Ex-undercover officer who hunted drug dealers reveals ‘terrifying’ violence he faced – and the secret he kept from family
Being bitten by drug dealers and stabbed with syringes “went with the territory” for undercover police officer Michael O’Sullivan.
Aged just 22, Michael became part of a secret unit in Ireland’s national police force when Dublin was in the grips of its first heroin epidemic in the early 1980s.
As the problem “mushroomed”, the city became a “dangerous, crime-ridden area” – and it was “disastrous for law enforcement”, Michael says.
“The situation in Ireland – it was like Mexico,” he tells Sky News.
“There were people being visibly kidnapped out of Dublin. There were two or three bank robberies in the country a day.
“You had armed men going into country towns and holding up three banks at the same time.
“It was chaotic.”
Pic: Sky UK
Frustrated at the Gardai’s failure to tackle Dublin’s heroin problem through conventional methods, Michael began working with an undercover team known as the Mockeys who posed as drug users to catch dealers in the act.
But faced with the prospect of lengthy jail sentences, dealers would turn to violent tactics in a bid to escape arrest.
“Lots of us got fingers bitten,” Michael says.
“You were getting bitten by guys who could be Aids carriers.
“There were a lot of injuries. A guy got hit with a hammer. One guy was bitten four times. (There were) black eyes, stitches.
“People lost teeth. One guy got a jaw fractured.
“The inner city was a tough place.
“A lot of these people were violent criminals anyway. You’re stood between them and five years (in prison) – and they didn’t care how they got away.
“They’d turn like animals. This was fight or flight.
“One guy on a top-storey balcony tried to push me over the balcony and I had to hang on for dear life… I was about five floors up.
“Looking back on it – it was hairy.”
Pic: Sky UK
‘Terrifying’ undercover work
Michael says he never used drugs but had grown up in a tough part of Dublin – where someone in his class was “done for murder” – so he could “talk the talk” during his undercover work.
He also was “very slight”, weighing 10-and-a-half stone, and at 5ft 9in tall, he only just met the minimum height requirement to serve in the Gardai at the time.
“You might sit on a wall or in a park with all these drug addicts for about an hour, an hour-and-a-half, swapping stories,” he says. “Then you went and you did the buy.
“Was I frightened? I was terrified.
“You were operating on adrenalin.
“You don’t have a radio. You leave your gun back at the office. You have your ID card in your sock.
“You go into these flat complexes and other drug addicts would mug you or rip you off.
“Some jobs didn’t work out.
“You went in and just hoped for the best.
“It was terrifying but you’re young, you feel invincible.”
Pic: Sky UK
Michael spent about six years working undercover before going on to achieve the rank of assistant commissioner in the Gardai and then leading the EU’s anti-drugs smuggling agency.
Now retired, he features in a new Sky documentary, Narcos Dublin, about the city’s illegal drug trade, from the introduction of heroin in the late 1970s through to the 1990s as cocaine and ecstasy flooded into the country.
The three-part series, from the team behind the BAFTA-winning documentary Liverpool Narcos, charts how the notorious Dunne family rose to become one of Ireland’s most terrifying gangs and looks at the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin, who had worked to expose drug barons.
Anti-drugs campaigners on the streets of Dublin during the city’s heroin epidemic. Pic: Sky UK
Protecting family from ‘darker side of life’
Michael, who arrested Micky “Dazzler” Dunne on drug charges, says it was “strange” to watch another member of the family, Christy, being interviewed for the series.
“It was like looking at something in the past to see him,” he adds.
“It brought back memories – some of them not very good.”
Michael says his family were unaware his work involved meeting dealers and pretending he wanted to buy drugs until they watched the documentary.
“My kids weren’t around at the time – my wife knew I was off doing some sort of surveillance stuff and drugs stuff,” he says.
“You see the darker side of life. When you come home, you don’t talk about it.
“You close the door on it in your head. That’s the only way… you don’t worry the people at home.”
Former heroin addict Paul Tracy speaks in the documentary. Pic: Sky UK
Ex-addict who used heroin over 37 years
As well as featuring the efforts to tackle Ireland’s illegal drug trade, the series hears the stories of former substance users including ex-heroin addict Paul Tracy.
He first injected the drug in Dublin at the age of 18 and continued using it over 37 years before finally going clean at the age of 55.
Now aged 59, the hairdresser says he was told by doctors he had just five years to live when he was 22 after testing HIV positive, which was linked to his heroin use.
“I had a promise of five years if I stayed healthy. If I was to use (heroin), I wouldn’t last two years,” he tells Sky News.
“I thought I would rather have two years on my terms.
“It was a self-destructive time.”
He adds: “I was kind of excited. That was irrational.
“(I thought) ‘Oh my god, I’m going to die young’. I had visions of my heroic, young death. Mad s**t. I can’t even explain it to you.
“I couldn’t wait to tell some people.”
Paul Tracy tested HIV positive when he was 22. Pic: Sky UK
‘Heroin takes your soul’
Despite his diagnosis in 1985, Paul says “incredibly” the HIV virus has now been undetectable for more than 25 years.
Describing his early heroin use, he says: “This thing made me feel really cool and relaxed and I liked the kind of person I was.
“Once the narcotic effects had worn off after an hour or two, I’d have this nice feeling – a false sense, maybe – that I was in control, and I was calm, and I was together.
“I actually liked this new person that came up in the middle of the drug. That was a very dangerous thing, that attraction to me.”
But as his addiction developed – which at its height saw him taking two grams of heroin a day – he turned to committing fraud to fund his habit.
“There’s a poverty mentality around heroin because you never have enough,” he says.
“Every time you see 20 quid, it’s a get-well card.
“The obsession was so deep in me that I needed to break the obsession.
“I could go through the cold turkey all the time. I could never stay off it. The obsession was always with me. I needed something to break that.
“Everything else takes your money, your reputation. Heroin takes your soul.
“Nobody can take heroin and retain their soul.”
Dublin Narcos is available to watch on Sky Documentaries and Now TV from today.
A famine has been declared in Gaza City and the surrounding neighbourhoods.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) – a globally recognised system for classifying the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition – has confirmed just four famines since it was established in 2004.
These were in Somalia in 2011, and in Sudan in 2017, 2020, and 2024.
The confirmation of famine in Gaza City is the IPC’s first outside of Africa.
“After 22 months of relentless conflict, over half a million people in the Gaza Strip are facing catastrophic conditions characterised by starvation, destitution and death,” the report said, adding that more than a million other people face a severe level of food insecurity.
Israel Gaza map
Over the next month conditions are also expected to worsen, with the famine projected to expand to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, the report said.
Nearly a third of the population (641,000 people) are expected to face catastrophic conditions while acute malnutrition is projected to continue getting worse rapidly.
Over the next year, the report said at least 132,000 children will suffer from acute malnutrition – double the organisation’s estimates from May 2024.
Israel says no famine in Gaza
Volker Turk, the UN Human Rights chief, said the famine is the direct result of actions taken by the Israeli government.
“It is a war crime to use starvation as method of warfare, and the resulting deaths may also amount to the war crime of wilful killing,” he said.
COGAT, the Israeli military agency that coordinates aid, has rejected the findings.
Israel’s foreign ministry said there is no famine in Gaza: “Over 100,000 trucks of aid have entered Gaza since the start of the war, and in recent weeks a massive influx of aid has flooded the Strip with staple foods and caused a sharp decline in food prices, which have plummeted in the markets.”
Another UN chief made a desperate plea to Israel’s prime minister to declare a ceasefire in the wake of the famine announcement.
Tom Fletcher, UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said famine could have been prevented in the strip if there hadn’t been a “systematic obstruction” of aid deliveries.
“My ask, my plea, my demand to Prime Minister Netanyahu and anyone who can reach him. Enough. Ceasefire. Open the crossings, north and south, all of them,” he said.
The IPC had previously warned famine was imminent in parts of Gaza, but had stopped short of a formal declaration.
Palestinians struggle to get aid at a community kitchen in Gaza City. Pic: AP
The latest report on Gaza from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) says there were almost 13,000 new admissions of children for acute malnutrition recorded in July.
The latest numbers from the Gaza health ministry are 251 dead as a result of famine and malnutrition, including 108 children.
But Israel has previously accused Hamas of inflating these figures, saying that most of the children who died had pre-existing health conditions.
The Ukrainian suspected of coordinating attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines had served in Ukraine’s Secret Service and in the Ukrainian Army’s special forces, Sky News understand.
Serhii K., 49, was arrested in northern Italy on Thursday following the issuance of a European arrest warrant by German prosecutors.
It is not known whether he was still serving at the time of the pipeline attack in 2022 and Ukraine’s government has always denied any involvement in the explosions.
According to sources close to the case, the suspect has been found in a three-star bungalow hotel named La Pescaccia in San Clemente, in the province of Rimini.
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Man arrested over Nord Stream attacks
When military officers from Italy’s Carabinieri investigative and operational units raided his bedroom, he didn’t try to resist the arrest.
The hotel’s employees have been questioned, but no further evidence or any weapons were found, the sources added.
Serhii arrived on Italy’s Adriatic coast earlier this week, and the purpose of his trip was a holiday. He was found with his two children and his wife.
At least one of the four people within his family had a travel ticket issued in Poland. He crossed the Italian border with his car with a Ukrainian license plate last Tuesday.
He was travelling with his passport, and he used his real identity to check into the hotel, triggering an emergency alert on a police server, we have been told.
A satellite image shows gas from the Nord Stream pipeline bubbling up in the Baltic Sea. File pic: Roscosmos via Reuters
After the arrest, he was taken to the Rimini police station before being moved to a prison in Bologna, the regional capital, on Friday.
Deputy Bologna Prosecutor Licia Scagliarini has granted the German judicial authorities’ requests for Serhii’s surrender, but Sky News understands the man told the appeal court that he doesn’t consent to being handed over to Germany.
He also denied the charges and said he was in Ukraine during the Nord Stream sabotage. He added that he is currently in Italy for family reasons.
While leaving the court, he was seen making a typical Ukrainian nationalist ‘trident’ gesture to the reporters.
The next hearing is scheduled for 3 September, when the Bologna appeal court is set to decide whether Serhii will be extradited to Germany or not. He will remain in jail until then.
In Germany, he will face charges of collusion to cause an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage and the destruction of structures.
German prosecutors believe he was part of a group of people who planted devices on the pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm in September 2022.
Serhii and his accomplices are believed to have set off from Rostock on Germany’s north-eastern coast in a sailing yacht to carry out the attack.
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The explosions severely damaged three pipelines transporting gas from Russia to Europe. It represented a significant escalation in the Ukraine conflict and worsening of the continent’s energy supply crisis.
According to a US intelligence report leaked in 2023, a pro-Ukraine group was behind the attack. Yet, no group has ever claimed responsibility.
Spare pipes for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. File pic: Reuters/Fabian Bimmer
Sky News understands Genoa’s Prosecutor’s Office in northern Italy has requested their colleagues in Bologna to share the information related to Serhii.
Anti-terrorism prosecutors are investigating another alleged sabotage linked to the Russian shadow fleet oil tanker Seajewel, which sank off the port of Savona last February.
On Thursday, they asked an investigative police unit to figure out whether there is a link between that episode and the Nord Stream attacks.
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