E-xecution

In Bansha there was shock and disbelief at the news that two brothers
from the little Tipperary village were believed to be the victims of a
brutal Dutch gangland slaying. In Holland, the shock was just at the
extraordinary brutality of the murders. There, people have become used
to the vicious underworld feuds fuelled by drugs and in particular the
amazingly profitable ecstasy market. Jerome O'Reilly reports from Amsterdam.

The prostitutes black, white and Asian, dressed in lacy underwear pose
provocatively, but stare absently through the streetside plate-glass
windows in the district of red lights and seedy hotels around
Warmoesstraat and Oude Zijds Voorburgwal.

It's live meat for sale in downtown Amsterdam. The punters, mostly sex
tourists from other jurisdictions, are lured from the pretty cobbled
streets by seductive smiles that somehow never quite manage to reach
the girls' eyes.

>From the brightly-painted smoking cafes nearby comes the unmistakable
rank aroma of high-grade Dutch skunk homegrown leaf twice as potent as
the best export resin from Lebanon and Morocco, Nepal and Kashmir, and
openly for sale for a handful of guilders. You can smoke it there or
take it away. It's your choice. In Holland, it's always your choice.

The country which prides itself on its liberal values, on its personal
freedoms on sex, drugs, euthanasia, abortion and every other social issue
has, at its core, a rotten heart. But it's the outsiders who have infected
the Netherlands: the murderous emigres of Eastern Europe, evil war crime
veterans of the former Yugoslavia, sadistic amoral gang members of the
Colombian Cali cartel, Jamaican Yardies, British gangsters and Nigerian
freelancers.

And the Irish. Our hoodlums who found their way to Holland criminals
like Brian `The Tosser' Meehan and George `The Penguin' Mitchell may
be big men in the Dublin criminal underworld, but in Amsterdam they
never did, and never will, count for much.

A few miles away from the heart of Amsterdam, in the city's mortuary,
the hideously mutilated bodies of three men lie on cold, sterile
trolleys. Apparently, two of them went to the Netherlands to make a
fast fortune; the third was on holidays and due home to start work
this week.

For the bewildered families of Vincent (29) and Morgan (22) Costello
from Bansha, Co Tipperary, and Damien Anthony Monaghan, of Childers
Road in Ennis, Co Clare, the agony of waiting for positive
identification will continue for a few more days. Their families must
wonder how these men got involved in the manufacture of ecstasy and
the amphetamine known as speed.

But in this permissive junkie yard of Europe, speed kills if you cross
the wrong men. Why the three were murdered and who carried out the
atrocity is unknown, but the sadistic intent, the obscene nature of
the initial assaults, which included mutilation of the genitals, has
rocked even the shockproof Netherlanders, who are well used to the
random, mindless codes of drug-related murders.

It was 3.30am when the night-shift worker returned to his fourth floor
apartment at Gevers Deynootweg in the seaside resort of Scheveningen
and he first smelled the petrol. The fumes carried an underlying
stench that he couldn't identify, but his first worry was the
possibility of fire. He alerted the caretaker who lives in the luxury
apartment complex overlooking the beach.

The two men searched methodically, starting in the basement, where
every apartment has its own tiny storage cubicle. Nothing.

Ground floor, first, second, and third floor, and by now the smell was
getting stronger. When they opened the lift door on floor five of the
16-floor complex owned by the giant Dutch insurance company ING, they
were met by smoke billowing from beneath the door of apartment 1058,
which was inhabited by three Irishmen, one of whom liked to smoke
skunk and was regularly under the influence of the drug.

Fire. There was panic on the fifth floor and all the occupants, many
of them elderly Dutch couples enjoying their retirement by the
seaside, were roused from their slumber and brought down via the
staircase in their nightclothes, and taken to the nearby Europa
complex for coffee. There was no need to evacuate the rest of the
building. The complex is built to the highest, rigorous Dutch
standards, with pre-stressed concrete floors and walls to minimise
sound and create an effective fire barrier. Even the doorframes are
steel.

The firefighters arrived within moments and entered the apartment,
fought their way through the suffocating black smoke and found the
hideous source of the fire.

The bathroom was like a scene from the Scarface. The underlying smell
noticed by the night-shift worker who raised the alarm had been
burning flesh. There were bullet holes in the ceiling and walls,
indicating (though forensic tests have not yet been completed) that an
semi-automatic weapon had randomly sprayed bullets from the door into
the tiny bathroom.

All three men had been shot, mutilated, doused in petrol and set
ablaze. It was a macabre triple execution; a calculated slaughter
designed to send out a clear message.

But who carried out the atrocity? Neighbours reported a steady stream
of undesirable visitors to the flat: Eastern Europeans, Americans and
South Americans. Two visitors aroused the interest of neighbours. They
looked South American, according to British journalist Vera
Vaughan-Bowden, president of the Foreign Press Association of the
Netherlands, who lives in the complex. They were immaculately dressed
in soft-cut jackets. One of them was very fastidious, flicking
imaginary flecks of fluff from his lapels when he came into the lift
and wearing too much aftershave. ``I didn't hear them speak, so I
cannot say if they were Colombian or not. They could have been Eastern
Mediterranean,'' she said.

Another neighbour, GW Bliyze, said the three Irishmen who were the
regular occupants were rude and brusque. ``When you came along the
corridor they always slammed the apartment door shut,'' she said. ``We
knew something was going on in there. We could smell the drugs,
especially during the summer. About a year ago there was a raid by
police who broke down the door, but I don't think anyone was arrested.''

The list of suspects is endless in a city that's a melting pot of
ethnic groups vying for control of the various sections of the drugs
trade. The Netherlands, because of the availability of the chemical
building blocks for the manufacture of speed and ecstasy, is the
biggest source of these dance culture drugs.

But the lucrative trade, as well as attracting major and minor
criminal gangs from Ireland and Britain, has been infiltrated by
extraordinarily violent gangs from Eastern Europe and particularly the
former Yugoslavia. The civil war in the Balkans in the 1990s brought a
new breed into the drugs markets of Northern Europe, and the Slavs
have fought to gain a niche beside the vicious gangs which include
elements of the Russian mafia, Slovakia gangs, elements from the Czech
Republic, Colombians and Moroccans.

Drug-making apparatus, including a tablet press for making ecstasy and
speed tablets, was found in the apartment and in the basement storage
cubicle attached to the flat. Amphetamines were also found.

Also in the mix were five passports, three of which belonged to the
residents of the flat, one of which had been reported missing two
years previously by another Irish national and the fifth is believed
to have been issued to a 27-year-old Northern Ireland women. When it
emerged that one of the passports had been stolen, it added a new
level of confusion in the hunt to find out who actually died.

By yesterday there were reports in the newspapers of Dutch
indifference to the murder, suggesting that because it was apparently
drug-related and involved foreign nationals, the story had been
greeted with a shrug of shoulders by the phlegmatic
Netherlanders.

These stories were fuelled by the inability of the Dutch police to
release even cursory details of their investigation. However, there is
a large team of detectives investigating the case, with liaison with
the gardai continuing through Europol, and the story was the second
item on both the Dutch news channels on Thursday night.

There are signs that the Dutch, who have for so long tolerated the
evil in their midst as long as it didn't affect them, are about to cry
halt.

It is now known that so complete is the stranglehold of drugs in
Northern Europe that drug dealers are abandoning traditional suppliers
to shop at giant drug supermarkets on the Continent.

Some of these European suppliers, with 12 drugs supermarkets believed
to be operating in Belgium and Holland, are even copying supermarket
tactics by offering discount prices in an attempt to win customer
loyalty. Holland's geographical location, relatively open borders and
diverse culture makes it the ideal staging post for drugs.

In Central Europe, to the south and east, there are no effective
checks on the Balkan heroin route to the Hungarian border. Bulgarian
and Romanian gangs, who have a large presence in Holland, are now
fully integrated into the Turkish networks, and there are new routes
from the Caucasus, the Ukraine, and the Bulgarian and Romanian
traffickers have diversified both their operating methods and the
narcotics they supply.

Holland also has to deal with Latin-American, Italian and Nigerian
rings, while trying to stamp out its own synthetic drug production
within its borders. The Colombian Narcotraficantes also have a
significant presence and come from a country which has a homicide rate
four times that of the US. Murder is the leading cause of death for
Colombian males aged between 15 and 44. Yet they have managed to
successfully blend into the Dutch multicultural society, though their
presence is closely monitored by national and international police
bureaux.

How three Irishmen from rural backgrounds managed to get involved in
this murderous mix is unfathomable. If they came to the attention of
the gardai, it was a very low level and they were never considered to
be anything other than small fry.

Yet they were living in a comfortable apartment costing pounds 500 a
month in an affluent tourist seaside resort, without any visible means
of support. The apartment they lived in was literally a stone's throw
away from the celebrated Kurhaus Hotel, which has painted ceilings by
the Belgian artist Van Eyck. Its famous music room played host to
stars like Maurice Chevalier, Herbert Von Karajan, Duke Ellington,
Bella Bartok, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and Marlene Dietrich.

The vicious murders in this opulent neighbourhood will send shock
waves through the expatriate Irish drugs dealers who maintain bases in
and around Amsterdam and The Hague. It has also stunned the 14,000
Irish people who make an honest living in this part of Northern
Europe, many of them in the construction trade, the IT industry and
the financial services sector.

It may be some days before a positive identification is made; until
then, the agony goes on for the families involved while the forces of
law and order, both in Holland and Ireland, try to come up with a
motive for this savage act.