number of addicts led to an unprecedented upsurge in street crime. Burglaries, muggings and ‘jump-over’ robberies in local shops and businesses became a part of everyday life. When AIDS arrived, the addicts found that they had a ready-made weapon which was as terrifying as a loaded gun – a syringe filled with their own blood. Young women and men also sold their bodies for sex on street corners. Drug addicts became the new underclass in Gangland’s social structure. Junkies could be manipulated into doing the gangsters’ dirty work in return for the price of a ‘fix’. Heroin changed the underworld landscape for ever.

  As a young community activist Mick Rafferty, who came from the same area as the Dixons, witnessed the tidal wave at first hand: ‘The heroin problem just swept through the area like a prairie fire and we were all shocked. I think the reason it happened so quick was because the people knew and, in some sense, trusted the dealers. There was a culture of acceptance of criminality in the inner-city, and once the main criminals turned to drug-dealing there was a sense that this must be okay, if they say it’s okay. These were very vulnerable kids who were effectively losing their childhood and they didn’t know what they were taking. The values that we always pushed in our communities was respect, but that respect went out the window, because the heroin addicts would do anything for a fix. So a mother could come home in the evening and find her TV gone. An elderly woman could have her head smashed in for the few pounds in her purse. Then AIDS came and added to the misery.’

  When AIDS arrived in the wake of the heroin epidemic, Father Paul Lavelle officiated at the funerals of its victims: ‘About 60 per cent [of drug addicts] became infected and I’d say most, if not all, of them have passed on because of AIDS. They were young, they were in their twenties; some were married. There’s quite a lot of AIDS orphans around the place. For many of them getting HIV was just another part of the agenda of life; no school, no work, poor housing – into drugs, HIV, AIDS – pretty pathetic.’

  Anti-drugs campaigner Eddie Naughton wrote a powerful novel, bluntly titled Thank God Life Doesn’t Go On Forever, that was based on the realities of life in an inner-city community, besieged by drug-pushers. He recalled: ‘I remember a local woman, whose three young children died from AIDS in their late teens, saying to my wife “thank God life doesn’t go on forever, there has to be something better than this”. She and her husband spent their middle years going between police stations, hospital wards, courts and counselling sessions until they were worn out. At the same time t
hey buried their children one-by-one. This is what the drug culture and the drug-dealers have bequeathed, people in such despair that their only glimmer of hope is that the next life might be better.

  ‘My most vivid recollection of the ’80s and ’90s living in this area is the funerals; attending funerals, seeing funerals, it was like there was a conveyor belt of coffins coming through the doors of our local church on Meath Street. You would see horse-drawn carriages, limousines and just ordinary funerals; poverty-stricken people who could barely afford it, burying their children. And behind the coffins you saw the procession of the friends of the dead, all of their faces with the same deathly pallor of the heroin addict, and wondered which one of them would be next. The kids who died were mostly between the ages of 15 and 25. If you lived to 25 you were doing well. At the time I don’t think there was anyone in the Liberties area who didn’t know somebody that was dying or [had] died of AIDS, or didn’t know somebody who was heavily into drugs. It was the same in every working-class community across the city. When the criminals decided to get involved in drugs the first people they destroyed were their own.’

  When heroin first struck the north inner-city, former Det. Supt Mick Finn had been attached to the local station at Store Street for almost twenty years. He had earned the respect of the local people and was known as a ‘good copper’, a relationship which was rare in the tougher neighbourhoods. Finn witnessed how the problem overwhelmed the police on his beat as hundreds of drug-pushers and addicts from all over the city began congregating around O’Connell Street and turned it into an open heroin market. He eventually took charge of one of the first permanent drug units outside the Drug Squad to tackle the heroin crime problem, and arrested Jem Dixon many times.

  ‘The introduction of heroin brought devastation to the people who lived in the poorer areas. It became a great scourge in the north inner-city where I worked and it happened very quietly and very quickly,’ Finn recalled. The prevailing policing philosophy was to treat crimes as individual one-off incidents. There was no room for long-term planning or strategy to prevent crime. The bulk of personnel and intelligence resources were still geared towards the Troubles.

  ‘Many of the first people I saw using heroin had been incarcerated in institutions such as Daingean or Letterfrack or Upton and we didn’t realize for a long number of years later what had happened to the children in those places. It had a major effect on how they led their lives after. Most of the addicts were unemployed and had been involved in petty crime. The area was socially deprived and perhaps for them the heroin was a form of escape. Over a period of time you could see the deterioration in the people using the heroin and their families, particularly their parents. And you see them every day hanging round waiting to buy or scrounge what they could off some other addict. There was a lot of fear both within families and on the streets, as people resorted to violence to rob money for drugs. It was a catastrophe.’

  If heroin exposed the weaknesses within a dysfunctional society, then the reaction from the Government in the early 1980s highlighted an attitude of indifference. As long as the problem was contained within certain working-class areas and didn’t seep into middle-class society, it was not considered a crisis. Drug addiction was still viewed as a personal choice and a medical issue. It would take years before any meaningful efforts were made to tackle its social roots.

  The laws were also hopelessly out of date and the courts were being far too lenient with the big players. When the Dunnes were recruiting and enslaving the likes of the Dixons, John McGroarty was a senior detective in the small Drug Squad. He recalled: ‘The politicians just didn’t grasp what was happening: this was a fire that had just started downstairs and they’re thinking that somebody will put it out and it will go away but that’s not what happened. We suddenly had an epidemic of street crime as a result of the heroin epidemic. We had to put a lot of pressure on to get additional, more effective legislation and to increase the strength of the various drug units to take on the suppliers. But by then the drug problem was too well established to be eradicated.’

  As the heroin plague seeped further into working-class areas across Dublin there was a commensurate improvement in the balance sheets of the Dunne family. Each batch of heroin they supplied created even more demand – and more profit. The family did not all become involved simultaneously, and neither did they operate together as a single organization. Serious cracks had already emerged in the ranks of the once-united clan and at the start of the decade they were going in their own directions. Shamie and Larry had separate international contacts and smuggling routes. They each had their own customers in the family and individually supplied Henry, Robert, Boyo, Charlie, Mickey, Collette and Gerard. These siblings in turn carved out their own drug patches, on both sides of the Liffey. Christy didn’t get into the heroin trade and contented himself with importing hash.

  The other family members supported one another by lending each other money and supplementing supplies after a Drug Squad bust. The Dunnes made full use of their fearful reputations for violence when it came to collecting money. If customers didn’t pay up they were severely beaten and their lives were threatened. Larry and Shamie also sold heroin at wholesale prices to new dealers who began to emerge – criminals who were also looking for the easy money and wanted to set up their own operations. Drugs were sold openly in the flat complexes and in the streets. People of all ages, including 12-year-old kids and old-age pensioners, were being used to deliver the ‘gear’. The infamous Jetfoil pub, owned by Martin Cahill and John Traynor, became a notorious hub for dealing. Very quickly an elaborate distribution network was established that stretched from Bray, County Wicklow up to Ballymun in North Dublin. This was the genesis of the criminal drug rackets in Ireland.

  The people blamed the Dunnes and their army of dealers for the horror that completely demoralized a generation of people, but the family’s legendary ability to rationalize their behaviour meant that they could easily detach themselves from the devastation they were causing. Anti-drugs campaigner Mick Rafferty recalls: ‘I remember a meeting I was chairing in Rutland Street, and Larry Dunne stood beside me, to intimidate me, and he said “I’ve been accused of this, sure you all know me, I’ve only done good for the community”.’

  The Dunnes simply ignored the fact that they had introduced a new layer of misery into the lives of the already hard-pressed working classes. The family were allowed to blame society for not giving them a chance in life and turning them into criminals, but the same logic did not apply to their growing army of customers. As Mick Rafferty remembers it: ‘They [The Dunnes] were a deprived family – we could argue about deprivation and criminality – and they got involved in crime, and crime can begin in working-class areas out of a sense of a need, but greed takes over, and the Dunnes introduced heroin into our communities …’ The prodigious profits the Dunnes were suddenly making were all they cared about – and if the addicts could pay.

  Within two years, the Dunnes were credited with controlling at least 50 per cent of the heroin trade in Dublin. Garda intelligence reports identified a total of 170 people involved in the entire Dunne network, 40 of whom were at the core of operations. As street crime spiralled, the Dunnes were also being paid for drugs with jewellery and other valuables stolen in thousands of burglaries. They were then fenced through separate networks in Ireland and the UK. Like armed robberies, the drug trade had created its own subsidiary industries.

  The Drug Squad had an early break when they nabbed the main man, Larry Dunne. Larry was a fitness fanatic and was always immaculately groomed, wearing only Italian designer suits and shoes. His arrogance and a tendency to underestimate the police had brought about his downfall – he got sloppy. He had also developed a drug problem but didn’t realize it himself – neither did his brothers, associates or the Gardaí. He picked up the habit by snorting tiny amounts of the drug to test the quality.

  On 13 October 1980, Shamie Dunne took delivery of a consignment of
heroin from their London-Irish partner in crime, Pat O’Sullivan. The Drug Squad picked up the information on Shamie’s phone and knew that he was arranging a meeting with Larry in the car park at the Burlington Hotel. At the last minute the venue was changed to Larry’s house in Carrickmount Drive in Rathfarnham, South Dublin. John McGroarty got a search warrant and mobilized his team. At the same time Detective Garda Felix McKenna, who was attached to the Tallaght District Detective Unit (DDU), was investigating the armed robbery of £117,000 worth of jewellery from the home of Dominic Cafolla in Clonskeagh that September. The Dunnes and the Cahills were the prime suspects. Det. Gda McKenna had been a key member of Ned Ryan’s Flying Squad in the CDU. Over the following 25 years McKenna would be a constant thorn in the side of organized crime gangs. The Tallaght cops got a warrant that evening and also headed to Carrickmount Drive.

  Shamie and his sister Collette Dunne arrived at Larry’s house around 7 p.m. Larry, his wife Lilly and a third man were waiting for them to arrive with the drugs. A short time later the Gardaí from Tallaght arrived to search the house. When Larry answered his door a member of McKenna’s team presented him with a search warrant and told him they were looking for stolen jewellery. As Larry read the warrant, his hands started to tremble and his face went pale. When McKenna searched upstairs, he found 70 grams of uncut heroin hidden in a pillow in a child’s bedroom. The detectives also found 30 grams of cocaine, a small amount of hashish and a set of laboratory scales. The haul, worth £60,000 (over €300,000 in today’s values), was considered a major seizure. Larry, Shamie, Collette and Lilly Dunne were arrested and brought to Rathfarnham Garda Station for questioning.