Tony Felloni

Anthony Felloni (born Anthony Carroll, 1943 – 22 April 2024) was an Irish heroin dealer, pimp, and career criminal.^[1] He became a hated figure in the 1980s and 1990s, blamed for "flooding" Dublin with heroin and creating the city's first generation of heroin addicts.^[2][3][4][5]

Felloni was born in Dublin in 1943 to Renaldo Felloni (an Italian immigrant) and a Miss Carroll.^[6] As his parents were not married, he was given his mother's surname, calling him Anthony Carroll.^[7]

Carroll adopted his father's surname in 1959.^[8]

Carroll began as a blackmailer; he would seduce impressionable women from rural areas who were employed as domestic house workers, and force them to pose for nude photographs, threatening to send the pictures to their parents unless they paid him half of their wages each week.^[9][10] He later began to force women into prostitution;^[11] in 1964 he was convicted of "procuring young girls for immoral purposes".^[12] During the 1960s he pretended to be the brother of footballer George Best to rent a flat in Rathgar, in which he stored stolen goods.^[13] In the 1970s he turned to burglary.^[13]

In 1980 Felloni moved to England and began to work in the growing drugs trade; he was arrested in Surrey in 1981 and jailed for four years for conspiracy to import heroin. He returned to Dublin and was again imprisoned in 1986 for heroin dealing, receiving a ten-year sentence, he was paroled in 1993.

In the 1980s and '90s he was one of Dublin's largest heroin suppliers, after usurping Larry Dunne's position as the city's main dealer.^[14][15] His children worked as couriers and tasters, many of them being later imprisoned.^[16] Ali Bracken claimed in the Sunday Tribune that "He enlisted his children to help him sell heroin when they were just teenagers and encouraged them to experiment with the drug so that he could control them."^[17]

In June 1996, Felloni was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for heroin trafficking.^[9] Assets of over IR£400,000 were seized in 1998;^[18] it was estimated that Felloni had earned £875,000 from drug dealing since 1988.^[19] An appeal against the sentence was denied in 1999. A report found that Felloni contracted HIV and he later developed AIDS.^[20]

In 1998, Paul Reynolds published King Scum: The Life and Crimes of Tony Felloni, a book about Felloni and his criminal career.^[21]

In 2010, Gardaí seized another €500,000 from the family. Felloni was released in January 2011 after serving 14+1⁄2 years; at 67 years old and suffering from AIDS, he was not expected to return to crime.^[17][22]

Felloni's ex-wife Anne Marie Flynn is the sister of Dublin politician Mannix Flynn.^[23][8][24] Felloni and Flynn met in a café on O'Connell Street; both already had a number of convictions by the age of eighteen and were in jail six weeks after their wedding.^[13] He had six children with her, including a son who died from heroin addiction at three days old,^[17] and two more with a mistress. Most of his children were part of the Felloni crime network, many of them developing heroin addictions and HIV.^[25] Felloni was also physically abusive to Anne Marie, being three times convicted of assaulting her.^[13] Anne Marie later divorced Felloni.^[2]

Tony Felloni died from a heart attack at his home in Dublin, on 22 April 2024, at the age of 81.^[26][27]