Inside a real-life Love/Hate lifestyle
High-end cars, designer handbags, bundles of cash and €71,000 of watches – it would be an impressive haul of luxury goods in any home but when it was found in a house belonging to a couple who don’t work, CAB moved in and their findings take us...
DRIVING past the three-bedroom terraced house in Clondalkin, west Dublin, it’s unlikely you’d notice anything too out of the ordinary. Certainly the property is smarter than most of its neighbours. A freshly painted façade and a nicely paved driveway, expensive looking triple-glazed windows and a tasteful, black-coloured front door, show a well-kept home.
You might have spotted the shiny BMW and Citroen cars parked outside, both with recent licence plates, and briefly wondered how the occupants of such a modest ex-council house in a sprawling, solidly working-class estate could afford such high-end vehicles. And, if you looked closer, you might have thought it was a little unusual that there were CCTV cameras on the outside walls.
But it’s what was found inside this house, belonging to Kenneth Carpenter — who lives there for the moment with his partner Elaine Byrne and their two children — that was truly astonishing, especially when you learn that neither of them work.
Wardrobes stuffed with designer clothes and shoes, drawers that revealed a collection of men’s watches that included a gold Rolex worth €29,400 and a Breitling that cost over €10,000, not forgetting the Hublot timepiece that’s worth €10,500.
And on a bedside locker, a ladies’ gold Rolex watch, costing €22,000, while hanging over the banister a small, white quilted Chanel handbag, complete with gold chain strap, which cost €2,610.
But that’s not all. There was a Louis Vuitton handbag, the kind women often bring back from their holidays where they can get a knock-off version for €20 or so. This one, however, was the real deal, with it’s pink silk lining, worth a hefty €965.
And then there were the bundles of cash, found dotted around the house, not particularly hidden away, just lying in drawers in different rooms. Varying sums of money in Egyptian pounds, sterling, American dollars and Polish zloty. Also thick wads of euro, coming to a total of almost €20,000. There was also a bulletproof vest.
By anyone’s standards it was an extraordinary haul of luxury items and goods — over €71,000 worth of watches alone — one suited to a mega-wealthy family living in the Hollywood Hills or a mansion in Monaco, not to a couple in west Dublin apparently living on a loneparent’s allowance.
This week the details of the extraordinarily lavish lifestyle that Carpenter and Byrne were leading was laid bare in the High Court. In a case brought forward by the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB),
It shows the net is closing in on these people
the pair gave an undertaking to leave the house, which Carpenter bought in 2007, by next July.
Given Byrne’s status as a lone parent, it’s probable that she wasn’t even supposed to be living there in the first place.
It was claimed by CAB that the property, in Rowlagh Park, Clondalkin, was acquired with the proceeds of crime.
They alleged Carpenter is active in the sale and supply of drugs, has a number of previous convictions for drug offences and associates with known criminals in south and west Dublin.
And in much the same way as Nidge or John Boy Power (played by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Aidan Gillen respectively) or any of the henchmen in the hit TV show Love/ Hate enjoyed the spoils of their criminal labour, it would seem Carpenter showed little restraint when it came spending the money he allegedly made from this criminal activity.
As well as the loot that was found during a CAB raid on his house in 2017, officers from the bureau discovered the father-of-two had taken his family on a number of expensive holidays in recent years, spending about €20,000 on flights alone since 2010.
Destinations included the UK, several jaunts to top European spots and holidays to luxury locations like Mexico and Dubai. They
‘The money is phenomenal but it’s short-lived’
also travelled to the US, where they had gone on a cruise.
They also found that Elaine Byrne held a Brown Thomas Platinum card, which requires customers to spend at least €5,000 in the luxury goods store every year if they want to hold on to it. It appears Byrne had no problem fulfilling the terms and conditions.
Their home was immaculately decorated in tastefully muted colours. A cream-coloured flock wallpaper covered the sitting room, while a large flatscreen TV hung over a marble fireplace. In the extension at the back of the house was a set of large brown leather sofas, undoubtedly top quality.
It’s a home that anyone would be proud to own, but one that, thanks to the hard work of CAB, no longer belongs to Carpenter.
Their exhaustive investigations revealed there was no credible explanation for the ridiculously affluent lifestyle, and that the huge sums of money they were spending did not correlate with their known income.
And because of CAB’s investigation, they were able to seek an order from the High Court under Section 3 of the 1996 Proceeds of Crime Act, deeming the house, which was purchased for €317,000 in 2007, as being acquired with the proceeds of crime.
They claim Carpenter submitted false information to obtain a mortgage for the house, that he stated he worked as a motorcar salesman and earned about €75,000 per year. CAB was able to establish that he did no such work and claimed any mortgage payments made on the house, now worth €220,000, came from the proceeds of his criminal conduct.
When quizzed about how he afforded to live in a house that had been renovated to such a high standard, Carpenter told officers that he had worked in various jobs, including as a truck driver, a plumber and a courier. He also claimed to have made money from selling items online.
When they asked him about the large amount of cash they had found, he told them he had been saving for a holiday and was considering giving some of it to charity.
The court also heard this week how the couple had consented to orders being made allowing other items to be seized from them, including two cars, a BMW and a Citroen, which were bought in 2016.
All the stuff that is seized by CAB in these cases will eventually be put up for public auction and the money raised goes into the exchequer.
It’s a case that has given an extraordinary insight into some of the lives being led by Ireland’s criminal underworld. A place where so much money is made in short spaces of time, that it’s considered nothing to drop almost €30,000 on a watch, or more than €2,600 on a handbag for everyday use.
But it also shows that the net is closing in on these people, who are
spending obscene amounts of cash but have no legitimate form of employment.
Already this year, 32 operations have been carried out by CAB. Each one typically involves about six similar searches to the one carried out on Carpenter’s house, but often many more — one operation involved 39 such searches.
Recently Detective Chief Superintendent Pat Clavin, chief bureau officer of CAB, explained to RTÉ’s Sean O’Rourke how 2017 had been their busiest year so far and that 2018 is set to surpass it.
‘Our strategy is to go after the lower level criminals, in the hope that if we take them out earlier they mightn’t become the big godfathers that we’re all so concerned about,’ he said. ‘To try and nip it in the bud.’
One of the reasons they have been so successful in recent years is due to the training up of more than 300 ‘asset profilers’, people who put profiles together of possible targets for CAB.
‘They do a training programme on what to look out for,’ he said. ‘How to search properties, how to search for bank accounts, we give them access to certain databases, give them a template of a profile form to complete. We got 66 profiles in 2016, 101 in 2017 and 153 profiles this year to date.’ The chief has also been travelling around the country, talking to various community groups, asking them to help CAB in their quest to find criminals living off ill-gotten gains.
‘It’s about looking out for things like an expensive car when someone doesn’t work,’ he said. ‘Someone spending an awful lot of money on a home where there’s a lot of what people describe as “bling” being displayed. People with Rolex watches who you wouldn’t expect to have Rolex watches.
‘People having expensive handbags, people taking expensive long-haul holidays and there’s no evidence of them ever working. We want to hear about people like that. Very often we find those suspicions are well-founded. If they’re not well-founded, if someone has won the lottery, our investigation will find that out and we’ll take no further action.
‘We look at their earnings, look at their social welfare payments, look at their property, vehicles, everything about their lifestyle.’
‘That house in Clondalkin is fairly typical of what you can find in housing estates all over the country,’ explains one well-placed crime source. ‘Regular houses that are pimped out with all the best gear, plasma TV screens in every room, top of the range appliances, some of them have bullet-resistant windows and doors or state-of-the-art CCTV systems. I was in one in north Dublin where it was floor to ceiling marble, like a tomb almost, and the plastic was still on all the expensive furniture.
‘They like to stay living in the neighbourhoods that they know, places they feel comfortable in and where their neighbours are less likely to rat them out. They might be able to afford to live in posher areas but most of them have no interest in moving.
‘There’s also an element of showing off to the neighbours that they’re the ones who have made it. I’ve heard of one house in an estate
‘A case like this is a moral victory for society’
close to Dublin city centre where it was estimated they spent about €700,000 on renovations.
‘A lot of the time these people don’t have a clue about money, there’s no sense of value to it. What you and I and the vast majority of hard-working people in Ireland, would consider a silly amount to spend on a watch or pair of shoes, it’s nothing to these people because they don’t understand what it is to have a real job.
‘What it difficult for most of the rest of us to understand is why more of these people aren’t being turned in. After all, they’re basically lording it over their neighbours, a lot of them who are working really hard to raise their families and keep their kids on the straight and narrow. You have these gougers spending more than a year’s pay on an obnoxious watch. What’s worse, they’re often making that money from selling drugs to their neighbours’ kids.
‘It must feel sometimes like there are only two choices, be a drug addict or sell the drugs. But you have to look at the longevity of these guys, it’s not a “career” that will see you to retirement. So while the money can be phenomenal, it’s always short-lived, that’s the nature of that way of life.’
The CAB’s ongoing successes in hitting these people where it hurts, namely their pockets, is having a positive effect, according to our crime source.
‘Cases like the one this week are a moral victory for society,’ they say. ‘Turfing these people out of their homes, places they have bought with filthy money, is a way of showing the community that crime might pay for a while, but there’s rarely a happy ending for these people, one way or the other.’