Two men have been jailed for moving money and keeping the accounts for a transnational organised crime group that made €12m in one year.
56-year-old Patrick Lawlor from Collins Avenue West in Dublin and 32-year-old Ross Hanway from The Beeches in Ashbourne, Co Meath, were jailed for seven and four years respectively.
24-year-old Ian Lawlor, Patrick's son, was also jailed for two years today after he was caught with €18,000 worth of the drugs in the family home.
The drugs were only discovered as part of the investigation into his father.
The three men were jailed today following an investigation by the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau into a major transnational organised crime gang which took in more than €12m in 2019 and spent €98,000 on encrypted phones in the same year.
It was run by George Mitchell, the Dublin criminal known as 'the Penguin' who left the country over 25 years ago and was since targeted by the Criminal Assets Bureau, who took almost three quarters of a million euro from him.
A taxi driver, Ross Hanway, was paid €4,000 a month to move the money. The transactions were lodged in ledgers kept by Patrick Lawlor. On 26 May last year, Patrick Lawlor got into the taxi with €412,000 cash in a rucksack before it was stopped by gardaí from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, which had the men under surveillance.
Both men had dual-partition encrypted phones with a separate network and server to ordinary phones, which are used by crime gangs to communicate with each other. The messages burn off every seven days.
When Lawlor was searched, the encryption app on the phone was open, which enabled the gardaí to take screenshots of messages over the previous week.
These included communications between the two men, but even as the gardaí were taking the pictures, the messages were disappearing.
Lawlor was being paid €5,000 a month.
The court was told today that the 56-year-old only got involved with the drugs gang because his construction business failed due to the recession after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
The banks came after him for his home, where he lived with his wife of 27 years and three children, and he borrowed €32,000 from criminals, the court heard.
He missed a few payments and was threatened and beaten; he had his ribs broken and his thumbs snapped, and once he had gotten involved with organised crime, he couldn’t get out.
The court was told he was more useful to the gang keeping its records in the ledgers, which detailed the gangs payments to truck drivers, money movers and expenses such as the cost of the phones.
When caught, Patrick even tried to take responsibility for the cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy that his son Ian had been caught with, even though he knew nothing about it.
The gardaí found €18,000 worth of cocaine, ecstasy and ketamine, which Ian was holding while they were searching the house as part of the investigation into Patrick Lawlor. The father knew nothing about his son’s drug dealing, the court heard.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
Detective Garda Ronan Doolan said as a result of the investigation, other units froze Patrick Lawlor and his wife’s bank accounts which had over €100,000. A 191 E-Class Mercedes was also seized.
The court was told today that Ian Lawlor suffered mental health difficulties, as did Ross Hanway.
Hanway was on the gang’s payroll since 2017. He started at a monthly rate of €1,750 which rose in 2019 to €4,000 cash.
None of the three men had ever been in trouble in their lives.
Patrick Lawlor was sentenced to eight years in prison with the final year suspended, Ross Hanway to six years with the final two suspended, while Ian Lawlor was sentenced to three years with the final year suspended.
