Free Republic

The IRA Bagman and Kim Jong Il's hot dollars Sean Garland is legendary in Ireland for his violent republican past. But was he also a frontman for a counterfeiting scheme run by the communist regime of North Korea? America wants to extradite the Workers Party chief claiming he smuggled millions of dollars in fake $100 bills  David McKittrick reports 08 December 2005 It is a tale of codenames and counterfeiting, of the United States secret service, Russia and North Korea, of international political and criminal conspiracy and intrigue, of millions of dollars in illicit currency. Kim Jong Il, the...

An Irish republican leader is responsible for flooding the UK money markets with near-perfect counterfeit money, it has been claimed. The BBC's Panorama programme has traced the supply of millions of fake US dollars to Sean Garland, a leader of the former paramilitary group, the Official IRA. Panorama also reveals that the profit from passing the currency is used to fund the republican group - which split with the better known Provisional IRA in 1970. The fake currency - known to intelligence agents as "superdollars" because it is so realistic - is believed to be printed in North Korea. It...