Content area
Full text
The death of Tony Felloni, one of the country's most notorious heroin dealers, will probably be celebrated in the inner-city communities where he once unleashed misery, devastation and death.
He died on Monday in the manner that many of his victim's families would have wished for: as a lonely 81-year-old who ended up spending a large part of his life in prison. Felloni survived into old age with HIV - but his criminal activities brought an early death to many others.
Such is his notoriety that even youngsters growing up today in Dublin's north inner city - which he once vowed to "flood with heroin" - are intuitively aware of his name, which like a bogeyman has passed down through the generations.
They are certainly aware of the fitting nickname their forebears bestowed on him at the height of his reign as the country's biggest heroin supplier.
They called him 'King Scum'.
Felloni stands out in the pantheon of gangsters as the most reviled and demonised drug dealer in our history - even more so than his one-time business partners the...