Cartel wife’s Wexford home up for sale at €190k after being seized by CAB, Another Cartel, great Bargain.

Drug dealer’s partner loses Wexford bungalow now due to be auctioned off after CAB seizure

Yesterday at 17:41

A property linked to Kinahan cartel drug dealer Barry Fowler is due to go under the hammer next week after it was seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau.

This time last year a receiver was appointed to the property and given the authority to sell it on behalf of the State.

Fowler and his partner Lorna Palmer lost their CAB case after a judge ruled €500,000 in cash and the house – which was in Palmer’s name – were the proceeds of crime.

Described in court as “her last refuge”, the couple had spent €107,527 on the house and grounds at Coolamain, Oylegate, Co Wexford.

The Wexford house had been bought for €265,000 in 2008. A mobile home was bought for €17,000, which were “inconsistent with their legitimate earnings,” it was previously heard in court.

The three-bedroom detached dormer bungalow now has a guide price of €190,000 and is described as “filled with light throughout, sits centrally on large gardens bound by mature hedging”.

In his judgement, Judge Alex Owens said Fowler and Palmer had “been living high on the hog of criminal enterprise”.

The pair were “awash with cash” and the evidence in court involved “vast sums of money”.

He described Fowler as “a man of means with no means” and that there was “quite the degree of a luxury lifestyle”.

He ruled the house in Co Wexford was bought with the proceeds of crime.

Fowler had dropped his opposition to having €99,000 cash seized by CAB.

Also included in the ruling were two jet skis and two mobile homes.

Fowler is currently serving a six-year sentence over a cannabis drugs haul while Palmer got 18 months last year for money laundering.

Fowler, who has 20 previous convictions, had been caught with €500,000 worth of cocaine and €294,000 worth of cannabis along with €118,000 in cash in 2012.

He got a seven-year sentence for that, but the drug dealing continued. In May 2012, just months after his release, he was caught with €134,000 of cannabis.

His close links to the leader of the Byrne Organised Crime Gang also emerged in court, which heard he had been seen driving a vehicle used by Liam Byrne and which was later seized by CAB in a separate case.

The Sunday World previously photographed Fowler in a van mocked up to look like a DHL delivery vehicle and dressed in a uniform.

At Palmer’s money laundering trial last year, it was heard how she told gardaí she didn’t know why people were posting money through her door, where gardaí found two envelopes with €700 and €2,000 in them.

Officers searched the house and found large quantities of cash in two safes and in envelopes inside a money box amounting to €99,730.

A garda witness agreed Palmer knew the money was the proceeds of criminal conduct but was “turning a blind eye” to what was going on and was not involved in the criminal activity.

Video from Palmer’s home at Millbrook Lawns in Tallaght in April 2017 revealed money drop-offs occurring.

A search of the house resulted in that seizure of €99,780 in cash for which she got a prison sentence in 2022 after pleading guilty to money laundering.

Chief Superintendent Michael Gubbins detailed in an affidavit how the couple and other family members created schemes to launder the cash.

This included obtaining a mortgage for the Wexford property but making payments with cash and paying for renovations with cash.

One loan for €50,000 taken out by a family member and used in the house purchase was paid back within eight months, even though the person had no means to do so.