Grim tale of heroin kingpin Dunne at an end
THE grim tale of one of the country’s most notorious criminals, who introduced heroin to Ireland, ended in St James’s Hospital.
Larry Dunne (72) was being treated at the facility for self-inflicted injuries and had been rushed to the hospital from his home in Rathfarnham on Sunday.
Dunne was in the advanced stages of a battle with lung cancer.
Dunne’s notoriety was enhanced when he infamously proclaimed: “If you think we’re bad, wait till you see what’s coming after us” after he was handed a 14-year jail sentence for heroin dealing in March, 1985.
Despite his reputation, he had not been an active criminal for well over a decade or more.
Through the years, nine other members of Dunne’s family have been jailed for drugs, firearms and other criminal charges but Larry was the leader of the pack.
His brother Mickey Dunne was sentenced to eight years in 1987 on drugs charges. Eldest brother Christy Dunne received a 12-year sentence.
Seamus Dunne got 12 years in the UK after he was caught with a huge quantity of heroin which he was trying to bring back to Ireland.
But Larry was the kingpin – the criminal who was the number one target of drugs squad gardaí – a relatively new unit within the Garda organisation.
In an era long before the Criminal Assets Bureau was set up, the criminal who had been born into abject poverty in a flats complex in inner city Dublin in February 1948 loved to flaunt his wealth from his heroin-trafficking enterprise.
He drove expensive cars and lived a Champagne lifestyle, buying a mansion in the foothills of the Dublin mountains which would today be worth over €1m, but he also had a house in Crumlin.
It was in the plush mansion called Gorse Rock in Sandyford where he spent most of his time and this became a notorious symbol of his ill-gotten wealth in the 1980s.
His lifestyle seemed lightyears away from his difficult and tragic childhood which had involved him being incarcerated in the notorious Daingean Industrial School in Co Offaly.
Following his jail term for heroin trafficking, Dunne was released from prison in 1995, but would continue to get into scrapes with the law.
In 1998, Dunne was accused of firing a pistol during a robbery at the Bradford & Bingley Building Society in Erdington in England.
But a jury at Birmingham Crown Court took just over two hours to find him not guilty of having a firearm with intent, robbery and attempted wounding.
He was also acquitted of a charge of attempted murder at a previous trial in which another defendant was jailed for 11 years.
After being cleared of those charges, Dunne returned to Dublin and it was during this period that he received a three-month jail sentence for assaulting an undercover garda with a 15-foot plank and a bamboo cane as gardaí carried out a drugs raid.
Dunne was later also found guilty of cocaine dealing in 2004 for an offence that occurred in 1999, but this was his last major brush with the law and gardaí say he had no major links with the new breed of gangland criminal causing mayhem nowadays.
Dunne’s drug importation business in the 1980s swamped Dublin with heroin and led to an addiction epidemic.
In time, bigger drugs traffickers such as Christy Kinahan and John Gilligan would emerge but 40 years ago, Dunne was Ireland’s number one drugs trafficker.
In April, 2000, Larry’s wife Lily died in Our Lady’s Hospice, Harold’s Cross, in Dublin after a long illness.
Despite his criminal pedigree, Dunne was known as a good family man and it is understood that some family members were around his hospital bed when he passed away.
However, he also had more than 40 convictions, the most serious of which was when he was arrested and charged with possession and intent to supply heroin, cocaine and cannabis with a combined street value of between IR£50,000 and IR£60,000 on October 19, 1980.
He was found guilty in June, 1983, but he had already absconded on the opening day of the case.
The trial was told that when gardaí raided Dunne’s corporation house, they found heroin, cocaine and cannabis resin.
Although unemployed, Dunne had moved to a home in the Dublin Mountains, then worth IR£100,000, while on bail for the drugs offences.
In his absence, Dunne was found guilty of being in possession of drugs for supply.
Dunne had fled to Portugal but he was arrested there and extradited back to Ireland, where he was given the 14-year sentence on March 25, 1985.
Dunne was the first drug dealer in Ireland to use more junior criminals to carry drugs for him – often for very little cash reward – a trend that continues in organised crime to this day.
In his latter years, Dunne lived a modest and quiet life in his home in the working-class Carrickmount Drive housing estate of Rathfarnham.
This was the same property where he was busted with the drugs 40 years ago and when arrested, he told gardaí: “Look, I’m accepting responsibility for everything and that’s all I’m saying.”