Before the Kinahans, there was Larry Dunne
Larry Dunne headed up the family recognised as bringing heroin to Dublin, writes Liam Collins
BEFORE the Kinahans there was the Dunnes, a sprawling family whose activities encompassed theft, armed robbery and eventually the mass introduction of heroin to Dublin in the 1970s and 1980s, laying waste to inner-city communities and destroying some of their own relatives.
Although they were never a ‘gang’ — with various combinations of brothers involved at different times — it was Larry Dunne, described as “cool and detached” who became the senior criminal in the family.
In the process, he moved from a corporation house to a detached property in manicured grounds in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains, eventually discouraging “undesirables” — including members of his own family — from calling to visit.
Despite his notoriety, his only convictions in Ireland at the time were for driving without insurance and he was banned from driving.
As a consequence, he bought himself a horse and trap to convey him and his wife, Lily, to the nearby Blue Light pub for a pint. He was then supplying large parts of Dublin with heroin and ensuring supplies for his brothers who were running inner-city drugs operations.
His motto, according to underworld lore, was ‘Larry doesn’t carry’, which meant he operated at arm’s length through a network of pushers, making him difficult for the gardai to pin down. But even as he and his brother Henry, who bought a racehorse, were drawing attention to themselves with their lifestyles, the net was closing in.
The newly installed Taoiseach, Charlie Haughey, was asking his most senior gardai why something wasn’t being done to curtail their activities. Maybe this had something to do with the eldest in the family, Christopher, who was active in Fine Gael for a time, supplying and driving a lorry for the party’s presidential candidate Tom O’Higgins from which leader Liam Cosgrave and a string of ministers spoke. It was later put about by Fianna Fail, wrongly, that the lorry was stolen.
Larry Dunne, who has died aged 72, was one of 16 children (11 boys and five girls) born to Christopher ‘Bronco’ Dunne and his wife Ellen. ‘Bronco’ started working at a stall in the Iveagh Market in the Liberties at the age of eight. When he wasn’t fathering children, he was often in jail, including serving a term for manslaughter, acting the ‘character’ in Dublin pubs or working in England.
While he was away, some of his sons were running wild in the various family homes in the Liberties, Dolphin’s Barn, Kimmage and in Rutland Avenue, Crumlin, where they finally settled.
(Several members of the family had no involvement in crime and led respectable lives in Ireland and England.)
In May 1960, 12-year-old Larry Dunne and his eightyear-old brother Henry took off from home, making their way to London to look for their father. They wandered around the city for a few days before losing each other in Hyde Park. When a picture of Henry appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror under the headline ‘Anyone Lost a Son?’ they were reunited with their father and escorted back to Dublin.
Soon afterwards, both of them, like six of their brothers, were in ‘industrial’ schools — Larry in Letterfrack, Co Galway, and later Daingain, Co Offaly, from which he absconded.
Larry, too, went to England as a teenager where he racked up 18 convictions for petty crime. Back in Ireland in his early 20s, he joined some of his older brothers in their new racket, armed robbery, getting shot accidentally in the arm in one botched attempt.
According to Smack, a book chronicling the introduction of large-scale drug use in Ireland, Larry was a latecomer to serious crime.
“Shamie, Christy and Henry were the senior partners in the family’s criminal enterprise,” say the book’s authors Sean Flynn and Padraig Yeates. “But Larry learnt quickly and unlike his more extrovert brothers, concentrated on the business aspect of crime. He was the only one who attempted to plan his activities on a long-term basis where drugs were concerned. After an erratic phase in 1979, when he dabbled in drugs himself, Larry settled down to family life with his wife and their three children. Larry was willing to pay over the odds for continuity of supply.”
With heroin from Iran flooding the market and a contact known as ‘The American’ as his supplier, Larry Dunne began making big money in the drugs trade. But due to a slip in his mantra of ‘Larry doesn’t carry’ Dunne found himself, for the first time, in serious trouble with the law.
On the night of October 13, 1980, two groups of gardai converged on his house at Carrickmount Drive in Rathfarnham, one investigating the Dunne drug empire, another searching for stolen jewellery. Detective Garda Felix McKenna found heroin in a pillowcase in one of the children’s bedrooms. Cocaine, cannabis and weighing scales were also found.
“Look, I’m accepting responsibility for everything, that’s all I’m saying,” Larry told the gardai before lapsing into silence. Eventually charges were dropped against the other family members — the ones who had brought the drugs to his house.
Out on bail, Larry Dunne not only continued to ply his lucrative drugs trade but in a show of defiance in May, 1982, paid £100,000 cash for his new home on Woodside Road in the Dublin Mountains, complete with a view that stretched out across to Dublin Bay.
When his trial eventually started on the April 20, 1983, Larry Dunne carefully watched as the jury was selected, and, according to the book Smack, he selected his own juror, one who could be ‘nobbled’. When the jury retired on April 26, a single juror held out for a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict on all but the minor charge of possession of drugs for personal use.
Judge Ronan Keane refused to accept this and at 11 o’clock that night the jury foreman told him they had been unable to reach a verdict. Larry Dunne even had time to enjoy a bottle of champagne he had ordered across the road in the Legal Eagle pub at lunchtime that day in anticipation of a favourable verdict.
In his own way, Larry Dunne changed Irish legal procedure. When he appeared in the Central Criminal Court for a second trial on June 21, 1984, legalisation had been introduced that allowed majority verdicts in criminal trials for the first time.
After a day-and-a-half listening to the evidence, he knew he was “going down” and at lunchtime went across to the Molly Malone pub, changed into new clothes got into a waiting taxi and disappeared.
Dunne made a second piece of legal history when the trial proceeded in his absence and the jury took only 20 minutes to convict him on all six counts, carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years. His wife, Lily, told the Irish Press: “Larry is well away by now, I hope he stays away.” After staying in a ‘safe house’ in Ireland for several weeks, Dunne eventually made his way to Spain. In 1985, he was arrested trying to enter Portugal with false papers, he was extradited back to Ireland and served his 14-year sentence.
When he was eventually released from prison, the drugs trade was now in the hands of John Gilligan, Christy Kinahan and other criminals. The days of what gardai called ODCs “ordinary decent criminals” was over. Dunne’s warning, “if you think I’m bad wait until you see what’s coming” was prophetic.
Although he largely lapsed into obscurity, he was tried and acquitted of involvement in an armed robbery in England and convicted on a drugs charge in 1990.
In an interview in W magazine, Christopher, the eldest of the Dunne brothers, who had a string of convictions but never dabbled in drugs, told Jason O’Toole: “I’m not afraid to be critical of any of my family... three sisters, one brother and his wife, they became addicted to heroin. We’ve had our share of death in our family.”
Larry Dunne had returned to live in Carrickmount Drive in Rathfarnham with his daughter. Lily died in 2000 and he was suffering from lung cancer when he was taken to St James’s Hospital, Dublin, where he died, reportedly of self-inflicted wounds, last Monday.
‘“Larry doesn’t carry” found himself in serious trouble’