The Dublin city centre street traders are well more clued in when it comes to flogging dodgy smokes and quickly recognising a sting operation.
It is a bright September morning and a team of investigators hired by Japan Tobacco International (JTI), one of the biggest tobacco companies in the world, gather in a Dublin hotel to map out their day.
The plan is to scour the north inner city for sellers of illegal tobacco before moving to online to trace people using Facebook to ply their illicit trade. There will be no confrontations or arrests – JTI’s team have no authority on that score – but the team will pass their findings on to Revenue and gardaí and hope they will take it from there.
Trevor (not his real name) is a young man in a tracksuit and baseball cap. He is JTI’s lead investigator. He has his homework already done and outlines his targets for the day. First up is one of the countless shops in Dublin’s inner city selling an eclectic mix of vapes, reconditioned phones, tablets and a range of knock-off Labubus.
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With one of his team – and The Irish Times – lounging discreetly across the road and connected only by an earpiece, he wanders through the doors of the shop.
The interaction is short and to the point.
“Do you have any cigarettes?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“Can I just get a packet of Marlboro Lights. How much are they?”
“€15.”
“They were a tenner yesterday?”
“Okay, €12.”
The money changes hands and Trevor pockets the cigarettes and leaves, after which the tobacco is placed in an evidence bag and he’s on to his next rogue trader, or at least that is the plan.
The previous day he struck up a conversation with a woman in Dublin city centre who said she had cigarettes to sell. He told her he would be back. The only problem is she is nowhere to be seen when he returns.
Trevor approaches some other traders on the street and asks for his prior contact by name. The sellers look confused and say they have never heard of her.
He explains in a whisper that he is looking for some cigarettes, but they say they cannot help him. He makes his way back to base empty-handed.
An hour later another member of the JTI team tries his luck as The Irish Times lurks nearby. He approaches a woman with a plastic bag chock-full of cigarettes at her feet.
“Have you any cigarettes?”
“Not today, love.”
He shuffles up the street.
The Irish Times follows at a discreet distance and as we pass the woman she whispers to a fellow trader.
“Watch your man in the grey jacket, the fella on the phone.”
The grapevine carries the alert up the street and minutes later he leaves the scene empty-handed.
The online pickings are more fruitful.
Trevor has made a connection with a tobacco seller on Facebook Marketplace and has arranged to buy six pouches of rolling tobacco for €100, a discount of just under €60.
We drive to the man’s home in a well-heeled, gated apartment complex in south Dublin and make a call, after which the man pads out in shorts and T-shirt, tobacco in plain sight. He wanders gormlessly to the gate and tries to hand the contraband to a passerby, looking confused until Trevor beeps his horn and beckons him over.
The deal’s done with the target utterly oblivious to the fact he has now been marked as a criminal. When asked what will happen next, Trevor shrugs.
“If we think tracking this guy for a bit longer has value and will lead further up the chain, then we’ll do that. Otherwise we’ll pass on the information to the guards and that’s that.”
The sale of illicit tobacco is big business in Ireland, and it is getting bigger. In 2022, Revenue seized more than 51 million dodgy cigarettes and approximately 11,800kg of illicit tobacco. Last year 112.3 million cigarettes and 39,500kg of tobacco were seized. More than one in four of the cigarettes smoked here fall foul of the law, and it is costing the exchequer about €600 million in lost revenue annually.
Vincent Byrne is the global director of anti-illicit trade operations at JTI having joined in 2013. Before that he served as a detective sergeant with the Criminal Assets Bureau.
“What you’ve seen today is at the bottom end of the street trade, but across the world organised crime groups dominate the supply chain [and they’re] involved in other types of criminality as well, including drug and people trafficking,” he says.
He points to investigations highlighting how people working in illegal factories producing tobacco for the black market are effectively enslaved after being “lured with the promise of cash reward and payments”.
When Byrne talks of illegal factories it is easy to imagine faraway sweat shops but sometimes it’s much closer to home.
Earlier this year, eight tonnes of raw tobacco were discovered at an illegal factory in Co Louth. The factory had the capacity to produce and package up to 700,000 cigarettes every day, Revenue said. Also seized were 660,000 illicit cigarettes with a retail value of €595,000, with a potential loss to the exchequer of almost €470,000.
In 2024, Revenue shut down an illegal commercial cigarette factory in Dublin 11, seizing 758,000 of Marlboro-branded illicit cigarettes and more than 1.4 tonnes of raw tobacco.
Byrne says it’s “very difficult to get an exact handle on the illegal trade because unfortunately, organised crime groups never make official returns” but internal JTI figures suggest it’s about 25 per cent of all cigarettes smoked in Ireland.
He says the sting operations are key to getting “a sense of what’s happening and what’s out there”.
“The street sales intelligence is not going to make a huge difference on its own but that context is needed to form part of the bigger picture.”
Byrne notes that black-market tobacco is sold without any controls, but the legitimate products are hardly good for people and cause cancer, emphysema, heart disease and all sorts of other life-threatening and -limiting conditions just the same. In most stakeouts and stings, there are good guys and bad guys but these operations run by Big Tobacco are more a case of bad guys and more tax-compliant bad guys.
Byrne – a non-smoker – stresses he is not focused on the morality or wisdom of smoking, and says his concern is whether the product is legal or illegal.
“JTI and the other tobacco companies are legal companies [that] produce a legal product whether you like that or not,” he says.
“You might dislike the industry and say we’re the bad guys but we’re a legal industry and we’re highly regulated. We contribute to the Government with excise and, because we take the issue of illegal trade seriously, we are actually contributing and trying to assist law enforcement where we can.”
He says the same “can’t be said for the bad guys, the criminal networks”.
