Ex-boxer gets 12 years for conspiring to import heroin

A Meath aviation broker known as “The Boxer” has been sentenced to twelve years in prison with two suspended for conspiring to import €7m of heroin and cocaine from Belgium.

John Kinsella (aged 38) a former Irish super heavyweight boxing champion, of Carne Wood, Johnstown, Navan pleaded guilty the day before his trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring with others to import the drugs between September 22 and 26, 2006.

The trial had been expected to last over six weeks with up to 130 witnesses, including members of the Dutch and Belgium police.

Dutch authorities found 57 kilograms (kg) of heroin and 21 kg of cocaine, worth an estimated €7m, in the luggage of a passenger trying to board the private jet Kinsella had hired for a round trip from Weston Airport, Kildare to Wevelgem, Belgium on September 26, 2006.

Judge Tony Hunt said he regarded the maximum penalty of 14 years for such an offence as “low” and felt “constrained” by the law given Kinsella’s “scale of criminality”.

He accepted that Kinsella appeared not to have been “at the top of the Christmas tree” in this drugs enterprise and that there was at least one person above him, referred to as “the auld fella” in wire-tapped phone conversations between Kinsella and his co-accused, James Rankin.

Judge Hunt noted that Kinsella “knows well the identity of the major player” but chose to withhold this information.

Kinsella had claimed he was “a victim of circumstance” shortly after his arrest on September 26 at Weston Airport and that a business associate, “Mr Barton Gregory”, had tricked him into the drugs run.

Detective Garda Peter Gilligan of the Garda National Drugs Unit said Barton Gregory, described by Kinsella as possibly Algerian with black hair and a goatee, turned out to be a fictitious person when all attempts to trace him led to a “dead-end”.

Det Gda Gilligan told prosecution counsel, Ms Pauline Walley SC, that Dutch police had set up a wiretap on the mobile phone of Scotsman James Rankin, a drug trafficking suspect who was based in Holland in September 2006.

Det Gda Gilligan said a garda colleague traveled to Amsterdam and brought back a CD containing wiretap recordings of phone conversations between Rankin and “The Boxer” a.k.a. Kinsella in the days leading up to the drugs bust.

Ms Walley, reading from the transcripts, pointed out that Kinsella mentioned arranging a “bird”, i.e. plane, in a phone call on September 25 and told Rankin to make sure his “lad” was “dressed the part” in another call the same day. Rankin assured Kinsella that his “lad” was “suited and booted” with a laptop.

Det Gda Gilligan told Ms Walley that the man Dutch police arrested trying to board the private jet was dressed in a suit with a laptop bag and two wheelie suitcases full of drugs.

Ms Walley said Rankin indicated to Kinsella that there were 23 drug packages in each of the suitcases in a phone call around 11.20am on September 26, around the time the drugs courier was to board the jet at Wevelgem.

Kinsella responded: “It’s a lot...my name is on this”.

Det Gda Gilligan said there were a series of missed calls from Rankin to Kinsella following one around 11.45am where Kinsella stated that his plane was still on Belgian soil and the pilots weren’t answering their phones .

He said the phone Kinsella had used to make these calls to Rankin, who has since been jailed for eight years in Belgium for his role in the crime, was never recovered by gardaí.

Kinsella, a self-made businessman, claimed in interview that he didn’t know Rankin nor the drugs courier, who was jailed for three years.

Det Gda Gilligan told Ms Walley that Kinsella had flown to Morocco with “Gerard Byrne” a.k.a. Rankin on June 17, 2006. Gardaí also found two text messages from Rankin’s phone to a mobile discovered in a bedroom drawer at Kinsella’s house.

Det Gda Gilligan said his colleagues put it to Kinsella during his five-day detention at Clondalkin garda station, that his aviation broker company, Billionaire Ltd, had been struggling and that he had entered the drugs trade for financial reasons.

The detective garda told Ms Walley that Kinsella owed €30,000 to a former investor who had financed Billionaire and left the company in July 2006 after it failed to make returns. Kinsella moved from a Dublin Airport office to one in Weston, where he’d been establishing a new company at the time of the offence.

Defence counsel, Mr Martin O’Rourke BL, submitted to Judge Hunt that his client had spared the taxpayer “considerable” expense by pleading guilty before a “long and complicated trial”.

Judge Hunt backdated Kinsella’s sentence to the date he entered custody in September 2006.