Is he Ireland’s greatest conman?
To be fair, Finnegan cannot always be sure that Shanley, one of the most prolific con men of recent years in this country, is behind the invoices for peculiar items, but once bitten, twice shy, says Finnegan, who is also the radio station’s CEO.
“I had invoices coming in for stuff you wouldn’t use in a month of Sundays. I got a bill for two ton of coal. I got a bill for a ride on a lawn mower six years ago. I’m not sure if it was him though...”
Frankie Shanley, of Boyle in Roscommon and Carrick-On-Shannon in Co Leitrim, is currently serving a sentence in Cork Prison. The reason he came to be on Keith Finnegan’s radar was that, on a number of occasions, he pretended to be Keith Finnegan. He has pretended to be other people as well, and at a court appearance in Ennis Circuit Court at the start of June, Judge Donagh McDonagh remarked on the incredible number of court appearance Shanley had racked up in his relatively young life.
Those date back to 1998 and spread right across the country, north and south, east and west. It’s almost like you’re in a minority if you have not met Frankie on your travels. Aged 35, he has appeared before courts in Nenagh, Clifden, Killaloe, Ennis, Longford, Killarney, Bandon, Athy, Sligo, Cavan, Carrickmacross, Fermoy, Mallow, Bantry, Donegal, Tipperary, Castleblaney, Shannon, Dublin, Listowel, Kilkee, Clonakilty and Strokestown.
According to the judge in Ennis, “the number of counties across which Shanley has ranged is quite extraordinary”, but then, Frankie is singularly extraordinary and quite possibly misunderstood. His list of crimes is mind-blowing, but none ever seem to involve violence or intimidation.
Many of the people consulted for this article remarked on how Frankie is “a fierce nice fella”, someone from a good home and family. His modus operandi is described by one garda, off the record, as “ingenious” and by another as “cunning”. His talent for impersonation is so profound he should have an Equity card, yet at least two courts have heard that he has a mental illness, one described in Ennis as paranoid delusion disorder. It prompts questions, such as what drives him to do this, and can he ever stop?
Born on November 11, 1975, Frankie has spent most of his adult life either in court, in prison, or committing the crimes that land him in both. Trying to piece together his record is a thankless task, due to its sheer geographical scale — from Bantry to Donegal, from Ennis to Dublin — and the number of court appearances. It’s like trying to map the clouds, but it is beyond contention that Frankie has utilised deception, powers of mimicry and an uncanny ability to con to travel the highways and byways of Ireland, often with a stolen car underneath him. It is also quite likely that the finger of blame has been pointed at him in some instances where he had nothing to do with the alleged deception which took place.
Frankie, unfortunately, declined the offer of an interview for this article, so it is hard to say what the definitive motive is for his apparent compulsive need to commit certain types of crime. It would be almost impossible to build up a complete picture of this rolling crime spree, or if its aggregate cost to the victims or to the state of the myriad court appearances and Garda man hours spent poring over the finer details.
Nonetheless, some of the stunts seem ingenious in their execution. Obviously an intelligent man, it should also be pointed out that, given the available records, Frankie’s crimes are non-violent, a not insignificant factor when considering his life and times, particularly in an era when babies are kidnapped in tiger raids and elderly people are terrorised in their homes.
This is not to demonise him, or hold him up as some kind of anti-hero. In short, Frankie seems to be a rare case, something else entirely.
And so to the record. This year alone, there are a few notches on his criminal belt: in February it was alleged he stole a flat-screen Samsung television worth €430 in Beaufort, Killarney, for which received a nine-month prison sentence from the District Court.
On April 28, he faced charges and received a six-month sentence and a four-month consecutive sentence for theft on March 1 in Renville, Galway, this time of a 32-inch TV and a Phillips DVD player.
On April 28, he was given a three-month sentence to run concurrent to six months already being served, and was disqualified for 10 years from driving for not having a driving licence or car insurance.
He has been disqualified from driving on numerous occasions, such as the time in Longford for an alleged incident of dangerous driving in December 2008. He faced charges of the unauthorised taking of a vehicle in Donegal, and received two three-month sentences in Listowel Circuit Court in November 2004 for driving without insurance or a driving licence.
Last March he received a seven-month prison sentence for stealing a vehicle at Divane’s garage in Castleisland, Co Kerry. No order was made in court when he was found to have stolen an Opel Vectra in Carlow.
He stole an Opel Vectra in Co Monaghan in May 2006 and received yet another sentence, while he also received a jail sentence at the Circuit Court in Bantry as a result of an appeal over the theft of a car in November 2003.
In 2007, he was sent for trail in Limerick following the theft of a sports car worth €22,000, although no outcome was recorded. In March this year he was disqualified from driving relating to a November 2005 charge of stealing a car.
In November 2007, at Castleblayney Circuit Court, he received an 11-month sentence in Wheatfield Prison for the June 2005 theft of a Toyota Avensis. In Sligo Circuit Court in June 2008 he received another 11 month jail term and was also disqualified for driving without insurance or a driving licence.
He was also convicted in Fermoy Circuit Court of stealing a car. He also received what, in hindsight, seems like a rather harsh sentence of 11 months from a Sligo court for leaving a filling station without paying the €50 he owed for diesel.
On another occasion, in Bunclody in Co Wexford, Shanley deceived someone into giving him €2,000 for a deposit on a car which he had stolen and which had false plates; he received a six-month sentence in March of this year at Wexford Circuit Court.
He was sent forward for trial in Thurles over allegations that he stole a Renault Laguna in the town in March 2004. In July 2006, at Ennis Circuit Court, he was disqualified from driving for having no driver's licence or passport, and back in 2004 he was convicted at Listowel Circuit Court for making a false statement in December 2002 so as to take out insurance.
The more colourful cases involve his talent for attaining by deception. He received a six-month sentence in Donegal Circuit Court and it was ordered that he receive psychiatric treatment in March 2007 following an alleged incident in June 2006 at the Coach House holiday homes in Pettigo, where he rented accommodation and then left without paying the €290 bill.
He received two six-month sentences at Nenagh District Court for allegedly renting a lodge at the Abbey Court Hotel in the town and failing to pay the €705. He went for trial in May 2007 on charges that he induced by deception a man in Blanchardstown in Dublin to give him €4,800 after telling the man he was authorised to sell camera equipment.
He also went to trial on similar charges relating to other incidents in Ballinteer and Donnybrook for smaller sums. In January 2006, he stole €43,000 worth of camera equipment from a audiovisual hire company in Dublin and was sent for trial to Dublin Circuit Court, where it is understood he pleaded guilty but was released on bail prior to sentencing.
There was a bench warrant issued for his arrest on March 16, 2009, in relation to these charges after he had been due in court on February 2 of that year, when he said he could not make the court appearance as he could not travel from Carrick-on-Shannon due to bad weather. On March 16, he again failed to attend and the bench warrant was issued.
At Galway Circuit Court he received a two-month prison sentence after conning someone into giving him €180 in April 2005. He received another jail sentence over an incident in November 2005 when he, by deception, bought a computer from a store in Cavan town.
Back in Fermoy Circuit Court, he was jailed for eight months following an offence dating from March 2004 in Mitchelstown when he conned someone out of five Motorola mobile phones. In Ennis Circuit Court he received a six-month jail sentence for the February 2004 theft of another flat-screen TV.
Dizzying, mesmerising, barely believable — the list, such as it is, makes for remarkable reading. At his most recent court appearance in Ennis, the court heard that, back in September 2006, he handed himself in to gardaí in Manorhamilton after an appearance on the Liveline radio show that highlighted his crimes.
The court heard that, at the time, he had wanted to clean the slate with the authorities “as he had so many irons in the fire that he needed to get matters dealt with once and for all” and that he had been diagnosed with paranoid delusional disorder by a consultant psychiatrist.
Prior to handing himself ,in he had gone on the run from Maghabery Prison in the North (he was once on the PSNI’s wanted list) because he was put into a cell beside convicted killer and rapist Trevor Hamilton. He had been arrested in Derry earlier in 2006 and had been posing as a television producer for Sky One, among other channels. It is alleged that he convinced a Belfast film crew to follow him around nightclubs as to make a programme about DJs.
He told Liveline in 2006: “I’m a person that’s made mistakes. I’m not looking for sympathy from people. There’s reasons why I’ve done what I’ve done. I can’t defend what I’ve done. The only defence I have is that I haven’t hurt anybody. I haven’t killed anyone.”
The slate, however, did not remain clean for long. The following year, in October 2007, a bench warrant was issued at Sligo Circuit Court for his arrest, claiming through his solicitor that he was not in a position to plea. The Sligo Champion reported that, in court, Shanley’s solicitor produced a psychiatric report that cast doubt on his client’s competence to enter a plea when Frankie had been due to appeal against an 11-month District Court jail sentence.
According to Dr Patricia Casey of the Mater Hospital and Professor of Adult Psychiatry at UCD, paranoid delusional disorder is more properly known as persistent delusional disorder (PDD), formerly paranoid psychosis.
As its name suggests, it manifests itself in persistent delusions, typically confined to one area of life. For example, a person with the condition might have delusions of love, that they must be with a particular person, or delusions of infestation, where they believe they are being attacked by insects. An individual could also have delusions of illness, suffering severe hypochondria.
“They always appear pretty normal,” Dr Casey said of those who suffer from the condition. “Their personality appears pretty intact.”
It is not a condition without implications, although she stresses that having PDD does not necessarily mean someone will turn to crime. Someone with a delusion of love, for example, could take it to an extreme degree and begin stalking someone. In some cases drugs such as cocaine, and particularly alcohol, can be responsible for triggering PDD, but it can also develop the same way any other mental illness can.
Of a sample caseload of 300 people, Dr Casey said between 10 and 15 might display signs of PDD, adding: “I would certainly have seen some people in prison because of persistent delusion disorder.”
Whether or not someone with PDD should be in prison is open to debate, although Dr Casey says that people with PDD can be a danger to the public and it is difficult to treat.
She says in-reach services in prisons should be able to identify someone with a mental illness and provide access to treatment, which in this case should be medication as PDD does not respond to therapy. Typically, we have a lack of data in this country on the prevalence of PDD and similar illnesses in this country, and in our cash-strapped state it is often a choice between treatment or research. Access to adequate treatment should, in her view, “be the priority”.
In practice, those with the delusions believe they are fine. “They do not believe the problem is them — it’s other people,” Dr Casey said, adding that sufferers are not reined in by embarrassment or fear of getting caught. Finally, PDD is difficult to fake.
This prompts questions that have previously been raised at a wider level about those with psychiatric illnesses languishing in the prison system.
In the latest instance where Shanley was jailed, the issue of his diagnosis was obviously not deemed sufficient to keep him out of prison. Is he, however, receiving the treatment that the court in Donegal said he should receive? Counselling is available in Cork Prison, but one recent inmate described it to The Irish Examiner as “a joke”.
Last year, Frankie’s sister Rebecca took to the airwaves to address some of the issue surrounding her brother’s criminal career. Liveline had again featured Frankie, this time in his guise as a DJ in Waterford, where again victims were lining up to complain about him.
Management at the Casbah Club in Waterford told the show they had been taken in by Shanley after he claimed he was a professional DJ named Ollie, working for Today FM and with tickets to give away for the Oxegen festival.
However, even some of his victims wish him nothing but recovery and a better life. Among them is Keith Finnegan.
Frankie first came to his attention some years ago when he heard that a man had been to a store in Dunmore town in Co Galway, looking to pick up call credit for a Galway Bay FM outside broadcast. Suffice it to say, there was no outside broadcast, the radio station does not use call credit phones and the story pitched to the shop staff was bogus.
“I don’t think we will ever know the extent to which he conned people,” Keith says, adding: “He took me off very well.”
Mike Dervan of Dervan Sound in Loughrea believes he was almost duped by Frankie; the story certainly bears some of his signature style.
“I got an order for equipment and the whole thing sounded very suspicious, but I never loaned the equipment out,” he says. “We do very little dry hire, there was something didn’t add up.
“I got a call from Carrick or Boyle and he was doing an RTÉ production somewhere and he would send a guy down in a van to collect [the gear] and something didn’t twig right. I’m not 100% sure that it was him.”
Keith remembers the time Frankie gave gardaí the slip in an attempted sting operation aimed at catching him in the act. “I got a call to say ‘have you booked equipment for the west county?’ and I said ‘No, I haven’t’. I smelled a rat. I got the supplier and got them to contact gardaí and gardaí lay in wait from lunch ’til 11 at night.”
The collection point for the gear, hired under false pretences, was the West County Hotel, Ennis. Frankie dropped by at midnight when gardaí had left the scene.
According to Keith, Frankie has pretended to be working for numerous broadcasting companies at different stages over the years, but he is not without talent in this regard. On a Youtube clip of Frankie you can hear him linking records, and his tone and delivery is that of a polished broadcaster. He used this convincing manner to apparently run up a huge bill wining and dining local people during a stay in Claremorris in Co Mayo, under the guise of working for Today FM. He left without paying the bill.
“I made the point on Liveline that if he harnessed his energy he could have a very good career,” Keith says, describing him as “a talented presenter”. His almost addictive need to deceive led him to attempt to hire gear from a variety of other outlets in the guise of the Galway Bay FM boss, and Finnegan admits to having feelings of huge annoyance in the past. These have now dissipated and he says: “I have forgiven him a long time ago.
“From my recollection all they [Frankie’s family] wanted to do is for him to have a normal life,” he says, adding that his sister had called him to apologise on her brother’s behalf. “There is a compulsion there, like a gambler or an alcoholic, keep going until you get caught. Maybe he will mend his ways.
“I would wish that he would get help for it because he seems to be a very talented guy. My own wish in life is that he would leave Keith Finnegan alone.”
Many of the people the Irish Examiner spoke with regarding Frankie expressed surprise he had declined the opportunity to be interviewed, but it is possible that he is sick and tired of being in the papers. A high profile might not necessarily be an advantage in a prison, particularly when you are not a violent offender like some other inmates. Many legal minds have represented him over the years and his current solicitor, Cahir O’Higgins, said simply: “I have found Frankie to be a largely pleasant individual who is motivated towards resolving his difficulties and he deserves to be treated fairly and appropriately.”
Can this happen in Cork Prison, one of the most overcrowded jails in the country? That is debatable, but other people could justifiably claim that if you do the crime, you must do the time. His sister told Liveline last year that Frankie is in need of psychiatric support and this had not been forthcoming in any of the prisons in which he has been an inmate.
His failure to engage with the Probation and Welfare Service was mentioned in court in Ennis in June by counsel for the state, while Det Garda Larry Bergin of Clonmel Station said Shanley could not be located by gardaí in 2009 and that “there are multiple warrants going back many, many years”.
Frankie Shanley is arguably a man that needs to escape his past, even though it might prove a difficult task. But maybe he will stay on the straight and narrow once he emerges from prison and the 21-month sentence he was given in Ennis in June. Frank Abagnale Jr, subject of the film Catch Me If You Can, eventually ran out of road but received a Hollywood ending, working for the people who had once chased him, the FBI.
Maybe it’s possible that Frankie Shanley could some day harness that talent and energy and craft a career for himself, maybe as the broadcaster and presenter he has often depicted himself to be. Then again, he has tried to reinvent himself once before. According to Keith Finnegan, “He actually had the wherewithal to apply for a job here and sent me a demo tape about a year ago after he totally screwed us over.” The name on the application was Frankie Fenton.
Frankie Shanley is currently serving a sentence in Cork Prison.
* February 2011 — jailed for nine months for stealing a flat-screen Samsung television worth €430 in Beaufort, Killarney, Co Kerry
* March 2011 — disqualified from driving relating to a November 2005 charge of stealing a car.
* March 2011 — given a six-month sentence at Wexford Circuit Court after fooling someone in Bunclody, Co Wexford, into giving him €2,000 for a deposit on a car which he had stolen
* April 28, 2011 — faced charges and received a six-month sentence and a four-month consecutive sentence for theft of a 32-inch TV and a Phillips DVD player in Renville, Galway
* April 28, 2011 — given a three-month sentence to run concurrent to six months already being served, and was disqualified for 10 years from driving for not having a driving licence or car insurance
* July — August 2010 — rented a lodge for a week at the Abbey Court Hotel in the town and failed to pay the €705, resulting in two six-month sentences imposed at Nenagh District Court
* March 2010 — received a seven-month prison sentence for stealing a vehicle at Divane’s garage in Castleisland, Co Kerry
* March 2009 — bench warrant issued for his arrest after he failed to appear in court in February of that year. He said he could not make the court appearance as he could not travel due to bad weather
* December 2008 — disqualified from driving and receives a suspended sentence in Longford for an alleged incident of dangerous driving
* June 2008 — received an 11-month jail term at Sligo Circuit Court and was also disqualified for driving without insurance or a driving licence. He was also convicted in Fermoy Circuit Court of stealing a car. He also received a sentence of 11 months in jail from a Sligo court for leaving a filling station without paying the €50 he owed for diesel
* November 2007 — received an 11-month sentence at Castleblayney Circuit Court for the June 2005 theft of a Toyota Avensis
* 2007 — he was sent for trial in Limerick following the theft of a sports car worth €22,000, although no outcome was recorded
* May 2007 — faced charges that he induced by deception a man in Blanchardstown in Dublin to give him €4,800 after telling the man he was authorised to sell camera equipment. He went to trial on similar charges relating to other incidents in Ballinteer and Donnybrook for smaller sums
* March 2007 — received a six-month sentence in Donegal Circuit Court and it was ordered that he receive psychiatric treatment after renting holiday homes in Pettigo and leaving without paying the €290 bill
* March 2007 — in Fermoy Circuit Court he was jailed for eight months following an offence dating from March 2004 in Mitchelstown when he conned someone out of five Motorola mobile phones
* July 2006 — disqualified from driving at Ennis Circuit Court for having no driver’s licence or passport
* May 2006 — He stole an Opel Vectra in Co Monaghan which led to two nine-month sentences being imposed at Castleblaney Circuit Court
* January 2006 — stole €43,000 worth of camera equipment from a audiovisual hire company in Dublin and was sent for trial to Dublin Circuit Court, where it is understood he pleaded guilty but was released on bail prior to sentencing
* December 2005 — faced charges of the unauthorised taking of a vehicle in Donegal
* November 2005 — received another jail sentence when by deception he bought a computer from a store in Cavan town in
November 2005. No order was made in court when he was found to have stolen an Opel Vectra in Carlow.
* April 2005 — received a two-month prison sentence at Galway Circuit Court after conning someone into giving him €180
* March 2004 — sent forward for trail in Thurles over allegations that he stole a Renault Laguna
* November 2004 — received two three month sentences in Listowel Circuit Court in for driving without insurance or a driving licence
* February 2004 — theft of another flat-screen TV from a store in Ennis led to a six-month sentence
* November 2003 — stole a car in Bantry, which led to a two-month sentence
* December 2002 — made a false statement in so as to take out car insurance which led to a conviction in Listowel Circuit Court in 2004
(Just some of the offences Frankie Shanley has been charged with).
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