Crime World

A haunting border crossing from Ukraine. People just like us leaving behind everything they know and everyone they love. And an unpredictable dictator with his finger on the nuclear button. So what is it like to stand and witness this brutal history in the making and to see the faces of women and children set in fear in the freezing temperatures of a land not too unlike our own. Today I’m talking...

Mob boss Daniel Kinahan’s much anticipated interview due out this week has been shelved due to legal issues at the Anything Goes Podcast with James English. While the nature of the legal problems are unknown, Kinahan has already been hit with new court proceedings after he was named in a Proceeds of Crime Case against shamed businessman Jim Mansfield Jnr. For years Mansfield and his late father, J...

He is the first person to be jailed in relation to the brutal murder of teenager Keane Mulready Woods. Yet, despite pleading guilty to cleaning up and removing evidence from the scene of the killing at his home in Drogheda, father-of-eight Gerard ‘Ged’ McKenna will be a free man in just over a year. So, who is McKenna and what was his role in the shocking murder of the 17-year-old, whose dismember...

It’s a stark message to young people who believe that they are just having fun. But community worker Philip Jennings says that every recreational user of cannabis or cocaine has blood on their hands and his 'Think Before You Buy' initiative has been rolled out in schools across his native Blanchardstown in Dublin. Now, he is hoping for Government backing to bring his message further and to turn a...

Cartel chief Daniel Kinahan is posturing again, with press statements, pictures and propaganda from an army of boxers under his control. And now he is teeing up a ‘world exclusive’ interview with podcaster James English, whose popular YouTube show has featured chats with a host of MTK boxers, many of whom have taken the opportunity to praise the drug boss. So what is going on with Ireland’s most w...

They are the black-suited operatives whose role is to protect the President of the United States - and if Joe Biden’s plans to visit Ireland this summer come to pass they will be crawling around the highways and byways of the country to make safe his passage. But the Secret Service are no strangers to Ireland, and they have had a few bemusing encounters here in the past in scenes which would often...

A high-flying young record producer is gunned down outside his pricey London home after returning from a Christmas Eve celebration with his glamorous wife and two-year-old son. The victim, Flamur Beqiri, a brother of one of the stars of Real Housewives of Cheshire, is quickly identified as a kingpin in an international drugs gang. A police investigation leads straight back to Sweden where an under...

A rugby legend capped for Ireland. A politician steeped in the beliefs of loyalism. A giant who claimed family values as his flag. But behind the mask Davy Tweed was a monster and sex offender who terrorised his family and left a legacy of pain for his daughters. This week, in a long-read special, Hugh Jordan is taking the microphone to tell you the story of Tweed – the monster behind the legend....

It was still bright on the evening of September 2, 2016 when a man walking his dogs made a gruesome discovery in Rahin Woods, close to Carbury in County Kildare. Using a stick, he had poked at the ground and the brambles where his dog 'Bobby' had circled, only to see a foot protruding from the undergrowth. Later, forensic experts would surmise that 24-year-old Philip Finnegan had died where he lay...

He was a loner and a misfit who lived with his parents until his early 30s but went on to become a serial killer who stalked his victims on dating apps and gay hook-up sites. But, Stephen Port was no cunning killer, and when he was tried for four murders in the Old Bailey the failings of police in their investigations into mysterious deaths in the Barking area of London was as stark as his horrifi...

It’s known as the city of dreams - where models, actors and artists seek fame and fortune in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills. But alongside the glitter and glamour of the California Dream is a very different Los Angeles, one with a sprawling homeless population which has fast become the biggest social issue in America’s richest State. Nicola Tallant talks with with LA local Glenna Gordon, a phot...

An 'ISIS bride' lured to the Caliphate in fear of the fires of hell, a glamorous former radical who escaped Syria and unshackled herself from her extremist past and counter terrorism FBI agents called in after the fall of Raqqa. It sounds like the plot from a series of 'Homeland' - but it is playing out in Ireland’s Special Criminal Court where Dundalk woman Lisa Smith has pleaded not guilty to fu...

Innocent women flee their homes in fear of grenade attacks, a business shuts its doors terrorised by teenage thugs, while a community lives in fear of warring drug gangs brazenly attacking each other in broad daylight with hammers and wheel braces and displaying their gunfire on social media. The scenes playing out in a Dublin suburb seem more at home in Mexico, yet for the hard-working people of...

A shocking mass murder at a bookies office in Belfast, 30 years of unanswered questions for those left behind and now an Ombudsman's report that cites collusive behaviour and failings by police. At the heart of the Sean Graham bookmakers atrocity and seven other loyalist attacks carried out by the UDA which claimed the lives of 11 people, lie the use of RUC informants who were also killers. In the...

The brutal attack on bachelor farmer Thomas ‘Tom’ Niland in rural Sligo has struck fear into the elderly community across Ireland. In a worrying spate of attacks on our most vulnerable citizens, many pensioners living in rural areas no longer feel safe in their own homes. So, who are the criminals who are targeting older members of the community and are they organised mobs or more chaotic and oppo...

Jim Mansfield Jnr was dealt his fate this week when Judges at the Special Criminal Court handed him down a two-year sentence, suspending the final six months, in a crushing blow for the former millionaire heir of Ireland’s once-wealthiest family. Despite submissions for leniency from his legal team who insisted he was in the lower range of intellectual ability, is a carer to his elderly mother and...

He was the New IRA 'fixer' with an unclear past, but despite some red flags, Dennis McFadden managed to infiltrate the terror group and win their trust, all the while reporting back to MI5. For two decades the Scottish spy worked and lived in Belfast and moonlighted as an ordinary married man who moved in dissident republican circles. But when he disappeared last August panic ensued - and now 10 s...

Garfield Beattie is a triple murderer who was part of the infamous Glennane Gang, a brutal mob made up of Ulster Loyalists, RUC police officers and British Soldiers who went on a killing spree of Catholics in Co. Armagh and Co. Tyrone at the beginning of the Troubles. According to reports and investigations, the group killed between 75 and 120 people, most of whom were ordinary civilians with no l...

He was the Irish king of the Costa until the Kinahan mob turned on him and forced the one-time drug lord into hiding for more than 10 years. But Peter ‘Fatso’ Mitchell is back behind bars after he showed up in the UK, working as a driver for a cocaine gang. A murky gangland story involving double crosses, greed and paranoia lie at the heart of Mitchell’s journey to a prison cell in Wales, where he...

He was the first godfather of Irish crime, the man who unleashed heroin on Dublin’s impoverished housing estates and flat complexes. Larry Dunne found fame as the drug lord responsible for the destruction of entire communities, whose greed took parents from their children and turned countless young people into thieves and prostitutes. But when he lay down to die between two wheelie bins in the fro...

Across the world, cannabis is being de-criminalised and in some countries legalised but with a higher potency and soaring prices, consumption of weed has become the main drug of concern amongst teenagers. Here, Nicola Tallant talks with consultant psychiatrist Dr Bobby Smyth, who works with young addicts and who fears a tsunami of problems as attitudes to the drug become increasingly lenient. He r...

The murder of another witness in the Marengo Trial, the shocking revelations that suspect Ridouan Taghi was plotting a navy-seal-type jailbreak and a dramatic security breach around an under-threat journalist - what will happen next in The Netherlands? In a country under siege from organised crime, the very foundations of law and order are being challenged as a street dealer turned cocaine billion...

Nicola Tallant tells the story of 'Fat' Freddie Thompson, one of Ireland's most-feared mobsters. From his rise as a street fighter in Dublin to becoming the head of a gangland murder machine, we retrace the violent steps he took on his rise to power and how gardai finally ended his bloody reign of terror. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nicola Tallant tells the story of 'Fat' Freddie Thompson, one of Ireland's most-feared mobsters. From his rise as a street fighter in Dublin to becoming the head of a gangland murder machine, we retrace the violent steps he took on his rise to power and how gardai finally ended his bloody reign of terror. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former businessman Jimmy Mansfield Jnr went to jail this week, convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice by directing that CCTV footage be destroyed. The conviction centres around the kidnap of one of his late father’s employees, Martin Byrne. And while Mansfield Jnr was acquitted of involvement in the abduction, six men, led by terrorists Dessie O’Hare and Declan ‘Whacker' Duffy, h...