It has taken six years for the extradition case against Seán Garland to come to court
A 77-year-old man suffering from cancer, diabetes and a heart condition is the unlikely focus of an extradition application which involves high-quality counterfeit dollars, an alleged Marxist conspiracy on the part of North Korea to destabilise the US economy and the actions of secret service agents from a number of countries.
According to indictment documents filed before a Grand Jury in the US and revealed in 2005, Seán Garland, former chief of staff of the IRA and later president of the Workers’ Party, conspired with six others to smuggle and circulate internationally dollars forged in North Korea. In 1989 the US secret service noticed very high quality fake $100 bills in circulation and traced them to the government laboratory and printing press in North Korea. According to the indictment, Marxist-leaning groups throughout the world were used to circulate them.
Garland came to the Americans’ attention in the early 1990s, when the first “supernotes”, as they were known, appeared on Dublin streets. After the secret service were notified by the US embassy, they moved quickly to stop the trade and soon Dublin banks and money exchanges refused to exchange $100 bills.
The indictment claims that in the late 1990s Garland travelled to Moscow to arrange the purchase of the fake notes and smuggling them to Dublin, from where they were collected by English criminals for further distribution.
In 2002, three of them, David Levin of Birmingham and London, Terry Silcock and Mark Adderley, both from Birmingham, were jailed for nine, six and four years respectively for what police said was the largest counterfeit dollar operation ever seen in Britain. Silcock alone handled $4.2 million in counterfeit money, the court heard, and the whole operation was worth $29 million.
Garland is accused in the US of conspiring with them and Christopher John Corcoran ( 57), of Dublin to purchase, transport and resell the counterfeit dollars.
However, no move was made to arrest him until he attended a Workers’ Party conference in Belfast in October 2005, when he was arrested and released on bail pending an extradition hearing.
He fled to the South, claiming he had no confidence in the protections afforded him in the North and saying he was placing himself “under the protection of my own country and my own country’s Constitution”. Michael Forde SC, his counsel, told an earlier hearing Garland’s solicitor wrote to his local gardaí in Navan in 2005 stating the US or Britain may seek his extradition and he would readily make himself available for arrest.
However, the US authorities did not seek his extradition until late 2008, and he was arrested in January 2009. He was granted bail and the case was adjourned a number of times before it opened yesterday.
Extradition law requires that the offence with which a person is charged in the requesting country is of minimum gravity and corresponds to an offence in this country.
There is also a “political offence” exemption, which will be argued by Garland in these proceedings, on the basis that North Korea was engaged in political conflict with the US.