Rinsed by Geoff White

Author:Geoff White [White, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241624845
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2024-06-12T22:00:00+00:00

8.

Smurfing on Snapchat

It’s a big day for Kenoly Ugbodu. He gets up early and puts on some understatedly smart clothes – sharply pressed trousers, a grey shirt and stylish loafers – and journeys into the centre of his home town of Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. It’s a harbour city of just over 200,000 people, clustered on the edge of the Loch Mahon inlet that leads, eventually, to the Atlantic Ocean. Ugbodu heads for Anglesea Street, to the criminal courthouse, and makes his way inside. At 2.30 p.m. on 15 May 2023, he’s waiting in Court 4, as the Judge Helen Boyle arrives and takes her seat. Ugbodu shifts nervously. This moment will decide his future. From here, there are two paths: one leads to prison, and the bewildering, occasionally frightening daily regime of custodial living. The other leads back to his old life, his family home and his new fiancée. He’s about to be judged for a series of catastrophic decisions he made years earlier; decisions which brought him face to face with the underworld of organized crime, and which, from his family’s home in Cork, pulled him into the fringes of a global money-laundering scheme of dizzying proportions.

Ugbodu’s story doesn’t start in a courtroom in Cork, however. It begins 150 miles north, at a four-star hotel called the Carlton in Blanchardstown, a suburb of the Irish capital, Dublin. It’s the kind of hotel you find lurking on the edges of freeways the world over. From the outside it looks a bit like it was assembled from mismatched Lego sets. Inside it’s clean and colourful, with smartly uniformed receptionists lined up to assist. But in February 2020, there was whispering among some of the staff. In the past few days several men had checked in who’d raised concerns. At one point they’d arrived with a girl who looked decidedly young, and took her to their room. It would later transpire that the girl wasn’t underage, but the hotel workers didn’t know that, and to be on the safe side they called in the local police, the Garda, who agreed to visit the men and check it out.

So at about 2 p.m. on 21 February, a team of uniformed officers arrived outside room 419, accompanied by hotel staff. They knocked on the door. No answer. They knocked again. Still no answer. But there was clearly someone inside, because they could hear the toilet being flushed – several times, in fact. In the end, the hotel staff opened up the door and let the police in. Inside, everything looked fairly normal, until they got to the toilet, which was crammed full of printed paper. One of the officers took the plunge and ferreted out the sheets, which had survived despite the frantic efforts to flush them away. They were torn-up receipts, dozens of them, for cash withdrawals made all around Ireland. Meanwhile, the man in the hotel room remained unsettlingly calm.

The documents weren’t the only fishy thing the police found. They also discovered thousands of euros of cash around the hotel suite.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.