HE letters arrive at the Criminal Assets bureau (CAB) at Harcourt Square in Dublin regularly, sometimes in each post. They are usually anonymous and are often signed "Concerned Citizen" so they have become known in the bureau as "CCLs" - concerned citizens' letters.
According to the chief bureau officer, Garda Chief Superintendent Felix McKenna, CCLs are often the source of remarkably precise detail about the financial activities and ownership of property by criminals. The letters have prompted several CAB investigations that have led to successful prosecutions and deprived criminals of ownership of property and money they would otherwise have continued to enjoy.
The anonymous letters show the work of the bureau has caught the public's attention and earned its support. For decades, people - at least those who obey the law and pay their taxes - had watched helplessly as criminals and the corrupt amassed ill-gotten fortunes. The enthusiastic response of the public in supplying such detailed information is a social phenomenon the creators of the bureau had not anticipated. There was no particular publicity campaign or appeals for public assistance. It just occurred.
A CCL which arrived about two months ago led the bureau straight to the people who have been involved in livestock smuggling on a massive scale. The smuggling of sheep from Britain had brought with it foot-and-mouth disease, which threatened the national herds of cattle and sheep. The response of some right-minded people in the farming community was to point the finger. And, the best way they could do this was to pass the information they possessed to CAB. One CCL led CAB instantly to land and assets that might have taken months of police work to uncover. The smugglers will now lose property worth millions pounds by way of settlement of their debts to society.
Two of the largest smugglers, former IRA figures, who have amassed fortunes from the trade have so far managed to escape CAB because they live outside this jurisdiction. But, as the UK is emulating the Republic's Proceeds of Crime Act and is setting up a Criminal Assets Bureau, they, too, are likely to be caught. CAB has already co-operated with police in Britain and Northern Ireland. It can be assumed that the detailed information that has come to CAB will be passed on to its counterpart in Northern Ireland when it is set up, possibly later this year.
CAB is just now emerging from its formative stage and is growing in strength and confidence. Much of the first years of existence - it was founded in October, 1996, as a response to the murder of Veronica Guerin - were spent in court defending its legal and constitutional right to exist.
A number of cases, costing millions of pounds in legal fees, were launched against it. The cases took up the full-time services of one High Court judge for almost three years. The last CAB annual report observed: "As in previous years, it has again been the experience of the bureau that certain defendants have scrutinised and challenged the proceedings taken against them to the fullest extent possible." CAB's legal right to deprive criminals of their assets was finally established in the failed case brought against it by Derek Dunne, the heroin dealer shot dead in Amsterdam last year.
Judge Moriarty stated that he was entitled to take notice of the international phenomenon of money laundering and of CAB's right "not to achieve penal sanctions but to effectively deprive such persons of such illicit financial fruits of their labours as can be shown to be proceeds of crime". It was also legitimate for CAB to use the "lower probative requirements of civil law" to seize illicit assets.
The bureau Legal Officer, Barry Galvin, has successfully steered CAB and the asset-seizure legislation through the legal challenges. As a crime-fighting state solicitor in Cork, Galvin was one of the leading proponents of asset seizure and improved laws to fight organised crime. He was the natural choice to head its vital legal side. Together with its first Garda chief, chief superintendent, now Assistant Commissioner Fachtna Murphy, he helped build the bureau and continues to be its co-director.
CAB and the Money Laundering Investigation Unit in the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation (GBFI) building opposite in Harcourt Square, are currently tracing the movements of money - with a total value running into nine figures - from all kinds of criminal endeavours from drugs to smuggling, the sale of illegal animal growth promoters and corruption in both the public and private sectors. The Money Laundering Unit, under Detective Inspector Terry McGinn, has the forensic accountancy skills needed to trace hidden or laundered money. Her unit of 10 garda∅ and three sergeants, assisted by forensic accountants, supplies most of the information to CAB about laundered funds.
The unit carried out the bulk of the work leading to the seizure of laundered cash belonging to John Gilligan, Gerry Hutch and Brian Meehan, the man convicted of murdering Veronica Guerin.
CAB can operate secretly in seeking information from bank accounts in the State and abroad without the knowledge of the target. The investigation of accounts can go on for months with the suspect only becoming aware when they are invited to a local Garda station. So far this year, some 500 warrants to search institutions for illicit funds were granted to CAB. This was a marked increased on last year, when 183 warrants were signed and shows how the CAB and fraud bureau's work is picking up pace.
CAB has expanded to the point where it has 56 staff and has three floors in a wing of the Dublin Metropolitan Region headquarters in Harcourt Square. Since October, 1996, it has frozen assets worth £15 million; received unpaid tax of £10 million and issued tax demands for more than £36 million; issued injunctions for £18 million.
Its annual accounts show that CAB costs the State just more than £2 million a year. In financial terms, it is a run-away success. More importantly, it has defeated the notion that it is possible to defy the law and enjoy the profits. "We have begun to notice that an increasing number of people are coming forward to settle their taxes before they have their collar felt," observed Chief Superintendent McKenna.
But some still need encouragement.
Last year, an animal feed supplier in Wexford who had shifted millions of pounds through accounts in places as diverse as Laredo, Texas, and the Isle of Man, was invited to his local Garda station and presented with a tax bill understood to be between £3 million and £4 million. He was sufficiently well-heeled to take out his chequebook and settle the matter quickly.
The north Dublin man Gerry Hutch (formerly referred to in this newspaper and others as the north Dublin criminal the Monk) was visited by CAB last year and presented with a tax bill for £2 million. He has so far paid £1.25 million. The Money Laundering Unit, with the help of the RUC and a number of other police forces and financial regulatory institutions abroad, had tracked down Hutch's earnings from armed robberies during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Hutch was assiduous in the way he laundered his funds but some of these were finally uncovered. Money was traced to eight building society accounts opened in his wife's maiden name in Northern Ireland in 1993. Sums of up to £300,000 were involved in these accounts. The money was then withdrawn all in one day and moved to Jersey, again to branches of British building societies, such as the Halifax, Leeds Permanent and Alliance & Leicester. The money then moved to Portugal. The gardai were granted permission in the Portuguese higher courts to follow the funds through its banking system.
In Portugal, the money was moved into accounts in the name of the girlfriend of one of Hutch's business associates involved in the hotel business in Portugal and here. The spending money Hutch needed to maintain his upwardly mobile lifestyle in Dublin came back into this State into an account in the name of this woman in the midlands.
CAB and the Money Laundering Unit are now involved in tracking down the estimated £8 million the convicted drug trafficker, John Gilligan, is believed to have laundered through an off-shore bank in Antigua run by three men based in London and Dublin.
Gilligan is obsessed with defying the State and holding on to every ill-gotten penny he has made. He has fought CAB since becoming its first target in October, 1996, when it ordered the seizure of his equestrian centre in Co Kildare. He is still challenging the right of CAB to exist.
CAB's attention has recently also turned to the illicit earnings of people involved in the oldest vice. Earlier this year, it seized a substantial, if run-down house used as a brothel on Rathmines Road. It was put up for sale at auction on May 8th and made £265,000.
Last year CAB seized and sold Clashnacree House at Sneem, Co Cork after it was found to be the property of a Dutchman who was convicted for drug trafficking in Holland. The house made £1 million at auction in October.
Recently, CAB has received the findings of an investigation into the brothel trade in Dublin, which began last year into the advertisements in In Dublin magazine. The investigation was carried out by the National bureau of Crime Investigation (NBCI) under the command of Chief Superintendent Sean Camon.
Eight brothels run by six women and two men were investigated and both owners and prostitutes questioned. They are now in the process of being assessed. The brothel keepers were earning between £1,400 and £5,460 per week. The most lucrative, based in rented accommodation in Portobello Harbour, charged its clients £80 per half-hour. The two women who run the business enjoy the benefits of an annual turnover estimated at £284,000. Six prostitutes working in the house pay "house money" and work and estimated four "tricks" per shift. The house has at least 24 clients a day giving the brothel keepers a daily income of £780. They will shortly be served with tax demands and failure to pay will result in the seizure of whatever assets they have acquired.
One of the striking aspects of criminal behaviour has been the way that even the richest and most successful of them continued to claim State welfare benefits. Three officials from the Social Community and Family Affairs Department are seconded to CAB to deal with this unusual behaviour. The families of most Dublin criminals have continued to claim benefits. Up to last year, the CAB had stopped payments and sought repayment of more than £500,000 in unemployment assistance, lone parents allowances, child benefit and disability allowance.
Chief Superintendent McKenna observed: "It is a strange fact that of those involved in persistent and serious crime that even though they were profiting greatly from crimes like drug trafficking, armed robberies or fraud, that most of them still tried to maintain the illusion that they needed the support of the State and claimed and were paid social welfare benefit, which was means tested. Some payments were made in circumstances where they had hundreds of thousands of pounds of money available to them."
In any community, the appalling vista of a person known or suspected to be a criminal, with no visible means of support, enjoying vast wealth without working is corrosive in the extreme.
"The process of depriving known criminals of the benefit of their criminal activity is of huge public benefit in the fight against crime not least where it reinforces the confidence of the citizens in the criminal justice system.
"Before CAB was established many (criminals) were willing to serve prison sentences knowing that when they came out they could in the lap of luxury. Taking away that lifestyle is not only humiliating for them, it sends out the very positive message that crime does not pay."