Cannabis trade a good life on £5,000 a week

Within a few months of getting back into the cannabis trade, Charles Bowden was making more money than he could spend.

On Tuesday he told the Special Criminal Court his Army gratuity in 1989, when he left after six years, was £400. Yesterday he said that a few years later he would blow £400 "if I went out twice in a week" on night-clubs and cocaine.

In the summer of 1994, he said, he got back in touch with his drug-dealer friend through another friend who worked in a clothes shop where the man was a regular customer.

The named dealer had paid Bowden £500 a consignment to distribute ecstasy from the pub where he worked as a doorman in the years after he left the Army.

His job this time was to drive to a Co Kildare hotel, meet a named associate and pick up cannabis to deliver it to a lock-up in Dublin. "Then the consignments started to get bigger and bigger, so the money increased," he said.

He said, "clothes, drink, the car" were what he spent his money on. The rest went into a laundry basket in his Ballymun flat. "At most there was £35,000 to £40,000 in it."

Smartly dressed for his second day in the witness box, Bowden finished off his silk tie with a gold tie pin. He had gold cufflinks on his snow-white cuffs.

By 1995 his earnings some weeks had increased tenfold or more from £500 a week to about £5,000 a week, and on one week £6,000.

The court heard on Tuesday that Bowden was sharing a fifth of the profits of the gang involved in drugs distribution. "I spent it. I lived well, I bought designer clothes. I went on foreign holidays," he told defence counsel Mr Patrick MacEntee SC.

In October 1995 he bought a new house, taking out a mortgage with the Irish Permanent based on the accounts of Clips, a Moore Street hairdressing shop which he had bought into. He agreed the shop was a front for the drugs operation. He had fitted it out, "new ceilings, new sinks, new everything". But there was no phone.

"So the sign said, Clips, Don't Phone?" Mr MacEntee asked. Almost everyone smiled. Even Mr Paul Ward laughed.

The shop "gave me an air of respectability. It gave me a reason to have all the clothes that I had and the car that I had and enabled me to get a mortgage. It made me a businessman," Bowden said.

"You were a greedy man?" Mr MacEntee asked.

"Yes," said Bowden.

"A man obsessed with money and you didn't care too much about how you got it?"

"Yes."

"What was the biggest week because you must have gloated. You did gloat as the sums went up and up?"

"Absolutely, yes," Bowden said.

However, in the summer of 1996 the money became something which could associate him with the drugs gang. He put £100,000 in a hold-all and gave to "a friend of a friend" to mind in his Mespil Road flat.

"The particular pressure was that the police team hunting for the murderers of Veronica Guerin were closing in on us, all of us."