The grim tale of the man who introduced heroin to Ireland ended at 3pm yesterday in St James's Hospital.
arry Dunne (72) was being treated at the facility for catastrophic self-inflicted stab injuries.
He had been rushed to the hospital from his home in Carrickmount Drive in Rathfarnham on Sunday.
Dunne - one of the most notorious criminals in the history of the State - was in the advanced stages of a battle with lung cancer.
Despite his reputation - which was enhanced when he famously said "if you think we're bad, wait till you see what's coming after us" after he was handed a 14-year jail sentence for heroin dealing in March, 1985 - Dunne had not been an active criminal for well over a decade.
On that day at Dublin Circuit Court 35 years ago, loud cheers had greeted the lengthy sentence handed down to him.
Nine other members of the family have been jailed on drugs, firearms and other criminal charges, but Dunne was the leader of the pack.
His brother, Mickey Dunne, was sentenced to eight years in 1987 on drug-related charges. Eldest brother Christy Dunne received a 12-year sentence.
Seamus Dunne got 12 years in Britain after he was caught with a huge quantity of heroin which he was trying to bring back to Ireland.
However, Larry was the kingpin - the criminal who was the number-one target of drugs squad gardaí - a relatively new unit within the Garda organisation at the time.
The Dublin criminal, who had been born into abject poverty in February 1948, loved to flaunt his wealth from his heroin trafficking enterprise.
This was an era many years before the Criminal Assets Bureau was set up.
He drove expensive cars and lived a champagne lifestyle, buying a mansion in the foothills of the Dublin mountains which would today be worth more than €1million. He also had a house in Crumlin.
It was in the plush Sandyford mansion, called Gorse Rock, where he spent most of his time. The property became a symbol of his ill-gotten wealth in the 1980s.
His lifestyle could not have been further removed from his difficult and tragic childhood, which had involved him being incarcerated in the notorious Daingean Industrial School in Co Offaly.
He was released from prison in 1995 but would continue to get into scrapes with the law.
In 1998, Dunne was accused of firing a pistol during a robbery at the Bradford & Bingley Building Society in Erdington in England.
But a jury at Birmingham Crown Court took just over two hours to find him not guilty of having a firearm with intent, robbery and attempted wounding.
He was also acquitted of a charge of attempted murder at a previous trial in which another defendant was jailed for 11 years.
After being cleared of those charges, Dunne returned to Dublin. It was during this period that he received a three-month jail sentence for assaulting an undercover garda with a 15-foot plank and a bamboo cane as gardaí carried out a drugs raid.
In 2004, he was found guilty of cocaine dealing - a charge that dated back to 1999. This was to be his last major brush with the law and gardaí say that he had no major links with the new breed of gangland criminal causing such mayhem nowadays.
Dunne's drug importation business in the 1980s swamped Dublin with heroin and led to a massive drug addiction epidemic. This made him the number-one target for gardaí.
In time, bigger drugs traffickers, such as Christy Kinahan and John Gilligan, would emerge. But 40 years ago, Larry Dunne was Ireland's premier drugs trafficker.
At the height of his criminal activity, it is understood that he bribed juries and boasted about having contacts in the gardaí. He fled the country when the heat on him intensified, before finally being convicted for drugs supply and receiving a 14-year sentence.
In April 2000, Dunne's wife, Lily, died in Our Lady's Hospice, Harold's Cross, in Dublin after a long illness.
Despite his criminal pedigree, Dunne was known as a family man. It is understood that some family members were around his hospital bed when he passed away yesterday.
He had more than 40 previous convictions to his name. The most serious of which was when he was charged with possession and intent to supply heroin, cocaine and cannabis with a combined street value of between IR£50,000 and IR£60,000 in 1980.
He was found guilty after a circuit court trial in June, 1983, but he had already absconded on the opening day of the case and the trial continued in his absence.
The trial was told that when Gardaí raided Dunne's corporation house they found heroin, cocaine and cannabis resin.
In his absence, he was found guilty of being in possession of drugs for supply.
Dunne had fled to Portugal but he was arrested there and then extradited back to Ireland, where he was given the 14-year-sentence on March 25, 1985.
Dunne was the first drug dealer in Ireland to use junior criminals to carry drugs for him, often for very little cash reward. This is a trend that continues in organised crime to this day.
It is understood that Dunne gloated about not having to transport drugs. This prompted other criminals to profess that "Larry doesn't carry".
However, his luck ran out when he was busted by gardaí and, in his latter years, Dunne lived a modest and quiet life.
