Report details growth of organized crime in North

By Jack Holland

A report on organized crime in Northern Ireland has highlighted a growing menace from groups involved in drug dealing, smuggling and other forms of racketeering, even as the threat of politically motivated violence has waned.

The report, published by the Northern Ireland Crime Task Force, claims that 78 gangs have been identified, involving some 400 members. Forty-three of the gangs have links to established loyalist or republican paramilitary organizations.

The Crime Task Force is a multi-agency initiative set up by former British Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson last September. It involves the police, National Criminal Intelligence, Customs and Excise, the Criminal Justice Directorate (Northern Ireland Office), the Home Office and other agencies.

Criminal gangs take part in cigarette smuggling, fuel smuggling, drug dealing, the manufacture and selling of fake CDs, extortion, intimidation, fraud involving public money, and prostitution. The report revealed that between January and November 2000, the RUC seized drugs worth a street value of £10.5 million (about $10.8 million). In one operation alone last November, they retrieved £1 million worth of heroin in Belfast. So far this year, Customs has seized 51.4 million cigarettes, an increase of 130 percent over 1999-2000.

The extent of paramilitary involvement in these and other illegal activities has been well documented beginning in the mid-1970s when organizations such as the Official IRA ran building-site protection rackets and even massage parlors in Belfast. In the late ’80s, however, the Irish People’s Liberation Organization — an offshoot of the Irish National Liberation Army (itself a spinoff from the Officials) — began serious drug-running operations, smuggling large amounts of the drug ecstasy into the North. In 1992, a special antiracketeering squad within the RUC was set up. Its head, Superintendent Derek Martindale was targeted for assassination by the Provisional IRA, but the attempt in February 1994 failed. By the early 1990s it was estimated that the Provisional IRA alone was taking in over £7 million a year from various rackets.

Loyalist groups now control much of the drug trade in the North. According to the report, marijuana and ecstasy dominate, but heroin is beginning to appear in increasing amounts.

"One organized crime group has been clearly identified with the heroin trade," the report claims. Though no paramilitary organization is named in the report, this is thought to refer to the UDA’s Shankill Road based unit, C Company, which is run by Johnny Adair, currently from his prison cell. An ongoing feud, in part to do with drug trafficking, has claimed many lives among loyalist paramilitaries. Two weeks ago, Adrian Porter, a drug dealer and an associate of Adair’s, was shot dead in North Down by gunmen believed to be from the UVF.

The report also found that North Belfast was the worst area in the North for "intimidation and blackmail," and that the building trade was the worst affected activity and was still controlled by paramilitaries.

The report includes figures that show that fraud involving public money costs the public £345 million a year.

British Government ministers have visited Italy in an effort to learn how to cope with organized crime. Recently, former Northern Ireland Secretary of State Peter Mandelson has argued that new measures should be introduced, including the admission into trial of information gained from wiretaps, which is currently excluded from court proceedings.

However, the fear is that after a generation during which a paramilitary-style culture has dominated whole areas of Northern Ireland, from where ordinary law and order has been largely absent, groups like the UDA, UVF and Provisional IRA are now so deeply rooted that it will be impossible to remove them as they switch to purely criminal activity. Northern Ireland could become like a mini-Sicily, minus the abundant sunshine.