Crime World

He was the one-time billionaire and the pride of his native Cavan, where a generation of workers shared the spoils of his success. Businessman Sean Quinn was said to have built an empire on a mountain but always remembered his humble beginnings and was at his happiest sharing lunch with factory workers and playing cards with old pals. So, what has it been like to watch the fall of the Mighty Quinn...

A vision for a new police force in Northern Ireland 20 years after Chris Patten’s ground-breaking report identified a need for a 50-50 recruitment policy for Catholics and Protestants has failed to live up to expectations. Last year, of the 193 new recruits just 24 per cent were Catholic, blamed in no small part to dissident republicans deliberately targeting officers and their families from worki...

He was a towering Ulster rugby star who won four caps for Ireland in the mid 1990s and went on to forge a political career as an ultra-conservative unionist. After his death on October 28 in a motorcycle crash in County Antrim, political pals and friends from the Orange Order were amongst those to pay tribute to Davy Tweed, describing him as a giant of a man and a ‘larger than life character’. But...

When Irish heiress Marianne ‘Mair’ Smyth walked in the door of Jonathan Walton’s LA apartment neither of them could have guessed what lay ahead. For reality TV maker Jonathan, Mair came across charming, successful and well connected and he was quickly drawn into her world where she was forever on the brink of inheriting a vast fortune from Ireland. But Mair was no lady and instead she tricked him...

He was the violent enforcer of Slieve Rusheen who operated with impunity for more than eight years terrorising ‘traitors’ who turned on the mighty Sean Quinn. His death from a massive heart attack as UK cops raided his Derbyshire hideaway two years ago played out like the final dramatic scenes of a John B Keane play. But the end for 'Dublin Jimmy', aka Cyril McGuinness, only marked the beginning o...

A Kinahan mob prison party to celebrate the birthday of a dangerous criminal is held behind bars in an Irish jail. An inmate uses his smart phone to upload a video where suspected hitman Trevor Byrne jokes with a Limerick criminal about high powered weapons and Later he poses with pals giving the thumbs up to the camera and in his cell where he shows off his muscle. But are the jailhouse antics se...

It was the greatest social housing disaster in Ireland’s history - one which promised new beginnings for countless tenement families but instead became ground zero for the heroin epidemic. When the State ordered the demolition of Ballymun’s seven towers to make way for new housing it hoped to wipe away the mistakes of the past, but one of the country’s most promising film-makers was there to docum...

He was the gangland fixer known as 'The Coach' and for decades he tried to play the criminal underworld, police and the media. Criminal John Traynor dreamed of wealth and women when he joined the ranks of Martin ‘The General’ Cahill's armed robbery gang, but he would later turn on his old boss in favour of the new order under John Gilligan. Traynor believed himself to be a master manipulator, but...

It was a sensational blow to organised crime - and when Australia’s Federal Police joined forces with the FBI to create a phone network to infiltrate drug gangs, the fallout shocked both police and politicians. An Aussie cartel with tentacles deep into the airline and freight industry, along with border agents on the books of the gang, have been an eye-opener to the power of the criminal networks...

He was the boy who never came home – the teenager whose innocent face has haunted generations of Irish parents. Now, the disappearance of schoolboy Philip Cairns 35 years ago is the subject of a new book which firmly turns the attention on a paedophile DJ and his peculiar underground bunker buried in a field in west Dublin. Nicola Tallant talks to journalist and author Emma McMemamy, who has foren...

It’s been described as the biggest blow against the Colombian drug cartels since the famous takedown of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s. Seven years since he was declared an enemy of the state and the boss of the so-called Gulf Cartel, notorious kingpin Dario Antonio Usaga, aka 'Otoniel', was finally captured last week in his jungle hideout. But who is the 50-year-old crime lord who has been flooding t...

He was the notorious drug dealer who introduced heroin to his hometown of Ballymena, County Antrim. And after a lifetime of staying one step ahead of the law 61-year-old Noel Johnston made a final and fatal mistake when he mistook PSNI officers for a hit squad he believed had come to kill him - plunging 50ft to his death from a block of flats. Nicola Tallant is joined by journalist Hugh Jordan to...

A journalist shot dead on the street. A criminal lawyer assassinated on the doorstep of his Amsterdam home and the brother of a state witness gunned down as a reminder of the penalty for breaking the underworld's sacred code of 'Omerta'. Now, Narco terrorism in the Netherlands has reached even greater heights with its PrIme Minister under 24-hour protection and the suspect behind these shocking mu...

He is due to face kidnap charges later this year in the UK and has been a central and violent figure in the Drogheda feud - but it seems gang boss Cornelius Price is unlikely to ever face up to his crimes. Price, whose gang are suspected of a number of murders including that of William Maughan and his pregnant girlfriend Anna Varslavane, is currently in critical condition in hospital after being s...

He is a gangland heavyweight serving time for drugs and weapon offences and was once named in court as the triggerman in the murder of mob boss Martin 'Marlo' Hyland. But inmate Johnny Mangan is on the run after escaping from the low security Loughan House prison where he had been moved after a parole board deemed him low risk. In a huge embarrassment for the Irish Prison Service, it has emerged t...

It’s been 20 years since Sunday World journalist Martin O’Hagan was murdered on a Lurgan pavement as he walked home from a pub with his wife Marie. Known affectionately as Marty by his colleagues in the Belfast newsroom and an adored dad of three, he was just 51 when he became the only journalist to die as a result of The Troubles. His killing remains unsolved, but is believed to have been carried...

Convicted drug dealer Graham ‘The Wig’ Whelan is facing jail after pleading guilty to a number of offences relating to his arrest at a luxury Dublin hotel, when he was caught with cash in his pocket and an expensive watch on his arm by undercover officers investigating drug crime. While the offences may seem small for criminal as significant Whelan, they have placed the spotlight on his fall from...

They are the first people in Ireland to be convicted of human trafficking for a prostitution ring and now Alicia Edosa and Edith Enoghaghase are finding out for themselves what it feels like to be trapped after receiving jail terms of over five years. But an extraordinary story lies behind the headlines of a Midlands sex ring and the madams who ran it, a story that stretches all the way back to sl...

A FORMER FBI agent working with the family of missing Annie McCarrick has said that a Spanish serial killer arrived in Dublin as a stowaway on a boat 48 hours before the American student vanished - but slipped the net once gardai were called. Kenneth Strange, who is working as a liaison for Nancy McCarrick, Annie’s mum, has just visited Ireland to retrace the last known movements of Antonio Angles...

It’s the 37-year murder mystery that has haunted Ireland and remains the biggest policing scandal in modern history. A dead baby washes up on a Kerry beach with 28 stab wounds and a fractured spine, a Garda murder squad is dispatched to find answers but a local woman is hounded for the brutal slaying while the real killer walks free. Now, a DNA sample taken from the exhumed remains of ‘Baby John’...

It was a charity set up to respond to Dublin’s homeless crises and to provide food and shelter to the most vulnerable. But now the Inner City Helping Homeless (ICHH) group is in chaos with allegations of sexual assault and rape against founder Anthony Flynn, who died by suicide on August 18 as gardai investigated the claims of two men. Since then, two more homeless men have come forward to make co...

The news reports from Afghanistan are becoming more concerning by the day as Taliban militants return to their own rule of law with barbaric punishments, revenge killings and the persecution of women and minorities. The images of the terrifying warlords with their high-powered weapons and fanatical beliefs may seem like a world away from modern Ireland, but how will their reign affect us all and w...

Gerry 'The Monk' Hutch is back in an Irish prison for the first time in nearly 40 years after he was flown on a military jet into Baldonnel Aerodrome from Spain on foot of an extradition warrant. His appearance in the Special Criminal Court, where he was charged with the murder of David Byrne at the Regency Hotel in February 2016, was brief but dramatic and today I’m talking to Sunday World deputy...

It’s a murder mystery that has divided America, pitted armchair sleuths against seasoned detectives and turned a spotlight on how the media treats victims of crime. The case of 22-year-old tragic blogger Gabby Petito and her fiancé Brian Laundrie, who went missing weeks after returning home alone from their camper van road trip, has turned both into the internet sensations they dreamed of becoming...

He has lost in his bid to halt extradition attempts in a Spanish court and now Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch must come home to Ireland and finally face the music. Six years since a hit team staged a dramatic assassination attempt on Daniel Kinahan and six months since a European warrant was issued for his arrest, the veteran criminal will soon stand in the dock of the Special Criminal Court where he will...