A PRISON officer has been jailed for five years for trying to smuggle drugs and other contraband into inmates at Limerick Prison.
The bag contained cocaine, cannabis resin, 500 tranquilliser tablets, 31 mobile phones, 34 phone chargers, 22 phone bluetooth headsets and seven Sim cards.
Thomas Corry (52), Aughrim, Scarriff, Co Clare, pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of drugs and two counts of possession of drugs with intent for sale or supply at Roxboro Road, Limerick, on March 16th, 2008.
A former president of Scarriff Rugby Football Club, he was nine months short of 30 years’ service as a prison officer when he was caught by gardaí with the drugs and phones as he drove to work.
A Garda checkpoint was set up to stop his car near the jail after gardaí received a tip-off. He was found with a two litre 7Up bottle of vodka, 90 razor blades, two penknives and a screwdriver, which he was trying to smuggle in. He admitted his offences to gardaí.
Limerick District Court was told gardaí found €400 in Corry’s car – payment for smuggling the items. The drugs found had a combined value of €1,143.
Judge Ray Fullam was told by John O’Sullivan, for the prosecution, that Corry did not enjoy good relations with his colleagues and instead befriended some inmates.
It was through these friendships, Corry told gardaí, that he first agreed to smuggle a phone. Corry, a married father of three adult sons, said after two years he felt threatened to continue smuggling, when gangland criminals mentioned Corry’s son’s name to him and seemed to know him.
He took this as an implied threat to his family. “You’re rotten at that stage once you start it,” he told gardaí when arrested.
He said he only feared being caught when security at the jail “tightened and tightened”. At first he did not fear the inmates he was smuggling for, but when some of the gangland criminals put “fierce pressure” on him, he was in fear.
He told gardaí: “I have seen what they had done to their own lads. They would take somebody out and kill them in front of your eyes and not think a thought.”
The smuggling was organised when he met associates of inmates he knew outside the prison.
“When you get the call you get the call,” Corry told gardaí. “It’s easier to pull with them [the inmates] than against them.” He said when he collected the items he would be paid, usually €50-€200. Corry told gardaí he had an “amalgamation of regret and issues of conscience” over the smuggling that sometimes kept him awake at night.
In his statement of admission he advised gardaí of the jail’s security shortcomings, details that were passed to the prison service.
In the prison he would hand smuggled items to “beneficiary inmates” or leave them hidden to be collected. He told gardaí he smuggled three or four times a year over five years. Mobile phones were inmates’ “most desired items”.
Corry told gardaí he had not intended to smuggle in the knives, screwdriver or razor blades.
Judge Fullam jailed Corry for seven years but suspended two years. He said the offences were “planned and premeditated” and a callous breach of trust.