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 Best'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.