NO LIGHT IN SORDID FABLE OF HEROIN BOSS FELLONI

Tony Felloni has developed a new interest. He is taking a computer
course in Portlaoise prison's education programme, according to a prison
source. Perhaps he realises how much the world will have moved on by his
expected release date in 2010, after serving the State's longest
sentence imposed on a drug dealer.

At 55, Felloni is an old hand at being the model prisoner, having served
his first sentence at the age of 16. In King Scum, his new book about
Felloni, RTE crime reporter Paul Reynolds charts his criminal career
from the 1960s thug-in-a-suit who terrorised and sexually assaulted
young women to the heroin boss who sold the drug to his own children.

Like Felloni's permed and dyed hairstyle in the 1980s, it is a cheap and
nasty business. A notorious cheapskate, Felloni, with his instinct for
exploiting those weaker than him, has left a trail of victims. There are
the scores of by-now middle-aged women who remember how the charming
Italian-Irish man in a suit terrorised and blackmailed them as teenagers
in the 1960s; the Co Meath couple who were beaten up by Tony's gang when
he robbed their home; Felloni's former mistress who reared his son on
her own, when the "charmer" starting using his fists on her.

There are the junkies, both living and dead, to whom Felloni personally
sold deals of heroin at nothing less than the full price, and the ones
to whom he once sold the brown powder medicine prescribed for the family
dog because he didn't have any heroin to sell.

There is his wife Anne, who says she had 300 stitches over the years
that Felloni beat her. And finally his own children, whom he turned into
addicts, criminals, drug couriers and dealers in the family heroin
business. King Scum charts the seedy life of the man with the comic book
crook's name that has become synonymous with working the system. "There
was no romance about Felloni. He wasn't even the anti-hero," Reynolds
writes. "I couldn't find one person who had a good word to say about
him."

Chief among his detractors is Anne Felloni. Three of his 33 convictions
are for beating her up. Her loathing for her violent husband is familiar
to those who heard her interviewed after Felloni was convicted. As young
criminals they met at the Rainbow Cafe in O'Connell Street. She had 10
convictions by the time she was 18 and both were in prison six weeks
after the wedding.

Tony hit her across the head with a hatchet while she was expecting
their second child, Ann. Her pregnancies never stopped him kicking and
beating her and she wore a scarf to cover her blood-matted hair at their
eldest son's first communion.

"All in all I have about 300 stitches all over my body from him," she
says.

Her eldest daughter Ann remembers hearing the fighting. Felloni was
stabbed by his wife at 5 a.m. after he had beaten her. In another fight
she bit his injured left middle finger, which had been reattached after
he lost it trying to jump through reinforced glass. The finger "went
gangrenous and had to be amputated".

Tony was born Anthony Carroll in 1943, given his mother's name as his
parents never married. In September 1969 he changed his name to marry
Anne. Felloni was his father's name and the name he was known by.

At the time of his marriage, he had already served three quarters of a
three-year sentence for blackmail and theft from young women. Judge Hugh
McGivern described the scam as "a despicable conspiracy".

"It is rather significant that the girls you and your partner attempted
to extract money from were domestic servants, working in Dublin away
from the protection of their own homes," the judge said.

The story is told through "Maeve", then a 14 year-old girl who met
Felloni and his sister on O'Connell Street and agreed to go to a party.
Felloni took her to a Gardiner Street flat, forced her to strip, climbed
on top of her and then photographed her, threatening to send the
pictures to her employer if she didn't pay him.

"His sister was used as the decoy, his friend provided the flat and his
friend's friend could have a piece of anything that was left over."

Released after two and a half years, Felloni had already come to the
attention of the press and his Italian looks and liking for suits were
still getting him by. A young garda was disciplined and fined after he
opened the door of the Bridewell holding cell to let the respectable
solicitor in a crombie coat, suit and tie out after seeing his client.

The solicitor was Felloni, under arrest on suspicion of robbery.

When Anne Felloni was giving birth to their first child, Tony's mistress
was in the same hospital also giving birth to his son. That relationship
ended soon afterwards when he started beating her.

Six years later he turned up at a pub for his son's Holy Communion. "He
offered the boy a half-crown, the equivalent of twelve and a half pence
and worth about 80 pence today. His mother was highly insulted. `I felt
like shoving it back down his throat,' she says."

HOUSE-breaking and robberies peppered the rest of the 1960s, and he
posed as George Bests's brother Tony Best to rent a Rathgar flat from
two elderly sisters, where he stored stolen goods. Then he moved into
larger organised robberies in the 1970s as the gang targeted rural homes
and businesses.

Det Insp John O'Driscoll was one of the gardai involved in chasing
Felloni. "Twentynine years later his son, Sgt John O'Driscoll, was still
chasing Felloni and his family."

Felloni's well-documented years as a heroin dealer are told against the
backdrop of Felloni family life. Sentencing Luigi Felloni, Tony's second
son, Judge Cyril Kelly described him as "a victim of a violent childhood
in a dysfunctional criminal family".

Five of his six children have been convicted on various offences and
four remain in jail. The youngest, only four, is the only one not to
have come into contact with the criminal justice system. Luigi was first
convicted at the age of 14 in the Children's Court and received his
first prison sentence a week after his 16th birthday The eldest girl,
Ann, now suffering from AIDS, recalls when her mother started smoking
heroin. She remembers her mother cleaning the window with a toothbrush
and nearly drowning in the bath "I never had a normal girl's childhood.
I was just used by my father to distribute heroin," she told Dublin
Circuit Criminal Court before she was sentenced for her role in the
family business. Their happiest memories of childhood are of the times
when they were with their grandparents.

"Their grandfather, Dan Joe, got them up, washed and fed them in the
morning. He walked them to the nearby primary school, proudly parading
his clutch of golden-haired toddlers in bright new clothes into the
infant class.

"We were his pride and joy, snow-white hair, with the little clothes on
us," Ann says, "My ma always robbed the best of clothes for us."

Her granny's "love and affection made up for what my ma and da would
do". Ann carries two bad scars. One from when she was 12 and home alone
with the other children in front of the fire. Her nightdress went up and
a neighbour wrapped her in a carpet.

The other is a "crescent-shaped scar, four or five inches long that
loops around her left ear. It is about 10 years old now, but the outline
of the stitches is still clearly visible. She claims she got it in a
fight with her mother who, she says, slashed her with a Stanley knife.
Her mother denies it."

King Scum, The Life and Crimes of Tony Felloni Dublin's Heroin Boss, is
published by Gill and Macmillan.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst