A Meath aviation broker has been sentenced to twelve years in prison, with two suspended, for conspiring to import €7 million of heroin and cocaine from Belgium.
John Kinsella (38), a former Irish super heavyweight boxing champion, of Carne Wood, Johnstown, Navan pleaded guilty the day before his trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring with others to import the drugs between September 22nd and 26th, 2006.
The trial had been expected to last over six weeks with up to 130 witnesses, including members of the Dutch and Belgium police.
Dutch authorities found 57 kilograms (kg) of heroin and 21 kg of cocaine, worth an estimated €7 million, in the luggage of a passenger trying to board the private jet Kinsella had hired for a round trip from Weston Airport, Kildare to Wevelgem, Belgium on September 26th, 2006.
Judge Tony Hunt said he regarded the maximum penalty of 14 years for such an offence as “low” and felt “constrained” by the law given Kinsella’s “scale of criminality”.
He accepted that Kinsella appeared not to have been “at the top of the Christmas tree” in this drugs enterprise and that there was at least one person above him, referred to as “the auld fella” in wire-tapped phone conversations between Kinsella and his co-accused, James Rankin.
Judge Hunt noted that Kinsella “knows well the identity of the major player” but chose to withhold this information.
Kinsella had claimed he was “a victim of circumstance” shortly after his arrest on September 26th at Weston Airport and that a business associate, “Mr Barton Gregory”, had tricked him into the drugs run.
Detective Garda Peter Gilligan of the Garda National Drugs Unit said Barton Gregory, described by Kinsella as possibly Algerian with black hair and a goatee, turned out to be a fictitious person when all attempts to trace him led to a “dead-end”.
Det Gda Gilligan told prosecution counsel, Ms Pauline Walley SC, that Dutch police had set up a wiretap on the mobile phone of Scotsman James Rankin, a drug trafficking suspect who was based in Holland in September 2006.
Det Gda Gilligan said a garda colleague traveled to Amsterdam and brought back a CD containing wiretap recordings of phone conversations between Rankin and Kinsella in the days leading up to the drugs bust.
Kinsella, a self-made businessman, claimed in interview that he didn’t know Rankin nor the drugs courier, who was jailed for three years.
Judge Hunt backdated Kinsella’s sentence to the date he entered custody in September 2006.