The Zombie of Prisengracht: A Chance Encounter with Ireland’s Most Prolific – and Mad – Drug Lord By Christian Cipriani Tommy “the Zombie” Savage is an Irishman human development. Shortly after the Dutch locked up in Greece’s worst prison. But who is coast cut short the North Sea, we touched down he: An ex-terrorist, international drug kingpin, at Schiphol and spent the train ride to schizophrenic and killer… or an innocent man Amsterdam Centraal mapping out a strict framed by the highly corrupted elite of European itinerary that would crumble the minute our business, journalism, government and law shoes hit the street – find accommodations, eat enforcement? and then locate the University of Amsterdam, an institution I advised against strongly by virtue of its location. We ended up instead doing what all backpack- laden Euro-pedestrians do – we wandered, straight out of the redbrick train station and south on Damrak, the first main thoroughfare where stoned Americans get hustled by North African budget hotel-owners and overpriced cafés. And wander we did, westward through cobbled alleyways lit by neon beer logos and fast foods signs, bridge to street to bridge until everything looked the same and then… something. For no reason we took Prinsengracht to get back east. It could’ve been any other street; they all looked the same. And again, for no reason, we stopped at 816, the Hotel de Harmonie. I wasn’t even through the door when I heard him shouting at the top of his lungs. + + + + + Inside the bargain hotel, a glorified hostel aimed at traveling youths like ourselves, a squat bulldog of a man, head balding and eyes burning, stormed from end to end of his kitchen cursing wildly in a thick Irish brogue about a conspiracy involving Yahoo, Bill Gates, the Irish government, journalists and “me own brother.” The conspirator list would later include child pornographers, Irish underworld bosses, Gardaí (Irish police), Nazis and Dutch lawyers, amongst April, 2005 others. Courtney, a college student from San “They want to ruin me… 2 million Euro… Francisco I’d lived with in Oxford two years everything I’ve built… I’m no criminal… prior, was staying at my London flat during a they’re all in on it,” and without so much as week-long trip ostensibly planned as a chance to stopping to breathe he drew Courtney and me tour graduate schools. Her aging but vigorous into the saga as if we’d been there from the start. Grandma BJ, as she is known, bought us two “Come here and look at this would you,” he overnight tickets to Amsterdam not because she shouted, motioning us to take note of a binder liked me, but because she didn’t want to find her nearly bursting with computer printouts and pretty, overly friendly granddaughter at the photocopies. Thanks to the initial confusion and bottom of a canal. our flammable lunch, I’d failed to take note of As the morning sun arched higher over our my surroundings: eastern flight pattern, I smiled from my window The front half of the “lobby” featured a small seat at a sight that never fails to please – the sitting area, behind it a dingy kitchen. Family divide between earth and water as seen from a photos were tacked to a refrigerator supporting a plane, the exact moment when a vast, terrifying statue of the Virgin Mary; on one wall hung a ocean is replaced by land carved neatly by The Zombie of Prisengracht: A Chance Encounter with Ireland’s Most Prolific – and Mad – Drug Lord By Christian Cipriani framed Celtic symbol, the word “Éire” scrawled “Zombie: It’s a Frame-Up.” beneath it. “Face of the Zombie.” And on every conceivable surface was paper – “Zombie Lair,” which featured a grainy stacks upon stacks, foot-high piles, thousands of photograph of the kitchen in which I was now pages of documents filled the room, immediately standing. drawing to mind scenes from A Beautiful Mind, a “My Zombie Dad is No Drug Lord.” film about a conspiracy-obsessed genius. The parallel ended there; his energy was less A quick scan of lead paragraphs gave me a few professorial genius and more six-days-awake-on- critical facts: cocaine. His name was Tommy Savage… nickname “You see, it’s all here…” he said. “the Zombie”… career criminal… busted in Wound tighter than a nun in a brothel, he felt connection with a four-ton cannabis haul to capable of tearing my arms off if I even feigned Athens in 1997, awaiting extradition in disinterest. This man was extremely tense, Amsterdam… former INLA (Irish National possibly vicious, that much was certain. Liberation Army)… dangerous… the biggest Adrenaline kicked my brain into a series of supplier of marijuana and ecstasy to Ireland… defense calculations: Feet planted between my extremely dangerous. fragile companion and the crazed hotelier, I Bereft of internet bookings thanks to this so- cataloged exits and blunt objects while working called conspiracy, Hotel de Harmonie was through solutions to many violent variables. empty: “You can have any room in the house, The papers to which he pointed were a just leave your bags in the corner and go enjoy neverending collection of website registries, with yourselves,” Savage said. IP addresses, owners’ names, creation times and With a twisted grin he mentioned the streams other other technical data. Page after communal bathroom and his dislike of page after page, all scribbled with cryptic notes, Americans. times – down to the second – underlined We politely declined, booked into the hotel feverishly. Another film came to mind – The across the street, spent 20 minutes poking around Matrix. Did I have to look through the codes to the University of Amsterdam and after a weird see the truth? night went back to London in near disbelief. “You see when these websites were created? Gathering information on Tommy Savage All within seconds of one another, they’re all in became an on-again, off-again hobby for the next on it – Yahoo.com, Bill Gates, these no good two years. politicians…” he repeated, pointing to the printouts but moving and talking too fast for me + + + + + to gain even the faintest notion of what he was talking about. I made the mistake of asking him Savage was born in 1951 and grew up in St to slow down, to start from the beginning. Cronin’s Close in the middleclass Dublin suburb Courtney was giggling but my stomach told me of Swords, a 1,500-year-old settlement currently mockery would get us nowhere. experiencing unprecedented growth. What drew The condensed version I gleaned from the the young Savage into Ireland’s criminal incendiary, almost incomprehensible 20-minute underworld, which in later years would become speech that followed was thus: This man was infamous the world over for its brutality, is framed in a massive Greek drug bust, and now a uncertain, but by the 1970s, republican European network of high-level conspirators had paramilitary operatives with shifting goals were used an impenetrably complex internet scheme increasingly associating with organized crime to rob a mild-mannered hotelier of bookings to beyond political terrorism. the tune of 2 million Euros. One such group was the Irish National “Look at the lies they print about me,” he Liberation Army (INLA), with whom Savage implored, holding up another series of made his name after brief involvement with the photocopies culled from the front pages of the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA). In the Irish Daily Mirror, an offshoot of a major UK two-year wake following a 1972 ceasefire, tabloid. The headlines sent chills through the Seamus Costello and other activists forced out of both of us; this man was a Savage: the OIRA established the INLA, a neo-socialist, republican paramilitary operation – positioned at The Zombie of Prisengracht: A Chance Encounter with Ireland’s Most Prolific – and Mad – Drug Lord By Christian Cipriani odds with the Official and Provisional branches very top of the 30 gangs that run crime in of the IRA – that carried out grand heists, Ireland. They were behind some of the most political assassinations and armed campaigns daring robberies in the history of the State.” against the British military. Supported by Mitchell’s contacts in the Savage’s active involvement with the group international underworld, Savage, Weldon and was cut short by his first jail term, a nine-year Murphy’s drug network became a well-oiled sentence for armed robbery served in the INLA machine that ran in circles between Ireland and wing of Portlaoise Prison, County Laois – a now the Netherlands. The drugs were sent to Ireland 180-year-old maximum-security facility by couriers via Ringaskiddy or Rosslare in notorious for housing dangerous militants. County Cork and kept at a mother-dump location During his years behind bars, Savage’s group in the northern woodlands of Nadd and succumbed to internal feuding, culminating in Donoughmore. From there they were distributed the shooting deaths of three comrades. to street dealers throughout the country through Upon his release in the early 1980s, the INLA the hands of Edward Scanlon, a Dublin gangster was coming apart at the seams so Savage bid now serving a lengthy prison sentence, and his them adieu. Splits and heightened criminality partner Mark Burke. clouded the idealism upon which they founded In the early 1990s, Scanlon and Burke were the splinter group, so after parting ways Savage living in high Dublin style off the nearly took his INLA contacts and others he’d formed $500,000 a month they took in dealing Savage’s inside prison and set up shop in the drug trade.