The changing Irish drugs trade: rocketing cocaine prices, gangs growing closer and Irish middlemen in Colombia

Having just returned from an official visit to Colombia, where he viewed the vastness of that country’s cocaine production first hand, Garda Assistant Commissioner Justin Kelly speaks of rapidly changing times in the Irish drugs trade. Since the start of this year, the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine in the Republic has shot up by almost 50 per cent. It costs €40,000 at present compared with €27,000 back in January; an increase unprecedented in Ireland in both size and speed.

Once, a small number of all-powerful cartels – many in Colombia – controlled most of the global cocaine wholesale market. Closer to home, the Kinahan cartel was the main broker for Irish gangs and those gangs shot each other up as they competed for turf on Irish streets. But all of that has now changed.

A number of Irish criminals have in recent years moved to Colombia to cosy up to some of the smaller crime groups that have emerged from what Kelly calls a “fragmentation” of the cartel scene.

“There are people, not just from Ireland, but from various EU countries, who are based in South America and they’re acting as brokers, middlemen, they’re acting as facilitators,” he explained of westerners taking on roles in organising the transport of drugs to Europe, the movement and laundering of money and other tasks.

“It’s definitely growing,” Kelly added of the number of Irish people on the ground in Colombia. “There’s opportunities for people at different levels.”

In an interview with The Irish Times, Kelly explained because Europe had eclipsed the United States as the biggest market for cocaine, the newly emerged smaller Colombian crime groups needed to work with Europeans. As a result, the Garda had appointed Det Insp Noel Browne as the force’s liaison officer based in Bogotá, in a bid to keep pace with the Irish criminals moving into Colombia.

He said some of the Irish people now working as brokers there did not fill those positions overnight and, instead, had incrementally grown into them; transitioning from the Irish gangland scene into the international arena.

“There’s no one starting from scratch going out there, saying to themselves ‘I’m going to set up here’,” says Kelly. “But the thing about dealing with any international crime group in Bogotá or Medellin or if you’re going to Albania, Nigeria, wherever … If you can be useful to those crime groups, you can facilitate whatever they want to do, then your safety isn’t an issue. You’re going to be protected out there.”

The presence of Irish criminals on the ground in Colombia, finding new niches in a splintering scene there, has not exactly usurped the Kinahan cartel. It is still headquartered in Dubai and remains very active in moving drugs into Europe, including Ireland. However, the relocation of more Irish criminals into strategically useful positions in the cocaine market internationally means the Kinahans are not the only show in town for gangs in the Republic.

And that domestic gangland scene has also changed considerably, both in terms of how drugs are sourced and being sold, and the type of drugs market Ireland now represents. Kelly said many of the changes were brought about after the Garda “ramped up” its response to gangland crime when the Kinahan-Hutch feud erupted so spectacularly in Ireland with the attack on the Regency Hotel, north Dublin, in 2016. Members from the rival groups “were on a daily basis planning to kill people from the other side”.

“And we’d see quite a change in the way they were doing it,” he said. “They were using trackers [on their targets’ cars], bringing [gunmen] in from abroad, all very well resourced, they were putting big money behind these hits.”

However, the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau was able to access data from the trackers and also plant surveillance devices in cars being used for planned feud murders. And once suspects were caught, they were charged with a wide range of crimes under anti-gangland legislation; from murder, to murder conspiracy, money laundering, possession of firearms, facilitating and directing crime.

“There were many operations that we thwarted just as they were about to kill somebody,” Kelly said in reference to the Kinahan-Hutch feud, which ultimately claimed 18 lives. “At one stage we had 50 or 60 people from one of the groups [the Kinahan cartel] behind bars, all on lengthy sentences.”

Once the two groups began to lose significant numbers of trusted allies, they were forced to widen the net and recruit others, on promise of payment. But those new recruits simply proved incapable of executing the complex killings – “with trackers and surveillance” – that had been planned. Other would-be recruits were unwilling to get involved because so many others had already been caught.

And now other crime gangs, having witnessed the pressure applied to the opposing factions in the Kinahan-Hutch feud, were currently reluctant to engage in gangland murders. This reluctance, Kelly said, had driven down gun murders in Ireland in recent years – currently to unprecedented lows for the modern era. In the absence of gun feuding, some crime gangs had grown closer.

Although many people believed Irish crime groups were “competing with each other and these groups would kill each other on sight, that isn’t the way”. Instead, Irish gangs were “coming together” to import drugs, or transit drugs through the country on to other final destinations.

“We used to be an end destination, now we’re [also] a transit country, without a doubt. And in some ways, we’re a production country now, around cannabis herb,” Kelly said, in reference to the proliferation of cannabis growhouses in the Republic. “We’ve even had large MDMA [and] methamphetamine seizures here that have been going out of the country. And some of the really big cocaine seizures … some of them have been partly staying here, partly transiting through the country.”

Last September, 2.2 tonnes of cocaine, with a street value of €157 million, was seized on the MV Matthew freighter off east Co Cork. In February of this year, methamphetamine valued at €33.8 million was discovered in Cork Port. But aside from those so-called super seizures, there have also been seven consignments of drugs valued at €3 million or more in the Republic this year, much of it cocaine, with total seizures for the first half of the year running very close to €100 million.

[ Ireland’s biggest cocaine haul: The story of record seizure of 2.2 tonnes of drugs off Cork coast ]

Aside from the success of policing operations in Ireland, European police forces have seized consignments of cocaine measured in tonnes in recent months, including 39 tonnes in Germany last month – valued at €26 billion – and 5.7 tonnes in Southampton, valued at £450 million in February.

Kelly said the domestic and international seizures had combined to squeeze supply lines of cocaine in Ireland, which had led to the wholesale price increasing by almost 50 per cent since the start of the year. He says this is likely to be short term, though is struck by how large the price increase has been and how long it has lasted.

However, for now, the price of the drug on the streets has remained unchanged, as gangs absorb the higher wholesale cost, in part by reducing the purity of the drug they are selling to consumers.

He says when he was in Colombia, police and other officials there “cannot believe” how “disconnected” European drug users are from the human and environmental cost of growing the coca crops used to make cocaine.

One kilo of cocaine required 400kg of coca leaf to produce. That production process, pre kilo, used “274 kilo of gasoline” and potassium permanganate, a chemical used as legal medicine, often for the treatment of wounds. Kelly said the waste from the cocaine production process was “being dumped into the rivers, some of them in the Amazon basin”.

There was also 230,000 hectares being used to grow coca in Colombia and much of that space had been acquired through deforestation, which had caused “irreversible” environmental damage.

He said some people in Ireland “were driving their electric vehicles and had their eco credentials with their shopping” and yet they were also taking cocaine, which was “absolutely destroying” much of the environment in Colombia. Furthermore, many of the same people in Ireland would espouse human rights-based views but were disconnected from the fact human rights activists in South America were being murdered for opposing narco groups.

“It’s directly related to the drugs that people are taking here and the Colombians, the ones I met, just cannot believe there’s a disconnect,” he said.

On the continuing challenge posed by the Kinahan cartel – founded by Christy Kinahan snr and now led by his sons Daniel and Christopher jnr – Kelly said the investigation into them was “complex” as it involved law enforcement in several jurisdictions.

The Kinahans are based in Dubai, with the American authorities offering rewards of up to $5 million for information that would lead to their arrest and conviction. All the while, they were also under investigation by the Garda and the British and Spanish authorities.

“We’re going to be relentless about it. And you see people here being prosecuted for homicides that happened decades ago, we’re not going to forget about anything,” Kelly said of what has been described by Garda Commissioner Drew Harris as a “long march” to bring the Kinahans to justice.

“People might think they’re untouchable, but we don’t forget about them and we’re relentless,” Kelly added. “These people may have the trappings of wealth, but they don’t have any peace because they don’t know when [the Garda or international police forces] is going to put their hands on them. For most of them, if you look back, it all comes to an end at some stage.”

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