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Alfonso Turano: the lost suitcase carrying €294,000 of cannabis

The suitcase travelled from Barcelona to Dublin without him. Alfonso Turano nevertheless put his real name on a lost-luggage form and returned to Dublin Airport to collect it. Customs found 14.7kg of cannabis inside.

Published 31 July 2026 · Remigration Ireland case ledger
14.7kgCannabis
€294,000Adjudicated value
4 yearsSentence imposed
2y 4mImmediate custody

A suitcase arrived one day late

Turano travelled from Barcelona through London to Dublin on 28 February 2025. His checked suitcase did not arrive with him. It followed unaccompanied the next day. An Aer Lingus employee alerted customs after the bag landed from London and remained uncollected.

Turano had completed a lost-luggage form in his real name. He returned to the airport on 1 March and was escorted airside. An anomaly was detected and the search found two vacuum-packed bags containing 14.7kg of cannabis, valued in the final sentencing report at €294,000.

An earlier District Court report described an alleged 15kg worth €300,000. Those rounded, pre-trial figures are not treated as a second seizure. This file uses the more precise quantity and value placed before the sentencing court.

The account he gave

Turano initially said the suitcase was his and he had packed it. He later told gardaí that a man at Barcelona Airport had offered him €1,000 to carry it to Ireland and that he did not know what it contained. Garda evidence described a degree of wilful ignorance among people who accept bags without examining them.

Judge Ronan Munro accepted that Turano was not a criminal mastermind, but found that he would have known the bag contained something criminal. The promised reward and the value of the drugs were aggravating features. Turano did not receive the payment.

Plea, mitigation and final sentence

Turano pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis for sale or supply at Dublin Airport on 1 March 2025. He had no previous convictions, cooperated fully, answered questions and entered an early plea. The defence submitted that his culpability was at the lower end. The court also heard about his struggling small business, maintenance obligations to a teenage child, limited English and the isolation experienced as a foreign prisoner without family visits.

The judge selected a six-year headline, reduced it to four years for mitigation, and suspended the final 20 months for ten years on strict conditions. That leaves two years and four months of immediate custody, backdated to his arrest on 1 March 2025.

Nationality and immigration record

Turano is reported as an Italian national with an address described in the sentencing report as “Calabro, Italy”. He said he was visiting friends in Dublin for a short holiday and had been working on another business in Spain. Italy is an EU member state. The reports reviewed do not establish illegal entry, an asylum application, a removal order or his location after completion of the custodial portion. None is inferred.

Chronology

Public-cost benchmark

Twenty-eight nominal custodial months at the Irish Prison Service’s 2024 average annual cost of an available, staffed prison space, €99,072, produce a gross benchmark of approximately €231,168.

This is arithmetic, not a Turano-specific invoice. Actual cost depends on remission, release arrangements and annual rates. It excludes customs and Garda work, prosecution, courts, interpretation and legal aid. An Italian interpreter was reported, but no case-specific cost was published.

Sources

Record checked: 31 July 2026. No published appeal or immigration-enforcement outcome was located.