In November 1997, the GNDU got an indication of the extent of the gang’s activities when they seized over 300 kilos of hashish in a house in Tallaght, West Dublin. The drugs had been shipped into Ireland hidden in potted plants. The haul had a street value of £3 million (over €5.4 million). Five men were arrested and charged in connection with the seizure but were subsequently released over a legal technicality. The GNDU later discovered that Kinahan and Cunningham had supplied over a ton of cannabis in the previous month. The seizure coincided with the death of Kinahan’s father. When Christy slipped back into the country for the funeral, he was arrested on foot of the outstanding arrest warrant from 1993. In March 1998, he pleaded guilty and was jailed for four years in Portlaoise Prison. With Kinahan behind bars, Cunningham took control of the business.
In the following three-year period it was conservatively estimated that Cunningham shipped drugs worth in excess of €150 million and an unknown quantity of arms and ammunition into Ireland. In the two years between 1998 and 2000, Amsterdam café owner Peter Lingg, one of Cunningham’s ‘managers’, exchanged over €10 million worth of Irish and English currency into Dutch guilders at one Bureau de Change in the city. The money was payment for drug shipments. The syndicate was supplying gangs in Dublin, Limerick, Belfast, London, Manchester and Liverpool. Cunningham’s old pals in the General’s gang were among his customers. His friend Eamon Daly, who was released from prison in 1997, became one of Cunningham’s biggest customers in Dublin. The syndicate was also supplying Martin ‘the Viper’ Foley and his then sidekick Clive Bolger, and Seamus ‘Shavo’ Hogan.
In December 1998 the Gardaí seized a huge consignment of cannabis and firearms which had been dispatched to Ireland by Cunningham. The drugs and guns were discovered concealed in eight pallets of pitta bread, transported to Ireland by truck. The load contained 780 kilos of cannabis; 15 lethal Intratec or ‘Tec-9’ 9mm automatic machine-pistols, capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute; 10 9mm automatic pistols; silencers for each of the ‘Tec-9s’; and spare magazines and ammunition. It was the largest cache of illegal weapons ever intercepted with a drug haul by the Irish police. Technical experts later found that all the weapons had been manufactured in Eastern Europe. The discovery prompted a major international investigation involving Irish and Dutch police. It was to have serious consequences for John Cunningham.
Westlodge Freight, the transport company used to collect the drugs and guns, was owned by Kieran Smyth, from Dundalk, County Louth. Even though he had no criminal record, Smyth was a central cog in a vast international smuggling operation, based along the border with Northern Ireland. Smyth provided a logistics service to criminal and republican gangs, smuggling drugs, tobacco, oil and guns. He also acted as a money-launderer for his various clients, using an illegal bank which masqueraded as a Bureau de Change at the Dromad border crossing in County Louth. A CAB investigation later discovered that Smyth personally made an estimated £12 million (€21 million) in less than two years, which he laundered through the illegal bank.
In an operation codenamed ‘Plover’, the GNDU tracked the pallets of pitta bread back to Peter Lingg in Amsterdam. In September 1999, the Amsterdam Serious Crime Squad launched an investigation into Lingg. The police quickly established that he was involved in a major conspiracy and he was placed under 24-hour surveillance. His phones were also being tapped. In early November the undercover squad tailed Lingg to a meeting in a car park with a mysterious Irishman. They photographed him and sent the pictures to Dublin. The unknown man was quickly identified as John Cunningham.
The Gardaí informed their Dutch colleagues and underlined the Colonel’s importance. In Holland the undercover surveillance teams began watching Cunningham and bugged his phones. It was obvious that Cunningham was a very busy man, organizing deals by phone and in person. The operation continued for the next four months. The team discovered that the firearms came from Joopie Altepost’s Eastern European contacts. The powder used in the manufacture of ecstasy tablets was bought from a gang in the south of Holland. Cunningham then brought the powder to a number of flats which were equipped with tablet-making machines. The tablets were vacuum-packed and placed in foil-lined boxes. Each tablet cost the Colonel about £1. When he sold one to his Irish and UK clients, he quadrupled his initial investment.
Cannabis and cocaine were also sourced from a number of gangs in Amsterdam. In a typical transaction Cunningham would collect cash from truck drivers coming from Ireland and England. He would then put together the various orders and arrange for their delivery to Ireland, hidden either in pallets of foodstuffs or in holdall bags which were handed to Kieran Smyth’s most trusted drivers. Dutch military intelligence was called in to decipher Cunningham’s code system. He used it for telephone numbers, delivery times, amounts of money and quantities of drugs.
The tap on Cunningham’s phones produced top-grade intelligence which enabled the GNDU to identify most of his Irish associates, including Eamon Daly, Martin Foley and Clive Bolger. Cunningham’s partner in Dublin was 30-year-old Chris Casserly from Coolock, North Dublin, who was also a close associate of Christy Kinahan. Between November 1999 and March 2000 the eavesdropping led to a string of successful seizures in the Republic, Northern Ireland, Belgium and France. The busts were carefully orchestrated so that the mob would not work out how they were being caught. Between the four jurisdictions, police seized a total of 156 kilos of amphetamines, over 400,000 ecstasy tablets, £100,000 in cash and a number of automatic weapons. The different shipments were being sent to Casserly, Foley, Bolger and Daly. In the process seven of their couriers and associates were arrested and subsequently convicted.
Operation Plover had a devastating impact on the drug-dealers. After each bust the Dutch and Irish cops listened in as the villains discussed what was going wrong. In February 2000 the police also overheard conversations between Kinahan and Cunningham. Kinahan was speaking on a mobile phone from his cell in Portlaoise Prison. In one call Kinahan, using code, asked the Colonel to organize the delivery of five kilos of cocaine to an associate of his son Daniel in Dublin.
On Friday 10 March 2000, the Dutch cops swooped on the Colonel and his associates, as he was in the process of filling an order for weapons and drugs on behalf of a UK gang. When Cunningham was searched, he was carrying an automatic pistol in his belt. In one of his safe houses, the cops found an awesome arsenal of weapons. The cache included two Intratec machine-pistols, one submachine-gun; one Steyr military assault rifle; nine handguns and magazines, along with silencers and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition. In another of his hideouts they found a sophisticated machine for vacuum-packing ecstasy pills.
In Cunningham’s home at Weteringbrug outside Amsterdam, the cops found 50 kilos of amphetamine powder, 100,000 ecstasy tablets, 2 handguns and ammunition. At the same time another squad stopped a van that the Colonel had met earlier. In it they found 4 handguns, 1,000 kilos of cannabis and 30 kilos of ecstasy. The total value of the drugs seized was over £9 million (over €15.4 million). Peter Lingg, Joopie Altepost and three others were also arrested.
Three days later, Gardaí searched 13 addresses across Dublin and arrested 7 members of Casserly’s drug network. Five of those arrested were subsequently charged with drug-trafficking and money-laundering offences. The four men and one woman, none of whom had been known to Gardaí, were convicted and jailed for terms ranging from 18 months to 6 years. Detectives found a ledger that one of Casserly’s managers had used to keep track of the drugs. It showed that in a four-month period, Cunningham had shipped two and a half tons of hash and 80,000 ecstasy tablets to Casserly. The street value was just over €31 million.
During questioning the bookkeeper admitted that in the previous 14 months the gang had been distributing an average of 150 kilos of hash every week. It was conservatively calculated that in that period alone, the Irish end of the Cunningham/Kinahan business empire had been worth €100 million. Chris Casserly and another accomplice, named
later in High Court documents as Sam O’Sullivan from South County Dublin, fled Ireland before they could be arrested. Casserly moved to Spain and continued to work for the syndicate.
The success of Operation Plover led to bitter recriminations among Cunningham’s clients. Foley and Bolger had an angry falling out with Casserly and began threatening to have him shot. Kinahan sent instructions from prison that the Viper, who was despised by most criminals, should be silenced instead. In September 2000, Foley was ambushed as he left a swimming pool in Dublin. A hit man fired several shots at the mobster but only managed to hit him in the ankle and graze his skull with another bullet. The drug-dealer had survived his third attempted assassination in five years. As he waited for an ambulance to arrive, Foley moaned: ‘I’m fuckin’ sick of this! This is gettin’ fuckin’ ridiculous.’
In February 2001, John Cunningham was jailed for nine years on charges of drug-trafficking and gun-running. But the sentence, which was unusually harsh by Dutch standards, was later reduced to seven in the appeal courts. His bagman Peter Lingg was jailed for five years, and Joopie Altepost got four. Two Englishmen and another Dutch national, who were arrested in the operation, were also convicted on drug charges.
A week before Cunningham’s trial, his transport manager, Kieran Smyth, was abducted from his home. Smyth was tortured before being shot twice in the head, at close range, with a shotgun. His body was dumped at a roadside near Ashbourne, County Meath three days later. At the time of his murder the CAB had stepped up their enquiries into his business. One of Smyth’s many clients decided that they couldn’t risk the money-launderer doing a deal with the State. The Provos were the prime suspects for the execution.
Cunningham was released from prison in Holland in November 2004 – and was immediately extradited to Ireland where he served the remainder of his sentence for the Guinness kidnapping. He was freed in 2006 and went to live with his family in the Costa del Sol.
The syndicate’s thriving drug operation did not suffer from the Colonel’s absence. In March 2001, a month after Cunningham’s conviction, Christy Kinahan had been released from Portlaoise Prison. The Dapper Don could have been back on the streets several months earlier, but when he was offered temporary release for good behaviour, the ambitious drug-trafficker politely declined. He opted to stay inside while he completed an environmental science degree through the Open University.
Kinahan had little difficulty getting back into the narcotics trade. He had maintained his international contacts thanks to his son Daniel and his new business partner, Chris Casserly. Casserly, who lived in a luxury villa on a mountainside in Sitges, near Barcelona, handled the logistics for various drug-smuggling routes from Spain into Ireland, the UK and Holland. The Dapper Don began living between homes he purchased in Holland, England and Spain. In a short time he was attracting the attentions of law enforcement agencies across Europe.
The true extent of the Dapper Don’s criminal activities could only be gauged by the number and size of his drug shipments which were intercepted by police. Unlike most other offences, the available data on the true monetary value of the drug economy is solely dependent on the quantities of drugs seized and intelligence gathered by law enforcement agencies. Internationally it is accepted that law enforcement agencies only seize 10 per cent of the total amount of narcotics in circulation at any one time. But this is a best-case scenario and purely aspirational.
The economic principle of supply and demand is also a factor in the effect, if any, the seizures have on the overall drug trade. If a shipment is confiscated it causes a shortage of a particular type of narcotic and the price increases. If the price stays the same then it shows that supply has not been adversely affected. In the event that prices fall it is because there is a glut on the market.
Fifteen months after Kinahan’s release the GNDU got their first indication of how big he had become. In the summer of 2002, the then GNDU boss, Det. Chief Supt Ted Murphy, launched ‘Operation Zombie’. It specifically targeted Kinahan and his partner Chris Casserly and the investigation involved police forces in Spain, Holland, Belgium and the UK. Intelligence sources revealed that the Dapper Don was smuggling multi-ton loads of cannabis, concealed in boxes of tiles. They were being transported by truck from Alicante in Spain, directly to England and Ireland. On 16 August 2002, the GNDU made their move after the syndicate delivered a 1.5-ton shipment of hash to associates of Casserly in North Dublin. In the search of a van and a number of houses detectives seized a ton of hash, along with €100,000 worth of cocaine. They also recovered three firearms, including a machine-gun. A member of the gang was arrested and charged.
Then three days later, a surveillance team tailed another member of the Kinahan gang to the Slade Valley Equestrian Club near Rathcoole, County Dublin. When the club was searched another 500 kilos of hash and three automatic weapons with silencers were found buried in the grounds. The total street value of the haul was estimated to be between €15 and €20 million. It represented a net loss of the €2 million Kinahan and his associates had invested. As a result of Operation Zombie, four people were arrested, including Philip Sherkle, a close associate of both Kinahan and his son Daniel. A file was sent to the DPP but no charges were preferred against Sherkle. Raymond Molloy, the manager of the equestrian centre, took responsibility for the drugs and guns. Molloy subsequently disappeared and is presumed dead.
The setback was merely a temporary hiccup for Kinahan. A year after the Rathcoole drug bust, English police in Surrey launched ‘Operation Embargo’ in an attempt to catch the Dapper Don. As a result one of his close associates was arrested with one million ecstasy tablets which had been smuggled in from Holland. Kinahan escaped before police could arrest him. In December 2003, the British National Crime Squad received reliable intelligence that the well-educated drug baron had supplied a half ton of cocaine to the notorious Adams crime family in London. By that time Kinahan was a ‘flagged target’ by police and customs agencies throughout Europe.
A month later, in January 2004, the international drug-dealer was the target of a new investigation, this time by the UK Customs. Codenamed ‘Operation Bite’, it was set up to target a transport company being used by the Kinahan syndicate for smuggling tobacco and drugs. While the undercover investigation was going on, Daniel Kinahan also found himself under the watchful eye of the British police. He was implicated in a race-fixing scandal involving champion jockey Kieran Fallon. It was claimed that the drug syndicate had been involved in a ‘bet to lose’ racket in which jockeys were paid to ‘hold-up’ horses in various races around the UK. Philip Sherkle, Fallon and four other men were charged with conspiracy to defraud. A year later the men were acquitted following what the English press dubbed the ‘trial of the century’.
While the race-fixing investigation was ongoing, the Operation Bite team seized a ton of cannabis which the syndicate had shipped in from Spain in pallets of tiles. But according to Customs intelligence officers, the effect of the seizure on the market was ‘negligible’. It later emerged that Kinahan and Casserly had successfully imported another 15 tons before the route had been compromised. Eight days later, the authorities struck again and this time recovered 1.5 tons of cannabis. A total of nine well-known local drug-traffickers were arrested and subsequently convicted.
In October 2004, the Kinahan syndicate was suspected of the gangland murder of drug-trafficker Boudewijn Kerbusch, who was shot dead in Oss, Holland. Kerbusch had been recruited to smuggle drugs into Ireland hidden in a truck transporting seafood and smoked fish. The syndicate blamed Kerbusch for the seizure of 700 kilos of cannabis by UK police.
Despite the police operations Kinahan’s empire continued to prosper and expand. The Dapper Don took control of the syndicate’s money-laundering activities with his son Christy Junior and left the running of the business to his son Daniel. In August 2007 Christy Kinahan Junior was married at a no-expense-spared wedding bash at a luxury hotel in County Wicklow. The guest list was a ‘who’s wh
o’ of international organized crime and included the Dapper Don’s most trusted business associates. At the reception, Christy Kinahan looked like a man who hadn’t a care in the world. Business was booming.
In February 2008, the GNDU seized a 1.5-ton shipment of cannabis which was being transported in a container truck in County Kildare. Intelligence sources discovered that between October 2007 and January 2008, the Kinahan group had already sent at least six similar loads. The drugs were hidden in foodstuffs sent from a bogus company in Spain to another fake company the syndicate had set up in Dublin. The gang was also involved in smuggling large quantities of cocaine, heroin and weapons. In addition they dealt in various chemicals used for bulking up cocaine. One shipment of arms to ‘Fat’ Freddie Thompson’s gang in Dublin included military-spec rocket-launchers. Luckily for some unknown victim, the Organised Crime Unit intercepted the weapons.
But the drug shipments and the movements of cash were only the ones that the various law enforcement agencies were aware of. Sources in the underworld revealed that, at any one time, the organization could have several tons of hashish and cocaine stored in warehouses in southern Spain.
Another major international investigation was launched against the Dapper Don a few months later. This time the Belgian Federal Police were taking him on. They probed Kinahan’s involvement in a number of property deals, a real estate company and the purchase of a former casino in the heart of Antwerp. They investigated his portfolio, which included a mansion in the city’s most upmarket neighbourhood, known as ‘billionaire’s row’, where the Dapper Don lived with one of his many girlfriends. With the assistance of several European police forces, the detectives uncovered evidence of how Kinahan had bought his Belgian property by channelling funds through a complex web of offshore companies in Hong Kong, Panama, Cyprus and the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. The enquiries also exposed an extraordinary web of corruption, involving organized crime gangs, a soccer team and members of the Belgian police. Two senior officers attached to the robbery squad of the Antwerp police were secretly watched meeting with Kinahan and other local gangsters.
Badfellas Page 50
