Court told exboxer lived off heroin profits

A Dublin man, Mr Thomas Mullen (26), a former boxer, on trial in London on
drugs charges used profits from his heroin deals to finance a luxury
lifestyle in London, a court was told yesterday.

The man, nicknamed "The Boxer", became so rich he had to pass himself off
as a building contractor to his bank, it was claimed.

By early 1997 Mr Mullen acted as guarantor for his girlfriend's mortgage
application on a new £138,000 house in Finchley, north London, Snaresbrook
Crown Court heard.

Mr Mullen denies one count of conspiracy to export heroin. Another
defendant, Mr Turhan Mustafa, changed his plea on the same charge to
guilty. Yesterday the court heard how Mr Mullen ploughed money he allegedly
reaped from smuggling drugs which would be sold in Dublin into a luxurious
lifestyle for his girlfriend and her two children.

He kept up the veneer of respectability by presenting Allied Irish Banks
with profitandloss accounts for 1995 and 1996 showing net profits from
each year of just under £30,000.

Mr Mullen was guarantor on an application for a mortgage with the bank to
buy a house in Woodhouse Gardens in Finchley worth nearly £140,000.

He had shocked a London estate agent by strolling into her office to secure
comfortable rented accommodation in Etchingham Court, Etchingham Park Road,
Finchley, with a bundle of musty £5 notes.

Then in August 1996 he made light of having nearly £6,000 in a carrier bag
but no bank account details by saying his grandmother had left him the
money.

From time to time Mr Mullen used new excuses. The prosecutor, Mr Graham
Blower, told the court: "Mr Mullen was holding himself out at this stage to
be a building contractor."

He was finally arrested by chance when robbery investigators stopped him
after he was seen going to and from a Hampstead safetydeposit centre with
bags.

The officers found £103,000 in cash in a bag Mr Mullen was carrying and
thousands more in a safety deposit box he kept in the name of O'Brien.

Mr Gordon Pringle, for the defence, asked a finance investigator, PC John
Laws, to confirm that Mr Mullen had sold a house in Clonliffe Avenue,
Dublin, for £60,000 in 1996 but had bought it for only £16,500. The officer
agreed.

The trial continues.