Nathan McDonnell had it all — until a €32m drug bust changed everything
Nathan McDonnell had for years affected the air of the successful businessman, the man about town in Tralee.
On the day he was arrested, Nathan McDonnell was bound for Turner’s Cross. Soccer was a passion of his and Kerry FC was due to play Cork City in the latter’s home ground. It was February 16, 2024, the day McDonnell’s life was to change forever.
He may have looked forward to the occasion as one of private celebration. Twenty-four hours previously, he had loaded the machine that was dominating his life onto a truck at his Ballyseedy Garden Centre, outside Tralee.
The machine was designed to separate metals through an electromagnetic process, but that was not the purpose for which it was being used here. McDonnell operated the forklift himself to load it onto a truck. And then it was gone, out the door, no longer, as far as he was concerned, to be associated with him.
Hidden inside the machine was an estimated €32m worth of the drug known as crystal meth. He had completed his role in the transglobal drug-smuggling operation. Now he could look forward to his pay-off, which, he would later claim, amounted to €150,000.
The machine was driven to Cork Port where it was due to be loaded onto a ship for export to Australia. Before that could happen, a joint operation between customs officers and the gardaí stopped the transport of the container in which the machine was being moved. The gardaí were acting on solid information that had been built up over the course of a long investigation.
The machine was X-rayed. Suspicions were further raised by some inconsistencies in the drum of the machine. The law enforcement officers got to work with angle grinders, taking the thing apart. It took hours of work, slow, gruelling labour with no guarantee of a result at the end.
Eventually, they found what they were looking for. Bags of white powder were discovered in the drum. Further in, more bags were discovered in a black carbon material. This was nearly half a tonne of the crystal meth, en route across the globe from South America to Australia.
Once the discovery was confirmed, officers were dispatched to arrest 44-year-old McDonnell at his place of work. He was taken away and has been in custody since.
His shock at the arrest can only be guessed at. Nathan McDonnell had for years affected the air of the successful businessman, the man about town in Tralee, the kind of person with a Midas touch when it came to business. He was a staple in the wider social scene. He did his bit for the town, presented himself as something of a leader and was conspicuous in supporting various charities.
He was whispered as harbouring political ambition and there is little doubt but that one of the big parties would have been interested in such a figure. And now, he was under arrest, suspected of involvement in not just drug smuggling but with a transglobal organised crime gang.
How did it happen?
There is little sympathy for Nathan McDonnell in Tralee, but there is plenty for his mother, Bernie Falvey. She set up the business that her son used as a cover for his involvement in crime. She came from what is described as “good people,” worked hard, and raised a family herself. In her later years, she handed over stewardship to her only son.
Across a range of people in the town who spoke to the on condition of anonymity, the sentiment is largely uniform.
“She was a great worker and is well regarded in general as a person,” was one typical response. “People are desperately sorry for her and how her son has left everything.
As for him? "No great surprise. He was always a man about town and there was always a bit of suspicion about him.”
The Ballyseedy Home & Garden Centre was set up by Falvey in 1992 and went from strength to strength under her stewardship. She was one of a family of four girls and grew up outside the town. Her family were regarded as “quiet and decent”.
Bernie studied horticulture in Cork and there she met her future husband, Michael McDonnell. The couple moved to the northeast of the State for work. Three children, including Nathan, were born while the family lived there. After a few years, the family moved back to Tralee, but at some stage when the children were small, the marriage got into difficulty. Nathan is the only boy of the five siblings.
Michael McDonnell remained on good terms with his children. Last March, weeks after Nathan was arrested, his father offered to put up his “life savings” of €100,000 as surety for bail.
“I’m quite prepared to put it on the line for my son,” he told the court. “I have the utmost faith that my son will not leave the jurisdiction.”
The court rejected the application and remanded Nathan in custody.
Having returned to Tralee in the late 1980s, Bernie went to work for her uncle Dermot Kerins. He had started up the Fernhurst nursery in his native Kenmare and in 1988 he expanded to a new site in Ballyseedy. In 1992, he sold the latter business to Bernie.
At that stage, it consisted of a small plot of land and mobile home that served as an office. She quickly expanded on foot of a loan secured on a family home and before long it was renamed the Ballyseedy Garden Centre.
“She put serious work into that place,” one local person said.
Nathan would later claim that from his childhood he had a hands-on role helping out, cycling from Tralee out to the centre during lunch hour and working weekends. “Like every family business, every family has to help out,” he said.
He was educated locally and studied horticulture at third level in Cork. Following that, he emigrated to Australia where he spent about five years before returning home in 2005. At that point, he went to work for his mother and was soon expanding the business.
By 2006, the centre was now also serving as a “lifestyle destination”, retailing all manner of homewares to serve the consumer boom prevalent during the Celtic Tiger years. The business was renamed Ballyseedy Home & Garden. An upmarket cafe was added. That opened in 2007, just months before the economy began to tank.
“We got the tail end of the Celtic Tiger and for a while it was great,” Nathan said in 2013. After the crash, things turned hard. “Where we had been selling €4,000 garden sets, we were selling €800 sets, or none at all.”
In 2011, McDonnell took over a former used-car warehouse in Fota, outside Cork City, and opened another garden centre. Two years later, he was claiming blue skies were again appearing over the business, with the cafe in Ballyseedy generating about €1m in revenue that year alone.
By then, the two businesses were employing 120 people and more jobs would be on the way. The family stamp was across the business with the involvement of not just Nathan but also his sister Salome.
Concession space was handed over to big brands like Meadows & Byrne and Edinburgh Woollen Mills. That same year, he told an RTÉ programme on businesses struggling with debt that he considered himself lucky.
“We have a fine business that continues to see huge support. So many people are suffering with personal debt, bad investments and the potential time bomb of mortgage arrears. We are no different but with hard work and commitment, I hope we will come out the other side with a solid business.”
To the outside world, that is what appeared to have happened in the following years. The business went from strength to strength. Nathan McDonnell began to adopt the role of successful entrepreneur, a man about town. At one point, he met his wife, Jackie O’Duffy, a native of the salubrious Dublin suburb of Foxrock. The couple married and have three small children.
“He was flash,” one local businessman told the “He was driving around in a Porsche, projecting an image that wasn’t really in keeping with the kind of town Tralee is.
While he was the man about town he also did his bit for the voluntary sector, and supported a number of charities. His company was well-known for its annual sponsorship of a cycle for the Kerry Down Syndrome Association.
There was also, for businesspeople of a particular standing, the requisite involvement in a racing syndicate. Along with four other local businessmen he bought a horse, Stumptown, which enjoyed some success, including a second placing at Cheltenham.
Whatever the social occasion in North Kerry, be it judging the best-dressed man at the Listowel Races, taking part in the Strictly Come Dancing competition in Tralee, or being to the fore in a bid to attract the World Rally Championship to the town, McDonnell was front and centre.
In December 2021, he was elected president of the Tralee Chamber Alliance. On his election, he said he would do his best for the town.
“Tralee is a fantastic town with massive potential but we need to get better at telling our story to the world,” he said. “We need more jobs and industry but we can’t sit on our hands waiting for them to find us.”
The following year he opened another franchise, Smaash Burger, in the town of Ardfert.
His mother at this point was taking a step back. In an interview with magazine she was asked which accomplishment she was most proud of.
“Having had children to give me grandchildren, they are my world,” she replied.
In 2023, she completed the first year in a diploma on ancient wisdom. After a life of very hard work, which yielded success and satisfaction, she was finally in her autumn years getting the chance to kick back and enjoy life.
While his high profile gave the impression Nathan McDonnell was a competent entrepreneur, the real picture only came to light in the last year. Earlier this month, the Special Criminal Court heard there was great difficulty in repaying loans. There had been a hope the covid payments — extended to retail businesses during the pandemic — might come to the rescue, but that didn’t work out. The status of the finances was “very precarious”.
At time of his arrest, he was a director of 11 different companies with a cumulative turnover of between €4.5m and €5m.
One former employee, who worked in the business in 2022, told gardaí that “by the time she was leaving it was in very poor shape”. The woman described McDonnell as a “very likeable guy with very poor organisational skills and very chaotic”.
It is unclear when McDonnell first became involved with the serious crime gang, but he came to the gardaí’s notice in 2023 in the course of a major investigation.
On June 6, 2023, armed gardaí, backed up by members of the Defence Forces, searched a premises in Listowel. Five mobile phones, Sim cards and travel documents were seized. An analysis of bank accounts of an individual associated with the premises discovered the movement of hundreds of thousands of euro.
The phone messages were encrypted but gardaí managed to break codes which suggested that there was efforts “to import powder from Mexico to Ireland”.
There was also ongoing communication with an individual who was using a Polish phone but was based in Spain. This person went by the name Sam and gardaí discovered he had links to the notorious Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel.
One of the communications contained an email address for the Ballyseedy Garden Centre. There is no allegation McDonnell was involved in any of this communication but it does indicate somebody else had acquired the address and provided it with his permission. A Garda investigation that was throwing up some unlikely connections was now provided with a further lead, one that led all the way to the Ballyseedy Garden Centre and its high-profile scion.
A connection between a notorious central American drug cartel and elements in the south west corner of Ireland is an unlikely one, but this is not the first such connection. Last March, Liz Dunphy reported in the about the case of Morris O’Shea Salazar, who is now wanted in Chile on drugs charges associated with the cartel.
Mr O’Shea Salazar was born in 1990 to a Kerry father and Mexican mother. When his father, also Morris, died in a car crash in central America in 2005, his mother, Yolanda Salazar Tarriba, brought him and his sister to Killorglin where Mr O’Shea Snr had family. They lived in the Co Kerry town for a decade. Yolanda Salazar Tarriba is related to one of the senior figures in the cartel.
Ms Salazar Tarriba was arrested in Chile in 2021 and received a 10-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. Mr O’Shea Salazar’s uncle, Ricardo Salazar Tarriba, was jailed for 15 years for his involvement in the same case. Chilean prosecutors allege Mr O’Shea Salazar headed the Sinaloa cartel’s operation in Europe, overseeing major drug shipments into European countries, which are understood to include Ireland.
Prior to leaving Ireland for Spain initially around 2015, Mr O’Shea Salazar was in trouble with the law. “He had been before the courts facing charges including possession of a firearm, theft and criminal damage,” the reported.
It is unclear at this stage whether or to what extent O’Shea Salazar was involved in anything to do with this case but gardaí are adamant the Sinaloa cartel was behind the whole plan to use Ireland as a staging post in transporting drugs from South America to Australia.
By mid 2023, gardaí were convinced something big was about to happen. Their investigation had led directly to two individuals at the heart of an operation to import drugs. One, who cannot be named, was a Kerry-based man referred to here as Mr A. The second was a Cork-based individual by the name of John McGrath, who has since died.
Through 2023, this pair were involved in a whole series of clandestine meetings “in carparks, at stops on motorways, in hotels”, the Special Criminal Court was told. They set up a business scaffold that would look like a legitimate enterprise.
McGrath took control of a company that had originally been established for legitimate reasons. He then attempted to hire storage area in Cork from another company, an engineering firm. Somebody in this firm didn’t like the cut of McGrath’s jib, sensed something wasn’t legit and they backed out of the deal. There is no evidence McDonnell had any involvement with this aspect of the operation.
Having been rebuffed for their preferred storage, Mr A and McGrath had to find another safe location for the drugs that would be in transit. When exactly McDonnell was approached, or if he had any knowledge or involvement prior to this point, is unclear.
On 16 October 2023, the machine containing €32m of crystal meth arrived in Ringaskiddy. From there, it was delivered to the Ballyseedy Garden Centre. “It was unloaded within the garden centre and placed within a warehouse in plain sight, which was covered by a CCTV system in the garden centre,” the Special Criminal Court was told earlier this month.
Not long after its arrival, McDonnell began trying to make arrangements to have the machine exported to Australia. He got in contact with different legitimate companies in Australia through which he was trying to process the shipment as a legitimate business. Here he ran into difficulties and was forced to “fall back on family and friends” to set up the process.
The farrago over moving it on may have accounted for the four months the machine was in Ballyseedy. But there it remained right through the centre’s busy Christmas period and beyond until finally it was taken away on February 15 2024. The following day, Nathan McDonnell’s world fell apart.
At first, he told the gardaí that as far as he was concerned everything was kosher. He had imported the machine with a view to using it for food-making business in Listowel. This was implausible in terms of the machine’s designated purpose. He claimed he imported it in order to make a quick buck by flipping it and selling it on.
He was told about what was found within it. He said the news came as a shock. “If I’m not aware of what’s inside it, what can I do? I’m not a criminal or drug addict… this is going to be depicted like a movie, given who I am and my standing,” he said.
After five days in custody, he finally came clean.
“I have thought about it,” he is reported to have told gardaí at that stage. “My wife, family at home, I have to think of safety here. People know where we live, where I live. I have a neighbour looking at the house.”
Asked at what point he knew he was in over his head, he replied, “When I agreed to allow that into my yard”. He claimed to be in fear of Mr A and said his family would now require protection.
Initially, McDonnell was facing a whole series of charges which he denied, but last October he did plead guilty to drug importation and to “assisting and facilitating a criminal gang” to import methamphetamine, the drug known as crystal meth.
The seriousness of the case, and particularly the connection to a transglobal crime gang meant it would be heard in the Special Criminal Court before three judges and not a jury. Since his arrest, McDonnell has been held in the high-security Portlaoise Prison although it is likely he will be transferred from there unless a decision is made that it is the safest place for him within the system.
Following his initial arrest, the Ballyseedy Garden Centre released a statement apologising to the centre’s “employees and extremely loyal customer base” for any inconvenience caused and expressing its sincere gratitude for their continued support.
In November, the High Court wound up the restaurant business with debts totalling €1m. The garden centre element of the business continues to trade under a new brand, Fairtree Village.
Locally, there is some anger at the spotlight that has been shone on the town as a result of the fall of a prominent businessman, particularly as the crime involves the illegal drug trade. “We don’t need this kind of publicity,” one source said.
“And while his family and close friends will no doubt stand by him at this time, and fair play to them, I don’t think you’ll see much understanding or sympathy for how he got himself into that level of trouble. Most people have money troubles at some time but they don’t try to solve it with what was going on there.”
