A Co Clare livestock farmer who laundered millions of pounds of illicit revenue from cigarette smuggling has been jailed for four years in London.
Patrick Coughlan, of Girrogan Heights, Ennis, or the couriers he employed, used two bureaux de change in Knightsbridge to launder £5.1 million.
Joining the 39-year-old farmer in prison was an Italian, Pio Vadacchino, a suspected Mafia drugs trafficker,
The court heard Coughlan met his co-defendant while holidaying in Italy just over three years ago. Not long afterwards he had agreed to take part in the money laundering in return for a 3 per cent take.
Vadacchino smuggled £ 2.7 million of converted cash out of Britain hidden in his luxury cars, or had it electronically transferred to Switzerland.
It is believed to have filtered back to his crime masters in Rome.
Bags stuffed with used money were taken to be converted into foreign exchange - largely high denomination Italian lira or, on occasion, US dollars.
Southwark Crown Court heard that Coughlan, who owns three livestock farms in Ireland, went "quite openly" into the bureaux and was confident enough to use his own name, address and passport details.
But Customs officers had launched a surveillance operation and were watching as he ferried more than £500,000 at a time - enough English and Scottish notes to fill two holdalls.
Couglan admitted two sample charges of laundering the proceeds of crime, relating to December 1999 and February last year.
He said he earned £50,000 a year from farming and lending money to businessmen, including his co-defendant.
However, the court heard he was taking a 3 per cent cut from laundering money.
Vadacchino (37), from Naples, who rented apartments in Lancaster Gate and Hampstead, was convicted of conspiracy to launder criminal cash between June 1999 and April last year after a fourweek trial.
Judge Christopher Hardy accepted neither man was directly involved in the crimes that produced the cash - smuggling cigarettes to the north of England.
He said that in an attempt to distance himself from the action Coughlan hired other Irishmen at £4,000 a time to make the money-changing trips.
The judge said Coughlan was a prime mover in the laundering and had brought shame on his family. "It is difficult to understand how you, a farmer from Co Clare, could have got yourself trapped in this situation," he added.
The judge said Vadacchino, who had a warehouse at London's Brent Cross, used "considerable guile and sophistication" in getting the money out of Britain, attempting to blend the criminal cash with his "not very successful" clothing, wine and car businesses.
Coughlan must meet a £473,561 confiscation order against his realisable assets within six months or face a further 18 months' jail.Vadacchino was given a similar time to meet a £361,000 order or serve an additional 18 months.
Mr Mark Rainsford, prosecuting, said the pair sometimes worked together and at other times separately, but always laundering dirty money. In nine key months "about £575,000 per month was being exchanged".
Mr Rainsford said that at the time of Vadacchino's arrest offic- ers found a Ferrari, two Porsches, a Mercedes and a Smart car be- longing to him. He was repeatedly buying and selling the same cars to gain apparently legitimate cheques - converting £180,000 of criminal cash.
He said Coughlan and his couriers delivered £2.4 million in cash to Vadacchino via a bureaux de change from where the cash was wired to Vadacchino's Swiss bank account or, once exchanged into foreign currencies, the money was delivered to Vadacchino.
Coughlan was arrested in possession of £285,000 in cash and a bill of lading relating to three million cigarettes smuggled to Felixstowe.