By Vish Gain for AML Intelligence
DRUIDS GLEN, a five-star hotel and resort cushioned in a small town set in the picturesque lush green mountains of Co. Wicklow, Ireland, witnessed some unlikely activity six years ago.
Declan Brady, one of the senior most members of the notorious ‘Kinahan Cartel’ – one of the biggest cocaine trafficking organisatio in Europe and the UAE – paid €66,301 for the wedding of a family member, half of it in cash.
Brady, known in the media as ‘Mr Nobody’, is now accused of laundering more than €1.3m in cash from crime proceeds along with his wife, Deirdre Brady, and Hungarian girlfriend, Erika Lukacs, at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin Monday.
Charges involve mortgage payments for a luxury Spanish holiday property, the wedding at upscale Druids Glen and various illicit and circuitous transfers including over €140,000 to the Spanish bank account of Thomas ‘Bomber’ Kavanagh, another senior Kinahan operative.
Kavanagh, a member of the Byrne-branch of the Kinahan crime organisation, pleaded guilty last year to a series of serious drug and firearms offences at a court in England. He moved to the UK from Dublin in the early 2000s and settled in Tamworth, but runs his own gang based in Birmingham. He is currently in custody in the UK awaiting sentencing.
The non-jury court heard that Brady had laundered €418,654 in crime cash through multiple bank accounts, while his wife had laundered €770,499 and Lukacs had laundered €196,864, all from the proceeds of organised crime, according to a report in the Irish Independent.
Deirdre Brady, with whom Declan Brady has three adult children, also paid another €3,000 a month to her husband’s Spanish mortgage account on a property in Cala D’Or in Majorca, totalling over €138,000 between 2014 and 2016, the court heard. The property is now in the hands of the Spanish bank.
‘Profound regret’
Declan Brady has much to be regretful of. Last year, he pleaded at the Special Criminal Court to hiding over €250,000 in cash in the attic of a Kildare address. He is also already serving an 11-and-a-half-year jail term after he admitted supervising a firearms arsenal including an assault rifle and thousands of rounds of ammunition that had been stashed in a Dublin business park.
But his most “profound regret” stems from the plight of his wife and girlfriend, who wouldn’t have been in this position if it weren’t for him taking possession of the money, he reportedly told his lawyers, taking responsibility for his actions. Counsel for Deirdre Brady, Michael Bowman SC, even said his client was “acting blind” and “in complete ignorance” when she paid the rent on a property, which her husband had shared with his girlfriend.
Earlier this year, Declan Brady had been charged with a total of 16 offences related to money laundering and terrorist financing in the country, over a five-year period between 2012 and 2017. In the same month, his wife Deirdre and girlfriend Erika charged with a total of 52 money laundering offences.
The court also heard that Brady was taking orders from “more sinister forces based abroad”, which could not be lightly disregarded.
In January 2017, gardaí (Irish police) obtained a warrant to search an address in the town of Nass in County Kildare as they believed Brady was residing at that address with his girlfriend, Hungarian national Lukacs. Det Sgt Anderson said the couple had had a baby girl together in October 2016.
Upon searching the property, gardaí located a total of €250,000 in cash that had been spread across a bread bin on top of a fridge, a shoebox, a laptop bag and a hold-all bag in an attic. They also discovered documents for multiple bank accounts.
The detective said that Brady had declared “no gross income” recorded by the revenue department for four years and had five bank accounts, three of which he jointly held with his wife while another was a personal loan account. His wife Deirdre, who was described as a “housewife and homemaker”, had tax records with no declared income in that period and an analysis of her bank account showed lodgements of €690,000.
The funds used to pay for the wedding, too, seem to have no known source. “A sum of the wedding bill was paid in cash including a bar tab for €27,000. These payments don’t tie back to Declan Brady’s account, indicating they came from elsewhere,” he said, adding that all the monies were completely out of proportion from his declared income, according to online news website TheJournal.
The youngest of the four accused, Erika Lukacs, came to Ireland from Hungary in 2007 and began working in a petrol station, according to her lawyer. It is there that she met Declan Brady and began a romantic relationship that led to the birth of a child — who is now four years old. Lukacs lawyer said the child has a “very severe illness and cannot process proteins”, adding that his client would not be in court today if it wasn’t for Brady. In short, Lukacs had “no involvement in the generation of these funds.”
With three of the four involved in this labyrinthine case of money laundering — Mr Nobody and his two “mistresses” — remanded in custody in Dublin till July 30 and the fourth, Kavanagh, awaiting his sentence in the UK, the future of this cohort of the Kinahan group looks bleak.
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