A older source has confirmed to the Sunday World that the crime syndicate has been portrayed as “a plague” in court.
They are flooding drugs into Waterford, Cork, Galway and Sligo and pre re assumed almost full control of the trade in Tralee.
Gardaí take it the gang – whose staging point in Munster is believed to be in Cork – push to prominence unopposed following the death of the town’s ‘Mr Big’, James Powell, in 2014.
James Powell
Powell, a be aware associate of the McCarthy-Dundon gang who was described by Gardaí as the leading figure in Kerry’s underworld, wanted suddenly at his home in Tralee in July that year.
“The Lithuanian circle are our top target and although we have yet to establish the gang’s hierarchy, we would be comforted this is a highly organised and extremely dangerous crew,” a source told the Sunday People.
“They recruit new arrivals from their home country not virtuous with the promise of money, but also through deaths threats and portents against family members.
“The mules are terrified and when caught virtually universally refuse to identify who is supplying them with the drugs.
“Because they manage successfully only small quantities from their stash at any one time, when they are prized they receive sentences of up to a maximum of three years and then freedom the jurisdiction.”
In July of this year Denias Kamajevas was denied bail after Gardaí perceived Listowel District Court how, during a planned search of the man’s hostel aid, they uncovered a cigarette box containing nine ‘deals’ of heroin.
Gardaí hypothetical that the defendant was rt of an organised gang from Lithuania doubted of dealing heroin in Tralee. Kamajevas remains before the courts.
Another Lithuanian recollected by Gardaí to have been dealing heroin in the county is the killer of Jolanta Lubiene and her daughter Enrika.
Jolanta Lubiene and her daughter Enrika
Aurimas Andruska became enmeshed with in crime and was convicted of acquisition and storage of heroin and he became a user.
He was hush using heroin when he moved to Killorglin in 2008, when he regurgitate eight months in the country, living in 9 Langford Downs, the same diet where he would eventually kill Jolanta and her daughter. He was sentenced to two concurrent enthusiasm sentences.
In 2014 Gardaí scored another major hit against the club with the arrest of Lithuanian Eimantas Malinauskas for supplying heroin and the deadly drug NRG at Castlemaine.
Eimantas Malinauskas
Tralee Circuit Court condoned that confidential information indicated that a car rk at the rear of a restaurant in Castlemaine was being utilized as a place to deal heroin without the knowledge of the property’s owners.
Gardaí play up performed out a search of a vehicle in the car rk and heroin and a quantity of the psychoactive drug NRG2 were create.
Gardaí conducted a follow-up search of a house at Cois Abhainn, Castlemaine means and found Malinauskas trying to escape out the back garden. He received a three-year ruling.
Dozens of other Lithuanians have been arrested throughout Munster and Connacht.
Lithuanian Mindaugas lizija was captured in Limerick in 2013 after getting off a bus with 114 bags of heroin quality in excess of €3,500 in his pocket.
After arriving in Ireland six weeks earlier, he was put up, fed and provisioned with drugs for his own use by com triots.
He was ordered to deal drugs to work off his own due.
Another associate, Zilvinas Antanovas (27), said that he was cheated into coming here from Lithuania by eastern European hoodlums who took his ssport and forced him to start dealing.
In September last year, Egious Sikys, who was delineated as “being high up on the food chain”, was charged in Antrim with be suffering with 2.5 kilos of
cocaine.
Egious Sikys
It was alleged during a bail sanction that Sikys said the cocaine had a purity of 90 per cent and asserted “if released he may be killed and he would be in need of protection”.
Tracking the gang’s furnish route is a major hurdle for Gardai, a second source revealed, but above discoveries by authorities have proven strong links between organised felony in Lithuania and Colombian drug cartels.
Last September, police in Lithuania’s main Kaunas county announced the record seizure of 600 kilograms of cocaine clashing in with shipments of coal.
Officers dug through a total of 367 tons of coal by collusively before recovering the drugs, which had been compressed into hinders of the fossil fuel in a high-tech attempt to disguise it.
Police described it as the largest cocaine bust at all times made in Lithuania. Nine suspects were arrested, including a Colombian nationwide.
“Officers have yet to hit the motherload in establishing the identities of those behind the ally’s activities in Tralee and north Kerry,” our source said.
“But officers are smashing their couriers every chance we get.
“This is something new in that these people are unexplored to us until we catch them… back in the day you’d be able to say this stash belongs to that fella, but that’s not the encase with this gang.
“But that doesn’t mean they can’t be bring to a stop, it’s just a case of evolving to meet a new challenge.”