The Drug Squad had arrived at the house during the raid, so when the suspects were released without charge on the Cafolla robbery, McGroarty re-arrested them for the drug seizure. The four Dunnes were then charged under the Misuse of Drugs Act and later released on bail. The charges against Shamie and Lilly, however, were dropped by the DPP and the Drug Squad was instructed to return £3,000 in cash they had seized from Shamie during the raid. Collette Dunne was convicted a year later for possession of drugs and weighing scales which were found in her car when it was searched at Carrickmount – she was jailed for two years.
Larry was in a state of shock after the bust. Thanks to his complacency, he was facing a serious charge of possession of drugs with intent to supply – and the likelihood of a long stretch in prison. It also sent shockwaves through the family network, who began to suspect there was a spy in their midst. The home of a neighbour in Carrickmount Drive, who was suspected of tipping off the police, was petrol-bombed. But Larry quickly regained his composure and confidently predicted that he was not going down and it didn’t matter what he had to do to achieve that.
In the meantime he made full use of the archaic justice system to build a criminal empire. The courts were dreadfully slow in processing trials and were lenient in granting bail. In the average two-year period that it took cases to come to trial, the dealers and pushers were free to ply their trade and build up a nest egg. That’s exactly what Larry planned to do. The bust had also taught him one essential lesson about drug-trafficking – he had to insulate himself from his merchandise by staying strictly hands-off. His catch phrase after the bust was ‘Larry doesn’t carry’.
In May 1981, a Drugs Intelligence Investigation Unit (DIIU), consisting of less than a dozen detectives, was set up at Garda HQ. The purpose of the new unit was to carry out undercover work and gather intelligence on the movement of drugs and the criminals involved. The unit would also back up the Drug Squad, which still had just 20 personnel. Dinny Mullins and John McGroarty had repeatedly asked for a major increase in Drug Squad numbers but had been turned down each time. One member of Garda management once told McGroarty that if they doubled the size of the squad, then they would double the number of drug arrests. More arrests would signify a drug problem. The Gardaí didn’t need another problem.
The apparent lack of enthusiasm for a co-ordinated, focused approach to narcotics-trafficking on the part of management continued throughout the early 1980s. But despite poor resources and little support, the dedicated Drug Squad did try to take on the drug-dealers. In one initiative, a group of young officers based in city-centre stations set up an undercover unit that became known as the ‘Mockeys’. The modus operandi of the Dublin-born cops was to work undercover on the streets, among the junkies and their dealers. The revolutionary approach, however, was viewed with suspicion and disapproval by the police hierarchy, who saw such methods as gimmicky and continued to largely ignore the growing epidemic.
By the beginning of 1982 there were an estimated 5,000 heroin addicts in the city, but this was a conservative figure because there were no adequate treatment centres available to record the true extent of the crisis. The Catholic Church had also become gravely concerned at the speed with which the heroin plague had taken hold. In April 1982, Fr Paul Lavelle invited Monsignor William O’Brien, who ran one of the world’s biggest drug rehabilitation centres in New York, to visit Dublin. Monsignor O’Brien was stunned by what Fr Lavelle showed him. The pre-adolescent heroin problem was the worst he had seen and the strength of the heroin doses being sold was double the average on sale in most other countries.
The drug problem became so big that it could no longer be ignored by the Government. A young community activist and secondary-school teacher called Tony Gregory ensured that it was brought to their attention. Born in Ballybough, in the north inner-city, Gregory had been involved with Official Sinn Féin, and briefly the IRSP, before becoming an independent socialist politician. Mick Rafferty was a life-long ally and friend. Gregory was first elected as a TD for the area in February 1982 – a seat he held until his death in 2009. He fought his campaign on a promise to tackle the inner-city’s chronic social issues, including poverty and drugs. In return for his support for Charles Haughey’s minority Fianna Fáil Government, a £100 million package for the inner-city was agreed in the ‘Gregory deal’.
In May 1982, the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, and the Minister for Justice, Sean Doherty, called a meeting with Garda Commissioner Patrick McLaughlin and his deputy and assistant commissioners in Government Buildings. There were only two items on the agenda – drugs and the Dunnes. Haughey said he had never heard of the family and was unaware of the extent of the drug problem in the city until Tony Gregory told him. Of particular concern was Gregory’s claim that the local people knew who was dealing and when drops were taking place. Gregory told Haughey the local police had little understanding of the problem and, when information was passed on, there were few arrests. Haughey bluntly told the officers that he wanted the Dunnes put out of business and he would provide whatever resources were necessary. The Taoiseach said he wanted them all behind bars within 12 months.
The Gardaí had already dramatically increased their surveillance, both overt and covert, on the Dunnes and their associates. But their efforts gained momentum once the Taoiseach got involved. Shamie, who was normally cordial and friendly to the cops, went berserk and took a hatchet to detectives on one occasion when they were searching his house on Herberton Road in Rialto. He had been raided at least twenty times in less than two years and the pressure was getting to him. He was charged with assault and obstruction and picked up an 18-month suspended sentence. Shamie was a gregarious character and, like most of his other brothers, a ferocious womanizer. He’d left his English wife, Valerie, in 1978 and moved into a luxury apartment in Rathmines with Fiona O’Sullivan, a lover half his age. He could not read or write and was spectacularly vulgar. Shamie also had a fatal flaw for a gangster – he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
The Drug Squad placed taps on all the phones known to be used by the Dunnes. One former member of the squad still laughs today when he recalls Shamie’s attempts to pass coded messages to associates on the phone: ‘If he was giving someone another telephone number to ring, Shamie would call out individual numbers to the person at the other end. After each digit he would tell the other party on the line to add one or subtract one from it to get the real number – it didn’t dawn on him that we could add and subtract as well.’
But by then the heroin trade had taken root and the Dunnes weren’t the only suppliers. Many other dealers were getting involved and the situation had reached crisis point. People in the worst-affected areas decided it was time for them to take action.
Gregory’s election initially gave the local people the confidence that they could do something about the misery, but little changed. The sense of shock and hopelessness in the communities hardest hit by heroin soon turned to rage. They were sick of the open dealing in their streets and the sight of addicts shooting up in the stairwells of the flats in front of their children. In the playgrounds and open areas, children were playing with syringes dumped by the junkies. As a consequence of the appalling crisis, and a total lack of effective State intervention, the residents of the worst-hit areas banded together in 1983 under the banner of the Concerned Parents Against Drugs (CPAD).
At first residents held meetings to discuss the problem; then they began to take action. Eddie Naughton became deeply involved in the CPAD in South Dublin. He recalls: ‘There was widespread frustration right across the neighbourhoods and I think people just lost faith. I believe that the indifference of the police to the problem gave rise to the Concerned Parents. If the police had been on the ball there never would have been a need for the Concerned Parents.’
The CPAD took to the streets and marched, in large numbers, on the homes of known drug-dealers and evicted them. Drug addicts and pushers were summoned to mass meetings where they were confronte
d about their activities by the local community. Over time the tactic of marching on drug-dealers began to work, and they moved to other areas where the CPAD had not yet been mobilized. The protests rekindled community spirit and boosted people’s morale. At night, men patrolled flat complexes and housing estates and set up road blocks, to prevent the addicts and dealers getting through. Several dealers and addicts were literally thrown out on the streets by the marchers. Faced with such people power, the pushers could no longer threaten or intimidate objectors with impunity.
Members of Sinn Féin and the IRA became involved and soon controlled the organization from behind the scenes. Many of their members came from the affected areas and genuinely wanted to do something about the appalling situation. The republican movement also saw the CPAD’s war on drugs as an opportunity to build a political powerbase in Dublin’s working-class areas, where traditionally they’d had no support. The presence of the terrorists in the shadows deterred the drug-dealers from taking action.
But the republicans encouraged the CPAD not to co-operate with the police, and deliberately worked to turn the communities against them. In Finglas in north-west Dublin, Brian Whelan was a dedicated community activist who wanted to do something about the spiralling drug crisis, but he was dismayed by this hidden agenda.
‘The people who controlled the Concerned Parents [Sinn Féin/IRA] used it to push their agenda of further undermining the relationship between the people and the police. At every meeting their mantra was don’t go to the Gardaí, the Gardaí are corrupt, the Gardaí are in league with the drug-pushers. It was reminding the children who were listening to this stuff at the meetings that the police were as bad as the drug-dealers. In reality the republicans were using the drug issue to control whole communities,’ he recalled.
Some of the patriotic Provos saw another benefit of their involvement in the anti-drug movement – the chance to make money for ‘the cause’ and for themselves. Selected dealers were secretly given ‘permission’ to continue plying their trade in certain areas, in return for financial ‘contributions’.
Eddie Naughton was a witness to this corruption: ‘There were good people who joined the Concerned Parents but sinister elements, members of the republican movement, saw it as an opportunity to set up an alternative police force and controlled it for their own reasons. And people were going along with that but it was bound to fail. It soon became apparent that addicts were being beaten up for their money. After a while it was obvious that the organization was being drawn away from focusing on the people who were really doing the dealing, the major players in the area. It was a known fact around the area where I live that criminals of every hue were called in and they were told to pay a revolutionary tax to the Provos and those who didn’t were shot. They weren’t shot for dealing drugs. They were shot because they wouldn’t pay up. And the Guards did nothing about it.’
Brian Whelan recalled: ‘I was at the first meetings of the CPAD when it was set up in Hardwicke Street and I joined because a lot of good people were involved. At first there was tremendous work done on the ground and people started to reclaim their communities. But over time it became obvious that the people were being manipulated and exploited by well-known republicans and the only people being taken on were addicts or as they called them, “low-life junkies”. I think the word scumbag was their favourite term of reference.
‘But people began to notice that no major drug supplier was ever affected by the Concerned Parents, under the stewardship of the Provisional IRA. My suspicions were confirmed one night during a public meeting in a community centre in Finglas. I was in a toilet when a leading member of the IRA came in with a few local, petty criminals who were dabbling in the drug trade. He offered them a deal: stop joyriding in the area, stop breaking into houses and you can run the business of hash and Es. A weekly “tax” was to be paid over in return and as long as they stuck to the agreement no one would get hurt. That day those drug-pushers hit the big time because they had no worries about being marched on or targeted by the IRA. After that I left the organization with a sense of hopelessness. The ordinary people were being used and abused by everyone – the drug-dealers, the State, the Provos.’
The heroin plague had become a permanent feature of life thanks to the Dunnes and their army of dealers. But their days as the princes of the city’s drug trade were numbered.
8. Going Down
Larry Dunne’s wife, Lilly, had little empathy for the people impaling themselves on needles and shooting her husband’s heroin into their veins. As far as she was concerned, her family weren’t responsible. The junkies had no one to blame for their perilous predicament but themselves. They took drugs because they wanted to – no one forced them to do it. And Lilly had no difficulty sharing the family’s viewpoint with anyone who had the bottle to ask.
When RTÉ reporter Brendan O’Brien door-stepped Lilly to get an interview, she dismissed his awkward questions: ‘The drug-pushers don’t go round beatin’ people to buy it [heroin]; that’s a choice of their own,’ she said, in a tone that suggested this was so obvious that it didn’t merit any further discussion. ‘I wouldn’t say Larry went about beatin’ people to buy it.’
On 1 December 1983, O’Brien’s uninvited intrusion into Lilly’s detached world featured during a two-hour special investigation by the current affairs programme Today Tonight. The programme focused on the drugs trade and the growing culture of organized crime it had created. It also featured CPAD meetings and marches, including one that had been held outside Lilly’s home a few weeks earlier. It was the first time that the drug crisis, and the involvement of the Dunnes, had been given such prominence by the national broadcaster.
By the time the programme was broadcast, the Dunne empire was in a steady decline and the underworld notoriety they’d once craved had turned them into the most hated criminals in history. Six months earlier Larry had done a runner from the Circuit Criminal Court, just before a jury returned to convict him on the Carrickmount Drive drug charges. His picture had been splashed across the front page of every newspaper, as the drug-dealer who’d brought the heroin plague to Ireland.
When he’d vanished in June 1983, Lilly had faced the press with the same characteristic Dunne bluster. ‘Larry is well away by now. I hope he stays away. I have no idea where he is now. But wherever he is he should stay away – it’s better than being locked up in jail,’ she told an Irish Press journalist.
Lilly was equally unrepentant when the RTÉ men arrived at her door. When O’Brien asked her about her husband’s reputation as the country’s biggest heroin-trafficker, she side-stepped the issue: ‘He has always been a kind gentleman and a loving father; he’s never done us any harm,’ she declared defensively.
‘But the drug he was selling was doing people a lot of harm?’ the journalist asked.
‘Well, I’m only concerned about my family,’ she replied.
Lilly was a disciple of the Dunne family doctrine, that they were blameless victims of an orchestrated conspiracy.
The Dunnes never saw themselves as bad guys – they were merely trying to get by in a cruel world where the game was always loaded against them. Larry and Shamie easily rationalized why they sold drugs: ‘If I didn’t do it someone else would; I don’t force them to buy it,’ Larry was once reported to have told an associate. In the early 1990s this writer caught up with Shamie, who was living in what he described as a self-imposed exile in London. The illiterate drug-dealer pointed out the health warning on the back of a pack of cigarettes he was smoking. ‘Look at that,’ he said, as he held the box upside down. ‘They [the Government] say that these are bad for you but the people who sell them aren’t criminals. More people die from lung cancer than drugs, so what’s the difference? It’s all right because respectable people are making money from it. It [heroin] is a commodity and if people want to take it that’s their problem. There was heroin around before we became involved.’
In December 1983, however, the family was
running out of road. The cops had declared war on them and were winning hands down. Henry, Mickey, their sister Collette and Shamie’s wife, Valerie, were all behind bars, doing sentences for drugs, possession of firearms and receiving stolen goods. Shamie had been nabbed while cutting up £400,000 worth of heroin in his apartment and was awaiting trial. Others were also facing charges and eventually eight members of the family were in jail. Several of their main dealers and middle-ranking street pushers had also been rounded up and had either been convicted or were awaiting trial.
Christy Dunne hadn’t been spared either. He and John Cunningham had been charged with three aggravated burglaries in which firearms were used in Meath and Dublin in November and December 1982. The crime spree was particularly nasty and terrifying for the victims. In the three incidents, Dunne and Cunningham had broken into people’s homes and threatened them at gunpoint. In one of the cases a 71-year-old widow was grabbed around the neck and a gun was put to her head. Her 73-year-old sister was also held at gunpoint. In another incident a man lost the sight of one eye.
But that didn’t deter flamboyant Bronco from mounting his own damage-limitation exercise a month after the Today Tonight programme, when he appeared on RTÉ radio and described himself as ‘a good father – not a Godfather’. He took the opportunity to whine about how the authorities were making life difficult for his siblings and declared his loyalty to his fugitive brother, commenting: ‘I’d die for Larry.’ Bronco also managed to insult his brother Mickey ‘Dazzler’ Dunne, who had been jailed in October 1983 for seven years for dealing heroin. Mickey, he said, didn’t have the IQ to be a criminal mastermind. There were few who disagreed with him.
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