The vinyl cladding on the exterior walls of retired fireman George Barr’s Philadelphia home remains only half-finished, a stark testament to the sudden and calamitous breakdown of relations between the owner and his builder.

Neither of them is now in a position to complete the work. Barr, a recently widowed 75-year-old Vietnam veteran who lived alone in the house, is currently behind bars facing a murder charge.

And Salis Hanrahan, a British national of Irish traveller descent whom Barr had hired to put up the cladding, is now dead after the other man allegedly shot him following a heated confrontation over money on July 8.

Barr – who’d reportedly lived in the house for 45 years – would hardly be the first person in the history of home improvement to fall out with a workman but, by all accounts, this had been an association that was always going to end badly.

The US Department of Homeland Security says that 20-year-old Hanrahan – who leaves behind a young wife, Roseann, and a one-year-old daughter at his home in Braintree, Essex – was a member of a ‘travelling conman fraud group’ and had entered America illegally after being denied a visa.

The FBI, which is leading a federal taskforce to tackle these criminals, considers the menace posed by ruthless cowboy builders from the British Isles to be so serious – they’ve earned many millions of dollars – that it has designated them a ‘transnational organised crime group’.

Such groups, composed of Irish or UK nationals who enter the US illegally or on tourist visas which they then out-stay, have been operating for years but all too often have gone undetected.

Court documents related to them have described ‘Irish Travellers’ as ‘a traditionally nomadic ethnic minority indigenous to Ireland, distinct from the majority Irish population’.

George Barr allegedly shot Salis Hanrahan, who he had hired to put up the cladding on his house, after a heated confrontation about money

Barr's half-finished home in Roxborough, Philadelphia, where Hanrahan and his team were working

According to the US Justice Department, the conmen – who hide behind myriad false names and fake businesses – travel around towns and states targeting elderly, or otherwise vulnerable, homeowners.

Their modus operandi is to get their foot in the door by offering to do a minor repair for a low price and exploiting what a lawyer who has represented some of them has called the ‘Irish blarney’, a mix of engaging friendliness and charming flattery that has enchanted generations of Americans.

They then escalate the repairs that are needed – all of them fraudulent – to wring as much money as they can from their victims, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time. Victims say the charm often gives way to aggression and threats if they’re crossed.

Their actual building work will be sub-standard and unnecessary – sometimes repairing damage they’ve surreptitiously caused themselves. Once paid in full, they leave with the job unfinished.

Such unlicensed conmen are, of course, a long-established hazard in the UK. But now it appears that one of them has discovered in the most brutal way imaginable that employing the same deceitful tactics in a country with the world’s highest rate of gun ownership carries the risk of matters escalating disastrously.

According to reports, Barr – whose wife, Angela, died last year aged 62 – shot Hanrahan inside his house with a rifle with a bayonet attached to its muzzle – possibly a relic of his service in Vietnam.

Police said Hanrahan and his team were installing vinyl cladding on the modest 1,200sq ft, £190,000 home in the Roxborough neighbourhood of the so-called ‘City of Brotherly Love’ when, at around 2pm, Hanrahan staggered out of the house moments after workmen heard the sounds of an angry argument inside.

He collapsed on the pavement with a gunshot wound to the chest and was later pronounced dead in hospital.

Philadelphia police captain James Kimrey said the workmen ‘heard arguments or some kind of commotion inside and then they found the boss outside’.

A witness – who initially thought Hanrahan, who had blood dripping from his mouth, had injured himself with a nail gun – said Barr left his home while Hanrahan was lying on the ground and took his dog for a walk. He was arrested on his return.

Police found bloodstains leading out of the property and, inside the house, a rifle and ammunition laid out in full view. They also reportedly discovered a builder’s invoice for $70,000 (£52,350). The typical cost of cladding such a house has been estimated at £12,000.

A neighbour told the Daily Mail that Barr had been charged a $5,000 down payment by Hanrahan who then ‘every day’ asked for more money. Tensions had further escalated when the pensioner found unexplained damage to his roof, said the neighbour.

‘He called his brother a couple of days ago saying [the workers] put a hole in his roof, his brother told him to get them off the property and I guess that’s when the dispute happened,’ said the neighbour.

‘He has lived here for 45 years, no issues with anybody. He is a great guy. He lost his wife about a year ago. He’s nice.’

Another neighbour said Barr was affable but extremely private and rarely let anyone into his home. A friend told the Mail: ‘All he does is walk his dog, help his neighbours, and attend neighbourhood events. He’s a peaceful man who was put in a bad situation.’

Last Friday, Barr was arraigned on charges of murder, possession of an instrument of crime and recklessly endangering another person. It isn’t clear if he has offered a plea but he may do so at a hearing on Monday. His family and his lawyer have declined to discuss the case. Hanrahan’s body was repatriated to the UK and more than 100 mourners gathered on Tuesday this week as it arrived at a west London funeral parlour, releasing balloons and flares, and holding placards reading ‘RIP Salis’.

Online expressions of sympathy and support for George Barr have predictably incensed Hanrahan’s friends and loved ones. Hanrahan’s sister Lisa-Marie posted a picture of Barr online and wrote: ‘The scum that took my baby brother lord pls why us.’

Paddy Hanrahan, a relative, wrote on Facebook: ‘Please look at the evil in he’s [sic] face. He couldn’t even give a reason why he done it. He cold-bloodedly killed him for nothing.’

On petition website Change.org, his supporters have demanded ‘swift American justice’ for the dead man.

Salis Hanrahan, who leaves behind his wife Roseann and a daughter aged one, was a member of a 'travelling conman fraud group' which had entered the US illegally

A neighbour told the Daily Mail that Barr had been charged a $5,000 down payment by Hanrahan who then asked for more money 'every day'

‘Salis was simply there with his family business delivering on a contract,’ says the petition, which is addressed to President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance, and which claims Hanrahan has been the victim of anti-Romani discrimination.

The petition challenges claims that Barr ever served in Vietnam or worked as a fireman, accusing the media of overlooking a felony conviction he received in 1981 for aggravated assault and simple assault.

However, Tommy McKiernan, the vice president of the Philadelphia firefighter’s union, said Barr had been a long-serving firefighter – joining in 1989 and retiring in 2015. He said: ‘He was an exceptional firefighter and this [the shooting] is something that’s way out of character for him. I don’t know if he was diagnosed with PTSD from Vietnam but it’s likely something from being a firefighter, maybe a combination of the two.

‘I’ve never seen him angry or argumentative. He was in control. That was not his character to get mad or confrontational.’

McKiernan said the only time he’d ever seen Barr get angry was when a fellow fireman got killed on the job. The Daily Mail was able to confirm that Barr served in the regular army from 1969 to 1971 and for a further 11 years in the reserves and National Guard.

The Hanrahan case has highlighted a fraud which Todd Spodek, a New York defence lawyer who has represented half a dozen alleged Traveller conmen, said has become ‘very rampant’ in the US and involved ‘hundreds’ of criminals. Several of his clients had been accused of making millions of dollars from the fraud, he said.

He told the Daily Mail the conmen targeted the north-eastern US states because the region has so many Irish-Americans, who are often naturally drawn to the thickly accented Travellers, especially when they’ll turn up with gifts from the ‘old country’.

He said the frauds are sophisticated and take time to set up. While the groups will sometimes cold call potential victims offering a ‘free estimate’ for work on their home, they also set up websites packed with glowing reviews (all fabricated) and wait for homeowners to come to them with a leaking roof or broken stair.

‘The Irish culture has a very charming and nice feel to it, and particularly for the elderly,’ he said. ‘You can imagine someone who’s third generation American but has Irish blood and now they suddenly have this really charming contractor, who comes with a shamrock in their hand and a six-pack of Guinness. And who knows the town where they come from and tells them, “You remind me of my grandma” blah, blah, blah. You know, it works.’

FBI investigators say that as well as using such classic cowboy builder tactics as exaggerating the danger from minor cracks in the foundations, the conmen have sometimes resorted to more extreme measures like buying dead rats from pet shops and throwing them into a house’s crawl spaces to create a non-existent pest infestation.

Spodek said the conmen typically carry out an initial small construction job competently, not only to build up trust with the homeowner but also because, if they’re prosecuted, ‘if actual work was done, it’s a lot easier to defend these cases as just shoddy construction – which is not a crime’.

The swindlers have in the past proved elusive because they keep moving around and manage to conceal their real identities and their earnings. They like to launder the vast sums they’ve tricked out of Americans by buying gold jewellery, diamonds and super-expensive Rolex watches which they can then smuggle back to Ireland and the UK. Their family members have even been seen flaunting their ill-gotten gains online.

However, the US authorities are catching up with them. Last November, Elijah Gavin, a 29-year-old British man who’d fled to America after absconding from a jail in Northern Ireland, was given a four-year sentence for his role in a travelling conman group that tricked victims out of more than $1 million.

Gavin, who was described by his lawyers as a member of a family of Irish Travellers, had previous convictions for violence and burglary, and had been awaiting trial on a fraud charge in Northern Ireland.

His victims in the US included a New York church and a 78-year-old Rhode Island widow who was ‘fraudulently induced’ to pay more than $850,000 for ‘unnecessary foundation and basement repairs’.

The same month, Dubliner John O’Brien, 28, agreed to plead guilty to fraud in a Rhode Island court after being charged with cheating New England homeowners out of at least $1.5million.

Leslie Schuster, a university professor, almost became one of his patsies after she hired him to repair her front steps. He soon told her that her house was subsiding.

‘I am a woman with a PhD, but he worked me,’ she told the Boston Globe. ‘The pressure was really intense – the danger to my house.’

B ut, after getting a second opinion from a reputable builder who told her she didn’t need to do anything, she rejected O’Brien’s offer to repair part of her basement for ‘just’ $30,000.

In March this year, a civil court in Massachusetts ordered two Irish nationals – Michael McInerney and Crystel O’Reilly – to forfeit the $70,000 and two Rolex watches that police discovered in their car after stopping them in traffic in January 2024. The cash had been stuffed inside two white socks.

The court also found they were in the US illegally and didn’t even possess driving licences.

Officers had identified McInerney as a suspected member of a travelling conman fraud group and later discovered a 75-year-old local man had given him nearly $200,000 for work on a property that was never finished.

A 78-year-old resident said McInerney charged him $80,000 for building work that should have cost only $30,000.

Spodek doesn’t believe that the grim fate of Salis Hanrahan will deter fellow members of the ‘travelling conman fraud group’, describing it as an ‘anomaly’. It may, however, make Americans more aware of the dangers when they next need a job done on their home.

Additional reporting: Daniel Bates