Book review: Investigating conman Michael Lynn’s sordid success

Michael O’Farrell’s 'Fugitive' is a complex story but told clearly and with a grip that engages and sharpens attention

Thief, fraudster, liar, solicitor turned property developer, serial fugitive, narcissist, and self-deluding fantasist Michael Lynn. File picture: Paddy Cummins

• Fugitive: The Michael Lynn Story 
• Michael O’Farrell 
• Merrion Press, €16.99 

Mayo has much to offer the discerning angler, but no matter how sharp those anglers are, they will not find one of those blue commemorative plaques sometimes erected by the OPW or a proud local history society celebrating a long-gone resident who went on to enjoy international fame and fortune.

Mayo has not — at least yet — been moved to honour thief, fraudster, liar, solicitor turned property developer, serial fugitive, narcissist, and self-deluding fantasist Michael Lynn, 55, with a monument marking his place of birth near Gortnor Abbey outside Crossmolina.

It’s unlikely that Michael O’Farrell’s pacy, sharp, comprehensively detailed and exemplary work of persistence and research into a life lived something close enough to contemporary piracy, will encourage the establishment of a committee to link Lynn, who is serving a five-and-a-half-year jail sentence, with the locality by erecting a plaque. 

In any event there is already a monument on a nearby shore marking the spot where a record pike was caught many decades ago.

Though jailed, Lynn’s courtroom adventures may not have concluded. 

He is appealing the conviction and as late as mid-April he was asked to provide a statement of his financial means to the Director of Public Prosecutions, before legal aid might once again be granted to support his appeal against his conviction for stealing more than €18m from six financial institutions. 

He was implicated in misadventures involving multiples of that sum.

That request may be a nod to the suspicion raised in the closing pages of this excellent book by O’Farrell, late of this parish, and investigating gardaí that Lynn, and possibly his wife Brid Murphy, retain access to some of the loot he hoovered up during his career as a conman.

Though they say they are reliant on social welfare and have no other income, Lynn’s wife and four children live in a mortgage-free Wicklow home purchased for €450,000 just over two years ago, in January, 2022.

Lynn graduated from Trinity in 1991 and after a period in an established practice, he set up his own business in Blanchardstown in West Dublin. His focus was on conveyancing and property related opportunities offered in the “Wild West of European finance”. 

He was, the author tells us, quickly into his stride and between January and August 2007, had drawn down €26.3m from various banks. 

But that was not all. He paid €550,000 from a client’s account in his law firm to pay a deposit on his “dream home” in Howth.

That was not the extent of his chutzpah. He took three mortgages on that property and investigators concluded that he improperly pocketed €6.25m on that non-deal. The die was cast and probity had been cast aside.

The man O’Farrell describes is one of intelligence, unbounded energy, gifted with the cashmere charisma all conmen apply like body oil — unrelenting greed, resilience, self-delusion and the kind of gall and shamelessness most of us can hardly imagine, much less indulge. 

Towards the end of his first court case, Lynn alleged that the banks he borrowed from worked hand-in-glove with him and were fully aware of his non-disclosed intentions.

He claimed he bribed bankers, sold them apartments at greatly reduced rates and generally greased their palms. 

They wanted their share of the Celtic Tiger bonanza and, according to Lynn, they more than got it.

Journalist Michael O’Farrell’s excellent book warns us all too clearly about what can happen if our culture of ambition and business-first is not at least constrained by the application of laws that protect all of society. Picture: Michael Chester

“The banks couldn’t get enough of me,” he declared. Unsurprisingly, those allegations are rejected forcefully by all bankers and banks who were duped by Lynn.

However, that one of the judges presiding over one of Lynn’s early cases was successfully stonewalled by a bank when he tried to establish the scale and beneficiaries of commission paid to bank staff who facilitated Lynn’s loan addiction, must at least sow some doubt here.

This is a complex story but told clearly and with a grip that engages and sharpens attention. Apart at all from Lynn’s escapades the existence of the book tells us two important things.

First, without the enduring support of a publisher this kind of important work is impossible. 

In that regard O’Farrell’s employers, The Irish Mail on Sunday, have indeed done the State some service as it took more than a decade to find and convict Lynn.

Our changing media landscape raises all sorts of questions about the sustainability of this kind of years-long investigation.

Second Alan Shatter, who was justice minister for a time during this adventure, showed that our poor record on white collar crime need not be defining. 

He and a tight group of civil servants worked secretly to secure Lynn’s extradition from Brazil even though such a process had not been formalised. Where there is a will, or even better a grudge, there is a way.

Those are facts but the overriding impression that the book left is that what we know about these scandals, and by extension the role of the banks, in the 2008 economic implosion is hardly more than the tip of the iceberg. 

Let us hope we do not live to regret that blindness.

Some weeks ago, a Vietnamese property developer Truong My Lan was sentenced to death for her role in that country’s biggest ever fraud involving €25bn.

“The defendant’s actions … eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. 

Such a verdict is impossible in Ireland even if there was a real will to effectively confront white collar crime. 

We may not be alone in this, but O’Farrell’s excellent book warns us all too clearly about what can happen if our culture of ambition and business-first is not at least constrained by the application of laws that protect all of society.

It is hard to imagine that there will be a better book shining light into the darkest corners of this small, occasionally corrupt country in 2024.

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