Brazilian prostitute Zelandia Silva posted these pics online
Brazilian prostitute Zelandia Silva posted these pics online
Brazilian prostitute Zelandia Silva and engineer-turned-pimp Thomas Lyons
These are the sleazy pictures that show how a government adviser was hooked into becoming a secret €10,000-a-month brothel king.
Brazilian vice girl Zelandia Silva flaunts the curves that tempted married Thomas Lyons to become her boyfriend.
The relationship launched him on the road to building his own sex empire, which came crumbling down when the pair pleaded guilty to brothel keeping.
The Sunday World can reveal that Lyons was raking in up to €10,000 a week from a string of sex dens in Limerick and Dublin, and is now facing a €1million bill from the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB).
He used his background as a respectable engineer – who advised government departments – to rent properties for the sex trade.
He stiffed other vice gangs for at least €700 a week for properties, for which he was paying just €700 a month, according to Sunday World sources.
He embarked on his vice career after hooking up with sex worker Silva.
The traffic consultant, who has since left his family home in Malahide, north Dublin, used his earnings to buy properties in Ireland and a villa in Lanzarote.
Lyons even used notepaper from the respectable engineering firm he worked for to help out hookers who had problems with immigration visas.
The cheeky sleaze merchant was caught red-handed after a painstaking Garda surveillance operation that lasted more than a year.
When armed Gardai burst into one of the Limerick brothels run by Lyons, they found seven women working as prostitutes and two men acting as security guards.
Incredibly, Lyons didn’t know Gardai had raided the property and thought the sex-for-sale gang had done a runner, leaving the apartment door smashed in.
He then went to the nearby Henry Street Garda Station to make a complaint that a burglary had taken place and within days had it up and running again as a knocking shop.
The brothel was visible from the Garda station, where the operation was based to bust Lyons’s and Silva’s vice ring.
Lyons started visiting Silva in 2005 before cashing in on the city’s lucrative sex trade, becoming “one of the biggest on the go” in Limerick, according to a Sunday World source.
He started off by offering properties to hookers and pimps through the website Escort Ireland, run by convicted pimp Peter McCormick.
Soon he was running three knocking shops in the city himself, with Silva and a number of other women. When they had too many prostitutes, he sent them out to work for other operations and charged €200 per girl, said sources.
Detective Garda Vincent Brick said at one court hearing that Lyons had been the target of a lengthy Garda surveillance operation.
In Limerick Circuit Court this week, Lyons admitted that he kept or managed brothels in three Limerick city locations, between August 13, 2010, and June 15, 2011.
He is due for sentence along with Zelandia in December, but is currently in custody.
Lyons left his job with a top engineering firm shortly after Gardai smashed his vice ring. He set up another company, TL Traffic, using his old family address in Malahide, according to his LinkedIn profile.
According to that profile, which is still online, he worked in South Africa for 10 years before moving back to Dublin, where he was employed by the same firm for 19 years. There is no mention of his double-life as a sex-trade supremo.
As a senior transport consultant, he had offered advice to the Government on major infrastructure projects, including the shelved Metro West scheme,
Earlier this year, Lyons also pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to allowing an apartment at Burnell Court, Malahide Road, Dublin, to be used as a brothel in 2011.
The court heard Gardai set up surveillance there after residents complained about men coming and going.
He told Gardai he had rented the apartment so he could live there with his Brazilian girlfriend, who was involved in the escort industry, but whom he had met socially.
When they split up, he advertised the property for €700 per week on an Irish escort website to help pay mortgages on three properties and to support his wife and children.
Lyons also told Gardai he had been financially helping his then girlfriend so she could leave the escort industry.
Gardai got a search warrant and they saw an African woman and Eastern European woman enter the apartment.
Lyons arrived later that day and answered the door to the search team.
He made full admissions during interview and said he got about €3,000 a month take-home pay and some rental income on other properties, including one in Lanzarote.
A Garda witness agreed with Lyons’s defence counsel that he had co-operated fully and had not trafficked the women or acted as a pimp.
The judge commented that there seemed to be a contradiction between Lyons trying to help his girlfriend out of prostitution and facilitating other women in the trade.
“It’s not a business that one sees as a career opportunity,” Judge Ring said.
Judge Ring accepted that Lyons comes from a respectable background, but noted that this was not a victimless crime. She said he had put his family’s future at risk because they are dependant on him.