Christy Browne wasn’t present at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Monday when the Irish sporting icon who conned him and so many others into believing he had cancer was led away to jail.
By that point, Browne had heard enough about the astonishing downfall of Denis Joseph Carey, or simply DJ on any street in Ireland. And none of it made him particularly happy.
‘Bittersweet’ was Browne’s description to Daily Mail Sport later that night, hours after judge Martin Nolan concluded one of the most extraordinary tales in sport by sentencing Carey, the ‘Diego Maradona of hurling’, to five-and-a-half years for multiple counts of fraud.
In his summation, Justice Nolan had called Carey’s behaviour ‘reprehensible’ and a threat to the ‘belief in humanity’ held by the ‘good-natured people who wanted to help a person in need’.
The details behind such a conclusion were remarkable.
DJ Carey, the ‘Maradona of hurling’, was sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail this week for multiple counts of fraud
From a billionaire to a cancer sufferer to a pensioner to former athletes and others who simply trusted a famous friend, Carey, 54, duped almost €400,000 under the ruse of a cancer he never had.
One informed source is quick to point out that those were just the sums brought to court by a cohort of 13 claimants and the actual amount lost within the omerta surrounding an Irish legend could be substantially higher.
Some of it was an elaborate orchestration that spanned 2014 to 2022, comprising fake doctor’s notes and bogus promises of a medical negligence windfall that was never due.
Other elements reeked of farce, most notably the emergence of a photograph that appeared to show a mobile phone charger in Carey’s nose to create the impression of treatment in a hospital bed.
But to men like Browne, the emotions thrown up on Monday were more complicated than a sense of vindication. It was about an act of betrayal by an individual revered by his family.
‘To be honest, it’s hard to understand it all,’ he told me. ‘DJ is an icon here. He was the creme de la creme of hurling and very friendly with my dad. They knew each other through playing handball.
‘To see him through our eyes and to then get that call to help, well, of course I’ll help. Because you don’t think someone like that would trick you, do you? It was the great DJ Carey. Like I said, it’s all hard to understand.’
Browne, a care worker in Ballymore Eustace, 50 miles north-east of the Kilkenny fields where Carey made his name, would prefer not to share how much money he gave Carey.
At stages the whole sorry saga descended into farce – such as when Carey appeared to put an iPhone charger up his nose to pretend he was in hospital receiving treatment for cancer
Carey (pictured with Australia cricket captain Ricky Ponting in 2010) was so revered that many of his victims were unable to comprehend that he might defraud them
But he was one of the 13 complainants who fell for the swindle, which included Denis O’Brien, one of Ireland’s wealthiest entrepreneurs.
To comprehend how that happened, it is necessary to understand the scale of Carey’s popularity in Ireland, where the Gaelic sports are entwined with national identity and are bigger than football.
Within those spaces, Carey was a giant, a five-time All-Ireland hurling champion with Kilkenny and a nine-time All-Star pick across the Nineties and early years after the turn of the Millennium.
Light on his feet, always out of reach, they called him ‘The Dodger’; an everyman with thinning hair who was forever one step ahead of trouble on the pitch. The irony today is obvious.
‘There was a time when DJ Carey was so huge in Ireland that he was simply DJ,’ said Eimear Ni Bhraonain, an author whose book, The Dodger: DJ Carey and the Great Betrayal, was published last month. Within it, she forensically investigated the scandal that has been front-page news in Ireland for much of the past two years.
‘He was an ordinary hero,’ Ni Bhraonain told me. ‘We loved him because he was a down-to-earth guy, accessible, softly spoken. He was the kind of guy that would have the tea and the biscuits if you asked him into your house.’
When Carey retired in 2006, his ability to charm and dodge persisted. They would ultimately define his wider legacy.
The precise point of origin for his deceptions is disputed. But his former fiancee, the millionaire entrepreneur Sarah Newman, who was a star on the Irish version of Dragons Den, first alleged that he was lying about his finances as far back as 2012, the year their long-term relationship ended. She filed a complaint to police, alleging that he had stolen from her.
His former fiancee, the millionaire entrepreneur Sarah Newman, who was a star on the Irish version of Dragons Den, first alleged that he was lying about his finances as far back as 2012
That predated court evidence by two years and would later dovetail with claims brought to Newman by a local businessman, who was pursuing a missing payment from her partner after a cheque relating to the purchase of a Range Rover had bounced.
According to previous interviews with Newman, whose mother had died of cancer, Carey had told the man that he was receiving treatment for an incurable brain tumour at a clinic in the US. A version of that story would go on to be shared by Carey countless times for the next decade.
His need for money could be partially explained by failings in his post-sporting career – a company he set up in 2004, offering cleaning supplies, recorded losses for six straight years before entering liquidation in 2011. But it was the weaponisation of cancer that characterised the scandal once allegations started to pile up from 2023 onwards.
As Browne told me on Monday: ‘If he had robbed a bank, I think I would almost look at it differently, but cancer? It’s the worst way to trick money. That’s something we’ve all been affected by in our families – and he used it.’
That sentiment was especially nauseating in Carey’s courting of the Kirwan family. Margaret and Ger Kirwan are prominent figures around the Gaelic sports scene and it was in 2021 that Margaret, 60, was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer, multiple myeloma.
Shortly afterwards, Carey, their acquaintance, got in touch with the intention, ostensibly, of sympathising. But in their first conversation he raised that he, too, had the exact same condition.
Margaret would later say her husband, with whom she runs a trout farm, was progressively ‘groomed’ over the next two months into a loan of €5,000 to assist Carey’s treatments in the United States. It was his modus operandi.
Margaret Kirwan declined to comment in detail when contacted by Daily Mail Sport, saying: ‘I just want to get on with running my business now.’
‘If he had robbed a bank, I think I would almost look at it differently, but cancer? It’s the worst way to trick money’
Unlike many in the Carey orbit, the Kirwans got their money back. Of the €394,127 defrauded by Carey, only €44,200 was ever repaid to a handful of his victims.
The scale of the deception is still unclear. The 10 charges of fraud to which Carey pleaded guilty in July involved 13 claimants, but Ni Bhraonain, through research for her book, believes far more people were swept in. She told me: ‘I would know of at least 50 people that have given him money.’
She added: ‘He was ruthless. Take some of his victims, for instance. One of them was coming into retirement shortly and for the first time in his life, he was coming into a small lump sum in his pension. It’s like DJ could smell that and he targeted him. He sent him so many texts about how he was his special friend and the only one he could talk to.’
That individual was Thomas Butler, an accountant who lost both of his parents to cancer and volunteered for the Irish Cancer Society. He gave Carey €16,000 from his pension pot and described the betrayal as ‘gut wrenching’ in court.
His feeling of being duped was echoed by O’Brien, who has an estimated net worth of £2.3billion and was conned into handing over €120,000, a similar sum to Tom Brennan, a former school mate now prominent in the medical science industry. Neither recouped their loans.
‘They are good people with good souls and Mr Carey took advantage of their good nature,’ said Justice Nolan. The concoction of an illness, the forged letters in support of his lies and the sheer number of friends they sucked in, has left Ireland stunned.
And yet there persists an awkwardness around discussing the case, especially in the close-knit world of Gaelic sport. Two of Carey’s victims were prominent ex-hurlers, Tony Griffin and Larry O’Gorman, with both named All-Stars during their career and the latter an All-Ireland champion with Wexford in 1996.
Griffin did not respond to a message from Daily Mail Sport and O’Gorman told me: ‘I won’t comment on it.’
‘They are good people with good souls and Mr Carey took advantage of their good nature,’ said Justice Nolan
Even now, after everything that has been learned, the Carey name carries a certain weight, it would seem.
Ni Bhraonain said: ‘There are people involved in Gaelic sports that have said to me that DJ was not very smart. Well, I would challenge that theory by saying, look how far he got.
‘I mean, he was peddling his bogus cancer story for well over a decade and some would say nearly two decades, gaining financially from it.
‘It was like an open secret in some parts. But the most painful thing about all of this is that for people on the ground and people that DJ targeted, many of them knew him very well and knew his family, and felt really reluctant to turn on him.’
For Browne, that is a relatable thought. ‘It will be hard for people to talk about it,’ he said.
His experience was a familiar one – Carey’s first mention of cancer was eventually followed by a request for assistance in paying for a treatment in Seattle. After money changed hands, communication quickly ended. It was after Covid when Browne received a call from fraud investigators.
‘I remember mentioning to him that he might set up a GoFundMe page,’ said Browne. ‘He didn’t want to, because of what links people might make to his sister.’
Remarkably, Carey’s sister, Catriona Carey, a former Irish international hockey player, is facing charges of money laundering offences related to a financial services company she operated. She is due to stand trial in January 2027 in Dublin.
Carey’s sister Catriona is due to stand trial in January 2027 on charges of money laundering
‘It’s all been hard to take in,’ added Browne. ‘He was an unbelievably big star here and he has thrown it all away. Was it greed or living beyond his means? An unsound mind? I don’t know, but he has hurt a lot of people.’
Time will tell how that extends to Carey’s own family, which includes a 26-year-old son, Michael, who is a hurler for Kilkenny. ‘I have empathy for him,’ said Browne.
As for DJ, that is more complicated.
‘I haven’t spoken to him in a long time,’ said Browne. ‘But it is on my mind, like I’m sure it is for a lot of people. He was an icon here and gave that away.
‘One day I would want to sit and have a coffee with him and just ask why.’
