Few will mourn despised drug dealer Tony Felloni

Community knew man who flooded capital with heroin as ‘King Scum’

The death of Tony Felloni, one of the country’s most notorious heroin dealers, will probably be celebrated in the inner-city communities where he once unleashed misery, devastation and death.

He died on Monday in the manner that many of his victim’s families would have wished for: as a lonely 81-year-old who ended up spending a large part of his life in prison. Felloni survived into old age with HIV – but his criminal activities brought an early death to many others.

Such is his notoriety that even youngsters growing up today in Dublin’s north inner city – which he once vowed to “flood with heroin” – are intuitively aware of his name, which like a bogeyman has passed down through the generations.

They are certainly aware of the fitting nickname their forebears bestowed on him at the height of his reign as the country’s biggest heroin supplier. They called him ‘King Scum’. Felloni stands out in the pantheon of gangsters as the most reviled and demonised drug dealer in our history – even more so than his one-time business partners the Dunnes, who are blamed for first introducing heroin to Ireland.

As the biggest supplier of heroin in Dublin, he was instrumental in spreading HIV among the steadily growing addict population, who got it by sharing needles.

Aids swept away a generation of Felloni’s customers and dealers in the 1980s and ’90s.

Unlike some criminals to emerge in Irish gangland, Felloni had no redeeming features.

He had a well-earned reputation as a cowardly, heartless, greedy man who preyed on the weakest and the poorest in the community.

Such was his avarice that he operated at both ends of the market – importing large quantities of heroin and then overseeing its sale in little packages on the streets.

There is no evidence anywhere that Felloni ever showed a hint of remorse for turning whole neighbourhoods into human wastelands.

Felloni was the son of a Sicilian immigrant who married his Irish mother. He was born in 1943. His father was a tiler by trade and the family were said to have been decent, hard-working people.

But from the age of 16, their firstborn had shown that he wasn’t interested in honest toil. He was already on the road to earning his title as King Scum.

He had several convictions for petty crime and burglary and spent a number of years in St Conleth’s Reformatory School in Daingean.

Daingean was a veritable gulag for innocent children, where sexual, physical and psychological abuse took place at the hands of the Oblate order.

A psychiatric report once found that Felloni blamed his “disturbing” experiences there for the way he turned out.

During the 1960s and ’70s, he accumulated several convictions for assault, burglary and theft. But he was also demonstrating a much darker side.

He began blackmailing young women, of whom he had taken compromising pictures which he then threatened to show to their families or employers.

Felloni was also believed to have been involved in prostitution.

When his old friend from Daingean, Larry Dunne, first introduced heroin to Dublin, Felloni became a business partner. When Dunne and his other brothers were jailed, Felloni took over the business.

In 1986, he received a drug conviction, which saw him sentenced to 10 years for possession of over £100,000 worth of the drug.

As he was being led away to prison, he told the drug squad detectives who had caught him: “When I come back, I’ll flood Dublin with heroin.”

When he was released in the early 1990s Felloni was as good as his word and quickly built another drug empire. But the gardaí were still hot on his trail. In 1994, the drug squad arrested him with a large consignment of heroin and he was charged. But King Scum was adept at playing the system and got bail.

Over the following 10 months, he was arrested and charged on three more occasions while on bail.

In 1996, Tony Felloni’s reign finally came to an end, when he was convicted and jailed for 20 years, a sentence that was only matched by another notorious friend of his, John Gilligan.

‘He had a wellearned reputation as a cowardly, heartless, greedy man who preyed on the weakest’