Notorious heroin baron Larry Dunne dies at 72
INFAMOUS drug baron Larry Dunne, who is blamed for introducing major heroin distribution to Ireland, has died aged 72.
The career criminal died in the intensive care unit of St James’s Hospital on Monday afternoon, in the presence of two of his daughters.
It is understood he had advanced lung cancer but that this was not a factor in his death.
Dunne introduced heroin into Ireland in the late 1970s after it became widely available in Europe following the Iranian revolution.
He had more than 40 criminal convictions, including for the sale and supply of heroin and cocaine.
The Dunnes were the predominant heroin dealers of the 1970s and 1980s in the capital.
In those days, there was no heroin market outside Dublin, and the
Dunnes were ostentatious with their spending, so were soon on the radar of gardaí. In 1985, Larry was jailed for 14 years for distributing heroin, marking the end of his family’s reign in the trade.
At the time, he famously warned gardaí: ‘If you think we’re bad, you should see what’s coming up behind us.’ Gardaí acknowledge that his prediction was correct, as Tony Felloni and Christy Kinahan Sr, among others, were waiting in the wings.
When Dunne was released, in 1995, he had little cash and moved to Britain. He had also developed a heroin addiction while in Portlaoise Prison and was an addict for many years afterwards.
Before his 1985 imprisonment he was known as ‘Flash Larry’, due to his extravagant lifestyle, and love of foreign holidays and fast cars.
He ruthlessly pushed heroin in Dublin, in the flat complexes between the canals, causing a massive heroin epidemic.
Dunne organised young ‘runners’ to supply heroin across the city and subsequently earned the moniker ‘Larry doesn’t carry’.
Security sources say the capital has never recovered from the Dunne family’s ‘mafia drug enterprises’.
His elder brother Christopher ‘Bronco’ Dunne told the Irish Daily Mail yesterday that he believed Larry was a ‘Garda scapegoat’ and a ‘gentle’ person who had been vilified in the media.
He said: ‘Larry was a gentleman.
My father used to call him “Larry the Lamb” because he was so gentle. He never got into a fight in his life. Larry and my family were demonised by police at the time.
‘But our family motto is the phoenix. We’ll rise again from the ashes. We will stick together as a family.’
Despite Covid-19 funeral restrictions, ‘Bronco’ said he intended to attend his brother’s funeral.
He said: ‘If there is anything I can say about Larry, it’s that he was a bigger scapegoat than I am. The police spread a lot of lies about him years ago.
‘He’s been living in Rathfarnham [south Co. Dublin] for 40 years and no one has a bad word to say about him. The last time I saw Larry was last year at another of my brother’s funerals. We were not estranged.
‘I had ten brothers and seven sisters. My family will do what we want in terms of the funeral.’
‘We’ll do what we want for a funeral’