Drug baron who projected the image of a family man

A jail sentence of 22 years, the most severe given for a drugs offence in an Irish court, was imposed yesterday on Edward Scanlon in Cork.

Scanlon (49), a father of three, with an address at Laburnum Drive, Model Farm, Cork, was a leading member of a major drugs gang involved in importing and distributing cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine into Ireland, the Cork Circuit Criminal Court heard.

To the end Scanlon appeared to maintain his composure, explaining his wealth by presenting himself as an enterprising hard working businessman who at turns worked at renovating buildings, running a restaurant and developing a hydro-electric project.

Dressed in jeans, tie and casual jacket with his grey beard trimmed, he sat in the witness box and told of being in debt to banks over mortgages and spoke of his young children, projecting an image of a regular family man.

But yesterday was not the first time that Scanlon had traded on his image as a family man. Back in 1980, he enlisted the help of an eight-year-old boy, son of his then girlfriend, to paint a similar picture.

The boy was brought by Scanlon and his girlfriend as they drove from Turkey to Britain with a consignment of heroin worth £2.5 million. They were arrested at Harwich by British customs officials.

That run for a Turkish drug trafficker, Fuat Yuksel, earned Scanlon a seven-year prison sentence, but he served only three years of it at Maidstone Prison where he took courses in welding and brick-laying.

Three years later Scanlon was back in Maidstone, this time having been convicted of conspiring to import cocaine at Heathrow. The cocaine was found hidden in the underwear of his female companion.

The son of a successful Cork businessman who owned a tyre company, Scanlon was educated at Presentation Brothers Primary School and Mungret College.

It was an opportunity noted by Judge A.G. Murphy. "He was educated by the Presentation Brothers and the Jesuits at Mungret. He is quite obviously an intelligent person, but that to my mind makes him even more culpable."

After leaving school, Scanlon, known to his contemporaries in Cork as Judd, lived for a time in New York, where he was given life probation for possessing heroin, and later in Venezuela where gardai believe he served time for drugs offences.

Periods of temporary employment as an antique dealer at Kensington Market and as an amusements arcade manager followed, but when he returned to Cork in the late 1980s he was, according to a Garda source, "a folk hero to local small-time drug dealers".

After yesterday's sentence, Scanlon remained composed, correcting the prosecution barrister, Mr Sean O'Donnabhain, to say that his sentence should be backdated, not to March, but to February when he was first taken into custody.