Everyone who knew Nathan McDonnell thought he was a decent man. Friendly, good company, handsome, the eldest son who had stepped up to be a father figure to his siblings following the turmoil of his parents’ separation and who had three small cherished children of his own.
At 44, he relished the image of the CEO and business leader with all the trappings of luxury cars and well-cut suits. He drove the 32-year-old Ballyseedy Garden Centre brand, which had been built with sweat and vision by his dynamic mother, Bernie Falvey, in her native Kerry, with a finger on the zeitgeist, succeeding against the odds.
But rumbling beneath were rumours of continuing struggles with debt dating back to 2007.
At this point, it could be the same heartsinking story of many business owners who wobbled dangerously after the 2008 crash but survived, only to be crushed by rising costs, the financial challenges of Covid-19 and large Revenue debt. Keeping up appearances is what many people do in that situation, and McDonnell was the master of it. Call it arrogance, deep denial, a terror of seeming lesser in the eyes of others, but it is often accompanied by a desperate search for fresh funding to stay afloat. In McDonnell’s case, the fresh money was a €2 million loan sourced from a Limerick lender.
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Nathan McDonnell’s carry-on-as-normal behaviour suggested a profound dissociation from the €32m of crystal meth in his yard
Then something broke in him. His life as a business leader and family man was on the verge of collapsing. We don’t know when exactly he agreed to work for a gang with links to the murderous Mexican Sinaloa cartel but he somehow managed to go on keeping up appearances while more than €32 million worth of highly addictive crystal meth lay hidden in a large metal-separating machine in his yard.
The Sinaloa association alone is mind-boggling – a transglobal cartel usually identified with its best-known leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, portrayed in numerous films, documentaries and books.
Last Friday McDonnell was sentenced at the Special Criminal Court to 12 years in prison. The cartel remains an ongoing threat to his life, even in prison, for fear he may provide information to the Garda. Last month he had surgery for a broken jaw after being assaulted by another prisoner.
And all this apparently was for a paltry €150,000, a fraction of the Revenue debt, chicken feed in the broader context of the group’s indebtedness.
Although his deep remorse and suffering were evident to the court – which accepted that he acted under fear for his and his family’s safety as well as fierce financial and personal pressures – his recklessness and carry-on-as-normal behaviour suggested some profound dissociation from the appalling implications of the cargo in his yard.
Practically every step he took, every call he made to move the drugs on to their Australian destination, was traceable through his own phone and email accounts as well as CCTV coverage. It might be funny if the crime itself were not so consequential for humanity. A quick Google search could have told the loving father that crystal meth is a powerful, highly addictive stimulant that in the long term leads to paranoia, hallucinations and psychosis, aggression and extreme violence. He might have seen the RTÉ interviewee who described people with meth addiction as “like eating themselves from the inside out”.
Or he could have just watched a series of Breaking Bad, with its glimpses into the dark world of crystal meth and the transformation of a mild-mannered chemistry teacher and dad, Walter White, into an ice-cold drug lord.
Did McDonnell think that he was different somehow? The court found no evidence that he was under duress when he first chose to embark on the crime; he was “committed to and invested in” it. To describe him as “a mere cog in the wheel” was to undervalue his role, said Ms Justice Melanie Greally. He paid shipping charges, stored the drugs for four months, forged documents and used a family contact to help with export requirements.
His solicitor called the 12 year sentence “swingeing”, yet it’s hard to see how a more lenient tariff might have been justified.
It takes little imagination to grasp the effect of McDonnell’s actions on his family, neighbours and employees, or on the group’s small business suppliers who were left with swingeing losses. The word betrayal is used again and again in all its contexts.
The bigger question about McDonnell is what if his scheme had succeeded? Could he have stopped then? Would he have had a choice? Would the master of keeping up appearances have simply carried on as before, merely extracting a higher price for his endeavours? Could he have morphed into another Walter White or a Marty Byrde, the self-employed financial adviser and family man in the Netflix series Ozark, who after a money laundering scheme for a Mexican drug cartel goes wrong, proposes to make amends by setting up a bigger laundering operation in central Missouri?
McDonnell is serving his time, but his ability to dissociate himself from the consequences of his actions is hardly unique.
Any youngish person can tell you that drugs are often more prevalent at middle-class parties than alcohol. Of course the happy users are not contributing to the lost lives and mayhem, the violent destruction of families and entire communities or the drug cartels’ vast wealth; they only pre-order a little bag because it’s Christmas or it’s their birthday or the weekend or a festival and don’t they contribute to the Merchant’s Quay charity and march for the homeless, the rough sleepers, the destitute victims of the drug gangs (sometimes while also raging against the degradation and violence of the city)? Maybe McDonnell thought what he was doing was just fine, only different in scale.
