Nicola Talent

Three of Ireland's most notorious criminals flicker onto the courtroom screens from prisons across England.

Thomas Bommer-Cavanagh appears on Zoom from Belmarsh Prison, looking surprisingly tanned and trim in a dark grey T-shirt.

Beside him on the screen is lieutenants Gary Flash Vickery and Daniel Canning appear from other prisons, fidgeting in their seats.

In contrast, Kavanagh sits bolt upright with arms folded across his chest and listens intently in an interview room with bathroom blue walls.

As a female prison guard nips in and out of Kavanagh's interview room, the exasperated judge, Justice Martin Levitt, stops proceedings to scold, we'll just wait for Belmarsh to stop coming in and out of the room because it's interrupting us yet again.

Over the morning there are various arguments set out by wigged barristers who call each other my learned friend in clipped British accents.

But the outcome is clear.

Kavanaugh has three months to pay back more than 1.26 million euro in criminal assets or face another 12 years in prison.

One by one, the court strips him of his assets.

Luxury watches, designer clothes, equity in a Mallorcan property, rental income, cash seized by police, and even the cost of a family holiday to Cancun.

And the biggest blow, his half share of a fortified Tamworth mansion, the marble-floored stronghold where he reigned like an Italian mob boss in the English Midlands.

The court was told his wife, Joanne Byrne, the sister of David Byrne, who was murdered in the Regency, had not responded to a court notice.

Kavanagh, sitting at a wooden desk in Belmarsh, betrays no sign of emotion at the prospect of losing the family home.

But behind that blank stare is a man who once weaponised fear with precision.

Police wiretaps revealed a mobster, almost scientific, in his obsession with torture, casually calculating exactly how much pain he could inflict, terrifying men into loyalty without paralysing them completely.

Britain's National Crime Agency finally brought him down, jailing him for 26 years.

Now, here in Ipswich Crown Court, they're dismantling what's left of his empire.

And then one final twist.

It appears that Bomber couldn't do his time.

In a scheme that wouldn't have been out of place in a Guy Ritchie movie, Kavanagh tried to shave some time off his 21-year sentence for drug smuggling by orchestrating a plot from behind bars.