Gang Boss Barron Rostas
THIS is the Roma Gypsy king who built himself a comfortable pad back home after fleecing kindhearted Irish pedestrians in a begging scam.
Barron Rostas netted thousands of euro a week forcing women and children to beg on to the streets of Irish cities and towns.
Gardai launched a probe into the Begging Barron after discovering he wired €40,000 home to Romania, a Sunday World investigation can reveal.
And this is the relatively luxurious pad that begging cash built for him in his native town. Brazen Barron showed it off to local journalists to boast of how well he has done abroad.
Today a Sunday World investigation can reveal that 40-year-old Rostas was the face of a high-profile sit-in by gypsies on the M50 roundabout some years ago.
Then he pleaded that he was one of a group of marginalised and penniless Romas in need of refuge.
But in the last few years he has conned gullible Irish shoppers and workers out of a small fortune while also claiming thousands in welfare benefits.
A lengthy Sunday World investigation today lifts the lid on the ruthless Roma begging-gang bosses who are getting rich off the kindness of Irish people.
We can reveal that the heads of the Rostas family of beggars are leading lifestyles that many Irish people would find impossible.
They own a fleet of luxury BMW and Mercedes cars, have several mansions in Romania and are exporting huge amounts of money out of our bankrupt country.
The brains behind the large-scale begging operation which sees hundreds of helpless Romas being sent to beg around the capital and beyond each day, is 40-year-old Rostas.
He was the leader of and spokesman for the 100 Romas that were deported from a makeshift camp near the M50 at Ballymun in Dublin four years ago.
Rostas claimed that in Romania he was forced to live in a dump and eat out of rubbish bins but as our exclusive pictures show he actually lives in a large home built in a castle style with its own turrets.
It is one of the biggest houses in the area and is one of just a number he has built over the last four years in his home town near Transylvania.
Rostas is regarded as being a multimillionaire in his Roma community and was happy to pose for pictures outside his mansion while his exploited workers in Ireland are forced to live in squalor and beg for a living.
Gardai suspect that his family has received hundreds of thousands of euro from his gang of child beggars. Rostas and his second in command - his 26-year-old son Raju - routinely threaten their "workers" with violence and have lieutenants monitor them to make sure that they are not siphoning off money for themselves.
Even though Barron Rostas was deported from Ireland in July 2007 he was back in the country within weeks and has been at the helm of the begging racket ever since.
Romanian police told gardai that Rostas was using his begging racket cash to build houses in the village of Vadu Crisului in the north of the country and was regularly travelling back and forth to monitor and manage his property portfolio and to collect the begging cash, which was sent via money transfer using Western Union.
Rostas - who is thought to have fathered dozens of children - has convictions for robbery in his home country and served a four-year jail term.
He has several public-order convictions in Ireland and fled the country last April after gardai came looking for him because of an outstanding warrant.
He is regarded as being extremely intelligent and when he arrived in Ireland five years ago, he quickly identified that Irish people were very generous and were willing to hand over loose change to Romas.
He also saw that Irish women were easily intimidated and came up with the idea of putting Roma beggars at ATM machines and car park ticket machines where people were handling or using cash.
He realised that if his beggars became aggressive and intimidating that, more often than not, women would give them money to simply go away. It was a plan that has netted him thousands of euro and made him a wealthy man in his native Romania.
When he is not in Ireland, Raju Rostas takes over as the head of the lucrative family business.
Raju lived in a house in Manor Street near Dublin city centre until recently when it was raided by gardai as part of an operation to smash the gypsy gang.
When gardai raided the house in April they found €400 in €50 euro notes, which they believe was made from begging and was about to be exported to Rostas in Romania via Western Union. Rostas claimed that the cash was actually bail money.
He is very well known to gardai here and has been arrested on at least 30 occasions over the last three years for begging. His wife is also a well-known Roma beggar and he has fathered two children with her.
Raju has a string of convictions for begging, theft and road traffic offences and each time he is detained he pretends that he cannot speak English so that gardai have to waste his time in custody trying to track down an interpreter.
He has admitted to gardai that he is involved in organised begging and that the proceeds were being sent back to Romania to his family.
When his house in Manor Street was raided the landlord threw him out and he moved his family to another house in nearby Phibsboro.
The Sunday World has observed many members of the extended Rostas family leaving the new address and heading to town where they spend the day begging before returning home and handing the cash over to Raju.
A number of other men also left the house on several occasions and broke into a derelict factory where it is suspected they were stripping copper wire and scrap metal for sale.
Officers discovered that 20 people were living in the house and they would be made to walk to Dublin each morning to beg and would not be allowed home until they collected a minimum amount of money.
Undercover lieutenants regularly pass by and plant marked notes in the workers' begging jars. If the marked note is not handed over to the boss at the end of the shift, then they know the person is stealing.
Children as young as seven are sent to beg for the Rostas clan and teenage girls are made to cradle their young children to gain sympathy and cash from naïve Irish people unaware that their money is actually going to a cynical crime syndicate.
Some of the child beggars are also put to work around bars and restaurants, stealing handbags and mobile phones.
Pintea Rostas, who is 21, is also on the radar of gardai. As well as begging, Romanian police believe that he was involved in trafficking another Romanian national to Ireland in February of this year for the purpose of begging.
The trafficked man was arrested by gardai and charged but has since fled the country and escaped the clutches of the Rostas family.
Another Roma being investigated by gardai is 28-year-old Vasile Drama. Drama came to Ireland in 2000 and was arrested for begging a number of times when he was still a juvenile.
In 2005 he was arrested with a number of other Romas for demanding money for supplying forged passports. He was never charged.
Despite having no visible means of income, Drama leads a luxurious lifestyle and drives a BMW and Mercedes and lives in a large house in Celbridge, Co Kildare.
He recently paid €4,000 as a cash down-payment on a Mercedes car. He is an associate of another Romanian who lives in Portlaoise and is the suspected head of a human trafficking gang.
Vasile Drama's wife, Claudia Radu, is a convicted beggar who was slammed by a judge for "dragging" her young child between cars at traffic lights where she was harassing motorists to hand over money.
A 41-year-old Roma is also being probed by the authorities here. He has convictions for robbery in Romania and moves between Dublin and Cork. He is at the helm of the gang that controls the selling of roses in pubs, which is a regular sight around the country.
The sellers are mainly after wallets and mobile phones though and the 41-year-old drives an Audi car. He has built a luxury home back in Romania and like Barron Rostas travels back and forth between the two countries.
It only became illegal to beg on streets in February after the previous law forbidding begging was struck down.
Gardai are concerned about the activities of Roma gangs and have successfully cracked down on their activities and have charged nearly 200 people with begging, including dozens of minors.
Most of those arrested and charged have pleaded guilty but because the maximum fine that can be imposed is €250, the heads of the Rostas betting gang believe the money they make is worth the odd setback when the beggar is detained.