Background.
Throughout his lengthy alleged IRA and criminal career, Thomas "Slab" Murphy has successfully evaded the security forces on both sides of the Border, including the British army, the RUC, PSNI, MI5 and Garda Síochána.
Over the past 35 years Murphy is reputed to have built up a fortune of between £35 and £40 million laundering money and smuggling pigs, grain, oil and cigarettes.
He is still a free and reportedly hugely wealthy man but there is a sense of a net slowly closing in on him, particularly since last October when the Criminal Assets Bureau in the South and the Assets Recovery Agency in the North mounted major operations in Manchester and in Louth, chiefly directed against Murphy.
His house and properties at Ballybinaby that straddle the Border between Louth and south Armagh - as well as the properties of several other people - were searched yesterday by the Garda and PSNI with back-up by the British and Irish armies. Three people were arrested but Murphy wasn't one of them.
Still, Murphy (57), whose main social interests are Gaelic football, darts and road bowls, must know that North and South he is probably now Ireland's most marked man.
The operations of yesterday and October could not have happened during the height of the Troubles or directly after. Neither police in the Republic nor the North could have spared the resources. Furthermore, south Armagh was just too dangerous for an investigation that is largely criminal rather than paramilitary in its focus.
But yesterday between police, army, customs and Cab people, there were 400 personnel involved in this investigation tackling money laundering and smuggling.
For a long time he must have felt invincible. In October when the Manchester and Louth raids happened, he was reputedly still chief of staff of the IRA. He remains a senior IRA figure but whether he is still chief of staff is unclear.
While unionists will contend that some of his alleged criminally-amassed wealth is going to the IRA, Garda sources have said there is no evidence to suggest this fortune is being used for anything other than personal purposes.
For many years Murphy was a very big IRA player. The peace process might have collapsed without him. In the 1990s when "Real" IRA leader Michael McKevitt was seeking to tempt the south Armagh IRA into the arms of the dissidents, Murphy, with some difficulty, persuaded most of the Border IRA to stick with the policies pursued by Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
Gerry Moriarty