Local couple amongst those arrested by Spanish police in tobacco smuggling crackdown

Donna Maguire

A local couple were among five Irish nationals, a Norwegian and a Spanish lawyer who were arrested last week in what is understood to be a major Spanish police operation against tobacco smuggling linked to south Armagh.

The arrests are understood to include husband and wife, Donna Maguire and Leonard ‘Bap’ Hardy, who served prison sentences in Holland and Germany for their parts in IRA attacks on the Continent in the late 1980s.

Hardy (54) and Maguire (57) are married with four children and live in the Mountpleasant area of Dundalk.

According to yesterday’s Sunday Independent, it is understood one of the other Irish nationals arrested in operations across Murcia, Alicante and Gran Canaria at the start of last week is a Co Antrim man who has been living in the north Louth area in recent years.

He was previously questioned over a major cigarette smuggling operation after gardai and customs stopped a lorry near Castlebellingham, Co Louth in September 2013. The lorry was found to contain cigarettes with a retail value put at €4.3m. Seven people were arrested but no one charged.

The haul was seized after the cigarettes were detected when Islamic terrorists fired a rocket at the cargo ship carrying the container along the Suez Canal in July 2013. The container was inspected when the ship docked in Rotterdam. It was logged as containing furniture for a non-existent company in Dundalk but found to contain boxes of cigarettes, which had originated in Indonesia. No charges were brought in relation to the seizure.

The Independent said the arrests were made after a major investigation into smuggling and money laundering by the Spanish Policia Nacional.

It is understood Hardy and Maguire were arrested at an apartment in Malaga on Tuesday and she was later released without charge. The couple are receiving consular assistance, the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed last week. His detention was extended on Wednesday by a judge in Malaga on the application of the Policia.

Local businessman believed to be behind country’s illegal cigarette trade

The Modega cigarettes seized at Castlebellingham last year

A local businessman – nicknamed ‘the Jackal’ – has been identified by the Sunday World newspaper as the new ‘Mr Big’ of Ireland’s booming cigarette smuggling trade.

According to the paper, the 44-year-old is believed to have netted up to €20 million flooding the country with fake fags.

He had remained under the radar for years until an incredible brush with international terror group Al Qaeda unwittingly turned him into public enemy number one in Ireland’s war on cigarette smugglers.

When a terrorist cell attacked a ship in the Suez Canal, authorities discovered among its other cargo, a shipment of nine million illicit cigarettes bound for Ireland.

The Criminal Assets Bureau linked the haul to ‘The Jackal’ and launched a probe into his financial affairs.

The suspected smuggling kingpin has no convictions for terrorist related activity but sources say he is closely linked to the Real IRA and pays a sizeable portion of his enormous profits to the terror group.

The man is reported to have been shipping in contraband on an industrial level for years. He buys containers of cheap fags in the Far East for €20,000 and makes more than €1.6 million profit on each.

The businessman, who lives outside Dundalk with what the paper described as his ‘glamorous wife’, has been buying up properties and recently purchased more than 100 acres of land near Dublin.

According to The Sunday World, the couple are regularly spotted enjoying nights out and friends believe they have simply bucked the economic trend, having emerged unscathed despite owning retail businesses that have been hard hit by the recession.

However, ‘The Jackal’, is supposedly soon to be issued with a massive seven-figure demand from the Criminal Assets Bureau, who are trawling through his banking transactions and ‘company’ accounts.

It is understood they have linked him to major shipments of contraband cigarettes from as far back as 2008 and believe he may have been smuggling for up to ten years.

The Sunday World’s sources say he has held directorships on a number of legitimate companies which he uses as a front for his operation. But he has also hijacked VAT and registration details of perfectly innocent companies and used them to get his contraband through Irish ports.

It is understood that as part of their investigations, the CAB has contacted a number of retail stores around the country who had no idea that their details were being used to clear imported goods from Vietnam and other Asian countries.

Last year, the businessman lost a major consignment when Al Qaeda terrorists fired two rockets at the Asia Cosco cargo ship as it made its way along Egypt’s Suez Canal.

They were hoping to disrupt trade in the area and even released a video of the attack on the mother ship.

But instead, they blew apart ‘The Jackal’s’ lucrative business when investigators discovered the consignment of illicit cigarettes on the damaged ship and fitted it with a tracking device.

The cigarettes were transferred to a smaller vessel in Rotterdam, which docked in Dublin port. The Emergency Response Unit, the Organised Crime Unit, CAB and Customs watched as the container was loaded onto a truck and drove north towards Co Louth followed by a jeep.

The van was stopped at Castlebellingham and four men – three men in the jeep, along with the driver of the van – were arrested.

Although ‘The Jackal’ was not at the scene, a major probe into the consignment linked it back to him and he became a target of CAB.

He has been found to have links with, among others, Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy.

Read the full story here.