‘To be a convicted dealer you have to be a mercenary’

from, unable to put a label on us, they started to call us Mockies and it just stuck.’

It was with the Mockies that he first came across Christy Kinahan.

‘We arrested Chris Kinahan in 1986 with what was the largest heroin seizure of that year, in a luxury apartment in Clontarf,’ he said. ‘We put a lot of work into it and arrested him with an Algerian guy. He was going into the drugs business having transferred from the fraud business.

‘Subsequently he was sentenced to five or six years. The first thing that comes to mind about him is that he’s a convicted drug dealer, and to be a convicted drug dealer you have to be a mercenary.

‘And to be a convicted drug dealer who doesn’t have a heroin habit, you have to be a real mercenary.’

O’Sullivan was obviously less than enamoured with Kinahan.

‘People tend to glamorise some of these people as Robin Hood figures or that they’re highly intelligent. Chris Kinahan was caught by the guards, two, maybe three times. He’s been caught since going abroad.’

During his time on the streets of Dublin, O’Sullivan got to know the psyche of many of Ireland’s most prolific dealers.

‘They are in the business of selling drugs, if there was more money in the business of selling televisions they’d sell televisions,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about the higher level dealers, not some addict who is using heroin. But dealers are motivated by money, they don’t care about what they sell or the quality of what they sell, and they certainly don’t care about the effects it has.’

But he also got to know some of them well enough to chat casually to at times.

‘You build a rapport,’ he said. ‘You know people 20 or 30 years, you’d stop them on the street. I’ve often met criminals I’ve arrested years ago, we’d swap stories.

‘It’s a different story if they’re arrested, the whole mindset is to say as little as possible and try and get off the charge.’

Another criminal he came into contact regularly with was Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch, currently embroiled in a horrific and devastating ongoing feud with the Kinahan gang.

‘I know him too,’ said O’Sullivan. ‘I have to be very careful about what I say as investigations are ongoing and I don’t want to say anything that might influence people at a later stage. Suffice to say I know him 30 or