- 5 hours ago
Swindlers - Season 1 - Episode 02: The Thomas Byrne
Category
ðš
TVTranscript
00:0607, I think 08, and it was the time of the crash. Everything was gone.
00:16It transpired. It was the biggest, financially-wise, biggest fraud case in the country.
00:24We tried to keep it as level-headed as we could.
00:27We knew we were in something big. We knew it was high-profile.
00:34It went from being a fraud, deception, into actual theft.
00:40And it was only then, I think, we realised the amount of money that was involved.
00:50The case was referred by the High Courts into the Bureau,
00:53and we said, yeah, there's a lot in this.
00:56And the discussion was, God, it's going to be huge, it's going to be huge.
00:59And then we come up to the thing is, well, how do you eat an elephant?
01:03One bite at a time. So that's the way we took it.
01:05Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.
01:35If you look at the way we're in the ground, you're going to be huge.
01:46I remember being struck by the huge media presence at the trial.
01:55He was well known for his flamboyant dress wearers,
01:58Burberry Cokes, Ralph Lauren, all the labels coming in and out of court.
02:04It was November and December of 2013.
02:09The Thomas Byrne affair resulted in millions of lost euro and many victims.
02:14The scale of his wrongdoing was colossal.
02:16His dishonesty basically cost the family a quarter of a million euros.
02:19An incredible amount of work had been done by Angarda Shea Kona in preparation for the Thomas Byrne trial.
02:27No trial comes without its risks and this was high stakes.
02:31This was Ireland's biggest ever fraud trial.
02:36Six banks, 12 Dublin properties, almost 52 million euro and one solicitor.
02:42What was on trial was the banking system itself but what was also on trial was the regulation of the
02:50legal profession.
02:52When Byrne came to trial, he was depicted as one of the villains of the Celtic Tiger era.
03:00Thomas Byrne denies all the charges. The trial is expected to last up to eight weeks.
03:05It became kind of a lightning rod for the public's anger over their sense that nobody had been held accountable.
03:12Often when there has been a major crisis of any kind, there is a clamor for accountability.
03:18There's a clamor for justice and we hone in on the poster boys or girls of that crisis.
03:24I think Thomas Byrne probably had to unduly bear being the public face of the rogue solicitor scandals.
03:30In part because Michael Lynn, who has since been jailed for similar activities, had left Ireland.
03:36He had fled but Thomas Byrne was here and he was the one who was standing.
03:56This is a guy like who started out as a sole practitioner working from an extension that was built onto
04:02the side of his family home on the Green Hills Road in Walkenstown.
04:08He wasn't part of the traditional D4 set that goes into law, but he was always aspiring to be part
04:15of that world.
04:17He put himself through college by working in a garage at night.
04:21Very little that stands out about him, you know, he was just an ordinary guy, went to law school, qualified
04:25as a solicitor.
04:27We were both studying law at the same time actually in UCD, he was a year behind me.
04:32He used to come to occasional lectures wearing a dickie bow.
04:38He was charismatic, he was a very mannerly guy.
04:44He had a lot of charisma about him, you know, he was a bit flamboyant, he dressed very well.
04:49Always a fun guy to talk to, you'd enjoy meeting him, you know.
04:54He did a good way about him, people liked him, you know, you could trust him.
05:03He came from the area originally, he went to school around here and people knew of the family and they
05:09would have known him.
05:10And it was nice to see him coming back and setting up a business here in the area.
05:18It was a family home and he had this garage, it was converted.
05:22He even asked us to do it up for him.
05:24And that's when we first met him.
05:28So you'd go in and you'd meet his receptionist, Joan.
05:31And then if you needed to speak directly with Thomas, he'd either bring out the piece of paper to the
05:35reception area or he'd bring you into the back room.
05:39Where you'd walk through his living area, his kitchen and his kids stuff and things like that, you know.
05:46His initial clients were all people that he'd grown up with.
05:52Drafting wills, he was doing conveyancing for old ladies in his neighbourhood who were selling houses.
05:58He would get a slice of the fee, it was enough to keep him in relative comfort.
06:04He had a nice size practice, you know, in Walkenstown, which you would expect would have relatively small turnover.
06:14His business was getting bigger.
06:16He needed bigger premises, bigger offices, but he wanted to stay in the area.
06:19And just down the road here, there was a retail unit and he bought two units in there.
06:25And he still was the main solicitor in there himself.
06:31He had these two buildings here, he had upstairs and downstairs.
06:36Most people would be either stressed out or nervous in a solicitor's office because this is serious stuff.
06:42You know, have a cup of coffee, sit down, tell me, what did you do last week? Where are you
06:45going this week?
06:46I mean, have a bit of a chit chat and the whole line. He'd put you at ease.
06:49Oh, by the way, I think you need to sign this.
06:51And then the business was done in five minutes.
06:56He was such a lovely guy.
06:59The girls even used to call us up and invite us out for office parties.
07:04Oh, we're having a surprise party, but Thomas, come on, you must come down.
07:07You're his favourite clients, all this type of thing, you know.
07:11Little did we know.
07:12He started his business in 1995, which was literally the start point of the Celtic Tiger.
07:24The Celtic Tiger was a time of greater excess.
07:28We got money for the first time ever.
07:30The economy was growing, foreign direct investment was doing fine.
07:34There were jobs that were being created.
07:36It was fairly sustainable.
07:38It made entrepreneurship, yeah, open to everyone.
07:42Spend, spend, spend.
07:45I bought apartment blocks out in Bulgaria without even knowing what the monthly rent might be.
07:52It was insanely easy to get money.
07:55Lots of ordinary people who had no relationship whatsoever to property development suddenly became property developers.
08:03Public servants, teachers, nurses, guards, all buying and flipping properties to make really quick profits.
08:13And into that context, we find solicitors like Thomas Byrne, who were involved in that in terms of the conveyancing
08:22in their capacity as lawyers, as solicitors.
08:29Many people can probably pinpoint when things were getting a little bit too hot.
08:33One of them is actually sitting in the back of a taxi and your taxi driver is telling you about
08:37property deals.
08:38Ah, yeah, look, I just bought my third buy-to-let flat in Magaluf.
08:43It's grand, the rent will cover this, and I'm gonna use that, I'm gonna gear up again, and then I'll
08:47probably buy a fourth.
08:48It was a frenzy.
08:50Everybody was making money out of the property boom, and that was right across the entire professional landscape.
08:56And it was all based on one simple principle, that house prices were always gonna keep rising.
09:11I had in excess of 100,000 euros from the sale of my taxi plate.
09:17So I said, right, put that down as a deposit.
09:19We want to buy not one house, we want to buy four.
09:22The more we got into it, the banks got more confidence in it.
09:24They were throwing money at us then, you know.
09:25There was no bother.
09:27You could borrow what you wanted.
09:28We've just seen it as a means to an end for us, you know.
09:31We can have a nice lifestyle at the end of this.
09:33We can retire by the time we're 50.
09:35Thomas Bourne acted for us from the start.
09:38We were introduced to him by the TSB Bank.
09:41We had a good relationship with him, you know.
09:44He looked after us in regards to fees.
09:47When houses started to get out of our price range,
09:49we'd start buying houses with sites on the side.
09:52And we'd buy a house, and we'd build a house.
09:56We ended up then with 14 houses.
10:00We would go down to his office, sign the contracts,
10:04sign the transfer of deed, and we assumed that's it.
10:08For five years, people were making fortunes,
10:12and Bourne happened to be in the right place at the right time.
10:20Back before the 1980s, if you were buying or selling a property,
10:24it was a very, very cumbersome process.
10:26You cannot take down a loan until everything is in place.
10:29So the government brought in a new system,
10:31and what it allowed a solicitor to do in his capacity
10:34as an officer of the court, a trusted person,
10:37was that they could give the assurances to the banks
10:39that everything had been looked after,
10:41the deeds were in order, all of the documents were in order.
10:44And on that basis, money could be released much, much more quickly.
10:50What it allowed was for multiple loans to be drawn down
10:53on an individual property,
10:56a property that cost 4 million euro.
10:58You could draw down loans for 20, 25 million euro,
11:02and nobody was checking the bottom line.
11:05But it was a system explicitly based on trust.
11:11If you take who we all looked up to in the old days,
11:16the priests, the local solicitor, the local guard,
11:20the local bank manager, they were gods.
11:26When ordinary members of society were becoming property developers,
11:30buying and selling, flipping properties, making profit,
11:33he sees that there's a lack of regulation
11:36of both the lawyers and of the banks.
11:39What Byrne did was very quickly come to the realisation
11:43that, oh, I can make a lot of money
11:45by being a property developer.
11:49He looked at what we were doing
11:50and he thought it was quite impressive.
11:54I said, oh, well, I'd have a few of Bob Spare now, he says.
12:03This is the first house Thomas Moren bought from us.
12:05He came up, had a look at it, thought it was great.
12:09Told him about the possible investment.
12:11We'd run it for him, manage it for him, do all of that.
12:13He said, yeah, no problem.
12:14And within a few weeks, the house was his.
12:18Then he said, have you any more?
12:21I was quite surprised.
12:22I said, how is this coming so easy for you?
12:24He says, ah, he said, well, I have an excess of money
12:27I need to get rid of, he says, before the tax man gets it.
12:32That's what he told us.
12:36I think people hadn't realised the extent to which
12:39a small minority of solicitors had crossed that Rubicon
12:42and crossed the line between being a solicitor
12:45and had actually moved into property development
12:48and used their experience in one area to manipulate another.
12:54Byrne was introduced to a property developer called John Kelly.
13:00And John Kelly asked him to buy a property in Red Farm and flip it.
13:05They did that and they made a substantial profit on that one deal.
13:10Kelly's partner then asked Byrne to sell three other properties for him.
13:15They made a million euros on those three properties.
13:20Suddenly, Byrne is catapulted to an entirely different level.
13:25By 2000, within the space of five years, he's got 14 staff,
13:29he's paying himself half a million a year,
13:32and he himself has more than ten properties to his name.
13:41His lawyers told two High Court judges that he intended to cooperate
13:44with the investigations into his finances in any way possible.
13:50He gave evidence in court of how easy it was to go into a bank,
13:56present forged documents, and for them to just take his word as a solicitor
14:02that these documents were valid, that they were legitimately obtained,
14:07and that they weren't being used as security with any other financial institution.
14:12But as the case went on and it became clear that he was determined
14:18to blame everybody else for what he had done.
14:22He blames this man, John Kelly,
14:24a property developer who used him to take out loans.
14:27He said the money from almost every loan he took out went to John Kelly.
14:31Often he didn't know what it was used for.
14:35Byrne's argument was, I'm a fall guy here.
14:38The real crooks are the banks, who were recklessly lending.
14:42He tried to pin the blame on John Kelly,
14:45and he presented Kelly as being this poster child
14:49for all of the excess that went on during the Celtic Tiger era.
14:54Kelly had spent 100 grand on girls allowed
14:59to play at his daughter's 21st birthday party.
15:03Kelly had a fleet of Aston Martins.
15:06He had a ÂĢ5 million mansion in Wicklow
15:09with floodlit tennis courts, you know,
15:12a great big fountain and pond.
15:13So he was the perfect sort of bad guy
15:16that Byrne had presented to the jury.
15:21John Kelly maintained the allegations
15:23levelled against him by Thomas Byrne were scurrilous and false.
15:29Kelly pointed out that Byrne was unable to produce any witness
15:33or corroborating evidence supporting his claims.
15:40John Kelly was a property developer
15:44who has never faced any criminal charges.
15:57There was a great story of one of the big property developers
16:00going off to lunch in, I think it was Peplo's restaurant on Stephen's Green.
16:05And he walked out at the lunch with one of the big banks
16:09and he had a term sheet for a ÂĢ300 million loan
16:12and it was written on the back of a napkin.
16:14That pretty much says everything to me about just quite how easy
16:18it was to get money out of banks back then.
16:24People like Thomas Byrne were borrowing money,
16:29occasionally legitimately, in a very free, fast-rolling credit system
16:34where standards were slipping commissions were very, very high.
16:37The island economy is growing faster than the average of the EU.
16:42Everyone wanted to be richer. Everyone wanted success.
16:46I remember you'd see it on the Dart
16:47and there was an ad on the Dart that ran for years
16:50and it was the front page of the Evening Herald
16:52and the headline on the front page was
16:55you've never had it so good.
16:57I remember one property developer
17:00describing that atmosphere to me at the time
17:02and he said the world had a party, we had a rave.
17:10Burn wasn't going to sort of the two big traditional Irish banks.
17:15He was going to Irish Nationwide, Anglo-Irish Bank,
17:19getting to know the senior executives in these banks.
17:22Well, as regards to my own society where money is almost readily available.
17:27Burn was hoovering up all these new clients
17:30and then he was seeing that,
17:32OK, the banks aren't really watching what I'm doing.
17:34They're taking my word because I'm a solicitor.
17:37And he thought, OK, I can exploit this.
17:40I can become a multimillionaire.
17:44He was making a lot of money
17:46and he was suddenly at an entirely different level in society
17:50than possibly he'd ever dreamed.
17:59He was getting a bit too big, too quick.
18:05He came up one of the days to see the house that we were selling on.
18:08And I showed him the house and he arrived in one of these bounties.
18:12And I said, oh, well, change the car again.
18:14He says, oh, yeah, yeah.
18:15He said, I have another sideline going.
18:17He says, I fly in people.
18:18He says, pick him up the airport, the bountie,
18:20I'll bring him down to a hotel.
18:22And he says, I do these power breakfast speaks.
18:25I said, OK, right, that's great, yeah.
18:27And that goes on from seven to nine.
18:30And then he leaves that and goes into the solicitor's office
18:32and does his soliciting thing.
18:34So I don't know.
18:35That was very weird.
18:38He has his own chauffeur business where he has a fleet of Land Rovers and Aston Martins.
18:48He claims that he owns 16 different properties across Europe.
18:52He also claimed to be a consultant for a major fashion house in Paris.
19:03He faces 51 charges of theft, fraud, deception and forgery involving 12 properties around Dublin.
19:11Instinctively, I liked him.
19:13I think the media as a whole, we were all drawn to this story because, you know,
19:17a lawyer who's also a crook is a great story in its own right.
19:22But in the context of the Celtic Tiger and Byrne suddenly becoming the first guy to face the consequences,
19:31this elevated the story to a whole other level.
19:35Prosecuting counsel Remy Farrell said there was an almost comic tragedy
19:39to the financial statements he was submitting to banks as his activity increased.
19:44What is really interesting about the attitude of the banks,
19:48when Thomas Byrne and Michael Lynn, when those stories first broke,
19:52what we really, really saw in these cases and in these trials was the conduct of the banks themselves.
19:58The media were almost cheering him on in a sense,
20:02wanting him to tell us everything you know about the banks, you know,
20:06to lift the rock up and show us all the worms scurrying underneath.
20:09What we were there to see and what the public wanted to see, I think, was banks being held up
20:15to the light.
20:27Around early October 2007, there was a lot of rumours going around Dublin media circles
20:33about a solicitor who had been found forging documents.
20:38Most people in the media thought that was Michael Lynn.
20:41The court heard Mr. Lynn and his companies owned 105 properties across several countries.
20:47And it was days after Michael Lynn was exposed that we had the Thomas Byrne case,
20:51so there was an absolute frenzy.
20:55I was coming back on a train from Belfast and my phone didn't stop with people ringing saying,
21:00is it A, is it B, is it C?
21:03I was saying, no, no, it's not, no, it's not.
21:06And that probably was the moment in which I realised that the extent of the legal undertakings controversy was way,
21:12way bigger.
21:15By October 2007, the whole house of cards comes falling down.
21:21A solicitor in Thomas Byrne's practice discovers that her signature has been forged on deeds
21:29that were used to draw down a multibillion-euro loan from the bank.
21:38She notified the Law Society. The Law Society notified the guards. Byrne was arrested.
21:47There was one allegation made that he had forged the signature of one of the solicitors who worked in his
21:53office.
21:53So when we saw that, we said, you know, this is not the first time we did it.
21:58When his case came in, I walked into the boss and I said, come here, this is, this is going
22:05to be a big one, you know.
22:11When I went to collect the rent from the tenants, they'd all received letters.
22:16We got social welfare cheque each month, paid directly into the bank.
22:20And then the tenants would have to pay up the balance in cash.
22:24So I came up to pick up the cash, and the tenant handed me this letter from Anglo-Irish Bank,
22:30saying that they now own the house, and to pay them, not pay me.
22:35I'm not the legal registered owner of the house anymore.
22:40So I rang him, I rang the accountant, I rang the bank, and they said,
22:44yes, we know, we need to see you immediately.
22:47And I was literally told, get yourself a better solicitor immediately.
22:53Because this thing is going to get nasty.
22:57And then they sent us this. This is the, the list of houses, one, two, three, four, five, six.
23:02Yeah.
23:02That they have taken control of.
23:04Okay.
23:04Turns out then, six o'clock news that evening, the whole thing unfolded.
23:08I've seen her on the news.
23:10This is Thomas Byrne, the 41-year-old solicitor, originally from Walkenstown,
23:15who's at the centre of the latest investigation by the Law Society.
23:18The Society closed his office on the Walkenstown Road yesterday,
23:22amid concerns that he owes millions of euro to banks,
23:25and has taken out multiple mortgages on properties.
23:43There were a number of foreshocks, or warnings, about Thomas Byrne and his practice.
23:49The first went back as far as 1996, when a Dublin accountancy firm registered a debt,
23:54quite a small debt, just over ÂĢ1,000 at the time.
23:57A year later, the Collector General of the State registered a debt against him,
24:02a much larger debt, but again, another little bit of a red flag or a warning about him.
24:07Fast forward to 2002, and the Law Society investigate Thomas Byrne on foot of a complaint.
24:14As a result of that, he is not allowed to be the sole signatory on the account.
24:19Fast forward another couple of years, to 2005,
24:22and they discover a much bigger hole in the client account, to the tune of ÂĢ1.7 million.
24:27So he appears before the Solicitor's Disciplinary Tribunal,
24:31and he receives a âŽ15,000 fine.
24:35But he is allowed to continue to practice.
24:37Within a year, he appears before the courts,
24:39accused of stealing almost ÂĢ60 million from banks and clients.
24:54When you're involved in an investigation, like a fraud investigation,
24:57you have to find, you know, OK, it may seem wrong. Is it wrong? Can we prove that it's wrong?
25:05It started as two folders of paper, ended up being 50 or 60 boxes of solicitor's files.
25:13There's thousands of documents in it.
25:18It was alleged at the time he had forged signatures on the title deeds
25:22and he had transferred the ownership of the property to himself.
25:27So then we made arrangements to interview him.
25:33That's supposed to be my signature. That's supposed to be yours.
25:36Yeah, that's right.
25:36Clearly, that's nothing like what I'd say. No, no, no.
25:39This is transferring the deeds from our name into his name.
25:44You never even included the O or the R.
25:47I mean, I don't spell my name.
25:48Cons.
25:50I've been conned, yeah, that's for sure.
25:53Mainly, we were called to verify signatures
25:56because a lot of our signatures were forged.
26:00And I was asked about my signature.
26:03Do I write it any different?
26:05And I said, yeah, I do, yeah.
26:06I said, I always sign my signature Matthew P. Connors.
26:10And on the documents they were put in front of me,
26:12it was only Matthew Connors.
26:14And completely different.
26:15Completely different.
26:17And I said, I don't care what it says, it's not my signature.
26:20The signatures were chalk and shades like.
26:22Yeah.
26:24A man on a galloping horse would have noticed the difference between that.
26:30I remember in about 2003, 2004,
26:35writing a piece about Anglo-Irish Bank
26:38and raising questions about it, saying,
26:41what actually happens if property prices fall?
26:43And I remember Sean Fitzpatrick went absolutely nuts.
26:47He was the chief executive of the bank at that stage.
26:50And I got up at both barrels for, you know,
26:53calling into doubt the economic miracle.
26:57Ireland's property crash continues.
27:00There's no doubt that the bursting of the property bubble
27:02is being keenly felt.
27:03House prices are still falling sharply.
27:05I think the banks were in a state of absolute shock.
27:09I remember meeting bankers at the time,
27:11and they really couldn't believe that this was going on.
27:14These were maybe the people who'd written the loans.
27:18But when property prices fall,
27:2120, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70%,
27:24even more in some cases,
27:26you know, you're screwed.
27:27Just after 8pm this evening came the dramatic development
27:31that the Irish government is going to nationalise Anglo-Irish Bank.
27:34It took nearly $40 billion of taxpayers' money
27:38to rescue the bank and the entire sector.
27:41It's Charlie Bird from RTE.
27:43Why are you ducking down?
27:45There are taxpayers at home in Ireland
27:47who would like some answers.
27:50OK.
27:57Well, when we met Thomas Forrest in the Fraud Bureau,
28:00and we had all the files out,
28:01we'd get him to wear gloves.
28:03So we had a pair of white gloves.
28:05One of the guys said to me,
28:07God, he said, it's like a snooker table.
28:10That was the first time he came in,
28:12where we showed him the files.
28:15We'd be showing him documentation,
28:16and you'd know by the look on his face,
28:18he knew he did something wrong.
28:22My colleague said,
28:23did you look upset?
28:24I said, I am, yeah.
28:26He said, you look like you could do with a hug.
28:29I could, he says.
28:31And my colleague said, do you want a hug?
28:33He got up and he walked over to him and gave him a hug.
28:37When you bring somebody in to question them,
28:40they're at their lows, Deb.
28:42There's no point kicking them.
28:43There's no point knocking them down.
28:45He said, your job is to build them back up again.
28:47Tell them there is hope.
28:49OK, you did something wrong.
28:50It's not the end of the world.
28:51Let's deal with it.
28:53Move on.
28:54And I took the same approach with Thomas,
28:56and I think it worked great because we had a good rapport.
29:00When it came to questioning,
29:01he exercised his constitutional right.
29:04He started off on the advice of my solicitor,
29:07I have no comment to make.
29:09After we got down to about a page of questions,
29:12I said, I'm not putting words into your mouth.
29:14Could you just say no comment?
29:16It might speed it up for you and for us.
29:18So, after the first page or so,
29:21he just made no comments.
29:25He was interviewed voluntarily, I think about 15, 16 times,
29:30and it turned out he had said no comment.
29:33I think it was 3,700 and not times.
29:40In general, were people cooperative with the investigation?
29:44Yeah.
29:45Thanks?
29:46No.
29:47Because at the time, and we talk about legislation,
29:50there was legislation there for theft forgery,
29:54all the offences that we're looking at,
29:56but there's no obligation on people to make complaints.
29:59There were people who knew and must have known
30:04about the fraudulent activities of individuals
30:08who did not report those crimes at that time.
30:15When we started our initial investigation,
30:17we were looking at all the forgeries, deceptions,
30:20but we couldn't get the financial end of it, the theft,
30:23because we had no reports coming in from financial institutions.
30:26Did you ask for them?
30:28We spoke to them.
30:29We didn't ask them.
30:30We said, have you any crimes to report?
30:32Have you any issues to report?
30:34No.
30:36The new offence of withholding information will be created.
30:39It will be available when enacted to the Garda Shekhana
30:43in future investigations,
30:45and that applies to those being undertaken
30:47with regard to financial institutions.
30:50We knew the act was coming in.
30:52It was going to be signed in.
30:53So again, that probably added two years onto the investigation.
31:03Like a lot of people, he got greedy.
31:05I mean, Brian Lennon famously said that we all party,
31:08but Thomas Byrne definitely partied.
31:13His life was veering out of control.
31:16By 2000, he was, if not a full-blown alcoholic,
31:22he was definitely in the troves of alcoholism.
31:24He was abusing, in his own words, tablets.
31:28He was constantly chasing, chasing that next high.
31:33And that pressure all kind of came to a head in his personal life.
31:38Byrne left his wife and three children,
31:42and he entered into a relationship with a younger man.
31:50He had gone through a change.
31:52He was married, had children, then he came out as being gay.
31:56There were knock-on effects in his own life,
31:59in his personal life, in his family life in relation to that.
32:01And I think that did play on him, and we did speak about it.
32:04One to one.
32:05And you get an understanding of how he was feeling,
32:08and different things that were going on in his life.
32:13He himself admitted during the court case that the consequence of all that stress and all that guilt,
32:19he lost his family, and eventually he ended up sleeping in his car for four months.
32:30The government hopes to have this legislation passed into law before the Oireachtas summer recess at the end of July.
32:37Lucky enough, when Section 19 of that act passed in August 2011,
32:44made it an offence for somebody not to report the crime.
32:47So we spoke to senior councillors and said,
32:50can we go back to the banks?
32:52And the agreed term we would use is,
32:55are you aware of the new legislation?
32:58A lot of the banks then at that stage started to cooperate.
33:01We served, I think, in the region of 25 to 30 court orders on different banks all through the investigation.
33:07The court continued the freezing orders,
33:10and also ordered that National Irish Bank hand over details of all accounts held by them,
33:15for or on behalf of Mr Byrne, since September the 7th, when he got the 9 million euro loan.
33:23We made a big chart and you could see the properties,
33:25and it was like one of these things you see, you photograph the galaxy.
33:28You know, there was lines going, shooting stars going everywhere.
33:31The picture paints a thousand words, and for us that was the thing,
33:34we'd put up on the wall and we'd say,
33:37how do you get away with this?
33:40And he knew what he was facing.
33:42He knew the game was up.
33:43He knew his goose was cooked.
33:45Physically broken, you could see, you know, just emotionally, you could see,
33:50no, I mean, there was nothing behind his eyes, no, he was just,
33:53he was the shadow of the man that he was at his peak.
33:57Yes, he got the money.
34:00The documents were forged.
34:02Now we had another end of it.
34:05This is the first step, now we're going to the next level.
34:07What did he do with all these documents he forged?
34:10Who did he deceive? How did he deceive them?
34:16If you look at what he did, Byrne would take those deeds, go to a bank.
34:22He dealt with six different banks.
34:24The banks, on little more than the say-so of Mr Byrne,
34:28were happy to extend him large sums of money.
34:30In one instance, he borrowed four and a half million euros on the basis of three properties,
34:36which weren't remotely collectively worth four and a half million,
34:40but they were offered as security, even though he didn't own them.
34:44And in addition to the forgery, he was also using those same properties
34:51by going down the road to a different bank and saying,
34:55I have these three properties, I want to borrow another four and a half million.
34:59So what Byrne was doing was illegally exploiting a lack of regulation within the banking industry.
35:11He retained the deeds of most of our houses, which should have been in the bank's vaults,
35:16not in his office, which gave him every opportunity to do what he wanted with them, you know?
35:21Remortgaging and taking out large sums of money on our properties.
35:25Why would he do this? He didn't need to do that.
35:27The guy wasn't short on money, he had a good lifestyle, he had a lovely family.
35:31Just shell-shocked with the whole thing, you know?
35:33It took us a while to make any sense of it, you know?
35:36We were stressed out to be the band at the time.
35:42Well, as far as we know, these were some of the first houses that Thomas Byrne actually transferred the deeds
35:48on.
35:50He had the deeds, so he could go to any bank, present them deeds and get a mortgage.
35:56But he was clever enough to do it not once, not twice, not three, not four.
36:00He was doing it up to six different banks, with up to, from us, six different sets of deeds.
36:10OK, we're now in Lionkilling Green.
36:13This was one of the last houses we bought, which Thomas Byrne also took from us.
36:20So I have no idea what he was doing.
36:22It's just, he seemed to be a completely different person altogether than the Thomas Byrne we knew when we met
36:27him first.
36:28Level-headed businessman.
36:34Being honest with you, if I had another option, I wouldn't be in this area.
36:38Because I have to drive by an awful lot of the houses, and I see what's happened to them since
36:43we had them.
36:49What's it like when you're here now?
36:50I don't like to be here.
36:51I don't like it at all. I want to go.
36:54It's depressing.
37:00The court was told this is one of the biggest white-collar criminal trials to come before the circuit court
37:06this year.
37:08It was only when Byrne himself got into the witness box, and we had three days of him giving evidence
37:14on his own behalf and being cross-examined,
37:17that the real drama of the case came to the fore.
37:23He's in a very unusual position because, A, he's a lawyer, but he's the defendant.
37:29And, B, it's very unusual for defendants to take the stand and give evidence in their own defence.
37:35But Byrne decided to do that.
37:37What surprised me, probably most during the whole trial, was the fact that Thomas actually took the stand.
37:44And we were all wondering, what's he going to say?
37:45Will he put his hands up and admit everything? Will he break down? Will he do this? Will he do
37:49that?
37:50He was a weak man. I never saw a defendant cry so much in the witness box.
37:58I mean, he spent three days crying.
38:01Thomas Byrne today broke down as he tried to explain his involvement in the alleged sale of his parents' home.
38:07He allowed Mr. Kelly to use his parents' home as short-term security to raise money.
38:14He didn't express or show any willingness to accept the consequences of his actions.
38:21You know, he tried to blame everybody, not just Kelly, not just the banks, but he tried to blame the
38:27victims themselves.
38:28You know, and these weren't just random clients who walked into his offices.
38:33These were people, in many cases, that he'd grown up with.
38:39These were elderly people from his local community that he would have known for 30 years.
38:46In one very sad case, he actually forged a signature of his old music teacher.
38:51He took possession of her house.
38:54There was one woman called Vera McGrain, and her mother, Kathleen, was 91 years old.
39:01She was seriously ill, so seriously ill that she was confined to bed and she was living with Vera.
39:08Within a week of her dying, Byrne had transferred Kathleen's property into his own name.
39:15We've known Thomas Byrne for 30 years.
39:18He went to college with my nephew.
39:22The house was up for sale when my mother was alive.
39:25She was 90 years of age.
39:28And she thought that she'd see the house sold and distribute the proceeds amongst the family herself.
39:36A few months after her mother had died, Vera received an offer for the house.
39:42I think it was for about 380,000 euros.
39:46Byrne tried to convince her that he could get a higher price.
39:50But in actual fact, Byrne had forged Vera's signature and Kathleen's signature to transfer the property into his own name.
39:59The banks now owned Vera's mother's property.
40:05Brothers Michael and Brendan Dunn discovered a deed of transfer purporting to show the sale of the family home to
40:11him.
40:11Another client, Dermot Nocton, discovered mortgages had been taken out on two of his Dublin properties.
40:17Mrs. Costigan said she knew him growing up. He was one of her mother's piano students.
40:21To her horror, she discovered a deed of transfer.
40:24It said she had sold the house to Thomas Byrne for 410,000 euros.
40:28She said she never saw the document before, never signed it, and never sold the house or received the money.
40:36Vera McGrane and her sister Dolores.
40:39Mr. Byrne claimed their elderly mother signed over the family home at Bunting Road in Walkenstown to him a month
40:45before she died.
40:46Harry Connors, along with his brother Matthew, how much do you reckon you've lost?
40:50It'll cost a million euros.
40:56It was Byrne who totally betrayed the trust of childhood friends, elderly women, his old piano teacher, school friends.
41:12To the point where when these people find out about what Byrne had done to them, they were left at
41:19a complete loss.
41:21Not only did he deny the forgeries, he claimed that they were in on the act.
41:26That anything he did was part of some grand conspiracy by these elderly women to defraud the banking institutions of
41:34Ireland.
41:36He literally didn't have a defence. Byrne was responsible for all of his own crimes.
41:43The separated father of three had denied all the charges of fraud, theft and forgery,
41:49involving just under 52 million euro, 12 Dublin properties and six banks.
41:58I was happy enough the way things were going in the court. It was in the hands of the fraud
42:02squad and they were doing a good job.
42:04It certainly didn't look as if it was going in his favour so I said leave it alone.
42:10You are confident when you're putting everything together and then when the jury goes out then the fear slips in.
42:15Will we get it across the line?
42:19It's them that makes the decision. Did they see things the same way that I saw them?
42:23Did they see things the same way that the prosecution side saw them?
42:29You always had that little niggle thing at the back of your head.
42:37Thomas Byrne was hoping to throw himself before the jury and get some sympathy on the basis that forget about
42:43what I did, look at what all these bad guys did.
42:47The jury were desperate to believe Byrne and to almost concoct this new defence of human duress, you know, which
42:55didn't exist.
42:56The judge quickly told him, no, he can't do that.
43:01But still they took another five days before they reached a verdict.
43:08Just after midday today, the jury in Thomas Byrne's trial came back into court.
43:13At that stage it had been deliberating for 17 hours and 29 minutes and was ready to deliver its verdict.
43:23As the verdict came in, I would say Thomas Byrne was the only person in the room who thought he
43:29might be innocent.
43:33When they came in and they read out the first one guilty.
43:38And once you had the first guilty, I had a good feeling, yeah, they're going to go the same way.
43:45One by one, the foreman of the jury was led through 50 charges facing the former solicitor,
43:50and to each the foreman revealed they'd found the 47-year-old guilty by a unanimous verdict.
43:59He was sentenced to nine years for theft and a consecutive seven years for forgery, with the final four suspended.
44:15And when the sentence was handed down, it was for 16 years, and the last four were suspended.
44:23But it meant Byrne was going away potentially for 12 years in prison.
44:29And he was the first guy to face any consequences for all of the greed and the criminality that went
44:37on during the Celtic Tiger era.
44:38But still, a 12-year sentence was more than people often serve for murder.
44:45When the gavel went down, he said, well, at least now I know where I am.
44:50He had spent probably four years living this nightmare.
44:55And I think in one sense, he was glad to have it over with, even when the guilty verdict came
44:59back,
45:00because he knew where he was going to be for the next number of years.
45:03I know it sounds corny, but I think he was accepting of the fact that he was going to go
45:08to prison.
45:10The scale of his wrongdoing was colossal. The amounts involved were staggering.
45:15Those were the words of Judge Pat McCartan before he sent Thomas Byrne to jail for 12 years.
45:21I don't feel happy to see anyone being taken away from their family or being sent to prison.
45:30But I think Thomas determined his own fate.
45:35Terry Connors said the last few years have been stressful, traumatic and financially damaging.
45:40I was thinking maybe seven, eight years, but when I heard 16 years with four suspended,
45:45oh my God, he's going to be an old man when he comes out.
45:48You know, I feel so sorry for his family, you know.
45:50I don't know, what can you say? It's tough all around.
45:58It was a relief. The biggest thing was the relief, it's over, it's finished.
46:02Quite surprised at the length of the turn he got.
46:05There's no real winners here.
46:07You know, I said, we're getting nothing back so far.
46:10He's gone to jail. His family's left at home devastated, I'm sure.
46:14That's the way I was thinking at the time.
46:15I probably should be wanting to string your man up, but it's not in me to do that, you know.
46:24One of the things we can't really, really quantify is the human cost.
46:28And you have to remember that in many cases, this wasn't to big institutional investors.
46:34It wasn't the banks. Many times that the people who suffered were family and friends.
46:40I think that is where the empathy or the sympathy for someone like Thomas Byrne quickly evaporates.
46:49Thomas Byrne showed no emotion as the sentence was handed down.
46:52Before he left the court, Judge McCartan wished him the best of luck.
46:56He simply replied, thank you.
47:04That didn't end any of your battles though, did it?
47:07Well, it only started a lot of them for us really, you know.
47:10As soon as the houses were back in our name, Danske Bank stepped in then and they were pulling out
47:15of Ireland.
47:15And they wanted big accounts to be cleared.
47:19So they basically sent us a letter saying, okay, we're pulling your mortgage.
47:24We want ÂĢ1.6 million back off you.
47:27We had no hope of raising funds anywhere. No one would lend the money.
47:31The banks were all in trouble. The government was bailing out Anglo-Irish and every other bank in the States.
47:36So it was impossible to get money and these guys were calling in a debt on all our properties.
47:40So then they sent in the receivers and the receivers took every house we had.
47:45So all our income was stopped and it was left for ÂĢ50.
47:52Did you dread the post coming?
47:54Oh, every day.
47:56I'd heard it was in the postman coming. More bad news.
47:59I'd have a look at him. I'd look out through the window and say, what colour is the envelope?
48:02If it's white or brown, is it square or up on it?
48:05Is there a window in it? I'd know. Straight away, here we go again.
48:08Who's doing us now?
48:11I still have to drive a taxi every day for a living.
48:13You know, I was hoping not to have to do that.
48:17Ah, we're okay.
48:19Yeah.
48:24The judge paid tribute to Gorthy from the National Bureau of Fraud Investigation
48:29for the professional way in which they had pulled together the evidence
48:32and presented it to the court and jury.
48:36He never showed any true remorse to his clients.
48:39He never apologised to his clients, which I felt was mean-spirited.
48:46When I look back on this, from a personal perspective, my own performance
48:50and the way things worked out, we asked him three and a half thousand questions
48:53and he never once said he was sorry.
48:57And I think that's the one thing that most victims want to hear.
49:02If he only said, I'm sorry.
49:03He is so happy.
49:04I know he was supposed to have to be.
49:08He's not supposed to be.
49:11He is not supposed to be.
49:13He is not supposed to be.
49:19He is not supposed to be.
Comments