AS her mother whacked a cameraman with a rolled-up newspaper outside the court, Regina Felloni (20) headed off to Mountjoy Prison, joining a family roll of dishonour that includes her brother Luigi (23), jailed for six years last October, and her father Tony (53), who was given a 20-year term in June.
Regina got six years and nine months for her part in her father's drug-smuggling empire, and gardai who targeted the family are now seeking seizure of more than £110,000 said to be controlled by her.
For the Garda it will be a welcome topping to Operation Pizza, their initiative against the Fellonis, if they can deprive the heroin dealers of some of the wealth they have built up over the years.
The key figure in the operation was Tony, now understood to have a life-threatening disease. Unlike most heroin dealers he became addicted himself, and unlike most fathers he got some of his children addicted and began to draw in their young friends. A man to give recidivists a bad name, Tony was described in court as a "malign influence" peddling an "evil" trade.
Tony Felloni made a grubby start to what would become a notorious criminal career. The son of Italian immigrants made his early cash in an unorthodox way. It was in the 1960s, when many of the better-off families in the larger houses of Dublin had hired maids and kitchen staff. These were often young impressionable women from rural areas, living in Dublin for the first time and on a meagre wage.
Antonio Felloni - as he was then known - took to chatting them up in O'Connell Street, spending a little money on them, seducing them, and finally taking compromising photographs of them.
He would then threaten to show the pictures to their employers, unless they agreed to pay him a percentage of their wages every week. He soon had a steady income from a string of young women throughout the city.
Felloni collected more than 20 convictions including housebreaking and also assault, many of the assaults being on his wife Ann. The couple had six children. After one such conviction in 1980 Felloni moved to Britain, where he began to make contacts among the criminal fraternity and feel his way into what would become the growth business in Dublin in the 1980s, illicit drugs. But he was arrested in Surrey in 1981 and jailed far four years for conspiracy to import heroin.
On his return to the Republic in 1984, Felloni began to move into the drugs business in a serious way. Although he would never be one of the top barons, he was one of the few major dealers who sold directly to street pushers.
Against a background of growing public and media pressure, Felloni was targeted by the Mockeys, a group of young detectives who posed as drug addicts. In 1986 gardai hidden outside his home at Palmerstown Place saw him enter the next-door garden and remove a black sock from the garden shed.
After he replaced it gardai moved in and found it contained heroin worth £6,500 on the streets. A further £100,000 worth would later be found at the flat in Ballymun.
Felloni received a 10-year sentence in July 1986, his 26th conviction. Concerned Parents cheered and applauded in the courtroom.
Meanwhile family life continued. One son died after falling off a factory roof in Dublin and another was sent to borstal for a year.
When Felloni was freed in 1993 he set about rebuilding his business with vigour, constructing a network of more than 20 people.
This time some family members became more directly involved. Tony's son Luigi imported heroin through Dublin Airport and kept supplies at his flat in Dominick Street. Regina, who became addicted like her brother and used £100 worth of heroin daily, kept drugs at her flat in Drumcondra. Both say they worked under their father's domineering influence.
As Dublin's second major heroin crisis began in the early 1990s, with ever younger addicts smoking as well as injecting the drug, the money started rolling in. In July 1994 a bank account was opened in the unemployed Regina's name which now contains more than £24,000. Another opened in April 1995 has about £18,500. A third account shows a balance of almost £69,000.
Luigi was found with £9,000 in cash including £1,000 worth of pesetas. Meanwhile Tony Felloni was in and out of court four times in 1994 and 1995, getting bail and then reoffending, as the legal system ground its way towards the eventual 20-year sentence handed down last June.
As gardai turned up the heat on Operation Pizza the activities of the wider network came to light. Those in the trade included Luigi's 16-year-old girlfriend, who cannot be named; Josephine Heery (18), who went through Dublin Airport with heroin wrapped in condoms concealed in her body; Emma Mooney (21), caught with £80,000 worth of the drug at the airport; Jason Brack (23), intercepted at Dun Laoghaire where he was importing £30,000 worth of heroin from Liverpool; and Jason Doyle (23), who kept £150,000 worth at the home of Edward McLoughlin (50) in Ballymun.
In addition Paula Lynch (17), who used cannabis from the age of 12, and smoked heroin from the age of 14, was found with £20,000 worth of heroin in her vagina. As these members of the Felloni gang have come through the courts it has become clear that Tony Felloni never lost his talent for identifying the weak and vulnerable. The Felloni operation is much depleted, but the trade goes on. The Garda drug unit based at Store Street is now concentrating on a parallel investigation, Operation Family Tree. This network centres on another inner-city family which is estimated to be turning over more than £1 million a year.
Already four of its key figures have been sentenced, but the main target, Family Tree's equivalent to Tony Felloni but much younger, remains elusive. He may run out of luck in 1996, but there is no doubt that if he does, his patch will be taken over by someone else.
