Drug gangs renting in leafy Dublin suburbs

SOME of Dublin’s top drug gangs are renting expensive apartments in leafy suburbs of the city through legitimate frontmen.

One gang — which lost an estimated €5 million worth of drugs in a garda operation earlier this week — has moved gang members into apartments in posh areas of Dublin.

“The drug heads are now residing in these areas, renting fancy apartments in the likes of Foxrock and Leopardstown and Castleknock. Some are renting for €4,000 a month,” said a garda source.

“A legitimate person goes into a letting agency, gives clean references from landlords and the workplace. He gives cash upfront and says ‘give me an account and I’ll keep topping it up’. The agency thinks everything is fine, then the scobies move in.”

He said the gangsters often cause problems for neighbours and, if there are complaints and questions asked, the gangsters wreck the place and exit. “They leave the apartment in bits,” said the garda.

Gardaí said these apartments are away from the centres of drug dealing and garda operations. They provide a place for storing large quantities of drugs and for cutting high purity drugs up into smaller deals and act as safe houses for gang bosses.

The gang hit this week is one of the gangs involved in a violent feud in the Crumlin-Drimnagh, south inner city area.

In the first operation, gardaí from south Dublin raided an apartment in Foxrock Green on Monday night. They seized a quantity of cocaine and cannabis and arrested a man and a woman.

Gardaí believe the gang boss may have used this apartment at some stage as one of his safe houses. He is a target of both the rival gang from Drimnagh and the INLA and has escaped abroad on a number of occasions in the last year.

In a follow-up search, an apartment in Castleknock was raided on Tuesday morning. Officers recovered 1.2kgs of cocaine, with a street value of €100,000.

In a third seizure, they swooped on a drugs “hand- over” near the Spawell leisure complex in Templeogue and seized 10kgs of heroin and arrested two men. The heroin has a street value of around €2 million.

Gardaí said the two men arrested, one from Tallaght and the other from Drimnagh, were not high up in the gang.

In a fourth operation, gardaí searched an apartment on the Nangor Road in Clondalkin and recovered 14kgs of cocaine, worth almost €1m, 4kgs of cannabis, and related paraphernalia. Gardaí also recovered a handgun, and a man was arrested at the scene.

The four hauls, and the arrests, represent another financial blow for the gang boss, who has had a large number of seizures intercepted in recent years.

In one of the biggest seizures of his drugs, gardaí confiscated a massive 54kgs of heroin, worth almost €11m, from an apartment in Clondalkin in October 2006.