The arrest of an Australian man in a Sydney suburb on Monday led to a rapid-fire chain of events in Ireland hours later.
Some 33 search warrants were executed by the Garda in Dublin and surrounding counties. Eleven suspects were arrested. The worst is yet to come for the main targets in Ireland; “The Family” drugs gang.
The large Garda operation earlier this week – led by the National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau – involved 300 members of the force, many of them armed. It yielded drugs valued at about €16 million, almost all of it cocaine, with smaller quantities of cannabis and heroin.
There was cash too, €350,000 of it, along with Rolex watches and a Range Rover 4X4. Cryptocurrency and the keys for accessing those virtual currency accounts was also seized, as well as 27 laptops, about 200 sim cards and 126 mobile phones. It appears 42 of the phones were modified with special software and hardware so they could use the Ghost encrypted mobile messaging app.
Who should you vote for in the 2024 general election? Use this tool to see which candidate matches your views
Man (25) doused in petrol and taken at gunpoint by masked gang in alleged kidnapping in Cork city
Conor McGregor case: If jury decides woman was assaulted, damages should be appropriate, judge says
That takes us back to Monday’s operation in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Narwee. The alleged architect and administrator of the supposedly secure Ghost messaging platform was arrested as part of the takedown of his app. The Australian Federal Police took Jay Je Yoon Jung (32) into custody at about 5am.
It is now alleged he created the Ghost platform aged 23, and has been its administrator in the nine years since. A complex and ultra-private and secure niche messaging app, it was marketed to criminals in Australia as being unhackable by law enforcement. All the evidence suggests the most serious organised crime was plotted by its users.
How an app breach snared Ireland's biggest crime gang
Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, Europol’s deputy executive director, described Ghost as a “tool that was a lifeline for serious and organised” crime gangs. “This platform enabled drug trafficking, weapons dealing, extreme violence and money laundering on an industrial scale,” he added.
About 1,000 messages – texts, images and videos – were exchanged on Ghost every day. It was a service used exclusively by criminals, probably because access to it was so tightly controlled.
“Across many months, and indeed hundreds of thousands of intercepted modes of communication, we’ve no evidence to suggest this was used by anyone other than criminal enterprises,” said Australian police assistant commissioner David McLean.
Users paid about €3,000 to use the app for a year. Once they had access to it, via modified handsets, they messaged each other to organise drug shipments, plan money laundering, murders and a host of other crimes.
Though Ghost was mainly used by about 400 members of Australian crime gangs, it had also spread somewhat overseas. Of the estimated 200 users outside Australia, about 100 of them were in Ireland.
Jung was described this week as a socially awkward computer nerd who lived with his parents, had no partner, worked in a family-owned cleaning business and loved karaoke. He was hiding in plain sight in suburban Sydney, with the Australian police alleging he was motivated by money and the challenge of running his platform.
He is understood to have earned great wealth from the platform, which he ploughed into cryptocurrency. The Australian authorities also allege he was something of an IT adviser to the Australian gangs using the platform. They include biker gangs, who control much of Australia’s drugs distribution network as well as Middle Eastern, Italian and Korean gangs based in Australia. Jung is a Sydneysider of Korean ethnicity.
He also had a group of eight “resellers” working under him; a small group of people trying to get more clients for the platform. It appears Jung himself had the final say on who was allowed to become a user, and though efforts were made to promote it, those were controlled and covert. “It’s absolutely through recommendation, word of mouth,” Australian police commander Paula Hudson.
The Australians were first tipped off about Ghost in 2021 by the French authorities. Although an investigation – Operation Kraken – began immediately, the system proved impossible to hack. The Australians eventually managed to send a virus-like program to Jung’s computers.
When he then sent updates to the handsets around the world being used to access Ghost, the program spread to the handsets, with each one becoming a surveillance device. More than 125,000 exchanges were monitored over six months and it quickly became clear the app had a reach, though modest, beyond Australia.
The Australians teamed up with the FBI, Canadian Mounted Police, French National Gendarmerie and the authorities in Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden. Ireland was among those countries centrally involved because, when the Australian app users are discounted, Irish users accounted for half of the remaining 200 accounts on the platform.
The Australians pulled the trigger on the operation last Monday – moving in to arrest Jung and more than 50 criminals all over Australia. The live information available to the Garda about the Irish users and their activities led to the arrests and seizures in the Republic on Monday and Tuesday.
“I can assure you, there will be further arrests,” said assistant commissioner Justin Kelly, who heads the Garda’s Organised and Serious Crime branch. Det Chief Supt Seamus Boland, head of the Garda Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, echoed that view, saying those Irish criminals using Ghost were senior figures, who were high-value targets for the Garda.
Gardaí are now engaged in the painstaking task of analysing all of the Irish-related messages on Ghost over the past six months in a bid to “disrupt, degrade and dismantle” – as Kelly puts it – the four significant Irish drugs gangs who were using Ghost.
One of those was acting as something of an agent for the platform, trying to encourage its use in the Republic’s underworld. Of the four Irish gangs, Boland says one of them is now the largest drug-dealing organisation in the country.
Though he didn’t name them, that group is the drugs gang known as The Family, some of whose leading figures are men in their 40s from Ballyfermot. They have been involved in the drugs trade for close to 30 years but have gained in wealth and influence over the past decade.
They are now trafficking more drugs into the Republic than the Kinahan cartel and selling more cocaine and heroin to other gangs in Ireland than any other group. Their surpassing the Kinahan cartel is partly attributable to their growth. It is also due to the fact the cartel’s foothold in Ireland has been largely lost, and it is now more focused on European markets.
Its Irish operation – the Crumlin-based Byrne organised crime group once lead by Liam Byrne (43) – has been wiped out by the Garda in the policing response to the Kinahan-Hutch feud. Byrne, who was forced to flee from the Garda and the Hutches, to Britain around 2017, pleaded guilty in London on Thursday to serious gun conspiracy charges. He now faces a very lengthy sentence, having already lost his Crumlin home to the Criminal Assets Bureau in 2018.
It is arguably Liam Byrne’s crown – as former king of the domestic drugs trade – that has now passed to The Family.
Although The Family’s operation has now been infiltrated via the takedown of Ghost, it has already been under significant pressure in recent years. Some of the largest cash and drug seizures during the pandemic were owned by the gang and one of its leading members is before the courts.
Other leaders have previously spent years in prison after significant drug-dealing convictions. The Cab is also investigating the group’s money-laundering operation and personal assets. Once the senior leader of The Family gang is dealt with by courts, the legal restrictions around naming him and the other key figures will fall away.
Their names and photographs will never be out of the media. Their world changed this week, perhaps more than they realise. The fact they have been caught up in the Ghost inquiry, and confirmation this week they are now the biggest drugs gang in Ireland, means blanket media coverage awaits.
That kind of attention usually spells the end for those who reach the top of the domestic drugs trade. Liam Byrne could tell The Family all about it.
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
