VIDEO: Illegal cigarettes flooding the streets of Cork City
The former chief superintendent who’s helping gauge the ever-increasing level of illegal cigarettes sales in this country has smoked all his life, but he’d be scared to touch some of the stuff now flooding the streets — no matter how cheap they are.
“I’d be big enough to say we all know the health risks of smoking, but people out there have a free choice,” Kevin Donohoe says, just after stubbing one out.
There are a number of harmful chemicals in branded cigarettes, but the ‘illegal whites’ — counterfeit, non-existent brands — contain a cocktail of nasty surprises.
Tests carried out on them in Britain show they contained potentially harmful levels of arsenic, rat poison, human and rat faeces, and more, and the former senior garda says it’s highly likely that the same substances are present in the packets on sale here.
“Our operation is not only highlighting the additional health risks, but the vast profits being made by dissident gangs, which use some of the money to further their own ends,” says Mr Donohoe.
“There are also crime gangs from Eastern Europe involved.
“The people who end up supplying them will sell them to anybody, including children, and there’s a huge loss of revenue to the State, which everybody is affected by.”
The undercover operation mounted in Cork last Thursday mirrored what was discovered in other counties since the team started working in Ireland last February.
There is one plus side, according to former Scotland Yard detective chief inspector Will O’Reilly.
He says that indigenous Irish shopkeepers, unlike their counterparts in Britain and the North, are not selling illegal cigarettes.
The contrabrand is, however, sold on a regular basis by many Asian, African, and Eastern European shop-owners based in this country.
Mr Donohoe knows the gardaí and customs officials are short of manpower and may have their priorities set elsewhere, which, on top of the recession, is probably the reason why the sale of illegal cigarettes has exploded in recent years.
He says the ease with which some suppliers sold to strangers — including his team — was likely to be due to the very low penalties if they were caught, “which would appear not to be a deterrent”.
On their operation in Cork City, this is borne out. Only one supplier, who was in the Mahon area, seems a little cagey.
Over the phone, he can be heard saying he didn’t have any stuff on him at present and was awaiting restocking.
“I can’t get any at the moment,” he tells one of the team, who once worked as an undercover policewoman in Britain. “There’s a lot of shit around at the moment, it would actually burn the throat off you. As soon as I get some, I’ll give you a tinkle.”
The same woman says she’d gone into an Asian-owned shop in Bridge St the previous day and purchased counterfeit Palace cigarettes.
On Thursday at 11.15am, accompanied by this reporter, she goes into the Spice House Asian Grocery Store.
She says the man behind the counter wasn’t the same person who’d previously sold her the cigarettes, so she shows him a packet of Palace and asks him for two more.
The man goes to the counter behind him and produces the two packets, charging her €6 each. He opens the till to give her change, but the transaction doesn’t register on the till.
“There is no such make as ‘Palace’,” she says as she leaves the shop with me. “It’s counterfeit and potentially dangerous.”
Legitimate cigarette manufacturers are also required to ensure their products contain fire-retardant ingredients, so if one is dropped accidentally it is less likely to start a blaze. This is not the case with counterfeit cigarettes.
A few minutes later, I am told that another member of the undercover team, this time an Eastern European, has made mobile phone contact with an African man in an apartment in Blackpool.
The team member emerges from the flat a few minutes later with six 20-packs of Benson & Hedges, which cost him €6 each.
This time the packets appear genuine, showing a customs tag and a Federal Ministry of Health warning on the packets about the dangers of smoking.
“He probably brought them in the airport duty-free. They’d cost about €3 a packet in Nigeria, so he’s doubling his money,” says another member of the team.
Next up, the female undercover operative rings a man living in a house close to St Anne’s Cathedral in Shandon.
I accompany her as she calls to the house. Seconds after she knocks on the door, a tall man in his late 40s or early 50s hands her two 50g packets of Samson rolling tobacco.
He charges her €14 each, considerably less than they would cost here. The tobacco appeared genuine, and was probably acquired in the Netherlands or other north European country.
He hadn’t bothered to remove the retail price label on either packet, which clearly said €6.60 each.
The team then makes contact with a man who wants to meet them at a location in the city centre rather than at his home. He sounds a bit wary as he didn’t know the buyer, who said he was collecting it for somebody else.
The seller, who is in his 60s, Irish, and is driving a small Cork-registered car, pulls up a few minutes later and the Eastern European undercover contact crosses the road to meet him.
In one of the busiest streets in Cork, the seller opens up the car boot and hands out a plastic bag containing 200 Excellence cigarettes, for which he is paid €40.
These cigarettes are also among the potentially dangerous counterfeit brands.
Mr Donohoe said it is thought that a bottom-of-the-chain street seller would probably buy the cigarettes for €2 a packet from the crime gangs, thus making a tidy profit on the transaction.
The crime gangs will get 10 packets for €2.
Later in the day, the team tries to contact another seller in Barrack St, who they say had given them 200 Excellence counterfeit cigarettes the previous day for €45, or €4.50 a packet.
The seller, believed to be in his 60s, says on the phone that he had the product, again the same brand, but is running late.
The team decides not to wait because he is taking so long.
While many of the team are trained ex-police or military, the speed and ease with which they are able to acquire illegal tobacco within hours of visiting the city was an eye-opener to this reporter and even, to a lesser extent, to themselves. It seems the city was awash with it.
The operatives say that if they’d had more time, they could have unearthed considerably more suppliers.
These ‘blow-ins’ used the internet for contacts, or simply walked up to smokers outside pubs or bookmakers and asked where they could get cheap tobacco.
More often than not, within a few minutes, they were pointed in the right direction.
Some of the traders on Dublin’s Moore St have been known in the past for blatantly exhibiting illicit tobacco on their stalls.
Mr Donohoe says the team had also seen this outside the capital, most recently at stalls in markets in Bantry and Drogheda.
Mr O’Reilly, who has been working for Philip Morris International as a consultant since 2011, believes that, like Irish dissidents, Kurdish communities in Britain, who are “big sellers” of counterfeit cigarettes, may be using the profits to fund the actions of their separatist movement.
